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

by R. L. King

  “I understand.” Stone tried to calm his frustration. This wasn’t anything new—unless the case was a high profile-one, the wheels of justice turned slowly by sheer necessity. He cast about for any other leads to pursue. “I assume Halstrom’s flat has been cleaned out.”

  “Yeah. There’s already somebody else livin’ there. They had to drop the rent when news got around about what happened, but trust me, when you’re poor a murder on the premises won’t deter you from jumpin’ on a cheap apartment.”

  “Damn. That means I can’t—wait, hold on. If Halstrom’s missing and the mother’s dead, what’s happened to their personal effects? Are they in storage somewhere?”

  “Uh…I don’t know. I guess so. I can find out. Why do you—oh, right. You want to find something of Halstrom’s and do one of those tracking rituals like you did to find that Gallegos guy a while back.”

  “Exactly. Do you think you can get me access?”

  “I’ll see what I can do. But you’re gonna have to come up with an incentive. I already used up the favor my friend owed me just to get her to look into this at all. She likes good wine, but you didn’t hear that from me.”

  “Not a problem. I’ll come bearing gifts. But if you can hurry up, I’d appreciate it. There’s a bit about this that I can’t share with you—as I said, I’ve made promises to people that I can’t break—but I’m beginning to suspect that this issue might have more connection to another one I was tracking than I initially thought. And if it did, that could make this whole thing a lot more dangerous.”

  “Damn it, Stone, you really piss me off sometimes, bein’ so secretive.” He sighed dramatically. “I’ll see what I can do. But I warn you, my friend has good taste in wine.”

  “Don’t worry—I’ll bring something she’d never buy herself on a police clerk’s salary. One for you too, if you want, if you make it fast.”

  Blum snorted. “Never been a wine guy. Bring me a six-pack of Anchor Steam and we’re good.”

  32

  Blum didn’t get back to Stone until two days later. The message came while he was teaching his Friday-afternoon Occult in America course, and he couldn’t return the detective’s call until he was on his way back to his office.

  “Have you got something?” he demanded when Blum came on the line.

  “Yeah. I hope you got that bottle of wine, because my friend came through with the location of the Halstroms’ personal effects.”

  “Brilliant. Can she get me access?”

  “She can get me access. It’s taken a little fancy paper shufflin’ considering I’m in a different city and have no connection with the case, but we managed to make up a tenuous link between the Halstrom murder and one we’ve got over here in the City. It won’t hold up to much scrutiny, so better to get this done ASAP. Can you come up tonight?”

  “Just tell me where to go, and I can be there in an hour.”

  “Make it this evening. It’s an Oakland PD storage facility, and better to go when fewer people are goin’ in and out. Less chance somebody will get suspicious.”

  Stone called Verity as he was heading up to Oakland. “I’ve got some leads I wanted to discuss with you. I’m driving up to check one out now. Want to come with me?”

  “Can’t,” she said ruefully. “I’ve got one too—Jason’s on his way up here and we’re gonna look into it.”

  “Oh?” Maybe things were finally starting to come together after all. “What’s yours?”

  “We think we might have a line on Daisy. Lara from the Harpies heard from her friend that there’s gonna be a big party here in the City, and she thinks she might be there. I know it’s not much to go on, but it’s worth checking out.”

  “Brilliant. I hope it pans out. If you find her, let me know. I’d like to have a chat with her if she’s willing.”

  “Let us find her first—don’t even know if she’ll be there. What’s yours?”

  He told her about what he and Blum had discussed. “I’m going to see if I can use something of Ben Halstrom’s to track him. Shouldn’t be too difficult—I doubt he’s more than a minor mage, so unless he’s left the area he shouldn’t be able to hide from me.”

  “Nice. It does sound like he could be the key to this whole thing.”

  “I’ll let you know what I find out, and you do the same.”

  “Good luck, Doc.”

  Blum was waiting in his car in the storage facility’s parking lot when Stone arrived.

  “Okay, so here’s the deal,” he said. “Like I said, I got permission to check out the stuff, and I told them I’m bringing in a consultant—really more of an informant who thinks he can tell us somethin’ if he can find one of Ben’s possessions. But—it might be better if it’s not you, y’know?”

  “Not a problem.” Stone pulled his disguise amulet from his pocket and slipped the chain over his head, and a moment later Blum was facing a middle-aged man in tan chinos and a polo shirt. “Better?”

  “Fuck…” Blum shook his head in wonder. “I been around magic my whole life, but every time I see it in action I feel like I’m an extra in some freakin’ fantasy movie.”

  Stone produced the bottle of Silver Oak cabernet from his black leather bag and offered it to the detective. “Tell your friend how much I appreciate her efforts. I’ve got your six-pack in the car.”

  Blum studied the label. “I don’t know shit about wine, but I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Just see that she gets it,” Stone said with a chuckle. “You could have asked for one too, but too late now. Come on, let’s go.”

  The police storage building looked like any other facility Stone had seen, except for the discreet sign on the door proclaiming it police property and warning against unauthorized entry. Blum pulled a key card from his wallet and slid it into a reader, and a red light changed to green. He scrawled his name and signature on a clipboard hanging on a peg inside the door.

  “No physical security?” Stone asked. “I’d have expected at least one guard.”

  “Nah, this stuff is low-priority. They don’t store anything important, dangerous, or illegal here. Just things they need to hang on to for whatever reason because they might or might not turn out to be evidence. Eventually, if somebody from the Halstroms’ family shows up, or Halstrom himself if he’s cleared, they’ll probably hand it all over to them. Until then, it stays here.”

  Stone followed Blum inside. They ascended a flight of stairs to a long hallway lined with numbered doors. Some were wide, others the size of a standard human-sized door. As they walked down the hall, a series of fluorescent lights clicked on overhead to follow their progress.

  “Here we are.” Blum stopped in front of one of the wide doors, pulled out a key, and opened the padlock holding it closed. With a flourish, he rolled up the door and stood aside to give Stone a good look. “This is everything that they found in the Halstroms’ duplex. All their stuff should be here. Except the van, of course. That—or what’s left of it—is probably in a vehicle impound lot somewhere.”

  Stone studied the locker’s contents. Obviously, whoever had put them here hadn’t spent a lot of time with organization: the place was full of stacked furniture, boxes, clothes racks, and other assorted items. The boxes had scrawled, mostly unhelpful labels like “BDRM 1” and “LR RIGHT.” Still, the items took up only about half of the space, leaving him room to move around.

  “You lookin’ for anything in particular?” Blum asked from the hall.

  “Not sure yet. Let me just see if I can get any impressions.”

  “Knock yourself out. You think we can be outta here in an hour? They track entries and exits, and it’s gonna look suspicious if we spend too much time pokin’ around.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Let me concentrate.”

  Blum pulled a chair from the locker and straddled it in the hall. “All yours.”

  Stone had already forgotten about him, turning away to switch on magical sight. He started on one side, scanning
slowly around the area. When he needed to get to something, he levitated boxes around with barely a thought, rearranging them in neat piles. Then he scanned the whole thing again, just to be sure.

  “Anything?” Blum asked.

  “Nothing immediate.” He’d been looking for signs of magic or any traces of particularly strong emotion, but found neither. Either the traces had faded over the several weeks the items had been here, or they’d never been here at all. Maybe Ben Halstrom and his mother hadn’t been passionate about any of their material possessions.

  “Are you gonna be able to do it, though?”

  “Oh, yes. It would be easier with a bit more energy, but certainly not impossible.” He switched back to normal sight and studied the boxes until he found one labeled “BH BR,” and levitated it into the cleared space he’d created.

  Inside, he found about what he’d expected to find: clothes, a small collection of baseball caps, a small stack of old and well-thumbed Playboy and Penthouse magazines, books, a few commemorative beer glasses, some framed photos—in other words, the typical stuff a mid-twenties guy would have in his bedroom. He spread the items on the floor and scanned them again with magical sight.

  “There we go…” he murmured. “Should have guessed it would be something like that.”

  Blum leaped up from his chair. “What did you find?”

  Stone levitated a framed eight-by-ten photo into his hand. The glass had broken from being thrown carelessly into the box, but the image clearly depicted a stocky, smiling young man with his arm around a small, even chubbier woman with over-coiffed hair, too much makeup, and a wide grin. The woman wore a brightly colored pantsuit with a floral pattern. “I’m guessing this is Ben Halstrom and his mother.”

  Blum examined the photo. “Yep, that’s them. You gonna use that to find him?”

  “It’s still got traces of emotional resonance, which means he must have valued it.” Stone paused a moment, still looking at the photo. Then he pulled out his phone—he’d recently upgraded it to one with a better camera—and snapped a picture of it. When Blum shot him a questioning look, he shrugged. “If I use this for the ritual, it will likely be destroyed. I want a clear picture of who I’m looking for. Now stand back and let me do this so we can get out of here.”

  Stone cleared out a larger space in the middle of the storage locker by stacking the boxes and other items high against the sides and back. He used an abbreviated form of the tracking ritual; it would still pack the same level of power, but the range would be shortened to perhaps ten miles in every direction instead of the standard hundred or more. He had a strong suspicion that Ben Halstrom was still in the area, so no need to waste time looking for him far away. In only fifteen minutes, he had the circle set up and was ready to begin.

  “You know the drill,” he told Blum. “Don’t interrupt me unless absolutely necessary, and don’t break the circle.”

  “Yeah, yeah, got it. I’m gonna move inside, though—the cameras watch the hallway, and it’ll look pretty damn strange if I sit here on my ass staring into somebody’s crap for half an hour.”

  Stone wasted no further time settling into the center of the circle he’d drawn and beginning the ritual. With any luck, he’d get a bead on Halstrom within a few minutes, and then he and Blum could track him down and confront him. This whole thing might be over by the end of the night.

  As soon as he started, though, he knew that wasn’t going to be the case. He carefully took hold of the energy surrounding the photo and formed it, as he always did, into a luminous probe. Then he sent the probe off into astral space, where it would seek its sympathetic energy and form a pathway leading from one to the other.

  Except it didn’t do that. At first it seemed to Stone as if it would: it reached out, feeling around until it found a direction, and then streaked off toward the west. Stone followed it eagerly, his heart thudding hard in anticipation. Where would he find Halstrom? Would it be anywhere near the rift, or somewhere else entirely?

  Suddenly, though, as he began to perceive the tendril growing close to its quarry, the energy made a subtle change. It crackled and danced, sending the tendril bouncing around the astral space as if borne along on a rough current.

  Stone gathered more power, trying to focus the beam and keep it moving steadily on its path, but the more he tried, the more the thing seemed to fight him.

  A buzzing began at the base of his skull and worked its way up until it engulfed his head.

  A strange, yellow-green light prickled behind his eyes, and his whole body began to shake. Around him images flashed, but they moved too fast for him to identify them. Once, when he almost got a good look at one of them, his mind slipped sideways: the image, whatever it was, was nothing he had ever seen on Earth, even in his magical studies. Sounds—discordant, jarring clangs and shrieks—joined the sights, and a crawling sensation overwhelmed him. He felt suddenly as if a whole platoon of electrically-charged ants marched beneath his skin.

  Far off in the distance, he thought he heard someone yell, but the sound careened off to join and be submerged by the louder cacophony inside his head.

  His heart beat faster as he pulled in more Calanarian power, trying to stabilize both himself and the crazy energy threatening to engulf him.

  Then, as if a light switched on, his vision became nothing but a solid wall of yellow-green. He felt himself bucking backward and might have screamed—he wasn’t sure.

  Something grabbed him and yanked him hard.

  No! I won’t let you—

  Something hit him across the face. He roared in rage, flinging outward with a blast of magical energy, rolling sideways.

  Something else crashed down on top of him. A sharp pain tore into his chest, high on his left shoulder.

  He had to get away—

  He had to—

  The yellow-green light winked out.

  The inside of the storage locker reappeared, with the familiar bank of fluorescent lights flickering and swinging crazily overhead. All around him, the locker’s contents were in shambles, with open boxes spilling onto the floor, broken furniture, and items strewn all around.

  The circle, formerly drawn with neat chalk on the floor, had nearly been obliterated now. The spent candles lay on their sides around the perimeter and the chalk lines were broken in several places.

  “Holy shit, Stone. What the hell just happened?”

  Stone pushed a box off him and sat gingerly up, rubbing his head. It didn’t hurt—not exactly—but the fading vestiges of the crawling-ants sensation still remained. He looked around, quickly identifying Blum’s prone figure buried under a toppled recliner and three more boxes.

  “Blum!” He rushed over, using magic to pull the items off the detective and reaching down to give him a hand up. Blum swayed, then regained his balance. “Are you all right?”

  “What the hell happened?” the detective repeated, gesturing wildly around the room. “Why did you do that?”

  “I—don’t know.” Stone staggered backward and pressed his hand against the wall for balance. “Something…went wrong. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

  “Did you find him, at least?”

  “No.” He bent over, gripping his knees, feeling lightheaded and exhausted, like he’d just run several times around the block. He tried to recall what had occurred during the spell, but his memories clashed and danced away, refusing to solidify. “Are you all right? Did I hurt you?”

  “No—just knocked me around a little. Scared the shit out of me, though. And made a royal mess of this place. You—fuck, Stone, you’re bleeding!”

  “What?” Now that Blum had mentioned it, Stone became aware that the growing pain in his shoulder didn’t feel like he’d just wrenched it from falling. “Oh—right. I think I fell on something. Is it bad?” He backed into the wall, mentally deactivating the disguise amulet and trying to get a look at the wound. His black T-shirt was torn, the edges wet with blood.

  Blum picked hi
s way through the debris on the floor and pulled up the front of Stone’s T-shirt. “You sliced it a good one. Can you heal it?”

  “Best not to try right now. I’m not great at healing under the best of circumstances, and right now whatever that was took a bit out of me. My head’s spinning.”

  “Okay. Okay. I got a first-aid kit in the car. We should get outta here.”

  “Just a moment.” Stone looked around, using a light spell to augment the fluorescents, trying to find what he’d hit when he fell. It didn’t take long: the sharp corner of a metal file cabinet was streaked with bright red blood, and more had dripped down to the concrete floor. “I’ve got to take care of this.”

  “Take care of what?”

  “Can’t leave my blood lying around for anyone to find. It will only take a moment.”

  “Hurry up.” Blum glanced nervously at the hallway. “Just our luck, nobody ever comes here but tonight we’ll get a whole flock of cops showing up.”

  Stone moved fast, trying to ignore the burning distraction of his injured shoulder. The spell to neutralize blood was a simple one, especially when dealing with this relatively small amount. Five minutes later he rose, slipped his coat on over his torn T-shirt, and re-activated the amulet. “There. Let’s go.”

  “Yeah.” Blum looked at the mess again. “I sure hope nobody needs to get in to see this stuff any time soon, or you’re gonna owe my friend a lot more than one bottle of wine.”

  They got back to the parking lot without encountering anyone. Blum retrieved his first-aid kid from his trunk and directed Stone around the corner of the building. “No cameras over here. It’s gonna look pretty weird if anybody sees me fixin’ you up. Let’s have a look. I want to get out of here.”

  Stone removed his amulet, coat, and T-shirt and leaned against the side of the building. The blood still trickled sluggishly down his chest, but by now it had slowed. “Bloody hell!” he gasped, bucking backward when Blum began swabbing the wound with antiseptic.