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 species.
I like to think they’re the metaphysical equivalent of some BBC nature documentary painting stripes on the sides of their camera truck so they can film among the zebra. Or - and this one usually comes to me late on those nights after a particularly difficult exorcism when I can’t sleep - hunters who wear antlers so they can lure in other deer.
And sometimes they take on other forms. They look inside our nightmares and strut about the place wearing horns and flames or feathers and a halo, depending on what we fear more. It’s usually the latter.
When the Scene Team arrived to bag and tag the evidence, Cormac and the Magistrate went back to headquarters, and I headed back to my flat to get some much-needed sleep. But we stuck around long enough to find out that our caution had been unnecessary. The flask was just a flask, albeit one recently filled with the blood of some sort of sacrificial victim. Not for the first time, I bet myself that the NBCI didn’t have to deal with that kind of shit and I was definitely owed a raise or - at the very least - department-funded therapy. But I’d settle for a nicer flat.
Despite an estimated fourteen hours sleep I was still deeply, deeply, unconscious when the phone rang at 10 a.m. the next morning. It was Kim, politely reminding me I still had a job that I was expected to attend. I grumbled something that could be construed as a thank-you and hung up in a way that could be construed as something else. My shower had no hot water, even though I had fixed the boiler just a month before. This was shaping up to be a stellar morning.
When I finally arrived at my desk I found that three reports from the state pathologist had made it there before me. Two young males and one female. Each autopsy report was depressingly similar. Cause of death: immolation. Identities: unconfirmed. DNA results: pending.
The debrief from the Scene Team was slightly more illuminating. They’d de-constructed the summoning circle by literally removing the floor in sections and sending the pieces to Archives for analysis. The blood on the floor was a match for the blood in the flask, and didn’t correspond to any of the victims. They had run some divination spells, and expected to have identified the source by the early afternoon.
I busied myself by catching up on the dailies I’d recently missed. Three arrests of pub conjurers on New Year’s Eve. Those guys who go table-to-table doing card tricks for tips? They’re often real. Sometimes they’re masking cards or summoning billiard balls from a pocket dimension. It’s dangerous, but not illegal; we can’t exactly arrest them for false advertising. And it’s actually how we discovered Cormac. But occasionally we arrest one for bending the minds of their audience to make a trick more impressive or increase their tips or to get a drunken hen party more “suggestible”. The Magistrate takes a very dim view of mind-control magic. The three idiots we had in our cells would be there for a while.
There was also a report from the Scene Team about their previous day’s investigation at Trinity. A young student from the nursing college had been reported missing. The O.S.I. were consulted as it was the third missing nurse in Dublin in the last two years and a witness to the second abduction had reported seeing a “monster” on the night in question. But there was no sign of foul play and no sign of magic or trace of a magical creature at the scene and I suspected that - barring fresh developments - we wouldn’t be called in should there be a fourth. But still... three missing women were three missing women, and I made myself a mental note to keep myself up-to-date with the case.
The rest of the dailies were the usual stuff. A drunken troll that I recognised as a distant cousin had punched a bouncer on Harcourt Street and had spent a night in our cells. Some Swiss “monster hunter” was requesting a transit visa and permission to bring an arsenal of weaponry into Dublin in March. I didn’t see that one getting approved any time soon. Andrew Hutton, conjurer to the rich and famous, reported a grimoire stolen from his house during a party that went into the small hours of New Year’s Day. Goblin sightings, all nonsense. And Mrs. O’Riordan from Stoneybatter reported another Banshee, which would be her fifteenth report, but the first of the new year. Had she phoned twenty-four hours earlier, she would have seriously upset the result of our office betting pool.
I was researching Swiss weapon laws when Cormac laid a large map of Dublin on my desk without a word. A long splattered and haphazard streak of blood stretched across it.
“Is this supposed to be the location of the person whose blood was used for the spell?”
“Yup.”
“What does it mean?” I asked. I didn’t see how this could point to the location of anyone.
“Assuming they’re not in two or three places at once? It means they’ve been on the move since their blood was taken for the spell. They’d have crisscrossed the city a lot. Maybe hunting the three who took his or her blood?”
“Or just going about their business. What if it was given voluntarily? And a while ago? This could easily be someone just… I don’t know… going to work and to the shops.”
“So someone voluntarily gave their blood to a coven of warlocks for a summoning ritual, so they could make themselves wealthy and powerful, and then just goes back to their daily life? That doesn’t seem right.”
“What do we know about the owner of the car?”
Cormac pulled a file from his own desk and flipped it open. “Frederick Warburton. Twenty-two years old. Originally from Drogheda, and a student at U.C.D. He has an address in Donnybrook. We had the Gards check it out. His flatmates assumed he was back home for the Holidays.”
“Do we know what he is studying?”
Cormac went back into the file. “Doesn’t say. We’re waiting for the college admin office to reopen. If the Gards asked his flatmates, they didn’t write that down.”
I went back to staring at the blood-stained map. None of the streaks or spatters went anywhere near Donnybrook or the Belfield campus. “Can we narrow this down?”
Cormac grinned one of those ‘I was hoping you would ask me that’ grins. “I’ll need a paintbrush and some chicken bones.”
It was after 5 p.m. and dark when Cormac and I stood on the street outside an unassuming semi-detached in Chapelizod.
“This can’t be the right place. Throw them again.”
“I’m telling you, the bones don’t lie,” but he tossed the chicken bones into the air again and examined them where they fell. It was dark but I could make out the runes he had painted on each of them. They made no sense to me, but seemed to re-affirm for Cormac exactly what he had been saying. The blood at the scene and in the flask belonged to the man we had just seen enter the house we were surreptitiously lurking outside.
He was about my age - somewhere in his early thirties - and well dressed. He wore an expensive suit and had his hair short and neatly groomed. My first instinct said lawyer or stockbroker. “He doesn’t strike me as the ‘victim of a blood cult’ type. You think if someone had stolen your blood for an eldritch ritual, you’d be more…”
“Disheveled? Yeah. Something seems off.” Cormac’s phone beeped with that annoying alert tone he preferred. He pulled it out and flicked through the incoming message from Kim. “His name’s William Buckley. Thirty-two years old from… well, from here. This is, or was, his parents’ house. He works at Woodford & Boothe in the IFSC.”
I mentally patted myself on the back for my ‘stockbroker’ guess. “Any priors? Is he in our files?”
“Nothing at all. Looks like he’s just a regular civilian.”
I withdrew my Garda warrant card before realising the photo I.D. still showed me under my old glamour. “Shit. You have yours?” I asked, waving it to Cormac.
“Yeah. But I thought these were for emergencies. We’re not actually Gards.”
“We’re not arresting him. Just asking how his blood ended up at the scene of a crime. In and out.”
Cormac considered this for a moment. He looked from his card to the house, as he almost absent-mindedly stepped off the footpath to let an evening jogger go past.
Once the jogger was past us, they turned and slowed, running backwards along the path so they could continue to watch us. Suspicion was to be expected when you’re two official-looking individuals loitering at night in a residential neighbourhood, but something about their movements caught my attention. He was an older man with long grey hair and a tight beard and what looked like a very new tracksuit. But there was something about his features that seemed familiar in a way I couldn’t place. I was sure I'd seen him before, and recently.
But I did not have time for further study. The jogger stopped about twenty yards up the road, raised their hands, and inscribed a large glowing rune in the air. With a shout, they grabbed the rune with both hands, quickly rolled it up like a snowball then hurled the magical energies towards Cormac. I dived towards the arc of flame, shoving Cormac aside with a shoulder charge that sent him sprawling into the road.
The bolt of fire hit me square in the chest and I could feel the heat as my shirt took flame. The thin gold chain of my glamour melted, warped, and parted even as the glass ampule shattered. I raised my hands to see the pink human form slide away and reveal the grey troll skin beneath. My coat was now fully on fire, so I ripped it off my back and slung it into the gutter. The jogger’s eyes widened but I could not tell if this was from fear or surprise or both. He turned and ran and I broke into a full sprint in pursuit.
When you’re almost seventeen stone of pure muscle, full sprints can be fast. The problem is sustaining them. I almost caught the jogger by the first corner but was panting hard from exertion. I could see he was having difficulty too, but he managed to increase the distance on me. As he ran, he pulled a piece of cloth from a pocket and began panting another incantation. I redoubled my efforts but it was too late. With a final guttural yell, he tore the cloth in two and vanished.
I’d seen this spell before, so I knew he could not have teleported far, but I had no way to tell in which direction. I stopped and spun on my heel, looking for any telltale sign of my quarry. The houses along both sides of the road were dark and silent, but I had no idea if the spell he had cast would let him teleport through walls to the inside of a house. If he did there was no way I’d be able to track him down; I couldn’t exactly knock on doors with a singed warrant card and no glamour. Or shirt. The same was true if he’d jumped ahead of me, disappearing around a corner and increasing the distance. The only way I’d catch him would be if he’d tried to outsmart me by doubling back. So I did a quick about-face and retraced my steps, hoping to catch him between me and Cormac.
But there was no sign of him by the time I returned to Buckley’s house. Cormac had moved from the gutter to the curb and was tending to a large and nasty-looking graze along his leg with ointments he’d taken from his satchel. I retrieved my wallet from the footpath and the burnt remnants of my jacket from the gutter and took a seat next to him.
“Thanks for that,” said Cormac as he peeled back a flap of bloodstained trouser-leg. I watched as he rubbed a pungent-smelling salve into the injury, but turned my head when the flesh began to crawl and knit itself back together.
“No problem. Any idea who that guy was?”
“Never seen him before, but he looked sort of familiar.”
“I thought so too,” I said as I retrieved my keys from my coat pocket. Thankfully, they seemed un-touched by the flame. But the contents of the other pocket was a twisted mess of melted glass and plastic. “I don’t suppose that cream works on phones?”
“Not unless your phone has access to its own well of magical energy.”
“It was an iPhone.”
“Then probably not.”
“I knew I should have gone with a Samsung.”
Cormac let out a loud snort and I found myself unable to contain my laughter in response. We sat in the dark for a few minutes until the fit passed, then in silence for a few more.
“Let’s speak to him at his office tomorrow,” said Cormac eventually.
“Good idea. The suburbs are a dangerous place.”
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