He laughed when he saw the concerned look on my face. “That’s right, little man, I have your woman.” His voice was deep and gruff. “If you want her to live, you and I are going to take a walk in the woods together.” He nodded at the weapon in my hand. “Without the sword.”
I weighed my options and realized I didn’t have any. The ogre was going to take me into the woods and squeeze the life out of me or he was going to kill Felicity. Maybe both.
“I want your guarantee that she won’t get hurt,” I said.
He chuckled. “I’m not interested in her, Harbinger, only in you.”
“Before we do this,” I said, “tell me who sent you to kill me. Who wants me dead so bad that they’d hire two faerie beings to do the job?”
“That is none of your concern, Investigator.”
I shrugged. “If I’m about to die anyway, why not tell me who hired you?”
He shook his head. “You’ve made enemies in high places, that’s all I’ll say. Now, you drop the sword and I’ll drop the woman.”
I placed the sword at my feet. The blue glow playing around the blade disappeared as soon as my hand left the hilt.
“Put her down and let her drive away,” I told the ogre. “Then I’ll go into the woods with you.”
He set Felicity down on the ground. She tried to kick his legs but he pushed her away, laughing. “I’m giving you a chance to escape,” he said. “What is wrong with you, little woman?”
“Felicity,” I said, “there’s no point trying to kick him. Nothing short of running him over with a car is going to phase this guy.”
The ogre chuckled. “Run away, little girl. What is about to happen is here is not for your eyes.”
“Go, Felicity,” I said. “Get in the car and drive.”
She looked at me with tears in her eyes. “Alec, I can’t just leave you.”
“There’s no choice. Get in the car.”
She hesitated but then nodded. Slowly, she walked to the Land Rover and got in. The ogre came forward, still laughing at the prospect of killing me. He didn’t seem too bothered that his partner was dead.
Felicity gunned the Land Rover’s engine.
“Time to die, little man,” the ogre growled.
“For one of us,” I said.
The Land Rover shot forward, but instead of driving away, Felicity spun the steering wheel so that the vehicle came roaring over the grass toward the ogre.
The creature didn’t have a chance to react. By the time he knew Felicity was trying to run him down, the Land Rover was already crashing into him. The front grille smacked squarely into his chest, knocking him down. He rolled on the grass, trying to regain his feet. But by the time he had managed to stand, the Land Rover hit him again, sending him sprawling into a thick pine tree.
I grabbed the sword from the ground. Blue flame sparked to life along the blade as I walked over to the ogre. He was dazed and probably had a few broken bones. He looked up at me as I approached. He wasn’t laughing now.
“Last chance,” I said. “Who sent you to kill me?”
“You can’t escape your fate, Investigator,” he said. “When we do not return, when it is known that you are still alive, others will come for you.”
“Why is someone so interested in killing me? Who is it?”
He laughed again, but there was no mirth in it.
I swung the blade and cut off his head. Even after he was dead, his laugh drifted in the air for a couple of seconds. Felicity opened the Land Rover door, got out, dropped to her knees, and puked on the grass.
“You okay?” I asked her gently.
She got to her feet and nodded. “I’ll be fine. Do we need to bury the bodies?”
“No, they’re from the faerie realm, so they can’t stay here for long. They’ll disintegrate soon enough.” I bent down and checked the ogre’s pants pockets. I never knew an ogre to carry ID, but there might be something on his person that could tell me who sent him here.
The black sweater rode up his belly slightly while I was searching and I saw something on his skin. A tattoo in black ink. I pulled the sweater further up his abdomen, revealing more tattoos.
I stood back, feeling shocked.
“What is it?” Felicity asked.
“Do you recognize those tattoos?” I asked her.
She bent to examine them, her squeamishness seemingly gone. “Yeah, they’re magical protection symbols.”
I unbuttoned my shirt and opened it, showing her the tattoos on my own body. “Just like these.”
She looked from my tattoos to those on the ogre and nodded. “Exactly the same.”
“I know who hired them,” I said. “They were sent here by the Society.”
5
The bodies of the two ogres began to melt into the grass. In a few seconds, their remains would be gone, leaving nothing more than a patch of earth where flowers and plants would grow faster than normal for a while. I stood watching the bodies break down, questions tumbling around inside my skull. Why was the Society trying to kill me? Why would they send faerie beings to do the job? Who had given the ogres the magical protection tattoos?
“What do you mean they’re from the Society?” Felicity asked.
The bodies were gone now. “Those particular designs are tattooed on all fully-fledged investigators. They protect us from minor magic, things like location spells and some enchantments. As far as I know, only the Society of Shadows uses those exact symbols.”
A car drove past us on the highway. “We should get out of here,” I told Felicity. “The sight of a man standing by the side of the road holding a glowing blue sword might draw attention.”
“What about their car?” she asked as we got into the Land Rover.
“We’ll leave it here. It’ll be stolen. Faerie beings don’t own vehicles in our realm.”
“When they drove up next to us, they looked like normal men,” she said. “Was that a glamor?”
I nodded. “It’s how faerie beings walk among us.” I threw the sword onto the back seat and drove the Land Rover over the grass to the road, turning toward Leon Smith’s house. Was there even a point in pursuing this case if I was on the Society’s hit list? I had no idea, but right now, I had to go about my business as usual.
The day was becoming hot now, the sun climbing in a clear blue sky. I put the AC on, grateful for the chilled air as it dried the sweat on my forehead.
“Alec, it can’t be the Society,” Felicity said after we had driven a couple of miles. “It doesn’t make sense. Why would they send you here and set up the office in Dearmont if they were just going to kill you? None of it makes sense.”
“What doesn’t make sense is that those ogres were tattooed with Society symbols,” I told her.
She went quiet for a couple of minutes, lost in thought. Then she said, “What if it’s not the Society itself but someone inside the Society? Someone on the inside acting alone could have hired those ogres without the Society’s knowledge.”
I thought about that. It was possible. I’d pissed off enough people in the Society that a lot of them wanted me dead. And there was the fact that the ogres hadn’t simply tried to shoot us—they had wanted to kill me with their bare hands in the woods, and that could be more than just their natural bloodlust. The bearded guy had tried to shoot me off the hood of the Taurus and his partner had told him not to shoot me. Maybe their job had been to make sure my death looked like the type of fate any preternatural investigator might meet: being killed by preternatural beings.
When the Society investigated my death, as they did the deaths of all investigators, they would discover that I’d been killed by ogres. There was no way they would suspect those ogres had been hired by someone in the Society, because the usual transactions between Society members and preternatural beings involved a clash of swords, the casting of curses, and, ultimately, death for one or both parties.
Was it possible that a Society member had formed a temporary truce with the pre
ternatural world just to kill me and cover his tracks? Or her tracks, of course. There were plenty of women in the Society who would like to see me ripped apart by ogres.
“You could be right,” I told Felicity. “Let’s say someone in the Society wants me dead. They make a deal with the ogres, hire them as hitmen. As part of the deal, they give the ogres the protection tattoos. They hide the wearer from location spells and protect them from minor magic. For an ogre living in the faerie realm, that could be useful. And it benefits the Society guy because the tattoos protect the would-be assassins from me.”
She frowned in confusion. “You don’t use magic, Alec.” Then her eyes widened. “Do you?”
“Before you tell me which regulation in the Investigative Guidebook that breaks, no, I don’t. But I’ve employed witches in the past to help me.”
“Really? Because that breaks a whole chapter of rules in the guidebook.”
“Nothing is as black and white as the guidebook makes it out to be,” I said. The GPS directed us off the highway and along a narrow road that wound through the woods before the female voice said, “You have reached your destination on the right.”
On the right, a short road led to a large iron gate set into a high stone wall. I drove up to it. There was an intercom system on the wall, a small metal box with a talk button and built-in speaker. A camera pointed down at us from atop the gate.
Leaving the engine running, I got out and walked to the intercom.
After I pressed the button, a young male voice answered. “Who is it?”
“My name is Alec Harbinger,” I said. “My assistant, Felicity Lake, called you earlier. We’d like to talk to you about Dark Rock Lake.”
“Sure, come on up.” There was a buzz and the gate swung open slowly.
I got back in the Land Rover and drove inside, whistling with appreciation at the expansive grounds beyond the wall. A huge, well-maintained lawn stretched from the walls all the way to a huge mansion that sat proudly in the center of the grounds. The house was all modern angles and glass walls. I preferred old buildings, myself, but even so, I could appreciate the design of this modern-day palace.
“Someone has some serious money,” Felicity said. “This place is as big as a golf course.”
The road we were on was paved with white gravel which formed a circle by the front door of the house. Parked in that circle were a number of expensive cars, including Rolls Royces and Bentleys.
I parked my old Land Rover between a metallic-blue Ferrari Spider and a silver Bentley and climbed out. Felicity followed me to the front door, fishing her notebook and pen out of her purse.
The door was opened by a young black guy wearing a gray hoodie and blue jeans. I guessed his age to be early twenties, probably a couple of years older than his friend, James Robinson. “Hey,” he said. “Come in.”
“Leon Smith?” I asked as we stepped into a marble-floored hallway. The glass ceiling took advantage of the natural light, making the house bright and airy.
“Yeah, that’s me,” he said. “Come on, I’ll get Michael to make us some drinks. Iced tea?”
“Sure, thanks,” I said, and Felicity nodded.
A tall, white man in his sixties appeared from a side door and spoke to Leon with a British accent. “I’m sorry I didn’t get the door, sir, I was occupied with the arrangements regarding the party on Friday.”
“Leave that for now, Michael. I’d like iced tea for my guests and me out back.”
“Of course, sir. Then I will immediately return to the matter of the party.”
Leon sighed. “Sure, whatever.” He led us through the house and outside to an area paved with flagstones and surrounded by a low, ornate stone wall. There was a long, low table out here along with outdoor furniture that probably cost more than my house.
“Please, sit,” Leon said, “and I’ll answer whatever questions I can.”
We sat and Felicity asked him, “Do you mind if I take notes?”
Leon shook his head. “Of course not.”
“You seem very open to us being here,” I told him. “If I was approached by detectives wanting to ask me questions, I’d be a little guarded.”
“I’ve been expecting someone to come here,” he said. “In fact, I’m surprised you didn’t show up sooner. You were hired by James’s parents, right?”
I nodded. “Why were you expecting someone to come here?”
Michael appeared with a pitcher of iced tea and three tall glasses. He poured the drinks and left.
After the butler had left, Leon said, “That weekend was weird, man. James and Sarah changed, and I mean really changed. James is my best friend, but I haven’t seen him since we went to the lake. I knew his parents would try and find out what happened that weekend. I would if my son returned home totally changed. James is supposed to be my best friend, but he and Sarah didn’t even come back with us. They came home a day later.”
“Who’s Sarah?” I asked.
“Sarah Silverman. She was James’s girlfriend. Well, she was his girlfriend for that weekend. James changes his women as often as I change my socks. But I think things were a bit more serious with Sarah. The Silverman family live next door to James’s family, just on the other side of the woods between their houses, so they’ve known each other for a long time, but this was the first time I knew about her being his girlfriend. It was a surprise to me.”
“Okay,” I said. “Who else went to the lake that weekend?”
“There were seven of us. James, me, Sarah, Ed Kowalski, Alicia Jones—she’s Ed’s girlfriend—Mike Halliwell, and Scott Peterson.”
Felicity wrote down the names.
I took a sip of iced tea. It chilled my mouth and throat, but that was a welcome sensation in the heat of the day. “Tell me about the party,” I said.
Leon shrugged. “It was the type of party you’d expect a group of rich kids to have. We drove up to the lake on Friday night. We had a truck full of beer, liquor, and food. It was cold that night, but we had a barbecue on the beach. There was a lot of drinking and music. We had a good time. We rented three cabins. There’s a dozen cabins by the lake, but the others were empty that weekend, so we had the whole place to ourselves.”
“Three cabins between seven people,” Felicity said. “What were the sleeping arrangements?”
“I shared with Mike and Scott. James and Sarah had a cabin to themselves and so did Ed and Alicia. James and Ed still live with their parents so they were using the getaway for a weekend of wild sex, you know?”
“I do know,” Felicity said enigmatically.
That seemed to take Leon by surprise. He paused a moment before continuing. “So, yeah, that was the Friday. Everything was great. No weirdness, nothing out of the ordinary. On Saturday, I got up around noon and told myself I was never going to drink again. I had a hangover like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Were there drugs at this party?” I asked.
“Yeah, but I don’t get involved with those.”
“Did James and Sarah?”
“Yeah, I guess. I don’t remember if they did anything that weekend, but it’s possible.”
“Tell me when things started to turn weird,” I said.
“That was Saturday night. The day was mostly quiet because everyone was hung over. When it started to get dark, Scott built a fire on the beach and that got most people back into the party mood. Someone fired up the barbecue and the drinks began to flow. It was more subdued than the night before, but most of us got drunk again.”
“What about James and his girlfriend? Did they get drunk, too?”
“Yeah, they did. We were all sitting around the fire at midnight and they kept saying they were going to go for a walk in the woods, but I think they were a little scared because Ed had been telling ghost stories earlier. So James and Sarah were kind of daring each other to be the first to get up and go into the trees.”
“What was the night like?” I asked. “Was there a full moon?”
; Leon shook his head. “I don’t think so. It was a dark night. I don’t remember seeing any moon at all.”
“A new moon, maybe,” I said.
“What does that have to do with anything, man?” Leon asked.
“Maybe nothing,” I said. I’d forgotten that Leon thought we were mundane detectives. “I’m just trying to form a mental image of that night.”
“It was dark,” he said. “And cold. We were huddled around the fire, and to tell the truth, I was looking forward to getting into bed. But James and Sarah kept daring each other to go into the woods. Eventually, James stood up and held out his hand to Sarah. She took it and they both went off into the trees.”
“Okay,” I said. “And what happened next?”
Leon shrugged. “Nothing. At least not for a while. We waited, expecting them to come back to the fire after a few minutes, but they didn’t. After a while, we began calling them, but there was no answer. We assumed they were getting it on in the woods, you know?”
I nodded. “So when did they come back?”
“Well, like I said, we called and there was no answer so eventually, we went to our cabins and went to bed.”
“You just left them out there?” Felicity asked, looking up from her notebook.
“We felt like idiots waiting there and freezing our asses off. So, yeah, we went to bed. James and Sarah were both adults and we weren’t responsible for them. We thought they were just having some fun together.”
“When did you see them again?” I asked.
“I didn’t see them until the next morning. But I heard them return to their cabin later that night. I didn’t sleep so well because Mike was snoring. When James and Sarah came back, I was in the kitchen of our cabin, drinking coffee.”
“What time was that?” Felicity asked.
“Around 3 a.m.”
“You say you heard them but didn’t see them,” I said. “How do you know it was James and Sarah? You could have heard someone from one of the other cabins and assumed it was James and Sarah returning.”
The Harbinger PI Box Set Page 4
