Dark Magic (Harbinger P.I. Book 3)

by Adam J. Wright

  I could hear the pages of the book continuing to turn slowly. The intruder still had no idea I was here. I crept forward, arms raised, fists tight.

  I reached the open door and took a split second to peer into the room and see a hooded figure bent over one of my tomes, the flashlight beam pointed at the page, before entering the room low, fists raised, and lashing out at the flashlight with my foot. It went spinning into the air, its beam flickering over the walls, floor and ceiling like a crazy strobe light.

  I moved to the side quickly, avoiding a fist that came hurtling in my direction. I threw a punch at where I thought the intruder’s face was but now the flashlight had landed in the corner of the room, its beam pointing at the wall, leaving the rest of the room in darkness. I had planned to use the darkness to my advantage but hadn’t figured on the intruder fighting back so adeptly.

  A punch connected with my shoulder and slapped the arm away before shooting forward, staying low. I grabbed the intruder’s hips and twisted my body to bring him down to the floor. I was rewarded with a karate chop that connected painfully with my upper back as my opponent wriggled free.

  He fled into the hall and I caught sight of a black hoodie like the one Luke Fairweather wore. I gave chase, diving for the intruder’s legs before he could get downstairs and out of the house.

  We tumbled together down the stairs, struggling against each other and throwing wild punches that didn’t connect with anything. The stairs slammed into my back, legs, and shoulders and I hoped they were causing the same amount of pain to the intruder. Maybe the fall would slow him down and I’d be able to subdue him once we reached the floor.

  When we reached the bottom step, my opponent was up on his feet at lightning speed and reaching for the front door. I hooked my arm around his boot, bringing him crashing to the ground. By the time he had scrambled back to his feet, I was facing him, crouching low in a fighting stance, my hands raised and ready to go into action. “There’s no point running,” I said.

  Instead of running, he adopted a fighting stance that mirrored my own. He was shrouded in shadow, hood pulled up, face hidden. His stance told me he meant business, but so did I. One of us was about to receive an ass-kicking.

  He moved first, chopping the side of his hand through the air toward my throat. I blocked it and sent a kick arcing at his torso. He managed to block it with both hands but couldn’t grab my leg, which was what he’d tried to do. The force of the kick knocked him into the living room, where he regained his composure and repositioned himself into a fighting stance.

  I moved forward quickly, planning to knock him down with a couple of blows to the head followed by a fist to the solar plexus. But when I made my move, each blow was blocked. He went on the counter-attack, fists flying through air at various parts of my body. I blocked a face strike and a kidney punch and a double-fisted chop that would have knocked me down had it connected with my throat.

  When the intruder decided to attack using a high kick to my face, I seized the opportunity to duck low below the fast-traveling booted foot and then come up quickly beneath the extended leg, pushing it high into the air and sending my opponent crashing onto the coffee table. The table held and the black-hooded figure rolled backward off it and out of my reach.

  I adopted the fighting stance again and waited.

  Instead of attacking, the intruder held up a hand and said, “Okay, Harbinger, time out.” Her voice was feminine and that took me by surprise.

  I lowered my guard slightly. “Who are you?”

  She pushed the hood back to reveal an attractive face beneath shoulder-length curly black hair. “I’m an investigator like you. My name’s Sherry Westlake.”

  CHAPTER 14

  I held up my hands and said, “I don’t want to hurt you, Sherry.” She was definitely the same attractive black woman I’d seen in the photos Wesley had sent over. I had assumed that because she was a fugitive, she’d have run far away from Dearmont but here she was.

  “You don’t want to hurt me?” she said. “You’re a little busted up yourself, Harbinger. I’d say I was holding my own.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. “Okay, we’ll call it a draw,” I said, trying to lighten the atmosphere. “But there’s no need for us to be fighting at all. We’re on the same side. At least, I think we are.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “Because right now, I’m risking my life just being here. You know the FBI is after me, right?”

  “Yeah, I know. You want to tell me about it?” I indicated the sofa.

  “Bring me one of those beers from your fridge and I’ll consider it.” She sat in the easy chair and waited while I got two bottles of Bud.

  I sat on the sofa, facing her across the coffee table I’d thrown her onto earlier. “Why didn’t you just tell me who you were as soon as I found you upstairs?”

  “I’m trying to lay low,” she said. “I needed to come here to check out your books because I couldn’t find what I needed in the grimoire I took from your office. That’s been returned, by the way. It’s upstairs with your other books.”

  “Okay, thanks, but what were you looking for in it?”

  She held up a hand. “I’ll get to that in a minute.” After taking a swig of beer, she said, “I fought back because I didn’t know if I could trust you. I still don’t. I wanted to get in here, find what I wanted, and get out without getting caught. When you attacked me, I figured I could still get out of here without you recognizing me. But, it wasn’t to be.” She sighed and took another pull on the beer bottle. “You should have stayed in the hospital for longer.”

  “You knew I was in the hospital?”

  “I’ve been following you ever since I saw your picture in the newspaper. It stood to reason that a P.I. doing my old job would end up looking into that church sooner or later. I need someone I can trust to help me and you seemed like a good candidate. Once I found what I needed from your books, I probably would have contacted you one way or another.”

  “If you need help you should contact the Society,” I said. “What makes you think you can trust me?”

  She shot me an incredulous look. “The Society? Have you heard what’s happening to the Society lately? There’s a witch hunt going on involving senior members, and talk of spies from some medieval group that want to throw the civilization back a thousand years. I couldn’t go to the Society in case I ended up talking to one of those crazies.”

  “So why trust me? I could be working for the Midnight Cabal for all you know.”

  Sherry laughed. “Oh, that’s a good one. If you were one of the spies inside the Society, you wouldn’t have had your ass busted from Chicago all the way down to an office in Dearmont. You’d be trying to rise up the ranks and get deeper inside the Society’s infrastructure, and that would mean not getting tossed to the smallest town in America that has a P.I. So unless you’re the worst spy in the world, I’m pretty sure you aren’t working for any Midnight Cabal. Is that what they’re called?”

  I nodded.

  She finished her beer and set the empty bottle on the table. “Look, the only reason anyone gets sent here is because they’re on the Society’s shit list. I think the only reason they set up an office here is to use it to punish investigators gone bad. As far as the Society is concerned, this is a preternatural dead zone.” She pointed at me. “But you and I know different.”

  “Yeah, we do. So when you say investigators gone bad, are you including yourself in that description?”

  She smiled and nodded. “Yeah, I definitely fit that description. And so do you. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. You and I have more in common than just our good looks and kickass fighting style.”

  I laughed. “You know, despite the fact that you’re a fugitive from the law, you’re actually easy to get along with.”

  “You should see me when I’m not being chased by the FBI. I’m the life and soul of the party.”

  “You want another beer?” I asked her.

  “Sure,
but how about we eat some of that lasagna from your freezer too?”

  “Did you check out all of my food supplies when you broke into my house?”

  She put on a mock offended look. “Broke in? There’s nothing broken, I picked the lock as lightly as a butterfly landing on a flower and it opened for me.”

  “You broke through the wards.”

  She shook her head. “My tattoos broke through your wards. I didn’t do anything.”

  “I’ll get the beers,” I said. “And I’ll put the lasagna in the oven. But I want information. I need to know exactly what happened at the church on Christmas Day.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you. Like I said, I need some help, and now that we’ve been introduced, I’m sure my hunch was right and you’re the right guy for the job.”

  I went into the kitchen and put the oven on while I got the lasagna out of the freezer. I grabbed two more beers from the fridge and shouted to Sherry, “Do you mind if I call Felicity, my assistant, and get her to come over? She’s been helping me with the church case.”

  Sherry was standing right behind me, leaning against the wall with her arms folded across her chest. “Sure, why not? I mean, it’s not like I’m trying to lay low or anything.”

  “I trust Felicity with my life,” I said. “She won’t tell anyone you’re here.”

  She thought about it for a moment and then shrugged. “Go ahead and call her.”

  I handed her a beer and got my phone out of my pocket. Felicity answered immediately. “Alec, is everything all right?”

  “Yeah, fine,” I said. “Listen, something’s come up. I think you should come over here.”

  “I’ll be there right away,” she said, and ended the call.

  “She’s coming over,” I told Sherry.

  “Great. I’m going to go get something from my car. It’ll help explain what I’m going to tell you.” She disappeared out of the front door and into the rainy night.

  I slid the lasagna into the oven and leaned against the kitchen counter while I drank my beer. The gunshot wound was beginning to ache so I took a couple of Tylenol and washed them down with some Bud. I had tender areas on my arms where I’d blocked Sherry’s blows earlier and I was sure I’d have bruises tomorrow. Sherry was some fighter.

  As an investigator, she had been trained to survive in adverse circumstances, which was why I didn’t bother asking her how someone on the run from every law enforcement agency in the country had managed to procure a car and stay under the radar for seven months. She was a resourceful woman.

  Felicity came through the open front door, shaking rain from a pink umbrella outside before closing it and placing it by the door. She was wearing the same jeans and sneakers she’d worn earlier but had changed out of the Outpost #31 T-shirt and put on a peach-colored blouse with a red string tie at the collar. Her hair was loose, covering her shoulders like a dark silky mane. She looked amazing. She smelled amazing too, her perfume a subtle scent of jasmine and orange blossom.

  She definitely hadn’t put that blouse on just to watch TV at home.

  “That top looks great on you,” I said as she came into the kitchen.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I got it in London. Are we having lasagna? It smells good.” She smiled, her dark eyes lighting up, and I suddenly felt sorry that Sherry was here. I mentally kicked myself for being so vague on the phone. Felicity had the wrong idea about why I’d invited her over.

  “Listen,” I said, “the reason I called…”

  “When it rains, it pours,” Sherry said, coming in out of the rain and shaking droplets from her hair. She held a blue shoe box in one hand. When she saw Felicity, she waved. “Hi, Felicity.”

  Felicity looked over at her and then back at me. “Alec, what’s going on?”

  “Felicity, this is…”

  “Sherry Westlake—yes, I know,” she said. Then she whispered, “What is she doing here?”

  “I caught her looking at my books in the bedroom.”

  “What?” Felicity looked confused.

  Sherry came forward and put her arm around Felicity’s shoulder, guiding her into the living room. “You come and sit down with me and I’ll explain everything while Alec gets you a beer.”

  “Tea, please,” Felicity told me over her shoulder as she was led away.

  I made tea for Felicity and took it into the living room where Sherry had reclaimed the easy chair. I sat on the sofa and waited while she recounted everything she had told me—which wasn’t really much—to Felicity.

  When she was done, she picked up the blue shoe box and put it on her lap. She took out a newspaper clipping and laid it on the coffee table. The headline read THIRTEEN DEAD IN BIZARRE CHRISTMAS DAY SLAYING. Beneath the headline, there was a black and white photo of the church at Clara.

  “Before any of this happened,” Sherry said, “I was already investigating that church. In late November, the sheriff’s wife, Mary Cantrell, came to the office and told me she wanted to hire me to investigate the place. I asked her why and she said there was something weird going on there. Black magic rituals and that kind of thing. Obviously, I told her I’d take the job.”

  “Mary Cantrell hired you?” I asked. “We were under the impression that you were following her.”

  Sherry frowned at me. “Who told you that?”

  “Her daughter.”

  Understanding flickered in her eyes. “Ah, that makes sense. Let me tell my story from the beginning and you’ll see why the Cantrell girl thought I was following her mother.”

  “Okay,” I said, picking up my beer and relaxing back into the sofa.

  “I went to the church,” Sherry said, “and my eye of Horus tattoo lit up like it was the fourth of July. There was a serious glamor over that place. Have you seen those windows?”

  “Yeah, we saw them,” I said.

  “Felicity too?”

  Felicity nodded. “Yes, I saw them through a faerie stone.”

  “Then you know the kind of thing we’re dealing with here. I dug through some old local records and found out that before there was even a church in that location, those woods had been used by some sort of black magic cult that worshipped a beast they called Gibl. There are reports of monster sightings in that area going back hundreds of years. The place got a reputation for being cursed centuries ago and nobody went into those woods during the daytime, never mind at night.”

  She got some more papers out of the shoe box and laid them out on the table. They were photocopies of newspaper pages from the late nineteenth century and all of them had stories about a creature sighted in the woods around Clara.

  “And this is the really interesting one,” she said, pointing to a page of the Dearmont Observer that had the headline LOCAL CHURCH STRUCK BY LIGHTNING. There was a grainy photo of the church, a black burn mark traveling from its roof and along the wall to the ground. A number of men stood by the church, smiling at the camera.

  “Look at this guy here,” Sherry said, pointing to a lone figure skulking by the church doors. Unlike the others, he wasn’t smiling; his face looked sullen. Despite the grainy quality of the picture, I recognized the young man immediately.

  “Luke Fairweather,” I said.

  Sherry nodded. “Uh huh. Now look when this photograph was taken.”

  I checked the date on the top of the page. June 21, 1932. I looked at Sherry. “So what is he? Vampire? Faerie?”

  She shook her head. “From what I can tell, he’s a human being who is being kept alive by black magic. I think something happened that day when the church got hit by lightning. After that, a lot of people left the congregation. Now, I know some folk around here are superstitious, and having a church struck by lightning might be seen as some sort of divine disapproval but I think there’s more to it than that. I think this is the moment the place became evil. Look at the church window in that photograph. You can just see the edge of it there.”

  The photo showed the edge of one of the stained glass window
s. The scene on the window was of the crucifixion of Christ.

  “What do you see?” Felicity asked.

  “We see the same as you,” I told her. “The crucifixion.”

  “You see, I think the church was normal until the day it got hit by lightning,” Sherry said. “It was built in a cursed wood where there had been monster sightings since forever and the family that ran it was odd but I don’t think there was anything evil about the church until that day in 1932. And I discovered a record from 1934 that listed the pastor of the church as Pastor Luke Fairweather.”

  I pointed at the photo of the lightning-struck church. “That lightning was probably the result of some spell Luke had cast, maybe to show off his power to the other members of the Fairweather family. They gave him the job of pastor and he took the church down the road he wanted it to go in all along, the worship of the creature called Gibl.”

  “But why would they do that?” Felicity asked. “If they were normal God-fearing people, they wouldn’t hand the church over to a monster-worshipping black magician.”

  “You aren’t taking into account how black magic corrupts those whose lives it touches,” Sherry said. “Once he got them involved in the dark arts, they would become addicted to its power like it was heroin. And Luke had some sort of immortality thing going on so as the older members of the family passed away, he could corrupt the next generation and the next until the entire family became worshippers of this Gibl creature. It was all they knew. And anyone who didn’t fall into line probably became a monster snack.”

  “And that’s what happened to Simon Fairweather on Christmas Day,” I said. “Luke considered Simon an unbeliever so he made him part of a thirteen-course dinner for Gibl.”

  “Along with Mary Cantrell and eleven others,” Felicity said. She looked at Sherry. “I don’t understand what Mary was doing at the church. You said she hired you to investigate it but her daughter told us Mary was a member of the church—obsessed with it, in fact.”