Chapter 3
That night, well after dark, I locked up the shop and caught a cab to Mills Creek. I’d found Evan’s address in my records, from an invoice for a book he’d ordered last year. I needed to check out the crime scene, to determine if his murder had in fact been a magical working, and if so to look for clues the police wouldn’t be able to find.
All magic leaves residual energy behind, like ripples and stains in the fabric of reality, which fades over time in proportion to the amount of power used. Those of us with the gift can see such energy patterns. Back in the late nineteenth century, back when I’d still been young and naïve enough to believe in the Arcanum, I’d volunteered for a team tasked with investigating and stopping what turned out to be a mad djinn rampaging across Europe. We’d tracked it from Istanbul to London via the residual energy it left behind as it tore its victims apart.
A major blood rite like human sacrifice would leave plenty of evidence, which would last days, maybe even weeks, past the original event. Hopefully I’d be able to reconstruct the ritual’s structure and technique enough to start figuring out who—or what—had killed Evan. Complex rituals tend to be fairly unique to whoever designed them, like an artist’s signature style. If I could identify specific themes or aspects of the working’s construction, I might be able to identify a suspect. Or at least figure out what kind of mage was behind it.
Assuming it was a genuine magical working at all, of course. With any luck, it was just some kind of Satanic cult that happened to get their hands on an ancient book written in a forgotten Faen dialect. In that case, I could safely leave it in the hands of Detective Lajoie and his partner, and crawl back into my whisky bottles and ley-line research.
As I approached the door of Evan’s somewhat shabby building, I focused for a second and whispered a phrase in Aramaic. Nothing happened from my perspective apart from a slight tingle on my skin, but I knew that if anyone were watching me, I had just faded from their sight and they’d forgotten I’d ever been there. It was a handy glamour I’d picked up many years ago from one of John Dee’s journals, one which he’d attributed to the medieval Syrian sect called the hashashin. It wouldn’t stand up to any amount of magical scrutiny, but it was useful to avoid the police knowing I was sneaking into their crime scene.
I unlocked the front door of the walk-up almost absentmindedly and headed upstairs to Evan’s apartment. Locks are easy.
Before I even got to his front door, I knew for certain that whatever had happened here, it was definitely real magic. The whole third floor stank of blood, urine, and human defecate. But the hallway radiated terror and desperation, far beyond a mere smell. It wasn’t subtle. It was the kind of energy that even the non-magical pick up on, though they don’t realize it—the kind that gives people a shiver down their spine, a desire to leave a place despite not knowing what happened there. Something truly evil had occurred in this place, leaving its mark in everything around it.
There was a uniformed guard sitting in a chair outside the police-taped door to Evan’s apartment. He looked distinctly uncomfortable. I couldn’t blame him. But I needed him to act on that discomfort, long enough for me to get past the door.
The Arcanum is more a loose cooperative organization of individualistic sorcerers than a true government, so we don’t exactly have laws about the use of magic beyond upholding the terms of our treaties with other factions in the magical world. But we have numerous ancient customs and traditions that are broken only at one’s peril. Among those is a strong taboo against using magic directly to subvert the free will of another sentient being, meaning I couldn’t just psychically order the officer to stand up and walk away. I didn’t even know how to do so if I’d wanted—the taboo extended to the mere study of such skills, not just their application.
However, it did not extend to the use of magic to induce physical sensations. While I couldn’t take control of the man’s thoughts, I could certainly influence him in other ways, to prod him just enough for him to give in to his already-strong desire to leave, at least temporarily. With a silent apology, I focused briefly on making him feel like his bladder was uncomfortably full. He squirmed in his seat for a few seconds, then abruptly stood up and rushed down the hallway past me toward the stairs, desperately seeking somewhere to relieve himself.
I didn’t want to touch anything here if I could avoid it, so once he was gone, I willed the door to open and stepped into the apartment, ducking under the police tape. I didn’t bother to turn on the lights; my eyes saw just fine in the dark. But as soon as I crossed the threshold, I stopped just inside the doorway, stunned.
The photos Detective Lajoie had shown me were just of the walls. I hadn’t seen the rest. I hadn’t seen the blood on the floor. There was so much of it. It’s easy to forget how much blood a human body contains, even when you’ve seen it before. The furniture had all been removed from the living room, and blood pooled on the bare hardwood floor like a layer of spilled paint. Evan hadn’t just been killed, he’d been drained like a slaughtered animal.
But it wasn’t the blood that had stopped me in my tracks. The energy I’d felt in the hallway was almost overwhelming once across the threshold. A tidal wave of misery and hopelessness pressed against my mind, trying to push me away. I struggled to fight off its influence.
This wasn’t just the residual energy of an evil act. It was an active, malevolent force. It was purposeful. Setting something up like this required intent—the deliberate desire to cause terror and anguish to all who encountered it. Why would anyone, even an evil being, put the additional effort into leaving this dark energy behind? I’d never encountered such a thing before.
But malicious residual energy or not, I was here for a reason.
Even for those with the right natural gifts, it takes decades of intense training to master high-level sorcery, and a large part of that training consists of learning to control one’s mind. Trying to tap into the energy of a ley-line is a little like trying to fly a kite in a tornado—every emotion and instinct says to stay away, that it’s too dangerous, too overwhelming. Anyone seeking to wield that kind of awesome power, then, must first learn to quiet their subconscious emotions and instincts, to push their clouding effects to the side.
By itself, it’s not magic. It simply requires a disciplined mind, a strong will, and many years of practice. Your emotions don’t go away; they are exactly as strong as ever. They’re just pushed aside into their own little compartment of your brain. The thinking, rational part of your mind can work free of distractions like fear or anger. It considers your emotions, catalogues them with interest, and proceeds without being bothered by them.
But while sorcerers learn this skill to help us work with ley-lines, it’s fantastically useful in a variety of other situations, too. Such as when you’re overcome with revulsion, but still need to be able to think clearly.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath in through my nose, fought through the overpowering stench of blood and death, and I focused. My emotions and preconceptions fell to the side, and my rational mind noted their intensity as one might consider a particularly grotesque piece of art in a museum. I opened my eyes and looked with absolute calm and clarity.
I again noticed the volume of blood spread throughout the room, but rather than recoil in horror, I observed the stains and tried to understand what they were telling me.
I’d seen plenty of bloodstains before—that djinn had left an awful lot of its victims’ blood behind, alongside its residual energy. So had the Shadows. I’d learned to read the stories left in dried blood through long experience.
I noticed that the main pool of blood, which had turned black as it dried, had an unusual surface shape. Blood is a liquid when inside the body, but it holds various solids that do weird things as it dries: when pooled outside the body, it clots and separates. The main clot in the center forms a bumpy, uneven sheet, the edges develop radial cracks as they dry faster than the viscous portion in the middle, and the liquid serum which separates during the clotting process forms a yellowish-red stain around the solid black main pool. But in this case, the bumpy, uneven center wasn’t quite right. On closer inspection, I saw it had a fine ridge, clearly tracing the outline of something heavy which had been laid atop the blood as it dried.
There was the telltale brownish-red spatter of arterial spray a few feet away, and another smaller pool of blood off to the side.
I looked up and saw a bloody hook in the ceiling. When livestock is slaughtered, the carcass is often hung from a hook so gravity can help drain the blood before the meat is butchered. I realized that was what must have happened here: Evan had been hung from the hook, probably upside down, and his throat opened. That accounted for the initial arterial spray pattern, with the rest of his blood pouring out from the wound to the floor below. Then his body had apparently been removed from the hook and laid on top of the blood pool, where it dried around him into its present pattern. I could see the footprints where the killer had moved the body after the blood was drained. In fact, from the footprints I identified there were at least two killers, one with significantly smaller feet than the other.
I next noticed holes in the hardwood filled with pooled blood that could only have come from stakes driven through his hands and feet, pinning his body in place. But he had to have already been dead by that point, his blood drained beforehand. Had he been executed while pinned to the floor, most of it would have pooled in his body, contained by his skin.
On close inspection, the shape of the outline was odd, not quite right. My detached mind quickly realized that he hadn’t merely been killed and drained of blood, but also dismembered. Human bodies aren’t proportioned the way this outline indicated—it looked like his arms and legs had been removed and swapped, so his legs extended from his armpits and his arms from his hips. Then they’d been staked in that position. I didn’t know why anyone would do such a thing, but that was clearly what the physical evidence indicated. The why would have to wait until I could get back to my books and start researching sacrificial blood rites. It wasn’t exactly my area of expertise.
That also might explain the smaller bloodstain: if Evan had been wearing clothing at the time, the killers would most likely have removed it before dismembering him. A pile of bloody clothes may well account for the stain pattern in question, though they would have had to get a lot of blood on them before being cast aside like that.
I then turned my attention to the writing on the wall, which I had already seen in Detective Lajoie’s photographs. I could now see, on closer inspection, that they had been inscribed with two fingers from the same hand, written in an orderly, unhurried pattern. The hand in question had been calm and steady. From the red footprints below, I could identify the starting point and follow the order in which the glyphs had been written, which would be useful for deciphering their meaning.
I slowly looked all around the room, up at the ceiling, down at the floor, storing everything in photographic detail. The blood patterns, the footprints, the writing, everything. It’s amazing what the mind can do when you manage to cut through all the clutter.
Now for the unpleasant bit—the actual magic. Focusing might be a skill anyone can master with the will and the patience to learn, but it’s only the first step. The next part was a bit trickier.
It’s sometimes referred to as opening the “third eye,” but only by people who have never done it. It’s nothing like opening an eye. It’s more like tasting than seeing and involves opening your whole body to the magical energy around you, letting it pass through you.
And goddamn was the magic in this room foul.
Not exactly painful, but certainly not pleasant, it played along the energy channels of my body. I knew the emotional side of my mind was shuddering, revolted by the touch of this energy. It tasted of dead, rotting flesh, of desolation. It felt of all things rancid and putrid and decomposing. That was my first impression. I didn’t get a second, because it was also aware. And angry.
What happened next was something I’d never experienced before. Unlike actively probing around me, tasting was a passive form of magic. It didn’t require acting upon anything, just letting it act upon your senses. Much like seeing something with your eyes or hearing it with your ears, there was no way tasting would alert anything to your presence in itself.
But somehow, a fraction of a second after I began tasting it, the energy in the room changed. It coalesced in a spot directly above the site of Evan’s death, the lights in the room flickered once, the temperature dropped to freezing, and it lunged at me. It was like someone expected a sorcerer to show up and set a trap.
How interesting, my detached mind remarked.
But focusing doesn’t shut down the subconscious, just pushes it to the side. Recognizing the threat, my instincts kicked in before my rational mind had a chance to process what was happening and decide on a course of action. I instantly slammed shut my energy channels and threw up a shield. Just in time, as I felt the impact of the dark energy a fraction of a second later, the cold of it washing over me, trying to penetrate. I was surprised, but I had it handled. Then I heard an unexpected sound.
“What the hell? How did this door get opened . . . ? Goddammit, is someone in there?!”
It seemed the officer on crime scene guard duty had returned from his urgent bathroom break. And in my initial shock after walking into the apartment, I must have forgotten to close the door behind me. He still couldn’t see me through my glamour, but if he came in to investigate, there was a good chance he’d walk right into my back.
To make matters worse, a fraction of a second later I realized I had a bigger problem than being discovered. Maintaining active spells like glamours and shields takes energy. If I’d had time to bind the shield to a physical object like a piece of jewelry or a wand, the focus would have acted as a conduit, letting me power the spell with the surging energy of the ley-line node I felt in the earth directly below us. But since I’d been caught off-guard, I was instead drawing on my own reserves, limiting how big a shield I could maintain while also holding the glamour. I felt the attacking spell starting to seep over the top of my defenses. Directly toward the police officer who was about to investigate the open door.
He wasn’t going to walk into my back, he was going to walk right into the path of whatever the hell this spell was. I didn’t know what that would do to him, but I could hazard a guess that it would probably be very, very bad.
Shit. I didn’t have much choice here. I had enough on my conscience already. I wasn’t going to let an innocent bystander pay the price for my miscalculation.
“What the f . . . ” I heard the officer start to exclaim behind me as I dropped the glamour and suddenly materialized a few feet in front of him. But I would have to deal with him in a minute; right at this very second, I had a more pressing concern.
No longer maintaining two spells at once, I was able to expand my shield to block the spell’s advance. I flooded it with energy, and it flared into a bright blue wall of light, from floor to ceiling directly in front of my outstretched left hand, and the faded tattoo on the back of the hand glowed a matching color. I was already starting to shake with the exertion, but fortunately I didn’t have to hold the shield long. After a couple seconds, I felt the attacking spell dissipate as it wasted itself on the effort to get through my shield.
I let the shield fade back into nonexistence and stood there for another second, just breathing heavily as the trembling got worse.
“Hands up, pal! You’ve got a lot of explaining to do!”
I turned to see the officer aiming his sidearm at me, his eyes wide with confusion and shock. I slowly raised my hands, palms out towards him. It wouldn’t do to get myself shot by the man whose life I’d probably just saved.
“What the fuck just happened?!” he barked. “Who are you?!”
“I . . . ”
I started to answer, but between my exhaustion and my efforts to process what had just happened, combined with my need to figure out what to do about this particular situation, my focus slipped. Before I could get any more words out, the emotional part of my mind slammed back into the rational part like a locomotive.
Focusing comes almost instinctively to me at this point, my emotions separating from my rational mind in a fraction of a second. But no matter how easy it gets to slip into, no matter how practiced one gets with it, coming out of it never changes. The two halves of the mind have both just experienced the exact same situations, seen the same things, and registered their individual reactions. Once they’re reunited, the conscious mind gets to experience every emotion that had been pushed aside.
I had just witnessed a couple horrors back to back. My emotions had ranged from revulsion and despair to absolute terror. And I got the full impact of all of it at the same time.
My mouth opened and closed a couple times, no words escaping.
Then I passed out.
I came to on the floor, where I’d collapsed. I heard the officer requesting backup on his radio, so I couldn’t have been out for more than a few seconds. I was shivering violently—drawing on my own energy reserves the way I’d done to power that shield had chilled my core body temperature several degrees.
I was also in handcuffs, and I no longer felt the weight of my firearm in its holster. Evidently the officer had decided to secure the “suspect” before calling it in. Maybe I’d been out a little longer than I initially thought.
With a groan, I struggled to sit myself up. The shivering was rapidly subsiding now that I’d stopped expending energy and the magical fields around me were able to restore my power reservoirs, but the wave of nausea I had to fight off from the simple effort to sit up told me I’d be feeling the lingering effects for a couple hours at least.
“Okay, buddy,” the police officer addressed me, “if you could go ahead and start talking, that would be great.”
I shook my head. There wasn’t really anything I could tell him that would get me out of this. I knew that if I stuck around, I was going to spend the rest of the night in a holding cell. I wasn’t worried about going to prison or anything: even if trespassing on a crime scene were a felony, humans hadn’t built a prison which could hold a sorcerer who didn’t want to be there. But I had more pressing matters to attend to. First, I needed a good night’s sleep to recover from what had just happened. But then I needed to start following up on what I’d found in Evan’s apartment.
In blood magic, the blood itself is a conduit along which the mage can funnel power. Blood is an extremely effective channel for magical energy, much like gold is for electricity. It’s is one of the most easily accessible material bases of life, and life is energy. Blood magic, by itself, isn’t a big deal. Plenty of people use it for minor things, like finding people, healing minor illnesses, or binding oaths. Such small workings only require a few drops of blood, usually voluntarily given, and are generally harmless.
But Evan’s death was something else entirely. Major blood sacrifice went out of fashion centuries ago, for the simple reason that it usually requires murdering someone, or at the very least slaughtering an animal. People are more effective than animals because they’re more aware of what’s going on. The fear, the pain, those magnify the power gained through the blood—the more pain and terror, the more energy in the victim’s blood.
Evan’s murderers were building power for something. I didn’t know what yet—that would require a deeper understanding of the ritual’s construction and might require that translation Detective Lajoie had asked me for. But between the scale of the working itself, the deliberate malevolent energy left behind to deter people from the location, and the trap left behind for any sorcerer who might come along to investigate—sophisticated magic in itself—I could virtually guarantee that Evan wasn’t the end of it. I was probably looking at the beginning of a serial murder spree, and if the first victim were anything to go on, they were probably targeting sorcerers specifically, or maybe magical beings in general.
All of which meant I couldn’t afford a few days in holding. Whether I wanted to or not, I needed to deal with this before it got worse. Which in turn meant I needed to get out of there before this officer’s backup arrived.
“Hey, pal,” he said, “this’ll be a lot easier for both of us if you tell me what’s going on.”
“Sorry, son,” I groaned, looking wearily up at him, “but you wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, but I ignored him. Instead of answering, I closed my eyes, calmed my breathing, and focused. With a slight whisper, my handcuffs popped open.
“What the fu . . . ” he started to react, but I was way ahead of him. He didn’t have time to process what was happening before I was already on my feet. I stretched my hand toward him and lightly tapped his forehead.
“Somnum,” I said under my breath, and he fell asleep at my touch. I caught him as he started to collapse to the ground, and laid him down as gently as I could manage—he’d been through a lot in the past few minutes, and I didn’t mean him any harm, but I needed to get out of there. Preferably with no solid evidence I’d ever been present in the first place. I knew I didn’t have the energy to maintain the glamour spell I’d used to sneak in, so I couldn’t make him forget I’d been there. But I could at least make his description the only thing I left behind. Hopefully his story would be crazy enough that no one would believe it.
I put my hand on the body camera on his chest and directed my will into it. With a slight pop, faint tendrils of smoke issued from the plastic casing, confirming that it was destroyed, erasing the video proof I’d been at the scene.
I used the bottom edge of my shirt to wipe my fingerprints from the camera casing, then glanced around. Spotting my j-frame and wallet in an evidence bag next to the officer’s chair, I grabbed the bag and his notebook, and walked toward the stairwell.
I was three blocks away, turning the corner, by the time I saw the red and blue lights of his requested backup drive past in the other direction.