Circle of Stone: An Alastair Stone Urban Fantasy Novel (Alastair Stone Chronicles Book 19)

by R. L. King

  Once again, Jason shot a glance at her. He was fairly sure Blum wouldn’t have sent them a kid—especially not one on her own, since it quickly became obvious that the girl and the teenager didn’t know each other.

  Verity merely shrugged.

  “Hi,” the girl said. She looked around the room, swallowed as if she’d suddenly realized she was surrounded by adults, and took a seat at an empty table near the front.

  “Guess I can’t stall any longer…” Jason muttered to Verity. He waited for the server to make one last pass through, then stood at the front table and addressed the group.

  “Okay,” he said. “I guess you all know why I asked you to come. Thanks for taking time from your schedules to show up. I’ll be honest—I have no idea how this is going to go, but I hope it’ll end up being useful.”

  “Useful for what?” asked the middle-aged man with the brush cut. “That’s the part I don’t get.”

  “We’ll get to that, don’t worry. Just a couple things first. To be clear, everybody’s here either because they’ve dealt with our mutual friend who works in law enforcement, or you know someone who has. Right?”

  Most of them nodded, except the young girl, who suddenly found her napkin very interesting.

  Jason decided not to call her out, at least not yet, but he noticed Verity keeping a closer eye on her. “Okay, good. I deliberately didn’t try to find out too much information about you—when we’re dealing with something like this, I think everybody wants to keep their secrets about specifics, and that’s fine. But I’m gonna start by going around the room and asking for everybody’s first name. You can give a fake one if you want, but I think it’ll be better if we have something to call each other. I’ll start. I’m Jason.”

  “I’m Verity,” Verity said. They’d already agreed earlier that, at least for now, they weren’t going to admit to their relationship.

  The elderly man spoke up first. “I’m Curtis, and this is my wife Barbara. We don’t have anything to hide. I think this is all terribly interesting.”

  Barbara made a face suggesting that perhaps she didn’t quite find it as interesting as her husband did, but Jason could tell by the way she held his hand that she was here to support him, if nothing else.

  “And I’m Zoe.” The friendly woman across from them beamed a broad, grandmotherly smile around the room.

  “Yuri,” the tech bro in the polo shirt said. “I’ll admit I’m not sure about this whole thing, but I’ll hear what you have to say.”

  “That’s all we ask,” Jason said. “No obligations.”

  Across the table from him, the woman in the Berkeley sweatshirt spoke next. “I’m Lakisha, and I’m on the fence, depending on what you want.”

  The stylish Asian woman’s smile was more reserved. “I am Eleanor, and I will admit I almost didn’t come. I’ll reserve judgment for now.”

  “Name’s Tom,” said the man with the brush cut. “I don’t even know why the hell I showed up, to be honest. Oh, I know,” he added hastily when Verity started to speak. “I get it. But I haven’t got a clue why you contacted me.”

  “I am Ram,” said the elegant Indian man. A man of few words, apparently.

  That left the two newest arrivals. Jason focused first on the teenager.

  “Call me Wim,” they said. Their voice was neither deep enough to definitively identify them as male, nor high enough to sound female.

  Jason was trying to think of a polite way to ask when Verity smoothly interrupted. “Welcome, Wim. And that leaves you,” she said, offering an encouraging smile to the young girl. Jason thought he caught relief on Wim’s face.

  “Uh…I’m Courtney,” she said. She ducked her gaze. “I’m…not really supposed to be here. Your invitation was for my mom, but she ended up having to work at the last minute. She’s an ER nurse.”

  “Your mom asked you to come in her place?” Jason asked, surprised.

  “Well…not exactly. I saw the note. And I know about…stuff,” she said quickly, jerking her head up to reveal eyes magnified by her glasses. “I figured I could show up and then tell Mom about what happened.” She dug in her backpack and pulled out a notebook and pencil.

  “Uh…yeah. Okay.” Jason didn’t know how he felt about having a child involved in his little plan, and definitely wasn’t happy about having one here without parental permission. He supposed he could continue keeping watch on her, and make sure she had a way to get home when the meeting was over.

  He returned to addressing the group as a whole. “Thanks, everybody, and thanks for coming. The reason I contacted you all is because I’ve worked with the detective before, helping him out with an…unusual case. We were talking a while back, and it occurred to me that he might know other people who have connections with…” He tried to think of a way to say it without coming right out and blurting it.

  “With people who have magic,” Yuri said loudly. “Right?”

  Half-annoyed, half-relieved to have it out in the open, Jason nodded. “Yeah. Exactly. If you got invited to this meeting, it means you know at least one person who’s magically talented. Maybe you’re even related to one.”

  He scanned the group again and caught all of them either nodding or suddenly perking up. Nobody looked shocked or surprised—not even Courtney. That was a good sign. Best to find out for sure, though.

  “Does anybody not have any idea what I’m talking about? Raise your hand if I’m talking gibberish.”

  Nobody raised their hand.

  Jason let his breath out. “Okay, good. That’s a start.”

  “But why?” Yuri asked. Apparently, he’d appointed himself the group’s spokesman. “Why are you bringing us all together like this? I don’t have any magical powers. What can I do?”

  “Yeah,” Tom added. “And there’s no way in hell I’m gonna rat out whoever I might or might not know.”

  “Nobody’s expecting that,” Jason said hastily. “Let’s get that out in the open right away: I’m not going to ask you to tell anything you’re not comfortable revealing about your friends or relatives with magic. That’s your business, and nobody else’s. We can do what we came here to do without knowing that.”

  “Do you have somebody too?” Lakisha asked.

  “Yeah. I do. And I’m not telling either.” He deliberately didn’t look at Verity.

  “So, what, then?” asked Ram. “What do you want of us?”

  “Well…like I said, I’ve been talking to our law-enforcement friend. I’m guessing you guys don’t know about it, but there’s been some crime lately that we’re pretty sure is connected with magic.”

  “Yeah?” Tom looked interested. “I’m surprised that hasn’t happened already, to be honest.”

  “It has, actually. It’s just that usually nobody hears about it, because most of the world doesn’t believe magic exists. If anybody deals with it at all, it’s the other people with magic talent.”

  Curtis chuckled. “Like I said before, I’ve got nothing to hide—well, not much, anyway. I’ve got a relative who’s got magic, and I can’t picture him using it for any crime.”

  “Most of the time he just sits around and uses it to change the TV channel,” Barbara added.

  Jason grinned. “Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around. But there are also mages with a lot more power, and when other mages start doing things that might reveal themselves to the world, or taking advantage of mundanes, the powerful ones get involved.”

  “Yeah, so?” Yuri said between stuffing French fries in his mouth. He shrugged. “I’ll take your word for it—the people I know aren’t around here, and I don’t get too involved with what they do. But what’s that got to do with us?”

  “I get it,” Wim spoke up from the other side of the room.

  “You do?” Jason turned.

  “Yeah. You want boots on the ground. Eyes all over. People who know what they’re lookin’ for.”

  “You got it. That’s exactly what I want. That’s the thing,” Jason
said, addressing the group at large again. “Ever since I discovered that magic is real, I’ve always felt like I can’t really compete. I can’t do what they do—hell, I can’t even understand what they do. But then I realized, there are a hell of a lot more of us than there are of them, and we’ve got all kinds of skills. Mages aren’t any smarter than we are. Aside from the magic stuff, they don’t have skills we don’t have. We mundanes—especially the ones like us, who know the score—bring a lot to the party. So I thought it might be a good idea not to have us all scattered around. We can help each other, and maybe we can even help deal with magical crime.”

  “That’s crazy,” Yuri said. “I’ve seen what some of these people can do. There’s no way I’m getting in the middle of that. Do I look suicidal?”

  Around the room, others were nodding. Most of them didn’t look quite as enthusiastic as before.

  “Nobody’s asking anybody to get in the middle of anything,” Jason assured them. “Like I said, that would be dangerous and not advisable at all. But here’s the thing: I know more than one mage, and one of them always says something I’ve come to believe is true. Mundanes—the ones who don’t have a clue that magic exists—don’t notice anything.”

  “It’s true,” Verity said. “You’d be amazed at the amount of magic one of them has to do before people don’t just rationalize it away. They were seeing things, it’s a trick, whatever. Anything to admit to themselves that they saw something they can’t explain.”

  “I believe that,” Lakisha said.

  “I do too,” Tom said. “Okay, I’ll come out and admit it because it won’t hurt anything—my mother was a mage. She’s gone now, so I can’t cause her any trouble. And a couple times when I was a kid, she used magic in public because she had to. Nobody noticed. They just looked at it and went right on about their business like nothing happened. It used to confuse the hell out of me.”

  “I have noticed the same thing,” Ram said.

  Courtney nodded. “I’ve seen the mage my mom and I know do it too. I can’t even believe that everybody else doesn’t see it.”

  “Okay,” Wim said. “We get it. People don’t notice.”

  “But we notice,” Jason said triumphantly. He had them where he wanted them now. “Without giving any specifics, how many of you have noticed magic out in the world? Magic from people who aren’t your friends or relatives?”

  Every one of their hands went up.

  “Oh, my, yes,” Zoe said. “Just last week I saw a woman using it to gather up some items and put them in a box. I don’t think she knew I was watching, but she probably didn’t even care.”

  “Haven’t seen it for a long time,” Curtis said, “but then, Barbara and I don’t get out much these days. I think one of the guys who used to live in our building had magic, but he moved away a year or so ago.”

  “That’s what I’m getting at,” Jason said. “We notice things other people don’t. And I’ll also bet that at least some of you have other friends or relatives who know about magic. And they probably have more. It’s one of the things that surprised me when I first started getting involved in this whole new world: just how many people are in the know, if you dig deep enough. The only reason we don’t hear about it is because most of them think they’d end up in a rubber room if they admitted it to the wrong person.”

  “So let me get this straight,” Yuri said. He’d finished his burger and fries already and was glancing toward the door as if hoping the server would come back so he could order another one. “You just want us to…keep our eyes open? Watch for magic?”

  “Not exactly, though that’s part of it. I won’t tell you what I do for a job, but I will tell you it’s tangentially related to law enforcement. I’m not a cop, but I do track down bad guys. I haven’t heard of a lot of magical bad guys, but it seems like they’re getting bolder. The crime I’m talking about isn’t just one mage doing it on his or her own. It’s a group of them, and we’re pretty sure they have a leader who’s fairly powerful.”

  “So why don’t the mages deal with it on their own?” Tom asked. “It’s not our problem, is it?”

  “Why would you wish us to expose ourselves to potential danger over this?” Eleanor asked.

  “I don’t,” Jason said. “What you’re not thinking about is that the whole ‘not noticing’ thing goes both ways. Most mundanes don’t notice magic, and most mages don’t pay much attention to mundanes. Part of that is because they’re conditioned to believe we’ll use the whole rationalization thing to explain away anything we see, and part is…well, no easy way to say this, but a lot of mages don’t think mundanes are worth the effort of noticing.”

  “That’s the truth,” Yuri said. “I’ve met a few mages in my life—both here and in Russia—and most of them are just like you say.”

  “Not all of them,” Barbara said. “Curtis’s brother doesn’t think he’s anything special. He’s a good person, even if he’s very lazy.”

  “Not all of them,” Verity agreed. “Some are worse than others.” She flashed a quick, knowing grin at Jason.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But the point is, as long as you keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, the odds are really good that anybody you spot doing magic won’t notice you at all.”

  “So you want us to identify them and rat them out?” Lakisha asked. Her eyes flashed. “I’m not too crazy about the idea of gathering information about anybody and handing it over to the cops. Mages have as much right to exist and do their thing as anyone else.”

  “As long as they’re not committing crimes, you’re right,” Jason said. “That’s a really good point, though. One of my ideas was to try compiling a database of mages—location, general description, any ideas on power level or abilities—but you’re right, that seems pretty intrusive, considering most of them just keep their heads down and mind their own business. Better to stick to my original idea: to make a database of magic-knowledgeable mundanes, so if any magic crime turns up, we might be able to gather data on who’s responsible. There can’t be that many mages in the area, so either somebody’s gonna know who it might be, or else they’ll know that new ones have turned up. If we get a big enough network, we might even be able to branch out into other areas eventually.”

  “You said database,” Yuri said. “How are you planning on implementing it?”

  Jason shrugged. “I know somebody who’s a computer whiz—I can ask her to set it up. We can include as little or as much information as people want to provide. Really, all we need is a way to contact people.”

  “I don’t like the idea of being in anybody’s database,” Wim said. “Is this something Blum came up with?”

  “It was my idea,” Jason said, “but I discussed it with him. He thinks it could be good, but he doesn’t have time to get involved.”

  The teenager considered. “Blum’s helped me and my friends out a couple times. He’s not bad, for a cop. But no way do I want the rest of the cops knowing about me.”

  Several of the others, including Tom, Lakisha, and Eleanor, were nodding agreement.

  Jason, sensing the meeting had the potential to spiral out of control if he didn’t get a handle on it quickly, raised a hand. “Okay. Fair enough. I definitely see your point. How would you feel about some kind of coded entries in the database, so if anybody else got their hands on it, they wouldn’t be able to trace you? Just a code name or number, a location, and a contact point? Maybe later on if we get to trust each other more we can go from there, but it’s a start. Would you be willing to do that?” He shrugged. “I mean, we already know what each other look like, and we have first names for each other, even if they’re fake. This is for a good cause—let’s try not to let mistrust sink it before it’s even started.”

  “He’s right,” Verity said. “There are mages out there who are willing to help deal with this kind of magical crime—Jason and I know some of them. But it would sure help if we could give them more information to go on.”

  Curt
is pushed his plate away. “Well, I’m in,” he said. “I don’t know how much help I can be living in an apartment building in the East Bay, but I’ll do what I can.” Next to him, his wife looked skeptical but still supportive.

  “I’m in too,” Zoe said. “Honestly, it sounds intriguing, and it might help me get out in the world a little more. My husband’s disabled, so I spend a lot of time at home.”

  “Great,” Jason said. “Anybody else?”

  Surprisingly, Wim nodded. “Yeah, okay, I’m in too, as long as I don’t have to do anything official. Me and my friends see a lot of weird shit on the streets.”

  Courtney looked excited. “I’ll tell my mom. I think she’ll want to help, and I do too. She tells me stories sometimes about the stuff she sees in the emergency room—freaky stuff nobody can explain. She doesn’t think I know about magic, but I’ve heard her talking to—well, the person we know—when she doesn’t think I’m listening.” She gave a self-conscious smile and stared into her Coke. “I guess I’ll finally have to tell her I know.”

  Jason dashed quick notes on his pad and addressed the rest of the group. “Anybody else? Like I said—you’ve already shown some trust by showing up here in the first place. If you take it just a little further, maybe we can do some good. And if it turns out you don’t want to be involved later, nobody says you have to respond if you’re contacted.”

  It took a little longer this time, but finally, one by one, the others agreed. The three longest holdouts were Ram, Eleanor, and Lakisha, but finally all three of them agreed that the potential for doing some good outdid the chance that getting involved could come back to bite them.

  “I will tell you this much, though,” Ram said. “I am an attorney, and if I get any sense that you’re misusing the information we provide, you could end up in legal trouble.”

  “Not a problem,” Jason said. “I’m actually glad to hear that. Maybe it’ll help make some of the rest of you feel more comfortable.”

  He pulled off the top sheet of his pad and put it on the table in front of him along with a pen. “Go ahead and give me whatever information you want to provide—at least a name and a contact point. And that should do it. Thank you again for trusting me enough to show up tonight. I promise, I won’t let you down, and I think we can really do some good going forward.”