Lost Soul (Harbinger P.I. Book 1) (10 page)

W
hen Devon Blackwell
finally let go of my hand, her eyes became normal again. She leaned heavily against a stack of boxes, trying to regain her composure.

“What the hell just happened?” I asked her.

“She has visions sometimes,” Victoria said. “They come unbidden, especially if someone she touches has had a traumatic experience in their life or is under an enchantment.”

I frowned. “I’d understand it if she’d touched Mallory and had a vision, but not me. I haven’t had any traumatic experiences.”

“Do you know what ‘empire of the dead’ means?”

“Yes, it means the catacombs in Paris. I was there recently. We were talking about it last night. Is that what she’s picking up on? Nothing traumatic happened to me there.”

Devon looked up at me. “It isn’t trauma, it’s an enchantment. There’s a door in your mind that was put there to lock away a memory. I saw it, but I couldn’t open it to see what lay beyond. Whatever memory was locked away has been replaced by an enchantment, a memory you think is real but isn’t. It has something to do with the empire of the dead. That’s all I could glean before I was thrown out of the vision.”

“Okay, this is getting really creepy,” I said. “I’m not under any enchantment. I’m protected from things like that. Look.” I pulled up my shirt and T-shirt to show them the tattoos on my body.

“Those symbols can’t protect you from everything,” Victoria said dismissively. “Wait here.” She left the room and came back a couple of minutes later with a talisman on a leather cord. The talisman seemed to be made of stone and had a rune engraved on its surface. Victoria held it near me and said, “Freyja, adept of the mysteries, open our eyes to the magic which has been hidden from our sight.”

The rune-engraved stone began to spin, slowly at first and then gaining speed until it was spinning so fast it was a blur of motion. Victoria took it away from me and it stopped immediately. Putting the amulet into a pocket of her dress, Victoria said, “There’s a spell on you, and judging by how fast the rune was spinning, it’s a powerful enchantment.”

“I’m fine, really,” I said. I didn’t feel enchanted, not that I’d have any idea what that felt like. Maybe this was a little parlor trick the witch sisters did to drum up business. First Devon did her vision act and then the spinning amulet came out. After telling some poor sucker that they’d been enchanted, the witches offered to remove said enchantment, for a price, of course.

But that didn’t explain how Devon knew about the empire of the dead.

Besides, I didn’t really think these two were charlatans, otherwise I wouldn’t be here asking for their help with the werewolf locator spell.

“Would you like us to help you?” Victoria asked. “It would take some time to do the proper research, but….”

“I’m fine,” I repeated. Locator spells were one thing but I didn’t want any witches poking around inside my head. I left the room with Mallory on my heels, a concerned look on her face.

“Alec, are you sure you’re okay?” She looked worried about me and I didn’t like that at all. I didn’t want anyone to feel like that toward me. I was the guy who fixed other people’s problems without having any of his own. I was supposed to make everyone feel safe, not concerned.

“I’m totally fine,” I said firmly as we left the shop. The fresh air on the street outside made me realize how pungent-smelling the Blackwell sisters’ tea had been. “Did you try that tea?” I asked Mallory, in an attempt to start a new conversation with a subject other than myself. “Was that stuff disgusting or what?”

“It wasn’t too bad,” she said as we walked along the street toward my office. “The sisters are a bit oddball, though.”

“Some witches are. It’s because they spend so much time reading old books. Like, really old books.”

“The bookshop was kind of cool,” she said.

“You think so? It was like chaos theory in practice.”

“Well, that’s what makes it cool,” she said. “You could walk among those shelves and never know what you might discover next.”

“Probably a demon serving disgusting tea,” I said. “That stuff was so bad, it had to be otherworldly.” We reached the door to my office, the one that said HARBINGER P.I. on the glass panel, and went through.

When we got to the top of the stairs, Felicity poked her head out of her office and waved. She had her phone pressed to her ear and was saying, “Yes … fine … just a couple of cases,” into it.

I took Mallory into my office. “Well, what do you think?”

She looked around and nodded. “Looks good. The Society got you a nice place here.”

“Yeah, but it’s probably bugged. They sent Felicity here to spy on me, but they probably bugged the office too. Maybe even the house.”

She went to the window and looked out. “Oh, yeah, there’s a black van parked across the street with tinted windows. Do they normally have all those aerials and antennae on the roof?”

“Very funny,” I said.

“Well, one of us has to be, and it isn’t going to be you. You’ve been in a bad mood since we left the bookshop. Are you worried about what they said? About you being enchanted? Because I am.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said.

“It’s difficult not to after what those witches said. You saw how fast that rune thing was spinning. If that
satori
put some kind of mind mojo on you, who knows what actually happened in Paris? You don’t, because you’re remembering a memory that was placed in your head.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “It’s done and dusted. Whatever actually happened, I got slapped down by the Society and here I am.”

She looked at me with a serious look on her face. “You don’t want to know what really happened? That doesn’t sound like the Alec Harbinger I know. The Alec Harbinger I know loves a mystery and is great at solving them. Where’s that guy, huh?”

“Back in Chicago.”

She let out a groan of frustration. “You can be very annoying at times, you know that?”

“It’s part of my charm.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It really isn’t.”

Felicity came into the office. She was wearing hiking boots, jeans, and a black hoodie over a white T-shirt. Her hair was scraped back into a ponytail, the same as it had been last night at the barbecue. “That was your father on the phone, Alec.”

“Oh? What did dear old Dad want?”

“He asked me how things were on your first day and if you were settling into your new home.”

“Did you tell him we’re going faerie hunting?”

“I told him about the Robinson case and the Ellsworth case. I didn’t mention the ogres that tried to kill us. I thought I’d leave that up to you.”

I nodded. “I’ll tell him about that when I know more information, like who sent them. There’s no point in telling him anything until I know who’s behind it all, pulling the strings.”

“You’re probably right,” Felicity said. “How did it go with the witches?”

“Great,” I said, shooting Mallory a look that told her not to say anything. “They’re going to cast the locator spell later today and give the results to Mallory tomorrow. Then it will be a simple matter of visiting up the cursed person, telling them that they’re a werewolf, if they don’t already know, and locking them away with Timothy when there’s a full moon.”

“You want me to visit them while you’re away?” Mallory asked.

“No, wait until we get back. We have plenty of time. You could look around for a place to lock them up, though. Preferably somewhere remote.”

“Sure, will do.”

“I guess we should head to the lake,” I told Felicity. “Do you have a bag you’re taking?”

“There’s a suitcase in my office.”

“Okay, I’ll grab it on the way out.” I handed Mallory my office key and house key, noticing a look of disapproval on Felicity’s face as I did so. “Lock up when you leave the office. I’d tell you to help yourself to anything in the house but there’s nothing there, so you’re going to have to stock the fridge yourself.” I grinned at her.

“Ah, so this is all just a ploy to make me go grocery shopping for you,” she said.

“Yeah, and feel free to unpack all those boxes in the house, too.”

She gave me an amused look. “You guys have a great time at the lake while I do all the hard work.”

“Okay,” I said, kissing her forehead lightly before leaving the office. “We will. See ya later.”

I got Felicity’s case, a weekend-sized pale blue hard-shelled job, from her office and took it down the stairs. Felicity followed without a word until we reached the Land Rover and I was hefting her case into the back. “Are you sure it’s okay to give Mallory the keys to the office and your house?”

“Yeah, of course it is. She’s a good friend. I trust her.”

“All right,” she said, climbing into the passenger seat. “As long as you’re sure.”

“I’m very sure. Mallory and I are close. There’s a bond between us.”

“Yes, I can tell that by the way you are with each other,” she said flatly. After picking up the GPS from the floor, she programed it and attached it to the windshield.

I wasn’t sure how she had meant to convey that last statement. Her voice had been devoid of any inflection but almost as if she were trying to hide some emotion behind the words. Was she resentful of my relationship with Mallory? Maybe she was just sad that she was so far from her boyfriend and seeing Mallory and me rubbed it in. Not that there was anything between Mallory and I other than a weird physical therapy that was probably damaging to both of us, but I could understand how our easy interactions with each other might be seen by an outsider.

If I was a sensitive kind of guy, I’d probably just ignore Felicity’s remark, putting it down to the fact that she had some sort of problem in her personal life and probably didn’t want to talk about it. I’d keep quiet and let her tell me in her own time.

But instead of doing that, as I backed out of the parking space, I asked, “How’s Jason?”

She eyed me suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

“Jason. Your boyfriend. You left the barbecue early because he was going to call you.”

“He’s fine.”

I joined the light traffic on Main Street. “What does he do? For a living, I mean.”

“He’s an accountant for a bank in London.”

That was a conversation stopper. Jason sounded dependable and boring. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I just said, “Cool,” and focused on driving.

A while later, after we had left Dearmont and were driving north along the highway, Felicity said, “He’s not very happy about me being here.”

“Hmm?” Her sudden openness after almost an hour of quiet took me by surprise. I’d been dwelling on the fact that there might be a false memory implanted in my mind, replacing a real memory that was locked behind a magical door, according to Devon Blackwell.

“Jason,” Felicity said. “He doesn’t like me being over here while he’s over there in England. I knew he wasn’t happy about it when I told him about the job in the first place, but he didn’t say anything, apart from being sulky whenever I spoke about it. Perhaps he thought I wouldn’t actually go through with it and move here. Last night, he asked me to go back to England.”

“Oh. What did you tell him?”

“I told him that my career is important to me and that I’ll be staying here.”

Even though I barely knew Felicity, I was glad to hear that she wasn’t tempted to fly back to England. “I guess he wasn’t too happy to hear that.”

“No, he wasn’t. He told me….” She hesitated, her breath hitching a little as if she were trying to hold back tears. “He told me I have to make a decision. My career or him.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. I actually thought that Jason sounded like a giant douchebag and Felicity was better off without him, but I didn’t say that, of course.

She nodded in acknowledgement but didn’t say anything. Instead, she folded her arms and sank further into her seat, as if withdrawing from the world.

I went back to thinking about magical locked doors and enchantments that could alter memories.

I
t was
late afternoon by the time we reached Dark Rock Lake. A narrow, bumpy access road led us deep into the trees to the area where the cabins sat by a small beach. The lake was surrounded on all sides by dense forest. The beach was busy with vacationing families and couples, which was very different to how it had been when James and his friends had been here in April. Children ran by the lake’s edge, screaming and laughing while their parents watched from picnic tables in the shade. As well as the cabins, there were RVs parked beneath the pine trees.

As I parked the Land Rover and killed the engine, Felicity looked at the trees all around us “How are we going to find the entrance to Faerie? There are miles of forest to search. It could take forever.”

“If we were searching by conventional means,” I said. “I brought something along that’s going to make it a little easier than that.”

“Something magical?”

“Yeah, it’s a magical statue.”

“So let’s get it and start searching,” she suggested.

“It isn’t that simple. We can’t go wandering through the woods with a magical item, looking for a doorway to Faerie, while there are all these people around. We need to be more discreet. If there are this many people on the beach, there’ll be just as many on the hiking trails. Besides, the statue only works at twilight.”

“Oh, okay. So we’re stuck here for a while.” She turned in her seat to face me. “Can I ask you a question? You got the witches to cast a locator spell to find the werewolf in town, so why not ask them to cast a locator spell to find James and Sarah?”

“A locator spell can’t locate something that isn’t there. James and Sarah are in a different realm of existence. A locator spell only works in the realm in which it’s cast, so a spell cast here can’t locate someone in Faerie.” I opened my door. “Let’s get our stuff into the cabin. I need to stretch my legs after that long drive.” I got out of the Land Rover and walked around to the back. There was a strong tang of pinewood in the air, along with an underlying smell of burning charcoal from the barbecues outside the cabins and RVs.

Felicity and I got our luggage and found Cabin No. 6, the one we had rented for the next three days. The key to the cabin was locked inside a metal safe attached to the outside wall. Felicity punched in the code she had been given and opened the safe to retrieve the key. She opened the door and we went inside.

The cabin was basic but clean and tidy. There was a living area, a small kitchen, and a short corridor that led to two bedrooms and a bathroom. I claimed the bedroom that looked out over the parking area, letting Felicity take the one that overlooked the beach. After all, if I found the entrance to Faerie tonight, I might not be sleeping in the cabin at all. Because of the time dilation between the two realms, I would go to search for James and Sarah for a couple of hours and when I got back, a couple of days might have passed here. It might be time to head back to Dearmont as soon as I returned from the faerie realm. And if I had James and Sarah with me, they would want to get home as soon as possible.

When I got back to the kitchen Felicity was making coffee. “Not for me, thanks,” I told her. “I won’t be eating anything either.”

“Why not?” she asked, pouring coffee into a mug for herself.

“Faerie is a dangerous place and there’s lore that says a traveler should be fasted and purified before attempting to go there. A couple of centuries ago, people would fast for days before going to Faerie to protect them from the beings there. I don’t have that luxury, and I think those people may have been overcautious, but I can at least skip a meal and a coffee before I face the faerie folk in their own realm.”

“Should I be worried about you?”

“Traveling to Faerie is dangerous,” I said. “There’s a long history of people getting trapped there and being unable to return to our world. But as long as I keep my wits about me, I’ll be fine. You don’t have to worry unless I’m gone for a long time, but it’s difficult to know how long because of the way time works differently between here and Faerie. If it’s more than a week, inform the Society. They’ll probably send a rescue party to get me back.”

“A week?” Felicity looked shocked.

“Like I said, it should only be a couple of days our time. If it’s a week, I’m probably stuck there.”

“All right,” she said, bringing her coffee to the sofa and sitting down. She looked a little overwhelmed. Maybe she wished she’d gone back to boring douchebag Jason and taken up accountancy instead of having to deal with the possibility of her boss being lost in the faerie realm.

“Felicity, don’t worry about me. I’ve been to Faerie, and come back alive and well, many times.”

“How many?”

I didn’t have to search very far into my memory to find the answer to that question. “Once,” I admitted.

“Once?” She nearly spat out her coffee. “You’ve only done this once before?”

“Once is better than never.”

“Alec, maybe this isn’t such a good idea. There must be another way. What if we go to the Robinson house and confront the faerie that’s pretending to be him? You could kill it. And do the same with the one pretending to be Sarah.”

“Those two kids will still be trapped in Faerie,” I said. “The only way they’re coming back is if I go there and rescue them.”

She went quiet after that, probably deciding that I was about to embark on a suicide mission.

She drank some more of her coffee while I stood by the window, watching the people on the beach. Those people didn’t ever worry about preternatural beings trying to kill them, or werewolves prowling on the night of the full moon.

In a way, I envied them that innocence. I’d been thrust into the world of the preternatural at a young age by a father determined that I should follow in his footsteps as a member of the Society of Shadows. My mom had rebelled, telling my father that I should live a normal childhood, eventually leaving him and taking me to Oregon, the place of her birth, where she and I had family.

For a few years, I’d grown up like any other kid and been concerned only with the usual, mundane things that trouble a boy of ten. But two days after my tenth birthday, that all changed. My mother was killed in a car accident and my father, upon hearing the news, came to Oregon to claim me and return me to an education at the Academy of Shadows in England. That education included training in preternatural investigation, the history of the Society of Shadows, hand-to-hand combat, and the use of weapons.

Most of the people out there on the beach at Dark Rock Lake would call my upbringing “cool” or “awesome” but they all possessed something that I could never have: an assurance that the things they saw in horror movies were fake. That monsters didn’t really exist and nothing lurked in the shadows.

I could never have that assurance. I knew that the boogeyman did exist and the shadows were crawling with horrors. And knowing those things, I felt a responsibility to protect others from them.

That was why, when innocent people were taken from their mundane existence and thrown headfirst into the world of the preternatural, I felt duty-bound to fight the shadows and return the victims to their normal lives. I couldn’t turn my back on James Robinson and Sarah Silverman, even if it meant risking everything.

From behind me, Felicity said, “Okay, how are we going to find the door into Faerie?”

I went to the bedroom and opened my sports bag, removing the item I’d brought from home. It was wrapped in a plain white cloth and was the same size as Felicity’s coffee mug, although it weighed a lot more. When I put it on the coffee table, Felicity leaned forward and asked, “What is it?”

I pulled the cloth away, revealing a crude stone bust of a two-headed, bearded man. The two heads faced in opposite directions, joined at the back. “This is a statue of Janus,” I said. “He was an ancient Roman god of doorways, gates, and time. There are plenty of statues of Janus around, but this one is enchanted. Once activated, it leads the user to magical doorways that are in the area.”

She reached out to touch the stone bust. “Can I?” she asked, her hand hesitating, inches away.

“Sure, go ahead. Until it’s activated, it’s nothing more than a piece of rock.”

She stroked its carved surface. “If it has two heads facing opposite ways, how do you know which head is pointing at the doorway you want to find? I assume that’s how it works, by pointing in the direction you want to go.”

“Yeah, there’s some interpretation involved,” I said. “You have to make a guess as to which head is pointing in the right direction. Sometimes it’s easy, like if one head was pointing at the forest and other at the lake, we’d know to go into the forest. But sometimes, you don’t know which head to follow. It takes some trial and error and doubling back. It’s magic, not science.”

“So it could take us some time to find the entrance to Faerie.”

“Yeah, and we can’t start looking until twilight. That’s the only time the Janus statue works, because twilight is what’s called an ‘in-between’ time, between night and day, and doorways are portals between things.”

Felicity went to the kitchen to pour herself another coffee. “So we wait.”

“Yeah, we wait.” I looked up at the late afternoon sky. It wouldn’t be long now.

W
hen twilight arrived
, I went to the Land Rover to get my sword. The sky had turned a deep, dark blue, stained with patches of purple. The beach was much quieter, most of the families sitting around fires and barbecues eating supper. The savory smell of burgers, hot dogs, and grilled fish made my stomach growl.

I took the sword, hidden beneath its cloth wrapping, back to the cabin where Felicity waited with the Janus statue in her hands. “You ready?” I asked her.

“Yeah, let’s do it.”

Before we left the cabin, I recited the Latin words that activated the statue and were inscribed on its base. There was no visible change in the statue’s appearance—it didn’t glow or anything—but Felicity said, “Oh, it’s pulling against my grip.”

“Hold it very loosely,” I told her. “Cup it gently so it can rotate.”

She did, holding the statue in front of her, cupped in both hands. Slowly, Janus rotated so that one head looked out toward the lake and the other pointed toward the back of the cabin and the forest.

“I told you the first part would be easy,” I said.

We left the cabin and went into the forest, finding a hiking trail that went in the general direction the statue was pointing. I carried my sword, still wrapped, in one hand. If anyone passed us on the trail, they might think I was carrying fishing gear. Hopefully, they wouldn’t wonder why I was carrying it away from the lake.

“Stop here,” I said. “Check Janus.” The statue had shifted slightly in Felicity’s grip but I wasn’t sure if that was because she was holding it too tightly.

She held it up and relaxed her grip. Janus continued to point along the trail, and since the opposing head pointed back the way we had come, I was pretty sure we were headed in the right direction. It made sense. Leon Smith had said that James and Sarah were daring each other to come into the woods, neither of them really wanting to, so they probably didn’t venture far and would have stayed on the trail. Assuming the faeries that abducted them stayed close to the doorway to Faerie, the portal shouldn’t be too far from here.

We walked on for a few hundred yards before I heard a sound that made my senses go into overdrive. I tapped Felicity on the shoulder and put my finger to my lips. She nodded and froze in place.

The forest was gloomy now, the spaces beneath the trees hidden by dark shadows. I heard the noise again; footfalls on the trail behind us. “We’re being followed,” I whispered to Felicity. Her eyes widened with fear, staring into the darkness on our back trail.

“Maybe it’s just someone taking a walk,” she suggested.

“No, they’re trying not to be heard.”

“How many of them are there?”

“Two. One large, one smaller.”

I unwrapped the sword, tossed the cloth to the ground and moved into a fighting stance, facing the source of the footfalls. The enchanted blade glowed vivid blue, lighting up the trees around me, chasing away the shadows.

The footfalls halted. Whoever was back there had seen the blue light ahead of them on the trail. After a moment, the footfalls resumed, slower this time, hesitant. Hell, maybe Felicity had been right and it was just a couple taking a romantic walk through the woods. Just as I was wondering how I was going to explain away the fact that I was standing in the middle of the trail holding a glowing blue sword, two familiar faces appeared out of the darkness. When I saw who it was, I lowered my weapon.

“Leon, what the hell are you doing here?”

Leon Smith came up to us with a sheepish look on his face. He was wearing a black sweater, black jeans, and black boots, and had a black knitted beanie perched on his head. He looked like he might have stepped out of a Mission Impossible movie.

Similarly attired, and standing behind Leon, was his butler Michael. Clutched in Michael’s hands, its barrel pointing over his left shoulder, was a shotgun.

“Hey,” Leon said. “What are you guys doing out here?”

“I just asked you the same question. And why is Michael carrying that gun?”

“Why are you carrying that sword?” He looked at the weapon with wide eyes, the blue glow illuminating his face. “That thing is sweet.”

“Leon,” I repeated, “what are you doing here?”

“After you guys came by yesterday, I decided to do some investigating of my own, so I bought an RV and came up here to take a look around. Of course, I had no idea what I was looking for until you showed up this afternoon. So I waited to see where you were going and followed you.”

“Go back,” I said. “This is no place for you.”

“Because it’s supernatural, right?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Sign me up. It’s about time something excited happened in my life. You know, living in a huge mansion and being able to buy anything you want isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I’m bored, man. When you guys visited me yesterday, it was the most exciting thing that’s happened in my life in a long time. So I’m here to help. Can I get a sword like that one?”