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 and those who make one mistake casting a blood spell tend not to make a second. They tend to just make stains on the walls, floor, ceiling, and history books.
All this went through my head as I waited for the office to send backup. Cormac didn’t enter the room, but stood outside with his phone pressed to his ear with one hand while his other repeatedly drew protection sigils in the air about him.
“That’s not inspiring confidence,” I told him from my temporary prison.
He broke from scribing his protection sigils to hold up an index finger in one of those ‘one moment please, for I am busy speaking on the telephone’ gestures. He listened for a few more minutes then stowed his phone back in his satchel. “The Scene Team are busy on a call at the moment. Disturbance at Trinity. But if they’re not done by sunset, the Magistrate will be out himself. You are instructed to sit tight and await rescue.”
That actually did inspire confidence. Blood Magic was Sir Arthur’s speciality and it was what powered the glamour he had made for me.
Cormac disappeared into one of the bedrooms and emerged a few seconds later carrying a chair. He took a seat and we stared at each other in awkward silence for a while.
“I spy with my little eye, something beginning with G?” It was a noble effort from the wizard and it made me raise a small smile, despite myself.
I glanced about. “Grout.”
“How the fuck did you-”
“I’m a detective.”
Sir Arthur arrived a few minutes after the sun had set. The house was dark, and our phones were the only source of light by then. Cormac had discovered a cache of candles in a cupboard downstairs, but we had taken the decision that lighting candles next to a mysterious blood circle wouldn’t be the wisest course of action.
The first I knew Sir Arthur knew was there was when he spoke from six inches behind my left ear. “Oh, this is sloppy.”
“Fuck!” I nearly leapt clear of the circle in shock.
He was grinning. Of course he was. “You can step out. It’s a binding circle, but I sense its power is spent.”
I gratefully did so and sat on the edge of the bath, trying to rub some life back into my legs. Cormac entered the room for the first time, albeit hesitantly.
“It’s for summoning, right?” Cormac asked. “I found a notebook in the car outside with some similar sigils. But I couldn’t identify these two here.” He pointed to two large runes on opposite sides of the circle.
“It’s Akkadian,” said Sir Arthur. “Cuneiform. They are the symbols for ‘power’ and ‘wealth’. Someone was trying to better themselves without doing the hard work.”
“New Year's Eve would be a good night for that sort of spell.”
“An auspicious time to change one’s fortunes, yes.”
“But they can’t summon ‘power and wealth’ into a circle, can they? ‘Money’ sure, because you can have money in, like, a big pile on the floor,” he gestured vaguely at the circle, “but ‘wealth’ means something else.”
“They certainly cannot!” Sir Arthur was in his element now, lecturing on the Perils of Mortals Meddling with Elder Forces. “This is the sort of mistake one makes when one learns magic from books with no experienced practitioner to guide,” he continued. “They knew the mechanics of the spell but not its intent. They probably found it on the internet. As I said, sloppy work.”
“That raises the question… what the hell did they summon?”
As they had been speaking, my attention had meandered about the room, looking for anything out of the ordinary. On a hunch, I moved from my perch on the bath-tub to the cabinet below the sink. Inside it were more spell components. Some of the same candles from downstairs, but used somewhat, along with a mortar and pestle that was stained on the inside with more dried blood and what looked like seeds and fragments of bark.
Next to this stood an old steel thermos flask. Of all the things I’d seen so far that day, this was somehow the most ominous. “Something tells me this isn’t soup. Call the Scene Team.”
Cormac knelt next to me and peered at the flask. “It’s just a flask…”
I rapped it with a fingernail. “That’s iron. There could be anything inside. Djinn. Demon. Pissed off fae-queen trying to get her ‘wealth and power’ pack.”
“Demons don’t exist,” was the best Cormac could come up with even as he stood and fished his phone back out of his satchel to put in the call.
Sir Arthur joined me at cabinet-level. “It reeks of blood. It might just be what they used to paint the circle.”
I waved my open palm at the flask in one of those ‘by all means, open the mysterious sealed iron flask surrounded by death, but please let me get to a safe distance first’ gestures.
“Perhaps, Victor, you are right. We should wait for the Scene Team,” then he was gone from my side and I heard him out on the landing asking Cormac to pass him the phone. I decided, there and then, that my new year's resolution would be to actually witness that old vampire enter or exit a room.
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