“We can make it work,” I said.
She shook her head. “No, I have to find Mister Scary. I’m sorry, Alec, but I have to go. I’ll get my things.”
She went upstairs and I heard her gathering her things from the bedroom and bathroom. When she came down, she had a sports bag slung over one shoulder. In her hand was the enchanted dagger I’d given her, the one she’d plunged into the heart of the sorceress. “I guess I should give you this back.” She held out the glowing dagger.
“No, you keep it. You might need it,” I said.
“Okay, thanks.” She sheathed the dagger and said, “I’ll give it back to you someday.”
I didn’t like the tone of finality in her voice. “You know you can call me anytime,” I said.
“I know, and maybe I will. Maybe I’ll need help kicking some paranormal butt. Anyway, you call me when you find a cure for this curse, okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’ll do that.” We both knew this was nothing more than bravado. Ancient Egyptian curses cast by powerful sorcerers weren’t exactly reversible. But we went through the motions anyway. It was going to make this goodbye much easier.
She went to the front door and opened it. “Wow, looks like a storm.” The rain hissed down over the street, the houses, and Mallory’s Jeep. She turned to me and kissed me briefly on the lips. “Goodbye, Alec.” She turned and ran through the downpour to her orange Jeep and got in quickly, starting the engine as soon as she was inside. Her headlights illuminated the falling raindrops.
I walked out onto the driveway, ignoring the cold rain that pelted down on me. It soaked through my clothing and chilled my skin as I walked to the end of the driveway and then onto the sidewalk in front of the house, watching the tail lights of Mallory’s Jeep as it disappeared down the street. She made a left turn toward town, and then she was gone.
Turning back toward my driveway, I felt a sudden weakness in my body, as if I’d been drained of all my energy. I’d only felt this weak once before in my life, when I was bed-bound with glandular fever as a child. But even then, the feeling of weakness hadn’t come on so suddenly.
I stumbled to the front lawn. My legs gave way and I collapsed to the cold, wet grass. I couldn’t move. Even breathing seemed like an effort. I lay looking at the square of light beyond my open front door, knowing that although it was only a few feet away, it might as well be a thousand miles.
Whatever it was that I’d done to DuMont earlier in the cemetery, I was now paying the price for it.
All I could do was lie here and wait until my strength returned.
The smell of the rain on the grass brought back a memory, a memory that had been locked behind the magical door but was now clicking into place in the fragmented part of my mind. I remembered that when I was young, maybe nine-years-old, I’d been attacked by Tommy Lyle, a bully at my school in Oregon. Tommy had been much older than me and for some reason had taken a strong dislike to me. While I was walking home from school one rainy afternoon, Tommy and a group of his friends had come out of the Seven Eleven and seen me walking next to the railroad tracks that led in the direction of home.
The group of boys, and two girls, had intercepted me by the tracks and Tommy had started pushing me around. Even at the age of nine, I’d instinctively known that if I gave in to Tommy now, and let him beat me without a fight, I’d never be free of him. He would always see me as an easy target. So, I’d fought back. Tommy and I had exchanged punches in the rain by the tracks and at one point, the much-larger boy had knocked me down. I’d landed face down in the wet grass and the anger I’d felt at these bullies grew into a ball of fury that couldn’t control.
I remembered getting back up, tears of rage burning my eyes. I remembered Tommy and his friends laughing at me. I remembered bright blue energy that crackled from my hands. Tommy’s eyes went wide when I hurled the energy at him. The force of the blast threw him across the railroad tracks, where his friends ran over to him and helped him to his feet before running away. Tommy was dazed and his friends looked frightened. As they fled, they shouted back words like, “Freak!” and “Weirdo!”
Then my memory moved forward to the cave and the witches and the chalk circle, the time when the magical door was being put in my mind. And I knew who the figure in the shadows, the figure watching the proceedings, was. Just before I fell into the enchanted sleep the witches put on me, I looked across the cave and for a moment, the flickering light reached the features of the man standing in the shadows. It was my father.
The memory played itself out as I lay on the lawn and then receded as I returned to the present. I felt so cold and magically drained that if I didn’t get inside soon, I was going to perish out here. Wouldn’t that be ironic? Alec Harbinger, preternatural investigator, dies on his own front lawn in the rain.
I heard a car coming up the street. Maybe it was one of the neighbors, or maybe even Mallory returning. Whoever it was, I had to do something to attract their attention. But I still couldn’t move and the car stopped before it reached me. I heard the engine idling. Then a car door opened and closed and the vehicle turned around and headed back the way it had come.
I could hear high heels picking rapidly on the driveway next door, then a worried voice. “Alec?” The heels came across the lawn toward me and then I felt a pair of warm arms around my neck.
I managed to turn my head and look up to see a familiar face. Her dark eyes were hidden by the rain on her glasses, but even in my current state, I recognized her instantly.
“Felicity.”
She tried to help me to my feet but I was still too weak to move.
“Felicity,” I said again. My mouth seemed to be the only part of me that was working.
“At least you know who I am,” she said, an edge of concern in her voice.
I managed to get to my knees with her help. We stumbled together across the wet grass toward the open front door and the light and warmth beyond.
Of course I knew who Felicity was.
But with all the memories flooding back to me, memories of some kind of magical power that had been inside me all of my life, I wasn’t sure I knew who I was anymore.
Dark Magic
Harbinger P.I. SERIES Book 3
1
Felicity 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 investiga
tor, 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.”
2
The 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.
The Harbinger PI Box Set Page 31