Benji shuffled down the pathway through Central Park, passing by the occasional morning jogger. The early morning autumn air had a harsh bite as a recent cold front had dropped temperatures even lower than usually experienced this time of year. His black and grey checkerboarded scarf was wrapped up and around mouth. His warm breath fogged up his black and gold trimmed glasses due to the scarf venting the air up over his face. He didn’t care that he may appear silly looking, at least his nose was not running from the cold.

  He wore a long brown wool coat, beneath which was a black sweater, and grey slacks. A simple brown beanie covered his head. While the cold breeze felt like cuts across any exposed skin, this was Benji’s favorite time of year. He got to wear his various coats and sweaters to keep warm. It was always easier to add layers to stay warm than to take layers off to stay cool. Stylizing was only one reason this was his favorite time of year; the other reason was the bursts of color in nature. Yellow and orange leaves gave a satisfying crunch underfoot as he made his way to yellow caution tape cordoning off a crime scene.

  Detective Rachel Hayes stood near the crime scene tape, her dark grey pantsuit crisp and professional as ever. Benji appreciated that. The white turtleneck, the neatly pulled-back hair—it all made him feel like his own loosely combed-back hair was a disheveled mess. She barely glanced up as he approached, snapping her notebook shut. He felt like the cartoon expectation of a detective rather than a real one. Maybe that was fitting.

  The Magical Consulting Division was a new establishment, compared to something like a police force, and by law a separate entity from any actual law enforcement department. Their rules and governing policies were still being worked out, being only a decade old. They didn’t cover any mundane crimes other than to rule out any use of magic. Then, even when a crime was determined to be magical in nature, they were to supplement the police and detectives working on the case.

  Benji waved over to Detective Hayes whose expression tightened as he approached. He was still unsure if it was out of annoyance from him personally, or just his magic consulting position. He had worked with her on nearly all his cases since getting his position. At each one it seemed like he was the last person she wanted to deal with. There was a tension in society still that lingered with magic becoming more and more common place, especially with the agency he worked for and the differing law enforcement agencies; cops didn’t like their work being treaded on by those who they called “wizards”. It was only the turn of the century that saw magic not being shunned and hunted en masse, but magic and its wielders was still widely distrusted by the public.

  “You’re late,” she said, snapping the notebook shut.

  Benji pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, inhaling to try and defog them, then gripped at the strap of his satchel. “Sorry, detective. I’m still learning the subways here,” he admitted, ducking under the yellow tape.

  Hayes snorted and ignored the apology. “Here I thought wizards were supposed to be good with something like that. They aren’t that complex.” Benji tried to say something, but she continued without giving him the chance to retort. “Anyway, I just need to know if this is one of yours.” She motioned to the body of a young man, not much younger than Benji was. There were multiple stab wounds. “Time of death is roughly 9 p.m. last night.”

  Benji hesitated. The victim’s face was slack and wide-eyed. The skin was blue-tinged, and frost was crystalizing on his hair and clothes. Blood from the stab wounds had congealed into sticky pools, seeping down into ground and staining the surrounding area. The chill had staved off decomposition, but rigor mortis had already begun setting in. There was bruising on the neck, signs of strangulation. The air had a metallic tang.

  Benji realized his face probably did not look too dissimilar to the corpse as Detective Hayes asked, “first body?” Her tone was flat.

  “Yeah,” he paused. “First body,” he finished before reaching into his satchel to fish something out. He had worked with Hayes on a few different cases, but they were burglaries and petty theft. “This is nothing the cases we’ve worked on so far.” He resisted the retching sensation that grew from the pit of his stomach.

  “Be glad its cold outside. Welcome to homicide.” There was a bit of amusement in her voice.

  Benji pulled out a pendulum from his bag. It was shaped like an inverted teardrop. The bulging end of the crystal was attached to a thin silver chain. It was a simple device, but useful for discerning the presence of magic, and even the nature of it, when channeled properly. He held it over a wound in the body, expecting it to start swaying in a telltale pattern of a lingering magic. It didn’t sway at all. Not even the breeze moved it. Benji frowned.

  “No obvious magic,” he murmured.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I need to try something else.”

  He wrapped the chain around the crystal and stowed it. After reaching into the bag again, he had a simple wooden wand in his hand. It was carved from a single piece of oak, tapered on one and two grooves carved on the other about a hand’s width apart. It was the best implement for the spell he was about to cast. He had a rod in the satchel as well, but those excelled in enhancing magic that needed to affect a wide area. Wands were for precision.

  Benji held the wand to his temple and spoke an incantation. He channeled the magic through the wand, which refined and concentrated it. Suddenly, his view of the world exploded into vibrant and impossible colors. Leaves were no longer just yellow, orange, and green. They were iridescent in hues that don’t yet have names. They were outside of the mundane color spectrum and only visible with what was called “magic sight.” It was beautiful and dazzling. He could see the magic that permeated the natural world.

  He looked down at the body. There were magic traces around the body, but nothing concentrated near the stab wounds. It appeared more like the victim was a mage, than the victim of a magic attack. While the acceptance of magic had been increasing in modern society, there were still those that assaulted known mages. To outright kill one was extreme, but not outside of the realm of possibility, unfortunately. Something about the magic emanating from the body did not seem right though. It seemed off. Benji could not place it; it did not match any commonly used magic, but it certainly was not what killed this person. If it had been what killed this man, the magic would have been concentrated around the stab wounds. He looked around the park clearing.

  There were no traces of magic itself, but the way the colorful currents flowed seemed warped over the body. It was like a lazy whirlpool appearing in a river. There was a scent in the air there in the rippling magic. The smell was impossibly faint. Benji would not have noticed without the heightened senses granted by his magic. It smelled faintly like ozone and… cinnamon?

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  The world began to spin. Benji ended his spell before he collapsed or passed out. He could not maintain magic sight for too long, only exceptionally experienced, or specialized, mages could for any extended length of time. It was too much information for the human brain to process for an extended period. Usually, it would just leave the caster exhausted and give them a headache. He had heard that a mage had their brain activity monitored while having the spell active. The readings matched the pattern of a patient having a seizure.

  He took a second to compose himself and stood up. He turned to Hayes, whose look of concern was more for the crime scene than his well-being. “Your victim is a mage,” he told her. “But nothing indicates the use of magic to kill him.”

  Hayes frowned and her eyebrows furrowed. She looked at the body and the surrounding area. “You’re certain? How did he get here?” She pointed to his footsteps in the grass, then to hers. The frosted grass was trampled down where they had stepped, and around the steps of the officer that put up crime scene tape. “There are no footsteps in the grass other than ours, no drag marks, or any signs of a struggle. It’s like the body was dumped here by someone that didn’t leave any tracks, which I’ve heard is possible with wizards. But based on the wounds and the blood, the victim was stabbed and bled out here.”

  Benji looked around again, this time without magic sight, understanding what she meant. If magic had been used to cover the attacker’s tracks, he’d have seen some residuals of the spell.

  “So, I’m wondering,” she continued, “is it teleportation? The victim and killer teleported here, then the killer teleported away?”

  “That’s not possible,” Benji said firmly, shaking his head. “You can’t teleport a human being or really any sizeable organic creature, not even plants. Not without –,” he stopped himself, not wanting to delve into the gruesome details of why teleportation would not work. Inorganic matter, sure, there were spells capable of transporting rock, dirt, metals, and other inorganic materials to another location instantaneously. However, there was something behind the spark of life that made the transmission impossible. Teleporting living matter was impossible, as anything sent was never quite the same once it reached the other side. There was no known magic that could teleport life without somehow destroying it. “Just trust me, they didn’t teleport,” he concluded.

  Hayes raised an eyebrow. “So, what you’re saying is someone floated here with the victim who was still alive and then killed them here and floated off again? Must have flown together on a broomstick,” she mocked.

  “No, two people can’t even ride a broomstick at the same time,” he began correcting her, before realizing it was a jab at him rather than a serious statement. He sighed. “I don’t know how they got here. Maybe, they descended from the sky, flew, or something else, but the method of murder wasn’t magical.”

  “Terrific,” she said dryly, again snapping her notebook shut where she had written down some of his assessment. “A murder, a mysteriously appearing body, no real leads, and your voodoo isn’t picking up on anything.”

  Benji frowned as he put the wand back into his bag. His mind went back to the magic aura that lingered about the body, the twisting currents of magic, and that smell... The aura certainly was not from some sort of charming enchantment magic, so the mage was not forced to stab themselves. The currents of magic over the body were truly peculiar. That was a phenomena completely new to him. It reminded him of the demonstrations of how gravity warped space-time, which caused the force of gravity. The graphic he saw showing the outlined paths of the planets as they swirled around the sun as the sun moved through space. He started to believe the answer to this laid outside of his current understandings of magic.

  Even at dedicated universities, little was formally taught about magic. Attending a magic-focused university had one undergo general studies like every other “mundane” university or college, but the majors focused on specializations of magic. Not everyone could wield magic, and in fact, it took many years of testing for mages to prove that it was not something biologically encoded in their DNA, even if it did pass down generation to generation. There were magical families whose lineages went centuries back. There was also the odd person out in a family with no history of magical lineage who suddenly could spawn flames, control water, or perform other mystifying feats.

  Most mages fell into specific specializations, which were common enough they had their own major studies at university. People adept with fire could focus on conjuring flames, learn how to control the blaze, and utilize it in a way that benefited society. Others could learn how to shape earth or control the flow of water, even freeze it on a summer day.

  There was also general magic that anyone capable of spell slinging could learn. These usually came from specifically manipulating magic itself, rather than channeling it into something. Magic sight fell into this category. Enchanting objects and rune magic also fell into this category but was extremely difficult to master. The wrong mark on a rune could cause a shielding spell to turn into an explosion.

  Benji was different from those that specialized in a particular art of magic. He could channel magic in any form, from elemental to more abstract forms of magic, but he needed to know how to use the magic in that way. It was a learned art, rather than innate magic like those who were called pyromancers. Others like him were not all too uncommon. Where the number of learned mages like himself outnumbered the amount of airomancers or electromancers separately, the total of innate mages was far greater.

  Benji had not found any documented evidence, but he suspected there were also mages who could manipulate space and time. There was one mage in history noted to be able to use magic to control magnetic fields. What was it to say someone could manipulate fundamental forces like gravity? He decided this was something he’d have to research later.

  “Do you know the identity of the victim?” Benji eventually asked, needing to get out of his own head, and believing the identity of this mage could provide some answers, or at least clues.

  Hayes picked up a clear, plastic bag marked “Evidence.” In the bag was the victim’s driver’s license. He was a twenty-one-year-old named Henry Blakes. The name sounded familiar to Benji, like he had heard it recently. Was it during a conversation with some of his fellow alumni? He had spoken to one recently about magic’s effects on plant growth. No… That wasn’t it.

  Benji snapped his fingers remembering where he knew the name from. It was in an article published by the school he graduated from. Henry was a near prodigal mage who was a learned magic user. The article was a submission from Henry about magic’s use in medicine, particularly around cancer treatment. Henry proposed magic treatments to replace chemotherapy. Supposedly, it would be manipulating magic itself so anyone magically capable could learn how to do it. Benji felt morose to only finally put a face to the name.

  “He studied under Professor Renaldo,” Benji stated. “At [Magic School Name Here]. He was a prodigy and likely going to change the world for the better with some of his understandings of magic. Heard he came from nothing but made it into [Magic School Name Here] on a full-ride scholarship.”

  “Well, I think we might have our motive. Someone was jealous of this aspiring genius.” Detective Hayes was writing in her notebook again. “And who is Professor Renaldo?”

  Maybe. Would someone really covet the apprenticeship to the point of murdering Henry? He was working on a magical cure for cancer. It baffled him, but people had been killed for less.

  “He was the last in line of a family of mages dating back a few centuries at least. Maybe even more. He’s well known in magical circles, if only for his family’s downfall since they didn’t sell out magic secrets to the military.”

  Hayes tapped her pen against her lip, mentally digesting the information. “Well, you up to go ask this Professor Renaldo about Henry?”

  Benji celebrated internally, hoping she would be the one to suggest it first. While Renaldo was mostly renowned for his family’s downfall, he was still an exceptionally skilled learned mage with access to a private repository of magical spells that rivaled even the most prestigious magical academies’ libraries. Benji would normally never have access to even speak to a figurative magical giant like Professor Renaldo in an academic setting, given his grades and background. His stomach turned realizing he might be excited to talk to their prime suspect.

  Benji tightened the grip he found he had on the satchel’s strap. “I definitely am,” he said resolutely. He glanced back at Henry’s body. He didn’t have any emotional attachment to the student, but to be stabbed to death in the middle of the park at night? Henry deserved justice. And something seemed off about magic’s involvement in this case…