Dark Magic (Harbinger P.I. Book 3) Read online

“Don’t push it, Harbinger.”

  I turned my attention to the road ahead and the throbbing in my brain.

  “You have a party last night?” he asked.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You sure look like you did.”

  “I’m fine.” I wanted him to stop talking. His voice and the country music coming out of the radio were making my headache worse.

  He was quiet for a couple of seconds but then he ruined it by nodding to the backpack at my feet and asking, “What’s in the bag?’

  “Some things that may help us find out what happened to Deirdre Summers.”

  “Magical stuff?” Despite the fact that he’d seen magically-animated skeletons walking down Main Street, he sounded incredulous.

  “Yeah, that’s what I usually use in my line of work. Preternatural investigators and magical items sort of go together.”

  “Oh, I know all about preternatural investigators,” he said ominously.

  I kept quiet. I didn’t want this conversation to turn into a “preternatural investigators killed my wife” rant.

  But Cantrell was persistent. “You know Sherry Westlake?”

  “I’ve heard the name,” I said, glad that the shades were hiding my eyes. I had no doubt that a seasoned sheriff like Cantrell could spot a lie a mile away.

  “I’m sure you know her,” he said. “She’s in the same line of work as you. Even had the same office. You all work for the same parent company, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Well, I mean that there are preternatural investigators in most towns and cities. Now, I’m sure all those people didn’t just get it in their heads one day to put up a shingle and go vampire hunting. It’s a franchise, right? Like Pizza Hut or McDonalds.”

  He was right but the Society of Shadows was a secret society and I wasn’t about to blow its cover. “If we were a franchise, don’t you think we’d have matching uniforms or something?”

  He chuckled. “Okay, if that’s the way you want to play it, Harbinger, that’s fine by me. I was just making pleasantries and talking to you about the woman who worked in Dearmont before you, that’s all. Thought you might be interested. Unless you know already, of course.”

  “I don’t know Sherry Westlake,” I said truthfully. “I worked in Chicago before I came here. I didn’t know anyone in the area when I arrived.”

  He nodded and pursed his lips, thinking quietly for a minute. “So how did you go from Chicago to here? Sounds like you got your ass kicked over something or other.”

  “Long story,” I said.

  We drove past Earl’s Autos and Cantrell turned off the highway, guiding the cruiser along the road that led to the lake. He was quiet now, for a change. When we got to the parking lot where Felicity and I had sat in the Caprice and gone over the Deirdre Summers case file, Cantrell killed the engine and looked over at me.

  “You definitely know about Sherry Westlake, and I don’t just mean you’ve heard her name in conversation somewhere,” he said.

  I frowned at him, glad once again for the protection of the shades. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because you never asked me what happened to her.” He opened his door and got out.

  I followed, cursing my hangover for taking away my common sense. Of course, when Cantrell told me that Westlake worked in my office before me, the natural thing for me to do would be to ask him why she left, what happened to her. The only reason not to ask him would be if I already knew about the church massacre and that Sherry was a suspect.

  Cantrell stood looking out over the water, just as he had done in the photo taken three years ago, just after Deirdre Summers’ disappearance. I wondered how much it rankled him that he hadn’t been able to solve the mystery of the missing woman, particularly as she’d been a local and Cantrell probably saw her family in town every now and then.

  He’d told me that he wanted to put the case to rest for the sake of Deirdre’s daughter Natalie but maybe he also wanted to alleviate some of the guilt he felt at not being able to give the Summers family some closure.

  I knew as well as anyone that sometimes cases remained unsolved. Leads vanished, witnesses died, or demons appeared and ate everyone involved. That was just the way it went and even though I didn’t like John Cantrell, I didn’t think he should blame himself for not solving Deirdre’s disappearance, especially if there was a supernatural element involved. He couldn’t be expected to account for that.

  I, on the other hand, could. “Sheriff, did you bring the original drawings?” I asked him.

  He turned to face me and nodded. “They’re in the trunk.”

  I popped the trunk and found the drawings that Deirdre had pinned to her wall three years ago in a clear plastic folder. I put them into the backpack with the other stuff. “Okay, show me where her clothes were found,” I said.

  He locked the car and pointed to a trail that led from the parking lot into the trees by the lake. “It’s this way.”

  I followed him, slinging the backpack over my shoulder. When we were on the overgrown trail beneath the trees, Cantrell said, “We have no idea why Deirdre came here that night. Her car was found in the parking lot, locked up as if she expected to return to it. That’s one of the reasons that the suicide theory doesn’t sit right with me. If she knew she wasn’t coming back to her car, why lock it?”

  “Maybe just out of habit,” I offered.

  He shrugged his big shoulders. “What do you make of those drawings?”

  “It could be that she saw something at the lake one day and became obsessed with it,” I said. “People who see things they can’t explain sometimes develop an obsession with them. Did she ever mention seeing a monster?”

  “Not as far as I know,” he said. “When we interviewed Natalie, she said her mother had been acting a little strange but she couldn’t explain the drawings on the wall.”

  We walked a little farther and then Cantrell stopped. “Here, this is the place.” He pointed to the water’s edge. “Her clothes were on those rocks there.”

  I stepped off the trail and went down to the edge of the lake. The water was calm, lapping against the rocks rhythmically. There was a smell of fish and weeds in the air.

  I opened the backpack. Cantrell stood watching me from the trail. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Find out what really happened here,” I said, removing the potion vials from the pack and putting them on the ground. “If you want to see too, you’re going to need to drink one of these. You’ll also have to look through the hole in this stone.” I held up one of the faerie stones.

  “What the hell kind of mumbo jumbo is this, Harbinger? I’m not drinking anything and I sure as hell am not looking through some damn stone. You trying to make a fool of me?”

  I sighed and went up to him. “I thought you brought me on this case because of my special skills. You said you thought there might be a preternatural cause of death.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I did, but…”

  “If we want to find a preternatural cause, we have to use preternatural means to do so,” I told him. “Why did you invite me along? Did you think I was just going to get out a magnifying glass and look for clues?”

  “No, of course not. But this is weird.”

  “I haven’t even begun yet,” I said.

  He sighed and put his hands on his hips, saying nothing.

  “Do you want to solve this case?” I asked him.

  “You know I do.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not so sure. I thought it was strange that you hired me to work with you, especially after the zombie incident, which you blame me for. I think the Deirdre Summers case might just be a ruse to get closer to me and find out what I know about the subject you’re really interested in: Sherry Westlake.”

  “No, that isn’t right. I want to solve this case for Deirdre’s daughter. Don’t you dare question my motives, Harbinger.”

  “So shall I begin?”
I said.

  He nodded, determined to prove to me that he really wanted to solve this case. “Yes, do whatever it is you do.”

  “Are you going to drink the potion or not?”

  He looked unsure about that. “I don’t know. What’s in it and why do I need to drink it?”

  “Just herbs, water, and alcohol.”

  “Alcohol?” He eyed the vial suspiciously.

  I rolled my eyes. “There’s just a little bourbon in it. It’s an old recipe that’s going to let us talk to the trees.”

  He removed his shades and narrowed his eyes at me. “This is crazy.”

  “No, it really isn’t. I’m going to use Deirdre’s drawings to question the trees, kind of like when the police show photos to people on the street and ask, “Have you seen this man?” This is the same thing, except we’re going to ask the trees if they’ve seen this monster.” I held up the drawing of the lake monster.

  “He’s going to question the trees,” Cantrell murmured to himself in disbelief.

  “And the plants,” I said, looking around at the undergrowth. “The ones that were here three years ago, anyway.”

  “This is crazy, Harbinger. You’re crazy. I’m not playing along with this charade of yours.”

  I sighed. “Fine. I’ll do it and I’ll tell you what I see when I come back.”

  He frowned. “Come back from where?”

  “Well, believe it or not, trees and plants don’t speak English. The potion induces a vision state that lets me see what they show me. It’ll be images and sounds, impressions left from when Deirdre was here. As well as the potion, I need a faerie stone to see the images. My magical tattoos aren’t able to handle this.”

  Cantrell stood with his hands on his hips, his face looking up to the sky as if he were asking a higher power how he had managed to get involved in this craziness. After a few seconds, he looked at me with a resigned look in his eyes. “Okay, what do we need to do?”

  “Come and sit over here with me by the water’s edge.” I put Deirdre’s drawings on the ground, placing small rocks on them so they wouldn’t blow away in the summer breeze.

  Cantrell sat down next to me and I handed him a faerie stone. He looked through the hole at the surrounding trees, as if expecting to see something that hadn’t been there before.”

  “It won’t work yet,” I told him. “I need to say a few words and then we need to drink the potions. When I’ve done that, it takes a little time for the visions to begin. Use your left eye to look through the stone.”

  He switched eyes and glanced around.

  “We need to be patient,” I told him. “Trees aren’t exactly in a hurry to go anywhere so they’ll take their time.”

  He shook his head dismissively. “Harbinger, you should be in a psych evaluation ward, not living among sane people.”

  Cantrell was putting on a good show about not believing, but I could sense a lack of confidence in his voice. He was beginning to doubt his probably long-held belief that there was no reality beyond what you could see and touch in day-to-day life.

  That belief had been eroded slightly by the appearance of the walking dead. What he saw once he took the potion and used the faerie stone was probably going to blow his mind.

  I usually tried to protect skeptics from learning about the preternatural world, but in the case of Sheriff Cantrell, I would make an exception. In his job, knowing that there were more dangers in the world than just humans might save his life someday.

  It would certainly make him a better sheriff because he’d look at every case that came across his desk from more angles, some of them outside the realm of mundane thinking.

  I looked up at the trees and recited a short incantation that my friend Jim Walker had taught me when I’d been working with him in Canada. The words were so old that their origin was unknown but the incantation had been known in the Americas before any white man had ever set foot on the shore.

  “Drink the potion,” I told Cantrell as I popped the cap off my vial and downed the contents. It tasted bitter at first and then warm as the bourbon hit my throat. Cantrell drank his and put the empty vial on the ground.

  He lifted the faerie stone to his eye and peered at the trees like a child who had just received a set of binoculars as a gift and was eager to try them out.

  “Not yet,” I whispered.

  He sighed loudly. “You said we had to look through the stones.”

  “We do, but it isn’t time yet.”

  “So how do we know when it’s time?” His voice had dropped to a whisper to match mine.

  “We’ll know. For now, we wait.”

  The potion was beginning to take effect. My head, which had been pounding, now felt light and warm. The herbs suspended in the bourbon included hallucinogens and they were starting to kick in.

  “I feel funny,” Cantrell whispered.

  I held up a hand to quiet him. A rustling sound was coming from the trees, as if they were being blown by a strong wind even though the day was only mildly breezy. The undergrowth also became agitated, leaves trembling like a rattlesnake’s rattle as if they were trying to warn us of something.

  I took off my shades, picked up my faerie stone, and glanced through the hole. Everything looked almost the same as it did before except it was nighttime. A full moon hung over the lake and the stars were bright in the cloudless night sky.

  “Whoa,” Cantrell said, and I assumed he had picked up his stone and was looking through it.

  The night scene was quiet except for the sound of someone approaching, their feet swishing through the long grass at the side of the trail. I turned the stone toward the trail and saw Deirdre Summers there. She stood on the dark trail for a moment, watching the lake, before stepping out into the moonlight and walking to the rocks close to where Cantrell and I were sitting.

  “This is incredible,” Cantrell whispered.

  “Be quiet,” I told him.

  “Why, she can’t hear us, can she?”

  “Of course not, this is just a recording. But I want to hear what’s happening without you whispering into my ear. There might be something important.”

  “Right, a clue,” he said knowingly. I wondered how much effect the potion had had on him. He sounded like he was stoned.

  I looked over to check on him and because I had the stone to my left eye and had opened my right, I got a weird double vision effect. My left eye was looking at a night scene where Cantrell was not present so I was looking at grass and rocks; my right eye was looking at Cantrell sitting on the grass and rocks in bright sunshine.

  I lowered the stone for a moment. “You okay?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, waving me away with one huge hand.

  I raised the faerie stone to my eye again and went back to watching the night that Deirdre Summers had disappeared. She was standing ankle-deep in the water now, her gaze fixed on Whitefish Island in the distance.

  The wooded island was dark, as if the silver moonlight couldn’t reach it, despite the water around the island reflecting the full moon and glittering in its light.

  Something moved on the dark island, a shadow within a shadow, and I heard a splash out there as whatever it was entered the water. It sounded big.

  “What was that?” Cantrell whispered urgently.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. I swallowed hard, fear rising inside me even though I knew that I wasn’t present in this scene and was actually sitting by the lake in broad daylight on a summer’s day three years later.

  Deirdre was totally calm. She walked to the rocks and began to take off her clothes, folding each item and placing it neatly on the rocks. When she was naked, she returned to the water and waded in up to her waist.

  There were still splashing sounds in the distance and they were getting closer. I was breathing hard, willing Deirdre to get out of the water. Didn’t she realize she was in danger? What was she thinking?

  Cantrell must have been having the same thought
s as me because he whispered, “No, get out of there.”

  Deirdre couldn’t hear him, of course. She moved farther into the lake until she was in so deep that she had to swim. With an unhurried breaststroke, she swam out toward the distant sounds, her arms cutting through the moonlit water gracefully. She was so calm that I wondered if she’d been hypnotized or glamored.

  “What is she doing?” Cantrell whispered. “What is she doing?” I could hear the stress in his voice.

  Then, out on the lake, there was a movement that made the water roil and splash. A huge dark shape rose from the water where Deirdre was swimming and engulfed her in blackness. I saw a frog-like eye and the dark bulk of its body for a fleeting second but then it was gone, sinking back into the depths.

  Deirdre was gone too. The only thing that remained of her was the neat pile of clothes on the rocks. The huge creature’s movement had caused a disturbance in the lake that sent waves splashing against those rocks and over the grass where Cantrell and I sat. I couldn’t feel the water, of course, but I had an urge to stand up to avoid getting wet.

  Cantrell had dropped his faerie stone and was getting to his feet unsteadily, his eyes full of terror. “What the fuck was that, Harbinger? It ate her. What was it?”

  “Sit down,” I said. From my faerie stone, I could hear movement in the night scene. Someone was approaching. “Something else is happening,” I told Cantrell. “Pick up your stone.”

  “I don’t want to see anything else like that…thing.”

  “I hear a person,” I said. “There are footsteps on the trail.”

  He looked toward the trail.

  “Not now,” I told him. “Then. Use the stone.”

  He stayed standing but he picked up the stone and put it to his left eye.

  The sound of footsteps that were accompanying the vision stopped momentarily and then continued, this time coming toward us over the grass. I turned my head toward the sound and saw a young dark-haired man wearing a black hoodie with the hood pulled up over his head. His eyes shone unnaturally bright blue through the shadows that fell over his face. He walked to the water’s edge and stared out over the lake.

  “You recognize him?” I asked Cantrell.