by R. L. King
“Damn,” Jason whispered under his breath. There was another casualty caused by whatever sickos were after them—and another innocent one. So far at least five people had died because of whatever was going on: Charles, the unnamed kid who’d powered the ganger’s spell, Melody Barnes and her friend Willow, and now this innocent kid, whose only crime was that he’d been playing in what should have been his safe living room at the wrong time.
He switched off the TV and picked up the evening newspaper instead. The explosion story was there too, on the front page along with a story about a hostage situation in a San Jose bank that had ended with four people dead, a small puff piece on Gordon Lucas’s upcoming charity gala, a gloomy article about the rising unemployment rate, and another one detailing the recent uptick in gang activity all over the Bay Area.
Jason sighed as he leafed halfheartedly through the rest of the front section. They sure don’t report much good news these days. He was about to toss it down in disgust when his gaze fell on a small article on the back page:
Local woman dies in single vehicle accident
A San Jose woman died today after the vehicle she was driving veered off the road and struck a light pole. The accident occurred at 1:30 p.m. near the intersection of Middlefield and San Antonio Road in Mountain View. The victim’s identity was withheld pending notification of next of kin, but an unnamed source has tentatively identified her as Isabel Olivera, 54, a housekeeper. Witnesses claim that there appeared to be no cause for the sudden swerve. An autopsy will be conducted to determine if a medical condition was responsible.
Jason just stared at the paragraph, scanning it over again to make sure he hadn’t read it wrong. When Stone came back out a couple of minutes later, he held up the page. “Look at this.”
The mage read it over, frowning. “I’m very sorry to hear that,” he said at last. “I would very much have liked to have a chance to talk to her about her involvement in what happened. And if she wasn’t involved, then I’ve lost a good friend.”
Jason nodded. “Look at the time, though. If the explosion happened at 1:00, and the accident happened at 1:30 in Mountain View, then she didn’t have much time to get away.” He paused, thinking. “Kinda makes you wonder if she didn’t have help veering off the road, doesn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised at this point,” Stone agreed. “That’s one mystery we’ll likely never solve, though, unless the autopsy results show she had a sudden heart attack or something.”
“Add it to the list,” Jason said sourly. He leaned back on the sofa with a loud sigh of frustration. “And hope the cops don’t decide to pursue the connection between the explosion and your housekeeper dying in an accident a half-hour later.” He spread his hands. “So what do we do now? You said you might have some ideas. Now’s the time to spill ’em if you do, because I’m fresh out.”
Stone looked troubled. “I do,” he said. “But give me until morning. I still need to do a bit more thinking about it.”
“Why?” Jason glared at him. “If you’ve got something that might work, spit it out. You said you wanted to go on the offensive. So let’s do it. I’m as tired as you are of sitting on my ass waiting for somebody to try to kill us again.”
“It’s not that simple.” Stone didn’t meet his eyes. “The idea I’ve got in mind requires some—rather extreme action. And in all honesty, I’m not sure I’m ready to take it yet.” Jason opened his mouth to speak again, but Stone held up his hand. “I’m sorry, Jason, but this one’s my call. As I said, I’ll give it some thought and let you know in the morning. That’s the best I’ll do.”
Jason started to protest again, but he got a look at Stone’s eyes and stopped in mid-word. “Okay. I guess I’m stuck with it, since you’re the only game in town at the moment.”
“Thank you,” Stone said softly. He did genuinely look troubled—more so than he had following the explosion. “I promise, whatever I decide you’ll know in the morning.”
The next morning couldn’t come soon enough for Jason. He had gone to bed early since there wasn’t much else to do; he’d tried to read one of the books left on the shelf but stopped after a few pages—he couldn’t get into the classics when he was a kid in school, and Dracula wasn’t any more interesting now that he had a few more years on him.
When he got up to use the bathroom around midnight, he saw a light still glowing in the front room. Stone was sitting there in silence, staring into the dancing flames of the fire he’d started in the fireplace. He looked like his mind was a thousand miles away and wrestling with a difficult problem. Jason didn’t disturb him.
It was nearly ten a.m. when Jason came back out the next morning. Stone was still sitting in the same chair, and the fire had burned itself into ashes. “Did you even sleep at all?”
“Not much,” the mage admitted. “Had a lot to think about.”
“And…? Did you come to a decision about this idea of yours, whatever it is?”
Stone nodded slowly. “I did.”
“Are you…going to tell me what it is?” Normally this kind of evasiveness would have made Jason frustrated and impatient (two emotions he was never good at hiding), but right now he almost felt sorry for Stone. The mage looked like a man contemplating an impossible decision.
Again, Stone nodded without meeting Jason’s eyes. “Yes. I don’t see another option.”
“So—you’ve decided—whatever it is, you’re going to do it?”
“I am.” He stood, and his expression changed from troubled to determined. “We need to go to England.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Jason stared at Stone, convinced he couldn’t possibly have heard him correctly. “What did you say? Because I thought I heard you say we had to go to England.”
Stone nodded. “There’s something there—at my home—that I need in order to do this.”
“Wait a sec. We don’t have time for this. You know how hard it is to get a flight on short notice these days, and even if we left now and turned around to immediately come back after we get whatever this thing is, it’ll take a minimum of two days. That’s not even counting things like jet lag and delays getting tickets. Verity could be dead by then, if she’s not already. And besides,” he added, “I know this sounds a little crazy, but I don’t like flying under good conditions. With these mystery wackos trying to kill us, I’d rather not be shut up in a metal tube with no exits for ten or eleven hours, thanks.”
Stone took a deep breath. He appeared for a moment to be sizing Jason up, gauging his potential response to his next words. “We won’t be flying,” he said at last.
Jason took a moment to let that sink in. “We’re—not flying. Well, we sure as hell can’t drive. We—” He stopped. “Wait a minute. This is some other magic thing you haven’t told me about yet, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“What, you just— sprinkle some pixie dust around, click your heels together three times, and say, ‘There’s no place like London’?”
Stone didn’t smile. “This is serious business, Jason, and it can be very dangerous. That’s part of what I was trying to come to terms with last night. Because I don’t think it’s safe for you to stay here while I go, so you’ll have to come with me.”
“Okay,” Jason said, glaring at him. “Why don’t we start at the beginning? I know how much you like your cryptic little reveals, but right now I think we’re pretty much past that. Tell me what the hell is going on.”
“It’s very simple, really.” Stone still wasn’t rising to the bait. His voice was even, making him sound like he was lecturing to one of his classes on some mundane—as mundane as things can get when you teach Occult Studies—topic. “It’s possible—though potentially quite dangerous—to travel great distances in a short time. It requires a fair degree of magical skill and a specially prepared portal or gateway at both ends. Not all mages can do it by any means—a lot of them never bother to learn how to work the gateways.”
“Bu
t you did.” Jason took a deep breath, feeling like he was once again taking one of his frequent detours into the Twilight Zone.
“Yes. As it happens, I’ve one of my own back at home. It’s one of the few active ones in England, and only a few people there know of its existence.”
“You—built this thing?”
“No. It’s been around since many years before I was born. I come from a long line of mages.”
“O…kay,” Jason said. “So you’ve got one of these gateway things in England. And you know where one is around here?”
“Yes.”
“And where is that? Up at Stanford? At some—I dunno—super secret mage clubhouse somewhere?”
“No. Actually, it’s in the basement of a local restaurant.”
Why do I even bother asking? “A restaurant.”
“Yes. But listen—that’s not the important part.” Stone moved closer, his own bright blue gaze boring into Jason’s eyes as if attempting to read his mind.
Jason shifted uncomfortably, by no means sure that wasn’t exactly what he was trying to do. “Okay, what is, then?”
“The method by which we’ll be traveling.” Stone said. He began pacing around the room restlessly as he continued. “You see, the gateways connect to their destinations by means of an extradimensional space we call the Overworld.”
“Extra…dimensional space?” Jason’s eyebrows both went up. Holy crap, it is the Twilight Zone!
“It’s hard to explain without a lot of theory that will no doubt bore you senseless, even if I had the time to explain it to you. Here’s what you need to know if you’re going to come with me: the reason it’s dangerous to travel this way, especially with those who aren’t familiar with it, is that the Overworld has its own—population.”
“Population of—what?” Jason was almost afraid to ask.
Stone shrugged. “Nobody’s hung about up there long enough to study them. But here’s the thing—they’re drawn to any kind of strong emotion, especially negative emotion. When traveling in the Overworld, it’s absolutely imperative that a person keep himself completely under control. No fear, no anger, no disagreements with one’s companions—even excessive happiness or curiosity can draw them out to investigate.”
“And—what happens if you draw them out?”
“They attack you. And more often than not, they kill you. Or if you’re lucky, they just drive you mad.”
Jason stared at him. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I told you it was dangerous. You can see why I’m reluctant to do it. Especially with someone with your—shall we say—previously demonstrated self-control issues.”
Jason stood there for a long time, contemplating this. Finally, he ventured, “So you want me to travel through this—Tunnel of Freak-Outs—with you, keep myself from getting scared or angry, and eventually we’ll pop out on the other side in England. And then once you get whatever it is you’re after, we have to do it again.”
“That’s about it,” Stone said, nodding. “Believe me, if there were any other choice, I’d take it. I’d leave you here if I thought you’d be here when I got back.”
“What makes you think I won’t be?” he demanded, even though he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to take this particular trip. He wasn’t by nature a fearful guy, but this was just off the rails when it came to weird shit.
“Because I know you,” Stone said. “Tell me—if I left you here, would you sit quietly in the house and wait for me to come back? Or would you be bored or frustrated or guilty enough in a few hours that you’d set out in search of your sister on your own, just so you could tell yourself you were doing something?”
Jason sighed. He didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. His silence was all the answer either of them needed. Changing the subject, he asked, “So what is this thing that’s so important that you have to get it in England? Can’t you just have somebody get it and ship it to you, whatever it is?”
“No, that’s not possible. It’s a book, which is all I’ll tell you at the moment. But I wouldn’t trust anyone to ship it, even if anyone could get at it. Even my caretaker back home doesn’t know about it. It’s carefully hidden under magical lock and key in an area of the house he doesn’t even know exists.”
“Of course it is.” Jason tried not to sound sarcastic, but his capacity for accepting weirdness had been just about exhausted recently. This concerned him, because he expected things were about to get a hell of a lot stranger before tomorrow. He sighed. He knew how much was at stake here, and every day they hadn’t located Verity was another day when the DMW or whoever was directing them or some other random danger could find her. But he had to be honest, too. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
Surprisingly, Stone nodded. He even looked sympathetic. “I know. It’s not easy, even if you know what to expect. My first time through when I was an apprentice—on a lot shorter trip than the one we’ll be taking—I was so frightened that the two other mages I was traveling with had to knock me out to keep us from being attacked. Even then they had to run like hell because I attracted unwelcome attention.”
“Then how do you expect me to be able to do this? I’m pretty sure I can keep from getting angry, but I can’t stop myself from being scared, can I?”
“You can,” Stone said. “Let me ask you this—do you love your sister?”
Jason glared. “What kind of stupid question is that? Of course I love her!”
“And naturally you want to see her home safe, right? Otherwise, why are we doing this at all?”
“Yeah, of course I do. I’d give anything to have her back right now. I can’t stand the thought of her being out there and me not knowing where she is.”
“All right then,” Stone said, his tone gentle. “That’s your talisman. If you’re tempted to be frightened, just use that as something to hold on to. You’re doing this to help your sister. Her only hope of getting home safely is if you can manage this without letting your fear get the better of you.” He paused a moment to let that sink in, then continued: “I promise you, Jason. I give you my word—it’s only dangerous if you let it be. If you can keep your feelings under control, it’s safe as houses. Considerably more unnerving, I’ll admit—nothing that can be done about that, sad to say—but completely safe.”
Jason took a deep breath. “How long will it take? The trip through, I mean.”
“It varies, but for that distance, I’d say perhaps two or three minutes.”
“That’s all? You made it sound like it would be a lot longer.”
“Believe me, it will seem longer. Time works differently there—it will feel like you’ve been up there a long time. But once you’re through, you’ll see that it wasn’t that long at all.”
Jason nodded. As was often the case lately, he knew that ultimately there was only one answer. He might have washed out of the Academy for pasting an instructor a good one on the chin, but at least the “to protect” part of the police motto “to protect and serve” was wired pretty deeply into his DNA.
“Let’s do it, then,” he said. “Before I lose my nerve.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The restaurant Stone had referred to turned out to be in Sunnyvale and was called, amusingly enough, A Passage to India. It was a hole-in-the-wall place in a decently upscale cluster of eateries of various ethnicities on Murphy Street. The sign outside showed its name in stylized letters that were apparently supposed to look Indian.
“You’re kidding, right?” Jason said when he saw it. “This is all a big joke, and you’re about to drop the punch line.”
Stone chuckled. “There are more jokes at work here than you might suspect. For instance, the owners are actually British, though they did spend some time in India in their youth.”
“And one of them is a mage?”
He nodded. “His partner knows all about it, though—when you run a restaurant together it’s pretty difficult to hide a teleportation portal in your basement without your partn
er getting wise at some point that something dodgy is up.”
“So we’re not gonna end up in India by accident?” Jason pulled into a nearby space and shut off the engine.
“I certainly hope not, since I don’t know of any gateways there. Come on—we’re in time for the lunch special. The food here is quite good, and we’d best have something to eat before we do this. No idea when we’ll get to again.”
It was a bit early for the lunch rush, but the restaurant was well populated even at this hour. A waitress waved Stone and Jason toward a table, dropped menus in front of them, and immediately scurried off to help other customers. Stone studied the menu while Jason looked around. They didn’t have many Indian restaurants where he came from, and his dad had always been more of a steakhouse kind of guy anyway.
The waitress showed up again; Stone ordered the special and recommended that Jason do the same. When the woman finished jotting down their orders, Stone motioned her closer. “I’d like very much to speak to Marta or David if they’re around. Please tell them Alastair Stone is here.”
She looked a little confused, but nodded and disappeared toward the back of the restaurant. After about five minutes a short, balding and cheerful-looking man about ten years older than Stone came out of the kitchen and made a beeline for their table. “Alastair!” he said, smiling broadly. “I haven’t seen you in ages!”
“Morning, David.” Stone shook his hand, then indicated Jason. “This is my friend Jason Thayer.”
“A pleasure, I’m sure.” David pumped Jason’s hand with great enthusiasm. “Are you a student of Alastair’s?”
