It was only ten-thirty when I got out of the Taurus in front of my house but I was beat. There was no point in going to see the Blackwell Sisters—who I believed could help us with our passport situation—until tomorrow so I looked in at Leon behind the wheel and said, “Meet me here at nine”
“Okay, see you soon,” he said before pulling away from the curb.
I went inside and checked my phone. The damn thing wasn’t working. It had acted strangely before after I’d been to Faerie but had eventually synced itself. Now, after a trip to the Shadow Land, it seemed to be broken.
I went upstairs, put the phone on the nightstand and connected the charger, and lay on the bed. I planned to wait for the phone to sort itself out and then I was going to leave a message for Mallory, telling her what I’d learned about Mister Scary. Then, I intended to call Felicity.
But as soon as my head hit the pillow, I fell asleep.
Leon arrived in his canary-yellow Porsche Cayman at nine and he looked better than I felt. Despite having spent fifteen minutes under a cold shower, I still felt groggy as I went outside. I was wearing shades because the day seemed too bright. I felt like I had a hangover and the color of the Porsche wasn’t helping any.
“You ready to rock and roll?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “but I don’t have any choice. Leave your car here; we’ll take the Land Rover.”
He put his car into my driveway and I slid in behind the wheel of the Land Rover. As I drove toward town, Leon said, “Is your phone working? I think mine got fried by the Shadow Land.”
“Mine isn’t working either,” I said. I’d tried it as soon as I’d woken up but, despite being charged up, it couldn’t seem to find the network. I had it in my pocket anyway, just in case it decided to come alive again at some point. If not, I could use a payphone at the airport to call Mallory and Felicity.
“You said yesterday that the Blackwell Sisters can get our passports,” Leon said. “How are they going to do that?”
“They can’t get our passports but they can make us new ones,” I said. “There’s a magical technique where a piece of paper can be enchanted to look like anything you want. The Blackwell Sisters should be able to make us two enchanted passports that will get us to England.”
“Okay, cool,” he said.
By the time we pulled over outside Blackwell Books, I felt a little better. I climbed out and made my way into the bookshop.
At least the interior of the shop was gloomy. I removed my shades and hung them on my shirt pocket.
“Alec, how nice to see you.” Victoria Blackwell appeared from behind a stack of books and came over to us. “And Leon too. To what do we owe the pleasure?” She was dressed in her usual attire, consisting of a long black lace dress that looked as if it was stylish maybe a hundred years ago.
“We need passports,” I told her. “Or something that will look like passports, anyway.”
She raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Oh? Are you going somewhere?”
“England,” I said.
“Oh, how lovely. It can be a little cool at this time of year, so make sure you wrap up warm.”
“We’ll do that,” I promised. “So can you make the passports?”
“Yes, yes, of course. Come with me.” She led us to the back of the shop where she and her sister, Devon, had an office.
Devon was in the office, sitting at the desk in front of the computer. She looked up as we entered. “Alec! And Leon too. How nice of you to visit us!”
“Devon,” I said, nodding. “It’s nice to see you too.”
“They want passports,” Victoria told her sister.
“Passports? Are you going somewhere nice?”
“England,” I said.
“For a vacation?”
“No, business.”
“Well, it can be a little chilly there at this time of year, so make sure you—”
“Wrap up warm. Yes, we know. Don’t worry about us.”
“We can make the passports for you,” Victoria said. “But are you sure that’s how you want to travel? Flights can be so boring.”
I frowned at her. “How else would we get there?”
She looked at Devon and an unspoken communication seemed to pass between them. Victoria looked back at me and said, “Where exactly are you going in England?”
“A place called Bodmin Moor in Cornwall.”
Her face lit up. “Cornwall! Excellent! A place steeped in myth and legend. Yes, we can definitely help you get there.”
Devon opened the desk drawer and took out an old leather-bound book. She began leafing through it and I could see hand-drawn maps on the pages. She stopped when she came to a page near the back of the book and traced her finger over the map until she found what she was looking for. She looked up at Victoria and said, “There’s a stone circle in the area.”
“We can transport you there,” Victoria told me.
“You mean through some sort of portal?” I asked.
“Yes,” Devon said, nodding enthusiastically. “It’s something new we’ve been working on.”
“Actually, it’s something old. We discovered it in a spellbook,” Victoria said. “We can transport you from here to any place where there’s some sort of hallowed ground.”
“Stone circles,” Devon added. “Or old temples. And churches, of course.”
I thought about that for a moment. I’d been through enough portals lately to last me a lifetime and I didn’t have a burning desire to go through another. But it would be faster than catching a flight, and speed was of the essence. We had to get to that torc before Davos discovered its location.
“Okay,” I said. “We need to get some stuff from the Land Rover first.”
“Of course,” Devon said excitedly. “We’ll make preparations for the spell while you get your things.”
I turned to leave the office, then stopped and turned back to face the witches. “You’ve done this before, right?”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Victoria said. “Now, go and get your luggage for the journey and meet us back here as soon as you can.”
Leon and I went out to the Land Rover and I opened the back. After transferring my stuff from the trunk of Felicity’s Mini a while ago and discovering that keeping my gear in a chaotic pile wasn’t practical, I’d bought a large military duffel bag to hold the most important items. Inside, there were swords, daggers, faerie stones, crystal shards, a shotgun, bags of salt, wooden stakes, and a mallet. I heaved it out of the Land Rover and put it over my shoulder.
“This should be everything we need,” I told him. “If we flew to England, I was going to get some supplies from the Society’s headquarters but this way, we can use my stuff.”
“Do you think this is safe?” Leon asked. “The witches sending us through a portal, I mean. The last time we went through a portal, the outcome wasn’t so great.”
“The sisters are a little eccentric,” I told him, “but they know their stuff. We’ll be fine.” But even as I said it, I felt a twinge of reluctance. The witches did know their stuff, that was true, but I wasn’t sure how many times they’d cast this portal spell before, if ever. Still, we had no quicker way of traveling to England and getting our hands on Gloria’s torc.
The other thing that gave me pause was that the Blackwell Sisters hadn’t demanded a payment for helping us. Usually, they made me to promise to return the favor but this time, they weren’t concerned about payment for their services. That made me even more certain that Leon and I were being used as lab rats for the transportation spell.
We went back into the bookshop and made our way between the bookshelves to the office. The Blackwell sisters weren’t there.
“This way,” Devon called to us from deeper within the shop. We followed her through a door marked PRIVATE and along a short corridor to a small room where a magical circle had been painted on the floor in red paint. The circle was ringed by burning white candles that provided the only light in the roo
m.
An altar sat at one end of the room, covered with a black cloth that had a white pentagram embroidered on it. On the altar sat a small cauldron that didn’t have a heat source beneath it but was giving off a thick, pungent smoke that smelled of marigolds and hawthorn berries.
Victoria was standing in front of the altar, consulting a spell book.
Leon and I walked into the circle and I dropped the duffel bag at our feet.
“Got everything you need?” Victoria asked, looking up from the book.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Not quite everything,” Devon said, smiling. “I’ll be back in a moment.” She left the room.
“How do we get back here when we’re ready to come home?” I asked Victoria.
“Just give us a call,” she said. “You have our number. As long as you’re standing on hallowed ground somewhere—anywhere in the world—we can bring you back here.”
Devon came back into the room, carrying two oversized dark blue knitted sweaters. “You might need these,” she said. “Here, take them.”
Leon and I took the sweaters. They were large enough that we could both have worn the same one and still have room to spare.
“We knitted them ourselves,” Devon said proudly.
“Great, thanks,” I said, dropping mine onto the duffel bag. Leon did the same and the bag disappeared beneath a sea of dark blue wool.
“Ready to go?” Victoria asked.
We nodded.
“Whatever happens, don’t leave the circle until the spell is done. Hopefully, by then, you’ll be standing on Bodmin Moor.”
“Hopefully?” I said.
She grinned. “I told you not to worry, Alec. You look worried.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Let’s just get on with it.”
Devon went behind the altar and picked up a silver bowl that contained leaves and herbs, as well as two small daggers. She came into the circle and handed Leon and me a dagger each. She held the bowl in both hands, out toward us, and said, “You both need to put a drop of blood in here.”
I nicked my finger and squeezed a drop of blood onto the herbs. Leon did the same with his dagger. Devon took the bowl and daggers back to the altar and began reciting words in a language I was unfamiliar with. Victoria was also speaking in what sounded like a second unknown language.
I felt my hair stand on end as the energy within the circle began to increase. It felt like it was swirling around us, creating a vortex. The sisters chanted faster, the words of the two different languages seeming to deflect off one another and echo around the room.
Devon tipped the contents of the silver bowl into the cauldron on the altar. The smoke turned bright red for a second and then it was gone.
The entire room was gone.
Leon and I stood outside in the center of a circle of standing stones. By the appearance of the cloudy sky, I guessed it was early evening, maybe an hour or so before nightfall. The landscape around us was flat and green, dotted here and there with stands of trees and low hills, with a village in the distance. The air was cold.
“Wow, they did it,” Leon said.
I nodded. “Yeah, they did. And they were right about the weather.” I took one of the knitted sweaters off the duffel bag and put it on. It drowned me and I had to roll up the sleeves just to see my hands but at least it was warm.
Leon put on his sweater and, because he was smaller-framed than me, had to roll up the bottom of it because it reached past his knees. “Who did they knit these for? Giants?”
My phone buzzed in my pocket, surprising me. The trip through the portal must have shocked it back into life. I answered it.
The voice on the other end was Victoria Blackwell’s. “Are you there? Did it work?”
“Yeah, we’re here,” I said. “The spell worked. I guess that’s why you’re calling, to make sure we weren’t blown into a thousand pieces or something.”
“Excellent!” she said. “Devon, it worked!” In the background, I heard Devon whoop with joy. Then Victoria said, “You call us the moment you’re ready to return and we’ll bring you back here immediately. Isn’t our spell wonderful?”
“Well, we’re still alive, so there’s that, I guess. I’ll call you later. Bye.” I ended the call then looked at my phone. I had texts from Felicity asking where I was and a number of voicemail messages that I assumed were also from her. I called her.
When she answered, her voice held a mixture of worry and relief. “Alec! I’ve been so worried. Where are you? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Leon is with me but the others have been captured by the Midnight Cabal.”
“Oh my God! Are you going to rescue them?”
“We’re working on it. We’re trying to find the torc that gives Gloria her power. Listen, can you get a car and meet us here? We ‘re in the middle of nowhere right now.”
There was a slight pause and then Felicity said, “Of course. I’ll get the first flight I can—“
“No, you don’t have to do that. We’re in England.”
“What? How? No, never mind, you can tell me later. I can pick you up, I’ve got my dad’s Volvo. Where exactly are you?”
“We’re standing in the center of a stone circle on Bodmin Moor.”
There was another pause. “All right. Do you know which stone circle? There are more than one there.”
I looked at Leon, who was playing with his phone. “Is your GPS working?”
“Way ahead of you,” he said. “This stone circle is called The Hurlers and that village over there is called Minions.”
“We’ll be at a village called Minions,” I told Felicity.
“All right. It should take me about an hour to get there.”
“I’ll see you later,” I said.
She ended the call.
Leon said, “There a few bodies of water around here but how are we supposed to know which one is the right one?”
“Good question. Gloria had said she gave the torc to her sister in the Middle Ages. Maybe the lake isn’t even here anymore. We’ll ask at the village.” I swung the duffel bag over my shoulder. The contents clanked together, then settled as I walked out of the stone circle and across the moor.
“You ever been to England before?” I asked Leon as we walked toward the distant huddle of buildings.
“A couple of times but I’ve only been to London. It was nothing like this. This landscape is pretty bleak.”
As we got closer to the village, I spotted a place that would be the perfect for questioning the locals. I pointed it out to Leon, a large stone building with wooden picnic tables set out in front of it. A sign over the door displayed a painting of the stone circle with the words The Hurler’s Arms.
“A pub,” Leon said, grinning. “I like your thinking.”
Five minutes later, we entered The Hurler’s Arms. The place looked old, with exposed wooden beams in the low ceiling and a huge stone fireplace dominating one wall. A small fire burned quietly, lending an aroma of wood-smoke to the smell of hops that filled the room.
The windows were small, admitting only the barest amount of light from the outside, so the room was lit by lamps set in the walls. Paintings of the wild moor hung over the fireplace.
I assumed the pub would get busy later but right now, the only patrons were a couple of old men in dark trousers, boots, and gray knitted sweaters sitting at a table near the fire with pints of dark beer.
The barman was in his fifties with gray hair and a neatly-cropped beard. He looked over at us as we entered. “What can I get you, gentlemen?”
I looked at the names of the beers on the taps. “Two pints of Doom Bar, please. Do you take plastic?” We didn’t have any British money on us, a drawback to traveling via Blackwell Airlines.
“Of course, mate.” He grabbed a portable card machine and put it on the bar in front of me while he poured the beers.
When we had our drinks and I’d paid for them, Leon and I took them over to a table by
the fireplace, next to the two men who looked like locals.
“Afternoon,” I said as we passed them.
They looked up from their pints but didn’t say anything.
“Looks like a tough crowd,” Leon whispered as we took our seats.
But one of the men looked over and said, “We don’t get many of your type in here.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Our type?”
“Americans.”
“We’re here to see the lake,” I said.
“What lake might that be?” the other man asked.
“There’s only one lake around here surrounded by legend, isn’t there?” I asked. If the lake Gloria had mentioned did exist, and if it was inhabited by a faerie, there was sure to be a legend surrounding the place.
The first man grinned. “Hear that, Bernie? They’ve come all the way from the States to see Dozmary Pool.”
The man named Bernie nodded, his rheumy eyes traveling from Leon to me and back to Leon again. “I heard what he said, George. Maybe they’re treasure hunters, come here looking for Excalibur.”
“Excalibur?” Leon asked. “The Excalibur?”
George nodded. “Dozmary Pool is where the Lady of the Lake gave Excalibur to King Arthur. It’s also where Sir Bedivere threw the sword after Arthur’s death.”
“But just as the blade was about to hit the water,” Bernie said, “the Lady of the Lake’s hand came up out of the pool and caught it before sinking back down into the depths, sword and all. You’re not here looking for treasure, are you?”
“No,” I said. “But that’s the lake we want to take a look at. It’s somewhere near here, isn’t it?”
“It’s around these parts,” Bernie said, “but you don’t want to be going there, especially not this late in the day, in case you get lost on the moor at night.”
“Because then, Tregeagle will come for you,” George added.
“Tregeagle?” I asked. I knew these men were telling us the local legends but I also knew that if there was a legend of something out on the moor that came for people in the night, it was probably based on fact.
Dead Ground (Harbinger P.I. Book 4) Page 15