Faerie Storm, page 12
part #8 of Harbinger P.I. Series
With perks like this, Thomas wasn’t going to have any trouble getting people to work at Harbinger Academy.
“The only downside is that there’s no cell reception,” he said with a chuckle. “At least we won’t have to tell the students to put their phones away. Now, I’ll let you get acquainted with your new home while I attend to a few things in my office. Just come over to the main building when you’re ready and we’ll begin our first task.”
“All right,” she said, wondering if the bathroom had a shower. After her sudden flight from Manchester and hours spent in Thomas’s Land Rover, it would be good to freshen up.
“I’ll leave you to it, then.” He exited via the front door, which closed behind him seemingly by itself.
Felicity ascended the wide stairs to the first floor. She found the office first, a generous room equipped with a wide desk, more books, and a plush dark blue sofa that sat beneath an arched window. The view from the window showed the other buildings and the woods beyond. The trees seemed to reach all the way to the horizon. Just how big was this realm?
The room next door was a bedroom of roughly the same dimensions as Felicity’s entire house in Dearmont. Another arched window looked out over the campus and the light streaming in through the window illuminated a large, comfortable-looking bed. There was also a fireplace in here and a seating area furnished with armchairs, a long coffee table, and more bookshelves.
Built-in closets provided more space than Felicity would ever need for clothes.
She discovered the bathroom across the hallway and immediately realized that mentally questioning whether her new residence would have a shower had been ridiculous. The room—which was lit by light diffusing in through frosted windows set high in the walls—was like a professional health spa.
The floor was fashioned from smooth stone flagstones, the walls covered with tiny tiles that formed a mosaic of a lagoon on one wall and the interior of a cave with a glowing pool in its center on another.
A set of tiled steps led up to a hot tub and a conventional bathtub—which looked large enough in which to swim—sat beneath the frosted windows. A marble counter ran along one wall with two sinks built into its surface and a long mirror on the wall behind it. The far corner of the room was equipped with a variety of nozzles that far surpassed Felicity’s need for a simple shower. A set of dove gray towels waited on a rail near the counter, along with a white bathrobe.
A plain stone door led to a smaller room that contained a toilet and another sink.
If this residence was typical of what Thomas Harbinger was offering to the teaching staff at the academy, he wasn’t going to have any problems finding and keeping personnel.
Felicity undressed and placed her clothes on the marble counter before walking naked into the shower area. The console that controlled the nozzles and water flow was nothing like anything she’d seen before. It seemed more like a stone tablet than anything else. Numbers and diagrams had been carved into the stone and after a minute of inspection, Felicity had worked out which carvings indicated temperature and which controlled the showerheads.
She worked out a combination of buttons to press and soon found out that the carvings weren’t buttons at all; she only had to hold her finger above them and they glowed blue, indicating that they’d been activated.
The nozzles came to life and sprayed hot water from various directions. Felicity let her muscles relax, enjoying the sensation of the water playing over her skin. She let her mind wander over recent events and the prophecy she’d been informed of by the Coven.
If Harbinger Academy was humanity’s last hope, as the witches and Thomas had suggested it was, then she wanted desperately to be a part of that. The only thing that didn’t sit comfortably with her was not being able to tell Alec about the end-times prophecy. He was still working for the Society of Shadows, which was riddled with traitors and slowly crumbling. Surely he should be warned about his own employers.
She’d promised not to tell, though, and the dire warnings of the witches were enough incentive to make sure she kept that promise.
Besides, Alec was smart; he’d figure out the situation regarding the Society soon enough and somehow extricate himself from it before the whole thing collapsed.
A bar of soap and a small bottle of shampoo sat on a small stone shelf next to the shower console. Felicity used them to wash away the perspiration and dirt she felt she’d accumulated since going on the run from the Society and then waved her hand at the stone tablet to turn off the water.
As she donned the bathrobe, she felt more invigorated than she would after a regular shower and wondered if the water, or the shower itself, held some sort of magical rejuvenation properties.
She was surprised to find her suitcase sitting inside the bathroom door. The last time she’d seen it had been in her house in Manchester. Obviously the witches were taking care of her relocation arrangements and had somehow magicked the case here.
After selecting fresh clothes from the case—a pair of jeans and a white turtleneck sweater—she took the case to her bedroom and placed it beside the bed, wondering if the witches would be able to get hold of the rest of her clothes; the ones she’d packed in boxes for the Society to ship to Manchester from Dearmont.
That question was answered when—on impulse—she opened the closet and found the rest of her clothes hanging there.
She was even more surprised when she went downstairs and out of the front door and found her Mini parked outside the building.
Thomas was standing beside it with a grin on his face. “How’s that for an efficient moving service? You should find everything else you own in your spare rooms. As for the Society, they’re going to wonder where the hell all this stuff went to when the ship docks in England. Is everything okay with your residence? If there’s anything you’d like to change—”
“It’s perfect,” Felicity said.
“Good. Then let’s begin our first mission. Come on, we’ll use one of the lecture halls.” He walked over to the main building and Felicity followed.
Once onside, he took her along a corridor and through a door that led into a lecture hall that looked like it might belong inside any educational facility. Semi-circular rows of benches descended to a stage where a lectern had been set up along with a whiteboard and a screen.
Thomas went down to the stage and told Felicity to make herself comfortable. She took a seat on the second row and waited to hear about the mission she’d be undertaking.
“We know that at some point in the future, the realms are going to spill into each other,” Thomas began. “At that time, mankind will be vulnerable to the paranormal creatures that cross over into the Earthly realm. Harbinger Academy exists so that we can train a new order of protectors who will be skilled in magical arts that have all but vanished in the mists of time.”
Felicity nodded. She was here to be a part of that training.
“But before the realms spill into each other,” Thomas said, “there will be a period of time when the Earthly realm will be completely cut off from all magic.”
“When the Melandra Configuration spell is used to save the world,” Felicity added.
Thomas nodded. “When the Melandra Configuration is cast, all magic will cease to exist. Even the most basic magical item will become nothing more than a hunk of junk. The Earthly realm will be cut off from all the others. We don’t know how long this will last before it is reversed and the spill occurs.”
“That’s the part I don’t understand,” she told him. “If the Earthly realm is cut off from all the others and magic disappears, isn’t that what we’ve been fighting for all this time? For humans to live without the threat of paranormal danger?”
“Yes, it is.”
“So why will that situation be reversed at all? Can’t we prevent that from happening? Then we can stop the realms from spilling into each other and live happily ever after.”
“That sounds ideal, I grant you,” he said, going to the whiteboard, “but the reversal will occur to save mankind, just as the Melandra Configuration will be cast for exactly the same reason.” He picked up a marker and drew a blue circle on the whiteboard. To its right, he drew a green circle of the same size and to its left, a larger black circle.
“This is Earth in the middle,” he said, pointing at the blue circle. “At the moment, there are doorways from there to the Faerie realm.” He added dots to the diagram, connecting the blue and green circles. “And to the Shadow Land.” He added more dots to connect the blue and black circles. “And between Faerie and Shadow Land.” Placing more dots on the whiteboard, he connected all the circles.
“Not to mention various other realms such as the one we are in now,” he said, drawing a dozen smaller circles on the board. “This is the way things have always been. There is some movement between the realms but it is limited, as the doorways between Earth, Faerie, and the Shadow Land are few and mostly hidden. Now, here’s something you may not know; the Midnight Cabal has been taking over parts of Faerie as part of its war effort against the Society.”
“Yes, I know that,” Felicity said. “Alec discovered that some time ago when he helped Gloria…I mean the Lady of the Forest. She’d been kicked out of her home by Cabal invaders.”
His face fell. “Oh, you already knew.”
“Alec called the Society to let you know what was happening but you’d disappeared and he didn’t know who else he could trust with the information.”
“Oh, I see. Well, anyway, here’s the Cabal.” He scribbled a black square into the green circle that represented Faerie. “They plan to use a portal from Faerie to attack the Society, probably by stepping through it into the Society’s headquarters and assassinating everyone inside. Such a blow would destroy the Society. But the plan has a flaw; the headquarters building is shielded from magical attacks.”
“So their plan can’t work,” Felicity said.
“Not if they try to use a magical item or a spell.” He used the green marker to write Walker of Worlds over the Faerie circle. “Have you heard of these creatures?”
Remembering her folklore, Felicity nodded. “They’re an extremely rare type of Faerie being that can open portals between realms.”
“And they don’t need magic to do it,” Thomas added. “They possess a skill that allows them to cross the barriers between worlds using their minds. There’s no magic involved. I don’t know how the physics works exactly but I do know that the Cabal has been searching for a Walker so it can carry out its attack on the Society HQ. The building is protected from magical portals but any portal created by a Walker of Worlds isn’t magical.”
“So the Cabal could circumvent the Society’s defenses.” The thought of such a large-scale slaughter made her shiver. How many people would die if the Cabal managed to enter the building by surprise?
“Yes, it could,” Thomas said. “Now, add to that the fact that all magic is going to be turned off for a while. There will be no way to cross to or from the Earthly realm using any kind of magical item or spell.”
“So if the Cabal has a Walker in its employ, it will have a huge advantage,” Felicity finished for him. “Only its members will be able to pass between realms.”
“Exactly. The doors between realms will be locked to everyone else but the Cabal will have a skeleton key to unlock any of them it cares to. We can’t allow that to happen, can we?”
“No, it would be a disaster. The Cabal would be able to run roughshod over everything in its way.”
“Yes, it would,” Thomas said. “And it intends to. Its members know the prophecy about magic disappearing so they’ve been desperately trying to locate a Walker of Worlds to get the upper hand when that event occurs. Unfortunately, they’ve found one.”
Felicity felt suddenly cold. “That’s terrible.”
“It is. But the girl they’ve found didn’t know she had the ability to open portals and is in a state of shock after doing it accidentally. The Cabal doctors haven’t been able to get through to her. We need to rescue her before they find a way to control her and her powers.”
“All right,” she said. “What do we need to do?”
“The girl is in a place called Butterfly Heights. We need to break in and—”
“Butterfly Heights?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Alec and I worked a case there. We discovered it had been used by Cabal members in the ’40s. They were carrying out some sort of genetic experiments there.”
“Well it looks like they still are.”
“So how are we going to get inside and get the girl out?”
He grinned. “We have a few methods at our disposal. We need to decide on one and formulate a plan.”
“There’s something else that’s been bothering me,” she said. “The Coven told us the prophecy about magic being turned off but you said the Cabal knows the prophecy as well. Did a traitor from the Society leak the information?”
Thomas’s eyes became sad and he shook his head. “I wish that were the case. It’s preferable to the reality of the situation. When you met the Coven earlier, did you notice a gap in their circle?”
Felicity recalled a mental image of the nine witches sitting in a circle around the pool. There had been a gap between two of them but she hadn’t thought anything of it at the time.
“There used to be ten of them,” Thomas said. “The Coven was originally made up of ten members.”
Felicity frowned, confused. So where was the missing member?
“A traitor didn’t reveal the prophecy to our enemies,” Thomas said. “They’re getting their information direct from the source. The Cabal has the tenth witch.”
18
Leon and I were sitting on the porch eating pizza when Christina Flores arrived. It was getting late in the day and the sun had all but disappeared beneath the horizon, staining the underside of the clouds a dull orange before it gave way to the night completely.
A blue Jeep Renegade stopped next to my Land Rover and a lithe woman dressed in a denim jacket, white T-shirt, and blue jeans got out. She grabbed a brown paper sack from the passenger seat and sprinted through the rain to the porch, keeping her long black hair from getting too wet.
“Hey,” she said. “I brought Chinese but I see you went Italian.”
“Pull up a chair and we’ll share,” I said. “You want a beer to wash it down with?
“Hell, yeah.” She placed the sack on the plastic table and took a seat before looking from Leon to me. “Which one of you is Alec?”
“That’s me,” I said, shaking her hand. Her grip was strong and confident.
Leon introduced himself as my colleague and they shook.
“Christina,” she said. “Nice to meet you. I understand you guys can help me close the Laura Pelletier case.”
“We can,” Leon said. “Alec tells me you thought the case was closed already.”
She nodded and accepted the bottle of beer I offered her. “Yeah, as far as I knew, Laura was dead. Well, technically, she is. The real Laura I mean. The thing that’s walking around in her skin is something else entirely.”
“And you want to kill it,” I said.
She took a swallow of beer and said, “That’s my job. And since my assistant screwed up the case file, I feel I have to make things right.”
“Does your assistant do that often? Make mistakes, I mean.” Leon asked.
Christina pursed her lips for a moment, obviously thinking how best to answer the question. Her hesitation said it all. She confirmed it when she said, “Maybe they aren’t mistakes.” She lowered her voice and added, “I don’t really trust him, to be honest. The Society whisked my old assistant away to a new job and gave me this guy a couple months ago. I think he might have an ulterior motive that has nothing to do with assisting me in my job.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, aware of the similarity between her situation and my own.
She leaned forward. “You’ve heard the rumors, right? That the Society is basically being run by spies and traitors? I think my new guy has been sent to keep an eye on me for some reason.”
Leon looked at me and arched an eyebrow. “Sounds familiar.”
Christina looked at me closely. “You too?”
“I don’t know if it’s the same but my assistant was whisked away recently and replaced with someone else.” I didn’t add that Felicity had been taken away to fulfill a prophecy so that the Society could attempt to capture my father. There was only so much craziness I was willing to lay at a stranger’s door.
And as for Carlton, I didn’t think he was spying on me for the Society. I may have had that suspicion when I first met him but not any longer. “I don’t think my new guy is a spy, though,” I said.
“Well you’re lucky,” Christina said, “I hear all these rumors about stuff happening in the organization. Theft, murder, betrayal. I even heard that the Midnight Cabal is back in business after hundreds of years. Can you believe that?”
Leon and I looked at each other.
“Actually, there’s some truth to that,” I said.
Christina’s brown eyes widened. “What? Really?”
“Yeah. In fact, that’s why we’re here.”
She looked at the growing shadows around the lake as if Cabal operatives were about to leap out at us and lowered her voice even further. “The Cabal is here? In this neck of the woods?”
I nodded.
She took a swig of beer. “Tell me more. This changeling case just got a hell of a lot more interesting.”
I told her about the basics of the case from when Dan Pelletier hired me to when Laura Pelletier, aka the changeling, took us to Butterfly Heights.
“And you think the Cabal runs the place?” she asked. She’d listened with interest and now her eyes held a look that was equal parts shock and excitement.
I nodded. “We need to get Cathy out of there. She’s a Walker of Worlds—”
“Whoa! A faerie! I thought Walkers were just a legend.”
