“Real haunting ?”

  Now, that was interesting. The last time I actually got to use some magic was three months ago against a barely solidified spirit.

  “You sure?”

  “Do you even have to ask?” Came a self-assured purr from the other side.

  “Okay, okay, wait. Don’t tell me. Let me guess what it is.” I was giddy like a child before Christmas now. “A family moved to an old, weirdly cheap house, and it turned out that the house was haunted.“

  “Nope.” I could hear the amusement in the voice.

  “Ok. A group of college kids tried summoning ghosts and unknowingly used an actual medium.”

  “Not even close.”

  “Right. Some weird cult got their hands on a real Grimoire and screwed up a ritual.”

  “Colder”

  “But there was a ritual?”

  “No ritual.”

  “Hmmm,” I needed a moment to think this time. “An old local legend turned out to be true, and someone who didn’t know that they had magic in them did something wrong.”

  “Oh wow, that was a long shot. Are you giving up?”

  “A tall dude in a suit is standing around a forest like a twat, and I have to get the client their drawings back?”

  “...Really?” The flatness in the voice cut deep into my soul.

  “Ok, ok, but there is an artifact involved?”

  “No artifact.”

  “Grimoire”

  “No”

  “The family has some hidden lineage?”

  “No special bloodlines.”

  “Something that dates back at least a thousand years is somewhere in this story. But it is not a Grimoire and not… ”

  “No, nothing old.”

  “Wait… wait wait, that doesn't make any sense.”

  Was he pulling my leg all along?

  “We are aware of the same world history, right? Or did you start to buy into the Vatican’s cover-up? Any mana that was present after the war had already dissipated. So if there is nothing that dates back to when it was still around, and the family doesn't have any mages or special bloodline, then this is not a real haunting.”

  I felt like a kid coming into a school pizza party just to get one slice of a cold margarita.

  “Ok, tell me this wasn’t some weird prank?”

  “We checked the family, nothing special. The house is nothing special. We looked for artifacts and also nothing. No classic sources of hauntings. No runaway cryptid or mage in the vicinity. But…”

  “Oh, drop the suspense and tell me.”

  “Buuuuuuuuttttt”

  Should I get a new broker? This one was starting to piss me off.

  “The woman describes it as such. Two weeks ago, she killed a home invader. He was some loser from the internet. You know, the ‘I'm a nice guy, so I will stalk you relentlessly’ kind. But for some reason, she gave him a chance, and as you can imagine, things didn’t work out. And before you ask, nothing special about the guy either, maybe except for his internet history.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Anyway, he becomes a stalker and finally gets the bright idea to declare his love by breaking in, in the middle of the night. And she puts a couple of bullets in him in the end. And then it starts. Bad dreams, feeling of presence, sounds in the night, things misplaced when she returns home.”

  “Ok, while it sounds like a haunting, you know those can be easily explained by the fact that she killed someone two weeks ago, and her moral compass is acting up?”

  “Yes, I know that not everyone is the heartless killing machine you are.”

  “Thanks,” I said flatly.

  “You’re welcome,” Came a cheerful response.

  “Anyway, we thought the same until she added a new detail. Every night after the sun goes down, she can smell the odor of burning hair.”

  “Oh”

  “Yeah, ‘oh’ indeed. Also, in the dreams, the man speaks to her in some strange language. The dreams are so vivid that she could cite some of the things. The language is the black speech.” He ended with a dramatic tone.

  “Are you sure?” I was back to excitement.

  “Yes, from what we can translate from the woman's phonetic retelling, it should be something along the lines of ‘you shall be mine in the other life’ spoken again and again.”

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Unlike all the rest, that part sounded like real haunting, a very strong one at that.

  “Got you interested?”

  “Very, 3000 dollars plus the standard amount based on the rank of the spirit. Paid in gold obols, obviously.”

  “Deal”

  The deal was struck, so my broker just disconnected.

  Now, I was excited to the limit. Not only a hunting but one without any explanation. I had no idea what to expect, but there was a chance for a real challenge. Not the slugfest of fighting barely solidified ghosts with the maximum ability to move some chairs and moan at night, but a proper fight.

  I wanted to go to sleep and start the preparations first thing in the morning, but after a while, it became obvious that I would not be getting any sleep anytime soon. So, like an excited schoolboy before a school trip, I decided to lay out all of the necessary things.

  I put on some clothes and made my way to my rustbucket of a car. With the roads empty in the middle of the night, it took me barely 20 minutes to get to the old warehouse complex where my family's wealth was kept. Part of the exorbitant price is the ability to open the unit at any time.

  I nodded to the 24-hour security guard and made my way to the warehouse.

  After entering my storage unit, I patted the two gargoyles on their heads like large dogs. They were big, black, ugly, stone things that looked like old Halloween decorations—decorations that would come alive and rip apart any trespasser just to feed on what remained of the body. They were over a thousand years old and some of my favorite possessions.

  The rest of the unit looked like something between an ancient library and a mad scientist's laboratory. Books in piles on old wardrobes. Coffers locked with weird locks missing keyholes. And old statues depicting things that had no business being depicted in three-dimensional geometry, seeming to be in a constant state of battle against rules binding them to our Euclidean space. There was a lot. Most of my family's treasures were lost to time during the age of the Inquisition, but the most important things were here, protected by enchantments and gargoyles. Big, ugly gargoyles powered by magic stored thousands of years ago.

  It couldn’t go on forever, but a couple of hundred years more shouldn’t be an issue.

  I sat by the only not cursed-looking object in the room, an old heavy desk used for work, and started on my tasks.

  What to take?

  It should be a spirit. The burned hair suggests apparition, and black speech suggests, at last, partial intelligence. So something for a head-on battle against a relatively smart opponent.

  Making a quick mental list of things needed, I started on the preparations. I would need rune paint for a seal on the house and a couple of basic potions for safety to deal with any more minor wounds I might sustain. So first, I started on my alchemy, mixing reagents in a laboratory set that could come straight from some movie set about alchemy.Once the elements for the seal and the essential potions were done, the next part was the attack.

  My dagger, staff, and my own magic should be enough for offense normally, but I couldn't be too sure, especially with the enigmatic nature of the haunting. So after some hesitation, I decided to start on one more concoction.

  Stretching my back, I took a bottle filled with holy water from one of the shelves, the original, of course, not the bullshit they use in churches these days. But normal holy water was not enough. Now would be the hard part. After a bit of searching in the mess of my family’s belongings, I finally located the right coffer. The lock had a strange sigil on it with no visible keyhole.

  I put my finger on the rune and whispered the correct phrase to open the thing. Inside were a couple of white bones that looked like they could fetch some money as haunted house decorations. If any specialist looked at any of the bones, they would probably say that it was the wing bone of some huge bird if not for the weird hole in the middle that looked weirdly like an eye socket.

  Now for the hard part. Taking a special carving knife, I pushed some of my magic into the blade, and previously hidden runes lit up like Christmas lights. Straining my muscles, I spent the next hour trying to scrape enough powder from the bone, feeling my magic flow out of me with every pass over the hard material.

  How anyone killed the bone’s owner was beyond me.

  After scraping enough powder, I put the bone back in its place and mixed the fruit of my work with the holy water. Not many spirits should be able to live through coming into contact with that.

  With that, my basic preparations were done.

  The last part was surprisingly tiring. I wanted to rest a bit before returning home, but the feeling of emptiness quickly made itself known. It was like a pressure difference that desperately wants to be corrected but, for some reason, can’t, a feeling of something missing from you that you want back but can't locate. The nasty outcome of using magic in a world lacking any natural mana.

  With a heavy sigh, I opened one of the most protected chests in the room. It was filled to around half with blue crystal, segregated by size into compartments inside the coffer. Some of the crystals were the size of a pebble, others a bit larger than my fist. All strangely regular like they were cut by a professional, even tho all were natural.

  Most of the stash was spent on my training when I was younger.

  I took out one of the pebble-sized ones. Now with a source of mana I instinctively drew the energy into myself, slowly feeling the sucking sensation go away.

  That feeling of emptiness was the cause of so many mental illnesses these days. Untrained people with magic potential use their mana in a fit of rage or sorrow just to spend the rest of their lives thinking they miss something. That they can’t be happy. Thank the abyss, I had the crystals.

  With everything prepared, I went back to the apartment to rest.

  Aaaand I can’t sleep, too excited about something interesting finally happening.

  The next morning, after finally winning the battle with sleep, I woke up with the exorcism on my mind so much that I almost forgot it was a working day, and I couldn't just not go to uni.

  You see, I needed a job in the future. With any hauntings and mana sources becoming more scarce every year, a normal job was a nice thing to have. A safe thing. I studied two courses, archeology, as there was always a chance of coming up on some ruin dating back to the age of myth, and the second one online, physics. My father decided that one, to have something logical, something that describes the world in specific terms to anchor the mind when delving into things that can’t be truly understood or perceived.

  The archaeology course was a bit boring for me. Most of the events we studied were Vatican cover-ups or history told to mortals, so they stopped asking questions. Also, I didn't have many friends to talk to to pass the time, considering that the eerie feeling I gave out was still present even with my eyes covered. Most warlocks that dealt with demons were unnerving, and I had a deal with something much darker than a demon, so people usually stayed clear of me.

  I was not one for human companionship, but sometimes, it would be nice to talk about anything to pass the time.

  Well, not all of them, sadly.

  “Ayyyyy the exorcist. Fought any ghosts recently?” The college jock straight from the pages of any school drama and the bane of my existence,. Ever since, someone’s grandmother became my client and showed the exorcism photos on her phone to one of my group mates, he wouldn’t just fuck off.

  If not for the fact that it would be spending a finite resource that was magic, I would probably have put a curse on him long ago.

  “The ghost of your mother yesterday in my bedroom.”

  I wish I could just fight the ghost already.