The Harbinger PI Box Set

by Adam J. Wright

  I moved closer to him. He was a small guy and I towered over him. He shrank back slightly but the dumpster prevented him from escaping. If it wasn’t there, I was sure he would have fled by now. “What do you mean they’re over now? So you were spying on me before?”

  He shook his head so vigorously that his glasses were in danger of flying off his face. “No, no, not you. I never spied on you.”

  “Who then?”

  He swallowed and looked down at the ground nervously.

  “Who were you spying on, Wesley?”

  He looked up at me with pleading eyes. “It was a long time ago. Last year. It doesn’t matter now.”

  I also put two and two together but, unlike Wesley, I was pretty sure I’d come up with the correct answer. His interest in my work and close proximity to my office made it obvious who he’d been spying on last year. “Sherry Westlake,” I said.

  His eyes went even wider and he looked up and down the alley as if expecting my predecessor to be standing there. “Don’t tell her,” he said. “Please.”

  “How the hell would I tell her? Sherry Westlake disappeared on Christmas Day.”

  “I know that. But you P.I.s are tight, aren’t you? And you all work for the same parent company or something, right? I mean, if anyone knows where she is, it will be you. Am I right?”

  “You’re wrong. I have no idea where she is, or even if she’s still alive.”

  “Okay,” he said, breathing a sigh of relief. “That’s good.”

  “You seem pretty scared of her,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, she had her suspicions that I might be watching her and she told me, in no uncertain terms, to keep away from her.” He rubbed his throat and said, “She pinned me against a wall and held a knife to my throat.”

  Way to go, Sherry, I thought. “It sounds like you deserved it, Wesley.”

  He shrugged. “I was only taking a few photos and following her around now and then. This town is too quiet to make a living as a reporter. Sure, I have the store but journalism is my true passion. And the only way to get any good stories is to follow you guys around. You always know where the action is.”

  “But you didn’t get any stories from following Sherry,” I told him. “I read your articles online. You never wrote about her.”

  “I was going to publish a big story,” he said. “An investigation into the life of a preternatural investigator. I was going to ask some hard-hitting questions too, like who are the P.I.s, what company do they work for, and are they needed in a society where nobody believes in the supernatural anymore. It was going to be a great piece and it might have made my name known to some of the big-hitters like the Boston Globe or even the New York Times.”

  “But you didn’t publish it,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t, could I? While I was writing it and…observing…Sherry Westlake, that church thing happened and the feds were suddenly crawling over everything to do with her. They came to town asking questions, wanting to know who had hired her, who visited her office, that kind of thing. When they went to search her office, the place was empty, cleaned out like she’d never been there at all. The feds were fuming over that.”

  I nodded. The Society would have cleaned the place to prevent Sherry’s notes and computer falling into the wrong hands. “So you were following Sherry just before she disappeared. Did the FBI take your photos and research?”

  “No way, I never told them anything. I didn’t want them to think I was involved in any way. That might make me a suspect.”

  I considered the implications of what he’d just told me. If he’d been spying on Sherry Westlake just before the church massacre, his photos and records of her movements might contain a clue about what happened in Clara. Sherry must have had some knowledge about the church to be investigating it in the first place. If I looked at Wesley’s material, maybe I could pick up on something second-hand.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen,” I told him. “You’re going to box up everything you have on Sherry Westlake and you’re going to deliver it to my office. Then I’ll forget about you sticking your nose into my business at the cemetery and everyone will be happy.”

  He swallowed and nodded. “Okay, I can do that. When do you want me to bring the stuff over?”

  “Today. Leave it with my assistant because I don’t think I want to see your face again for a while. Understood?”

  “Of course. Can I get back to the store now?”

  I stepped back slightly to give him room to get past me. “You can but remember that I want that material today. Don’t make me come back here tomorrow.”

  “You’ll get it today,” he promised, scurrying to the door.

  “One other thing,” I said, stopping him in his tracks.

  He looked at me expectantly.

  “Timothy didn’t tell me you were out here,” I said. “I found out by magic.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  I raised an eyebrow at him as if to say, “Why are you still here?” He opened the door and disappeared inside.

  After he was gone, I stood in the alley, feeling a hot tingling sensation rise from the base of my spine, up to my shoulders, and down along my arms. I’d only felt it once before, when I’d sent a lethal blast of magical energy at DuMont in the cemetery.

  What I felt now wasn’t as strong and it didn’t feel like it was going to escape my body unless I let it. I had the feeling that if I stood still and breathed deeply a few times, the tingling would pass and the energy I felt in my hands would dissipate.

  But what would that prove? Something had been unlocked within me when I’d touched the statue of Hapi at the British Museum and I needed to know what it was. Controlling it and making it go away wouldn’t get me any closer to understanding what it was.

  I checked that I was alone in the alley and stepped back from the blue dumpster, deciding it would be as good a target as any. I flung my arms forward, palms facing the dumpster, and willed the energy to leave my body.

  The air in front of my hands crackled with bright green energy that formed itself into an intricate circle and glyph combination before becoming a streak of blinding green light that shot forward and hit the dumpster.

  I expected the dumpster to maybe crumple a little where it was hit but the force of the blast sent it tumbling end over end down the alley. The metal slammed onto the ground each time the dumpster touched down, the sound thundering off the walls of the surrounding buildings.

  After four revolutions, the dumpster skidded to a halt, upside-down and about thirty feet from its original location.

  I needed to get back to the office because if this was anything like the last time I’d fired a bolt of energy, I would soon lose all my strength. As I passed the door to the game store, it opened and Timothy poked his head out to see what the noise was.

  “Alec?” he asked. “What happened?”

  “Your boss is going to have to find a new place to smoke,” I said as I walked out of the alley.

  5

  I felt fine when I got to the office but I remembered that after blasting DuMont, I’d had time to drive Mallory home and have a conversation with her before collapsing on the lawn. As I passed Felicity’s office, I stuck my head through the doorway, told her about my encounter with Wesley Jones, and said that he would be coming over later with the Sherry Westlake material.

  “No problem,” she said.

  “I’m going to go into my office for a while,” I said.

  “You said you had something here that would let me see those windows the same way you saw them. Can I have a look at the photos now?”

  “Sure, I don’t see why not.” Actually, I could think of a lot of reasons why not, one of them being that I might collapse from exhaustion at any time, but I felt good at the moment and I wanted Felicity to see the windows in their true form. I particularly wanted her to see the magic circle in the cliff scene because she might recognize it and bring us one step closer to discovering t
he type of magic that had been practiced at the church.

  She followed me into my office and I put my phone on the desk before rummaging in one of the drawers for something I had put in there along with numerous other small magical items. I found it at the back of the drawer and laid it on the desk next to the phone.

  Felicity recognized the flat round stone with a hole in its center. “A faerie stone,” she said. “I’ve heard about those. People used to use them to see faeries.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Looking through the hole in the center of the stone allows you to see through magical veils and glamors.” Switching on my phone, I found a photo of the first window, the one with the ritual on the cliff and the woman walking toward the sea. “Take a look,” I said to Felicity.

  She picked up the pale gray stone and removed her glasses, setting them down on my desk. Her dark eyes looked expectant. She loved things like this, seeing beyond the normal into a world beyond. Her study of languages and magical symbols was all about looking beyond the mundane world and finding something more.

  She held the faerie stone up to her right eye.

  “Try the left eye,” I told her. “According to the folklore, the left eye is better at seeing otherworldly things.”

  She switched the stone to her left eye and looked down at my phone through the hole in the stone’s center. When she gasped and stepped back slightly, I knew she’d seen beyond the glamor spell to the image that was actually on the window.

  “That’s horrible,” she said.

  “Do you see the magic circle?”

  “Yes, but I don’t recognize it at the moment. I’ll try to find out what exactly it is.”

  I flicked to a photo of the next window, the one with the dead robed figures on the beach.

  “Creepy,” Felicity said.

  I showed her the photo of the fire and the dancers in the woods. When she saw it, a look of revulsion crossed Felicity’s face. “Oh, my God, what is that in the trees? I can only see its eyes but that’s enough to scare me.”

  She lowered the stone and looked away, her eyes moving to the window and the clear blue sky beyond. “I don’t like this, Alec.”

  “Me neither,” I admitted. “I don’t know if the windows have been enchanted with some sort of terror spell or if the creature in those pictures is so bad that it causes a fear response.”

  “It’s horrible.” She looked down at my phone again and put the faerie stone to her eyes. “All right, show me the last one.”

  I found a photo of the bloody cave littered with bones and the eyes in the darkness. Felicity looked at it for a moment and then put the stone down. “I’ve seen enough. Basically, we’re dealing with a bloody scary monster.”

  “Yeah, looks like it.” I felt a sudden weakness in my legs and leaned against the desk. But as I did so, my arms became weak too and couldn’t support my weight. “Shit,” I murmured as I felt myself sinking to the floor. I tried to grab my chair but it rolled away and I went down, ending up on my back on the carpet.

  “Alec!” Felicity rushed around the desk and knelt by me, her face worried. “Should I get an ambulance?”

  “No,” I said weakly. “I’ll be fine in a minute. Help me get into the chair.” If I was going to spend a few minutes recovering, I’d rather do it sitting in my chair than lying on the floor.

  She nodded and put her arms under mine, helping me get to my knees before rolling the chair over to me. “Ready?” she asked. “On the count of three. One. Two. Three.” She heaved with all her strength and I pushed against the floor with legs that felt like strings of overcooked spaghetti.

  When I was in the chair, I said, “Thanks,” and sat there for a moment looking at the ceiling. This wasn’t as bad as when I’d been helpless on the lawn after blasting DuMont and I was sure I’d be okay in a couple of minutes.

  When I moved my gaze from the ceiling back to my desk, Felicity was sitting across from me in one of the client chairs, her glasses back on her face and a look that was a mix of concern and anger in her eyes. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” she asked.

  I sighed. She had a right to know. “Okay, but this is between you and me. I don’t want anyone else finding out about it, especially not the Society.”

  Felicity nodded. “Of course. You know you can trust me.”

  She was right, I did. “When I was fighting DuMont in the old cemetery, something weird happened. After Mallory destroyed the heart inside the Box of Midnight and took Rekhmire’s curse into herself, I was so angry and upset that I felt my emotions rising like a ball of energy inside me. Some sort of magical power entered my hands and I directed it at DuMont. It killed him. Later that night, after Mallory left, I collapsed on to the lawn, which was where you found me.”

  “And now you’ve collapsed again,” she said. “This isn’t good, Alec. What if it’s slowly draining you? What if…”

  I held up a weak hand to stop her. “This isn’t the result of the same blast. I used the magic again earlier on a dumpster.”

  “Well that was foolish,” she chided.

  “Yes, it probably was. But I need to know what’s happening to me and the only way I can do that is to experiment.”

  “And then later collapse? No, that isn’t a good plan. You could kill yourself.”

  “How else am I going to know what’s happening?” I asked.

  “We can study it, find out where it comes from. In controlled conditions. And why not tell the Society? They’re experts in this kind of thing. They have people who can…”

  “No,” I said. “The Society is going through a close examination by the witches who run it in an attempt to flush out traitors belonging to a rival group. I’m not going to reveal this to anyone there. Besides, my father already knows about it.”

  “You told him?”

  “No, he’s somehow involved with taking away my memories of it. When I went to the British Museum, I thought the only memories I’d lost were the ones about Paris, the ones the satori took from me. But after I performed the ritual with the statue, it turned out that those were only minor. When the door in my mind was unlocked, I recovered some deeper, older memories of my childhood.”

  All of my strength had returned now. I stretched and flexed my muscles, testing them out. Good as new.

  “When I was a kid,” I told Felicity, “I used the magical blast on a bully. That memory was locked away, along with the memory of my mother’s death.”

  She frowned. “But your mother died in a car crash while you were at your aunt’s house. You remembered that before. You told me about it.”

  “That was a false memory. I was actually in the car with my mother and we were attacked. She told me to run for the trees and not look back. I did as she asked. She was murdered.”

  Felicity looked shocked. “I’m so sorry, Alec.”

  “There’s something else I remember now too. When I was still a child, my father took me to the Coven, the nine witches that formed the Society, and had them perform some sort of ritual on me so that I’d forget the magic I’d used on the bully and also to put a false memory of my mother’s death into my head.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Do you think he knows about your mother’s murder? Do you think he’s trying to cover something up?”

  I shook my head. “My father believes the story that my mother was killed in a car accident. He has no idea what really happened. I’m probably the only person who knows that she was murdered.”

  “You and the people who murdered her,” she added.

  “Yeah. I think my father took me to the Coven to wipe my memory of the magic inside me and the witches accidentally took the memory of the night my mother died too. Or maybe they did it on purpose. I don’t know.”

  Felicity shook her head slowly, her mind obviously trying to take in what I’d just told her. “But why would your father tell them to take away your memory of the magic?”

  “I don’t know. But he probably panicked after I came back
from Paris because he knew the satori had been altering my memories. She might have opened that door in my mind by mistake. That’s probably why he sent you here to spy on me, to see if my memory of using the magic during my childhood returned.

  “As it turned out, the satori didn’t touch the magical door in my mind, even though she knew it was there, and I got the childhood memories back as a side-effect of trying to get my Paris memories back.”

  Felicity nodded. “So your father doesn’t know you have your magic power again.”

  “No, he doesn’t, and that’s the way I want to keep it for now.”

  “But you’ll have to speak to him about it eventually. He probably knows what it is and where it came from.”

  “I was hoping we could find that out ourselves,” I said. “This is the kind of thing you specialize in.”

  “I have to admit, I’m intrigued,” she said.

  “So let’s keep this between us for now. Agreed?”

  “All right.”

  The phone in her office rang and she went to answer it.

  I wondered if I should go and see the Blackwell sisters. It was they who had discovered that there was a magical locked door in my mind and found out that an enchantment had been cast on me. Maybe if I went to see them now, they could tell me if the door was now open and the enchantment gone. Like going back to a doctor after having treatment.

  Felicity called me from her office. I went in there and she handed the phone to me. “Sheriff Cantrell,” she whispered.

  “Sheriff, how can I help you?” I said into the phone.

  “Have you had time to look at that case file yet?” he asked gruffly.

  “I have,” I said. “There isn’t a lot of information in there.”

  “What about the drawings pinned to her wall? Don’t tell me you missed those.”

  “No, I saw them,” I assured him.

  “So what do you think? Was Deirdre crazy or was there a real monster?”