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-named “criminal gangs”. It was a good excuse; Specific enough to answer some questions and vague enough that it didn’t raise many more. I worried they were using it too often these days, but it wasn’t my job to keep the press at bay. I had the easier job of catching whoever or whatever actually killed the trio.
Cormac and I had returned to the office, where we had dragged the big whiteboard out of storage. We had markers and magnets all ready to go. We just lacked the string to tie everything together and complete the cliche.
“So here’s what we know,” said Cormac, gesturing to the three victim pictures along the top of the board. “Warburton, Flanders and Dillahunt head to an abandoned house on Erne street on New Year’s Eve to try and summon ‘wealth and power’ to-”
“Which being abstract concepts-” I interrupted.
“Which being abstract concepts, cannot be summoned to a circle. Correct. They summon something or someone else instead. Demon or Fey or Djinn or-”
“Or pissed-off monster from beyond the veil.”
“Or pissed-off monster from beyond the veil. It murders each of them with Balefire. No small feat.”
“Why kill them?”
“Hm? Oh, summoning circles are usually also binding circles. When you summon something, you have control over it unless you release it or it frees itself.”
“Or it murders you.”
“That is a very popular way to free yourself, yes. For this summoning ritual, they use blood which Flanders took from the MMUH where she was doing her residency. She probably smuggled it out inside that flask,” he pointed to a large photo of the steel flask we had found under the counter in the bathroom used for the summoning ritual. “And the blood belonged to William Buckley, who insists people call him ‘Buck’.”
“Who, despite being a stockbroker who insists on being called ‘Buck’, seems to be a harmless and fairly decent individual who regularly donates blood. A completely innocent player in all this?”
Cormac nodded. “If nothing else, I don’t know any magic practitioner who would willingly give away their own blood.”
“So he’s no longer a suspect. But we were attacked with Balefire by someone outside his house. So were they there for us, or there for him?”
“And was that the same person who Balefired our three victims?”
“If not, it’d be a hell of a coincidence. Yes, yes, I know. Three weeks in Wexford. But if we assume it’s not, why would this summoned creature stick around? Why go after us, or try to keep us away from Buckley?”
Cormac didn’t answer. Instead, he sat behind the desk beside mine and leaned all the way back in his chair so he could stare at the ceiling. I gave him a few minutes. “Magic isn’t science,” he said eventually. “Some practitioners get into it thinking they can ’hack the source code of the universe’ like it’s a computer language, which is utter nonsense. Computer programming is nothing but rules. Magic, by definition, is the breaking of rules. It’s… It’s unreliable. It’s whimsical. It has a mind of its own. That summoning circle they used was cobbled together from at least three different traditions of magic, from what I could tell, and they were using it to summon things which can’t exist in a physical space. There’s no telling what they summoned, or what its motivations would be. Maybe it’s bound to the blood of the circle and if Buck dies, it gets sent home? Or dies itself? It might just want to stop us figuring out what it is, so tried to kill us. If it’s a being of pure magical essence, you’ll be a brick wall to it, which is why it buggered off and hasn’t been back since it saw you without your glamour.”
I let that sink in for a while. I’m a cop. I like rules. And while I knew how magic works, in a general sense, hearing it laid out like that wasn’t encouraging. “We may not solve this one.”
“Not with that attitude,” said Sir Arthur from right behind us.
Cormac and I leapt to our feet. “Shit. Sorry, sir. Didn’t know you were there.”
“I wasn’t,” he replied with a grin. “Is this everything you have?”
“So far, sir,” I said, and proffered a fat folder. “These are the victim profiles. Nothing on the suspect so far but conjecture and that composite.” I pointed to the picture of the jogger that had been put together based on mine and Cormac’s description.
Sir Arthur studied the picture intently. “He looks like Edward the First,” he said unhelpfully.
“Edward Longshanks?” asked Cormac.
“We never actually called him that, you know,” said Sir Arthur as he casually turned the pages of the victim profiles. “He had all the scholars say we did, but he was always just ‘Ned’ to us.” Cormac and I exchanged raised eyebrows. We both knew how old Arthur was, but it was still surprising when he brought things like that up in casual conversation. “But it’s probably not him,” continued the Magistrate, closing the file and returning it to my desk. He stopped suddenly as he noticed the blood-spattered map that Cormac had brought me the day before. “Was this a location spell?”
Cormac shuffled over. “Yeah. We used the blood from the flask. Seems it was a few weeks removed from the recipient, so it was a bit… unhelpful.”
Sir Arthur held the map up to the light and examined it intently. As he brought it close to his face, his chest didn’t betray any movement - it never did - but I got the distinct sensation he was inhaling deeply. Finally, he said “there’s something wrong about this,” and placed it back on my desk, spreading it out to its full extent.
Cormac seemed confused. “It’s Buckley’s movements from mid-December until yesterday morning. I cast the spell myself. What could be wrong?”
Sir Arthur shook his head. “It’s all his blood, alright. But the movement doesn’t… fit the blood, if I am describing this correctly. I don’t know. It’s hard to describe; I trust you and your spellcasting, Mister Francis, but there’s something… off… about this.”
“Is there blood left?” I asked.
Cormac nodded. “A little, yeah. Why?”
“Let’s cast it again. Compare the maps.”
An hour later, Cormac, Sir Arthur and I stood over two almost-identical maps of Dublin. Blood streaks stained the paper of both, and if you didn’t believe in magic, you’d be amazed that the randomness and haphazardness of blood spattered on two different maps would form two almost-identical patterns.
Most of the drops on the new map were just a tiny bit smaller and more faded than the one from the day before, but Buckley’s house and office were slightly darker and thicker. This was to be expected; He’d spent one more night at home and one more day at the office since we had made the first map. But there was one drop of blood which had hit the previous day’s map in a seemingly-random spot north of the Liffey that had hit today’s map in the exact same spot. It also looked both larger and darker today.
Sir Arthur tapped it with a fingernail. “Has Mister Buckley been here?”
Both Cormac and I shook our heads. “Not that we know of,” I said.
“Well, then,” said Sir Arthur. “It seems that someone has his blood. And they spent last night there.”
The location turned out to be an empty building on Harbour Court; a boarded-up shop with three floors of abandoned flats above it. Cormac and I headed over with Murtagh and his team from Containment.
Murtagh and I went in first, as we had resistance to whatever spells may be sent our way. But while my immunity to magic was natural, Murtagh’s was hard-earned through an intricate network of sigils tattooed on every inch of exposed skin. He was the toughest human I knew and it was reassuring to have him as backup.
The ground floor was a café, long abandoned. The tables and chairs were stacked by a wall and covered by a thick layer of dust and mould. But one of each had been recently dragged from the pile, wiped off, and set up in the middle of the floor. A map of Dublin was spread over the table, weighted at one side by a pile of cutlery and on the other by a small book bound in aged dark leather.
“We’re in the right place,” I said, as Murtagh’s men filed past us and took up strategic positions to cover the exit to the kitchen and a doorway to what I presumed was a staircase heading upstairs. A soft thud sound came from upstairs, as if in answer.
When we mounted the stairs, we found ourselves in the front room of an old and similarly abandoned apartment. The broken furniture had been moved aside to make space for a newer-looking mattress.
Before the mattress stood the jogger who had attacked us. He seemed frozen between crouching and fleeing.
“Freeze!” yelled Murtagh, but the old man hesitated only a second before darting to one side. He was probably trying to reach a door I could see which seemed to lead to another staircase, but Murtagh and I reached him first. Murtagh went low and I went high and we pinned him to a wall, probably a little too violently for regulations.
It was when I was close to him, with my elbow under his chin and our faces just inches apart, that recognition dawned. The vague sense of familiarity I had been experiencing crystallised into something solid, and I realised I was looking into the face of a man I had spoken to just a few hours previously on the plaza outside his office.
It was a few decades older and it was sporting longer hair and a beard it didn’t have six hours earlier, but it was unmistakably the face of a stockbroker named William Buckley.
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