Lucien leaned against a cold metal pipe in the shadows of the factory and tried very hard not to collapse.
His legs felt like jelly. His hands wouldn't stop shaking. And his head was pounding.
"Bloody hell," he muttered, wiping cold sweat from his forehead. "Being Death is exhausting work."
Playing the Grim Reaper for an entire factory full of cultists had sounded brilliant in theory. The idea was simple. He would terrify them with seemingly supernatural judgments, turn them against each other, and create enough chaos to make the real rescue operation much easier.
In reality, it meant he had been running on fumes for the past two hours. He had cast every spell he knew again and again until his magic felt scraped raw.
The Levitation Charm, the Water-Making Spell, the Scouring Charm. That was essentially his entire arsenal for the operation. Tonight he had used each one so many times that his wand arm ached as if he had spent hours swinging a cricket bat.
The cultists had it easy. All they had to do was stand around and wait to die in creatively ironic ways. He was the one doing the real work. He had to calculate angles, time each accident for maximum psychological impact, and make sure the blood formed ominous messages at precisely the right moment.
There was no mysterious divine judgment happening here. Just one very tired, very annoyed young wizard running around invisible and doing manual labor with magic.
And to make matters worse, his magic had decided tonight was the perfect time to start malfunctioning.
He pulled out his wand and stared at it.
The spells he hadn't yet mastered, such as the Full Body-Bind Curse and the Impediment Jinx, had failed exactly as expected. He had tried them on a few cultists out of desperation, hoping that the pressure of the moment might force the magic to work.
It hadn't. The result had been nothing but sparks and wasted effort.
That part he could accept. Those were advanced spells, far beyond what he should have been attempting in the first place.
The real problem was with the spells he could cast.
The Levitation Charm worked perfectly. It was as reliable as ever, thank Merlin. That spell alone had carried him through most of the night. Chandeliers, crane hooks, and shelving units had all been lifted and dropped.
But the Water-Making Spell and the Scouring Charm had gone completely mental.
The Water-Making Spell was supposed to create clean water. The concept was simple and straightforward. Yet about an hour earlier, when he had attempted to create a small puddle for someone to slip on, his wand had instead blasted out boiling water.
He had barely managed to cool it down with repeated castings before a cultist walked into the corridor. One second later and the incident would have turned into a very obvious murder.
The Scouring Charm was even worse.
He had cast the Scouring Charm to erase some blood writing on a wall after the cultists had noticed it. Normally it should have cleaned the surface instantly. Instead, the spell had produced a concussive blast strong enough to launch a newly turned walker through a doorway and into the next room.
The walker had slammed into the far wall and left a dent in the plaster.
Lucien stood there, still invisible, staring at the result of his so-called cleaning spell. For several seconds he couldn't process what he had just witnessed.
When he later tried to reproduce the effect, thinking he might have discovered something useful, the charm behaved exactly as it should. It cleaned surfaces and nothing more. There was no explosive force and no violent impact.
Something about his magic had changed. It might be broken. It might be evolving. Or it might simply be reacting to stress. He had no idea which possibility was correct, and this wasn't the time to investigate it.
He tucked his wand away and forced himself to breathe slowly. His lungs burned and his ribs ached. Every part of his body protested the strain. It simply wasn't designed to sustain this level of magical exertion.
Still, it had worked.
The factory had descended into chaos. Cultists panicked and turned on each other, convinced that an angry god was passing judgment on them. Some had already begun releasing prisoners in desperate attempts to prove their repentance. Others locked themselves inside rooms and prayed for salvation that would never arrive.
Best of all, his contingency plan ensured that no one would ever suspect magic.
The drugged canned food Miranda had smuggled into the factory played an important role. He had barely used any of it. The hallucinogens from the CDC were weak and closer to a placebo than a real drug. What truly mattered was the belief that the drugs existed.
If anyone survived long enough to tell Rick's group about floating chandeliers or blood messages writing themselves, Lucien could simply blame it on hallucinogens in the air. Powder, aerosol, it didn't matter. As long as it sounded scientific, people would accept that explanation long before believing that a kid could perform magic.
The plan was solid.
He had briefly considered poisoning the food. In truth, that would have been much simpler. Unfortunately, he had no access to anything colorless, odorless, and reliably lethal. There was also the risk that the cultists followed some paranoid ritual where prisoners were forced to taste test the food first. That would have exposed Miranda and almost certainly gotten her killed.
Psychological warfare was the safer option. If he could frighten them enough, they would destroy themselves.
Though if he was being honest, he hadn't planned to go this hard from the start.
His original plan relied on subtlety. A few accidents here and there. Small disturbances that would slowly create doubt and weaken the Shepherd's authority.
But everything changed the moment he slipped into the factory under his Invisibility Cloak.
The cultists had separated the prisoners.
Rick, Shane, and most of the adult men were locked inside the underground cold storage area. The women and children were held in a separate building. Maggie and her brother had been assigned guard duty in another section entirely.
None of them were anywhere near the places where he had been delivering his so-called divine judgment.
That meant he could unleash his magic without restraint. There was no risk of traumatizing his own people or accidentally revealing himself. The cultists had solved his biggest operational security problem without even realizing it.
So naturally, he had taken full advantage.
That was why the deaths had been so elaborate.
He had put on a complete performance. The cultists had been terrified, and in the process he had gathered valuable intelligence.
That had been the real objective from the start. Killing them was necessary. These people were monsters, and he felt no regret over their deaths. But the information he pulled from panicked guards was far more valuable.
Like the detail he learned about something called the Corpse's Kiss.
His jaw tightened at the memory of overhearing that particular detail.
It was the cultists' favorite execution method. They would lock prisoners inside cages surrounded by walkers. They called the place the Confession Chamber. The victim remained trapped while the dead clawed and snapped at the bars. Sometimes the torment lasted for days. Eventually the cultists would open part of the cage and allow the walkers to pour inside.
They referred to the feeding frenzy that followed as a kiss.
The cultists watched the spectacle. They even brought their children to watch. To them it was a sacred ritual.
Lucien had once heard a guard describe the scene with disturbing enthusiasm. The man had explained how the sinners would beg, scream, and promise anything if it meant the torment would stop.
That had been the moment Lucien stopped feeling even the slightest guilt about arranging their deaths.
If they wanted to worship walkers so badly, they could join them. That was how Tyler ended up with his walker girlfriend.
Still, the information about Rick's group unsettled him more than he cared to admit.
Merle, in particular.
According to the report, the cultists had thrown Merle into the Confession Chamber as a test. Inside, he had faced a walker directly. At some point he had grabbed a shard of glass that had been smeared with walker blood and used it as a weapon. In the struggle, he had even cut himself with it.
He had come dangerously close to being bitten.
The cultists wanted to see if he would "purify" himself by willingly joining the dead.
When Lucien heard that part, his heart nearly stopped.
A cut from walker-contaminated glass. That had to be as good as a bite, right? The virus would enter his bloodstream through the wound and then...
Lucien forced himself to slow down and think. He recalled the research reports he had read at the CDC about the walker virus.
The virus operated according to two rules. At first they seemed contradictory, but they made sense once you understood the mechanism.
The first rule was simple. Everyone was already infected.
The virus existed inside every living person in a dormant state. As long as a person remained alive, it stayed inactive and harmless, waiting. The moment someone died, from any cause at all, the virus activated. As long as the brain remained intact, the body would reanimate as a walker.
That was why destroying the brain was standard procedure. It wasn't only about stopping a walker. It ensured the dead couldn't rise again.
The second rule was just as absolute.
Walker bites were one hundred percent fatal.
This was the part that confused most people. If everyone already carried the virus, why did a bite still kill you?
The CDC researchers had proposed a theory. A walker's bite didn't simply transmit the virus. Everyone already had that. Instead, the bite introduced some kind of activating agent. It might exist in the walker's saliva or blood.
Whatever it was, it triggered the dormant virus inside the victim while they were still alive.