There is a secret government agency in the world of Bad Magic. It has a budget, a filing system, and very strong opinions about which kinds of magic are worth taking seriously.
It’s wrong with impressive consistency.
The Bureau of Magical Investigation was formed by Alan Pinkerton under President Lincoln. It is the fictional descendant of the real Bureau of Military Intelligence which operated during the Civil War under, among others, a man named Lafayette Baker, Lincoln’s controversial head of the National Detective Bureau. History recorded Baker as ambitious, ruthless, and not especially scrupulous about his methods. What history did not record is what he became afterward. This novel series has thoughts on that subject.
The Bureau of Magical Investigation, BMI is the institutional descendant of the real Civil War Bureau of Military Intelligence.
That should tell you something about its priorities. It was built by men, for men, during a war, to manage threats that could be classified, weaponized, or contained. It is very good at all this. It’s also, consequently, very good at mistaking its own filing system for a factual picture of reality.
The magic the BMI cares about, and what they like to refer to as “Big Magic,” runs on Vitae and Animus, the fundamental life forces that animate living beings. Vitae is the physical stuff, warm and golden. Animus is like the soul, the identity, the irreducible self. Big Magic practitioners work directly with these energies: all flavors of death mages, necromancers, healers who spend their own life force to repair others (the math on this is unforgiving), and Vampires, who feed on the living (both blood and animus) to sustain themselves. (The Continental Congress supposedly banished Vampires from American soil. We’ll see.)
The BMI loves Big Magic.
It’s dramatic. It is measurable. It can be classified, feared, and in theory controlled.
Perfect.
And then there is Mick Kelly, who is on their books and represents everything the institution simultaneously needs and would prefer not to think about too hard.
Mick is a Gleaner. At the moment of death, when a soul separates from a dying body, there is an explosion of energy released. Mick can catch it, store it, and use it. There’s all kinds of boring, quantifiable rules about how close she has to be, how much she gets, how fast she runs out, blah, blah, blah. She walks away charged up and ready for action.
And sometimes haunted. Literally.
Because every death she rides might leave a shade, a ghost of the person whose death she rode, following her around, sharing their opinions, and (often) unwelcome commentary until they decides to move on. Some go quickly. Some stay for years.
The BMI finds Mick useful when she behaves.
But she isn’t their only problem. The BMI has never quite worked out a whole other category of magic that doesn’t seem to be powered by Vitae or Animus. They officially refer to it as “Small Magic.” But the thing about Small Magic is it was named by people who didn’t fully understand it and didn’t try very hard to. It’s not really small. It just works differently than Big Magic. It doesn’t usually produce the kind of dramatic, effects that gets a government bureau clutching its pearls. It can’t be weaponized on a budget cycle. It doesn’t perform well for committees.
And most damning, Small Magic often belongs to the wrong sort of people.
Small Magic tends to be practiced by women, immigrants, folk practitioners, indigenous people. Folks passing knowledge through family lines rather than formal credentials. Most people casually refer to is as hedge magic or folk magic or even superstition. Small Magic lives in herbs and charms and blessings passed to grandchildren, in inherited magical knacks for predicting weather, and practical folk knowledge for banishing flea beetles. Officially, it’s barely worth notice.
The BMI looked at all of this and filed it under “not serious magic,” which makes it much easier to ignore.
The BMI has often finds itself in situations where the thing standing between catastrophe and a wagon train full of terrified civilians is a woman with a bag of yarrow and an extremely inconvenient amount of competence.
Those files are usually buried pretty quickly.
And don’t even get them started on magical beings, like shifters. Shifters are not people who do magic. They are people for whom magic is bound to their very identity, their animus. The Bureau recognizes there are “exceptional” shifter individuals, who they are happy to exploit but generally don’t like it if they become too ambitious or uppity. Because after all, it’s simply not done.
If you want sparkly wish-fulfillment and a seventeen year old chosen one, Bad Magic is not for you.
BUT if you want to know what happens to that seventeen year old 25 years later when she has decades of living with a brutal forbidden power, a secret government agency that both needs her and fears her, a magic system that extracts a price, and a hidden magical world living underneath real American history, you are in the right place!