Page 3 of Shadow Seeking

“It goes, it goes,” I said, heading toward my office. “Is everybody here?”

“Carson and Orik are. Dante’s on the way.” She arched her eyebrows.

“Oh, he’s always ‘on the way’, wouldn’t you say?” I laughed. “Well, when he gets here, gather everybody in the breakroom and let me know.”

“Will do, boss,” Sophia said, laughing back.

Dante’s lateness had become a running joke, but he was good at his job and he was my co-founder, so I let it slide. It wouldn’t do any good to talk to him about it, he’d shrug it off in that easy way he had, and I wasn’t in the mood to argue.

“Oh,” I said, glancing back at Sophia. “Benny’s probably coming in. Give him fifty bucks on account, and tell him to pick up when I call. I’ll figure out something for him to do in a while.”

She nodded and said something, but I was already on my way down the hall on the way to my office.

The third floor had three offices, the main reception area, a breakroom, a conference room, a storage room, a powder room out front, and in the back, a full bath that included a shower. Dante and I each had our own offices, Carson and Orik shared an office, and Sophia ran the reception area. As I passed Carson and Orik’s room, I peeked in.

“Staff meeting as soon as Dante’s here,” I said.

“Hey boss,” Orik said. At six-eight, he was a bear of a man. A priest of Odin, he was a top-notch investigator as well as our brawn. With long red hair that he wore in a bushy braid, and a beard and moustache to match, he was a big, cuddly teddy bear when he was in a good mood. He also wore a 25-millimeter lapis lazuli gauge in his left ear that symbolized his connection with the one-eyed god.

“Hey, how was your weekend?” I leaned against the door and glanced over at Carson.

Carson Dreyfus was our computer geek, and he was a genius. Only 29, he was human, and he often picked up on things the rest of us overlooked. He was good with patterns, and was able to see correlations that I couldn’t.

“I read three books,” he said, staring at the computer. He was wearing a long-sleeved sweater, blue jeans, and a pair of brown loafers. Ivory, the sweater stood out against his dark brown skin. Everything about Carson was neat and tidy. His hair hung mid-back in tight box-braids that ended in glass beads his sister had made in her kiln. They were twins, though she had taken the artist’s route rather than science.

“Why am I not surprised?” I said with a laugh. “The day you come in and tell me you had a date, I’ll be astonished.”

He waved me off. “I date. Once in a while.”

“Oh yeah?” I laughed again. “Since when?”

Snorting, he swiveled in his chair and shook his head, giving me a wide, toothy grin. “Rub it in,” he said. “But I’m much happier on my own and you know it.”

I nodded. “That you are.”

I’d known Carson since I was thirty—ten years before. We hit it off instantly, though we were vastly different people. But something about the geeky germaphobe spoke to my heart. He was a loner, except for his sister, and he’d been a misfit all his life. He’d graduated with a Master’s degree in computertechnology when he was fourteen, and had been isolated all the way through college.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m heading to my office. Staff meeting as soon as Dante hauls his ass into the office.”

As I entered my office and closed the door behind me, Sophia buzzed me.

“Hey, Dante here yet?”

“No,” she said. “But we have a potential client. Someone who wants us to investigate a murder.”

I frowned. We usually left the murders to the cops. “What about the police?”

“That’s the thing. The cops say it was suicide. But Angela—the victim’s sister—says she’s sure that her sister was murdered. The dead woman’s name is Letty Hargrove, and she was the leader of one of the local Witches Guilds.”

“How did she die?”

“She went out the window of her office—on the fourth story of the Windchime Magical Academy. Nobody saw her fall, but the cops say she threw herself out the window of the clocktower building.”

I frowned. stared at the phone. “Pencil Angela in this morning, and change the staff meeting to the afternoon.” As I hung up, I had an odd feeling. Something was off about it—though I had no idea what. I leaned back and closed my eyes.

Suddenly, I found myself standing in a bright room, with a massive circular window. But a massive shadow was approaching from the east, and it loomed up and over the horizon. Frowning, I tried to see what it was, but it hid behind the clouds.

Shaken, I opened my eyes and returned to my work, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something big was coming, though I had no idea of what it was.

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