01.

DAY 1.

Adelaide, South Australia.

1.00 pm, Australian Central Standard Time

On the night I arrived in Adelaide an expanse of dark clouds manifested in the sky above the city like a looming ceiling, and the three days since had been damp and dim, cast in perpetual twilight. Even now there was no sign of the afternoon sun I knew was somewhere beyond the clouds; only the gloom of another miserable fucking day.

At least for the moment, I was out of the rain, in a little covered alcove with my back to the locked front doors of an apartment building. I was bundled up inside my warmest coat, which I normally felt guilty for not needing. Now, I wished I had a thicker one.

I was here for a Trespasser – a monster from another dimension. Fae-class, based on what I had discovered so far. It had killed three people: a homeless man, an uber driver, and a jogger out too late; all after midnight, all in secluded spots with no witnesses around. It had clawed them to death, eaten some of their bodies, then crawled back into a nearby storm drain, taking a piece of bloody clothing as a trophy.

I’d seen a headline that the Vulgus authorities – in this case the South Australia Police – had written the deaths all off as unrelated animal attacks, each with a separate culprit caught, now humanely destroyed.

In reality, the Null Legion had caught on pretty early from the two-foot-wide bite marks on the victims, and they’d intercepted the story long before it got to the Vulgus news. It was the Legion’s job to keep magic hidden from the un-magical masses, which included knowledge of Trespassers, and the Covenants they kept with the Angels basically gave them carte blanche on how to keep that information suppressed: pulling political strings, deleting reports, erasing memories, whatever they had to do to ensure magic stayed hidden, and regulated.

Dealing with the Trespasser itself, though, was outside the Legion’s jurisdiction. They were human, and their concerns were human magic. Once they had suspected a Trespasser, they’d notified my bosses about the incursion, and that was how I ended up in Adelaide, watching my breath fog like mushroom clouds in the cold.

I was not in the Legion. I was an Envoy working for the Angels, and Trespassers were my jurisdiction.

Before this job, I had been on a surveillance gig in Beijing: two weeks on liaison with a local Mage, following a man suspected of colluding with a Trespasser through labyrinthine hutongs crowded with throngs of people in the heart of the city, as the suspect bounced between noodle restaurants and dive bars. I think I cast two spells all job, and never even drew my weapon. The month before that I’d been back in Australia, in the Northern Territory chasing artefact smugglers. In the Top End, they thought it was cold if it got under 25 degrees Celcius. I missed that – but not the humidity. Beijing had been hot and humid, too, though there the sun had been blotted by an impenetrable layer of smog, and it was hard to tell where exactly the heat was coming from. Like being inside a kiln. As if to taunt me, a gust of frigid wind blew past, dispersing my breath-clouds and whipping at my hair, blowing curls into my eyes.

I pulled my coat up, closing the collar around my throat.

I sensed movement through the glass doors behind me, and turned to see a tenant exiting the elevator at the other end of the lobby, heading outside to brave the weather. As I waited for him, I trod up and down on the spot, trying to get warmed up. My hand was already in my pocket, on my ID. Fifty-fifty on if I’d need it or not.

The tenant – a tall young man, university-aged, carrying a huge black umbrella – finally reached the door and pushed it open. He stepped out into the cold, and before he’d let go of the door, I turned to him, blurted, ‘Oh, thank fuck – it’s freezing out here,’ and made a bee-line straight for the open door. Startled, he held it open for me.

As I ducked past, he stuttered, ‘Uh, you’re not allowed to –’

Without slowing down I held my ID out towards him, just long enough for him to get a look, and confidently announced: ‘It’s fine.’ I shoved the ID back in my pocket, and he didn’t stop me. A moment later I heard the door clatter shut behind me, and he let me go, and went on about his day. For a Vulgus, with no magical ability, the ID was usually enough. It was just a hypnotic spell printed on an otherwise blank card.

The inside of the apartment building was white, with white walls, white tiles, and slightly off-white lights. I couldn’t feel much of a psychic impression coming out of the building itself, but the structure must have been fifteen or twenty years old. No murders or suicides – those left an impression.

I started up the stairs, taking it slow. I’d barely gone up a level when I felt an odd gravity tugging on the edges of my perception: a sound inside my head like a telepathic buzz, putting pressure on my optic nerve.

The little bastard was definitely in here somewhere.

This feeling, though, wasn’t coming from the Trespasser itself. It was the energy from its Dimensional Breach, the hole the Trespasser had chewed through into our reality, when it crossed from the Outside. The hole was still open somewhere above me, contaminating the whole building with abominable interdimensional magic. Magic from the Outside was anathema to our dimension; it corroded and corrupted everything it touched, and when humans were exposed, even for short periods, they could suffer irreversible harm.

The pressure grew stronger the higher I went – like gravity was getting heavier and pulling me in. The pressure peaked four flights up, on the top floor.

I left the stairwell and entered the hallway, pausing for a moment to listen. It was quiet – a weekday afternoon. But anyone could be working from home, coming out to pick up their lunch or ducking out to run an errand.

Quietly, I started down the hallway, stopping at each unit to place my left hand flat on the door, searching for a reaction. The first few were duds. At apartment number 406, I got it.

Before I could even touch the door, a circle of blue light illuminated on the back of my hand, like a tattoo made of flaming ink. The glowing ring was made of dozens of tiny individual symbols packed so tightly together you could barely discern them, and was usually invisible, until it felt the touch of Outside magic.

A sensation followed, in the back of my mouth like the metallic tang of blood. It was pressing on my sinuses, threatening to make me sick. Like the pressure from the stairwell had concentrated itself just behind my eyes.

I placed both hands against the door and closed my eyes, projecting my psychic senses into the room beyond. The space on the other side was alive, writhing with a jagged breath, swirling and growling. The Breach was definitely in there.

I tried the handle, but it was locked. Getting inside wasn’t so much an issue as was getting in quietly. I crouched down to look at what I was working with and got lucky: the lock was old, and I’d been picking pin-tumblers since I was thirteen. I pulled a bundle of lockpicks from my inside coat pocket and worked at it for a few minutes to get the door open, still cautiously listening for any movement in the apartments around me.

I popped the last pin and pushed, swinging the door open a crack. Immediately, raw Outside magic spilled out over the threshold. It was invisible, but assaulted my psychic senses so acutely I felt like I could see it, lapping through the open door and into the hallway like waves of multicoloured smoke. They were colours I had been trained to parse, although it may have been more accurate to say I had been trained to stomach them – looking at them brought a sickening feeling, and I assumed they were normally incompatible with human comprehension.

I flipped my coat aside and drew my dagger from its sheath at my right hip, while I stretched my left hand out in front of me in the gesture of warding: with the pointer and little finger extended. A Legionary once called it the devil horns, but the ward was the name I’d been told, when I’d been taught it.

I pushed into the room, and while the magic on the floor looked like smoke, it didn’t feel like it. I felt like I was wading into thigh-high water, struggling to keep my balance.

I pulled the door shut behind me, but noticed the wood no longer contained the magic: the waves now passed straight through it and out into the hallway, like it wasn’t there. I’d stopped wondering about the chaotic nature of Outside magic a long time ago. It was as unpredictable and aggressive as most of the Trespassers born of it.

In the kitchen a thick mist had gathered, about a foot off the floor, billowing gently in lazy patterns, caught in interdimensional currents and shimmering in unearthly colours. Within it there was a thick tangle of what looked like spider webs – a dense growth of criss-crossed nets hanging from invisible anchor points, and refracting the colours of the aurora in the fog around them.

Ectoplasm. It took a variety of forms but appeared when Outside magic existed too long in our reality. It was corrosion, like rust. I waved it out of my way, before giving the room a once-over.

The ectoplasm appeared to be growing out of the next room. I followed its trail, but paused at the threshold.

There was a dead man in there. He was slumped on the ground between a couch and a massive TV, face-first, with his arse up in the air. It was hard to tell how long he’d been there – there was no smell, no bugs, and he hadn’t decomposed at all. Instead, his skin had turned a pale grey colour, and was cracked and flaking, like dried mud. The Outside magic had petrified him; transfigured all of his body into a twisted statue, even his clothes. There was thick ectoplasm all around him, coating the carpet and couch.

Even after waving the ectoplasm out of the way, I couldn’t see much of his face. There wasn’t much of it left. His head was torn open, split in a deep wedge from the middle of his nose all the way over to the top of his scalp, like he’d been hit in the forehead with a big axe. That’s where the Breach was, and where the Trespasser had come from.

Out of his brain.

On the wall in front of his body was a spell array drawn in red paint: a series of inter-connected circles with a seemingly random assemblage of symbols from various cultures and time periods spiralling around each. Some of it at least was real magic – I recognised some pieces of the configuration, a number of old Norse runes and alchemical equations. But the array was gibberish. I couldn’t even guess what the artist’s intentions had been. Did he even know he was tapping into real magic?