Henderson looked at me. Wards were persistent spells and they didn’t just go missing. It was possible to break a ward—I’d done it a few times—but wards began to regenerate almost immediately. They absorbed magic from the environment. If the wards had been broken, they should’ve started rebuilding themselves as soon as the new magic wave came. We were standing right at the ward boundary and I felt nothing. It was as if the defensive spells had never been there in the first place. That just didn’t happen.
Besides, having your ward shattered felt like a cannon fired inside your skull. Sleep bomb or not, if someone had burst the wards, the guards would’ve awakened.
“The wards are gone,” I said. Kate Daniels, Master of the Obvious.
“Looks that way,” Henderson said.
“Were the wards present last night?”
“Yes,” Henderson said.
“Sleep bombs emit magic even when sealed. You can’t carry one through a level-four ward, so it must’ve been brought in during tech. Did Adam have any visitors?”
“No.”
Muscles played along Henderson’s jaw. I didn’t need to spell it out. The person who had dropped five grand worth of rare herbs onto the inventor’s lawn was wearing a Red Guard patch on his sleeve. And since everybody else was off in dreamland, that left Laurent de Harven as the most likely culprit. The Red Guard had a mole in it, and since Rene had handpicked people for this assignment, the buck stopped with her. She would have steam coming out of her ears.
That still didn’t explain what had happened to the wards.
Andrea emerged from the shed, carrying an m-scanner printout in her hand.
“We have a problem,” I told her.
“More than one.” She handed me the paper. A wide strip of cornflower blue sliced across the paper, interrupted by a sharp narrow spike of such pale blue, it seemed almost silver. Human divine. That was an unmistakable magic profile, one of the first everyone learned when studying m-scans. De Harven had been sacrificed.