Blood Magic

by N. P. Martin

  “All right,” I said. “Time to put on my big girl’s pants and get out of this cursed place.”

  I moved quickly back through the maze of walkways, ignoring the books that psychically tried to reach out and grab my attention like vines coming alive in a thick jungle. It seemed to take forever, but I finally got back to the ladder and climbed up it into the main basement, hurriedly slamming the trapdoor shut behind me. After that, I stood for a moment, taking deep breaths of air that was much fresher than the stale air down in the dark library. I hoped I wouldn't have to go down there again anytime soon until I realized I would have to return the book I was then holding in my hands. My heart sank at the thought, but I forced myself to forget about it. I had more important things to worry about at the time.

  Blaze had wandered down into the basement by then and was sitting on the floor near the big table in the center of the room. "Fuck that shit," I said to him. "I hate going down there. Come to think of it, I hate black magic altogether." I went and placed the book I was carrying on the table, glad to get it out of my hands. I could already feel its dark energy begin to seep into me and I reminded myself to exercise caution when handling the book. Too much direct contact could result in my soul being corrupted, and I didn't want that. It was bad enough my soul was preparing to leave me for good. I didn't need to corrupt it with evil as well.

  On the floor, Blaze growled up at the book.

  "Hey," I said. "I don't like it any more than you do, but it has to be done. Otherwise, you're going to end up with a soulless ghoul as a master, and I don't think you'd want that. I might try to eat you."

  Blaze growled again as if to say, Yeah like I’d even let you try to eat me. I’d eat you first.

  Warily, I stared at the book as if waiting for it to come alive and attack me, keeping a respectful distance from it until I told myself just to get on with it, that the book wouldn't read itself. I was right, of course. There was no point delaying any more. I needed to read the book so I could put together a summoning ritual. After that, it was up to fate what happened.

  Fuck fate. That's what magic is for.

  It was a bold thought, and one which I tried to get behind as much as possible, which was difficult because it felt then like I was slipping ever deeper into a dark hole that I would never be able to escape from.

  Shaking my head, I went and grabbed a bottle of whiskey. Because hey, if you can’t have a good drink before your possibly untimely demise, then when can you?

  16

  Black Magic

  EVER SINCE I lost my family to that demon, I have done my best to avoid the darker forms of magic at all costs. Before that, I dabbled a little, as did my brother and sister. We were young, wanting to rebel, naturally attracted to the darker forces that existed in the universe. Our mother always warned us not to meddle with black magic, however, often citing the story of our great uncle, Patrick.

  Patrick was from our father's side of the family. He was also a wizard, as were most of the men in the McCreedy family. Patrick McCreedy was always known as the black sheep of the fold, my mother said. Always liked to go his own way, never wanting to tow the family line when it came to anything, including the practice of magic. The family philosophy being to stay the fuck away from dark magic in all its malicious forms. That was the official line anyway. Unofficially, things were clearly different.

  Hence, Patrick didn’t listen (neither did my father for that matter, but more on that later), and being a bit of a rebel, he dived headlong into the world of black magic, summoning demons and using the power he gained from them to further his own ends, whether financially or sexually. Patrick accrued a vast fortune in a short period. He also became a serial killer, which no one knew until after he had butchered nearly a hundred people. By that point, Patrick's soul was as black as it gets and all he thought about was how much evil he could unleash on the world.

  In the end, Uncle Patrick was consumed by the darkness he had created in himself, to the point where he lost his humanity and became a demon. He now resides in the Underworld, in one of its many hells, wallowing in a pit of filth that is so foul it is beyond human comprehension. So the story went anyway.

  Needless to say, that wasn’t enough to put me or my brother and sister off toying with black magic. We summoned low-level spirits to make them do cruel things to people, like appearing above the bed of an old woman who lived nearby, and thus giving the poor dear a heart attack in the process. It was never our intention to kill her, only to scare her because we thought she was weird and deserved it, which is awful, I know, but we were kids playing with black magic, so what do you expect? We also communed with dark entities who lived in the Astral Plane, and these entities would try to fill our heads with dark thoughts. Their aim was to get us to do nasty things to other people and each other. After my sister stabbed my brother in the leg at their beckoning, we put an end to the meddling in all things black magic; or rather, our parents did. My mother went crazy over the incident, of course, and remained furious at us for days afterward. Our father, although he gave us a cursory telling off in the form of a lecture warning against the dangers of dark magic, also seemed secretly pleased by our foray into the darkness, though that could just be my mind twisting things to suit what I know about him now.

  Besides, our father then went and summoned a goddamn demon, breaking the cardinal rule he had forced us to live by our whole lives (even though he rarely stuck to this rule himself, always playing with the darker forms of magic behind the scenes).

  So you can see why I'm more than a little uneasy about the whole demon summoning thing. Dark magic twists your soul, turns it grotesque and eventually monstrous. It eats you up from the inside, and the worst part is, you are happy enough to let it do so.

  Of course, dark forces can never be completely avoided, especially in my line of work. I had dalliances with them all the time, but I never got in so deep that I ended up losing myself to them. What I was about to do—summon a high-level demon—amounted to slightly more than a mere dalliance, however. This was diving into the darkness head fucking first. I would either lose my mind, my body or my soul. Possibly all three.

  The things we have to do sometimes.

  * * *

  I spent a while in the living room, studying the summoning ritual as outlined in The Book Of Many Hells And Demons. As I sat turning the pages, my mind translating the ancient words for me thanks to the Translation Spell I had cast beforehand, I grew steadily more uncomfortable, shifting awkwardly in my chair, feeling like the room was getting hotter, cold sweat running down my face and body. I felt the tug of black magic in the air. Felt the way it ripped through the quantum fabric around me, slicing and dicing it like a kid with a razor blade swiping at a sheet of newspaper. It was destructive energy, but it was also seductive as it beckoned me in further. Then after a while, I ended up lost in a kind of trance as dark thoughts swirled around my mind like malevolent spirits. It was only Blaze’s insistent growling that shook me out of it. “It’s okay, Blaze," I said in a distant voice like I had just woken from a dream. "It's all right."

  Blaze stopped growling but kept his yellow eyes on me as he sensed the darkness that probably surrounded me like a black fog. I finally snapped the book closed then and placed it on the arm of the chair I was sitting in. It was time to prepare for the ritual, and I had many items to collect for it.

  But first I had to go to the city morgue to steal a dead body.

  17

  The Morgue

  TO PROCURE A cadaver, I had to go to Blackham City Police Headquarters, which was located in Bankhurst. Courthouse Plaza in the Highlands to be exact, where the city's movers and shakers gathered in their shiny skyscrapers, government facilities and business parks. Thanks to the name, the politicians and corporate crones who resided there were known as "The Clans". Needless to say, the local journalists often made reference to this, comparing the day to day political and financial moving and shaking as the "Highland Games".


  I didn't give a shit about any of that, though. I just needed a dead body.

  * * *

  The Blackham City Police headquarters is a huge stone building that reaches ten stories, with a further few below ground level that includes three basements plus an underground car park. The Medical Examiners office and the morgue were in one of the subbasements. Needless to say, the whole building was crawling with cops (quite a few of whom I used to have working relationships with before, you know…) and just walking in there and stealing a dead body wasn't going to happen. Obtaining a cadaver by simply driving down to the underground car park to steal and load a body in the trunk without being caught and arrested during the act is next to impossible, though. The last thing I needed was to end up in police custody. Leona would probably have gotten me out, but still, I didn't need the inconvenience.

  I also needed a body pronto, which the cops obviously wouldn't just let me collect along with my personal belongings on the way out. "Yes, sir, here's your keys, your belt, your wallet…and the dead body you took from the morgue. Have a good day now. You need someone to help you carry that corpse? Tony, give this guy a hand, will you?"

  Yeah, not too likely to happen, was it?

  The best way for me to enter the building clandestinely was to simply teleport in. I knew the layout of the building pretty well, having been in the morgue with Leona a few times, so I knew exactly where to go. All I needed was enough time to locate a suitable corpse, and then I could teleport straight out of there with it.

  Except these things are never that easy, as I was about to find out. I teleported directly into the morgue, only to find the Chief Medical Examiner and two detectives standing around an autopsy table while another young pathologist was in the process of cracking open the sternum of the corpse on the table. All four of them froze as they stared at me a moment, probably wondering how I was able to appear out of thin air in front of them. "What the fuck?" said one of the detectives, frowning in confusion as he instinctively went for his gun.

  “How the hell?” the other detective said, going for his gun as well.

  The ME and the pathologist stopped what they were doing and stared open mouthed at me, probably as much for my decidedly non-city official appearance as much as for the fact that I had seemingly appeared out of nowhere.

  "Hey guys," I said, giving everyone a small wave. "Sorry to interrupt and all, but…" I started sub-vocalizing the words to a spell that would make all four of them forget about the fact that I was even in the room. The magic crackled in my fingertips as I directed it toward them. All four men flinched at the same time as if they had been hit with a bucket of ice water. This was followed by expressions of extreme confusion as they all started to look around like they didn't know where they were anymore.

  Oh shit, I thought. I should have remembered the cameras in the room, which to all intents and purposes, were witness to my magic use. Remember I said that if a Sleepwalker witnesses magic that the magic would not always work as expected? Well, the four men in the room didn’t just forget I was there, they forgot everything—where they were, who they were, what they were supposed to be doing. Everything.

  "What…where am I?" mumbled one of the detectives as he looked around him like everything was now strange and unknown, just as the other three men were also doing.

  The taller detective seemed more panicked than the rest, though, and he took out his gun, even though he probably no longer knew how to use it. “Who the fuck are you people? What are you doing here?”

  The pathologist held up a bone saw. “Stay away from me all of you!”

  The ME screamed at the dead body on the autopsy table, causing the others to get frightened as well. Next thing I knew, the two detectives were pointing their guns at each other, screaming that they were both going to kill each other.

  Jesus, what a disaster.

  Quickly, I sent a magical charge into both security cameras, short-circuiting them both, along with the drive they were connected to. That took care of the whole farce being on record. Now I just had to stop the two cops from killing each other.

  I blasted them both at once with a mild charge of magic. It was enough to rattle their brains and render them unconscious. When the two cops hit the floor, both the ME and the pathologist screamed and they each ran to separate corners of the room where they cowered in fear like frightened children. “Don’t worry," I told them as if they were even listening. "You'll be back to normal soon. In the meantime, I'm just gonna get what I came here for."

  Wasting no more time, I started checking along the wall of steel drawers, looking at the names printed on the front of each one. I was looking for a John Doe, someone who wouldn't be missed all that much as I wouldn't have felt right taking somebody's loved one from them. Thankfully, the city was full of John Doe's, and after a moment, I found what I was looking for and pulled the drawer open to reveal a ravaged looking corpse on a steel slab. It looked like a homeless guy. The corpse had long straggly hair and a grayish beard, the body itself emaciated, the ribs showing through under thin, mottled skin that was full of sores and bruises. "You'll do," I said to the bum's corpse. What the hell, it was only old flesh and blood. The guy's soul would already have departed somewhere else.

  I was just starting to gather my energy for the teleport when I heard a frightened, screaming sound, and when I looked, I saw the ME with a scalpel in his hand as he charged toward me, a look of murder in his gaunt face. “Monster!” he screamed at me. “Monster must die!”

  Shit.

  My magic had clearly driven the poor guy insane. Whoever said that magic was always reliable was full of shit and had obviously never wielded a single goddamn strand of it. “Sorry, man,” I said apologetically as I laid my hands on the cold meat of the corpse beside me. “But I gotta go now.”

  The mad ME with the scalpel kept rushing toward me, and when he was two feet away, I said, “Bye now,” and teleported myself and John Doe out of the morgue and back to the Sanctum, hoping as I did so that the ME wouldn’t kill anybody before the spell wore off.

  18

  John Doe

  I REMATERIALIZED ALONG with John Doe in the basement of the brownstone, the corpse appearing in mid-air before falling four feet to the floor like a sack of gone off meat. "Sorry, dude," I said, slightly out of breath after all the excitement in the morgue. "You were on a slab when I took you."

  John Doe lay dead as dead can be on the floor, eyes shut, looking even more like a corpse now than he did in the morgue for some reason. Maybe it was just the dim lighting in the basement, making his skin that flat chalky grayness and more like dead flesh. The guy's soul must have been cursing me right then, wherever it was. It wasn't unheard of for a soul to come rushing through into this world again just to protect the physical body it used to inhabit. I hoped that wouldn't happen, however. The last thing I needed was John Doe's vengeful soul out to get me. The Sanctum was warded against forced entries by unknown entities, but even still, defenses didn't always work. Like I said, magic can be wholly unreliable at times, almost like it enjoys fucking with people who think they have a handle on it. The odd fuck up or outright disaster serves to remind cocky magicslingers like me that they are just conduits for a force they will never fully control.

  Blaze came down into the basement, pausing at the bottom of the stairs to have a look at what fresh madness his loyal friend had brought back to the Sanctum, his nose raised high as he sniffed the air. The corpse had been refrigerated back in the morgue. Soon enough, though, John Doe's flesh would begin to warm up, and the accompanying smell would be overwhelming, something I wasn't looking forward to. The near fruity tones of death and decay would permeate the whole Sanctum. From experience, I can tell you that it takes days to get fully rid of the stench. "Yes, Blaze, I know," I said as he looked at me like I never ceased to amaze him. "It has to be done, though. But hey, you can eat him afterward if you like. No? Too rotten? Okay then."

  As I stood looking down at the body
on the floor, I wondered what kind of man John Doe had been and if he ever thought his dead body would end being used as an avatar to be possessed by a summoned demon. Probably not. Not even at the height of his delirium tremens, which he surely must have had given how much his body had been so obviously ravaged by alcohol. “I just want to let you know that I appreciate this,” I told John Doe. “As a demon will be summoned to temporarily possess your body, I'll do everything in my power to ensure it is ejected as soon as I'm able to perform the closing of the circle, and that regardless of the state your body could be left in, that I'll make good on a proper cremation so your eternal soul can rest knowing no further abuse of it can take place."

  Just as I was shaking my head at the fact that I was talking to a dead body in my basement, I heard a faint knock at the front door upstairs. Frowning over at Blaze, I waited and another knock came. “Goddamn it,” I said. “Who the hell could that be?” I decided not to answer the door, thinking it would just be a sales call or the like, but then there was another knock, this one louder and more insistent. “Shit.”

  Stomping up the stairs, I made my way to the front door and looked through the spy hole to see the face of Leona looking back at me from the other side of the door. “Shit.”

  What to do, what to do…

  Leona knocked again. She wasn’t going away. Just open the door, I thought. See what she wants.

  I opened the door, trying not to look too put out by the unexpected visit. “Leona. What brings you here?”

  She stared at me a moment with her penetrating blue eyes. "Just checking if you’re still alive." Her eyes drifted past me into the hallway, a frown crossing her face as she took in the strange art on the walls, the boxes of books that I still hadn't gotten around to sorting out yet. I saw her breathe in through her nose like she was smelling something weird. Not the body, surely. Probably the strange, burnt almond smell of magic that permeated the whole house. Whatever, her interest was sparked, and before I could stop her, she had brushed past me and strode into the hallway like a cop entering a suspects house.