Dark Magic (Harbinger P.I. Book 3) (9 page)

Cantrell sat down next to me and I handed him a faerie stone. He looked through the hole at the surrounding trees, as if expecting to see something that hadn’t been there before.”

“It won’t work yet,” I told him. “I need to say a few words and then we need to drink the potions. When I’ve done that, it takes a little time for the visions to begin. Use your left eye to look through the stone.”

He switched eyes and glanced around.

“We need to be patient,” I told him. “Trees aren’t exactly in a hurry to go anywhere so they’ll take their time.”

He shook his head dismissively. “Harbinger, you should be in a psych evaluation ward, not living among sane people.”

Cantrell was putting on a good show about not believing, but I could sense a lack of confidence in his voice. He was beginning to doubt his probably long-held belief that there was no reality beyond what you could see and touch in day-to-day life.

That belief had been eroded slightly by the appearance of the walking dead. What he saw once he took the potion and used the faerie stone was probably going to blow his mind.

I usually tried to protect skeptics from learning about the preternatural world, but in the case of Sheriff Cantrell, I would make an exception. In his job, knowing that there were more dangers in the world than just humans might save his life someday.

It would certainly make him a better sheriff because he’d look at every case that came across his desk from more angles, some of them outside the realm of mundane thinking.

I looked up at the trees and recited a short incantation that my friend Jim Walker had taught me when I’d been working with him in Canada. The words were so old that their origin was unknown but the incantation had been known in the Americas before any white man had ever set foot on the shore.

“Drink the potion,” I told Cantrell as I popped the cap off my vial and downed the contents. It tasted bitter at first and then warm as the bourbon hit my throat. Cantrell drank his and put the empty vial on the ground.

He lifted the faerie stone to his eye and peered at the trees like a child who had just received a set of binoculars as a gift and was eager to try them out.

“Not yet,” I whispered.

He sighed loudly. “You said we had to look through the stones.”

“We do, but it isn’t time yet.”

“So how do we know when it’s time?” His voice had dropped to a whisper to match mine.

“We’ll know. For now, we wait.”

The potion was beginning to take effect. My head, which had been pounding, now felt light and warm. The herbs suspended in the bourbon included hallucinogens and they were starting to kick in.

“I feel funny,” Cantrell whispered.

I held up a hand to quiet him. A rustling sound was coming from the trees, as if they were being blown by a strong wind even though the day was only mildly breezy. The undergrowth also became agitated, leaves trembling like a rattlesnake’s rattle as if they were trying to warn us of something.

I took off my shades, picked up my faerie stone, and glanced through the hole. Everything looked almost the same as it did before except it was nighttime. A full moon hung over the lake and the stars were bright in the cloudless night sky.

“Whoa,” Cantrell said, and I assumed he had picked up his stone and was looking through it.

The night scene was quiet except for the sound of someone approaching, their feet swishing through the long grass at the side of the trail. I turned the stone toward the trail and saw Deirdre Summers there. She stood on the dark trail for a moment, watching the lake, before stepping out into the moonlight and walking to the rocks close to where Cantrell and I were sitting.

“This is incredible,” Cantrell whispered.

“Be quiet,” I told him.

“Why, she can’t hear us, can she?”

“Of course not, this is just a recording. But I want to hear what’s happening without you whispering into my ear. There might be something important.”

“Right, a clue,” he said knowingly. I wondered how much effect the potion had had on him. He sounded like he was stoned.

I looked over to check on him and because I had the stone to my left eye and had opened my right, I got a weird double vision effect. My left eye was looking at a night scene where Cantrell was not present so I was looking at grass and rocks; my right eye was looking at Cantrell sitting on the grass and rocks in bright sunshine.

I lowered the stone for a moment. “You okay?” I asked him.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, waving me away with one huge hand.

I raised the faerie stone to my eye again and went back to watching the night that Deirdre Summers had disappeared. She was standing ankle-deep in the water now, her gaze fixed on Whitefish Island in the distance.

The wooded island was dark, as if the silver moonlight couldn’t reach it, despite the water around the island reflecting the full moon and glittering in its light.

Something moved on the dark island, a shadow within a shadow, and I heard a splash out there as whatever it was entered the water. It sounded big.

“What was that?” Cantrell whispered urgently.

“I don’t know,” I answered. I swallowed hard, fear rising inside me even though I knew that I wasn’t present in this scene and was actually sitting by the lake in broad daylight on a summer’s day three years later.

Deirdre was totally calm. She walked to the rocks and began to take off her clothes, folding each item and placing it neatly on the rocks. When she was naked, she returned to the water and waded in up to her waist.

There were still splashing sounds in the distance and they were getting closer. I was breathing hard, willing Deirdre to get out of the water. Didn’t she realize she was in danger? What was she thinking?

Cantrell must have been having the same thoughts as me because he whispered, “No, get out of there.”

Deirdre couldn’t hear him, of course. She moved farther into the lake until she was in so deep that she had to swim. With an unhurried breaststroke, she swam out toward the distant sounds, her arms cutting through the moonlit water gracefully. She was so calm that I wondered if she’d been hypnotized or glamored.

“What is she doing?” Cantrell whispered. “What is she doing?” I could hear the stress in his voice.

Then, out on the lake, there was a movement that made the water roil and splash. A huge dark shape rose from the water where Deirdre was swimming and engulfed her in blackness. I saw a frog-like eye and the dark bulk of its body for a fleeting second but then it was gone, sinking back into the depths.

Deirdre was gone too. The only thing that remained of her was the neat pile of clothes on the rocks. The huge creature’s movement had caused a disturbance in the lake that sent waves splashing against those rocks and over the grass where Cantrell and I sat. I couldn’t feel the water, of course, but I had an urge to stand up to avoid getting wet.

Cantrell had dropped his faerie stone and was getting to his feet unsteadily, his eyes full of terror. “What the fuck was that, Harbinger? It ate her. What was it?”

“Sit down,” I said. From my faerie stone, I could hear movement in the night scene. Someone was approaching. “Something else is happening,” I told Cantrell. “Pick up your stone.”

“I don’t want to see anything else like that…thing.”

“I hear a person,” I said. “There are footsteps on the trail.”

He looked toward the trail.

“Not now,” I told him. “Then. Use the stone.”

He stayed standing but he picked up the stone and put it to his left eye.

The sound of footsteps that were accompanying the vision stopped momentarily and then continued, this time coming toward us over the grass. I turned my head toward the sound and saw a young dark-haired man wearing a black hoodie with the hood pulled up over his head. His eyes shone unnaturally bright blue through the shadows that fell over his face. He walked to the water’s edge and stared out over the lake.

“You recognize him?” I asked Cantrell.

“No, I’ve never seen him before.”

The young man held up his arms in a V shape and threw his head back to look up at the night sky. He began to chant in a language I’d never heard, a language that contained glottal sounds and weird combinations of consonants. I wished Felicity were here; she’d probably recognize the language and be able to translate it.

When he was done chanting, the hooded man turned from the lake and walked back to the trail before heading to the parking lot.

“Can we follow him?” Cantrell asked. “Maybe we can get a license plate number or something.”

I shook my head. “Only the trees around here are working under the spell. If we move out of this area, we’ll lose the vision completely.” I lowered the faerie stone and opened my right eye, blinking against the sudden brightness.

Cantrell was sitting on the grass again now, his stone lying on the ground by his hand. He was gazing out over the lake toward Whitefish Island. “No wonder we couldn’t find a body,” he said. “That monster ate her.”

“She was a sacrifice,” I told him. “Whoever that guy in the hoodie was, he offered Deirdre to the monster, maybe as a part of some bargain.”

“But why did she just swim out there to meet her fate? I don’t get it.”

“She was under a spell,” I said. “She probably had no idea what was happening.”

Cantrell frowned and murmured, “What am I going to tell Natalie?”

“Maybe this is one occasion where the case should remain unsolved.” I collected the stones, empty potion vials, and drawings, and put them into the backpack. “Officially, of course. We’ll solve it ourselves but it will have to be off the book.”

“That’s how you work, isn’t it, Harbinger? Off the book. Hell, you don’t even have a book.”

I ignored him and slung the backpack over my shoulder. “We’re done here. Deirdre was killed as a sacrifice to that monster. We need to find the guy with the bright blue eyes and deal with him.”

“Wait a minute. What about the monster? It lives on Whitefish Island. We need to call the National Guard or the Army or someone like that to blow it up.”

“No, we don’t. The monster isn’t on the island. It doesn’t live in this realm of existence. It was summoned here to collect its sacrifice. Now it’s gone back to wherever it came from until it’s summoned again.”

“So that’s it? We just walk away after watching that monster kill Deirdre?”

“I’ll take a look at the island,” I said. “There might be some evidence there that can lead me to the guy in the hoodie, but it’s outside your remit, Sheriff. There’s nothing you can do to catch this guy by conventional means.”

“Don’t patronize me, Harbinger. If you’re going to that island, then I’m coming with you.”

That was all I needed. But Cantrell was like a dog with a bone and he wasn’t going to let this go. “Okay,” I said. “Get the department to hire a boat sometime and we’ll sail out there and take a look around.”

“We’re going now,” he said, putting his shades back on and marching back to the trail.

I followed him, resigned to the fact that I was going to be spending most of the day with Cantrell whether I liked it or not. I checked my phone to see if Felicity had called. She hadn’t. I hoped she didn’t think I was avoiding her by being away from the office for so long. Maybe I should call, check that she was okay. I put the phone back into my pocket. Later, maybe.

Cantrell was on a mission, striding quickly across the parking lot despite his size, heading for the docks and the boat hire places there. I followed him to a shack that had a sign in the shape of a wave proclaiming it to be Woody’s Boat Hire.

Sitting outside the shack on a fold-up chair was an old man wearing a faded Portland Pirates cap and dark blue coveralls. He had a bushy white beard and was smoking a pipe. When he saw Cantrell, he nodded. “What can I do for you, Sheriff?”

“I need a boat that’ll get me out to that island, Woody,” Cantrell said.

The old man looked out at Whitefish Island. “Well, any boat will do that. You want a speedboat? Or something a little slower, maybe? You planning on doing some fishing?”

“I don’t care what boat it is just so long as it has an engine,” Cantrell told Woody.

Woody nodded sagely. “Not in the mood for rowing, eh?”

Cantrell jerked a thumb at me. “He’d be the one doing the rowing and I don’t think he’d get us all the way there and back by sundown.”

The old man looked me over. “I wouldn’t be so sure. He’s a big feller.” He knocked ash out of his pipe against the arm of his chair and stood up slowly, rubbing his back and wincing. “Anyway, I have just the thing, a twenty-eight-footer with twin outboards. She’ll get you to that island in no time.”

He went into the shack and came back with a set of keys and a clipboard. “Just sign here, Sheriff.”

“I don’t have time for that,” Cantrell said, snatching the keys from Woody’s hand. “Just charge it to the department.”

“But someone has to sign the hire agreement,” Woody said, bewildered, watching as Cantrell went striding along the dock in search of the boat.

“Here,” I said to Woody, “I’ll sign for it.”

He shrugged. “Okay, mister.” He handed me the clipboard. I quickly wrote my details in the relevant boxes and signed at the bottom.

When I passed the clipboard back to him, Woody tore off my copy of the hire agreement and gave it to me. “It sure is a shame about the sheriff,” he said. “He’s been that way since his wife died last year. He’s a good man beneath that gruff exterior. Losing Mary hit him hard. Damn shame, if you ask me.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Don’t worry about the boat, I’ll bring it back in one piece.”

“Harbinger, what the hell are you gassing about?” Cantrell shouted from the end of the dock. “And which of these damn boats is ours?”

If he’d bothered to look at the paperwork, he would know that the boat we were taking out was called the
Princess of the Lake
.

I found her and held out my hand to Cantrell. “Give me the keys, I’m driving.”

“The hell you are.”

I held up the hire agreement. “I’m the only one of us insured to take her out onto the lake.” I was pretty sure he was still under the effect of the potion he’d drunk earlier and I didn’t want him to crash the boat into the island. “You told me back there that you do things by the book,” I said. “I hired the boat so I’m driving. And you’re still under the influence of that potion. You wouldn’t go driving under the influence, would you?”