Twelve Months to Midnight

On the 3rd of January, officers investigating Case H220001 entered an abandoned premises on Harbour Court and forcibly detained an invasive spirit masquerading as William Terence Buckley. This spirit is believed to be responsible for the three homicides originating the case (see attached files) and was removed to the Office of Special Investigations Head Office on Conyngham Road where it was contained while the magics holding it to the mortal realm waned. No prosecution is recommended at this time. “OK, but what if he’s not?” I asked again. Cormac exhaled heavily. We were back in the office, and this argument had continued on-and-off for the last two days. “He’s a trickster fae. He’s even admitted it. He took on the form of Buckley, murdered the three summoners and was trying to track down the real guy the night he found us at Buckley’s house. But Blood Magic is too strong to sustain long. It’ll fade, and he’ll be pulled back to wherever he came from soon enough. This is why he looks s...

There’s a bit in every Detective TV show where the detective encounters a wild fluke of events and then gets all grim-faced and macho and says something like “I don’t believe in coincidences.” I once followed a stand-up comedian around Wexford for three weeks because someone else with the same name as him and the same make, model and colour of car, was smuggling arcane artifacts in through Rosslare Harbour. I’m a detective and let me tell you: I absolutely believe in coincidences. I just hate them.  Three weeks in fucking Wexford . The national press picked up the story about three promising medical students being brutally slain and almost declared war on the Gardaí for not having solved it already before somebody slipped them the idea that our three victims had gone to that house on New Year’s Eve for sinister purposes. So the good journalists reined in their bloodlust pending further developments. I knew that the Garda press office would be preparing a cover-story blaming un-name...

There’s a lot of differences between the magical and mundane species. Some are impossibly powerful and ancient, while others are like mayflies: they appear and live their entire lives in the blink of an eye. But all of the many races I have met have one thing in common; one universal binding feature. Every single one of them gets an unexplained pleasure from peeling the plastic film off a new mobile phone. Cormac and I arrived outside the offices of Woodford & Boothe the next day. According to their website, they were a small financial firm specializing in mutual funds, whatever those were. They occupied the third floor of a glass ziggurat near Mayor Street where we presented ourselves just before lunch. I still had my old warrant card, but I was wearing my old glamour again, so I got no more than the usual amount of suspicious looks from the receptionist. “Mr. Buckley is on a conference call at the moment. But if you take a seat, I will tell him you’re here.” I sat in a low leathe...

Demons, as Cormac had pointed out, are not actually real. Neither are Angels, for that matter, or 80% of the things that people think go bump in the night. But that does not mean those strange noises outside are just the wind. There’s fae, for one. And djinn for two. And there’s also spirits, but not ghosts; That one is more problematic. Every so often, something from the outer depths will come ashore just as some human is dying and breathes in that person’s final breath. Then they go around flicking the lights, rattling pots and pans, messing with ouija boards, and whispering made-up secrets of the dead to mediums until someone like me has to send them back where they came from. We’re not entirely sure why they do it. Some suspect it’s simply mischief, but others think the spirits are trying to somehow become mortal . Taking what they can from humans in order to move among us and interact with us on some sort of equivalent level, like higher beings trying to make contact with a lower...

If magic is water, I’m a rock. Most Trolls are. Our rhino-like skin isn’t just for show. Spells tend to fizzle out when they hit us. We can’t be cursed or baned or hexed or charmed, we’re invisible to scryers, and in our hands, wands and staves are just fancy sticks. But despite this and despite our natural tendency to isolate ourselves, we’re still creatures of the magical world. It’s hard to remove yourself from the community when you can see right through the illusions and glamours it uses to conceal itself from other mortals. And historically speaking, we’ve served as foot-soldiers in more than a few of their magical wars. There’s few things more useful than a front line of bruisers who are immune to your enemy’s most powerful weapons. But there is one type of magic that can penetrate our defenses and get under our skin: Blood Magic. Though it’s rare to find a Blood Magic practitioner these days. It’s the oldest form of magic and one of the most powerful, but its rites are archaic ...