Familiar Stranger Read online

  #021 Familiar Stranger

  (07-2007)

  Bewitching 01

  by

  Michele Hauf

  Michele Hauf - Bewitching 01 – Nocturne 021 Familiar Stranger (07-2007)

  WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN THE ONE YOU LOVE MAY BE YOUR

  MORTAL ENEMY? Recruited by a secret paranormal organization to hunt demons, Jack Harris never guessed the revenge he sought for his partner's death would be this complicated. Jack's worldview is black-and-white—until he is ordered to follow Mersey Bane, a beautiful woman who is also a familiar with shape-shifting abilities. Mersey belongs to the Cadre—a peaceful hermetic order that captures and studies Otherworldly Entities—which is at odds with Jack's organization. As Jack delves deeper into the inner workings of the Cadre, he finds himself drawn to Mersey like a moth to a flame.

  She may challenge all his beliefs, but she brings color and passion to his world. Jack doesn't know whether what he feels for Mersey is love or lust. But if he doesn't figure it out soon, they may become the hunted instead of the hunters.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-0439-7

  FAMILIAR STRANGER

  Copyright © 2007 by Michele Hauf

  To: Marty Enerson and Vicki Cortese

  Special thanks to Helen Taylor, across the ocean in England, who made suggestions for proper usage of some British terms. Any mistakes, of course, are my own.

  I am so pleased to have been able to work on the DARK

  ENCHANTMENTS series with my friends Nina Bruhns, Cynthia Cooke and Pat White. Cheers to you, ladies! Here’s to many more wonderful years of friendship.

  Four hundred years ago a secret, hermetic order was created by the first Earl of St. Yve and a handful of initiates who pledged their lives to keep the world safe from evil paranormal beings. Ever since, the Cadre has been dedicated to maintaining the delicate balance between the mortal and Dark realms through research and observation of otherworldly entities. Seldom does the Cadre interfere. But not all mortals seek peaceful understanding between the realms. In recent decades, an opposing force has been created by the British Security Service. This covert group, called P-Cell, has but one directive: destroy paranormal creatures of all kinds.

  As the two organizations fight faithfully for their separate causes, unbeknownst to either of them the dark forces of evil gather, preparing to overtake the mortal realm….

  Prologue

  Shrewsbury , England

  J ack Harris didn’t like his life right now.

  This morning he’d overheard his folks whispering about Dad’s lung cancer. Treatment could prove more deadly than waiting out an inevitable death, the doctor had informed Dad. Mum had started to weep.

  She’d put on a smile as Jack entered the room. He’d faked a yawn and rubbed his eyes, mostly to hide that he’d been crying, too. Mum had placed a parcel into his hands and patted him on the head. From Aunt Sophie in Scotland—that particular aunt that his mother always whispered about, but never spoke her name aloud.

  Yesterday had been Jack’s eighth birthday.

  Now, loping across the hay meadow toward the forest, Jack thrust up the glass gazing ball Aunt Sophie had sent him. The glass though marred with a few murky flaws, captured the sky and fit the whole world into the ball.

  Plunging into a soft thicket of grass, Jack rolled onto his back and held the globe high, zooming it to the left, then to the right, as if it was an airplane cutting through the clouds.

  “Wager I could make a wish on this,” he said, to no one but the crickets chirping near his head.

  Was his aunt a witch? Had this been one of her magic balls? He didn’t believe in magic, or all that faery rot his mum often whispered about. But maybe. Could it make his dad better?

  Holding it high stretched out the captured sunlight in brilliant white beams. What if these powerful beams were inside his father’s lungs? Surely something so strong and important as the sun could cure his dad.

  “Whoa!”

  Startled at the press of paws across his chest, Jack dropped the ball. He pushed up onto his elbows just as a cat leaped from his ribs and pounced off into the wilds.

  “Blimey! A black cat stepped right on me.”

  And while his mum would have Jack pay heed to a black cat crossing his path, Jack scrambled to his knees and parted the grass to observe the critter’s scampering trail across the clearing.

  Brilliant. To have a cat traipse right across you! And a black one, at that.

  Jack groped for the glass ball and clutched it to his chest. But the real spectacle had just begun. The cat transformed—within twenty human strides of where Jack sat—into a woman.

  Jack huffed out a gasp. “No bloody way.”

  His jaw fell wide open, and his eyes grew even wider. His eight-year-old heart pounded faster than after a good bogeyman scare that found him huddled at the head of his bed, his feet tucked under the blankets so nothing could nibble on them.

  He rubbed his eye with a fist. He couldn’t be seeing right. And yet, he’d seen it with his own eyes. The cat had changed to a woman. Fur had melted away to reveal human limbs that had stretched and grown to support an upright-standing woman. Long, shiny black hair fell like a mourning veil to her waist. Skinny legs tromped across the clearing. And…she didn’t wear clothes!

  Jack averted his gaze to the ball in his hand. Aunt Sophie had written on his birthday card that the gift would “spark his imagination.” No mention of magic. Had it made the cat change to a woman? When Jack again cast his gaze across the clearing, the woman paused and turned toward him—she had a huge belly—and then she winked at him. A winking, fat, naked woman!

  Too astonished to be frightened, Jack swallowed. Suddenly, something dark appeared in the sky above the woman’s head.

  “Watch out!” Jack yelled. His fingers clenched about the ball. “Lady!

  Look!”

  Jack’s world suddenly tilted into deep dread. Yes, even more dreadful than knowing his dad was not in a good way. Every piece of him shook, from his freckled ears down to his knobby knees.

  Big as a bull, the monster hovered. It was red. It had horns. It was going to hurt the woman, Jack felt it deep inside, like when he knew he was going to get a switching for staying up in the lookout tree past suppertime.

  He’d never run from the switch. Nor had he feared it all that much.

  “No!” Standing up and stretching back his arm, Jack threw the glass ball through the sky.

  The woman noticed the monster, let out a cry and bent at the waist. The growling, horned thing lunged. The glass ball landed on its target, right between the monster’s eyes.

  And Jack, overwhelmed with shock, horror and the excited elation of making his target, collapsed backward onto the summer grass. He hadn’t fainted. Only girls faint. But he did close his eyes for a moment. And when he opened them, the red monster hovered above him. Something smelled like the rotten eggs his mum had found in the henhouse last week. Yellow eyes took his measure. A foul string of spittle dangled from its sharp teeth.

  Feeling his bones stiffen, Jack opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He wanted to cry blue murder. Or better yet, lift his arm, so he could punch the creepy in the snout.

  A long black tongue snaked out from the monster. The touch of it burned Jack’s chest. He barely had a moment to realize it made contact with him before the monster vanished.

  The next thing Jack was aware of was something soft touching his cheek. He opened his eyes. She knelt over him. The naked woman.

  “Jack the Demon Frightener,” she declared with a smile. He felt the cool weight of the glass ball press onto his spread palm.

  “You preserved my freedom. Thank you, Jack. I will not forget your bold act of valor.”

  And awa
y she skipped, her giggle like sunshine sparkling on a pond. Jack slapped a hand over his chest. His finger went to the small hole burned through his Sunday shirt. Mum would bring out the switch, him ruining a good shirt and all.

  But it didn’t matter. He’d frightened off a real demon. Wicked!

  Twenty-four years later…

  Jack Harris stormed through his front door, tugging the ill-fitted black suit jacket from his shoulders. He tossed it onto the couch and searched the afternoon shadows of the stark living room. Inside him, a storm raged.

  Jack had spent four years with MI5, and before that, six years in the British Security Service. While in MI5, he and Monica Price had partnered for two memorable years. And now she was dead. The funeral had affected him in unexpected ways. It had torn through the numb that had crept into his bones. Every tear he’d tried to hold back since her death had escaped as he’d sat in the car park below his building. Unspoken emotion clawed for release, yet, alone in his car, he hadn’t had anyone to talk to. So instead, he’d pounded the steering wheel with his fists.

  He should have told her how he felt about her.

  You didn’t have time to love her, mate. Or is it you lacked the courage to love her?

  Either was a poor excuse. He did love her. Had loved her. Love, he did not deserve.

  Had he been the one to bring bad luck into Monica’s world? Bad luck? Hell, the incident resulting in her death had involved no luck whatsoever.

  Life had been swimming along fine until Jack had received that package two weeks earlier. Where was it?

  He sighted the parcel his mum had sent him. After cleaning out the old house in Shrewsbury—she’d purchased a home in LasVegas, of all places

  —she’d sent along a box of things from Jack’s childhood she suspected he might want. He’d sorted through the contents, tossing the dirty print-smeared football cards, handing the collectible Marvel comic books to the kids down the hall and leaving the insignificant detritus from his past still nestled in the packing material. He’d ignored the most obvious evidence of his childhood. Until now. Lunging to the side of the couch, Jack reached into the box. His palm fit about the cool glass ball, as round and hefty as a grapefruit. This…this thing. It had come back to haunt him.

  “Bloody bit of bad luck.”

  He threw hard, backing the force with anger and guilt and, most prevalent, the hunger for revenge.

  The ball hit the wall with a thud and busted through the plaster board. White dust spumed out and settled onto the hardwood floor. Suspended there, it had fit itself halfway into the wall, a colorless eye that had shown Jack remarkable horrors.

  “Sodding…bloody—ah!” Jack released the last bits of anger in a throataching cry. He’d thought he’d left the eerie bad luck behind with his childhood nightmares. Now, it had begun again.

  Two hours later, Jack received a call from Dirk Marcolf. The man identified himself as deputy director for a black ops division of MI5.

  “Harris,” Marcolf said over the phone. “I’ll need you to come in for a thorough debriefing.”

  “Already been debriefed, Mr. Marcolf.” Jack had given it all up during debriefing. Shell-shocked, he hadn’t had control over the words as they’d spilled from his mouth. He’d said all he could say about the horrific event.

  “Sorry, Harris, but you’ve seen things.”

  “Things I’d like to erase from my brain.”

  “And you’ll probably have questions.”

  “You can’t begin to imagine.”

  “Oh, I think I can. Ever hear of P-Cell, Harris?”

  “No.”

  “Good. That’s us. And tomorrow morning, you’re joining the team.”

  “But what if—”

  “We chase monsters, Harris. And if my guess is right, I know you’re going to want in on that action.”

  For the longest moment Jack breathed into the receiver. He didn’t need to roll over the words Marcolf had just said. He understood them perfectly. And he didn’t need to think on his reaction.

  “See you in the morning.”

  Chapter 1

  London —three months later

  J ack Harris had committed to this mission of destruction. The road, not up from his indiscretions, but one that threatened to parallel it all the way to hell.

  He had been given a license to kill. Not mortals, but instead, the dark denizens from another world. A world called the dark realm. A world he’d never imagined to exist months before now. Yet, for all purposes, it had once touched him.

  Since joining—make that being recruited—into P-Cell, the covert paranormal section of MI5, life had not been the same. Normal people did not dream about demons, or stalk the hallway in the middle of the night and reconnoiter the loo before taking a leak on the off chance a demon might be clinging up on the ceiling.

  Yet, in all his years with the British Security Service, and then working as a spook for MI5, he’d never before felt quite like this. Confident and hungry for the kill.

  Sure, confidence was second nature to Jack, but to hunger for destruction? Such an appetite was new, yet not unwelcome. Jack hefted the M4 carbine, positioning the butt of the rifle upon the crook of his elbow. A salt grenade was locked into position. He’d only get the one shot.

  The electromagnetic-field gauge he held in his left hand registered a faint blip. Something occupied the cavernous walls of this building. And he knew it wouldn’t be all ducks and bunnies.

  Slowly, he took the iron stairs in the abandoned warehouse, twisting at the waist to ensure the hand-size EMF gauge could pick up readings to cover his periphery.

  A flick of his finger switched to GPS function. This model had been designed specifically to pick up the electromagnetic resonance of ley lines and map them on screen. A network of ley lines stretched across the earth, meeting and aligning at key mystical sights and resonated with a magnetic energy that attracted the otherworldly. Demons always came through to the mortal realm via a ley line. Combat boots tread stealthily. His stripped-down gear shifted silently upon his sturdy frame—flame-resistant black shirt and trousers, Dragon Skin vest, and at his belt a night-vision scope, combat knife and salt spray (pepper proved ineffective against the creatures he stalked). And he carried a silver dagger tipped with a UV cartridge, if by chance he stumbled on to a thirsty vampire.

  In the past two weeks, Jack had gone out nightly on patrol. Direct orders from the deputy director of P-Cell. The paranormal activity in this area had increased measurably, of late. And the kicker? The hot spot was just up the road from his flat in Bermondsey. Much too close for comfort.

  He had embraced the job at P-Cell with an angry heart and a keen eye. He was still fighting terrorists—though now they were otherworldly. Demons were terrorists with uglier faces and supernatural methods. The challenge was that all bad guys had faces a man could read and react to—but not all demons did.

  As a demon hunter, his objective was to shoot first, ask questions never.

  P-Cell’s array of weapons kicked arse. He used the M4 more often than he utilized his martial skills. Didn’t get to physically kick a lot of demon arse because he still hadn’t figured out where, exactly, that portion of the demon was on their strange anatomy.

  Well, some, he could. In his short stint, Jack had learned the variety of demons was vast and varied. No two were alike, though they were classified into two genuses. Daemon sapiens, the modern demons were more refined, wise and always appeared in human form. The daemon incultus were the ancient, nastier breed that Jack preferred to hunt. The latter usually appeared in demonic form, which worked for him. Jack could spar with them until they tired of the daft mortal’s antics, and then the demon would attempt to take him out with a lash of burning tongue or some nasty exhalation of fumes or slash of talons. Confrontations kept Jack on his toes. He’d been hospitalized briefly last month for a deep slash through his kidney. Good thing he had two of those.

  According to the GPS, he stood on top of a ley line.
The electromagnetic field meter had a six milliguass range and picked up virtually all demon activity within shouting distance.

  Something was in this building.

  Of course, the somethings never showed themselves until Jack was close enough to be slashed, spit on, knocked down or all of the above. Which is why he wore Dragon Skin, a new scaled form of Kevlar that provided ease of movement as well as protection. Had to protect that last precious kidney.

  Hell, he had to protect himself, because he wasn’t going down until the dread demon that had murdered the woman he loved met the same bloody end.

  The encounter with that particular demon had not been his first. No, Jack had recognized Monica’s slayer. Last time he had seen that nasty thing, he’d been eight years old.

  These days he wasn’t tossing about silly glass balls. Now he relied on semiautomatic firepower.

  Reaching the top of the third-floor stairs, Jack placed the palm of his left hand over his chest—there, where the subtle ache beneath the small scar never stopped.

  Tonight, it was him or the demon. Take no prisoners.

  The air was charged with the inexplicable, and it sent prickles up Mersey Bane’s spine. She intended to get lucky tonight. She needed a fix.

  Long sinuous strides moved her down a quiet pavement that paralleled the Thames. The moon waxed gibbous as the night crept up on morning. Arms bent and hands held before her waist, she gripped the witching rods lightly, thumbs pointing skyward. The handles were ash columns, a hardwood resistant to influence. The copper rods, bent in an L-shape—

  the short length inside the handles—moved slightly with the rocking motion of her steps.

  Two hours earlier, back at base, Mersey had received instructions to track down the leak in paras traced to this Bermondsey neighborhood. Paras were entities that were not human or mortal and usually apported here from the dark realm. Demons, faeries, elves, weres, the whole shebang.

  The common man would be surprised to know how many nonhuman entities walked this earth. It was Mersey’s job to keep that influx to a minimum, utilizing as little violence as possible. She loved tracking and capturing. Demons were her specialty, for reasons beyond her control—