Dark Magic (Harbinger P.I. Book 3)

F
elicity helped
me through the front door, out of the rain and into the warmth of the house. I sat on the sofa, shivering from the cold that seemed to have permeated my skin and chilled my bones and internal organs. Felicity fussed around in the kitchen and, after a few seconds, the rich aroma of coffee drifted into the living room. It was the best smell I’d ever experienced in my life.

She came into the living room and stood with her hands on her hips. She’d wiped the rain from the lenses of her glasses and her dark eyes looked concerned. “You should take a hot shower and put some dry clothes on while I make the coffee.”

I nodded, still shivering. “Felicity, what are you doing here? When I saw you at the hospital…”

“We’ll talk about that after you get warmed up. Can you make it to the bathroom?”

I stood warily. At least my muscles seemed to be working again. “I’ll be fine,” I said. I went through the kitchen and down the hall to the bathroom. I turned the temperature dial on the shower as hot as I could get it and stepped under the scalding spray, closing my eyes and letting the water run over my face and body. It hit my skin like a thousand white-hot needles, but it felt far better than the insidious cold that had been seeping into my body.

My strength eventually returned. By the time I stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around my waist, I felt almost like my old self again. I went back through the house, passing Felicity in the kitchen as she was pouring coffee into two mugs, and went up to my bedroom where I put on gray sweatpants and a hoodie that had the words “Miskatonic University” across the front and “Dept of Medieval Metaphysics” across the back.

My old colleague Jim Walker, whom I’d worked with in Canada during my early days as an investigator, had bought it for me. Jim had been a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft and had given me the hoodie as a graduation present when I’d become a fully-fledged P.I. and gone solo.

When I got back downstairs, Felicity had also changed into dry clothing and was sitting on the sofa. Her luggage, which she’d left on her driveway when she’d come over to my lawn and hauled my ass inside, was now sitting inside the front door with her wet clothes on top of it. She must have gone back out to retrieve it and then changed into the black slacks and white blouse she was wearing now. Her dark hair hung around her face in damp tendrils but it looked like she’d dried it with a towel. Two steaming mugs sat on the coffee table in front of her.

“You look much better than when you were lying outside on the wet grass,” she said as I sank into the easy chair and picked up a mug of coffee. “What was that all about?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Probably much longer than yours. So why don’t you start? Why did you come back? When I saw you in the hospital in London, you seemed pretty certain that you were staying in England.”

“Yes, I was certain at the time. There just seemed to be so much death everywhere and it made me question my career choice. Being poisoned by a demon didn’t help, either. And seeing Jason again made me realize that I had options. I could lead a normal life. That was very appealing at the time. So I made a decision to stay in England and forget all about demons, and changelings, and witches.” She paused to take a drink. I did the same. The hot, bitter coffee was the best I’d ever tasted.

“So what changed your mind?” I asked, holding my mug in both hands and letting the steam drift up to my face, bringing with it the rich coffee aroma.

“When I was discharged from the hospital,” Felicity said, “Jason came to pick me up. He was excited because he wanted to show me a house in Essex that he was going to buy for us to live in. I was still a bit too tired to want to go looking at houses but I agreed and he drove us out there. The house was lovely, a little cottage with a quaint garden and a nearby village that was like something out of an Agatha Christie novel. It was perfect.”

She took another drink and set her mug down on the coffee table. “But the more I looked around the place and thought about spending my days there, the more I began to feel scared. I felt that if I spent my life in that house, in that village, I would slowly die inside. I can’t explain it fully, Alec, but it was as if living a normal life was even more dangerous than working here, fighting monsters. I knew that if I tried to live the life Jason wanted me to live, I would be dead before I even knew it. Dead inside.”

I nodded, understanding exactly what she meant. It was what I’d tried to explain to her on the flight to England. Felicity wasn’t meant for a mundane life. She was like me, unable to turn her back on the preternatural world once she knew of its existence.

“So here I am,” she said. She smiled but there was a sadness in her eyes.

“You left Jason?” I asked.

She nodded. “He made it clear that I couldn’t be with him and pursue a career as an investigator as well. He said I had to make a choice between you or him, as if the situation hinged on what man I chose to be with, not what I wanted for myself. So I told him I wasn’t choosing you or him, I was choosing me, making the decision I thought would be best for me and no one else. I think that shocked him even more than my decision to return here.” She straightened slightly and looked proud of herself. Hell, she had every right to be. I was proud of her too.

I felt myself grinning, trying to imagine Jason’s face when Felicity had stood up for herself. The self-righteous prick had tried to pay me to tell Felicity to stay in England. It must have been a shock when she dumped his ass.

“What are you grinning at?” she asked me.

“I’m just imagining you telling Jason that you’re an independent woman. It probably fried the circuits in his medieval brain.”

She giggled, all traces of her earlier sadness gone. It was good to see her laugh. “Now, tell me your story,” she said. “Judging by the state of the Land Rover and the condition I found you in, I’d say I missed all the action.”

“The state of the Land Rover? I left it at the cemetery. I drove back here in Mallory’s Jeep.” But now that I thought back to when Mallory had left, the Land Rover had been sitting in the driveway. At the time, I’d been too upset by Mallory’s departure to give the vehicle’s mysterious appearance a second thought.

“Yes,” Felicity said, “it looks like you’ve hit another vehicle.”

I got up and went to the front door. The rain had stopped, leaving the road and sidewalk glistening in the glow from the streetlights. Even in the darkness, I could see where the front of the Land Rover had been damaged on the driver’s side. The lights were smashed, the bodywork crumpled.

I put on my boots and went out to the vehicle, running my hand over the dented metal. “What the hell?”

“You don’t remember doing it?” Felicity asked from the doorway.

“I didn’t do it. Sure, I drove through a horde of zombies and crashed through the gates of the cemetery but it wasn’t damaged like this.”

“Zombies?”

I nodded, noticing a sheet of paper on the back seat, along with the Box of Midnight and the Land Rover keys. I opened the door and took out the paper, which was something fancy—vellum, maybe—and looked at the words written on it in an ornate script. I read them aloud.

“Alec, I thought you might not want the police to find this at the cemetery, so I returned it for you. Unfortunately, I had a slight mishap on the way to your house. Crashed into a brick wall. I’ll never get used to these newfangled automobiles. Sorry about that.” The message was signed with an ornate “P”. “It’s from Polidori,” I said.

“Polidori?” Felicity frowned in confusion.

“John Polidori,” I said, taking the blackened Box of Midnight and my car keys out of the vehicle before locking it.

“The same John Polidori who knew Byron and wrote
The Vampyre
in 1816?”

“Is that when he wrote it? Yeah, that’s him.” I went back into the house and placed the Box of Midnight on the coffee table, along with Polidori’s note.

Felicity picked up the mugs. “So you drove through a horde of zombies, and a physician from the nineteenth century crashed your Land Rover. I’ll make some more coffee. You have a lot of explaining to do.”

T
he buzzing
of my phone woke me the next morning. I reached over to the nightstand and picked it up, groaning inwardly when I saw the office number on the screen. Why the hell was Felicity there so early? I answered the call and she began speaking before I even got a chance to say hello.

“Alec, you need to get down here right away.”

“I do?” I asked, trying to make out the time on the bedside clock through blurry eyes. “Why? What time is it?”

“It’s half past ten. The sheriff has been here this morning, looking for you. He was going to come to your house but I told him you’d be here shortly.”

“Is he there now?”

“No, he had to go somewhere but said he’d be back shortly. You need to come to the office, Alec.”

“All right, give me ten minutes.” I ended the call and slid out of bed, hoping a shower would wake me up. Felicity and I had stayed up until the early hours discussing the events in London and what had happened in Dearmont last night. She had been genuinely upset when I told her about Mallory destroying the Box of Midnight and cursing herself with only a year to live.

I hadn’t mentioned the magical blast I’d used to kill DuMont at the cemetery. I was still too confused about that to talk about it openly. I wanted to wait and see if any more memories came back to me that might explain why I had been able to do that to DuMont. I was also trying to figure out why my father had taken me to the Coven when I was a child and had them cast an enchantment on me.

Until I could figure out more, I wasn’t going to burden Felicity with my problems. She had enough of her own to deal with. Yes, she’d left Jason and come back to Maine but I knew it wasn’t going to be so cut and dried as that. Felicity would probably experience an emotional rollercoaster for a while. I would be here for her when that happened.

She’d said she would help me research the curse that had been attached to the Box of Midnight and would try to find a way to reverse it. I wasn’t about to give up on Mallory.

I had no idea where Mallory was and, even though that wasn’t unusual, I was concerned because she’d taken off while still trying to come to terms with Rekhmire’s curse. It probably wasn’t a good idea for her to be alone right now. She needed support, even if she wouldn’t admit it.

Going on a desperate search for Mister Scary when she had no leads was only going to end in disappointment. She was a strong girl but dealing with Rekhmire’s curse and the fact that she was no closer to finding the killer responsible for the Bloody Summer Night Massacre would be enough to break anyone.

I made a decision to call Mallory later. Even if she wouldn’t come back here, having someone to talk to might help her figure out her next move. She was my friend and I wanted to help her any way I could. Besides, she had taken that curse to help me defeat DuMont’s zombie army.

I showered and dressed quickly and went outside to inspect the damaged Land Rover in daylight. The morning was bright, the sun already burning off the moisture from last night’s downpour. The damage to the Land Rover’s bodywork was mainly cosmetic apart from the smashed light, which I would have to get fixed today. I didn’t want to give Sheriff Cantrell a reason to give me a ticket. He was probably going to throw the book at me for last night’s zombie attack on the town anyway.

I drove in to town and parked in my usual place, next to Felicity’s blue Mini, behind the building that housed my office. I walked onto Main Street but didn’t make it to my office door because Cantrell intercepted me outside Dearmont Donuts.

“Harbinger,” he said gruffly, coming out of the donut shop with a bright green box under his arm, “I need to speak with you.”

“Of course,” I said, putting on a smile and a cheery voice. “How can I help you today, Sheriff?”

“Don’t give me that shit-eating grin, Harbinger. You don’t think I’ve had enough of your bullshit after what happened last night?” He pointed at the door that bore the words HARBINGER P.I. and said, “Your office. Now.”

I opened the door for him and followed his considerable bulk up the narrow stairs to my office. As I passed Felicity’s door, I gave her a little wave. She was working on her computer, her hair piled up on her head and an expression of concentration on her face. She looked damned good for someone who had only caught a few hours of sleep last night. When she saw me, she waved back and went to the coffee maker.

Cantrell settled into one of the chairs at the desk and I went around to my own, larger chair. “Felicity will be bringing coffee in a minute,” I told him. “Are you going to break out the donuts or are they for your colleagues at the station?”

He glared at me. “You think you’re a real wise guy, don’t you, Harbinger? You’re lucky I don’t throw your ass in jail for what happened last night.”

“And what exactly happened last night, Sheriff?” I sat back in my chair, waiting for his answer.

His face fell a little. “Well, we don’t know yet exactly. But people were busting out of their graves in South Cemetery and walking up Main Street.” He recovered his composure and pointed a meaty finger at me. “Don’t try and tell me that was nothing to do with you. I know what your job entails; meddling with things that shouldn’t concern normal people. You’re playing with fire and it’s the good people of this town who are getting burned.”

“Was anyone hurt last night?” I asked him. I knew that what happened was DuMont’s fault but if anyone had been injured, I was going to feel guilty about it.

“Only minor injuries,” Cantrell said. “Luckily, those walking skeletons were easily killed.” He frowned at his own words. “I can’t believe I just said that. Zombies belong in books and movies, Harbinger, not on the streets of Dearmont. I’m the sheriff of a small town; I shouldn’t have to deal with the undead.”

“No, you shouldn’t,” I agreed. “That’s my job.”

The door opened and Felicity came in, carrying a tray of coffee and donuts. I recognized the donuts as coming from Dearmont Donuts, the same as the ones Cantrell had. So Felicity hadn’t had time to bake something from scratch this morning; she was human after all.

She placed the tray on my desk without a word and went back to the door.

Cantrell turned slightly in his seat to address her. “You may want to stay, Miss Lake. I didn’t just come here to ball out your boss.” He sighed resignedly. “I came to offer him a job.”

Felicity turned to face us and I expected her to look as surprised as I felt at hearing Cantrell’s words, but her British composure kept her features unreadable. “I’ll get my notebook,” she said.

Cantrell sat quietly until she returned. I was in a state of stunned silence. The sheriff hated me, so why the hell would he hire me to do a job for him? There was the matter of his dead wife’s involvement with a church where she and twelve other people had been murdered, of course, but as far as Cantrell and the other authorities were concerned, the perpetrator of that crime had been my predecessor, Sherry Westlake.

When Felicity took a seat at the end of the desk and opened her notebook to a fresh page, I asked Cantrell, “What can I do for you, Sheriff?”

“There’s an old case,” he said. “In fact, it’s three years old and as far as my department is concerned, it’s a cold case but I keep thinking there might be something we missed at the time. I suspect the case might involve…things in your area of expertise. I didn’t think so at the time but my thinking about such matters has changed over the intervening years.”

“You mean the case of the lady in the lake,” I said, remembering the news report I’d read online when I’d first seen a picture of Sheriff Cantrell and his daughter, Amy.

He looked surprised. “Yes, I am talking about that. But Deirdre Summers’ body isn’t in Dearmont Lake. We sent search parties out there in boats and we sent divers down into the depths looking for her. There was no body.”

“You don’t think she might have simply left town and left her clothes by the lake to make it look like suicide?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, I don’t. Deirdre was as straight-laced as they come. For her to disappear like that, there had to be foul play involved.” He paused, as if considering what to say next. When he spoke again, he said, “I’ll have someone bring over the case file. When you read it, you’ll see why I think the case might be best investigated by someone in your line of work.”

I wondered if the sheriff had shown the file to Sherry Westlake. With the case being so old, it was possible. I took a shot in the dark. “Have you shown the case file to any other preternatural investigators?”

A dark look crossed his face. “No, I have not.”

“I’ll be happy to take a look,” I said, changing the subject. It was obvious that Cantrell was thinking of Sherry Westlake, the woman he thought had murdered his wife. Hell, for all I knew, she had murdered his wife but I didn’t want the sheriff dwelling on it in my office. He had a gun, after all, and he seemed to have tarred all P.I.s with the same brush as Sherry Westlake. I was still shocked that he was hiring me to look into the Deirdre Summers case.

“I have to ask,” I said, “why are you hiring me, Sheriff? You don’t like me, that much is obvious. So why come to me with this?”

“You’re right, I don’t like you. And after the events of last night, I like you even less.” He leaned across the desk slightly, his weight pushing it across the floor toward me. “But I can rise above my personal feelings to do my job. Deirdre Summers was a respected member of this community and she left behind a daughter who has no idea what happened to her mother. I owe it to that young lady to solve the case of her mother’s death, even if it means working with people like you.”

“Fair enough,” I said. We were obviously never going to be friends but if he was willing to put our differences aside and work with me on a professional level, then I would do the same. “I have another case I’m working on, so I’ll add the Deirdre Summers case to my workload just as soon as I can take a look at that case file.” I didn’t mention that the other case I was working on was an investigation into the church his wife had attended. Nor did I tell him that his daughter had hired me to look into the church and his wife’s death.

“I assume I’m being paid by the Sheriff’s Department for this investigation?” I said.

Cantrell nodded. “You’ll be paid as a consultant. That means I want to see detailed breakdowns of your time and expenses.”

“Of course. Felicity will handle that. Am I to report any developments in the case to you?”

He grinned at me like a wolf looking at a trapped rabbit. “You won’t be reporting to me, Harbinger, I’ll be working the case with you.”

The shock I felt must have registered on my face because Cantrell’s grin widened.

“No,” I said. “I work with Felicity.”

“Not on this case.” He pointed at me with a huge finger. “You think I’m going to let you handle police business on your own? I’m going to be keeping a close eye on you every step of the way.”

This was going to be a nightmare. I would be working with Cantrell on the Deirdre Summers case while also investigating the death of his wife without his knowledge. I wanted to say no and send him on his way but what choice did I have? If I declined the case, he was going to start getting pissy about last night’s zombie attack and I’d probably end up in jail.

I sighed. “Okay, I’ll work the case with you,” I said, my voice sounding even more resigned than I’d intended. I’d wanted to suggest that I wasn’t happy about the arrangement but my tone made it sound like I was a condemned man about to leave his cell for the final time.

“Don’t think I’m looking forward to this any more than you are,” he said. “But Deirdre died on my watch and I will not allow the case to remain unsolved, even if it means working with the likes of you.”

I wasn’t in the mood to take a barrage of insults. I wanted Cantrell out of my office so I would have time to think without him looming over me. I stood up. “I’ll need to read the case file before we get started.”

He stood too and gave me a curt nod. “I’ll send someone over with it this morning.” He offered his hand reluctantly, as if he were about to place it in something nasty. I shook it, making sure to grip his hand tightly and look into his eyes. The fact that he’d offered his hand despite his dislike of me told me that he’d been brought up with traditional values and that meant he would respect a strong handshake with eye contact.

He released my hand and nodded to Felicity. “Miss Lake, thank you for the coffee.” He turned and left. I heard the stairs groan beneath his weight as he went downstairs. Then the main door opened and closed and I watched him through the window as he went to his patrol car and put his box of donuts into the passenger side before climbing into the driver’s seat and starting the engine. He drove south along Main Street toward the police station.

“Well, I wasn’t expecting that,” I told Felicity.

“No, neither was I. At least we have more work. There’s always room for another case.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Except I have to work it with Sheriff Cantrell.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing. This could be an opportunity for you to earn his trust. He might give you more consultancy jobs if you bond with him.”

“Bond with him? We’re not going on a boys’ night out, we’re investigating a woman’s death. Besides, he hates me and that isn’t going to change any time soon.”

She shrugged. “Maybe he’ll learn to trust you.”

“Trust me? While I’m working with him on the Deirdre Summers case, I’ll be investigating his wife’s death behind his back. That isn’t the foundation of a trusting relationship.”

“Well I think it’s good that he already trusts you enough to bring you this case.”

“It isn’t that he trusts me,” I told her. “He wants to keep an eye on me. He said so himself. I wonder what he’s up to.”

Felicity stood up and smoothed her skirt before picking up her notebook. “I’m sure you boys will stop fighting one day and play nice. I’ll be in my office if you need me.”

“I need you now,” I said, then realized how that sounded and added, “We should drive over to Clara and take a look at that church.”