However much accidentally damaging a woman’s soul had shaken him, Quinn couldn’t let it stop him yet. He had a brief moment of time to try to do something useful without anyone currently threatening him. He had to make the most of it. His original thought had been to try draining out the berserker spell on the cultists yet, but after the mess he’d just made, Quinn scrapped that idea and went back to priority one.

Phenalope was robed in a blood-tinged mist now, its edges mingling with the writhing shadows. The last glow of twilight cast a ghastly pall over the scene.

Quinn got the horrible feeling that it might be too late to stop the ritual safely. There was so much power in that ritual, condensed down and ready to be fed into a vessel as small and as vast as a human soul. The magic was already manifesting in the physical realm just as a byproduct of the condensation. Without a way to hold so much magic somehow in something, breaking the ritual midway would likely just result in all of that power spilling out into the physical world to do… something. Kill everyone present, obviously, since it was death magic, but maybe it would also raise their corpses as mindless zombies or create a rot that spread through the whole forest or maybe it would make a death spirit thing. Quinn couldn’t even begin to guess what letting that power spill over without direction would result in.

Which meant completing the ritual now that it had gotten this far and then dealing with the aftermath. The idea that having to battle a demigod death mage might be the safer option was unsettling, to say the least. Still, there were some options left. For one, just because completing the ritual was the best choice didn’t mean he had to let Phenalope be the one to complete it.

“Adam,” Quinn spoke quietly, hoping his partner could still monitor him through this mess, “I might need to go code Alpha. Is that a go?”

Quinn tried not to think too hard about what he was requesting. Code Alpha meant he was going to risk tipping over his limit on death magic and would likely need to be put down. He saw no way he could take over a ritual crammed full of that much death and suffering and not end up corrupted to hell and back though. Even channeling it through him for some other effect was likely to smear him with too much to stay sane, even if Quinn wasn’t pushing his limits already.

“Negative,” Adam’s stern voice sounded like it was spoken right next to Quinn’s ear, making him jump slightly. “You are not cleared for that course of action, Agent Morrish.”

Quinn rolled his eyes before scanning the area around him for immediate trouble again. “I haven’t even said what I was planning yet.”

“It does not matter,” Adam’s voice got even more firm if anything, “If you went code Alpha, at best, you would be a trained death mage transitioning from ally to enemy. At worst, you would manage to end up as a trained demigod and I cannot guarantee I could put you down fast enough in the middle of this. The cultist demigod is preferable in comparison.”

Those were… very good points. Quinn looked at Phenalope a bit helplessly. “Well, you might get that wish in a moment if I don’t come up with something else. Disrupting that ritual will likely kill us all at this juncture, so someone is finishing it. And whoever does is likely coming out of it as an insane death mage, whatever they were going in, and therefore likely a demigod as well.”

“Then let the cultist finish it, Morrish,” Adam ordered. “I’d rather kill an enemy than an ally.”

That was a sentiment Quinn could decidedly get behind. So, against all his instincts, Quinn was going to let Riordan and his pack of ghosts be used to power an ascension and then clean up the mess afterwards. He hated that with every fiber of his being, but Quinn just couldn’t see how they could safely end the ritual now. Riordan was dying or dead. His protection of the ghosts had to have been voided. There was so much moving magic here now and it had to go somewhere. It wasn’t going to just settle down and behave like a scolded puppy. The avalanche was already in motion. All that was left was directing it.

Directing it meant controlling the ritual though. And controlling the ritual meant being in the heart of death corruption. Who could do that and resist using that power to their own ends? And even if someone could resist that lure, what else could they do with the power besides use it? There was nowhere safe to dump such a contaminated mass of active magic. Quinn wouldn’t be able to do it and he didn’t believe any of the others were better equipped for dealing with death magic corruption than he was, which meant they were screwed.

Quinn watched Phenalope become radiant with unholy glory and knew that it was his fault. He’d been too late and not enough and now other people were paying the price.

With effort, he wrenched his gaze away from the ritual and turned it towards the surrounding mob of cultists. It looked like a zombie horror film out there past the whirl of the ritual’s power. People swarmed over each other, bruised and bleeding and heedless of all common decency. That was one nasty spell. Surely he could at least do something about that.

For such a large and controlling spell to be activated with only three words meant that the spell itself had been entrenched over time. Even after Quinn dug it out, the survivors were going to be susceptible towards such spells in the future and might even have emotional and behavioral sequelae. It also likely meant that were something more than just the trigger words that was used for it. Quinn glanced around for Gloria and found her currently pinned under a bear.

An unconscious bear. Whoops, it looked like spells did work at least a bit at close range.

Still, bears weren’t light and that shifter was still doing his job even when unconscious. Quinn was impressed. He dropped to his knees next to them, grabbing one of his own charms out of a pocket as he got close. Gloria turned to try and cast at him, but from her place of disadvantage, she wasn’t able to get it off before he hit her with a stunning charm straight to the face. Also maybe a bit of a punch in there for added measure. She went as unconscious as the bear on top of her. Having a tank made a huge difference for a caster like Quinn.

Quickly, Quinn began rummaging through her pockets. Or well, he tried to, but couldn’t get access with the bear on top of the person he was trying to search. Another charm, this one containing a spell that combined a purifying sweep of the target with a minor shock to the nervous system, and Quinn had an awakened (and rather unhappy) bear.

“Thank you, need you to move,” Quinn explained without pausing to breathe, “Looking for a spell anchor for that berserker spell.”

The shifter clearly wasn’t all the way together again, but he at least didn’t maul Quinn for waking him. Quinn didn’t question it and went back to stripping everything off Gloria as quickly as he safely could. He didn’t think she’d fill her pockets with traps, but then again, she is tricky. He didn’t think there would be much that they could get out of her, either in terms of information or cooperation, but he’d been surprised before.

Quinn had enough experience to get a general sense of purpose from touching the items she carried. More than that, he felt the tingle of active magic once he pulled a necklace off of her. He probably would have been able to sense it faster if he hadn't been in the middle of a storm of death magic. His overactive imagination wouldn’t be surprised if it started raining blood any moment now. That might also be the terror radiating off of the mess finally leaking in through his overtaxed defenses.

The necklace was a circular pendant depicting two faces looking opposite directions, one at peace, one in either pain or rage or something nasty anyway. Quinn backed away from the altar enough to trust that the trigger spell wouldn’t get ripped away when he tampered with it. Sinking into the structure of the spell, Quinn saw what was essentially the toggle switch for this thing. He might lack the prescribed incant for disabling it, but he also had enough practice modifying other death mage’s spells that Quinn was able to reach in and just switch it directly.

Instantly the roaring of an angry mob ceased. A breath later and the noise was replaced with screams of pain and fear and confusion. So, still a mob, just a panicked one instead of a berserked one. Minor improvement. Quinn would take it. He had other things to deal with. Even with Gloria down, he still had a death mage to stop, one who was a hair’s breadth away from being ridiculously empowered. This would be a really difficult fight--

Quinn blinked, trying to process what he was seeing through the mess of manifesting magic in the air. Phenalope stood behind the altar, wreathed in shadows and ghostly glowing fog, embroidered in blood. Her hands were raised to the tree in supplication or perhaps glorification or domination. The ritual’s center was shifting, peeling off of the spirit that it had been hung upon to flow into its new vessel. Quinn could feel how askew the power was, disrupted and lacking the secondary caster that had begun the process, but Phenalope held it together with sheer fanatic fervor and freshly spilled blood.

And behind her, an old man nimbly plucked the dropped ritual dagger, still stained in Riordan’s blood, from where it had fallen upon the ground. In one smooth practiced motion, Norris stepped up behind Phenalope, grabbed her hair to pull her head backwards, and sliced her throat in a single deep slice that nearly beheaded her.

The ritual froze in that instantaneous split-second moment between losing all support and gravity kicking in. All that magic was going to fall out into the physical world and Quinn didn’t think there was anything he could do to stop it.