Twelve Months to Midnight

Magic is a bit of a tricky concept to understand if you don’t have the talent for it, so if it’s OK with you, I’m about to use a metaphor and then extend it well beyond its breaking point. Magic is like water . It's vital for life to exist, and something that’s influenced and shaped our history since before we started recording time. But modern mankind on the whole tends to avoid it. Nobody takes boats any more and rivers, while useful to some, act more like an unnoticed background feature to peoples’ daily lives in the 21st century. But some of us live on the coast, and are aware of the huge ocean of power out there. There’s your coast-dwellers: Those whose lives depend on that ocean but who have to keep something more solid beneath their feet. The crabs and seagulls of this metaphor are your magical-but-mortal races like werewolves, vampires, trolls, and similar. Further out, we have undersea reefs and the life that makes its home there. They exist surrounded and completely immer...

The longest year of my life started under a bridge. And I’ve already heard all the jokes, so don’t bother. It was the first day of a new year, and I had dragged myself to bed so late that my night of sleep was better described as a nap. New Years’ Eve is a busy time for law enforcement, and my department is no exception. Fireworks and fancy dress and drunk idiots make for a bad combination. It was well after 2 a.m. when I’d finally returned to my basement flat on Benburb Street so the ringing of my mobile phone just a few hours later went unanswered.  Eventually, whoever it was gave up and called my landline instead, the bastards. The flat was essentially un-changed since it had been furnished by the department back in the 1970s and the landline was a large cream-and-brown wall-mounted bakelite monstrosity whose cable had given up its last curl a few decades back. But its ringing was loud and shrill enough it could rouse a sleeping yet-somehow-still-sleep-deprived troll. Which it...