Hibernian Charm (An Occult Detective Urban Fantasy) (Hibernian Hollows Book 2) Read online

  HIBERNIAN CHARM

  A HIBERNIAN HOLLOWS NOVEL

  Dean F. Wilson

  Hibernian Charm © 2017 Dean F. Wilson

  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  HIBERNIAN CHARM

  An occult detective in Dublin, Ireland gets an unusual case that keeps pointing back to her.

  Melanie Rosen hasn't settled for much, but her travels have brought her to Dublin, Ireland, where she works for the Occult Investigations Unit, exploring the strange and unknown.

  Her fiery disposition and tendency to probe where she's not wanted keep her in the office with the paperwork, or chasing cases that don't seem to have an answer.

  Then she gets a new case, where a killer slowly paralyses his victims, and leaves a calling card behind: a charm. Her Romani-Irish roots might come in useful, but the more she probes this case, the more she doesn't like the answer. All the clues keep pointing back to her.

  “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

  — W.B. Yeats

  In ancient times, the Romans called Ireland Hibernia. Much of the magic and mystery of the Emerald Isle has been lost over the years, but those with a second sight can see the secret life, the hidden world, where the line between myth and reality blurs. If you can see that, you've entered the Hibernian Hollows. Getting out is not so easy.

  Chapter 1 – Calling Card

  She showed up out of the blue. No name. No identity. She was just a child, a girl of six or seven. And she was paralysed, unable to move or talk—unable to tell anyone who or what had done this to her.

  The only clue was a small charm bracelet on her left wrist, with all but one of the charms missing. It was like a calling card, but right now no one knew who to call. It would be just another case in the Unexplained Files.

  Melanie Rosen spent a lot of time on those cases. Resources were tight in the Occult Investigations Unit—the OIU, or “the Vowels,” as it was often called—and the Irish police, An Garda Síochána, didn't like delving too deeply into the strange and unknown. There was a different government agency for that, and people spoke of it in hushed tones, if they even spoke of it at all.

  Melanie was given the “dud” cases, the ones that weren't just cold, but getting colder. It was a kind of balance for her hot-headed nature, a way to keep her out of trouble. They could have just sacked her, but then she'd be free to follow her own lines of investigation. They had to keep an eye on her. That was the funny thing about all of this. There were a lot of eyes watching, and not all of them were human.

  But this case was different. This was one of the few times where they picked her for her expertise.

  “You know charms, right?” Don, head of the OIU, asked. Life hadn't been good to him, but then he hadn't been good to himself either. He was still smoking those same cigars that cracked his skin and yellowed his teeth.

  “A bit, yes.” She never liked Don, and she never tried to hide her contempt.

  “A bit?” he said, looking over his glasses. She was taller than him, so he couldn't look down on her, but this was his way of doing it anyway. And if he couldn't do it with his eyes, he'd do it with his voice. “I thought that was right up your alley, what with you being a gypsy and all.”

  She cocked her head, letting the brown curls and hair charms roll off her shoulder. “Not really keen on that term.”

  “Well, get used to it, hun, 'cause it might be one of you lot who's behind all this.”

  She froze, the fire in her extinguished. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, this is the second time we've had someone show up like this, wearing nothing but a charm. We didn't think much of the first. I mean, it was likely just a coincidence. But twice? Nah. We've been in this business too long to not notice the beginning of a pattern.”

  He held his fist out, face down, and she instinctively cupped her hands in response. She heard the chink as he dropped two charms into her palms. The first was a Hamsa, a protective symbol in the shape of a hand, but bound tightly in cord. The second was a filled-in vesica, designed to suggest a blinded eye, and so protect against the Evil Eye. She didn't really get what they meant in this context. If anything, they hadn't worked to protect the victims.

  “Both different,” Don said. He wiped his hands on his shirt, as if he didn't like even touching those trinkets. “Now, someone who hasn't been in the police business for thirty years might say: doesn't that make it look more like coincidence? And they'd be right. It makes it look that way, and that might be the intent.”

  “Or the perpetrator wants to make a full set,” Melanie replied.

  “What's that?”

  “They were on charm bracelets, right?”

  “Yeah. We just kept the charms. Figured the bracelet didn't mean anything.”

  “But maybe it does. How many attachments were there?”

  “Attachments?”

  “For charms. How many of them were empty?”

  “God knows. Five or six, I think. We'd have to check.”

  “If I were a betting woman, I'd wager that our man is looking to make a whole set. If there are six attachments total, then we've got four more to go.”

  “Or woman,” Don said.

  Melanie raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, you're all about equality, right? Could be a lass.”

  “True,” she replied. “Whoever it is, we need to find them before they do this to anyone else. It seems to me like the perpetrator is just getting started. Speaking of which, do we even know what the actual cause of the paralysis is?”

  “No. The tests have ruled out anything medical.”

  “Anything scientific,” Melanie mused.

  “That's why it came to us. They think it might be some kind of magic. Just your cup of tea, eh? Maybe you can read the leaves. It'll keep you and Eckhart busy, anyhow. Probably best for you.”

  She indulged him with a forced smile.

  There was a knock on the door, and one of the junior detectives poked her head through. Melanie hadn't seen this one before. The OIU was a bit like a revolving door. People left just as quickly as they came. Melanie was one of the few who stuck it out, who wanted answers.

  “Sorry, sir,” the new detective said, “but you asked for updates on the girl.”

  “Yes?”

  “She's regained some movement in her right hand. We think she might be coming out of it.”

  They rushed down to the medical ward, a facility you only got to see if there were some “anomalies,” and boy were there lots of those. They saw the girl in a hospital bed, inside a sealed globe. The entire room was a stark white, the kind of white that wasn't comforting, but rather suggested you were being experimented on. If the girl wasn't paralysed, she might have scre
amed.

  “Why is she in that thing?” Melanie asked, pointing to the globe.

  “For her protection,” the nearby doctor said. He looked out of his depths here, and seemed to be rifling through papers on a clipboard, more out of habit than intent. He wouldn't find any explanation for the girl's condition there. He'd be better off looking in an old library, under the section marked “Occult.”

  “And for ours,” Don added. He shrugged. “Just in case.”

  He picked up a microphone from the table. “Can you talk?” he asked.

  “She can't talk yet,” the doctor said.

  “Give me that,” Melanie said, tearing the microphone from him. “Sweetheart, we're here to help. We need to know who did this to you. We need to find them before they do it to anyone else. Do you understand?”

  The girl couldn't nod yes or no. She couldn't even blink. But she could move her hand. That was about all she could do.

  “We need to know who did this to you,” Melanie repeated.

  The girl pointed, and Melanie almost dropped the microphone. She was pointing at her.

  Chapter 2 – Pointing Fingers

  Melanie had seen a lot of things in her ten years with the OIU, though they'd tried hard to keep her from seeing it all. She took a lot in her stride. She had to. Yet, something about that girl put her on edge. It could've just been a harmless gesture, but in Melanie's world, most things had a meaning. She didn't like what this one implied.

  “She pointed at me,” Melanie told her police partner, Toby Eckhart. He was a bit more than just a colleague, a bit of a consort, a confidante. If he'd had his way, he might've been even more.

  Eckhart tutted. “No, she didn't.”

  “I swear to God, Eckhart, she did.”

  “You're reading into things, Mel. She can barely move a finger. She was probably just … I don't know, stretchin' or something. Or she was pointing at the door. Or the wall. Or anywhere. You can't make a case with something like this.”

  Eckhart was a sceptic, which was saying something when it came to all the occult phenomena they experienced in the Vowels. While some jumped at the thought of a tap on the wall being the sign of a ghost, he was always first to attribute it to some logical cause. He didn't quite gel with many of the other detectives because of that. Many joined the OIU because they wanted to believe. Melanie already believed. She wanted to fix things.

  “I don't know why I told you, anyway,” Melanie said.

  Eckhart grinned. “Because you love me?”

  “Now who's reading into things?”

  “Hey, what's a partner for? You'd be lost here without me. You wouldn't want to be Don's partner, would you?”

  Melanie laughed. “Like that would ever happen. He's had it in for me ever since I joined. Moved me twice. Gave me dud case after dud case. Christ, he gave me this one with the girl.” She paused, waiting for Eckhart to crack a smile and point with both index fingers to himself. “Yeah, and he gave me you.”

  “So not all bad then.”

  “Heh.”

  There was a pause, one of those awkward ones that happened so often between them. Those days should have been long gone now. They were on the same team for two years now, and sometimes it still felt like they just got saddled with one another last week.

  “So, you're dropping this whole thing about the girl pointing at you, right?”

  “Right,” Melanie said reluctantly. She knew she probably should. Hell, she should probably drop the whole case and go back to ticking boxes. But the way that girl looked at her—like she'd seen her before. A shiver wormed its way up Melanie's spine.

  “You're not gonna drop it, are you?” Eckhart asked, running his hand through his hair.

  “No, probably not.”

  Eckhart rolled his eyes. “You're too predictable.”

  “And you're not?”

  “Hey, I'm as spontaneous and surprising as they come.”

  Melanie laughed. “Yeah, I'll believe that when I see it.”

  The laughter died down, letting the awkward silence emerge again. They glanced at each other and gave those forced smiles. It wasn't so bad before he proposed, before he tried to make them partners in a different sense. He took rejection like a champ, didn't make a fuss about it, but it still felt weird since then. Some things just couldn't be unsaid.

  “So,” he said, piercing the silence. “Where do we start?”

  Melanie paced around the room. “We don't have a lot to go on.”

  “What do we have?”

  “Two victims, and two charms.”

  “Two?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, let's go visit number one then,” Eckhart suggested.

  “He's dead.”

  Eckhart shrugged. “We work in the Vowels, Mel. Death hasn't stopped us before.”

  Chapter 3 – The Original Victim

  “So, where is our … uh, original victim?” Eckhart asked.

  Melanie bit her lip. She knew he wasn't going to like this. “Downstairs.” That could have been anywhere, of course, but in the OIU, “downstairs” only meant one thing.

  “We're not seriously going there, are we?”

  “Why not?”

  “That's where they … do experiments.”

  “That's only a rumour.”

  Eckhart raised an eyebrow. “Is it?”

  “It doesn't matter what they do. That's where our clue is.”

  “Our person, you mean.”

  “To be honest, Eckhart, I'm not sure he's much of anything any more, or won't be for long.”

  “I guess we better get moving then.”

  * * *

  They headed downstairs, using the lift. You had to have a special pass for this, and Don gave it to Melanie with glee. Perhaps he thought she could get up to less trouble down there. She knew all too well he'd be wrong.

  The lift shook as it descended. It seemed an awfully long way, like going to Hell. The numbers of the floors no longer registered. They stood silent, staring at the sealed door until it chugged to a halt. A friendly chime preceded the doors opening. The noise was at odds with the other, stranger sounds in the distance, muffled by concrete and steel.

  “The Bowels of the Vowels,” Eckhart mused. He said it a little quieter. You said everything quieter down here. “You're lucky I hate doing paperwork.”

  “We all do.”

  “Well, then you're lucky I hate it more than the thought of this place.”

  Eckhart might have been the sceptic, but he wasn't sceptical about what they did down here. Melanie couldn't say much to disprove the rumours. Any answer she had was quashed by a cry of pain from behind some sealed metal door with frosted windows.

  A doctor was waiting for them at the end of the corridor. “Doctor” might have been a loose term. Melanie had seen all sorts go downstairs: researchers, politicians, magicians, and even monsters. They preferred different names, of course. Vampires, werewolves, fey. To Melanie, most of them were monsters all the same. Some of them were even human.

  “Patient 109-3A?” the doctor inquired.

  “The paralysis victim,” Melanie said.

  “That's the one. Follow me.”

  They followed him through the maze of tunnels. They stopped being corridors after a while, shifting to metal tubes. Some of them were encrusted with seals and talismans, glowing faintly.

  “To protect us,” the doctor said, when he noticed their stares.

  “From what?” Eckhart asked. Melanie caught his gaze, and knew he wished he hadn't asked at all.

  “You don't want to know.”

  The doctor led them to one of the generic sealed rooms, drawing a symbol on a keypad, which let them in. They were immediately taken aback by the sight of a naked man suspended in a glass tube, completely frozen and wide-eyed.

  “Jesus,” Eckhart blurted.

  “Is he … still alive?” Melanie asked. Don had told her the first guy was dead. He might as well have been.

  “Barely
,” the doctor said. “He has some vitals. He seems to fade in and out of consciousness. He was able to twitch his nose when he first came in. No longer.”

  Melanie circled around the glass tube. “Have you been able to identify a cause?”

  “No. This doesn't match any of the usual causes for something like this.”

  Eckhart grimaced. “The usual causes?”

  “Poisons, diseases, exposure to certain paranormal influences, and so forth. There's no obvious sign of anything, no crackle of energy to suggest magic, no markings to suggest a foreign invasion of any kind. It just … is.”

  Eckhart sauntered up to the glass, pressing his face close to it, close enough that he could stare into the man's panicked eyes.

  “God,” he said. “I can only imagine what he must be going through. Can't you, like, do something?”

  “Without a cause, we can't cure him.”

  “No. I mean … like, maybe … I don't know, put him out of his misery.”

  “That would be unethical.”

  “And this isn't?” Eckhart gestured to the tube.

  “He's valuable research.”

  “He's a human being, for Christ's sake.”

  “And not everyone in this world is,” the doctor said. “The sooner we know our weaknesses, the sooner we can devise ways to plug those gaps. We don't want to be caught on the back foot when it comes to these … others.”

  “You're right there,” Eckhart said, “but couldn't you at least get him some clothes?”

  “We can't have any interferences.”

  “Well,” Melanie said, “thanks for your time.”

  The doctor didn't even give a nod. He'd spent so much time down there with his experiments, where he didn't need his manners, that he'd largely forgotten how to interact with others. He was there to observe, to test, to document. Maybe he was there to torture too.

  Eckhart skipped out after Melanie as quickly as he could, putting his arm around her shoulder. “Glad we're out of there,” he said with a shudder. “I told you they do weird stuff.”