Alastair Stone Chronicles Box Set: Alastair Stone Chronicles, Books 1 through 4

by R. L. King

  Once he’d identified the right apartment, which was on the second floor (three spells, he thought with some dismay), he slipped around the back and spotted the windows that corresponded with it. There were three of them: two large ones that were probably bedrooms, and another smaller one between them that was likely a bath. Light shone from both large windows: one bright, one dim.

  Before he talked himself out of what was looking increasingly like a very bad idea, he murmured a few words under his breath and shimmered into invisibility, then levitated himself upward until he could peer through the windows into the rooms beyond.

  The one with the bright light had to be Davis’s roommate’s. A young black man, maybe mid-20s, lay sprawled on his bed, watching a flickering television screen.

  Gritting his teeth, Stone drifted over until he could see into the other room. Invisibility was one of his most difficult spells; he could only maintain it for two or three minutes before it started to slip, and it took a lot out of him. He needed to do this fast, before he lost control of one of the spells and either crashed to the ground or got spotted hovering at second-floor level like some weird, oversized bird.

  The second room was empty, illuminated only by the light that came in the doorway from a light in the hall. It too looked like it was occupied by a young male: sports posters and centerfolds on the walls, drifts of laundry on the floor, unmade bed. With care, Stone used magic to flip the catch on the window and slid it open a few inches. He was glad there weren’t bars on the windows; the lower ones had them, and that would have made what he was trying a lot more difficult.

  Once the window was open, he took a few seconds to glance inside, looking around. He needed something that Davis wouldn’t miss, but that was strongly associated with him. It was hard to see in the dim light, but finally he settled on one of the jumble of shoes under the bed. He levitated it and brought it to him, slipping it through the open window and stashing it inside his overcoat. Sweat beaded on his forehead now; he wouldn’t be able to hold the invisibility spell much longer. Sliding the window shut again, he lowered himself to the ground, glanced around to make sure no one was watching, and then let the invisibility spell drop.

  For a moment he just bent over, hands on his knees, panting. If he’d known ahead of time that he was going to be putting out this much effort, he’d have charged up a couple of his focus items to help with some of the heavy lifting. But he hadn’t, so he had to deal with things as they were.

  And the hard part was still ahead.

  He hurried back to his car, collar pulled up and head ducked low in case anyone had spotted him in the parking lot. He didn’t want to admit it, but for the first time in a long time he was actually apprehensive: this wasn’t a good part of town, and he didn’t have much in the tank right now, magically speaking. If he had to defend himself, he might be in trouble.

  He made it to the car with only a couple close calls where he had to duck out of sight to avoid being spotted. Two young men went by at one point, and he couldn’t miss the distinctive DMW emblem on their jackets. When he finally dropped into the driver seat and hit the locks, he just sat there for a few minutes listening to his harsh breathing and the pounding of his heart.

  Remind me again why I thought this was a good idea?

  He started the car, pulling the shoe out from inside his coat and tossing it on the passenger seat. It was a well-used Nike basketball model, its size indicating that Charles Davis was a big man. Or at least Stone hoped it was Davis. If he’d grabbed the wrong man’s shoe, then life was going to get rather embarrassing over the next couple of hours.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  East Palo Alto, it turned out, had about as much in common with its more upscale sister city as Jason did with the Queen of England. His gaze moved constantly as he and Charles rumbled down side streets, taking in the rows of shabby houses, drifts of trash in the gutters, abnormally large number of abandoned cars parked haphazardly at the curbs, and small groups of loiterers on street corners.

  “Nice place,” he muttered. “Your friend lives here?”

  “She don’t have a job—at least not a legal one. Her place isn’t the greatest, but the neighborhood’s decent by EPA standards. She does all right.”

  Jason wasn’t convinced. More determined than ever to get his sister out of here before something happened to her, he returned his attention to driving.

  “Turn here,” Charles told him, pointing to a street on their left. “Then take the next right at the stop sign.”

  They both saw the flashing lights up ahead long before they reached the house. Jason stiffened, but Charles muttered in his ear, “Be cool, man. I’m sure it’s fine. Cops come around here all the time. Just be easy, and don’t do anything suspicious.”

  Easier said than done, but Jason did as instructed. As they rounded the last street, though, his worst fears were realized: three police cars with their red lights flashing, along with an ambulance, blocked the street. “Is that the house?” he whispered. “Your friend’s?”

  For a long time Charles didn’t answer. Then, finally: “Yeah.”

  “Shit!”

  Jason started to speed forward, but Charles grabbed his arm. “Listen to me,” he ordered. “I don’t know what cops are like where you come from, but around here they’re bad news. At least most of ’em are. I want to help Verity, but I ain’t going to get hauled in tryin’ to do it. Just be cool. Don’t give ’em any excuse to hassle you. Got it?”

  Every nerve in Jason’s body screamed defiance; he wanted to rush forward, knock down anybody in his way, and find Verity. But even as he slowed the bike down he realized Charles was right. He wouldn’t be helping her by running in without a plan. He had to see what was going on first. He pulled off at the curb two houses down and approached the scene on foot. Charles hung back, remaining near the bike.

  Almost immediately, one of the cops moved to intercept him. “Nothing to see here, kid,” he snapped. “Keep moving.”

  Jason could already see a crowd had gathered loosely around the outer fringes of the scene: mostly women huddled with kids in small knots, a few teenagers. “I think my sister’s here,” he told the cop. “I think she’s stayin’ here at this house. What’s going on? What happened?”

  As he watched, two EMTs came out of the house behind the cop, pushing a figure on a gurney. They quickly headed toward the ambulance.

  Jason tried to do an end run around the cop, intending to get a look at the gurney’s occupant. “Is that her? V?”

  The cop grabbed his arm and shoved him back. “I said stay back,” he barked. “This is a crime scene.” He examined Jason for a moment, then said, “You know the people who live here? What’s your name?”

  Jason turned to say something to Charles, but the man had melted into the shadows and was nowhere to be seen. Turning back to the cop, he said, “No, I don’t know them. I was told my sister might be staying here, and I’m tryin’ to find her. She’s seventeen. Dark hair, dark eyes. Damn it, tell me if that’s her in that ambulance so I can go with her to the hospital if it is!”

  The cop keyed the mic clipped to the shoulder of his uniform jacket, muttering something into it. He listened for a reply, then told Jason, “No dark-haired girl around here. Don’t ask me for details—I can’t give ’em to you. But I can tell you the victims are both older women, one black, one white. No teenagers.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?” He stared at the house as if trying to see through its walls. Yellow crime scene tape stretched across the doorway, and cops and other personnel moved in and out like busy insects intent on their jobs. “Are they dead?”

  “Looks like a home invasion gone wrong,” the cop said, still glaring at him. “And I’m not telling you anything about their condition. It’s none of your business. Now move along. I can’t stand here yakking with you all night.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Thanks. But keep an eye out for her, okay?” The bright edges of panic were starting to claw at his br
ain now. If Verity wasn’t here, where was she? Did they catch the invaders? If they’d gotten away, had they taken her with them?

  He drifted away from the cop, doing his best to look nonchalant until the man moved back over to his patrol car and started writing something on a clipboard. Then he headed toward the crowd. Maybe if they lived somewhere near here, they might know what was up. Where the hell was Charles, anyway?

  He chose a couple of male teenagers standing next to each other near the fringe of the crowd, not wanting to spook the mothers with kids. He sidled up next to them, hands in his pockets like any other gawking onlooker. “Hey.”

  They looked at him suspiciously, but nodded.

  “You know what happened here?”

  “Somebody got killed,” the younger of the two said. He was only thirteen or so and looked worried, though he was trying hard not to show it.

  The older one, who looked like his brother, nodded. “Yeah. Somebody musta broke in, and—” he made a slashing motion across his throat.

  “They cut her throat?” Jason asked. That seemed a little extreme, even for a botched robbery.

  The older boy nodded. “Yeah. I looked in the window before the cops showed up. Andre dared me to do it. She was layin’ on the floor in the bedroom, all splayed out. Looked like blood everywhere.”

  Jason paused to digest that. “What about the other one?” he asked, pointing at the ambulance, which was pulling away from the curb with its lights flashing.

  “Dunno. She didn’t live there. I think she was a friend of Miz Barnes.”

  “That’s the lady who got killed?”

  “Yeah. I recanized her.” Like his younger brother, the boy looked a lot more spooked by the proceedings than he was trying to let on, but still relished the opportunity to tell such an interesting story.

  “But you didn’t hear anything? You didn’t see anybody else around here? Like maybe a teenage white girl?”

  They shook their heads. “Nope. Miz Barnes, she had a lotta visitors. Usually at night. Sometimes she told fortunes, too, in the daytime. But no teenage girls. Mostly men at night, and middle-aged ladies in the daytime.”

  Hmm. So now he knew what Charles’s friend’s “not so legal” occupation was, at least. “You know when this all started? When the cops got here? Did you call them when you saw Miz Barnes dead?”

  The boy looked at him like he was crazy. “Call the cops? Me? No, man. I just heard somebody scream—maybe an hour or so ago. I waited a few minutes, then went to check it out. That’s when I saw her. I didn’t stay too long—you don’t want to get caught anywhere near something like this, trust me.”

  Jason nodded. “Okay. Thanks, guys. Listen—if you happen to see a teenage girl around here that you don’t recognize—” He reached in his pocket, pulled out a stub of a pencil and a scrap of paper, and scrawled down the phone number and room number for his motel. “—call me there, okay? I’ll make it worth your while if you help me find her.”

  The older boy looked at the paper, then pocketed it. “Okay.”

  “Oh—one other question. You said you heard the scream, then waited awhile before you came over. Did you see anybody leaving? Running away?”

  The boy shook his head. “No. They musta gone out the back. We didn’t see nothin’.”

  “Okay, thanks.” Jason sighed and headed back toward the bike. Every time it seemed like he had a lead on Verity’s whereabouts, something snatched her away from him again. If he’d been a more paranoid type, he’d have to start thinking that somebody was doing this on purpose. As it was, he needed to figure out what to do next. Was she out on the street somewhere? Had she fled the scene when the intruders had busted in? Had they busted in at all, or were they “clients” of Miz Barnes’s, and something had gone wrong? The questions were definitely beginning to outnumber the answers.

  As he approached the Harley, Charles detached himself from some shadows and nodded to him. “You find out anything?”

  “Where have you been?” Jason demanded. “You kinda left me hangin’ out to dry there.”

  “Sorry. I told you before—I can’t afford to get mixed up in this and lose my job. Cops see somebody who looks like me around a crime scene, and things start to get ugly.”

  Jason nodded. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t doubt it was true.

  “What’d you find out? I take it Verity’s not there? If that was her in the ambulance you’d be followin’ it, not standin’ here talkin’ to me.”

  “Yeah, she’s not there. You know somebody named ‘Miz Barnes’?”

  Charles’s eyes widened. “Yeah. Melody Barnes. That’s my friend, the one who took V in. Why? What happened? Is that her in the ambulance?”

  Jason took a deep breath. He’d never been good at breaking news gently. “She—uh…I’m sorry, Charles. She’s dead.”

  “What?” Charles gripped his arm hard. “What do you mean, she’s dead? Dead people don’t get taken away in ambulances!”

  “That wasn’t her in there. It was some other woman who was visiting her. Your friend—they said she was murdered. I’m sorry,” he said again, and he genuinely was. Caught up as he was in the search for his sister, he had no reason yet to believe that she wasn’t alive. This woman, whoever she was, wasn’t so lucky. This was bad stuff.

  Charles stared at him for a moment, then dropped his gaze. “Aw, man…” he muttered.

  Jason didn’t know what to say, so he covered it by mounting the bike and firing it up. “I want to cruise around the area a little. I don’t expect we’ll find V, but I gotta at least try. I’m out of options, otherwise. After that I’ll drop you off at your place. Where do you live?”

  “Home? I don’t want to go home. I want to go to the hospital. I want to see this friend. Maybe she can tell me what happened to Mel.”

  Jason nearly slapped himself. Of course! There was still somebody who’d been involved with this who was still alive, and he’d completely forgotten about them. “Yeah, okay, let’s do that. Hop on. Maybe she can tell us something about V, too.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Even mundanes—people with no magical abilities—recognized that certain objects can have powerful connections to individual people. Anyone watching a child hug a threadbare old teddy bear, an old man gaze with longing at a photo of his dead wife, or a young woman idly twirl her engagement ring on her finger could see that. Even fake “psychics” made a big show of asking for a treasured object: people who consulted them for readings almost always brought such an item with them, and would have felt somehow cheated if the psychic didn’t request it. And everybody knew about the TV version of Voodoo, where the evil priest obtained a lock of his victim’s hair or some nail clippings to incorporate into a doll that would be used to cause harm.

  There was a good reason why this particular trope persisted so strongly throughout the ages: because it was true. To any trained mage, an item belonging to someone they wished to locate was a valuable and necessary component in the ritual used to find them, especially if the subject wasn’t personally known to the mage. The whole “psychic emanations” thing was true too, with a couple of caveats. It didn’t usually work with casual items like books or rarely-worn clothes: unless the practitioner was particularly powerful, something intensely personal was required to get anything good, and even then it was hard. Stone wasn’t skilled at that kind of divination; he had a friend who was, but he’d never gotten the hang of it.

  What he was good at, however, was finding people. If he could get an item associated with the individual he was looking for and the person wasn’t too far away, it was almost impossible to hide from him. For a mundane, at least. Mages had ways to screen themselves from such attempts at tracking them, and hiding behind a ward such as the one he’d put up at Kolinsky’s shop would keep even a mundane safe from all but the most insistent scrutiny from the most powerful mages. Fortunately, Stone was reasonably sure that Charles Davis was neither a mage nor protected by a ward.

 
When he arrived home, he headed down to his locked basement, where he maintained a semi-permanent magical circle (he couldn’t make it completely permanent since he was renting the place) and began gathering the components for a ritual. He wanted to do this quickly; it was already after eight p.m., and he didn’t think Charles Davis would take too kindly to being accosted by a stranger if he waited too much longer. The ritual itself would take at least half an hour to set up, and then he’d have to get to wherever Davis was.

  He moved with confidence; he’d done this ritual enough times before that its setup was mostly second nature. He did, however, build in a component that he didn’t usually include, both because it wasn’t often needed and because it would add extra effort to the ritual. He was already tired from the wards and the castings at Davis’s house, and this would just add to his fatigue, but it couldn’t be helped. Since he had no idea where Davis was, or whether he would remain where he was long enough for Stone to get to him once the ritual located him, he’d need to tweak the ritual to allow him to do a continuous tracking, sort of like a magical compass. The spell itself wasn’t that different, but he’d have to attach a small bit of power to the tether item—the shoe—and keep the connection open so it would keep pointing him in the right direction once the spell was complete.

  He sighed, running a hand through his hair, and thought for a moment again about why he was going to all this effort. If he could just wait a few more hours, he could go back to New Horizons and figure out a way to talk to Charles Davis without nearly draining his store of magical energy looking for him.

  Because if it is your Verity, he reminded himself, you can’t just let her disappear without knowing what happened to her, and possibly being able to help her.

  He wished he could have just found something belonging to Verity and eliminated the middleman, but he suspected the security at New Horizons was a lot stronger than it was on a dodgy apartment building in East Palo Alto, even leaving out the fact that somebody had been doing black magic on the premises recently and might still be there. So Davis it was.