Free Lost Soul (Harbinger P.I. Book 1) by Adam J Wright

It would be good to see a familiar face in these unfamiliar parts.
    “I think I managed to get all your boxes into the correct rooms,” Felicity said, her voice cutting into my thoughts.
    “Well, thanks for sorting everything out,” I said. Felicity was right; I needed to unpack all my stuff. I was here to stay, whether I liked it or not, so I might as well get used to the idea.
    Sandra returned with our drinks and burgers. My mouth watered so much when I saw the burger and fries on the plate in front of me that I wondered if the cook might be casting a faerie glamor over the food. No burger had the right to look so juicy and tempting.
    When I took a mouthful, the tender meat, crispy onions, and fresh garnishing created a taste sensation in my mouth that made me close my eyes and go, “Mmmm.”
    A grin crossed Felicity’s face. “I knew you’d like it.”
    Swallowing the little piece of heaven that was a Darla’s Double Burger, I said, “This is definitely our lunch place. Now, we need to discuss our next move in the James Robinson case.”
    “We’re off the case,” Felicity reminded me. “Mrs. Robinson fired us.”
    “Yes, she did. So refund her money. We’re going to have to log this as a Society Case. It means we’ll get paid peanuts for solving it, but we don’t have a choice.” It was every investigator’s intention to find and hold on to private clients. It was how we became aware of preternatural activity in the area we worked. The best case scenario was to solve the case and get paid by the client because the private rates were good. But if the client got cold feet for whatever reason and fired us, we had a duty to carry out every job to its conclusion once we had established a preternatural presence.
    The Society of Shadows had been fighting the supernatural since its formation in London, England, in the year 1682. It didn’t care how much investigators got paid and only used the private cases to root out preternatural beings. If we couldn’t keep a client for whatever reason, the case became a Society Case, which meant the Society paid us to solve it at a flat daily rate. If we didn’t get clients coming through our doors, we were expected to scour local news reports to find possible preternatural activity and bill the Society at those low rates.
    The loss of Mrs. Robinson as a client meant I was basically working her case for free, but I had to see it to the end. Otherwise, I’d be breaking the Society’s rules, and that never ended well.
    “Okay, I’ll put it in the books as a Society Case,” Felicity said. “We’ve definitely established a preternatural presence.”
    “Yeah, you saw how that creature reacted when it touched iron. It’s a faerie being.”
    “The question is, why is it pretending to be James Robinson?” She took a drink of her soda and waited for me to provide the answer to that question.
    “No,” I said. “The question is, where is the real James Robinson? We don’t need to know the faerie’s motive. Faeries like to play tricks and games. It probably took on James’s identity simply because it could.”
    “Do you think James and Sarah are dead?”
    “No, they’re not dead. They’ll be trapped in Faerie. Somewhere in the woods by Dark Rock Lake there will be a place where the barrier between our world and Faerie is unstable. Those places are usually marked by hawthorn bushes. Hawthorn is strongly connected with the faerie realm. If we find a hawthorn bush in the woods, that’s where James and Sarah will have been lured into Faerie.”
    Her voice dropped to a whisper despite the fact that nobody could hear her anyway in the noisy diner. “Can you bring them back?”
    I nodded. “It means travelling to Faerie to get them, but I can do it.”
    “What would happen then? There’d be two James Robinsons and two Sarah Silvermans.”
    “We’d take them to their homes and confront the faerie beings. Remember, the faeries aren’t really James or Sarah, they