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

by R. L. King

  Jason shook his head. “Mind’s going too fast. I even tried watching TV, but no dice. I just want to get this over with.”

  “Quite understandable.” Stone glanced at the soda can. “Ah, good idea. I wish I’d known you were bringing that—I’d have asked you to bring me one, too. It can get a bit warm down here.”

  Jason got up, glad to have something to do. “I’ll grab you one,” he said. “Better than sitting here waiting.” He hurried across the room and out the door.

  Mrs. Olivera was nowhere to be seen when he got to the kitchen. That was a bit odd, since he hadn’t been gone more than a few minutes. He’d reached the fridge and opened it when it occurred to him that there was something else odd about her behavior: she’d responded to his offer of help by telling him that she’d already retrieved whatever she’d dropped behind the stove. But if she’d already retrieved it, why was she still poking around under there with the broom handle? Had she found something else?

  Curiosity getting the better of him, Jason closed the fridge and grabbed a flashlight from its charger on the wall. He got down on all fours, ducking his head low so he could look under the stove. It was a nice one, massive and gas-powered, the kind of thing owned by people who really enjoyed cooking. There was only about a three-inch gap from the bottom of the stove to the floor, so Jason had to put his cheek flush with the floor to be able to see underneath. He switched on the flashlight and shined its beam into the gap.

  The first thing he noticed was that it was very neat under there: no sign of dust bunnies or grease stains or any of the other things people often had under their stoves for lack of cleaning. He started looking on the left side, but almost immediately noticed something else out of the corner of his eye on the right. He moved the beam over and it illuminated a small object, mostly cylindrical and about two or three inches in diameter. It appeared to have some kind of wire sticking out of one end that snaked around behind it, and a tiny red light blinked steadily at the other end.

  The thing was humming.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  To his credit, Jason’s brain only seized up and refused to act for a grand total of about five seconds. That was probably quite a bit better reaction time than the average civilian would experience when confronted with a similar situation. Then he was on his feet in one motion, flinging the flashlight aside and pelting toward the basement, barely touching the stairs on the way down.

  “Doc!” he screamed, pounding on the door with his fists so hard that if it had been a normal interior door it would have buckled. “Doc! Get out here NOW!”

  There was a pause that seemed like it took about twenty years, and then the door swung open. Stone stood there, looking confused and a little freaked out. “Jason? What is—?”

  Jason seized his arm. “We gotta get outta here! Now! Right now!” He was nearly babbling.

  “Jason, what’s going on?” Stone pulled back as Jason tried to drag him up the stairs.

  “Come on!” Wild-eyed with terror, he met Stone’s eyes before resuming his efforts to pull him up. “There’s a bomb in the kitchen!”

  Stone stared at him, dumbfounded. “A—?”

  Jason wasn’t talking anymore. He redoubled his efforts and had succeeded in getting Stone about halfway up the stairs before the mage’s brain finally locked on to what he’d said, and he began moving under his own power. At the top of the stairs he stopped. “Wait—my books—my research—”

  “Fuck your research!” Jason yelled. He was a long way from rational now. “I don’t know how long it’s set to go before it blows. If you don’t want them picking what’s left of us up with a spoon, let’s get our asses out of here!”

  “Go on!” Stone yelled, wrenching his arm away from Jason. “Get out. I’ll follow you.”

  “No way!” Jason lunged at him again, but missed. Glaring, he followed the mage into the living room, where he snatched up the notebook full of strange symbols he’d shown Jason and stuffed it into the waistband of his jeans.

  “All right, let’s go,” Stone said grimly. Together they hurried to the front door. Stone flung it open. Then he stopped in the open doorway. “Wait! Mrs. Olivera!” He made as if to turn and run back into the house, but Jason grabbed him hard and restrained him, plucking up his leather jacket from the chair by the door and shrugging into it.

  “Doc,” he said, almost sobbing with frustration now. “I think she’s gone. I’m pretty sure she’s the one who set the bomb!”

  “What the hell—?” Stone glared at him as if he’d announced that sentient rabbits had taken over the world’s governments and were scheduling mass executions. “How—?”

  “Never mind!” Jason tightened his grip on Stone’s arms and frog-marched him across the yard out toward the street.

  They made it halfway across the yard toward the street when a faint whoomp sounded behind them, followed by a massive explosion a couple of seconds later as the flame from the small device contacted the gas from the line its initial detonation had ruptured. The blast blew Jason and Stone forward, tumbling them over a parked car. Jason saw something bright flare into existence around them just before they hit, then wink out. They rolled and came to rest in the middle of the street, where a passing pickup truck swerved to miss them and smashed into another parked car on the other side. All around them car alarms were going off, each one adding its individual note of warning to the general cacophony.

  Jason must have blacked out briefly; when he came to, somebody was trying to drag him out of the street. He could hear screams now: people were coming out of nearby houses and running into the street. He struggled out of his rescuer’s grasp. “I’m—okay,” he breathed. Taking quick inventory of his major systems, he discovered that his head hurt a little, he was bleeding from several minor cuts, and in general his body felt like he’d gone several rounds with a bar gorilla back home in Ventura. Nothing broken as far as he could tell. He looked around. “Where’s Dr. Stone?”

  The man pointed. “He’s over there. You sure you’re all right?”

  Jason struggled to his feet. “Yeah. Thanks.” And then he was gone, heading over to where Stone lay on the grass in a neighbor’s yard two houses down, surrounded by a small group of worried neighbors. Already the car alarms were stopping; Jason could hear the distant sound of sirens getting closer.

  He pushed his way past the neighbors and dropped down next to Stone. The mage was awake, though disoriented. He was covered in a collection of cuts and scrapes similar to Jason’s.

  Jason touched his shoulder. “You okay?” He looked past Stone to his former home, appalled and shaking to see the towering orange flames and black smoke rising from it. We were almost in that when it went off. We wouldn’t have stood a chance down in that basement.

  Stone nodded wearily. “Yes…I—think so.” He fumbled at his middle and pulled the leather-bound notebook from his waistband. “Here—take this. Put it—in your pocket.”

  Jason did as he was told, stashing it in the inner pocket of his leather jacket. The neighbors, most of whom had gone back to staring at the fire now that it was clear Stone wasn’t badly hurt, didn’t notice. Jason leaned down close so he wouldn’t be overheard. “I saw—some kind of bright thing show up around us right as the explosion went off. You—shielded us somehow, didn’t you?”

  Stone nodded again. “Not very effectively, I’m afraid,” he said. “But at least we’re still alive.” He moved to sit up, and Jason helped him. He stared at the burning house, letting out a long, slow breath. “Well, that’s the house done for, then.” Sadness flashed across his face. “I’d been in that place for over five years now. I’d gotten rather attached to it, not to mention my library, the artifacts—” He looked around. “But none of that’s important now. Was anyone else hurt?”

  “I don’t think so.” Fire trucks—three of them—were rolling up now, along with several police cars and a couple of ambulances. “Though I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the nearby houses had their
windows blown out, so I guess they’ll probably be checking.”

  Stone stared at him. “You got us out of there,” he said, as if he couldn’t quite believe it. “If you hadn’t—”

  Jason nodded, still shaking. Despite the heat radiating out from the house fire, he felt cold. “Yeah,” he breathed. “If I hadn’t gone up to get that soda—”

  That seemed to trigger something in Stone’s mind. “Wait a minute—you said something about—Mrs. Olivera? Did I hit my head, or did you say that she—set the bomb?”

  Jason was about to answer, but he noticed a couple of policemen and a pair of EMTs approaching the little crowd standing in front of them watching the fire. “We can talk about this later, okay? I don’t think I really want to talk to the cops right now.”

  Stone nodded. “I—understand. I’ll talk to them. I’ll see if I can distract them long enough for you to slip off into the crowd and disappear. Your car’s still all right, yes?”

  “Yeah. I had to park down the street. I guess the Jag is history.”

  “Sadly, I fear so.” Stone got to his feet with a little help from Jason. “I’ll deal with this as best I can, and meet you at the Fifth Quarter later. It’s a bar over on El Camino, near Page Mill. Just sit in the back and watch the games and no one will bother you. Don’t be surprised if it takes a while—I suspect this sort of bureaucracy moves slowly.”

  He pulled out his wallet and handed Jason a couple twenty-dollar bills. “Go to a gas station and get yourself cleaned up as well as you can. I’ll be there as soon as I can get away. And don’t lose that notebook.”

  “Yeah…Okay.”

  Stone walked forward, swaying a little unsteadily at first, but recovering quickly. He moved through the crowd and intercepted the group of police and EMTs before they reached it. By this time an even bigger crowd had gathered, so it wasn’t too hard for Jason to mingle his way to the edge and then saunter to his car and get away before the whole street was blocked in. Score another little victory for dumb luck, I guess.

  As lucky as you could be when you’d just been nearly blown to bits by your friend’s cleaning lady, anyway.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  It was a little over two hours before Stone turned up at the Fifth Quarter. Jason sat in the dimly lit back room, as the mage had instructed. Several TV sets were stationed in various corners of the room, showing everything from football to soccer to auto racing. He’d parked himself in a booth in the far back corner where he could watch all the entrances, and was now working on his second beer. Fortunately, his leather jacket, coupled with Stone’s shield spell, had taken the brunt of the impact from the explosion, so most of his superficial cuts had been confined to his face and hands. He’d easily cleaned them up at a nearby gas station bathroom. There were still a few bloodstains on his jeans, but he rubbed some dirt over them and hadn’t thought they’d draw much attention in a bar. He was right. So now all he had to do was sit here feeling all the various aches and pains throughout his body, watch sports he didn’t care about, and wait. By the time Stone came in, he was beginning to feel like he should instigate a bar fight just to have something to do.

  The mage still looked pale and shell-shocked. He’d gotten an overcoat from somewhere, but he was still wearing his ripped and blood-spattered T-shirt and jeans and his hair was more disarrayed than usual. He dropped down into the seat across from Jason and for a moment he just sat there, silent and staring at nothing.

  “You—uh—got away okay, I see,” Jason ventured. “Gimme a sec and I’ll get you a beer. You look like you could use one.”

  Stone nodded. “Guinness, please.” His voice sounded numb.

  Jason went off and returned a few minutes later with Stone’s order. He set the glass in front of the mage and resumed his seat. He didn’t speak either, willing to wait for Stone. He himself had had two hours to sit and contemplate what had happened—Stone had likely been given no such luxury.

  “I—think I’m done with the police,” the mage said at last, taking a sip. A long pause, and then: “I told them I smelled gas inside, and I’d left the house to go to a neighbor’s and call the gas company when the explosion went off. They seemed to believe me.”

  Jason nodded. “Did anybody else get hurt?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Stone said. “The explosion blew out a plate-glass window in the house behind mine, and the shards hit two young children playing in their family room.” He sighed, staring down into his glass. “They think they’ll recover, but both were badly injured. One of them might lose an eye.”

  Jason closed his eyes for a second. “Did they make you go to the hospital?”

  Stone shook his head. “They tried, but I declined treatment. Oh, and I also called the University and arranged to take some leave. I had quite a bit of it saved up, and under the circumstances, they had no objection.”

  Jason nodded and glanced up again, not sure how to ask the next question. “Did you—tell the police about Mrs. Olivera?”

  “No. I wanted to talk to you about that a bit more, since you told me practically nothing. As far as I know, she was still in the house, and died in the explosion.” His gaze sharpened. “I sincerely hope you have something to back your claim. I might have been able to save her. Though I did notice when I left that her car wasn’t where I saw it parked when I got home.”

  “I don’t think she was there,” Jason said. He told Stone about what he’d seen in the kitchen.

  Stone stared at him, jolted out of his numbness. “So she was poking under the stove with a broom handle after she said she’d retrieved whatever she dropped?”

  “Yeah. That’s what finally registered to me as strange when I went back up. When I got down there to look myself, there was nothing there but the bomb. I don’t know what else to think. If she saw something that weird under there and hadn’t put it there herself, wouldn’t she have said something about it? And why would she leave so soon afterward? I was only downstairs for five minutes or so before I went back up. It seems like she was getting out of there in a hurry.”

  “So if that’s true,” Stone said slowly, his gaze returning to his glass, “then it means my housekeeper—the woman who’s worked for me for the better part of four years—just tried to murder me.” He sighed again. “You’ll pardon me if that’s a little hard to take—whether it’s true or not.”

  Jason didn’t say anything. There wasn’t much he could say at that point. He concentrated on his beer for a while, and the two of them just sat in an uneasy silence. Finally, he looked up. “What are we gonna do now?”

  “I need to give that some thought,” Stone said after a long time. “If it were ever in doubt that some very dangerous and powerful people want you, me, or both of us dead, I think that’s been effectively removed by the latest events. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired of running, and of not having a bloody idea what the hell is going on. I’ve always been much more comfortable on the offensive than the defensive.”

  Jason stared at him. “What are you saying—that you want to go after them? We don’t even know who they are. We don’t know what they want, other than to kill us. And we don’t know why they want that. So where can we even start?”

  “Let me work on that,” Stone said. “Right now I’m still shaking, and my concentration is buggered to hell. Our first priority is to find a place to stay temporarily, and set up an answering service so the police can reach me without having to know where I am. After that—” He spread his arms. “ I don’t know yet. I have some ideas, but give me a little time.”

  “Yeah,” Jason agreed with a sigh, nodding. “Guess it’s all we can do.” He looked up. “You—didn’t happen to save the teddy bear, did you?”

  Stone shook his head. “Sorry, no.”

  “So, you couldn’t do another ritual to find V even if you found a place where you could do it.”

  “I’m sorry, Jason. I’m afraid not.”

  Jason nodded. He’d suspected as much, but
he had to ask anyway.

  “Oh—” Stone said. “That reminds me. Do you still have my notebook?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He pulled it out of his pocket and handed it over. “What’s so important about this thing, anyway? It’s the one that has all those symbols in it, right? But you don’t even know what they mean.”

  “That’s not all it has in it by a long way,” Stone said, stowing it away in an inner pocket. “I take it you didn’t succumb to temptation and have a look?”

  Jason shook his head. “Honestly it didn’t even occur to me. I forgot I even had it. I was—a little freaked out, you know?”

  Stone chuckled, but it was a mirthless sound. “You wouldn’t have understood it anyway. Even if you could manage to decipher my chicken scratches.” He stood, finishing his Guinness. “We should get going, though. I’d like to have a place to stay before it gets dark, and we should pick up a few changes of clothes. Fortunately, unless whatever evil force is stalking us has access to my bank account, cash shouldn’t be a problem for a while. I don’t fancy holing up in a dump.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  By six o’clock that evening, things were looking a little more sane. They picked up some spare clothes and other necessities, and Stone called in a favor from a fellow professor to secure them a small, rented house near the University. “Remember, don’t let anybody in,” he told Jason. “That means don’t even call out for pizza delivery. I don’t want to get another place blown up.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Jason said. “At this point, I wouldn’t tell my own mother where I’m staying.”

  Stone went to his room to set up his answering service, so Jason switched on the TV to watch the news. The explosion was one of the top stories—the talking-head reporter was saying that authorities suspected a leaky gas line as the culprit, but they were still investigating. “The occupant, a professor at Stanford, got out with only minor injuries because he left the home to report a gas leak,” the reporter said, “but unfortunately we’ve just gotten word that one of the two young children in a neighboring home who were hit by flying glass has died of his injuries. The other child is in serious but stable condition.”