“Not really,” Dani replied. “But she’d been hiking through heavy terrain a couple times a week. And if she’s been working with the rift a lot, she probably felt drained. It wouldn’t be out of the question for her to just collapse.”

Jillian placed a white banker’s box on Zed’s desk. “I found a bunch of journals and stuff in her house. I thought you might help me look through them. I haven’t read much, but it looks like she really was conducting her own research. She wanted to write her own book about the rift, and part of her research was determining whether the rift could be expanded.”

“Does it say anything in her notes about trying to kill me in the library?” Dani asked.

Jillian shook her head and handed Dani the brown, leather-bound diary. “Nope. I don’t see a section about ‘planned assaults.’ But I haven’t read very far, maybe it’s more toward the end.”

“Is there any way of knowing how much damage she inflicted on the rift?” Zed asked.

“Not really. I can say that I feel more energy leaking out of the rift than I did before, but I don’t exactly have a scale for this sort of thing,” Dani said. “I just don’t understand why. Why would someone do this?”

“Because they want to cause a panic and sabotage the League’s efforts to gently integrate magique into the world,” said Jillian.

“Or because they’re trying to create more magique,” Zed suggested. “It could feed into the whole panic motive. Or it could be another Simon Malfater, trying to get magical powers for ordinary people.”

“Is there any way to fix what was done?” Bael asked.

“Sure, it could take me a few months, but I can do it. Of course, every single human in Mystic Bayou could be a magique by then,” Dani said.

“We should warn people,” Bael told Zed. “Give them the choice.”

Zed nodded, a grim expression on his face.

“I’m sorry. I wish I’d said something sooner,” said Dani.

“Well, yeah, that would have been handy, but no use getting upset over it. It’s not like we can go back and fix it.” Jillian paused and glanced at Bael. “We don’t have anyone who can go back in time to fix it, right?”

Zed and Bael shook their heads. “No.”

Jillian frowned. “The one magical power we don’t have around here.”

15

Dani