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

by R. L. King

  When the answer came to him, he didn’t like it.

  He didn’t like it at all.

  But he couldn’t see a better one, and time was ticking.

  He jammed the book into his inner coat pocket. “Keep driving,” he told Eleanor, and gave her an address.

  It was barely seven a.m. now—far earlier than Stone had ever visited Kolinsky’s shop in the past.

  “Where the hell are we?” Eleanor asked, looking around the shabby business district with distaste. “What are you planning to do, pawn the thing?”

  “No. Listen—I’ve got to leave you for a few moments, and I have to leave the obelisk in the car.”

  “Why? I don’t like that idea very much.” She glanced in the mirror as if expecting someone to pull up behind them.

  “There’s no helping it. I need magic to get where I’m going.”

  “You’re not afraid I’ll drive off with it?” Her words were joking—but not entirely.

  “No. At this point, I trust you. And besides,” he added with a feeble attempt at a grin, “I’m paying you, remember?”

  “Well, hurry up. If I see anything that looks wrong, I’m out of here.”

  “Five minutes. Ten at the most.”

  Stone, still with the book in his pocket, got out and darted across to Kolinsky’s shop. He slipped past the wards, unlocked the door, and dashed down the stairs.

  As he expected, the place was empty, the illusion of the threadbare shop in place. He barely paid it any attention.

  “Stefan!” he called. “I know it’s early, but trust me, you’re going to want to show up for this one.”

  For a few agonizing seconds, he thought Kolinsky would ignore his plea. But then the door to the back part of the shop opened and the dragon strode through, looking as well put together as if he’d just finished lunch at a fine restaurant.

  He narrowed his eyes and frowned at Stone. “Alastair. It is early.”

  “Yes, I know. I hope I didn’t get you out of the shower or anything. But I need your help—and I don’t think you’re going to mind this time.”

  “My help?” Kolinsky’s brow furrowed. He glanced up, staring off into the space like a dog catching a distant scent. “Something is…odd.”

  “You sense it from here?” Stone was impressed. “You’re good. Bloody good.” He glanced over his shoulder, mindful of the time passing. “Remember the thing we talked about before? The device?”

  “The one that can interfere with magic? Yes, of course. I will remind you that you have not yet fulfilled your part of our agreement by providing the pyramid for me to study.”

  “I’ve done better than that—I’ve got the whole thing.”

  Kolinsky’s eyebrows rose. “Indeed.”

  “Yes—and that’s what I need your help with. It works, Stefan. It works better than I ever expected. I’m not even going to tell you what I’ve been up to for the past several hours. Maybe later, over a nice dinner which I’ll buy. But right now, I need you to take this thing off my hands and make it disappear before anyone catches on I’ve got it.”

  “Take it…off your hands?”

  “I don’t want it. I don’t want to be near it. But there are a lot of nasty people who do want it, and I don’t want them to have it either. I figure you’re the safest bet for making sure it doesn’t end up somewhere it shouldn’t be.”

  Kolinsky couldn’t keep his interest entirely hidden. “So, you propose to simply…give it to me?”

  “Yes. I hope you’ll let me study it, and that it will tilt our balance sheet back in my direction for a while. But aside from all that, I just want it safe. Will you take it? Can you keep it safe? Will anyone give you trouble for having it?” With a sinking feeling, he remembered what Kolinsky had told him before—why he couldn’t help Stone look for the device. If he refused to take it now—

  “Of course. And…yes, I can keep it safe.”

  “What about the other dragons?”

  Kolinsky smiled thinly. “Do not concern yourself with them. I have not provided you any aid in seeking the device, and I did not ask you to bring it to me. Where is it?”

  Stone smiled too. Dragons would make lawyers look like amateurs, the way they wormed their way around the loopholes in their agreements. “Outside, with my…associate. You’ll have to take down the wards long enough to let us bring it inside.”

  Kolinsky shook his head. “No. Do not bring it here. One moment.” He pulled a notebook from his pocket and wrote something on a page. “Take it to that address. I will meet you there.”

  Stone didn’t like that—he didn’t like having the thing in his possession any longer than necessary—but he sighed and nodded. “All right. Hopefully nobody will bother us on the way, because my magic’s useless around it.”

  Eleanor was waiting impatiently when he slipped back into the car. “What was all that about?”

  “Drive. I’ll navigate. Did anyone suspicious turn up?”

  “Not yet. I’ve been listening to the police channels. We might have gotten lucky—they didn’t spot the car at the hotel, or at least not the license plate. I always rent generic-looking cars for just that reason.” She pulled away from the curb. “So where is this we’re going?”

  “I just talked to a friend. He’s going to take the obelisk and hide it where nobody can get hold of it.”

  “You’re just going to…give it away to somebody? After everything we went through?”

  “Not give it away, exactly. I’ll still have access to it. But I can’t keep it, and I don’t want Portas or the Feds or your former employers to have it.”

  She sighed. “About that. They think I’m still working for them. What do I tell them if they ask me what happened?”

  “Tell them…our relationship didn’t work out, and the pyramid is in safe hands. Tell them I don’t have it anymore. They’ll probably trace Richard—that’s the man Portas killed—and then the trail will die out. At least the one pointing to me, and as far as I’m concerned that’s all I care about.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” She stretched her arms, pressing back against the steering wheel. “This has been a wild ride, I’ll have to say that.”

  “It has. And it’s not quite over yet.”

  Nobody approached them as they drove out of East Palo Alto and into an old, wealthy neighborhood near downtown Palo Alto. The address was a two-story house on a corner, only a few blocks from Stone’s old townhouse.

  “Here we are,” Stone said.

  She pulled off at the curb. “Okay. And here’s where we say goodbye, I think.”

  He bowed his head. She was right, of course, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. “Already?”

  “My job here’s done. I need to ditch this car and be on the other side of the country by tomorrow. I’ve got another job starting the day after, which is going to take me to western Africa.”

  He chuckled. “You do get around.”

  “I do. Hey, this isn’t the end. If I’m in the area again, I’ll look you up. Or give me a call sometime. If we’re on the same continent, maybe we can get together for a little fun.”

  “I’ll make sure your payment—and a nice bonus—makes it to your account.”

  “That’s appreciated. But I want the other part of my payment, too.”

  He tilted his head. “What’s that?”

  “You promised me a kiss. I’d like more, but—” She indicated the car. “Not really practical right now.”

  He smiled, leaning toward her. “I always pay my debts…” he murmured. “And as for the rest…will you take an I.O.U.?”

  39

  “Holy shit,” Verity said, and looked troubled. “If only I hadn’t gone off to Australia…”

  They were seated around a big table at the Dancing Dragon in London—Verity, Jason, Amber, Eddie, Ward, and Stone. It was three days after Eleanor had left.

  “Now, come on,” Stone assured her. “You’ve got your own life, and I can’t expect you to hang about on the of
f chance I might need patching up.”

  “But you could have—” She sighed. “Okay, I guess it’s looking like you couldn’t have died. But still—that’s horrible. They could have tortured you, which maybe would have been worse.”

  “Yeah,” Jason agreed. “Damn, those Portas guys are hardcore. I thought they were just a little fringe thing, but it sounds like they aren’t.”

  Stone nodded, only half listening as the group continued talking among themselves. He still hadn’t quite gotten past looking over his shoulder for Portas, or the Ordo, or even Redhead and Dad Bod, but he was finally starting to think things might finally be returning to normal.

  Kolinsky had the obelisk, and had promised Stone he would keep it somewhere none of those people—or anyone else—would ever get hold of it. Stone hadn’t asked him where that place was, or how he planned to get around the obelisk’s powerful anti-magic field, but he trusted the dragon to keep his word.

  What he hadn’t done, though, was give Kolinsky the book—or even tell him it existed. As soon as he’d dropped off the obelisk, he’d called a rideshare to take him back to his own car near University Perk (which, wonder of wonders, hadn’t been towed). Then he’d returned home to Encantada and immediately popped over to the Surrey house for a nice, long nap that ended up lasting the better part of the day. When he awakened, feeling much better and almost back to his normal self, he’d headed to Caventhorne to drop the book off with Eddie and Ward.

  “See what you can do with it,” he’d told them. “I can’t make heads nor tails of it, but from the look of those diagrams, it might contain instructions not only for the ritual to get the device working, but also for how to build another one. Not that we could—or would necessarily want to—since the substance that powers them seems to be unavailable, but…”

  “…but more knowledge is always nice,” Eddie said, his eyes shining with curiosity as he took the book. “We’ll sort it out, mate. It might take some time, but we’re on it.”

  When Stone got back from that trip, he’d made one more call, to Leo Blum. He hadn’t given the detective all the details about what had happened to him, but he asked him to keep a lookout for both anything about the raid on the Portas facility and anything indicating the cops were looking for Stone.

  “I don’t know what you did,” Blum had told him when he called back an hour later. “But whatever it is, none of it’s on my radar.”

  “Nothing?” That was a surprise. Eleanor had told him other law enforcement had been involved in the raid. “Are you sure?”

  “Trust me, I’m sure. I checked all the calls in the San Jose area for hours around the time you gave me. Nothing at all.”

  Stone wondered if Dad Bod and Redhead’s shadowy organization was powerful enough to expunge anything from the local record. “Okay, thanks for letting me know.”

  “You think somebody’s after you?”

  “No way to know. I’ll have to keep an eye out for a while, I suppose.”

  “You do that. I’m just glad this whole mess is over and I can get back to some normal police work, like tracking con men up trees and dogs killing their mistresses.”

  “Hey, Al?”

  Stone snapped out of his drifting thoughts and focused back on the present. Jason was regarding him expectantly. “Yes?”

  “I was just sayin’, you said something about all of us going out for a nice dinner after this was all over. We should plan that—but how about you let us take you out for a change?”

  He smiled. “Sounds brilliant.”

  He took a healthy swallow from his pint and sat back, feeling content—mostly, anyway. He caught himself thinking about Eleanor, and wondering what part of west Africa she was in and what kind of dangerous, high-adrenaline job she was doing. He wondered if he truly would ever see her again.

  He hoped so.

  Epilogue

  When the shadowy figure appeared in the dusty underground room, he had to stand still for a moment and take a few deep breaths to get his anger under control.

  Fortunately, the bad air here didn’t affect him in the slightest.

  The last time he had been here, aware of his surroundings, it had been after he had clawed his way out of a sealed sarcophagus. He’d been skeletally thin, desperately weak, disoriented, thoroughly lost as to where—and when—he was.

  Aldwyn Stone did not like being out of control. The only thing liked even less were the people who had put him in that state in the first place.

  The people who had conspired against him—his own son included—and designed this room in secret to immobilize him, to block his defenses, to contain his power.

  They couldn’t kill him. They might not have known that for certain, but they’d strongly suspected it. Thus, they’d done the next best thing, interring him in this bespoke prison and leaving him to languish in a state of suspended animation for nearly two hundred years.

  The worst part might have been that he couldn’t have his revenge against them. Not when they were long dead, their bones turned to dust in the ground by now.

  All but one, as he’d recently discovered.

  Not many people in this modern age knew Aldwyn even existed. He’d kept quiet on purpose, concealing not only his presence but his existence from all but a few people. He’d revealed himself to his descendant, the powerful mage who owned the family property now, and whom he had not yet given up on the hope of turning to his side despite an inconvenient association with his sworn enemy. By necessity, the others of his kind knew of his return, but their complicated and carefully wrought agreements meant they couldn’t interfere with him any more than he could interfere with them. None of them were pleased about this, but thus went the agreements. Breaking them would cost more than any of them were prepared to pay.

  And so, Aldwyn had waited. He was good at waiting. He’d always been patient, willing to spend years, decades, even centuries setting up his plans within plans to ensure everything would go as he expected. He’d settled in to a new location deep in the mountains of Scotland, surrounded by forests and illusions, and set about learning the ways of this new world. He’d already retrieved some of his hidden fortune, and by various untraceable proxies he’d hired a series of individuals to instruct him in history and technology, to gather information for him, and to multiply his already vast holdings into something that had grown many times larger even in this relatively short period of time.

  He’d also kept track of his descendant. The manor house in Surrey had been his, after all—he knew its secrets better than anyone, including its current master. He didn’t keep constant watch, nor did he need to. But when it had come back to him that the younger Stone had discovered a smaller version of the device that had imprisoned him, his interest had naturally been piqued.

  He'd also discovered something else through his secret ways: that one of his betrayers had, beyond all possible reason, remained alive. His spirit had persisted after his own compatriots had betrayed him, remaining a fellow prisoner with Aldwyn in the catacombs beneath the house until the same small earthquake had released him as well. And now, somehow, he’d managed to find a descendant of his own and take over her body so he could continue practicing his foul, necromantic magic.

  Aldwyn had smiled when he found that out—the sort of smile nobody on this Earth would ever want to see—but he had been even more pleased when he heard of the device’s existence.

  What more fitting way to exact revenge upon his betrayer than to use the man’s own tricks against him? Except he would not limit himself to merely imprisoning James Brathwaite without his magic. Suffering could be extended for a very long time when the one committing it had the power to heal a frail human body to full health at the end of each session.

  Brathwaite would indeed regret the day he’d ever made his unwise decisions.

  The whole thing would have been perfect—except his fool descendant, in a fit of weakness, had chosen to give the device to his enemy! Aldwyn’s rage had burned brig
ht when he’d discovered that, and it had probably been good that no one else had been in his presence.

  But his anger hadn’t lasted long. He didn’t blame his descendant for what he’d done, inconvenient though it had been. It made things more difficult for him, but he still had another way around it. It might take him longer, but that was fine.

  Time, he had.

  It had been easy for him to breach the wards at the London library, and easier still to borrow the book his descendent had left in the care of his two friends. After making his own copies of all the pages—there was nothing inherently magical about the book or its contents—he’d returned it to its place so no one would suspect it had been gone. Aldwyn preferred operating in full secrecy. The fewer people who were aware of his plans, the smaller the chance one of them would interfere with them.

  And now here he was, back in the place of his initial incarceration.

  But now his rage had faded and he was smiling, because it would also be the place where he would begin his revenge.

  He raised a hand, summoning a light spell around it, and looked around at the symbols on the wall. They were all familiar to him, but he paid them little notice. This place was broken, and would never function as it was designed again…but that didn’t mean it couldn’t still be useful.

  What he was looking for was a single, small symbol near the center of each of the four walls, indistinguishable from the others in size, type, and method of carving. He moved to each of these in turn, using a bit of magic to activate it.

  The first three proved to be disappointments. The tiny alcoves opened to his touch and his magic, but the small vials of quicksilver liquid in each one were broken, their contents long since dried and useless. He began to wonder if his plan would work at all.

  But then the fourth alcove revealed another vial, this one whole and sealed, glittering in the light of his spell. Sparks of multicolored energy danced around it like flecks of metal in a kaleidoscope.