James Baldwin - Blood Hound

“ Bi-en bol baltoh .” The words bubbled up as I faced the sigil, eyes closed. I brought the knife up and around, drawing it through the soapy film of energy to find its flow and pattern. The words themselves were fragments of Enochian, a language which had to be spoken slowly, each letter intoned at a specific pitch. “ Comselha cilna nor-molor .”

Enochian was invented by John Dee, the court wizard of Queen Elizabeth I. He believed he had discovered the language of the angels. I suspected he had actually taken a lot of drugs and made it up, but it was the ideal magical language for someone who saw sounds in color. Every sound had a unique color and texture, and I could taste both with every well-shaped word. They tripped sweet and syrupy from my tongue, rolling, weaving into the ward, and my senses began to expand. I could feel Moni twitching and flinching from ten feet away through my fingertips. This was not even the high weirdness, but magical disturbance was unnerving for Blanks [7] A slang term for non-magical people. with no ability to understand what was happening. They feel dread, I am told: a twisting in the belly that screams “wrong!” like a siren going off in the animal part of the brain.

I carefully pricked the skin of my wrist and watched the red well up, only to be sucked away. The first drop twisted upwards and vanished, then the next. A giddy rush of energy flooded me then, pushing and clamoring. I tipped my head back and let it connect, feeling out along the ward as it fed from my body. It did not take long to find what I was looking for: the chink. The delicate error where the mage’s drying finger had not quite connected the circle. I felt it out with the prying fingers of my mind, braced myself, and shoved.

My arm bled, the ward swelled, and then it snapped. My grasp on it turned from caress to violation as I shunted hot power through the fine filaments of magic. The air of the stairwell blackened and buzzed like television snow around us; the lights flickered, one of them bursting with the pop and fizzle of spent Freon.

“Jesus have mercy!” Moni’s voice echoed up and down the stairs.

The magical net snapped one last time, flickering with pearly light, and then burnt itself out and fell dormant. The ripples slowed. The lights shone normally. The ward was inert, while the big Bulgarian, a veteran of hundreds of smuggling runs and God-knew-how-many murders, was white and bunched with fear. He watched me warily in the swelling silence.

“That was what we colloquially refer to as a ‘snatcher.’” Scanning the wall for anything I might have missed, I tugged my gloves up and adjusted the cuffs of my jacket. “A spell designed to extract intention and memory. If we’d passed the door, we’d have forgotten what we were here for. If Nicolai asked about the job, we’d have said it was finished, and as far as we’d know, it would be.”

Moni’s eyes bugged. Slowly, he clambered up towards me from the bottom of the stairs. “So you’re saying that maybe some of the things I remember, I don’t really remember? Like, maybe I didn’t even do ’em?”

“Perhaps, but spells this powerful are not especially common these days. They’re very expensive to hire for. Now, we move on. Come.”

I led the way into the hallway, and for a time, we heard nothing but the rhythm of our shoes tapping against marble. I counted the doors out of habit, but I knew which one we needed. The penthouse floor was like a wind tunnel, the pressure of arcana drawing me towards its core.

The ward scribed into Vochin’s door was a delight, thrumming the Yesodic substrate with a deep bass hum. The hairs on my neck thrilled as we approached, and I paused for a moment of appreciation for such a beautifully wrought piece of work. The one in the landing had been quick and dirty, a first-stop defense. This ward throbbed with power and malevolent, bated heat. It was written to connect with the energy of Mars, which meant it would respond—and act—with some kind of physical force. Explosion, implosion, kinetic burst. No wonder Semyon had fled here.

Moni couldn’t see the lines, but I could see him sense the force in them as the ward rippled warily in my presence. Gooseflesh crept up the big man’s neck and arms, and his fingers tightened on the trigger. “Fuck this place. Feels like them air pockets, huh? You know, like when you’re on a plane.”

“I’ve never flown.” I held a hand up towards the door, and the ward thrummed sensuously in response. Who on earth had this kind of ability? I could only dream of creating something like this. It was impossible to suppress a twinge of envy, but given what had happened to Surzi and Boris, I’d expected Semyon’s inner layers of defense to be greater than what I myself could cast or dispel. “This is the same kind of ward that killed the men earlier today. Masterful, and the product of a great talent. Very dangerous.”

“What did it do to them?”

“It turned them into two buckets of red paint and ground beef,” I replied. It was hard to keep the right tone of voice at this point in the game. “This is a very powerful piece of magic—and I need your help.”

“Me?” Moni turned to face me, a gleam of avarice finally lighting the spark in his wolfish eyes. No doubt he enjoyed my loss of blat’, respect, and the boost to his own authority. His mind was already stoked on whatever he planned to do to Vochin’s wife, and the money he expected to get after the job: twenty thousand, minus Nic’s cut. Even after he greased the Kommandant’s palm for his excellent driving, Moni would have more money than he’d held in his entire life. “What the hell do you think I can do about this shit, shortass?”

“You believe in God, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” His eyes narrowed warily.

“I need you to stand right in front of the door and pray while I speak the incantation. Belief in the divine is more powerful than normal magic. I need your help and your faith.” I pitched my voice low, gentle and authoritative. “Make sure you don’t touch it, but get as close as you can.”

Moni nodded, licked his chapped lips, and moved slowly towards the door. The ward geared itself expectantly, poised like a weaving cobra, but Moni did what he was told. He lifted his hands and prayed earnestly. He was scum, but he could definitely follow orders. None of us joined the Organizatsiya because we were nice, pleasant people, but I made sure Nic gave me the worst of the worst for these jobs. Rapists, bullies, pedophiles… My last partner had a thing for teenage girls, fourteen or fifteen years old. My stomach curled at the memory of his banter in the car.

While he mumbled earnestly at the sigil, I drew my most powerful tool from my coat, a tool I have worked on enchanting for most of my professional life: The Wardbreaker, a silver Colt Commander engraved with symbols down the length of its barrel. I checked the silencer was properly aligned, and then leveled it at the back of Moni’s head.

“ IAL !” The word of power burst from my lips like the bullet from the gun.

Moni’s face exploded in a wet spray against the ward, body jerking in surprise, and the air buckled and warped with a sub-audible screech. The sacrifice flooded the ward with energy, so fiercely and so suddenly that the magic spent itself before the man’s soul snapped its link and closed the Gate. I helped it along with another bullet, shoving as much of my own return force into the spell’s weave as I could. Moni didn’t even hit the floor: the ward sucked the remaining life out of him and compressed his flesh into something the size of a baseball, which landed with the full weight of a two-hundred–pound man and shattered into chunks of super-dense charcoal. A frightened cry came from inside. The job could begin.