I pulled on to the driveway and cut the engine. Mallory was waiting to greet me as I opened the door and got out. She jumped into my arms and kissed my cheek. The familiar feel of her body against mine was arousing but also rekindled memories of frustration.
“When did you get here?” I asked her.
“About a half hour ago. I was going to wait in my Jeep but it’s too damn hot so I thought I’d sit by your front door and give your neighbors something to look at.” She gestured to the houses on the street. “Is this place quiet or what? I never thought I’d see you outside of the Windy City.”
“You know I didn’t have a choice.”
She broke away from me and a serious look crossed her features. “Yeah, I know. Looks like they really screwed you over for what happened in Paris.”
“It’s not so bad,” I said, trying to sound upbeat. “I thought this place would be dead but I have a couple of cases already.”
“Cool. And a couple of cases of beer too, I see. You want some help getting those inside?”
“Of course.” I opened the back of the Land Rover and passed her a case of Coors Light. “We’re having a barbecue later, so how does burgers and hot dogs sound?”
“Sounds great.” Then she eyed me suspiciously and said, “We?”
“Felicity Lake,” I said. “She’s my assistant.”
Mallory grinned. “Is she pretty?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You guess?” She swung her elbow against my arm playfully. “Maybe that’s why you like it here in the boondocks, hmm?”
I grabbed a case of beer and took it to the front door, balancing it precariously on my raised knee while I fumbled with my keys. “It’s nothing like that. There are too many complications in my life at the moment to add a relationship into the mix.”
“Oh,” she said with a mock pout. “What about your relationship with me?”
“That’s one of the complications.” I got the door open and entered the house, glad I had turned on the AC this morning. Walking out of the late afternoon warmth and into the cool house was refreshing.
“Don’t let me stand in the way of you and your lovely assistant,” Mallory said as we dumped the beers on to the kitchen table. “You know that what happens between you and me is nothing more than therapy.”
“Yeah, I know.” We went back out to the Land Rover to get the rest of the supplies.
“Why do you have an assistant anyway?” Mallory asked me. “You never had one before.”
“The Society sent her here to spy on me.”
“Oh, wow, they really don’t trust you, do they?”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said. “Remind me to tell you about the ogre assassins.”
Her hazel eyes went wide. “Ogre assassins!” She realized she had said that out loud in the street and dropped her voice to a whisper. “Ogre assassins?”
“Yeah, like I said, this town isn’t dead, but someone in the Society wants me to be. Anyway, what have you been doing since I last saw you?”
She shrugged, her face looking suddenly serious. “I’ve been traveling here and there. New York, Boston, the Florida Keys.”
“The Florida Keys? Was that a vacation?” I handed her a case of beer.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t take a vacation until he’s dead, Alec. I can’t live a normal life, have a normal relationship, until I know he’s gone and never coming back. You know that.” She took the beer into the house.
“Yeah,” I said to myself, watching Mallory step through the front door and wondering if she would ever find the man who had ruined her life and taken so many others. She was touchy about it, but I couldn’t blame her. All of her friends and classmates had been murdered five years ago during a high school party, an event the newspapers called the Bloody Summer Night Massacre. Some of the victims’ bodies had been carved up with a knife, magical symbols cut into their flesh, and the guy who had done all the killing, a guy who referred to himself as Mister Scary, was still out there somewhere.
Mallory Bronson had been the only survivor that night and had been dubbed a Final Girl by the internet news sites, in reference to slasher movies where a single girl survives and beats the killer.
Mallory had beaten Mister Scary. She had shot him five times and knocked him over the safety railing of a third floor balcony, avenging the deaths of her classmates, or so she thought. But by the time the police arrived at Blackthorn House, where the massacre took place, Mister Scary had disappeared.
Just like in a slasher movie.
And Mallory had spent the past five years searching for him, following leads and unsolved murders all over the country. The emotional scars she carried weren’t going to heal until the killer was dead. Mallory was sure that the death of the killer would allow her to forget her bloody past and move on, but I wasn’t so sure it was that simple.
I grabbed a case of beer and followed her into the cool house.
10
An hour later, Mallory and I were sitting out back on foldout chairs I had found in the basement. It was a perfect area for training, with a hook already in place for my heavy bag and more than enough room to set up my weapons rack and training dummies. It even had a small bathroom, complete with a shower stall.
A small storage room led off the main basement area and that was where I had found the chairs and a white plastic table that the previous owners had left behind. There was even a large black and white striped umbrella that fitted through the hole in the center of the table and provided us with some shade.
The barbecue was throwing off charcoal-scented heat, the air above the grill shimmering. I’d told Mallory about the events of the day, including the ogre assassins. Now, we sat drinking beer while she tried to figure out who would want to kill me.
“It has to be someone in the Inner Circle,” she said.
“Yeah, but no one knows who the members of the Inner Circle are,” I reminded her.
“We know your father is a member. Maybe he can tell you.”
“Are you kidding? He would never do that. As far as he’s concerned, the Society’s secrets are more important than his own life, never mind mine.”
Mallory put her beer on the table and pressed her thumb and forefinger to her temples as if it would help her think. “Okay, let’s look at this from a different angle. Instead of trying to figure out who’s in the Inner Circle, let’s try to figure out why someone from the Inner Circle would want you dead.”
“Because of what happened in Paris,” I said.
“And what exactly happened in Paris?” Felicity’s voice came from the side of the house, where it was possible to walk from the street to the backyard where we were sitting. She was holding a bottle of red wine in one hand and she had changed into jeans and a dark blue t-shirt with the Coca Cola logo across the swell of her breasts. Her dark hair, which had been piled up earlier, was scraped back into a ponytail, accentuating the feminine lines of her face. She waved at us as she approached.
“The lovely assistant, I presume,” Mallory whispered.
I kicked her chair, but not too hard, because I knew how easily those damned things folded up on themselves.
Felicity came over and set the bottle of wine on the table among the packages of meat and buns.
“Felicity, this is my friend Mallory Bronson,” I said. “Mallory, this is Felicity my … assistant.” I mentally kicked myself for almost saying lovely assistant. “I’ll get some wine glasses,” I said, excusing myself and going into the kitchen to search the cupboards. All of my cups, mugs, glasses, and plates had been unpacked and put into the kitchen cupboards when I’d arrived at the house. At the time, I’d wondered who had done that, but now I knew it was Felicity. Maybe her efficiency at arranging my stuff and unpacking some of my boxes had been borne of guilt. After all, she’d been sent here to spy on me.
I found three wine glasses and a corkscrew and went back outside. Felicity busied herself with opening the w
ine while I arranged three burgers on the grill. They sizzled juicily and the charcoal briquettes sent up little plumes of smoke as the fat hit them.
“God, that smells good,” Mallory said.
“Nothing like a burger cooked over a barbecue,” I said.
Felicity was pouring the wine. “Are you two avoiding my question?”
Mallory and I looked at each other. I had not heard Felicity ask a question. “What’s that?” I asked.
“When I got here, you were talking about Paris. I asked you what happened there.” She turned her attention to Mallory and handed her a glass of wine. “Do you know what happened in Paris?”
Mallory nodded. “Yeah, of course.”
“Of course,” Felicity repeated softly. I wondered if she was trying to figure out whether my relationship with Mallory was more than mere friendship.
I flipped the burgers. As they were turned over, a new bout of sizzling and spitting began. I turned to Felicity. “What happened in Paris should have never have happened at all. I wasn’t even supposed to be there. Not on a job, anyway. It was supposed to be a vacation.”
“A vacation, how nice,” Felicity said. “I love Paris.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I was in Paris taking a break. We’re allowed to take one now and then, but not often enough. I usually spent my vacations in Chicago, but that never worked out because there would always be a call or a message from someone who needed something. Or the guy temping my job while I was away would need help and I’d end up not taking a break at all. So I decided to get out of the country and go to Paris. I thought that being so far away meant I’d be left alone for a while. It didn’t turn out that way.
“I’d only been there a couple of days when my father called me. He said he needed me to do something urgently for the Society. It was a simple job. All I had to do was check on the Paris investigator in the area of the city where I was staying. Pierre Louvain. I was to make sure Pierre was okay and report back to my father.”
“Did he say why?” Felicity asked.
“No, he just told me to check on him.”
“So why didn’t your father send one of the other Paris investigators to check on Pierre?” she asked.
“Oh, believe me, I asked him. I told him I was on vacation, it was the middle of the night, and if he wanted someone to check on this guy he needed to send someone else, like any of the other investigators in the city. He said that Pierre had called him and said that he couldn’t trust anyone in the city. He thought the Society in Paris had been compromised by its enemies. So, since I was from out of town, it was decided that I should do some investigation into the matter. Like I said, I never get a real vacation.”
I turned my attention back to the burgers. They were ready. I put three buns onto paper plates and opened them to begin assembling the burgers. “There’s ketchup, mustard, BBQ sauce, and cheese slices; help yourselves,” I said as I slid two of the plates across the table to Mallory and Felicity.
While they were fixing their burgers, I put some chicken thighs on the grill and took another sip of red wine.
“So, I had to go and check out this Pierre guy,” I told Felicity. “I was pretty pissed at the Society for interrupting my vacation but I went over to where the guy’s office anyway. I’d hired a Vespa scooter for the week I was there, which was ideal for getting around Paris, so I rode over there on that. When I got to Pierre’s office, the place was a mess. Someone … or something … had trashed the place. If there had been anything there that would be useful, I figured it had been taken.”
I put cheese, mustard, and ketchup on my burger and took a bite. It wasn’t as good as the burger I’d had at Darla’s Diner, but it was still delicious. “I had Pierre’s home address, so I rode over there, wondering if the poor guy was dead or alive. I felt vulnerable. I had no idea what I was getting myself into and I had no weapons. If Pierre’s message had been correct and the Society in Paris had been compromised, there was nobody I could turn to for help.”
“You thought members of the Society were trying to kill one of the Society’s investigators?” Felicity asked. “But why would they do that? Who could make them become traitors like that?”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” I said. “I got to Pierre’s place, a nice first floor apartment near the Louvre, and found him there. He was dead. His throat had been slashed open and his tongue had been cut out. It was lying on the floor near his body.”
Felicity put down her wine. “Oh my God, that’s terrible.”
“Yeah. I called my father and told him what I’d found. He decided to tell me what this was all about. I guess he figured that if I found Pierre alive and well, my involvement would end there and I could finish my vacation in peace. But now that I’d discovered Pierre’s body, I might as well be told what was going on. I was in deep now.”
I paused to turn the chicken thighs on the barbecue. The smell rising up from them made me hungry despite the half-eaten burger on my plate and the memory of Pierre Louvain’s body lying in his apartment in a pool of dark blood.
I returned to the table and leaned over the buns and mustard to talk to Felicity in a lower voice. News travels fast in small towns and I didn’t want a nosy neighbor to overhear me and tell the rest of the street that the new guy belonged to a secret society that had its roots in sixteenth century Europe and was at war with supernatural forces all over the world. It might make small talk difficult when I was mowing my front lawn.
“Pierre Louvain had been investigating a Japanese woman in Paris who might be a satori.” I took a bite of my burger.
“I’ve heard of those,” Felicity said. “They read minds and predict the future.”
“Yeah, they’re very rare.” I used the barbecue tongs to get the thighs from the grill to a paper plate. “They’re usually only found in Japan and they’re shunned by society there, forced to live in the mountains. A lot of people think they can control other people’s minds as well as read them, which makes satoris feared.”
“And there was one in Paris?” Felicity took a chicken thigh and put it on her plate to cool down.
I nodded. “My father told me that Pierre Louvain had discovered a possible satori. A satori would be very valuable to the Society because of the alleged mind control powers they possess. For the same reason, a satori would also be valuable to the Society’s enemies. So Pierre reported his findings to the Society’s London headquarters, thinking they’d want to send over some people to talk the satori into working for them.”
“But it didn’t turn out that way?” Felicity asked.
“No, it didn’t. After making the call, Pierre kept watch over the woman. Only a couple of hours after he had informed headquarters about her, a number of Paris investigators arrived at her apartment and kidnapped her. They bundled her into the back of a van and drove away. Pierre said the investigators were working with vampires. He followed the van on his motorcycle and called headquarters again, asking what the hell was going on. He was told that the Society hadn’t sanctioned the kidnapping of the satori and were still putting together a team of people to fly over to Paris to speak with her.”
“So,” Mallory said, biting into a chicken thigh, “someone at headquarters found out about the message and decided to act on it themselves.”
“But who would do that?” Felicity asked.
“Someone who wanted to bag themselves a satori,” Mallory said through a mouthful of chicken.
“It has to be a member of the Inner Circle,” I said. “If the Society thought there was a satori in Paris, that information would be restricted to the highest level members. My father only told me because I was directly involved in a possible rescue mission.”
Felicity frowned. “But how could you be? Pierre was dead, so how could you know where they’d taken the satori?”
“When the van reached its destination, Pierre called my father and left a four-word message before the line went dead. He said, ‘L’empire de la mort.’ After th
at, he wasn’t seen or heard from again until I found his body in his apartment. They must have taken him back there to kill him.”
“L’empire de la mort,” Felicity said. “The empire of the dead.”
“Yeah, there’s an inscription over the entrance to the Paris catacombs that says, ‘Stop! This is the empire of the dead.’ I’d visited the catacombs the day before, so I knew what Pierre was referring to. My father knew, too, but his team were still in England and I was the only Society member he trusted in Paris, so I had to go to the catacombs and rescue the satori from the corrupt investigators and vampires.
“I searched Pierre’s apartment and found a dagger and a few stakes and took them out to the Vespa. I didn’t have a plan other than going into the catacombs and killing anyone or anything that wasn’t the satori. Great vacation, huh?”
The frown on Felicity’s face told me she was confused about something. “What is it?” I asked her.
“Something doesn’t make sense. You were kicked out of your Chicago office and sent here because of what happened in Paris, yet you were acting in your father’s orders. You were doing what was best for the Society. Why did they punish you for that?”
“I didn’t exactly follow orders. When I got to the catacombs, I took out two vampire guards posted at the street entrance and descended into the underground caves. I had to go a long way into the skull-lined catacombs before I found the satori and her captors. The captors were already dead, their bodies lying in a mess on the ground, blood coming out of their ears and their eyes. The satori had done that somehow with her power. I guess they hadn’t thought their kidnapping plan through. The satori was standing among the dead bodies, calmly looking at me as I entered the area. She looked just like any other young Japanese woman, dressed in jeans and a hoodie that wasn’t even blood-stained, despite the carnage around her.”
Felicity was frowning again.
“What is it?” I asked her.
The Harbinger PI Box Set Page 8
