Neon Stonehenge - Ch. 01

Book One of The Druid Gunslinger Legends

A Blake Conrad tale

Chapter One - "There Is No Beginning"

I'd fallen out a window and was somewhere between the 15^th and 14^th floors when I realized that this latest case I was mixed up in might very well be the death of me. At least I wasn't the only person falling out of this window, I thought to myself, just before the guy who'd tackled me and sent us both crashing downwards transformed into a fucking bat and started flying away.

Life had a way of always kicking me in the teeth.

But let's wind the clock the back a few weeks, and start the story somewhere closer to the beginning, or what feels like a beginning. My name's Dale Sexton, the last in a long line of druid troubleshooters. The Sexton line is full of us, all of us druids, usually soldiers, sometimes spies, sometime law officers, and, in my case, a private detective. It hadn't been what I'd set out to do, but after I washed out from the army, I'd inherited a vineyard and a winery up in the Napa Valley, which became my main source of income, as well as what I used to cover my nighttime job as an investigator for hire who specialized in the odd and strange.

If you were just worried that your spouse was cheating on you, I wasn't the one to be calling. There were people much cheaper and far better suited for that sort of task. Now say, if you were worried that your spouse was cheating on you because she sold her soul to the Devil and nefarious forces were causing her to prostitute herself out to pay off some of that debt, well, then I might just be the sort of specialized help you could find yourself in need of.

My dad, Lane Sexton, had used the winery to cover up his activities as well, but he'd also been much more of a hunter than I was, traveling around, working to catch and kill as many monsters as he could, to keep people safe, without them ever knowing he existed. I loved my dad. I mostly loved my dad. He was a hard ass, but I guess he had to be. But he's gone now, and the winery is in my and my sister's name, although I don't spend most of my time up there. She's much more the traditional hunter archetype than I am, so naturally Charlotte prefers to keep her workspace there, whereas I keep my personal office in a very old building in downtown San Francisco overlooking the bay, the one my father used to use as his in-town base of operations as well. The downstairs part of the two-story office houses part of the winery business, handling all the shipping and accounting, and the upstairs part that looked out towards the Bay was my office, armory, apartment and workspace. When I'd first inherited everything, I was worried about living in what used to be my dad's home-away-from-home, but with rent prices being what they are in the city, not to mention the incredible view, I was happy enough to spend most of my time here these days. I can spend hours watching the fog roll in and out across the water, clouds of vapor slowly engulfing the cities across the Bay in shadows of feather and light.

I love that view more than anything.

I was looking out at it when there was a knock at my office door, one of those classic wooden ones with a heavy frosted glass window with my name and profession stenciled on the exterior of it. DALE SEXTON, UNCONVENTIONAL INVESTIGATIONS. The knock's a little uncommon, because usually I'm told in advance by my secretary when there are appointments, but she'd been on maternity leave for the last month, so I suppose whoever it was had just wandered right up to see me. Topaz, who managed the front desk downstairs, probably hadn't even noticed that Ruby was out on leave. 1^st floor preferred to pretend that the second floor didn't really exist unless they needed something.

"C'mon in," I said to the door, which opened immediately. A rather mousy looking flat-footed man strolled into my office wearing a cheap suit that looked very old and very well cared for, as if it was all the guy had in the world, and he had been doing his best to keep it hanging on by a lifeline. Despite looking like a stiff breeze would knock him over, there was a sense about his presence that he hadn't always been this way, that he'd used to be the kind of guy who would knock heads if you argued with him, and maybe, just maybe, there were still flashes of who that guy was buried somewhere within the guy he was now. He also oozed cop to me, although he wasn't anybody I knew, and I knew my fair share of guys on the force. He was of Chinese lineage, but I'd clocked him right away as second or third generation Bay area native. He had to be in his mid-50s, but despite the sort of weary aura around him, I also knew that if push came to shove, this guy would go down hard and go down swinging. There was a fighter inside that shell; he was just exhausted and a little beaten down.

"Mr. Sexton?" the man asked, his voice much deeper and bassier than I'd expected it to be, like there was still a ghost of that deadly giant he'd once been rattling around inside of him. "I'm Detective Artie Gao, from the San Francisco Police Department. I was referred to you by a couple of people, including one of our coroners, Doctor Shirow. She said you're the guy people in my line of work turn to when everything has moved into the weird and well beyond the pale."

I chuckled a little bit, knowing that if Erika had sent this guy my way, at least a little bit of my homework had been done for me. Doctor Erika Shirow and I had been acquaintances for about seven years now, from when I'd first come back to San Francisco in '98 to pick up the pieces of what my father's untimely death had left behind. She, Dad and Charlotte - my younger sister, who also helped carry on the real family business - apparently had an understanding about the work we do and had known each other since the good doctor had started working for the SFPD, so I was happy to piggyback off that relationship. Doctor Shirow also helped cover up any unfortunate collateral damage that any of us Sextons left behind in our wake.

"Depends on just how weird things are getting, Detective Gao," I said to him as I moved to sit down at the antique desk that had been with our family for generations, gesturing for him to take a seat on the other side of it. "Are you here for professional or personal reasons?"

"Personal," the detective replied, slumping into the chair. "As a cop, I'm used to only believing what I can see and what I can prove, but recently, I've been forced to accept that maybe there's a whole other world going on that I'm just not a part of, that I'm deliberately being kept out of."

"Why don't you start at the beginning?" I asked him.

"There is no beginning to this story," Gao said to me. "Not one that I can point to, anyway. Growing up, I thought it was just elders trying to scare the kids with ghost stories and talk of family curses, but now, I'm starting to wonder if just maybe all of that had some ring of truth to it."

"Which is it?" I asked, grabbing a yellow legal pad from my desk as well as a pen, starting to scribble notes. One of the things I learned early on doing this was that once people started talking, they'd usually tell you something they hadn't meant to, but if you weren't paying attention, you could easily miss it. The first thing I did was scribble down SHIROW, so that I would remember to contact the coroner at some point during this mess to find out what she knew that Gao might've left out. After that, I wrote down GHOST and CURSE next to each other and waited.

"My grandfather used to tell me that our family lineage was cursed, and that if we ever strayed from our own people with our love, that great doom and misfortune would befall not only the person who dared step out of line, but our entire family," Gao sighed. "I always thought it was just Chinese grandparents wanting us to marry Chinese girls, but now... now I'm not so sure."

I underlined CURSE and scratched out GHOST, then wrote down the client's name - ARTIE GAO, SFPD DETECTIVE. Cops generally hated coming to my family for help, because it meant admitting to a failing, that they needed some specialized knowledge they weren't going to get anywhere else. "Great doom and misfortune? Can you be a bit more specific?" I asked, writing the phrase down, simply because the way he'd said it had felt pregnant with meaning. It was fun to look at in my notes. GREAT DOOM AND MISFORTUNE. Sure, it might be nothing, but there was something ominous and specific about the phrase, so I didn't want to neglect it. Cases like this are made and broken in the details.

"Not really. My grandfather died decades ago. And, honestly, I'm not even sure it's related to what's happened now. But maybe it is? I wanted to treat this all just like a typical missing person case, but the more I dig down, the less comfortable I am with what I've found." He looked up at me with sunken eyes, clearly operating on not enough sleep. "That's why I'm here, talking to you. I want you to find my missing girlfriend."

My hand scribbled down GIRLFRIEND next on the pad. Now we were starting to get down to the nitty-gritty. "You know as well as I do, Detective Gao, that most of the time, a missing persons case is going to end one of two ways - either the missing person is intentionally missing and doesn't want to be found, or the missing person is dead," I said, keeping my eyes on the man, trying to size him up. "Neither is an outcome likely to bring much joy."

"If she's dead," Gao said, anger sparking in his voice just a tiny amount before he buried it back down once more. "I want to know who did it and why, so either I can punish them, or you can. If she's intentionally missing..." He looked down at his hands, forced himself to breath in and then exhale again, then looked back up at me. "Then I just want to know why and be sure it's not my fault or something I did. If it is, I just want to be sure it's not something I can fix."

"Alright then, let's start with the Who. You have a name and a photograph?"

He nodded and reached into his jacket, pulling out a glossy picture, tossing it down onto my desk. In it, I saw Gao, smiling and laughing, with his arm around an Irish looking woman in her late thirties or maybe early forties with her head resting on his shoulder, shock of deep red curls all over the place, and deep green eyes. She was dressed in a sporty jacket, a scarf around her neck, and a t-shirt that said San Francisco Zoo on it. The wind must've been high that day because most of her clothes and loads of her hair were diagonal with the ground, flapping towards the right. They were at Fisherman's wharf, and my guess was that the photo had been taken by a third party with one of those disposable cameras. The photo could've been developed at any of a thousand one-hour photo places around town. She looked happy, laughing with him, each of them holding onto sticks of cotton candy that looked in danger of blowing off the stick at any moment. Maybe that was what they found so funny. "Her name is Saoirse Staire. I wrote it down on the back because how the hell you get SEER-sha out of Saoirse is beyond me. We'd... we've been dating about two years now, and she moved in with me last fall when the lease at her previous place ran out."

I took my time spelling the name correctly in my notes, copying it from the back of the photo before turning it back to look at her picture again. Good looking woman, but not the kind of over-the-top beauty that screamed out black widow or Dearg Dur. Definitely Celtic heritage, though, which could mean a dozen different other options, most of which weren't things I liked thinking about, but fuck it, that's the job. It also meant I was going to have to visit some people I hadn't seen in a while. Lord only knows how those visits were going to go. "I take it things were both serious and good then?"

"You think it could be one without the other?"

I smiled, desperately trying to avoid patronizing a guy who should definitely know better. "I think people get together for all sorts of reasons. If you're lucky, it's love. If you aren't, it's necessity. And if you aren't paying attention, it can be awfully easy to confuse one with the other."

"We're in love, Mr. Sexton," Gao said. "I promise you that. We were even talking about getting married, at least we were before she up and vanished."

"Now, let's circle back to that," I said. I scribbled RUNAWAY BRIDE? but wrote next to it UNLIKELY. I didn't have any reason to be convinced of that, but like Dad always said, you get an instinct in this business, nothing wrong with making a note of it. And this didn't feel like a disappearing fiancée case. Maybe it was something about how convinced the Detective was. "You say 'vanished,' so give me a bit more detail about what that means to you."

"She stopped showing up for work unexpectedly, she hasn't come home, she hasn't called any of her friends. It's been six days. Wherever she is, I can't find her, and I'm frightened."

"It's new tech, but you guys have been working on triangulating locations via cell phones over there at the SFPD. You try that?" I wrote down SIX DAYS MISSING on the pad.

"She'd have to use her cell for us to do that, and any time I've tried calling her, it just goes straight to voicemail. Wherever it is, it's off and it's been off as long as she's been missing."

I added CELL PHONE OFF to my notes. There was a slight chance I might be able to track it down via other methods, but it was always better to start with the easier stuff than running straight into the guaranteed solution with the highest price tag that might not even answer the real question being asked. Finding a phone was never a guarantee you'd find a person with it. "Activity on credit cards? I know you know all this stuff, Detective, but my job is to make sure you aren't getting caught up in the emotion of it and missing something obvious."

"Nothing."

I scribbled NO CREDIT CARD ACTIVITY on the pad. Most of this was just making sure he'd gone through all the shit he was supposed to, and that he hadn't been distracted by her absence into making dumb mistakes. "She normally gets around town via bus? BART? CalTrain? Cab?"

"You seen the prices cabbies are asking these days? We're not made of money, Mister Sexton. She used a combination of bus and BART, but I haven't seen her on any of her usual routes, and there's way too much CCTV footage at all the BART stations for me to watch," Gao said to me. I wrote down MUNI TRAVELER in my notes, although that didn't differentiate her much from nearly everyone else in the damn city. "There weren't any signs of foul play at the house, and I'm the one reporting her missing, although my colleagues are still happy to consider me a suspect, which I suppose they're professionally obligated to do."

"Any signs she just decided to leave you?" I asked him, my eyes focusing on his face, trying to spot any micro signs of emotion that he could be trying to hide. "I know it sucks, but it's still one of those things I have to ask about."

"She didn't take any of her clothes, she didn't take her toothbrush." NO MISSING CLOTHES. "Hell, her cat is still at the house, and she wouldn't leave Pumpernickel behind."

I frowned. DIDN'T TAKE CAT. I also wrote down WHO NAMES A CAT PUMPERNICKEL? But leaving everything behind like that wasn't good. It usually meant the absence wasn't planned. "Which leads more towards the other thing, you know?"

"But if she's dead, wouldn't we have found a body?" Gao asked.

"People who jump off the Golden Gate aren't always seen or found," I said, cautiously testing the waters on the suicide theory.

"Forgive me, Mr. Sexton, but that's bullshit. Saoirse wouldn't commit suicide. She's too... stubborn for that. It would be like admitting defeat, and that's something she just doesn't do."

PROUD PERSON. "You know her better than I do, so I'll take your word for it. You reached out to her family?"

"I don't know her family," he grumbled. "She told me when we first hooked up that they're basically dead to her, so if I don't know where she is, wherever they are, they definitely don't either. I don't have a number or even a name of who to talk to."

NO FAMILY I wrote down next, tapping my pen beneath it before I paused to underline it. It wasn't entirely unheard of for people moving out to California to be leaving something troubling behind. Still, everybody had somebody they gave a shit about back home. Maybe not a lot of people, but inevitably there was one or two people just too ingrained in a person's life to cut out forever. Which opened another option. OR FAMILY TROUBLES? That was always another path I had to entertain - that this girl had been abducted by her family for one reason or another. I'd certainly seen weirder things in my time in this business. "And now we come to the part where you've got to talk to me about this supposed family curse of yours." This, I knew, was why my name had come up. Something had crossed the line from the stuff old people used to scare children to the thing an adult man took seriously. He'd asked around the SFPD about someone who wouldn't dismiss him right out of hand, and my name had come up. "Obviously, you aren't just dismissing it anymore."

"A couple of days ago, I woke up in the middle of the night, and the house was so cold, I thought maybe I'd left a window open. I could see my breath and felt myself shivering, so I picked up my gun from the nightstand and went to sweep the house and..."

"...and?" I prompted, trying to get him to say it, because I'd seen this sort of thing before, when someone was confronted with something they couldn't understand, and suddenly they were out of their world and thrust, terrified and incomprehensibly, into mine. I also wrote down COLD HOUSE in my notes. It was a common enough supernatural marker, and could be indicative of a thousand different things, but it was the sort of detail that a lay person wouldn't know made their story credible.

"...and I saw a giant wolf standing in my hallway, but too big to be an actual wolf, more like something you'd see in a movie, with the wolf's head as high as my own. He had glowing red eyes and fangs that were dripping thick with saliva and maybe even blood. And he was snarling at me. I didn't know what else to do so I pulled the trigger and..."

"And what, Gao?" I asked, jotting down DIRE WOLF on the legal pad.

"And as soon as I felt the kick from the gun going off, the wolf had disappeared, and I was simply shooting a bullet down my empty hallway into a linen closet," Gao said. "But I know what I saw."

"You find the bullet okay?" I scribbled down VAMPIRE? across the yellow paper, but also wrote down DRUID? on the other side of the line. I used the legal pad to sort of think aloud while I was working. Keeping notes was important. Dad and Grandma had both taught me that. FAE? SHAPESHIFTER? The dire wolf was another common staple among these stories - all sorts of nasty people used the form because it embodied fear for a lot of the populace. And Gao's memory wouldn't be sharp enough to pick out details about what kind of dire wolf it was.

"Embedded in a bunch of bedsheets that I paid way too much for at one point in my life," he sighed. "That's not the only thing, either. I started finding these little jade figurines everywhere I went. It seems like they generally disappear, but this one I found this morning." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny little jade Foo Dog, sliding it across the desk to me. "You take it. If I hold onto it, it'll have vanished by morning."