She put the books she’d been holding back onto the shelf.

  “Aren’t you going to buy those?”

  Shaking her head, Lucy said, “It’s weird. I thought I really wanted them for research but now, I’m not so sure.” She gestured to the door. “Let’s go.”

  We pushed past the line of people. As I opened the door and Lucy stepped out, Victoria shouted to me from behind the counter. “Alec, did Devon give you your gift?”

  I nodded. “She did. Thanks.”

  “I hope it brings you lots of luck.”

  I waved my thanks and stepped out onto the snowy sidewalk, where Lucy was waiting.

  “Speaking of luck,” she said. “Isn’t it lucky that I bumped into you today?”

  “Sure, if you want to look at it that way. But since most of Dearmont is in the bookshop at the moment, the chances of us meeting were pretty high.”

  She shrugged, the movement almost lost beneath her thick, winter jacket. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. So, where are we going?”

  I looked up and down Main Street. If we walked back toward my office, we’d end up in the residential area. In the other direction lay the highway, the lake, and the woods. “How about down the hill to the lake?”

  “Sounds good.”

  We set off down the incline that led away from the stores and toward the edge of town.

  “So how’s business?” Lucy asked after we’d been walking in silence for a couple of minutes.

  “Slow,” I told her. “In fact, it’s non-existent. That’s why I’m out here in the cold instead of sitting in the office. I was going nuts staring at the same four walls every day with nothing to do.”

  My phone rang. I fished it out of my pocket and saw Bud Clarke’s name on the screen. Bud was the director of the Society of Shadows headquarters in Salem. I’d done him a favor in the past by tracking down two demons that had killed a Massachusetts PI. Bud had returned that favor by sending a clean-up crew to Butterfly Heights after I’d encountered a siren and some Cabal members there.

  “I have to take this,” I said to Lucy. I answered the call. “Bud, how can I help you?”

  “Hey, Alec.” He sounded weary. “I was wondering if you could do something for me.”

  “Sure, what is it?”

  He sighed. “My son, Ethan, is missing. No, that’s not strictly true; he isn’t answering his phone. The reason I’m calling you is because he’s in your neck of the woods. He was visiting some friends in Dearmont. There was some mention of a party, but I’m not sure where it was being held or who else was going. He’s eighteen, so I probably shouldn’t be worried that he isn’t answering his dad’s calls while he’s with his friends, but…”

  “But you want me to check that he’s okay,” I said.

  “Yeah, if you don’t mind. I’d come up there myself but, as I say, there’s probably nothing to worry about. And the roads are a nightmare at the moment.”

  “No problem,” I said. “I’ll check on him. Do you know the names of the friends he was visiting here?”

  “Yeah, he was staying with a guy named Steve Kershaw. I’m sure you’ll be able to find out where he lives.”

  “I will. Leave it with me, Bud.” I ended the call.

  “Sounds like you have a job after all,” Lucy said as I slid the phone back into my pocket.

  “Yeah, sounds like it. Well, it isn’t really a job; I just need to check on a friend’s son.”

  “Can I come? I can interview you on the way.”

  I didn’t see any reason to refuse her. She’d provide some company while I found out where Ethan Clarke was, and she’d get a glimpse into my work, albeit a very brief glimpse. “Sure. My Land Rover’s back that way.”

  We turned around and headed back up the hill.

  “Today must be your lucky day,” Lucy said.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Well, you were just telling me how you were going crazy because you had nothing to do, and now you have a case.”

  “It’s hardly a case,” I said. But the word she’d used—lucky—stuck in my head. Was there more to the sweater Devon had given me than just a rune knitted into the shoulder?

  As we passed Blackwell Books, I glanced in through the window and saw Victoria serving the line of customers. The line was shorter now that the sisters’ enchantment had been removed

  But had another spell been activated when I’d put on the sweater?

  Chapter 2

  I told Lucy what Bud Clarke had told me over the phone and added, “I need to find out where Ethan’s friends live. We’ll probably find Ethan there and then I can call Bud and let him know. You see, it isn’t really much of a case.”

  “Unless he and his friends have been taken hostage by a gang of trolls or something,” she suggested.

  I frowned at her. “I’m sure that isn’t what happened.”

  Up ahead, I saw Amy coming out of a store with a sack full of groceries. If anyone knew where Steve Kershaw lived, it would be her. She could save me some research.

  When we reached her, she was loading the sack into the back of her police pickup truck. She saw me and offered me a weak smile. She looked tired. The disappearance of her father weighed heavily on her shoulders and it had taken its toll on her.

  “Hey, Alec,” she said, her voice flat and emotionless.

  “Amy,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  She closed the truck door and shrugged. “Not good, to be honest. This is going to be my first Christmas without my dad. I guess I have to get used to that.”

  “We’ll find him,” I said. “Merlin will crawl out of whatever rock he’s hiding under soon, and we’ll be ready for him.”

  “And then what?” she asked, looking me in the eyes. “You can’t force him to give my dad’s body back.”

  “I’ll try,” I said, truthfully.

  She shook her head. “Face it, Alec, he can stay in there for as long as he wants. Meanwhile, my dad is locked away in some sort of ice prison. I’m beginning to see now why he hated PIs.”

  I had no answer to that, no words that would comfort her. “Listen,” I said, “I’m trying to find out where a someone lives. Steve Kershaw. Do you know where I can find him?”

  “Why?” she asked, narrowing her eyes suspiciously. “What do you want with him?”

  “A friend of mine asked me to check on his son. Apparently, he was staying with Steve.”

  “Is that all? Doesn’t sound like the type of case you take on. Where are the monsters?”

  “There aren’t any. Like I said, I’m just doing a favor for a friend.”

  She studied me closely for a moment, as if by doing so, she’d be able to tell if I was telling the truth. Then she sighed. “Sure, why not? Steve’s parents are in the phone book anyway. So you’d find his address easily enough. He lives on Whitman Road, in a big house with a huge arched window. You can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I was about to turn away, but I stopped myself and said, “Amy, what are you doing tomorrow? If you’re alone and you need some company…”

  “I’m working,” she said. She opened the truck door and climbed inside.

  As Lucy and I continued along the sidewalk, she said, “That wasn’t a good time to ask her for a date.”

  “I wasn’t asking her for a date,” I said. “Her mother is dead, and her father is…well, it’s complicated. I just didn’t want her to be alone, that’s all.”

  “Uh huh, you keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel better about striking out.”

  “I didn’t strike out because I didn’t ask her for a date.”

  Lucy nodded. “Of course you didn’t.” She didn’t seem convinced.

  I was beginning to wonder if bringing her along had been a bad idea.

  We got to the Land Rover and climbed in. I started the engine, dialed the heating up to max, and waited while the snow on the windshield melted into rivulets of water that cascaded down the glass.

  “Okay,” Lucy said, pulling down the zipper on her jacket and taking a notepad and pen from an inside pocket. “Tell me all about the life of a Preternatural Investigator.”

  I backed out of the parking space and steered the Land Rover onto the road. “I’m not sure there’s much to tell. I fight monsters for a living and try to help people deal with their paranormal problems.”

  She nodded and scribbled some notes onto the pad. “And how did you get into this line of work?”

  “When I was young, my mom was killed in a car crash and I went to live with my dad. He was heavily involved in the monster hunting business, so I followed in his footsteps.” The part about my mom wasn’t exactly true; I’d thought that she’d been killed in an accident, but I now knew that the crash, and her defection to the Midnight Cabal, had been a ruse. I wasn’t about to go into all that with Lucy, though, so I stuck to the story I’d been told my entire life.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, looking up from the notepad. “I didn’t know.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, turning north on Main Street. “It was a long time ago.” That wasn’t true either; although the accident had been a long time ago, I’d only recently realized that my mother was still alive. And then I’d watched as she’d rejoined her sisters in the Coven and forgotten entirely about my dad and me.

  “So what kind of training did you have to undertake before you could become a PI?” Lucy asked.

  I had a vague idea that Whitman Road was in the more upmarket part of Dearmont, but I wasn’t certain, so I turned on the GPS and typed in the street name. I was right; it was located a couple miles north of town.

  “Hand-to-hand combat,” I told Lucy. “Training with different weapons. Learning the lore that surrounds various creatures. Ancient spells and rituals. How to recognize paranormal activity. That kind of thing.”

  “Uh huh.” She made more notes. “So you’re equipped to deal with any monster that crosses your path?”

  “Yeah, that’s the idea.” In reality, though, I’d met monsters for which the training hadn’t prepared me at all. Mister Scary was still at large. Merlin was walking around in Sheriff Cantrell’s body. I’d dealt a blow to the Cabal by destroying one of its outposts in Faerie, but the organization was still out there, lurking in every shadow.

  “So how do you get clients? Do you just wait for them to come to you or do you seek them out?”

  “I wait. They come to the office, seeking my services, when they need my help.”

  “In your line of work, you must get a lot of weird people coming through the door.”

  “I sometimes need to make a judgement about what they tell me. Sometimes people attribute a paranormal cause to mundane events.”

  She wrote that down and said, “So you have to be a good judge of people as well as being able to fight monsters.”

  “Yeah. That comes from meeting people in their time of need. By the time my clients come to me, they’ve usually exhausted every other avenue of help and are desperate.”

  “You’re their last resort?”

  “That’s the way it usually goes.” We were leaving town now, heading north through the driving snow.

  Lucy fell silent for a moment while she read over her notes.

  I saw the sign for Whitman Road ahead and slowed down. Not that I was going fast in the first place; the road was covered with snow and ice and I’d maintained a steady speed all the way here. So, by applying the brakes, I was merely bringing the Land Rover’s speed down from slow to even slower.

  Whitman Road was a short stretch of road with large, expensive-looking houses sitting a long way back, behind snow-covered lawns that were at least as long as a football pitch.

  “Arched window,” Lucy said, pointing past me to a house on the left. “That must be the place.”

  I looked through my window at the distant house. Its frontage was dominated by a large arched window that stretched from the first floor to the second. I steered the Land Rover onto the lengthy driveway and drove up to the house, noting the lack of tire tracks in the snow ahead of us. It didn’t look like anyone had come to the house or left it today.

  A dark green Lexus and a crimson Porsche were parked outside, though, so it looked like someone was at home. With any luck, I’d find Ethan Clarke and his buddies inside.

  I parked by the front door and Lucy and I got out of the Land Rover. The house had looked big from the road but now that we were standing so close, it looked imposing. The huge arched window looked down at us like a baleful eye.

  Lucy strode beneath the porch to the front door, where a knocker shaped like a lion’s head with a steel ring hanging from its mouth waited. She lifted the ring and used it to rap sharply on the door three times.

  While we waited, the cold wind whipped snow beneath the porch and into our faces.

  “Maybe no one’s home,” I suggested after a couple of minutes had elapsed and I couldn’t feel my nose anymore.

  Undeterred, Lucy rapped sharply on the door again, this time slamming the steel ring against the wood with more force.

  After a couple of seconds, a female voice inside the house shouted, “Okay, I’m coming!”

  “She sounds pissed,” Lucy said.

  The door opened and a dark-haired young woman in a bathrobe peered out at us. She looked no older than eighteen or nineteen. Her eyes and nose were red. “Who are you?” she asked. She sniffed and took a tissue from a pocket in the robe before using it to wipe her nose.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said. “I’m looking for Ethan Clarke. Is he here?”

  “No, he isn’t.” She started to close the door.

  “Do you know where he is?” I asked quickly.

  “He went to the party last night with Steve,” she said. “I was supposed to go too, but I’m sick. So while they’ve been drinking and having fun, I’ve been watching TV alone.”

  “Are you Steve Kershaw’s girlfriend?” Lucy asked.

  The girl screwed her face up and looked at Lucy as if she’d just said the dumbest thing in the world. “What? No, I’m his sister. Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Lucy. Lucy Hawthorne.”

  “Well, I don’t know you, so you should leave now.” She turned her attention to me and looked at me through red-rimmed eyes. “You too.”

  “The party,” I said, before she closed the door. “Do you know where it is?”

  “Of course I do. It’s at the old Dawson place. They’re probably snowed in up there and that’s why they haven’t come back yet. Either that or they’re still hung over and can’t face driving home.”

  “These aren’t their cars?” I asked, indicating the Lexus and the Porsche.

  “The Porsche is mine,” she said. “The Lexus is Ethan’s. They went to the party in Steve’s Cherokee. Do you have all the information you need now? Why are you looking for Ethan, anyway?”

  “His dad’s worried about him,” I told her.

  “That must be nice. My parents are in Florida, visiting my grandmother. Merry Christmas, right? It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have this damn flu.” She sneezed as if to emphasize the point and added, “If you see Steve, tell him to get back here. I’m bored as hell. I’ve called him, like, a thousand times but I just get his voicemail.”

  “I’ll tell him,” I said. “The Dawson place is north of here, right?”

  “Yeah, the spooky house on the hill. I told Steve the place would be better for a Halloween party than a Christmas party, but Dave had organized the whole thing and got permission from the owner or something.”

  “Dave?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Dave Briggs. He’s kind of a big deal at our school. He organized the party and invited maybe twenty or thirty people. Including me, of course. I was supposed to go with Tricia and Marcia, and Rob Brooks was going to be there.” She sighed wistfully. “He probably met someone else there. I’ve lost my chance thanks to this.” She pointed at her runny nose before wiping it with the tissue.

  “If I see Steve, I’ll tell him to come home,” I told her. “Thanks.”

  She gave us a thin smile and closed the door.

  As we walked back to the Land Rover, Lucy said, “So, are we going to the spooky house on the hill? It sounds like your kind of place.”

  “I guess we are,” I said, opening the driver’s door and getting in behind the wheel. “Ethan and his buddies are probably just sleeping it off, and that’s why he’s not answering his dad’s calls, but I want to make sure that’s the reason he’s incommunicado.”

  “Maybe the place is so remote that there’s no cell signal,” Lucy suggested.

  “Yeah, could be.” I started the engine and drove back along the driveway to the street. When we reached the main road, we headed north.

  “The Dawson place is ten miles along this road,” Lucy said, staring at her phone. “It’s an old house that used to belong to a wealthy family who lost their fortune in the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The house fell into a state of disrepair until one of the modern day Dawsons fixed it up as a vacation rental.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the "old Dawson place," which sounded like a setting from a Scooby Doo episode, came into view. Through the snow, I could see a hill in the distance, and upon the hill sat a squat shape that I assumed was the house.

  "There should be a road somewhere up ahead," Lucy said, consulting her phone.

  We reached the road and drove along it toward the house. The virgin snow that lay over the road like a pristine blanket told me that no none had come this way recently. None of the partygoers seemed to have left the house yet.

  A secondary road that was marked by a wooden sign that read Dawson House led away from the main road and snaked up a steep incline.

  As we topped the hill, the house appeared in front of us.

  The place was old. Whatever improvements had been made to the place, they weren't visible from the outside. The house looked weary, as if it was tired of standing on this hill and wanted nothing more than to slide down the incline and into the trees.

  Moss and ivy covered most of its walls. Some of the boards that covered the walls were peeling away. And the front porch stood at a crooked angle.

 

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