Page 42 of Wizard of Most Wicked Ways

His stomach roiled.

“Let’s hurry.” Anxiety spurred him to action. He avoided the tank and crossed to the far door first. Locked, but from the outside. Any guardsinsidethe facility might have a key.

“Office,” Fallon said as he turned back. She was on her hands and knees, peering under the other door with the light. “That’s what this looks like.”

She stood and handed him the light, which he took to the sideboard, where several short stacks of papers lay. He was a better reader than she was, and it quickly became evident that there was a lot to read. Everything was well organized. He tested the drawers of the sideboard. They were locked, but the bolts melted beneath his touch. He pulled out folders and papers, scanning through them. A lot he didn’t understand. Columns of numbers with abbreviations unfamiliar to him, tables and charts with the same.

Movement outside the hallway door. Fallon stiffened. Owein eyed the door, focusing on it before shutting off the light spell on the lantern. Then, eyes unused to the dark, he reached toward the door and enlarged it with a spell, slowly, delicately pinching it tightly against its frame.

After a moment, Fallon asked, “What did you do?”

“Kept him from getting in,” he whispered back, reigniting the lantern to its lowest setting. “Help me.”

Fallon moved into action, silent as a ghost, running her hands over cabinets, checking under tables. Owein filtered through the rest of the papers, reading the tops of documents:

Plasma proteins before and after exposure to invisible light

Comparative blood smears in magically + v − persons of genetic relation

Proofs on blood typing

Spectrophotometry report 01851.04.11

Results of genome distilling phase four, Patient A

He pulled that one out and brightened the lantern. More columns, more numbers, but handwritten at the bottom it read,This is the most promising reduction we’ve had. Change in relative magical categories estimated to increase 0.43–0.81 per gram.He didn’t recognize the handwriting. Not Hulda’s. Myra’s?

The next page had a single column of numbers, with a list of chemicals and the percentage used in ... what? The distillation of magic from Patient A?

Who was Patient A?

He couldn’t follow everything, but this fit with what he’d gleaned from Hulda over the years. Synthesizing—or distilling?—magic, but the research was still young. Complex, but young.

“Owein.”

Fallon had whispered, but in the quiet, it seemed to echo off the walls. Owein turned and found her kneeling by the far wall, in front of a wooden cabinet with long, narrow drawers. She had the center bottom drawer pulled open. “What do you think these are?”

Owein shut the drawers he’d been searching and used a restore-order spell on the locks before crossing the room in four strides and crouching beside her. The drawer was cold—cold enough to be enchanted, but he didn’t take the time to search for a rune or ward. It was packed with a stiff material, with cutouts for narrow corked beakers that reminded him of ingredients kept at a perfumer or apothecary. He pulled one out; the contents were almost silvery in nature. A little rosy. In tiny script he read,Patient A.

Fallon opened the drawer beside it and found more vials, but these were full of clear liquids. Above that—

“What isthis?” She pulled out a short beaker attached to a needle, with a stopper that looked like it had been made to compress its contents. Handed it to Owein. It was empty, with little measurement markers on the side.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen one.” It looked medical. He pulled and compressed the plunger a few times. The needle was hollow. Something for administering a liquid beneath the skin?

He shared as much.

“So theyareexperimenting on people.” Despite their hopes for finding a physical solution for stopping Silas, Fallon looked sick at the thought.

“I don’t think so. The pages I looked at made it seem like they were too early in the process—”

A key clicked in the lock of the door Owein had trapped in its own jamb. A man mumbled on the other side, turned the knob sharply, then hammered his fist on the door.

“Time to go.” Fallon hurried back for the hole.

Owein followed her, but not before he grabbed one of the silvery vials and a needled syringe. He needed to know more about what they were, and the best way to find out was to go straight to the source.

Which meant, even though a restore-order spell sealed up the hole in the room’s cement floor seamlessly, Hulda Fernsby was going to find out exactly where he had been.

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