Twelve Months to Midnight

In 1842, Sir Arthur returned to England from Hong Kong, which he had just helped establish as a colony of the Empire. He was welcomed back by all who knew his history, but in truth, nobody was quite sure what to do with him. He had been absent from Europe for almost a century but still held lands, title, and property in London. At least, he held them on paper. When he had last lived in London, he and another vampire had split the city between them; their territories divided by the route of the Thames. But the other vampire had disappeared on an ill-timed excursion to Paris about fifty years prior, and others had since moved in to claim both halves of the city as their own. Though they too welcomed their brother back with pointed smiles and a veneer of politeness, even the mortals who saw the exchanges knew trouble was on the horizon. It was Robert Peel, the Prime Minister at the time, who devised a solution. He offered the role of Magistrate of the Dublin Office of Special Investigator...

The Dublin Office of His Majesty’s Special Investigators had four Resident Magistrates in its first ten years. The first died within a week of arriving in Ireland. He was leaving for church on his first Sunday and was shot dead on his doorstep by a gang of Irish rebels. It was never clear if he was their intended target or if they mistook him for the house’s previous occupant - also a magistrate - who had hanged two of their members a year earlier. The second Magistrate served for two years before a disagreement arose between him and a Colonel in the Royal Irish Regiment over a horse race. They would not or could not settle the dispute by sane methods so arranged to meet in the Phoenix Park for pistols at dawn, where and when the Magistrate was shot. He was rushed to a doctor, but died of his wounds two weeks later. The third Magistrate stayed several years in the role, but was recalled to London following a scandal involving the wife of a prominent Whig. The fourth Magistrate managed ...

The Office of His Majesty’s Special Investigators was founded more than two hundred years ago by King George IV, when he was still Prince Regent. Investigators were dispatched to Edinburgh, Belfast, Dublin, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Cardiff, to hunt out supernatural creatures and practitioners of witchcraft, all reporting back to the Chief Investigator in London. Within a few years, it became apparent that a single investigator per city was woefully insufficient, and so regional offices were opened and organised in the model of the newly-formed Metropolitan Police. The Dublin office was also assigned a Resident Magistrate to rule on cases that could not be referred to existing local courts. I joined Containment the next morning on a raid. For the previous two weeks we’d been working together to hunt a gang of human traffickers who had been using Midnight Doors to stay ahead of law enforcement. My first position with the OSI had been in Containment, and I enjoyed getting back to my roo...