Shadow Summoner: Choronzon Chronicles Book One

by Tess Adair

  “Henrietta Logan. I have known you since you were an infant. When you were four years old, your father forgot you at a park two miles away from the estate. By the time he realized his mistake, you’d already found your way back. In your entire life, you have never once gotten lost.”

  Now it was Logan’s turn for silence. She remembered the story, but it meant something entirely different to her. To Knatt, it was an example of her ability and her competence—proof that when she made a mistake, it was not out of ineptitude but carelessness, the more dire sin in his eyes. But to her, it told the story of her entire childhood—always forgotten by her father, always left alone to find her own way. If she was good at it now, it was only because she’d had no other choice. And Knatt knew it.

  “Fine,” she answered, her tone blank. “What matters is that I’ve already informed the client. The rest is my own business. I’ll see you when I get home.”

  She hung up without waiting for his response and slid her phone back into her pocket. This time, she set the ringer to silent.

  Miss Adelaide Humphrey’s estate was about 30 miles out of town. Logan maneuvered carefully past the small suburban stretch, then took off, racing down the lonely backroad far above the speed limit. All too quickly, she arrived at the dense line of trees demarcating the entrance onto the hundred acre property. As she passed through them, she forced herself to slow down. The drive up to the house was lined with security cameras.

  Just as the land before her started to curve upward, she found her way obstructed by a gate. She pulled over to the right and pressed the buzzer. After a moment, the gate clicked and swung wide open. She and her Ninja sailed on through, and it swung shut again behind her.

  She hated places like this. It all felt so ostentatious—ostentatious, and paranoid. In fact, those two words described the majority of her father’s clients. And underneath the shallow grab to impress with material wealth, she always felt something rotten lurking. Places like this had bad histories. They had ghosts.

  A small mansion loomed before her, waiting at the top of the hill. It looked like something in a movie, like it had been ripped out of the past and transplanted to this spot, right in front of her. The drive curved in front of the door, then continued around, making a circle around the building. She pulled up to the huge oak front doors, where a young, white, blonde-haired woman stood with a straight back, silently watching her.

  She swung off the Ninja and removed her helmet in one smooth motion.

  “Good morning, Miss Humphrey.” She projected that voice again—the happy morning-person voice.

  Her face impassive, the young woman glanced down at her gold-banded watch.

  “I suppose it is still morning, yes. Are you Henrietta?”

  “Actually, I prefer Logan. Henrietta is my father’s name.”

  A mixture of confusion and mild distaste took over the young woman’s features. She couldn’t tell if this was a joke or not, and she didn’t seem to approve of the ambiguity.

  “Very well. You may call me Adelaide. Please come along inside, I’d like us to get started as soon as possible.” Just as she was about to disappear into the house, she paused to glance back at Logan once more. “Oh. I realize I never mentioned this to Mr. Knatt, but you’ll be meeting Richard inside as well. Hope that’s not a problem.”

  Logan’s features froze in her placating smile, and she used all her concentration to keep from rolling her eyes. She knew for a fact that Knatt had relayed the necessity of clearing the house of all other occupants. Adelaide appeared to be ignoring this directive without shame. She barely even paused long enough to let Logan know before striding forth into her foyer.

  With a sigh, Logan got her bag from its compartment and clipped her helmet to the back once more, then followed Adelaide in. Unlike her client, she was in no particular rush to get started. She knew that starting earlier didn’t mean ending earlier—these kinds of things worked on their own schedule, not the one you set for them. But it was always impossible to tell the client that.

  When she passed under the doorway, she felt an electric shiver shoot up her spine. Out of habit, she glanced around, but the cause was not immediately visible. This surprised her none.

  The house looked exactly like she had suspected it would. They came into a tall, wide entryway with a marble staircase in the center, curving upward. The ceilings were high, and the walls were adorned with massive paintings in thick, heavy frames. She followed Adelaide back into the house, until they passed through double French doors into a large dining room with a long stone table running through the middle. A white, brown-haired man, presumably the aforementioned Richard, stood at the back of the room, leaning against the window and staring out onto the grounds. He didn’t look back at them when they entered.

  “So how does this work?” the young woman asked with a certain sharpness to her voice. She entered last, and shut the French doors behind her as she did.

  Logan restrained the rush of frustration. Some clients were a little too eager to get to the point of it all. The sooner they learned to follow her lead, the better.

  “We will certainly get to that.” She hiked her bag a little higher on her shoulder, surveying the room to decide the best place to set down. “But before we do, can you tell me if there’s anybody else in the house?”

  Adelaide paused, her pale, pinched brow furrowing ever so slightly.

  “The house is empty. We dismissed the help for the day, just as Mr. Knatt requested.”

  “Good. It makes everything easier to clear the property as much as possible.” She glanced over at Richard by the window, but didn’t mention that she wished he had been cleared out for the day as well. There was little she could do about it now.

  “So, what do we do?”

  Logan had reached the mid-point of the table, which looked to be approximately the center of the room as well. She set her bag down on the stone top and pulled out a few tapered candles.

  “Tell me your story,” she said, now pulling out a high-backed chair and sitting in it.

  “Pardon?”

  Logan leaned back and gave her a well-practiced smile.

  “I want you to tell me everything that’s happened so far. You know, your version of events. Your, I suppose you’d call it, experience here. Why did you decide to call Mr. Knatt in the first place?”

  “Ah, yes.” Adelaide glanced over at the man by the window, who still hadn’t turned around. When she turned back to Logan, she looked uncertain. “Didn’t, ah, didn’t Mr. Knatt tell you…what we told him?”

  Knatt’s precise words had been, “It sounds like a standard summoning gone wrong, but it’s difficult to say how long ago it happened. Either Miss Adelaide Humphrey has no knowledge of the original event, or she has chosen to withhold that information, for reasons which remain her own.”

  But her client didn’t need to know about any of that, so Logan just turned on a new smile.

  “He did, but I find that some stories lose a certain flavor in the retelling. So I’d like to hear it directly from you. How did this all start?”

  Almost like an unbreakable habit, Adelaide’s gaze flicked back over to the man in the corner before settling on Logan once more. Then she pulled out the seat across from her and perched on the edge of it. “Well, ridiculous as it sounds…it would seem we’re being…haunted.”

  She paused, possibly for dramatic effect, and glanced over at Logan like she was waiting for a reaction. Logan nodded blandly and motioned for her to continue.

  “Well, it’s the house, really. The house is haunted. We always thought—well, my father had a bit of a penchant for traveling to foreign lands and bringing back, you know, exotic artifacts. They all had these stories attached to them—this item was cursed, this one belonged to a ghost, that sort of thing. Of course I never believed any of it, until…until things started happening a-again. And, you know, I remembered that Father used to talk about these men he knew from a long time ago—a Mr. Logan and his p
artner, the paranormal contractors. We were to call them if we ever came across anything out of the ordinary, he used to say. The number we had on file still worked, so…here you are.”

  “You said things started happening again,” said Logan without missing a beat. “When did they happen before?”

  “Well, the house has always been strange,” said Adelaide. Already, her demeanor relaxed, her voice taking on a warmer tone. So keen to tell her story, she forgot to maintain her veneer of disapproval. Logan was unsurprised of course; people loved telling their own stories, and they loved it best when they suspected that the story made them in any way more interesting than they otherwise would be. “Ever since I was a little girl, there have been…signs. Nothing ever seemed to stay in the right place, you know? It always started small—you put your glass down on a table, then you turn around and it’s on the counter instead. Or sometimes, you’d be across the room and a glass would topple to the floor and shatter, even though no one was around. But then it got bigger—paintings jumping off the walls, tables flipping over by themselves. I thought it had stopped sometime after I went away to college. My parents certainly claimed it had. But…it seems to have started up again. A few months ago, the chandelier fell down from the ceiling of its own accord, nearly killing one of the staff. And with that, everything flared right back up again.”

  Logan tapped her fingers on the table in front of her, considering her phrasing carefully. “You said your father used to collect…extraordinary artifacts?”

  “Oh yes,” said Adelaide, nodding enthusiastically. “He used to call himself, uh, a connoisseur of the mystical and bizarre. Why do you ask?”

  Logan’s smile drew taut. “The more information, the better. Do you know if your father ever used anything he collected? Did he simply store them somewhere, or did you ever see him take them out and do anything with any of them?”

  Adelaide appeared uncertain. She flicked yet another glance over at the man in the corner. “Well, yes, occasionally. One item in particular he’d gone to some lengths to get, so I think he felt rather proud of it. I saw him bring it into his office from time to time. Why? Does that matter?”

  Logan braced herself for the blowback that was likely to follow. “As a matter of fact, it does. You see, while the events you’ve described could possibly qualify as a haunting, so to speak, that’s actually rather unlikely. If by ‘haunting’ you mean the deceased and angry spirit of a human being trying to make its presence known, of course.”

  Adelaide folded her arms over her chest, looking petulant. It occurred to Logan that her client didn’t like to be told she was wrong.

  “I don’t understand. What else could it be?”

  “Well, it’s not a definite, but it’s much more likely that we’re looking at a demon, probably trapped just beyond the veil, so to speak. Most hauntings, as you think of them, are more about the occurrence than the entity. A being of some kind is trapped between worlds, or between states, and whatever it’s doing inside that in-between state is reverberating through to this side. Portraits falling, objects moving—those are reverberations.”

  “But, if it’s a demon instead of a ghost—then how did it get there?”

  Logan clicked her tongue, considering again. There was no way to answer that without at least implying an accusation. Of course, she could choose to be indirect about it. “If a demon’s there, then that means someone summoned it—or, actually, that they tried to summon it, but they either couldn’t finish the job, or they chose not to. So, with the ritual started but not completed…the demon gets trapped.”

  That mixture of confusion and disdain crossed Adelaide’s face again, but she quickly shook it off.

  “I see,” she said. “Well, I still think ours is a ghost. We’ve seen—oh, what do they call it? Ah, yes—spectral phenomena. Haven’t we, Richard?”

  At long last, Richard, still standing silently at the window, noticed the presence of the women in the room. He turned to face them, revealing his pale, pinched demeanor—which was not entirely dissimilar to Adelaide’s. He huffed at the sight of them, and placed his hands delicately in his pockets.

  “We have,” he answered, surveying Logan closely. “Are you the person she hired? The expert exterminator, or whatever?”

  Logan’s practiced smile unfurled.

  “The private contractor. Yes.”

  “Private contractor. Right. Professional ghost chaser.”

  Her smile held tight. Despite his proximity to their conversation, he’d clearly absorbed only select pieces of it—and apparently none of those pieces included anything Logan had said. Still, she’d heard far worse.

  “If you like. Now, could you please detail for me what kind of phenomena you’ve witnessed?”

  Adelaide jumped back in, bouncing a little in her seat as she spoke again.

  “You see, that’s how I’m sure it’s a ghost. Every time we’ve seen it, it’s looked exactly like a little girl. She’s either got a little doll or a little ball, and she throws it at you. Or sometimes she runs at you. But she always disappears before she gets to you. Just like a ghost.”

  Logan nodded patiently at Adelaide before glancing back to Richard.

  “Is that what you’ve seen, too? You’ve seen a little girl?”

  Richard’s mouth pushed into a thin line. “I’ve seen what she’s describing.”

  The answer struck her wrong, its careful avoidance sticking out immediately. Logan could feel her patience running out. “Have you seen a little girl?”

  “Well, no.” He glanced briefly over at Adelaide before dropping his gaze to the floor. “When I see it, it’s a little boy. But everything else is the same.”

  Logan looked back at Adelaide, who wore an expression of shocked betrayal on her face. But she soon seemed to pull herself together with a small shake, and spoke again.

  “Okay, so, what—it’s a ghost that changes genders?”

  Some people really took to an idea and held to it.

  “Like I was saying, it’s unlikely that it’s a ghost. There’s a chance it didn’t even originate in this reality. Most likely someone tried to summon it here, although it may have tried to break through on its own. And then it got stuck. Now, it’s trying to get itself unstuck.”

  Of course, the barriers between this world and every other could get complicated, as could the ways a demon might find itself stuck between them, but the likelihood of it being anything other than a summoning gone wrong was so remote, Logan found no point in bringing it up. Besides, she had learned that the simpler the explanation, the likelier the client was to understand it.

  “Unstuck?” Adelaide asked, eyebrows raised. “How does it do that?”

  “By breaking through into the world it was called to in the first place.”

  Logan reached into her bag and pulled out a few more candles, planning to place them strategically along the table. Luckily for her, she didn’t need much light to see by, but most people needed a bit more help.

  “So you’re going to stop it?” Adelaide nervously fingered her crystal encrusted watch.

  “No, I’m not. I’m going to help it.” She pulled out her lighter and picked up one of the long tapered candles, then flicked on the flame and held the base of the candle over it until it began to soften and melt. Holding it firmly, she pressed it hard into the stone before her and held it down until it could stand on its own. Then she picked up the second candle and did the same.

  “But why on earth would you help it? We don’t want it here!”

  “Of course you don’t; neither do I. But you do want it to stop, don’t you? The spectral phenomena, the haunting? You want it to go away.”

  “Well—yes, of course.”

  “If there was another way to do it, I would. But there isn’t. Either we can let the phenomena continue indefinitely, or I can finish the summoning. Which means I’ll be bringing the demon right here.”

  For a moment, Adelaide sat before her, a stunned and disbelieving
look on her face. Logan observed her silently, wondering where her thoughts might take her.

  Finally she spoke again.

  “So…it’s definitely not the ghost of a little girl? Or a little boy?”

  Logan shrugged. “You each saw what, on some level, you expected to see. In essence, you saw a reflection of your own mind superimposed over the reality of the situation. Happens a lot more often than you’d think.”

  For a brief moment, Logan couldn’t help thinking that her entire life could be explained in those two sentences.

  “Right,” said Adelaide, sounding defeated.

  Logan took a brief moment to mentally fortify herself. There was no doubt about what she had to do next: try to convince Adelaide and Richard to leave the house, for their own safety.

  “So, now that we’ve established all that, it’s time to discuss a point of procedure.” She glanced over at the corner. “This goes for you, too. The thing is, once I summon the demon…you both need to be gone from here.”

  “What are you saying?” That look was back—the combination of confusion and disgust. Logan got the feeling that their whole conversation was a bit too much for Adelaide to absorb.

  “It would just be better in the long run, safer, if you both vacated the premises for a little while. You don’t have to be gone long—I’d suggest leaving a little before sunset, and not coming back until the sun is up again. If it gives you peace of mind, I’ve got a few cameras we can set up so you can be sure I don’t take the good silver. Does that sound acceptable to you?”

  Adelaide’s outraged expression spoke the answer before her words could.

  “Absolutely not!”

  Of course it wasn’t.

  “Miss Humphrey—Adelaide—I’m not sure you fully comprehend the danger you’ll be putting yourself in if you stay here tonight.” She glanced back and forth between the two of them, wondering what the best tack to take would be. She also wondered, passingly, what Richard’s relationship to Adelaide was. Were they siblings? Were they lovers? She couldn’t tell. Her gaze settled on Adelaide when she spoke. “Have you ever seen a demon? Apart from your recent experiences, have you ever seen anything paranormal before at all?”