Psychic for Hire Series Box Set

by Hermione Stark

“This one is not a cold case,” he said. “It’s a closed case.”

  I took it from him and opened it up. “See this file is a weird one. Half the contents are missing. Where are they gone? And I couldn't even find a mugshot of the suspect, this Steffane Ronin guy—”

  “What do you mean, they’re gone?”

  “They’re gone. Absent. Incomplete. When I found the file it was mostly empty. There isn't even a log of it on the computer system. Isn’t that weird?”

  Storm frowned. He tried to take the file from me but I held onto it. “That’s unexpected right?” I insisted.

  He unwrapped my fingers from the file in order to remove it from my grip. I rather enjoyed the feeling. He was much stronger than me, and annoyingly it wasn’t long before I was forced to surrender. In other circumstances I think I would have enjoyed surrendering to him, if only he’d make use of those other circumstances.

  “I’ll look into it,” he said grimly.

  I chuckled. Damn, I wish he would look into it. I’d make sure he had fun negotiating the terms of my surrender.

  Sadly Storm was unaware of the cozy scene inside my head and he stuck stubbornly to the topic at hand. “This Ronin case is closed. Steffane Ronin was convicted. If you’re going to have dreams you can damn well have them about the cases I gave you. Not about any damn case you choose to stick your nose into. Is that clear?”

  Wow. Two damns in one breath. That must have been a record for Storm.

  “Yes, boss,” I murmured, still enjoying my alternative train of thought. “But you're not exactly making the best use of my skills here. I’m drawn to what I am drawn to. You should let me loose at all those badboys. Even the ones you think you’ve already closed.”

  “And have you unleash hell and undo years of hard work? I think not.”

  “C’mon,” I chided. “What have you got to fear? You’re a good agent. It’s the sloppy agents who should be worried.”

  “I worked this Ronin case,” he said shortly.

  My eyebrows flew up. That did surprise me. There was something off about the Ronin case. I just didn’t know what it was yet. It was not like I could investigate just a vague feeling of mine, which was why it was so annoying that all the photos in the case file were missing. I liked photos — I found them easier to work with. They sometimes sparked fleeting but helpful visions. The next best thing would have been to actually speak to Ronin, but it was not like I could march into the sort of super-max prison that they held otherkind in at my leisure.

  But if Storm had worked the Ronin case there couldn’t be anything wrong with it. I sighed. “So maybe some of these other cases?” I said.

  “No,” he said firmly. “Stick to the ones I assigned to you. The last thing I need is to ruffle the feathers of the other departments.”

  “I don’t care about them. I didn’t think you did either.”

  “It’s my job to care about them. That’s why I’m a supervisory agent and you’re…” He stopped, Probably worried about hurting my feelings.

  “A mere consultant?” I filled in. “Ain’t no shame in that. I prefer being a consultant. Less red tape to tangle me up.”

  “The red tape still applies whether you like it or not. And you should be worried about being a consultant. It means the Agency can fire you in a heartbeat. Is that what you really want?”

  “I trust you to have my back,” I said glibly.

  My attitude did not reassure him. “You’re still seeing your therapist, right?” he said suspiciously. “I missed your signed sheet last week.”

  “I left it on your desk,” I told him. “And yes. I have an appointment with her shortly. The things I do to please you. Even though you know what I think about psychiatrists and their like.”

  “You need someone to talk to about your… your life. It might as well be a professional.”

  He was going to say about my problems. It would have irked me if I wasn’t in such a darn good mood. If Storm had half a clue what my problems really were, his straight-laced side would dump me from my job and from his life so fast that my head would spin. The man was far too into letting his head rule his heart.

  “If you like them so much maybe you should be seeing one,” I told him. “If last night is anything to go by, I’m not the only one with troubles.”

  “I didn’t lose my mother to a serial killer,” he said.

  Those words should have stabbed at my heart. They would have just three weeks earlier. Now they bounced off my sunshiny mood like water off a duck’s back.

  “How do you know you didn’t lose your mother to a serial killer too?” I asked him. “It’s not like you found out who killed your mom.”

  The look on his face was thunderous. Damn, this mood of mine was going to land me in a bunch of trouble.

  “Mine was a long time ago,” he said stiffly. “Yours was just two years ago, and you only buried her three months ago.”

  “Three and a half if we’re counting.”

  “Don’t be glib,” he said shortly. “Sometimes I think I don't know you at all.” He shook his head as if tired of me.

  “We can change that if you like,” I said suggestively.

  He didn’t bother to answer. He shrugged into the other arm of his jacket, and with the files tucked under his arm, he headed towards my door. On his way he paused beside my shower cubicle and raised an eyebrow. “What is this?”

  “Big enough for two is what it is,” I said with a grin.

  He sighed. “I’m serious, Diana. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now. I don't need the extra trouble. Promise to leave this one alone?”

  He was right next to my door now. He really did look tired. I’d never seen dark circles under his eyes before. They bothered me. Storm shouldn’t have dark circles. Whatever the hell was on his mind was really getting him down. He had taken an unexpected week off work and the rumor was that Storm never took his holidays unless the chief forced him to.

  It was too bad that I was the last person he wanted to share his troubles with.

  I went over to him until I was close enough for a hug, but I didn’t hug him, much as I thought it would do him good. I placed my hand on the door handle behind him, not seeing that his hand was already on it until my hand landed on top of his. Something flicked through his eyes. Fear? It was gone so quickly that I could not be sure. He jerked his hand away from under mine.

  “A problem shared is a problem halved,” I said, offering my services one last time.

  He shook his head. If his back wasn't already up against the door he would definitely have taken a step back.

  “Okely dokely. It’s your funeral.”

  I opened my door for him, since that was what he so clearly wanted. He exited like a shot. No pretense of anything else. The Diana of three weeks ago might have felt the urge to cry, but not this new Diana. I stayed watching him as he descended the steps outside my apartment without even looking back.

  When he was out of sight I flung the door shut. Two minutes later I was in my shower singing a song that I’d heard on the radio. “Ready or not, here I come. You can’t hide…”

  Chapter 3

  DIANA

  My therapist’s name was Roopamala. I had googled it, not that I would admit to her that I had taken such an interest in her life. She would have been far too pleased — or far too offended — that I had wanted to check out anything about her. I could never tell with her what her mood was going to be. The name meant ‘blessed with beauty’, which had actually made me laugh. Because I couldn’t tell whether her parents had jinxed her with that name or not. Roopa was all sorts of contradictions rolled into one.

  She had agreed to see me on Sunday and Thursday mornings, and as today was Sunday I had been sitting in the room that she referred to as her office for half an hour, saying words without saying much of anything.

  Really I couldn’t wait for this session to be over. What I hadn’t told Storm was that I had already taken a photocopy of all of the files that I had
snitched from Agency Headquarters. I had planned to take the originals back asap before their absence was noticed. My secret copies were waiting for me at Grimshaw’s magic shop, where I would be going to next, as soon as this early morning inconvenience of a so-called therapy session was over. Storm’s insistence that I must not look into the Ronin case had me even more determined to do so.

  Roopa had assigned me a very specific chair. It was one of those office chairs that swiveled around. She had gotten it second-hand off the internet. I liked it a lot. It let me fidget to my heart’s content, and fidgeting was all I felt like doing for the excruciatingly dull hour I had been coming here twice a week for the past three weeks.

  The so-called office was Roopa’s smaller lounge. She had two, but I was not allowed into the second larger one that led through to the rest of her small house. I was not allowed to even use the bathroom here, because it would mean going outside of this ‘office’. It seemed that Roopa thought I was not to be trusted.

  The first time I had visited she had opened her front door wearing a loose tent-like outfit. She had said, “I must apologize for my attire,” and then she had laughed. It turned out she was wearing her habitual attire. Clearly she didn’t give a damn about what I thought. I liked that a lot too.

  Roopa was ignoring me. Her head was bent over her coffee table where she was scribing painfully small patterns onto a two-inch square of very thin paper. The intricate patterns were of her own invention Theo had told me, and they were pure magic, somewhat like the sigils of the magical language. Whatever she was doing took great concentration because the tip of Roopa’s tongue had been trapped between her teeth for the past thirty minutes.

  She applied one final squiggle and then heaved a massive sigh and sat up to rotate her shoulders rather vigorously. She didn’t care that I was watching her squirming and wiggling as she tried to work loose the kink in her shoulder that was bothering her. When she was satisfied that the ache was sufficiently gone, she picked up her little piece of paper and squinted at it. She nodded her head in satisfaction.

  “You need spectacles,” I told her.

  “Nonsense,” she said. “My eyes can see perfectly fine.”

  “You can see fine with that thing right next to your nose. But if you had specs you wouldn’t need to bend down so close to the paper.”

  “Do you know me or do I know me?” she said tartly.

  “In this instance I know you better than you know me.”

  “I don’t know why I bother with you, girl,” she huffed. “You’re full of troubles and now you’re bringing me troubles. You speak endless nonsense about your own self and now you have started speaking nonsense about my own self. I can only pray that it won’t be endless too.” She brought the palms of her hands together in a gesture of prayer and lifted her eyes heaven-wards, beseeching her God to listen.

  “Whatever. If you won’t listen to me then you should go to an optician and listen to her.”

  “Am I here to help you, or are you here to help me?” she said sharply. Her singsong English made me smile. Roopa had been living in London for decades, but she was born in Bangladesh and raised by traditional parents. She had an accent and the manner of speaking that took the edge off everything she said no matter how harsh she meant it to be.

  “Now I am finished with my work and you can tell me the real things and I will sign your paper and you can go,” she said, not bothering to make me feel that I was any sort of valued client.

  I knew full well that I was not. Storm had insisted that I agree to seek psychological help as a condition of being hired onto his cases, and then Theo had insisted the same after he had worked his magic on me and found that the outcome was not as he had desired. We had been trying to merge together the two parts of my separated personality in order to get rid of the troublesome and dangerous half. But instead of being banished, it seemed my troublesome half was more me than either of us had thought.

  The outcome would have horrified the old Diana too, but I was glad to be me. Or we, I should say. Despite not knowing exactly what that meant. The only part I regretted was not knowing exactly what ‘we’ was.

  Theo was probably right to be worried. For the past three weeks a feeling growing inside me had been keeping me lying awake at night. At those times the almost-music of the world, the song of the universe that I was hearing, became a deep and dreadful menace. There were bad things in the world, it seemed to say. We need to stop them. Stop them. Stop them. Stop them. We need to kill them. It’s our duty. And those words resonated inside me and felt good. Too good. Like love or lust maybe. It was a wanting, a yearning, that was bone deep.

  And that was how I knew I was going to do it. Sooner or later I was going to kill someone or something, and it was just a matter of when and how and who. And I needed to make sure I got the right who, otherwise I was not going to be able to face Theo or Storm or even myself afterwards. I didn’t want to become the monsters I was meant to hunt.

  I was hoping it would be just one. Kill one monster and get the urge out of my system and go back to a normal life. The kind of life where I could go to work and come home and relax in the evenings with a wonderful someone of my choosing. And I knew exactly who I wanted that someone to be. Was that so much to ask?

  So here I was, stuck with seeing Roopa twice a week more often than I would like, because Theo thought I needed to talk through the anxieties he was sure I must be suffering. Little did he know that I was high as a kite, reveling in this seemingly endless sunshiny good mood.

  “So Roopy-Roo, what do you want me to say?” I asked her, trying not to give her a big fat grin.

  “You tell me,” she retorted.

  “Are you really a qualified therapist?” I asked her, a question I had asked during every one of my six sessions to date.

  “Yes I am,” she snapped.

  “Did you get qualified so your family would stop calling you mad?” I said cheekily. This was probably going a step too far, but I couldn’t help goading her. Her family life was immensely interesting, probably because I had never had one — or at least not a real one.

  “They wanted to lock me up in an asylum and throw away the key,” she said pertly, looking rather pleased with herself. “So I told them I will become a qualified therapist and then we will see who is mad and who is locking who away!”

  Her answer took me by surprise. She had always refused to speak about this before. Seizing the opening, I asked her, “But I’m the only real client you’ve ever had, right?”

  “There is no need for your boss to know that,” she said craftily.

  “Theo already knows all about you.”

  “Not him. The handsome one.” She waggled her heavy dark brows at me. If she tweezed them a little she would have a striking face instead of a forbidding one. I preferred it forbidding.

  “Theo is handsome,” I told her stubbornly.

  “That Theo is a silver fox. But I mean the other one. The one who is hot as fire and has been keeping you up at nights.” She cackled, clearly interested in seeing if I would blush in a maidenly fashion.

  I sighed exaggeratedly. “I wish he was keeping me up at nights.”

  She roared with laughter. “Ha! So he has been keeping you up at nights!”

  “Did I deny it?”

  “No. But you didn’t admit it either. It is one of your big dark secrets that you like to hide as if it makes you special.”

  “Don’t say that. I thought I was special. Now you’ve gone and hurt my feelings.”

  “You children are such babies. It is easy to look at you and see what you are thinking.”

  “I’m not a baby. I’m twenty three.”

  She tutted. “You are an embryo. Even my children are older than you.”

  I sat forward in my chair. “Really? How old are they?”

  “Never you mind. You may think I’m old,” she gestured down at herself, “But when you get to my age you’ll know what it is when your body still wants a man.
Just because he looks like fire and you look like ashes, it doesn’t mean you won’t take a long juicy look. Hmm?” She waggled her eyebrows again. I swear she did it to make me squirm.

  She seemed to know full well that I was rarely in the mood for squirming, but that didn’t stop her from trying. I waggled my eyebrows back at her. “You should come into the magic shop and try your charms on Theo.”

  “Never mind that. Tell me about your hot one,” she insisted.

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “I bet you wish there was something to tell,” she said, chuckling at my expense.

  “You’re impossible. I don’t know why I bother coming to you.” I didn’t want to speak to her or to anyone about Storm.