Chapter 4
I woke up the following morning feeling well rested for the first time in ages. It had been a long time since I’d used that much magic, especially without the assistance of a ley-line, and it had left me exhausted enough to sleep dreamlessly. It was a novel experience—I’d forgotten what it felt like for my joints not to ache. I even felt up to showering and shaving before opening up the shop.
Then, having no customers to immediately deal with, I headed into the back room and started going through my books, pulling anything I could find on blood magic and ritual sacrifices, especially involving the Fae, off the shelf into a stack by the desk.
I didn’t have a particularly extensive background in the subject—people who can access the power of ley-lines don’t generally have to resort to crude alternatives like blood and elaborate rituals—but I had been given a well-rounded education. Between what I’d learned from my Arcanum masters and what I’d encountered dealing with rogue sorcerers over the years, I knew enough about the basics to recognize that something was off about this particular ritual setup.
It wasn’t just the unusual trap spell, which was something I’d never seen before—as best I could figure, that had to have been set to attack as soon as the magical energy in the room was disturbed in any way, like a sorcerer allowing it to flow through him so he could taste its patterns. That alone was interesting, because I wasn’t even sure how one would set such a trigger. Whoever had been behind the trap was highly skilled and likely extremely powerful. Which raised the question, if they were that good, why did they need the ritual and the blood sacrifice in the first place?
Furthermore, the actual construction of the ritual itself just didn’t make sense. Why lay the body down on top of the blood? Why the apparent dismemberment? Why stake the limbs down after the victim was already dead? I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something weirdly familiar about all of it—it reminded me of something I’d heard about before. I didn’t think it was anything from my personal experience, but it felt like I’d read about a ritual like this before, or maybe been told about it by someone else. Unfortunately, this was where my long memory became a liability: I had read about so very many things, and heard so very many stories, that I had no idea where to start narrowing it down.
And so, without a better plan, I cracked open the first book and started skimming, hoping something would spark that little hint of recognition in the back of my mind.
By midafternoon, I’d made my way through a half dozen books, but was no closer to an answer when a quiet voice rose up from the dark recesses of my mind. The Immortal would know. Johannes could help you, if you let him.
I froze.
This was the second time in three days I’d thought about my old mentor, someone I’d successfully avoided thinking about for years. This kind of shit is exactly why I tried so hard not to get involved with anything beyond my shop and my own research. Getting involved meant having to think about things, having to face memories I didn’t want to confront.
My relationship with my old mentor had not ended on good terms. It had been shortly after the first reports of the Shadows, mysterious creatures from another universe which had begun preying on humans and Fae alike. That was the last time I’d answered the Arcanum’s call. The last time I’d been foolish enough to think I could save the world.
I’d been in a bad place when I met Johannes. By the time he found me, I was already halfway towards being a drunk, in large part because of the things I’d done in the service of the Arcane Court over the century before. Krakatoa. The Tear. Tunguska. That last one had been the final straw. What had happened in Siberia that morning had left me angry and resentful and cynical.
He’d tried to save me from myself. The Immortal wasn’t affiliated with the Arcanum—he was much older than it; to my knowledge no one else in the society was even aware of his existence—and he’d done his best to rescue me from what they’d done to me, what they’d turned me into.
But he may have done too good a job. Over the two decades I’d spent learning from him, I’d rediscovered myself, and even rediscovered some of my ideals. I’d learned to hope again.
Then the call came. The Shadows appeared out of nowhere, and the Arcanum needed everyone they could get. In my newly restored idealism, I’d seen it as my duty to answer the call, to serve humanity once again.
Johannes had begged me not to go. He reminded me of what I’d been when we’d met, what my service to the Arcanum had done to me once before. He warned me that if I followed that path again, this time it might well destroy me.
I went anyway. He’d been right.
I hadn’t spoken with the Immortal since I’d left his house three quarters of a century ago. I hadn’t been able to face him. I had too many regrets, too much shame about the things I’d done in the Shadow War, the things I’d done with the gifts he’d taught me.
I opened a new bottle of whisky and stamped that whispering voice back down into the darkness.
I’d found nothing useful in my books on blood magic, so I decided to try a different tack. I pulled out my copies of the Annals of the Arcanum, the society’s records of every major event in its long history. I knew something was familiar about the ritual that had killed Evan. Maybe I’d read about it in the Annals at some point.
An hour later I found it.
It was a description of a series of blood rites the Lord Marshal of the Arcane Court and his men had discovered in thirteenth century Brittany. I’d read it before, a long time ago, and as I skimmed it now something about it jumped out at me. I reread it, carefully, then again, making sure I understood the archaic Latin properly. The description wasn’t straightforward, but after my third reading it still seemed like it was exactly what I was hoping to find, the memory that had been teasing me all day.
There had been a series of four murders. In each case, the victim had been tortured, flayed, and dismembered. The description wasn’t clear on how exactly the ritual had been arranged, but it did say their blood had been used to write words of power around the body in Fae tongues.
Thinking back to what I’d seen the night before, I realized that if Evan had been flayed before being dismembered, his discarded skin would perfectly account for the secondary blood stain, the one I’d initially guessed was from bloody clothing cast aside. And hadn’t Detective Connors mentioned something about skinning when she was arguing with her partner that they had better things on which to spend their time? It all fit.
And it named the people the Arcanum had executed for being involved. A rogue sorcerer, two apprentices, and . . . oh, that’s problematic.
I grabbed another book off my shelf and laid it on the desk. Unlike most of the books I’d been reading through for the past several hours, this one wasn’t dusty at all, nor was it written in Latin. It was still huge and leather-bound, but it was written in Elizabethan English, and was less than five hundred years old. It was a compendium of every kind of magical creature in the world for which the author could find a name, and I regularly used it as a go-to source when I needed fast information about a specific being.
I found what I was looking for where I knew it would be but had greatly hoped it wouldn’t. The Avartagh, he was called in Irish.
Legends claimed he was a powerful example of the walking dead, who tormented his human subjects and drank their blood. Legends are told by someone who heard something from someone else. The reality is rarely even close, often to the point that it’s impossible to tell how the truth became the myth. But according to the compendium’s author, in this case it was clear where the stories came from.
He was a monster, an insane Faerie who hated humans for the perceived crimes of the Christians, mostly stealing his territories in Ireland and depriving him of worshipful followers. Apparently, the part about drinking the blood of the humans in his territory was true. He hadn’t been killed, despite the legends which credited druids or the hero Fionn mac Cumhaill for doing so, just banished back to the Otherworld.
Evidently, he’d returned at some point, if the annals’ account of the blood rites in Brittany were accurate. And the annalist may have said the Arcanum executed him, but he’d been executed before. At least three times. Clearly it didn’t take very easily.
I finished my whisky, thinking over what this meant.
It was not good. It was very not good. If the Avartagh were active once again, things could get out of hand rapidly. I might not be able to contain this alone.
Just then I heard the bell over the front door ring for the first time all day. I took a deep breath to calm down and slow my heart rate back to normal levels, then headed out to greet my customer.
Except it wasn’t a customer: I stepped out of the back office to discover Detective Lajoie had returned. A quick glance around showed no sign of his partner.
“Mr. Quinn,” he greeted me as he walked over toward the counter where I stood.
I grunted in annoyance. I didn’t care for the interruption.
“What can I help you with today, Detective?” I asked in a tone suggesting I had no desire to help him with anything right now. “I haven’t had enough time to translate those glyphs yet.” They’d arrived in my inbox this morning; knowing what I now knew, I wasn’t going to waste time. I’d have one of my Fae contacts translate it for me as soon as I got the chance.
“No, I know,” he shook his head, “that’s not what I’m here about.”
“Oh?” I cocked my head in feigned interest. My thoughts were still on the Avartagh. I didn’t have time for this.
“What does the word Arcanum mean to you, Mr. Quinn?”
My heart skipped a beat, and I hesitated for a fraction of a second. That was a dangerous question. Detective Lajoie suddenly had my full attention.
“Literally,” I answered carefully, acting nonchalant, “it’s a Latin word meaning ‘the secret,’ or ‘the mystery.’ Why do you ask?”
“My grandpapa died when I was young boy,” he told me, putting his hands on the counter and looking me in the eye. “My mama kept a small box of some of his personal things when we left Haiti. In a couple of his letters, he mentioned ‘the Arcanum’ like it was some kind of secret occult society. I think he was a member. Have you ever heard of it?”
That gave me pause.
“No,” I shook my head after a second’s thought. “Doesn’t ring a bell, sorry.”
“Bullshit,” he said frankly, looking me in the eye.
“Excuse me?”
“Let’s stop fucking around, Mr. Quinn.”
“What?” My voice grew dangerously quiet.
“There was a second murder last night, virtually identical to Evan’s. We’re now officially looking for a serial killer. Two of them, actually, but you probably noticed the footprints last night when you were in Evan’s apartment.”
That took me aback. I’d covered my tracks. How did he know I’d been there?
“I wasn’t . . . ”
Before I finished my protest, he wordlessly pulled a smartphone out of his pocket, turned it to face me, and tapped the screen. My voice trailed off as a video began to play.
It was security camera footage of the hallway outside Evan’s apartment. The video began right as the police officer I’d encountered last night returned from his bathroom break to discover the open apartment door. I watched as he froze at the opening, then a flash of bright blue light illuminated the doorway, blinding the camera for a few seconds. When the light levels readjusted, I saw myself lying unconscious on the ground in the doorway, my face clearly visible, the tattoo on the back of my left hand still glowing blue, though dimming rapidly. The officer handcuffed me, frisked me and found my gun.
I watched in silence as the events unfolded from there exactly as I remembered them. My voice was clear as I told the officer he wouldn’t believe me even if I told him the truth. The video cut out after I put him to sleep, destroyed his bodycam, retrieved my revolver, and left the frame toward the stairwell.
I looked up to see the detective watching my face, his expression carefully neutral.
“I guess you didn’t see the other camera, huh?”
I was silent for a few seconds, processing this turn of events.
“Who all has seen this footage?” I asked quietly as I met his eyes.
“As of right now, just me,” he replied. “This was my camera, not the department’s—I set it up just in case you might turn up. I wanted to see what happened. But before you get any ideas, I have an automated email scheduled to forward a copy to Detective Connors and Captain Paulson, along with a couple friends at the Inquirer and some other news outlets, at midnight. Anything happens to me before then, and your secret gets out. Now, Mr. Quinn, how about you start telling me the truth? I know you’re not one of the killers, because our timeline for the second murder puts it almost exactly when you were busy trespassing on the first crime scene and destroying police property. What I don’t know is who or what the hell you are, or what you were doing there.”
He was smart. And just then, as I looked into his eyes, recognition dawned. I suddenly realized why Detective Lajoie had looked familiar since I’d met him the day prior.
“Antoine Richelieu,” I whispered in recognition, “You’re Antoine’s grandson.”
I hadn’t put two and two together immediately because of the different surnames, but he was the spitting image of his grandfather. A fellow First Ranked Sorcerer of the Arcanum, and a renowned master of Vodou, I’d known Antoine for most of my life. He’d died in the late eighties under mysterious circumstances, but that was long after I’d withdrawn from the magical world at large, and I didn’t know any details.
He nodded. “I am. Now what the fuck is going on?”
I looked away for a few long seconds, thinking things over.
This changed the situation dramatically. It meant I would have to cooperate with Detective Lajoie whether I liked it or not. I certainly wasn’t going to kill innocents to keep that video from getting out, and even if I had some other way to keep them quiet, there was no way of knowing who he’d addressed on that email. The video alone wasn’t damning proof of magic, but it would lead to a lot of awkward questions I didn’t have the time to deal with. At the very least I’d probably have to face charges of obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence, and maybe even assaulting a police officer, which was a hassle for which I didn’t have time. My only real option was to convince him to cancel it, which meant giving him what he wanted.
The Avartagh’s involvement also changed things. If he were behind Evan’s death, and right now all signs pointed in that direction, this could escalate rather quickly. The truth, which I already knew, was that the Arcanum wouldn’t be able to contain things rapidly enough to keep the human world unaffected, even if I could convince them of the threat and they responded immediately. The local authorities needed to be able to help protect the people of Philadelphia.
Furthermore, Detective Lajoie was personally in danger. The magical world is a perilous place—if I let him continue investigating this case uninformed of those hazards, he faced a very real risk of injury or death, far beyond the normal dangers of police work. What if he encountered the Avartagh or a rogue sorcerer and I wasn’t there to protect him? And given what he already knew, even if I somehow managed to destroy his video and stop his email he was likely going to keep searching for the truth. In which case his blood would be on my hands.
However, I also realized, I could now justify answering his questions without risking a treaty violation: as Antoine’s grandson, the Treaty of Tara no longer bound me to keep magic secret from him. Close kin of Arcanum members, even those in whom the gift never manifested, were traditionally allowed to know their family history. Admittedly, that was mostly because they inevitably saw magic around them growing up, so this case was somewhat unusual. But it was still within the bounds of the customs.
I made a decision. I didn’t know if any Lord Marshal had ever condoned actively working with law enforcement in the history of the Arcanum. And despite my long-standing relationship with the current Lord Marshal, and my many past services to the Arcane Court, I had no idea how she’d react when she found out I’d chosen to do so. But this wasn’t her city. It was mine, and it was Detective Lajoie’s. He had a right to know what was going on, and a right to help protect its citizens. And he damn well had a right to know about his own grandfather.
“We’re going to need this,” I announced, as I pulled a bottle of Scotch and a pair of glasses out from under the counter.