Darklight Detectives: Clanhome Stories

By Bonnie Elizabeth

Only the rich hire investigators in Clanhold.

 

Argon Darklight discovers he can make better money investigating theft and murder than working in a warehouse. Flush with a full gold coin, he sets up Darklight Detectives.

 

The richest of the clans to the poorest of street urchins hire Darklight Detectives if a crime has been committed against them.

 

To make Darklight Detectives the best of the best, Argon employs a wide variety of investigators, from Fi, a clanless daughter with a nose for the truth, to Delina, daughter of a clan she renounced, but still passes even in the richest of clan societies, to Dikkin a former street orphan who pays the other orphans well for their information.

 

Each brings their own talent which Argon uses well, doing his part to keep his corner of Clanhold safe.

 

Darklight Detectives is a collection of short stories featuring various detectives in the agency. Fans of fantasy mystery won't want to miss out. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: My Big Fat Orange Cat Publishing
• Release date: Jul 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201147396

Bonnie Elizabeth

Bonnie Elizabeth could never decide what to do, so she wrote stories about amazing things and sometimes she even finished them. While rejection stung her so badly in person, she spent most of her young life talking to cats and dogs rather than people, she was unusually resilient when it came to rejections on her writing, racking up a good number of them. Floating through a variety of jobs, including veterinary receptionist, cemetery administrator, and finally acupuncturist, she continued to write stories. When the internet came along (yes, she’s old), she started blogging as her cat, because we all know cats don’t notice rejection. Then she started publishing. Bonnie writes in a variety of genres. Her popular Whisper series is contemporary fantasy and her Teenage Fairy Godmother series is written for teens. She has published in a number of anthologies and is working on expanding her writing repertoire. She lives with her husband (who talks less than she does) and her three cats, who always talk back. You can find out more about her books at her publisher, My Big Fat Orange Cat Publishing.

Book preview

Darklight Detectives

Darklight Detectives

5 Stories of the Finest Investigative Agency in Clanhold

Bonnie Elizabeth

My Big Fat Orange Cat Publishing

Contents

Introduction

Warehouse Thief

Procuring a Ring

Sickness in the Garden

Cheap Hire

The Dead Guardian

About Bonnie Elizabeth

Also by Bonnie Elizabeth

Darklight Detectives

My Big Fat Orange Cat

Fantasy 2021

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Copyright 2021

Bonnie Elizabeth Koenig

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Cover image Copyright © Ravven | Deposit Photo

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Cover Design Copyright © Bonnie Koenig

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My Big Fat Orange Cat Publishing

MyBigFatOrangeCat.com

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the copyright owner.

Introduction

The term private investigator brings to mind men in trench coats walking along dark rainy streets, alone. Their stories bring them face to face with the worst of the worst. They take care of villains the law can’t touch, often nearly dying in the process. While many classic PIs are men, modern investigators are just as often women as men.

I’m a huge fan of noir mysteries. Those take the reader to darker places, with investigators that are typically psychologically damaged in some way. While there are lighter-toned stories, like Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, when I think private investigator my mind immediately goes to the person living in the shadows, investigating where the police fear to go.

A few of my books contain dark overtones, but I prefer writing lighter stories. I like stories that offer hope, where the good guys win and the bad guys get what’s coming to them, usually lawfully, or as close as can be. When you write in genres like fantasy, sometimes the law doesn’t work exactly the way the law might work in a straight-up mystery.

I love creating my own law and my own rules. It’s one reason so much of what I write ends up being at least contemporary fantasy or paranormal mystery. This time, I wanted to create a completely new world.

While I love creative fantasy worlds, my knowledge of history bends heavily towards the medieval western version of history. I wanted to make this world unique. Which meant there was a little voice in the back of my head suggesting things that were just a little bit different. They’re still mostly western, but my goal was to put them together in a way that changed the picture just enough to make the world stand out.

So then I met Fi. Fi is the main character in two stories in the collection. While investigating the murder, she described things in the world that were just a little unusual. I found this world fascinating. Like any good investigator, private or otherwise, I started talking to other people in that world, people from diverse classes to find out more about their world.

Oddly, they all ended up being detectives at the same agency that I was starting to compare to a romanticized idea of Pinkerton Detectives. These people were all private investigators that worked for the richest of the rich.

Of course, my detectives hadn’t always been rich so they needed to go back to their roots from time to time. Enter Dikkin, my street orphan who runs the front desk at Darklight Detectives. He gets hired by two orphan street kids, for far less than any other detective. He’s not worried. His goal, someday, is to work as a real detective for Argon Darklight.

On the other end of the spectrum, I investigated Delina. Clanhold, the country all the mysteries take place in, is run, as can be expected, by clans. Everyone either has a rich clan or is clanless. Delina renounced her clan due to the age-old story of a woman engaged to a man she didn’t wish to marry. I have a feeling that before she became an investigator, Delina worked at a variety of positions to keep a roof over her head. Her story, however, begins as an investigator and she allowed me to explore the upper classes of Clanhold.

No story would be complete without the owner of the company, in this case, Argon Darklight. I wondered how one would become an investigator in this world, that like so many medieval-style worlds, tended to be very class-oriented. I wanted to know what would drive someone to become an investigator rather than, say, a City Guard.

I start the collection with Argon’s story, though he takes a backseat to most other investigations. Still, he’s always the one taking the payment, when there is one. Then I move on to Fi, Delina, Dikkin, and finally back to Fi. She was, after all, the reason I discovered the detectives.

I can’t say if there will be other stories featuring investigators from the Darklight Agency. I suspect that they’ll wander into my subconscious sometime. If not these characters, then others who work for Argon. The world appears ripe for people to search out and become investigators working for hire.

So, enjoy exploring the world of Clanhold with the Darklight Detectives.

Warehouse Thief

Riverbend was a beautiful city if you could get out in it. Argon never seemed able to. He worked moving items in a warehouse from one place to another, sending them out to dockworkers who got to actually be outside. When it rained, they said they envied him. What they didn’t remember was that the warehouse was always hotter than the outside, colder than the outside, and every stink that had worked its way through the air in the docks found the way to the warehouse and squatted. In perpetuity.

If the stink of the hour could be pushed out by another scent, that wouldn’t have been so bad, but it seemed like the aromas stuck around, banding together making one horrible-smelling building worsened only by heat and familiarity. Given the amount of magic that hung around the docks, Argon was thankful he wasn’t one of those who smelled magic. He couldn’t image that stink along with everything else.

Someday, Argon decided, he was going to find work that allowed him to go outside. Not a dockworker, who often suffered in the summer heat and got drenched in the spring rains. He’d do something that allowed him to be out on his own terms. Argon hadn’t figured out what that was, but it would happen.

Around him, the brick and wood building creaked and groaned. The floors were stone, set as evenly as possible, but stone was never going to be flat. Argon had stubbed his toes more times than he cared to remember. He picked his feet up cautiously even as he heard Hist, his partner in warehouse prison, swear.

Argon loaded up another crate of goods. Fortunately, this warehouse stored mostly cloth. When he’d started, Argon had worked in one of the tile merchant’s warehouses. Everything in there was heavy, though the volume was lower. His back ached just thinking about it. Of course, even cloth packed tightly into crates got heavy but it wasn’t like carrying tiles. Even smaller containers of tile often took two men to move.

Hist found his way to the door. Argon read through the notes about which crates needed to be staged. He’d been educated as a child, which had gotten him the slightly higher position of manager. If only the title came with a bit of time in the open air.

Granted, he had a day off just like every worker, but it seemed like that day was always four hours shorter than others and soon he was back hauling crates and bags.

Argon and Hist went to the back corner of the warehouse to finally get rid of some of the heavier cloth bound for Northside. He wondered if the trek up there would be interesting. The ship would take the river as far north as it could, rowing most of the way. At Inlandport, the merchandise would be off-loaded, some of it sold to merchants in that market but the rest would be put in wagons to be taken overland to Northside.

Northside was a huge town tucked up near the mountains, by a freshwater lake. Rumor had it, the place was even more beautiful than Riverbend where the High Lord lived. The tiles there were softer in color, most of the town being decorated in softer blues and greens and an unusual pale cream stone found only in the mountains. The stone itself came in huge slabs so large it was nearly impossible to transport and Argon had heard it took years to build even the smallest of homes.

Of course, the challenge was getting there overland. Dire wolves roamed the forests and even the Init, wide-bodied deer-type creatures with tusks rather than antlers would attack anything they noticed. Men had died fleeing from them or trying to kill them. As a child, having seen a picture of the Init, he’d laughed that men were afraid of a deer with tusks, but as he’d grown, he’d learned about the creatures and had no desire to meet one.

Some people said that Northside’s magic came from the lake. Argon wanted to travel there to see if it were true. He had his own magic, but like most clanless men, his was fairly minor. He was good at a few things but he couldn’t light a fire to save his life. From what he’d heard, it got cold in Northside and