Balance of Power: An Alastair Stone Urban Fantasy Novel (Alastair Stone Chronicles Book 25)

by R. L. King

  She rose from her crouch, looking tired but satisfied. “I think he’ll be okay. I caught it fast and it actually wasn’t as bad as it looked. Head wounds can bleed a lot, even when they’re not serious.”

  Stone didn’t want to wait around for the ambulance and other emergency personnel to arrive, but he didn’t have a lot of choice. It would look suspicious if he left now, and in any case there wasn’t much they could do since they didn’t have anything to use as a tether object to track DaCosta. Nonetheless, he itched to get out there and do something.

  They were in the middle of San Francisco, so it didn’t take long for the ambulance to arrive, accompanied by a pair of uniformed SF cops. The EMTs hurried in with a gurney and immediately set about examining the assistant, while the cops took Stone and the others to the other side of the room.

  Blum showed them his badge. “Detective Leo Blum,” he said, and gave them his station name.

  The cops exchanged glances. “What are you doing here, Detective? This isn’t your end of town.”

  “Off duty. Attending the auction with some friends.” He introduced Stone and the others. “Dr. Stone’s a professor down at Stanford. Occult stuff’s his specialty, and a lot of it was up for auction earlier.”

  “You know who this guy is?” one of the EMTs spoke up. “I can’t find any ID on him.”

  “I don’t know his name,” Stone told him. “But he’s the assistant to Mr. Chaz DaCosta, who may have been abducted.”

  “Oh, right,” one of the cops said. “Is that the silver Mercedes we just got the BOLO about?”

  “Yeah.” Blum paced as he talked.

  “So who whacked this guy?”

  “We don’t know yet. How’s he doing?” he called to the EMTs.

  “Not too bad.” They were already loading him on the gurney. He hadn’t regained consciousness yet, but he looked better than before, following Verity’s healing. “I thought it was gonna be a lot worse, but he seems stable. Just a little banged up. Excuse us, please.”

  Stone and the others stood back as they wheeled the assistant out.

  “Okay,” said the other cop. “Just need to ask you some questions, and then you can go.”

  Stone sighed and exchanged frustrated glances with Blum. There was no helping it, though. He leaned against the edge of the desk and waited.

  “Well…that was a lot weirder than I expected,” Verity said.

  She, Jason, Amber, and Stone were walking to the parking garage across the street. The cops’ “few questions” had ended up taking nearly half an hour, and by the time they were allowed out of the office, the third auction was over and most of the attendees had left. Only a few remained, resisting the security guards’ efforts to move them out.

  “No kidding,” Jason said. “Al, do you know who all those people were? The ones we were watching?”

  “Not specifically. Though I’d be quite surprised if they didn’t include members of the Ordo, Portas…and as I said before, some sort of government agency, apparently.”

  “Are those the two who were talking to you before?” Amber asked. “The ones Verity called Dad Bod and Redhead?”

  “Yes, so it would seem. They wouldn’t tell me which agency, though. I suspect they’ve got some idea that the pyramid is something special.” Stone realized he was still carrying the book under his arm, and offered it to Verity. “Oh—here. Got this for you.”

  She stared at the cover in wonder. “For me? Why?”

  “Thought you and Hezzie might find it interesting.” He gave her a sideways glance. “You didn’t think I was interested in magical horticulture, did you?”

  “Well, I’ll admit I did wonder,” she said dryly. “Thanks, Doc. I think it’ll be a great reference for our alchemy stuff.”

  “You guys want to go get some dinner?” Jason asked, glancing at his watch. “I’m starving.”

  Stone didn’t think he could sit still long enough for dinner. “I’m going to beg off, I think. Still got a few things to do tonight. Thank you—all of you—for helping out with the auction. I owe you. Later, after all this is over, I’ll take you out for a truly memorable dinner.”

  “Right now,” Jason said, “I’d just settle for a big plate of burgers.”

  Stone used the ley line to return home, but couldn’t focus on much. His mind was stuck on wondering what had become of DaCosta, and what would happen when whoever had hijacked his car discovered the pyramid was a fake.

  When his phone rang around nine o’clock and he saw it was Blum’s number, he snatched it up from his desk, startling Raider.

  “Yes? Have you got anything?”

  “Yeah.” He sounded tired.

  “DaCosta?”

  They found him and the car. He’s okay. They think somebody used knockout gas on him or something, and stashed him and the car in a garage. He came stumbling out into the street and nearly got hit by a taxi.”

  Stone let his breath out. That was a relief, at least. “But he’ll be all right?”

  “Yeah. They’re keepin’ him in the hospital overnight, all hush-hush, to make sure. And the assistant’s okay too. Whacked upside the head, but not hurt as bad as your guy down at Stanford.”

  “Thanks to Verity, anyway.”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “I take it the pyramid was gone.”

  “Oh, yeah. No surprise there. I hear DaCosta’s hopping mad. He tried to blame his assistant for selling him out until he found out the guy in the car fooled him.”

  Stone frowned. “What does he think about that?” It wouldn’t be good to have a relatively famous person blabbing on the news about illusionary disguises.

  “Don’t worry—you got nothin’ to worry about there, thankfully. DaCosta barely noticed the guy in his car. Saw the hair, the jacket, and figured it was his guy. Probably feels a little embarrassed about it. Anyway, apparently it’s not a new thing. He’s a pretty self-centered guy, so he doesn’t pay a lot of attention to other people unless they’re in his way.”

  “Well…thank the gods for that, I suppose.” Stone sighed. “But that doesn’t leave us anywhere, does it?”

  “Not really, unfortunately. At least the pyramid’s a fake. How long do you think it’ll take ’em to figure that out?”

  “Who knows? Obviously they’ll know it’s not what it’s supposed to be…but then again, nobody ever said it was. They might think the one in the storeroom was just a mundane object after all.”

  “You think that’ll happen, honestly?”

  “Honestly? Not a chance. Which means they’ll probably be coming after me next.”

  “Well…take care, Stone. I know you can look after yourself, but if you need anything, feel free to call.”

  “Thank you, Detective. This day didn’t go anywhere near as I expected it to, so it’s time for me to have a good think about my next steps.”

  32

  Stone got no farther in his investigations over the next few days. That was frustrating, but even more frustrating was the constant, low-level feeling of a sword hanging over his head. Whoever had snatched the pyramid must know by now that it was a fake.

  Or did they? The longer it went without anyone trying to come after him or his friends, the more he began to convince himself the thieves had reached the conclusion that either the pyramid hadn’t been the other half of the magic-blocking device or, more likely, that its magic had faded over the years. They’d never known for sure it ever even had magic, after all.

  Chaz DaCosta had been making a lot of noise in the media about the theft, offering a twenty-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of the people who’d attacked him. When asked why he wanted to pay twice the (probably hyperinflated) price he’d paid for the pyramid in the first place, he’d responded angrily that it was “the principle of the thing” and that he wasn’t going to “let those lowlifes get away with this.”

  Stone, for his part, had also mostly convinced himself that Portas Justitiae was behind the t
heft. They’d obviously sent at least one mage after DaCosta, so they could easily have killed him and made him disappear, rather than simply drugging him and stashing him with his car in a garage. And Verity had pointed out that even the assistant hadn’t been hurt badly before she got to him. In other words, they’d gone out of their way not to kill any mundanes. Stone didn’t think the Ordo would have been so careful.

  He continued to see Eleanor off and on, to maintain the fiction of their relationship if the Ordo was still watching. It wasn’t difficult—he liked her, and was reasonably sure she wasn’t faking that she liked him too. It wasn’t as if the sham relationship had any chance of becoming a real one, but the company and the sex were both good, so neither of them was in a hurry to put a stop to it yet.

  When he was alone, though, Stone had to admit to himself that his prospects of getting hold of the other half of the device were growing weak at this point. If the Ordo had it—and he was convinced they did—they had the capacity to keep it as well hidden and protected as he did the pyramid. His only consolation was that at least neither of them would have a chance of reuniting the two pieces.

  He also had to do a bit of soul-searching as to why he wanted to reunite the parts. As long as he had the pyramid, the Ordo or whoever had the other piece couldn’t re-create the device and use it for its intended purpose. Maybe it was better if things stayed that way. Better for nobody to have it than people who would use it for the wrong purpose. And what did he want with it, anyway?

  He knew the answer, though: he wanted it because it existed. Even if he ended up stashing it where no one would ever see it again, his curiosity had been activated, and he planned to do his best to see the thing through.

  He’d already filled Eddie and Ward in on the latest developments the day after the auction, and neither had had any suggestions at the time. On Wednesday morning, though, Stone’s phone buzzed as he was preparing to go out for a run. He stopped at the front door when he saw Eddie’s number.

  “Morning, Eddie. Have you got anything for me, or just want to collect on those rounds I owe you?”

  “Well, both, actually—but I might ’ave somethin’. Can you pop over to the Library?”

  “I was about to have a run, but I can do that later. Give me a few minutes to change into something respectable, and I’ll be there.”

  Eddie laughed. “You? Respectable? Not much chance o’ that, mate.”

  “Sod off.”

  Both Eddie and Ward were waiting for him in the workroom when he arrived at the Library twenty minutes later. A closed folder was on the table between them.

  Eddie shook his head in wonder. “Gonna be a while before I get used to that speedy new travel thing o’ yours, not gonna lie.”

  Stone didn’t sit. “What have you got? Did you find something? Have you got a line on the other half of the device?” He realized he sounded almost as breathless as if he had gone for that run, and took a moment to calm down.

  “No luck on that,” Ward said. “To be honest, we haven’t really been trying, except to put a few discreet feelers out.”

  “We’re not ready to tangle with the Ordo yet,” Eddie agreed. “Though we did discover one thing you might find of interest.”

  “Is this what you called me about?”

  “Nope, this is extra. About the Ordo.”

  “What about it?” Stone paced, pausing to study the books on the shelves without consciously registering their titles.

  “Them, actually.”

  He stopped and turned back to them. “Them?”

  “Yep. There are two. At least two. Maybe more.”

  “Two…what?”

  “Ordos.”

  Stone flung himself into the nearest chair and glared at his friends. “Eddie, what the hell are you on about?”

  Eddie and Ward exchanged smug glances. They always loved it when they knew something Stone didn’t—which was far more often than he would have liked.

  “Well,” Eddie said, stretching back in his chair, “there’s the European version we all know an’ love, of course. It doesn’t appear they’ve changed much from the old days. Bunch o’ rich wankers who think magic and money let you get away with anythin’ you want.”

  Stone thought about Elias Richter, who was most likely dead by now, and James Brathwaite. They both definitely fit the mold. “And the other one?”

  “The American version,” Ward said. “Almost certainly including the two men you encountered in Massachusetts a while back.”

  “Kroyer and Lang?” Stone narrowed his eyes. “So…there are different Ordos?”

  “Near as we can figure—and trust me, this kind of info is thin on the ground if you’re not in bed with ’em—the two broke off from each other sometime in the early nineteen-’undreds,” Eddie said. “They have a different organizational structure, different leadership…and it doesn’t seem they’re too fond of each other.”

  That was news to Stone—but then again, he hadn’t even known the Ordo existed at all up until a couple of years ago. Stefan Kolinsky had mentioned previously that the organization had a U.S. arm, but he’d thought they were simply another branch office answering to the European higher-ups. “So…what…they each do their own thing and don’t communicate much?”

  “That’s what we think,” Ward said. “They also have different…priorities.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Eddie shrugged. “The American Ordo doesn’t seem to be as concerned with breeding and family and all those other things we get our knickers in a knot about on this side of the pond. Their focus seems to be on advancing magical scholarship—by any means necessary. They don’t give a rat’s arse who your family were or where you went to school, as long as you bring the magic and you’ve got a good brain.” He tilted his head, shooting Stone a quirky grin. “You’d fit right in with ’em, mate. We probably would, too.”

  “Except for the ‘by any means necessary’ bit,” Stone said. Once again, he was thinking of the extradimensional horror the kids were trying to summon from Lake Nepahauk. Kroyer and Lang hadn’t helped with that effort, but they’d certainly arranged to be johnny-on-the-spot to study it once it was here.

  “Well, yes,” Ward agreed soberly.

  “So you’re saying they’re basically mad scientists.”

  “That’s a good way to describe ’em,” Eddie said. “The good news is, they may not be as bloodthirsty as the European version. The bad news is, they might be willing to go even farther in pursuit of things man wasn’t meant to know.”

  Stone pondered that. “And they’re the ones who nicked the bottom piece out from under my nose at McGrath’s place.”

  “Sounds that way, yeah.”

  He sighed. “It doesn’t matter, though, does it? Who cares which branch has it, when they’ve both got the resources to keep it hidden?” He rose and began pacing again. “I might have to give this one up as a bad job. I don’t like it, but I’m out of ideas.”

  Eddie gave a sage nod. “Of course you are. That’s why you keep us around.”

  “Wait.” Stone spun back around, hardly daring to hope. “You’re telling me you have an idea?”

  “Maybe. Don’t get yourself all wound up about it yet. It was just somethin’ we were knockin’ around, and honestly I don’t think it’s got much chance of workin’.”

  “Tell me. It’s better than I’ve got.”

  “Well…” He leaned forward, clasping his hands on the table. “The thing is, somebody ’ad to build this thing originally, right?”

  “Yes…”

  “We’ve already got one ’alf of it, and we’re reasonably sure, from examinin’ the thing and extrapolatin’, that the second ’alf serves as a kind of amplifier. It makes sense, then, that the pyramid is probably the…control module, I guess you’d call it. The base provides the punch, and the top part provides the targeting.”

  “Or the fine control,” Ward said.

  “Okay…” Stone still didn’t see where the
y were going with this. “But the pyramid on its own doesn’t have enough power to do much of anything except erase magical documents.”

  “Right,” Eddie said. “But you missed the important part o’ what I said. Somebody ’ad to build the original.”

  One of the things Stone liked most about Eddie and Ward—and one of the things that frustrated him the most about them—was that they kept him humble. He was used to being the smartest person in the room, but with these two, that was never a certainty. “Come on, Eddie—spit it out.”

  He grinned. “Simple, mate: somebody built it. So, somebody can build it again. Why not us?”

  Stone stared at him. “You’re…saying you want to build our own version of the amplifier, to work with the pyramid?”

  “Why not? No idea if it’s possible, but it’s worth a go, isn’t it? If anybody can do it, the three of us can.”

  For a moment, Stone let himself get caught up in his friends’ enthusiasm. Maybe Eddie was right. Maybe they could build it. They certainly had the magical knowledge and more than enough brainpower between them. They could—

  His shoulders slumped. “No,” he said, dejected. “We can’t.”

  “Why not?” Eddie looked confused. “I mean, I know we might not succeed, but why not at least give it a go? You said you didn’t ’ave any other ideas.”

  “Because it won’t work.”

  “Why won’t it work?” Ward asked.

  He looked at his hands. “Remember I’ve mentioned Stefan Kolinsky before?”

  “The bloke with the tatty shop back in California, yeah. What about him?”

  “I didn’t tell you this before—it sort of got lost in everything else. But he’s the only person I know who probably surpasses you two in magical knowledge. At least the only one who isn’t trying to kill me.”

  Now it was his friends’ turn to be perplexed. “So?” Eddie asked.

  “So…I talked to him about this a while ago. He’d actually heard of these devices.”