Sierra jogged a little to catch up with North.
“I heard that,” he growled.
“That business about taking good care of you because you’ve been through a lot? She means well.”
“I know. But here’s the thing. You don’t want gratitude. I don’t want pity.”
Sierra decided to shut up.
The door of the library opened just as North reached for the big brass handle. A dramatic figure loomed at the entrance. She was nearly six feet tall and was constructed along statuesque proportions. A long mane of silver hair framed features that would have done justice to a warrior-saint. She wore knee-high leather boots and an ankle-length black cloak. She appeared to be in her sixties, but her eyes were a thousand years old. They were the eyes of a woman who saw more than she wanted to see, the eyes of a woman who lived with an unrelenting mission.
Sierra smiled. “Hi, Harmony. Nice to see you again. It’s been a long time.”
“I’ve been expecting you,” Harmony said, speaking in resonant, ringing tones that could have been used to announce the apocalypse. “You are late. Time is running out. The ghosts of the Bluestone Project have been aroused. They seek vengeance and power. Just as one fights fire with fire, the dark forces of the past must be met with the light of the future.”
“Thanks for the prophecy,” Sierra said. “This is my client, North Chastain. But then, you probably know that already.”
“Are you kidding?” Harmony’s voice switched to a normal pitch. She held out a hand to North. “By now everyone in town knows who you are. We expected you late yesterday. Come on inside.”
Sierra moved through the doorway. North followed.
The library was crammed with shelves filled with books, some old and bound in leather. Others were new. At the rear of the room there was a staircase. One set of steps led to the upper floor. The other went down into the basement.
Sierra remembered that the upstairs space was the apartment where Harmony lived. By tradition, the Oracle of Fogg Lake always lived in the library.
The basement was where the oldest and most valuable volumes were housed, as well as the Fogg Lake ancestry records and a few artifacts.
“We got caught in the fog,” North said. “Had some car trouble.” He gave Sierra an inquiring glance. “You two know each other?”
“I struggled when I first came into my talent,” Sierra said. “Broke a lot of mirrors before I learned how to get some control. My parents brought me here so Harmony could assess my situation and do some research. She’s the one who figured out that I needed the mirrored crystal to focus my psychic vibe.”
“It’s obviously a rare gift,” Harmony said. “But I found some data in an old journal written back in the nineteenth century by a researcher who took the paranormal quite seriously. Turns out the ability to channel energy via mirrors and glass is not only unusual, it is a particularly difficult talent to handle.”
North glanced at the locket Sierra wore. “Where did you find the right crystal?”
Harmony chuckled. “I didn’t. It found her.”
Sierra smiled. “Harmony was able to tell my parents what I needed. They took me around to every rock and crystal shop in the Pacific Northwest. We attended endless auctions that featured old jewelry. Eventually this locket turned up in an estate sale. I knew as soon as I saw it that I could use it. There were no other bidders.”
“You two must have had a very uncomfortable night,” Harmony said. “How about coffee?”
“Coffee sounds wonderful,” North said.
“Yes, please,” Sierra said.
“Follow me,” Harmony said. She led the way toward the staircase.
North looked around. “How did you land this gig as the Oracle of Fogg Lake?”
“Believe me, I didn’t set out to become an oracle,” Harmony said. “It definitely wasn’t on the list of career paths that my high school guidance counselor suggested.”
“I don’t think my high school guidance counselor mentioned a career as a go-between,” Sierra said.
Harmony gave her a knowing look. “We all have to stumble around until we find our callings. It can be hard to hear the voice above all the noise in the world.”
“So I’m told,” Sierra said.
“I was trained as a librarian,” Harmony continued. “But here in Fogg Lake the jobs of Oracle and librarian always seem to go together. No one knows why. The day I arrived in town the previous Oracle announced she had been waiting for me to show up. She said it was time for her to move on and that I was supposed to take her place here. She packed a bag and left. I was on my own. I’ve been figuring it out ever since. Learn something new every day in this job.”
North looked at her. “Do you see visions? Hear prophecies?”
Harmony shrugged. “It’s hard to describe how I work. Sometimes I just get this vibe and I feel compelled to speak up. But the process is like trying to explain a dream. You think you understand it but you don’t, not really. Unfortunately, things are almost never crystal clear for me. Interpretation is always a bitch.”
Sierra nodded. “Same with my father’s psychic poems.”
“I know.” Harmony smiled a cryptic smile. “I consult with your father from time to time, remember?”
“Of course,” Sierra said.
North looked at Harmony. “I don’t suppose you have anything to add to that announcement about the ghosts of the Bluestone Project and the need to fight the dark forces with the light of the future?”
“Sorry,” Harmony said. “That’s all I have for now. I give you my word that if I get any more flashes of prophecy along those lines I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, you’re here to speak with Marge, and I know you’re in a hurry. She’s working down in the basement. The coffee is down there, too.”
“Marge is working here in the library?” Sierra asked. “What in the world is she doing down there?”
Harmony winked. “Marge has the ability to see auras and a preternatural eye for detail. She’s helping me fill in some of the missing data from the Fogg Lake ancestry logs. Turns out that while she was at that horrible Riverview hospital she met a lot of other inmates who had a psychic vibe. Some of them had parents or grandparents who were living here in Fogg Lake at the time of the Incident.”
The basement was a concrete structure filled with more crammed shelves and the glass-and-steel cases that protected the artifacts. The currents of energy in the underground space were a lot hotter than they were upstairs.
“The Oracles of Fogg Lake have been collecting books, treatises and occasionally artifacts relating to the paranormal since the days of the Incident,” Harmony explained.
North looked around. “I’m surprised Victor hasn’t tried to convince you to give this collection to the Foundation library.”
Harmony snorted. “Victor Arganbright and I have an understanding. He stays off my turf and I stay off his. However, we have agreed to consult with each other whenever one of us thinks it would be wise to share information. For example, we are both concerned about the new rumors of Vortex that have begun to circulate. Until now that old lab was treated as a myth or a legend. But something has changed.”
“The chatter about Vortex is heating up in the hot artifacts market, too,” Sierra said.
A middle-aged woman dressed in a long, flowing caftan patterned in an exotic print sat at a table in the middle of the room. She wore a pair of sneakers and a knit cap. A yellow notepad, a pen and a can of soda were in front of her.
She watched Harmony lead Sierra and North across the room.
“Took you two long enough to get here,” she announced.
“This is Marge,” Harmony said. “Marge, meet Sierra Raines and North Chastain.”
“Nice to meet you, Marge,” Sierra said.
Marge grunted.
“Thanks for agreeing to see us,” Nort
h said.
“Not like I had a choice,” Marge said. “Got to stop those ETs from Riverview before they launch their attack.”
“ETs?” Sierra repeated.
“Extraterrestrials,” Harmony explained. “Marge says Riverview is their secret laboratory. They use rogue human doctors to conduct experiments on people like her.”
“Oh, right,” Sierra said. “Olivia LeClair explained that.”
North looked at Marge. “You’ll be glad to know that the Foundation has taken charge of Riverview. Dr. Garraway is dead.”
“No loss,” Marge growled. “Who got to him?”
“We think it was one of the orderlies,” Sierra said.
“The clones.” Marge nodded sagely. “That figures. They did all the dirty work for Loring and Garraway. Probably got pissed off when they realized they’d been conned. Did you get the doc and the clones, too?”
“Not yet,” North said. “But we’re working on it. You think the clones were conned?”
Marge rolled her eyes. “The fools believed Loring when he said he could increase their talents and give them serious paranormal powers. But he was lying. He made them practice with something he called a night gun. He said once they mastered it there were more weapons where it came from. But that thing was scrambling the clones’ energy fields. I could see that clear as day.”
North set the lockbox on the table. “Tell me about the night gun,” he said.
Marge drank some soda and put down the can. “That’s what Loring called it. Don’t know where it came from. Looked sort of like a flashlight. You could see clear through it. Made of glass or crystal or something.”
“What did it fire?” North asked. “Bullets?”
“No, some kind of weird light. Hard to describe. Loring said it could destabilize a person’s aura. Called it the perfect murder weapon on account of it wouldn’t leave any evidence.”
“I think someone used that gun on my father,” North said.
Marge scowled. “What happened to him?”
“He’s awake but unresponsive,” North said. “The doctors think his aura has been badly traumatized.”
Marge exhaled heavily. “Sorry to hear that. Loring talked a lot about how the damned thing had to be tuned. He was always telling the clones that he was aligning their aura currents to the wavelengths of the gun but I could see that every time they fired that thing their auras got wobbly.”
North looked thoughtful. “The weapon was too powerful for the clones. They couldn’t handle the psychic recoil.”
Marge shrugged. “Whatever. Didn’t look good for the clones, I can tell you that much. Made ’em real mean, too. They were never what you’d call nice, but after they started getting tuned up to use that gun they got real short-tempered. Violent.”
“Did Loring try to tune the weapon to his own aura?” North said.
Marge took a swig from the can of soda and shook her head. “I think he was afraid to use the tuner thing on himself. The clones didn’t know it, but he was experimenting on them.”
“Were there any other weapons in the lab?” North asked.
“Loring had a couple of other gadgets around—a glass ball thing and a little metal box—but he said they didn’t require tuning, not like the gun. He said they were more like grenades or small bombs. One-time use.”
North opened the lockbox and took out the machine he had found in Loring’s lab. He set it on the table. “Is this what Loring used to try to tune the clones to the vibe in the crystal gun?” he asked.
Marge eyed the machine and snorted in disgust. “Yep. That’s it. How’d you get hold of it?”
“Found it in Loring’s lab at Riverview.”
Marge looked grim. “Too bad Loring and those clones got away.”
“We’ll get them,” North said. “Just a matter of time.”
Sierra looked at Marge. “Did the clones use the night gun on you and the other patients at Riverview?”
“Nah.” Marge grunted. “Between you and me, I think Loring and Garraway were scared to let the clones use it on us. They would have had to deal with a lot of dead bodies, or maybe a lot of people in comas. Hard to explain that to the local cops. Anyway, that wasn’t why me and the others were kidnapped. They needed us for something else.”
“What?” North asked.
“Most of us could see the energy around people, y’know?” Marge said.
“Auras,” Sierra said.
“Right. Auras. Loring shot us full of drugs that were supposed to jack up our senses. He wanted to see if he could make us do more stuff.”
“Like what?” Sierra asked.
“He made us hold old objects and describe the places where they came from.”
“Remote viewing,” Harmony said quietly.
“What kind of objects?” North asked.
Marge shrugged. “One time it was a desk tray, the kind you keep pens and pencils in. Another time it was a busted coffeepot. A lot of the stuff looked like it came from an old office. I could tell it made him crazy when I said I couldn’t feel a damn thing.”
Sierra smiled. “You lied to him, didn’t you?”
“Damn straight,” Marge said. “None of us ever told Loring the truth if we could help it.”
“Any idea why he wanted you to test the artifacts?” Sierra asked.
“The bastard never explained anything to us. He thought we were stupid, I guess. But some of us talked about it when he wasn’t around. We figured out that Loring and Garraway were looking for something. Guess they thought one of us might be able to pick up a vibe in an object that would somehow tell him where it came from. Heard Loring talk about a paranormal GPS or something.”
North whistled softly. “A dowsing stick.”
Sierra got a ping. “The artifact we picked up at Swan’s?”
“Maybe.” North nodded. He reached back into his pack and took out the black metal rod that he had picked up at Swan Antiques. Energy whispered in the atmosphere. He smiled slowly. “I think Dad found Griffin Chastain’s magic wand.”
Harmony raised her brows. “Are you serious?”
“Better known as a dowsing stick or rod,” North said. “A paranormal GPS and compass combined.”
“Dowsing sticks were used in the old days to find a source of water underground,” Sierra said. “People hired dowsers to tell them where to dig wells.”
Harmony looked thoughtful. “Theoretically, in the hands of a true sensitive, dowsing sticks or rods could be used to find a lot of things. Gold. Lost valuables. Water. But they were almost always used by con men and fake psychics.”
Sierra looked at Marge. “We were told that you escaped Riverview a couple of months ago. Any idea why Loring came looking for you in Seattle after all this time?”
Marge winked. “Expect he finally figured out I’m the one who took his precious notebook. He kept it in a vault, you see. Didn’t look at it very often, so he might not have noticed it was gone until he decided to look up something. And even then I’ll bet he had a hard time figuring out that I’m the one who swiped it. He thought I was just a crazy old lady. But I’ve got a good memory for numbers. I saw him punch in the code for that vault so often it was easy to memorize.”
North watched her intently. “You took his research notebook?”
“Not his.” Marge smirked. “Reckon it’s yours.”
“I’m getting a little confused here,” North said.
Marge bent down and opened a big satchel that was sitting on the floor next to her chair. She pulled out a black leather logbook and put it on the table.
“The night I left I opened the vault and helped myself to this,” she said. “I knew it was important to Loring. That was good enough for me.”
North contemplated the logbook. “Mind if I have a look at it?”
“Nope.” Mar
ge waved a hand. “It belongs to you.”
“Why do you say that?” North asked.
It was Harmony who responded. She picked up the logbook, opened it and glanced at the first page. With a smile she handed it to North.
“Take a look,” she suggested.
North opened the logbook with exquisite care, as if he was afraid it would shatter in his hands. For a long moment he just stared at whatever was written on the first page.
“Well?” Sierra asked, unable to contain her curiosity.
He looked up, dazed. “This logbook belonged to Griffin Chastain. It’s a record of research into the potential uses of energy from the dark end of the spectrum. There’s a note that the work was done in a lab here at Fogg Lake.”
“We knew your grandfather was on one of the research teams here,” Sierra said.
North flipped rapidly through the pages. He paused when he got toward the end.
“Listen to this,” he said.
He read aloud.
“I no longer trust my research partner. Crocker Rancourt is obsessed with weaponizing dark light energy. I am convinced he will attempt to steal the prototype devices and the tuning crystals. I do not know if he is working as a spy for a foreign power. I doubt it. I think he intends to use the machines to make himself the most powerful man in the country. He is borderline delusional. Drunk on his own visions.
“Until I can persuade my superiors that he should be removed from the project I must protect the devices. I will seal the laboratory and destroy all records linked to it. I will send a crystal and the locator to my wife. I have tuned the locator to my signature. Only I or someone from my bloodline will be able to use it to open the lab.”
North looked up. “My grandmother got a crystal like the one in this machine but she never got the dowsing rod.”
“It must have been stolen at some point and wound up on the black market, where it landed in the hands of a collector,” Sierra said. “Eventually it ended up in Gwendolyn Swan’s shop, where your father found it.”
“Loring was searching for the dowsing rod,” North said. “He knew it existed, because he had Griffin Chastain’s logbook, but evidently he had no idea what it looked like. He probably heard the rumor that it was at Swan’s shop at the same time Dad did. My father got there first, but he suspected he was being followed, so he bought another object, the radio, and left the dowsing rod behind.”
All the Colors of Night Page 20