“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?”
He hesitated before throwing the keys at me. I caught them and began untying the Princess of the Lake from the dock. She was a simple fishing boat with a pale turquoise hull and a control console at the bow beneath a fiberglass roof.
Cantrell climbed aboard, muttering, “It’s not called driving, you idiot, it’s piloting. You pilot a boat, you don’t drive it.” He found a seat in the stern and sat down with arms folded over his barrel chest.
I piloted the boat away from the dock and out onto the lake. There were a few other craft on the water but the area around Whitefish Island was clear. The island stood alone—dark, brooding and waiting.
I looked back at Cantrell. He had removed his sunglasses and turned his face to the sun, eyes closed. Either he was trying to catch some rays or he was sleeping off the potion. I was pretty sure it was the latter from the way his chest rose and fell slowly. He’d probably be snoring soon. Well, he shouldn’t bother getting too comfortable because we’d be at the island in five minutes, tops.
I checked my phone again. Nothing. No call from Felicity. After a moment’s hesitation, I called her, deciding to play it cool and nonchalant. “Hey, Felicity,” I said when she answered. “I’m just calling to see how everything is going. See how you are.”
“I’m fine, Alec. Are you with the sheriff?” Her tone was a little flat but sometimes that was the norm for her so I couldn’t tell if she was giving me the cold shoulder or just being her usual British self.
I looked back at the sleeping form of Cantrell. “Yeah, I’m with the sheriff.”
“Have you found out anything regarding Deirdre Summers?”
“Yeah, a bit. We’re heading for that island in the middle of the lake.”
“All right, be careful.”
She obviously didn’t want to talk right now, so I said, “Okay, I’ll see you later.”
I was about to end the call when she said, “Alec, something’s happened at the office.”
“What? Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine. It’s just that when I got here this morning, the door was unlocked. You locked up last night, didn’t you?”
I tried to remember. I’d been carrying the box of stuff from Wesley but I was sure I put it down on the sidewalk and locked the door. “Yeah, I locked up. Has someone broken in?”
“We haven’t been burgled,” Felicity said. “I mean, the computers are still here and nobody tried to break into the safe or anything.”
“So what’s wrong?” Maybe I had forgotten to lock up after all.
“There’s one thing missing,” she said. “A book. It’s gone from the shelf in your office. There was a space where it should have been.”
“Someone broke in and took a book?” It was true that some of the books on my shelf were rare and valuable but why would a thief only take one? Why not take all of them and the computers too while they were at it?
“Yes,” Felicity said. “It’s the only thing that’s missing, I’m sure of it. I checked the titles on the shelf against the inventory I made when I put the books in your office. There’s only one title missing. ”
“So what book is it?”
“It’s a book of black magic written in the Middle Ages. The Grimoire of Dark Magic. I was going to call you earlier but…I didn’t.”
“No problem. When I’m done here, I’ll come straight back to the office. Do we need to call a locksmith to fix the door?”
“No, the door is fine. I used my key to make sure.”
“Someone probably picked it.”
“But what about the wards?”
The office was magically warded against things like break-ins. A mundane thief wouldn’t have been able to cross the threshold even after picking the lock. “We’re dealing with someone who was able to slip past them,” I said.
“That isn’t good, Alec.”
“No, it isn’t. And what makes it worse is that they now have a powerful book of black magic.”
10
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After ending the call with Felicity, I pulled back the throttle on the Princess of the Lake. We were close to the island and I didn’t want to crash the boat onto any rocks that might be lurking beneath the water or get her stuck in shallow water.
Cantrell was snoring now. The potion had hit him hard but I was sure he’d be fine when he woke up. Because I was more experienced with taking potions, the only effect I’d experienced was that my hangover had disappeared entirely. Maybe I should market the stuff as a hangover cure and make a fortune. The only problem was, the FDA definitely wouldn’t approve of some of the ingredients.
I cut the engine and let the boat drift, looking for a good place to go ashore. Whitefish Island was mostly wooded, with rocks and fallen trees littering the shore. There was no obvious place to land a boat, and certainly not a 28-footer.
I looked over the side of the boat and frowned. I could see the bottom through the clear water and there were rocks down there. I was still thirty feet from the shore but it looked like I was going to have to swim the rest of the way. Great.
I dropped the anchor and waited while it dragged on the bottom of the lake for a couple of seconds before settling. Then I took off my jeans and T-shirt, socks, and boots. When I was down to my boxers, I climbed over the edge of the boat and lowered myself into the water. It was damn cold.
Letting go of the boat, I swam for the island. I’d made the right choice not bringing the boat too close to shore; the water was shallow in places and my feet bumped against rocks.
Tendrils of weed brushed against my legs and thoughts of the monster that had swum in these waters three years ago entered my brain, making me panic. “Just stay calm,” I told myself. “That thing has gone back to wherever it came from.”
When I reached the shore, I pulled myself up out of the water and sat on the rocks for a moment, glancing back at the Princess of the Lake and the sleeping sheriff in the stern. I’d be back on board before he even knew I was gone.
I wondered how Sherry Westlake had managed to get to the island and place the Apollo Stone here. Wesley hadn’t mentioned that she’d taken a dip when he was watching her through his binoculars. Maybe she’d had a smaller boat and was able to anchor it right by the shore.
The Harbinger PI Box Set Page 39
