Gathering Storm: An Alastair Stone Urban Fantasy Novel (Alastair Stone Chronicles Book 17)

by R. L. King

  Before he could get the spell off, Clyde stopped moving, jerking upright as if he’d stepped into an electrical current. He screamed, twitching and juddering, and then something sizzled. His scream cut off abruptly as he disappeared. His flashlight dropped to the ground and rolled, its light-beam picking out the mossy bottom of a tree trunk.

  And then silence.

  “Clyde!” Stone went stiff, instantly bringing up his magical shield. Whatever had gotten Clyde, it hadn’t been his telekinetic grab. “Who’s out here?” he called, sweeping his gaze around again. “Show yourself! You won’t find me such an easy target!”

  A figure stepped out from behind the trees. “You aren’t a target at all, scion. We must speak.”

  20

  Stone could see the figure—it was right there in front of him, perhaps fifteen feet away—but he couldn’t make out any of its features. It looked like a slim humanoid shape, probably male, its features and clothing obscured as if it were standing inside a steamy shower cubicle.

  What he did recognize immediately, though, was the distinctive, flickering orange aura around it—the same one he’d spotted across the street from the motel before they’d left.

  “Who are you?” he demanded. “What do you want?” He jerked his head sideways toward where Clyde had disappeared. “And what did you do to him?”

  “It was unfortunate,” the figure said. “I regret the necessity, but I assure you, it was a necessity.”

  “You’ve killed him, then?” Stone took a step closer, sharpening his magical gaze to try to see past the swirling fog.

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Why him and not me?” He reinforced the shield again, just in case the figure decided to add him to its quota. The thing’s words from before came back to him. “And what did you call me? ‘Scion’? What do you mean by that? Scion of what?”

  The figure waved it off. “We must speak. I cannot remain long.”

  “I have nothing to say to you. Get the hell out of here and let me get on with dealing with this thing before it causes any more trouble.”

  “That is an unwise course of action.”

  “Oh, really? Is that so? Do you plan to stop me, then?”

  “I cannot stop you.”

  “You did a bloody good job of stopping poor Clyde.”

  “He was a mundane, a child who played with forces he didn’t understand. In this form, I don’t have the power to affect you, even should I desire to.”

  “Wait,” Stone said. He glanced around quickly, making sure no more weird, orange-auraed figures were converging on the area. “Who the hell are you? What do you want?” He gestured toward the swirling green structure. “Are you responsible for this thing?”

  “I am not.”

  “So why do you give a damn about whether I stop it? It’s causing trouble. It’s been responsible for several deaths already.”

  “All is proceeding according to plan,” the figure said. Its voice was strange, not quite male but not quite female, and a part of it seemed to echo inside Stone’s mind. “It would be unwise and dangerous to interfere.”

  “Interfere with what? This thing isn’t natural. I don’t know what’s causing them to pop up, but this is the second one I’ve dealt with so far. Are you saying there are more of them?”

  “I cannot say any more. None of this is your concern.”

  “Wait.” Stone gestured at the swirling red again. “Were you responsible for the illusion? Are you…trying to hide these things?”

  “Go home, scion. This does not concern you. If you continue to meddle in things you don’t understand, you could set into motion events you can’t comprehend.”

  “So explain them to me!” Stone snapped. “What are these things, and why are they here? What purpose do they serve?”

  The figure flickered, shifting like an unsteady television signal. “I can say no more. It is not permitted. Take this as a warning: do not interfere.”

  “I can’t do that. These things are affecting mundanes. They’re killing them. Either explain to me what’s going on and who the hell you are, or get out of my way and let me get on with it.”

  The figure regarded him in silence for several moments, then flickered again. “I must go,” it said at last. “I beseech you to heed my words. If you persist in this folly, you could cause untold consequences.”

  The thing was already fading. Stone launched himself forward toward it. “Tell me!” he yelled. “What’s a ‘scion’? What consequences?”

  The orange-wreathed figure shimmered one last time and disappeared.

  21

  Stone barely acknowledged Marta Bellwood’s greeting as he trudged out of A Passage to India’s dining room the following day. He gave only a perfunctory wave before hurrying out, pausing as the door swung shut behind him.

  His shoulders slumped with fatigue. He’d gotten next to no sleep the previous night, between trying to write down everything he could remember about what had happened before he forgot any of the details, and tossing uneasily in bed as he fought with a mind that refused to quiet.

  When the figure had disappeared and left him alone in the clearing near Clyde’s friend’s hunting cabin, he’d immediately tried to find it, to track it back to wherever it had come from. He’d run to where he’d last seen it, kicking his magical sight to maximum intensity, focusing on locking in on any leftover magical energy he could use as a trace.

  He’d found nothing. It was as if the figure had never been there at all—or else it was good enough to hide its tracks sufficiently to thwart Stone’s efforts. The latter hypothesis unnerved him: he knew his own power level, and these days there wasn’t much out there that could hide from him.

  When it became clear he wasn’t going to follow the figure, he turned his attention back to the rift itself. The illusion concealing it was a weak one, obviously designed to deter mundanes from getting too close to it. Unlike whatever the orange-hued figure had been doing to hide itself, its efforts to hide the rift were easy to undo. Once Stone cleared away the last of the illusion, he spent the next hour examining the rift from all sides, taking readings, and making notes. He even tried tossing a few twigs and rocks through it, but all of them simply flew through and landed on the other side, rather than disappearing as he’d expected them to. So whatever this thing was, it wasn’t a portal—at least not for physical objects.

  What it was, though, was a power source. Stone wasn’t sure whether Clyde had been a latent talent; as with Mitch and Cathy Kirkson, he hadn’t had time to perform the level of examination necessary to determine that for sure, and now that Clyde had been vaporized, he’d lost his chance. But whether he was or wasn’t, the shifting anomaly was putting out some significant power.

  Stone remembered what Clyde had said about his cousins Pete and Louie not showing any sign of the “superpowers” he himself had gained. That might have been true, or the rift might have bestowed different abilities on them—ones that hadn’t manifested in obvious ways. After all, Clyde might never have discovered his healing abilities if the bear hadn’t attacked his beloved dog.

  It didn’t matter, though: Clyde was almost certainly correct that the Sixes had murdered Louie and Pete, which meant all three of his potential test subjects were firmly out of his reach. All he had left was the rift itself. It was letting in power from somewhere, he was sure, but that left two important questions: what had caused it to appear here, and where was the power coming from?

  The only other things he determined definitively with his testing were that wherever this thing was pointing, it wasn’t the same place the one in Devil’s Creek had pointed, and it wasn’t anywhere he’d ever seen before, like the Overworld or Calanar. Aside from that, he had no idea. He might be able to find out more if he had the materials to do a potent ritual, but he wasn’t sure he could find the place again if he left. Hell, he wasn’t completely sure he could find the van from where he was now.

  And then there was the matter of the mysterious fig
ure. It had told him to leave this alone, that he was meddling with things he didn’t understand. It hadn’t come out and admitted to casting the illusion to hide the rift, but it hadn’t denied it, either—and it had denied that it had done something to cause the rift’s existence. If both of those were true, that meant the thing had some reason for concealing the rift from others.

  It did—or whoever it worked for did. It had spoken of “not being permitted” to say anything else—not permitted by whom?

  And what the hell was this ‘scion’ business about?

  Finally, in frustration, Stone had closed his notebook, taken one last hard look at the rift (he couldn’t swear to it, but he was fairly sure the level of power it was putting out had decreased slightly even in the hour he’d observed it), and then tried the same trick he had in Devil’s Creek: pumping power from Calanar into it in an attempt to overload it and seal it up. He did it with some trepidation, remembering both what had happened last time and the strange figure’s warning, but he couldn’t go away and leave this thing here if he could do something about it.

  This time, the process went more smoothly, perhaps because of the increased time he had for study before making his attempt. He focused his thoughts and his power, feeding energy into the rift until the swirling green fog flared bright, then brighter, then winked out of existence. He quickly spun, looking around as if expecting the figure to have returned, but it didn’t. The woods were silent except for the occasional far-off rustle of a small animal or call of a bird.

  “There. That’s done. Got anything else to say?” he called, keeping the shield up and bracing himself for an attack.

  Apparently, whatever it was didn’t have anything else to say, because the silence remained. Even the birds and animals shut up.

  Before he left, he paused on the spot where the hapless Clyde had been vaporized. “Sorry, mate,” he said, and meant it. The skinny, greasy guy might have been annoying as hell, but he hadn’t asked for any of this.

  As he drove back to Palo Alto after an uneventful trip through the portal, Stone contemplated his next steps. It was too late in the day to pop over to England to discuss this with Eddie and Ward, and he wanted a bit more time to turn things over in his head before he took it to Stefan Kolinsky. Finally, he pulled out his phone and called Verity.

  “Hey, Doc!” She sounded happy to hear from him. “Are you back? Did you find anything this time?”

  “I…did. Where are you? Up in San Francisco?”

  “No, I’m actually at the Mountain View place tonight, finishing my packing. The other guy left already, so the landlord’s letting me move stuff in early. You want to come over?”

  “No work for Scuro?”

  “Not tonight. Not till later this week, actually. I’d love to see you—but this time, don’t laugh, but I’ll have to feed you takeout. All my pots and pans and stuff are in boxes.”

  He chuckled. “I’ll bring something by. I’m on my way home, so I need to stop over and check on Raider.”

  “He’s fine. I was just there a couple hours ago. I refilled his food and water and scooped the litter boxes. He barely acknowledged my presence. I think he likes having the place to himself.”

  “As long as he doesn’t start throwing parties. Brilliant, then—I’ll be there shortly.”

  Stone did stop at home to assure Raider he hadn’t abandoned him, but he wasn’t sure whether it was out of concern for the cat (who had proven on numerous previous occasions that he had no problem with extended solitude) or whether, deep down, he was reluctant to visit Verity and look at her mostly-empty apartment and collection of stacked boxes.

  It seemed only a few days ago when he’d helped her move into that place. She’d been so proud of herself, that she could finally afford an apartment of her own and didn’t have to live in Stone’s guest room, let him pay half her rent, or share space with Jason. He’d been pleased too—it always made him happy to see his former apprentice take another step toward independence—but now, her next step was taking her far enough away from him that casual dinners or dropping by each other’s place on a whim would no longer be practical.

  He wondered, as he often did when his mind went to dark places, if moving to San Francisco was her way of gently disengaging from him—perhaps in a way she wasn’t even consciously aware of. Between her work with Scuro, her relationship with Kyla, and her activities with the Harpies and Hezzie, she was as busy as he was these days. Maybe more so, now that he’d deliberately cut his class load down to three days a week. Even Jason had commented that he barely saw her anymore.

  He gave a wistful smile as he bid Raider a good evening and drove toward Mountain View. Perhaps all of this was for the best, all things considered. He cared deeply for Verity, and he knew she did for him as well. That much, he was sure of, because she still hadn’t learned how to hide her aura from him. But she also cared deeply for Kyla, and Stone had known from the time he met Verity when she was seventeen, before he’d had even a glimmer of interest in her beyond that of a teacher with a student, that her primary attraction was to women. As strong as her feelings were for him, and as much as they both enjoyed their nights together, he was an anomaly. She’d never mentioned any other relationships with men to him, and Jason had told him once that he was aware of only a couple, both of the one-night-stand variety and neither recently.

  He shook his head in annoyance. He was acting like some kind of romantic fool, and he didn’t have time for that right now. Verity would do what she would do, and he’d accept it because he loved her and wanted her to be happy. That was the end of it. Right now, he had more pressing matters to concern himself with.

  She pulled him into a tight hug when she opened the door, then kissed him. “It’s so good to see you. Come on in.”

  He held up a bag. “I’ve brought takeaway from the Dragon Garden.”

  “Oh, good. I was just gonna call for pizza delivery, but this is better.”

  He thought about poor Clyde as he followed her in, and was glad he wouldn’t have to look at another pizza for a while. He gestured at the stacks of boxes piled around the living room. “All set to go, I see.”

  “Yeah. Fortunately I don’t have that much stuff, so Kyla and I are gonna make a couple of trips this weekend. I’ll have to pick up some furniture, though, since the new place isn’t furnished. Jason offered to help me carry it in.” Her eyes twinkled. “I don’t really need him to, of course, but I’ll let him so he can feel useful.”

  “Do you need any help from me?”

  “No, it’s fine. Thanks for the offer, but I think I’ve got it under control. I’ll invite you over for a housewarming evening when I get settled in.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “So,” she said, setting a Guinness in front of him as he began pulling cartons from the bag, “how did your trip back East go? Did you find another one of those things?”

  “I did, yes. And they’re beginning to trouble me.”

  She took a seat across from him, shoveled some broccoli beef onto her plate, and started on it with her chopsticks. “Why so?”

  He told her the whole story, focusing most on what happened after they reached the forest, and ending with the strange figure’s appearance and its warning.

  Her eyes widened. “Wow. That’s pretty unsettling. So there’s somebody running around trying to keep people from finding these things? Killing people over them?”

  “This one, anyway. I didn’t see any sign of him, or anyone else, around the last one.”

  “And you have no idea what he meant when he said you were meddling with things you don’t understand?”

  “None.” He took another swallow of Guinness and contemplated the cartons. “I’m at a bit of a loss about what I should do from here. It’s not practical to go running about all over the country trying to track down more of them. The two I found out about were both essentially by chance—one because your friend knew someone in the area, and the other from a student looki
ng for extra credit. I can ask my friends in the magical community to keep a lookout for odd events, but after this last one I’m concerned. I certainly don’t want anyone else getting hurt or killed over them.”

  “Yeah…poor Clyde and his cousins. It always makes me sad when mundanes stumble into magical stuff and end up getting hurt.”

  Stone nodded soberly, looking down at his plate. “Yes. And if you count the two gangs, this thing has led directly to several other deaths that I know of. True, they were murderers, but that doesn’t mean they deserved this.”

  “What about what that thing he called you—‘scion’? Have you had any luck figuring out what that means?”

  “No idea. Obviously I know what the word means, but I’ve no clue how it applies to me. This thing almost seemed as if it knew me somehow, or at least knew who I was.”

  “Maybe it knows about your family? You do come from a long line of mages, right?”

  “Yes…that’s the only reasonable explanation I’ve come up with, but I don’t see what my family has to do with unexplained rifts opening to other dimensions. I suppose it might be worthwhile to do a bit more research on my family history, as distasteful as that might be. I’ve been putting it off, but if it’s causing trouble…”

  Verity finished off the contents of a carton and stacked it inside another one. “Have you considered listening to this guy?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well…it sounds like he thinks you could cause more trouble if you keep looking for these things. Have you considered just leaving them alone?” As he drew breath to reply, she continued quickly, “I’m not saying I think it’s a good idea, necessarily. But remember, these are only the ones you encountered by accident—you said so yourself. How do you know there haven’t been more of them out there for a long time, just…doing what they do without any interference?”

  He pondered her words. “You’ve got a point,” he admitted. “I suppose it’s possible there are loads of them out there, all over the country—or the world—that I don’t know a damn thing about. There are stories of supernatural anomalies all around—haunted houses, strange sightings, all the standard stuff. Perhaps they’re related to these things.” He sighed. “But you know me, Verity—now that I’ve discovered them, I can’t just…not do anything. At the very least, I need to do my best to discover why they’re here. Things like that don’t just pop up for no reason. Besides, I don’t have much faith that whatever it was that showed up and killed Clyde has anyone’s best interests in mind but its own, and those of whoever or whatever it works for.”