Not much is known about Hugo Blackwood. He seldom spoke, but appeared to be constantly by Dee’s side, privately and in public functions. People called him Dee’s Shadow but were careful to only do it when he was not nearby.

He was originally presumed to have first encountered John Dee during Dee’s 1555 prosecution for treason—Dee had been accused of reading by “casting” (that is to say, tampering with) then Queen Mary’s horoscope—in the Star Chamber where Blackwood was apprenticing as a legal clerk. This theory has fallen out of favor over the past twenty years as contradictory biographical information, however slim, has surfaced, which would place Blackwood’s age at the time of the invocation somewhere in his thirties. It now appears that Hugo Blackwood was originally employed as Dee’s legal representative, though documents from the time are scarce. One theory, as yet not disproved, is that Blackwood represented John Dee in matters relating to his property and acquisitions.

What is known is that, like many before and after him, Hugo Blackwood was drawn into the famous philosopher’s orbit. The reason for his presence at this invocation is unclear. It is not known if he, like Dee and Talbot, had fasted in preparation for the ceremony, though it is presumed that he partook of a goblet of fermented grain beverage, a draught of wormwood, derived from Artemisia vulgaris cultivated in Dee’s own garden. Perhaps Hugo Blackwood was an interested observer, or, less likely but still possible, perhaps he simply happened to be at Dee’s residence on other business on the night in question.

Or perhaps, as had happened many times before, John Dee sensed something in Hugo Blackwood’s character that interested him, that Dee judged made him conducive to his pursuit of evidence of an exalted, alternate realm, that prompted him to include the barrister in this ceremony.

Barely any mention of the extraordinary survives in Dee’s notebooks, so either nothing occurred that evening that Dee believed warranted special notation, or perhaps he was unaware. Dee lived many more years in search of the ineffable, ambitiously attempting to fuse mathematics, divination, astronomy, and spiritualism into a single discipline, and never succeeding.

But on this night, something did happen. In the act of experimenting with spheromancy in order to summon an archangel to divulge its divine knowledge, a line was crossed. A natural law was broken. A dark boundary was trespassed.

Two men emerged from it unchanged.

One did not.

Chapter

2019. Newark, New Jersey.

The mass murder scene investigation went all night.

Odessa was a while explaining to the first responders exactly what had happened, offering a preliminary ID on Cary Peters as the assailant of the two dead children and their mother, identifying Walt Leppo as a fellow law enforcement member. The girl was inconsolable. Odessa couldn’t even get her to say her first name. EMTs took her away.