Lost Soul (Harbinger P.I. Book 1)

by Adam J. Wright

  “If we were searching by conventional means,” I said. “I brought something along that’s going to make it a little easier than that.”

  “Something magical?”

  “Yeah, it’s a magical statue.”

  “So let’s get it and start searching,” she suggested.

  “It isn’t that simple. We can’t go wandering through the woods with a magical item, looking for a doorway to Faerie, while there are all these people around. We need to be more discreet. If there are this many people on the beach, there’ll be just as many on the hiking trails. Besides, the statue only works at twilight.”

  “Oh, okay. So we’re stuck here for a while.” She turned in her seat to face me. “Can I ask you a question? You got the witches to cast a locator spell to find the werewolf in town, so why not ask them to cast a locator spell to find James and Sarah?”

  “A locator spell can’t locate something that isn’t there. James and Sarah are in a different realm of existence. A locator spell only works in the realm in which it’s cast, so a spell cast here can’t locate someone in Faerie.” I opened my door. “Let’s get our stuff into the cabin. I need to stretch my legs after that long drive.” I got out of the Land Rover and walked around to the back. There was a strong tang of pinewood in the air, along with an underlying smell of burning charcoal from the barbecues outside the cabins and RVs.

  Felicity and I got our luggage and found Cabin No. 6, the one we had rented for the next three days. The key to the cabin was locked inside a metal safe attached to the outside wall. Felicity punched in the code she had been given and opened the safe to retrieve the key. She opened the door and we went inside.

  The cabin was basic but clean and tidy. There was a living area, a small kitchen, and a short corridor that led to two bedrooms and a bathroom. I claimed the bedroom that looked out over the parking area, letting Felicity take the one that overlooked the beach. After all, if I found the entrance to Faerie tonight, I might not be sleeping in the cabin at all. Because of the time dilation between the two realms, I would go to search for James and Sarah for a couple of hours and when I got back, a couple of days might have passed here. It might be time to head back to Dearmont as soon as I returned from the faerie realm. And if I had James and Sarah with me, they would want to get home as soon as possible.

  When I got back to the kitchen Felicity was making coffee. “Not for me, thanks,” I told her. “I won’t be eating anything either.”

  “Why not?” she asked, pouring coffee into a mug for herself.

  “Faerie is a dangerous place and there’s lore that says a traveler should be fasted and purified before attempting to go there. A couple of centuries ago, people would fast for days before going to Faerie to protect them from the beings there. I don’t have that luxury, and I think those people may have been overcautious, but I can at least skip a meal and a coffee before I face the faerie folk in their own realm.”

  “Should I be worried about you?”

  “Traveling to Faerie is dangerous,” I said. “There’s a long history of people getting trapped there and being unable to return to our world. But as long as I keep my wits about me, I’ll be fine. You don’t have to worry unless I’m gone for a long time, but it’s difficult to know how long because of the way time works differently between here and Faerie. If it’s more than a week, inform the Society. They’ll probably send a rescue party to get me back.”

  “A week?” Felicity looked shocked.

  “Like I said, it should only be a couple of days our time. If it’s a week, I’m probably stuck there.”

  “All right,” she said, bringing her coffee to the sofa and sitting down. She looked a little overwhelmed. Maybe she wished she’d gone back to boring douchebag Jason and taken up accountancy instead of having to deal with the possibility of her boss being lost in the faerie realm.

  “Felicity, don’t worry about me. I’ve been to Faerie, and come back alive and well, many times.”

  “How many?”

  I didn’t have to search very far into my memory to find the answer to that question. “Once,” I admitted.

  “Once?” She nearly spat out her coffee. “You’ve only done this once before?”

  “Once is better than never.”

  “Alec, maybe this isn’t such a good idea. There must be another way. What if we go to the Robinson house and confront the faerie that’s pretending to be him? You could kill it. And do the same with the one pretending to be Sarah.”

  “Those two kids will still be trapped in Faerie,” I said. “The only way they’re coming back is if I go there and rescue them.”

  She went quiet after that, probably deciding that I was about to embark on a suicide mission.

  She drank some more of her coffee while I stood by the window, watching the people on the beach. Those people didn’t ever worry about preternatural beings trying to kill them, or werewolves prowling on the night of the full moon.

  In a way, I envied them that innocence. I’d been thrust into the world of the preternatural at a young age by a father determined that I should follow in his footsteps as a member of the Society of Shadows. My mom had rebelled, telling my father that I should live a normal childhood, eventually leaving him and taking me to Oregon, the place of her birth, where she and I had family.

  For a few years, I’d grown up like any other kid and been concerned only with the usual, mundane things that trouble a boy of ten. But two days after my tenth birthday, that all changed. My mother was killed in a car accident and my father, upon hearing the news, came to Oregon to claim me and return me to an education at the Academy of Shadows in England. That education included training in preternatural investigation, the history of the Society of Shadows, hand-to-hand combat, and the use of weapons.

  Most of the people out there on the beach at Dark Rock Lake would call my upbringing “cool” or “awesome” but they all possessed something that I could never have: an assurance that the things they saw in horror movies were fake. That monsters didn’t really exist and nothing lurked in the shadows.

  I could never have that assurance. I knew that the boogeyman did exist and the shadows were crawling with horrors. And knowing those things, I felt a responsibility to protect others from them.

  That was why, when innocent people were taken from their mundane existence and thrown headfirst into the world of the preternatural, I felt duty-bound to fight the shadows and return the victims to their normal lives. I couldn’t turn my back on James Robinson and Sarah Silverman, even if it meant risking everything.

  From behind me, Felicity said, “Okay, how are we going to find the door into Faerie?”

  I went to the bedroom and opened my sports bag, removing the item I’d brought from home. It was wrapped in a plain white cloth and was the same size as Felicity’s coffee mug, although it weighed a lot more. When I put it on the coffee table, Felicity leaned forward and asked, “What is it?”

  I pulled the cloth away, revealing a crude stone bust of a two-headed, bearded man. The two heads faced in opposite directions, joined at the back. “This is a statue of Janus,” I said. “He was an ancient Roman god of doorways, gates, and time. There are plenty of statues of Janus around, but this one is enchanted. Once activated, it leads the user to magical doorways that are in the area.”

  She reached out to touch the stone bust. “Can I?” she asked, her hand hesitating, inches away.

  “Sure, go ahead. Until it’s activated, it’s nothing more than a piece of rock.”

  She stroked its carved surface. “If it has two heads facing opposite ways, how do you know which head is pointing at the doorway you want to find? I assume that’s how it works, by pointing in the direction you want to go.”

  “Yeah, there’s some interpretation involved,” I said. “You have to make a guess as to which head is pointing in the right direction. Sometimes it’s easy, like if one head was pointing at the forest and other at the lake, we’d know to go into the forest. But sometime
s, you don’t know which head to follow. It takes some trial and error and doubling back. It’s magic, not science.”

  “So it could take us some time to find the entrance to Faerie.”

  “Yeah, and we can’t start looking until twilight. That’s the only time the Janus statue works, because twilight is what’s called an ‘in-between’ time, between night and day, and doorways are portals between things.”

  Felicity went to the kitchen to pour herself another coffee. “So we wait.”

  “Yeah, we wait.” I looked up at the late afternoon sky. It wouldn’t be long now.

  * * *

  When twilight arrived, I went to the Land Rover to get my sword. The sky had turned a deep, dark blue, stained with patches of purple. The beach was much quieter, most of the families sitting around fires and barbecues eating supper. The savory smell of burgers, hot dogs, and grilled fish made my stomach growl.

  I took the sword, hidden beneath its cloth wrapping, back to the cabin where Felicity waited with the Janus statue in her hands. “You ready?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, let’s do it.”

  Before we left the cabin, I recited the Latin words that activated the statue and were inscribed on its base. There was no visible change in the statue’s appearance—it didn’t glow or anything—but Felicity said, “Oh, it’s pulling against my grip.”

  “Hold it very loosely,” I told her. “Cup it gently so it can rotate.”

  She did, holding the statue in front of her, cupped in both hands. Slowly, Janus rotated so that one head looked out toward the lake and the other pointed toward the back of the cabin and the forest.

  “I told you the first part would be easy,” I said.

  We left the cabin and went into the forest, finding a hiking trail that went in the general direction the statue was pointing. I carried my sword, still wrapped, in one hand. If anyone passed us on the trail, they might think I was carrying fishing gear. Hopefully, they wouldn’t wonder why I was carrying it away from the lake.

  “Stop here,” I said. “Check Janus.” The statue had shifted slightly in Felicity’s grip but I wasn’t sure if that was because she was holding it too tightly.

  She held it up and relaxed her grip. Janus continued to point along the trail, and since the opposing head pointed back the way we had come, I was pretty sure we were headed in the right direction. It made sense. Leon Smith had said that James and Sarah were daring each other to come into the woods, neither of them really wanting to, so they probably didn’t venture far and would have stayed on the trail. Assuming the faeries that abducted them stayed close to the doorway to Faerie, the portal shouldn’t be too far from here.

  We walked on for a few hundred yards before I heard a sound that made my senses go into overdrive. I tapped Felicity on the shoulder and put my finger to my lips. She nodded and froze in place.

  The forest was gloomy now, the spaces beneath the trees hidden by dark shadows. I heard the noise again; footfalls on the trail behind us. “We’re being followed,” I whispered to Felicity. Her eyes widened with fear, staring into the darkness on our back trail.

  “Maybe it’s just someone taking a walk,” she suggested.

  “No, they’re trying not to be heard.”

  “How many of them are there?”

  “Two. One large, one smaller.”

  I unwrapped the sword, tossed the cloth to the ground and moved into a fighting stance, facing the source of the footfalls. The enchanted blade glowed vivid blue, lighting up the trees around me, chasing away the shadows.

  The footfalls halted. Whoever was back there had seen the blue light ahead of them on the trail. After a moment, the footfalls resumed, slower this time, hesitant. Hell, maybe Felicity had been right and it was just a couple taking a romantic walk through the woods. Just as I was wondering how I was going to explain away the fact that I was standing in the middle of the trail holding a glowing blue sword, two familiar faces appeared out of the darkness. When I saw who it was, I lowered my weapon.

  “Leon, what the hell are you doing here?”

  Leon Smith came up to us with a sheepish look on his face. He was wearing a black sweater, black jeans, and black boots, and had a black knitted beanie perched on his head. He looked like he might have stepped out of a Mission Impossible movie.

  Similarly attired, and standing behind Leon, was his butler Michael. Clutched in Michael’s hands, its barrel pointing over his left shoulder, was a shotgun.

  “Hey,” Leon said. “What are you guys doing out here?”

  “I just asked you the same question. And why is Michael carrying that gun?”

  “Why are you carrying that sword?” He looked at the weapon with wide eyes, the blue glow illuminating his face. “That thing is sweet.”

  “Leon,” I repeated, “what are you doing here?”

  “After you guys came by yesterday, I decided to do some investigating of my own, so I bought an RV and came up here to take a look around. Of course, I had no idea what I was looking for until you showed up this afternoon. So I waited to see where you were going and followed you.”

  “Go back,” I said. “This is no place for you.”

  “Because it’s supernatural, right?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “Sign me up. It’s about time something excited happened in my life. You know, living in a huge mansion and being able to buy anything you want isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I’m bored, man. When you guys visited me yesterday, it was the most exciting thing that’s happened in my life in a long time. So I’m here to help. Can I get a sword like that one?”

  “No,” I said, losing my patience. “Leon, this isn’t a game. Go back to your RV.”

  “You’re out here trying to find out what happened to James, right?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Well James was my best friend,” he said. “Before he changed, we used to hang out together all the time. Since he came into these woods, that all went to shit. I want to know what happened to my friend, and I’m not going to just walk away from this.”

  I sighed, unsure of what to do next. Twilight was running out fast and once it did, the Janus statue wouldn’t work anymore. “We’re looking for something,” I said, “and we need to find it before twilight ends, so I don’t have time to argue with you. Please, for your own good, leave it to us to help your friend.”

  “Whatever you’re looking for, we can help,” he said.

  “Fine. If you’re not going to go back, you can come with us. But once we find what we’re looking for, you and Michael will stay here with Felicity. Do not try to follow me.”

  “Sure,” Leon said, nodding enthusiastically. “So are we looking for a cave or something?”

  “New rule,” I said. “Keep quiet. Felicity, check Janus.”

  She held up the statue. One face still looked at the path ahead of us.

  “Let’s go,” I said. We set off along the path, Felicity in the lead, Leon and I following, and Michael bringing up the rear.

  “So, are you going to tell me what’s happening?” Leon asked. “Why are we following a statue of a two-headed dude?”

  I thought back to when we’d interviewed Leon at his house. He hadn’t seemed worried that we were preternatural investigators; in fact, he’d seemed excited by the idea. Some people were able to handle the supernatural better than others, usually depending on their upbringing and beliefs. Maybe Leon would be able to handle the truth.

  “Have you had any experience of the supernatural?” I asked him.

  “Not directly, but my grandma was into all that stuff. She used to tell me stories when I was a kid that were like fairy tales but, like, ten times more gory. And her neighbors used to come see her when they needed healing potions or a spell to get rid of a curse, stuff like that. She used to brew all kinds of weird concoctions in her kitchen and her place always smelled like herbs and flowers. I loved visiting her house.”

  “She ever tell you about faeries?”
>
  “Yeah, she believed in all that.”

  “Felicity, check Janus,” I said. She held up the statue and it twisted in her hand so that the heads pointed away from the trail. One face looked left, the other right. Shit. This was where the ambiguous nature of the statue’s magic could get us lost.

  “Which way?” Felicity asked.

  All I could see in both directions was darkness and trees. “Left,” I said. “If we don’t find anything after a couple of minutes and the faces are still pointing in the same direction, we’ll come back to the trail and go the other way.”

  We stepped off the trail and made our way through the undergrowth, twigs snapping and leaves crackling beneath our boots.

  “You think there are faeries in these woods?” Leon asked me in a whisper. His eyes scanned the darkness beyond the glow of my sword.

  “Did your grandma ever tell you that faeries sometimes trap humans in their realm, a place known as Faerie?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s their basic trick, isn’t it?”

  “You could say that.” I silently thanked Leon’s grandmother for giving her grandson an understanding of the preternatural world. It made what I was about to say easier. “That’s what I think happened to James and Sarah.”

  “They were taken by faeries? But we saw them. They went home.”

  “What you saw were two faeries pretending to be James and Sarah.”

  He went quiet, letting that sink in for a moment. Then he whispered, “Holy fuck.”

  “I’m going to get them back,” I said.

  Felicity stopped and pointed into the trees. “Alec, is that it? Janus is pointing right at it.”

  I followed the direction of her pointing finger, using the sword’s enchanted blue glow to illuminate the area. We had come to a rocky bluff and in the face of the rock, a narrow cave entrance stretched up from the ground to the height of my head. I knew that faerie doorways were usually situated at the same locations of doorways and portals in our realm, so this was probably the place. There was only one way to find out.