by King, R. L.
She smiled. “You’re on, Mr. Stone. Or should that be Dr. Stone?”
“Alastair will do fine. I’ll pick you up here at seven o’clock.” He waved as he closed the door behind him.
Chapter Five
Stone hadn’t even unpacked properly at the Nest Motel, so in less than half an hour he’d gathered his gear, checked out, and driven back up to the new house.
As he drove, he thought about Lindsey Cole and wondered what had possessed him to accept her invitation. Sure, she was attractive, intelligent, and had a good sense of humor—all things he prized highly in women. But he didn’t have time for this right now. Whatever had happened to Jason, it was almost certain it was connected with the “weird thing” he’d left the message about, which meant things were probably going to take a sharp turn into Deep Strange any time now. Taking uninitiated hitchhikers along into that particular territory could only end in ways he’d rather not think about.
Ah, well. Ritual first, then whatever came after second. If he ended up having to cancel dinner, then so be it.
After shoving all the furniture in the living room up against the walls and making sure the blinds were all drawn tight, he took his time setting up the circle, using materials from the black leather duffel bag he hadn’t even bothered to take out of the trunk at the motel. When he had everything the way he thought it should be, he paused to check it against one of his books, despite the fact that he’d done this particular ritual dozens of times and could no doubt write his own book about it at this point. He’d been called arrogant more times than he could count (and sometimes it was even deserved), but he wasn’t arrogant enough to take chances with a friend’s life.
Since he knew Jason well he didn’t strictly need a focus object, but he used one anyway: an old baseball cap Jason had left at Stone’s townhouse a few weeks ago when he and Verity had been over for dinner. Taking the cap, Stone settled himself carefully into the center of the circle, lit the candles around it with a flick of his power, and took several deep breaths to center his mind. He closed his eyes and willed magical energy into the circle, focusing on the cap and the thread connecting it to its owner. To this he added his own connection to Jason, the friendship they had developed over the last couple years, the shared adventures, and their mutual association with Verity. All of these strands wove themselves into the sending, forming a slim but powerful cord that reached out into the magical realm and sought its match. If Jason was alive and not somehow hidden behind magical protections, this spell would find him. All it would take was patience, and time.
The minutes stretched on. Stone willed himself to remain calm, to keep his breathing steady, to remain vigilant as he followed the slender cord on its search.
Something was odd.
Something was wrong.
In all the times Stone had performed this tracking ritual, it had ended in one of two ways: either the ritual had located the person it sought, allowing him to magically mark the spot so he could find it in the mundane world, or else the searching cord had ranged out for a few minutes and then collapsed back in on itself, ending the ritual. If the latter occurred, it indicated that the subject of the search was either dead or outside the ritual’s effective range, or that they were behind wards or other magical methods of obfuscation. Stone was a powerful mage and his range was extensive, which meant that the spell could take as long as half an hour to determine that it wasn’t going to find anything. He could even sometimes get a glimpse of a target behind a ward, assuming that the ward’s caster was significantly less adept with the Art than he was. Either way, the spell would give him something.
This time, though, what he got back was something he couldn’t make sense of. A couple of times he seemed to get a quick bead on what looked like Jason’s essence, but that essence was wrong somehow. Weak. Fluctuating. Stone couldn’t come up with the right words to describe it, because he’d never experienced it before. And every time he tried to home in on it, to direct the searching cord to pin it down, it danced away like it was never there. It was like trying to grab a handful of smoke. Frustrated, he gritted his teeth and tried to tighten his focus, increase his power, and narrow the beam of his search down to punch through whatever force was blocking him.
The next time he picked up a quick impression of Jason, he was ready. He gathered his power and forged it into a metaphorical blade, using his will to wrap the searching cord around it and drive it into the middle of the dissipating cloud of smoke. Dimly, he could feel his body beginning to sag: he knew he’d only get one shot at this before he’d have to stop and renew his energy.
And then, suddenly, something else was there, reaching out for him, grasping at his mind. He pulled back, startled, struggling to shore up his mental defenses. He routinely built a certain baseline level of protections around his mind even during his everyday mundane life, since there were all sorts of things out there that would take advantage of an unprotected wielder of the Talent, but he hadn’t expected anything like this.
He knew he couldn’t stay long—it was too risky to take the offensive against whatever this thing was without a lot more preparation. Still, Jason was out there somewhere, and he wasn’t going to let this attempt at locating him go without one last effort. He could do the ritual again, sure, but it would be harder without the tether object adding to the search’s potency. He took a deep breath, focused harder, and sent out a call: “Jason!”
The—thing, whatever it was, seemed to perk up at the sound. It moved closer to him—if you could even call it that. It had no form, not even a shifting mist in the astral world. It was nothing more than a series of fleeting impressions, and a growing sense of malevolence. Stone fought to keep his defenses up and forced himself to “listen” for any response from his friend.
A growing sense of dread began to seep into his consciousness: an overwhelming compulsion to get out, to flee, to run. He did his best to ignore it, devoting a corner of his mind to keeping his defenses strong but otherwise reaching out, trying to catch any impression that Jason might have heard his call.
And then, suddenly, there it was.
“...Al...?”
It was weak, so weak. He wasn’t even sure he’d actually heard it, or whether it was simply the wishful thinking of a tired brain. He stiffened, trying to pinpoint which direction—as much as that concept meant anything in the shifting geography of the astral world—the voice had come from.
It was not repeated.
Meanwhile, the formless thing flowed around him, testing his mental shields, its impression radiating unwholesome curiosity along with the dread.
It wants to know what I am.
Despite all his efforts, Stone couldn’t maintain the link any longer. He felt his ethereal presence beginning to fade as the slender cord of his spell tugged itself, and him along with it, back toward his body. Since there was nothing he could do to stop this, he instead chose to hasten it. Severing the connection instantly rather than letting it fade in a more natural manner would be harder on him and would probably give him a hell of a headache, but it also meant that whatever was so interested in him wouldn’t have a direct line back to his body.
It didn’t mean it still couldn’t find him—just that it would have a harder job of it, and maybe that would buy him enough time to track Jason down before it came calling.
With a flick of his mind, he cut the cord. Immediately, it shimmered and disappeared. His mind slammed back into his body and he felt himself reeling backward, his head lighting up like he’d just been beaned by a fastball.
He hit the floor in a crash of flailing limbs, knocking over one of the candles that fortunately had already gone out when the ritual died.
For several long moments he lay on his back, staring up at the room’s ugly wrought-iron light fixture and letting his heartbeat and breathing return to something close to normal. His head throbbed and cold sweat soaked his shirt
and his hair.
That was not the way he liked to end rituals.
He sat up, probably before he was ready, setting off new blossoms of pain inside his skull. It didn’t matter, though: he didn’t have time to coddle himself. If he hadn’t gotten anything else out of that ritual, he’d gotten the most important thing: Jason was alive. And if he was alive, that meant two other things:
First, whoever (or whatever) had him wanted him that way, because it would have been laughably easy for it to kill him if that was what it intended.
Second, as long as he remained alive, Stone could find him.
That “as long as he remained alive” part was the sticky bit, though. Since he had no idea why this—whatever it was—had taken Jason, he likewise had no idea how important it considered keeping him alive to be. Now that it knew there was a mage on the scene who was strong enough to threaten it, it might just decide to cut its losses and eliminate any way, no matter how tenuous, it could be tracked.
That meant Stone had to hurry.
He dragged himself to his feet, leaning on a nearby chair for balance, and blinked several times. The circle lay smudged and inert before him; he’d clean it up later, after he got back. Grabbing a bottle of Advil from his bag (every mage worth the title would agree that ibuprofen was a vital, if unsung, addition to one’s magical kit-bag), he tossed a couple back with some water and headed to the shower.
As he let the hot water roll over him, he realized his next steps were not quite as mapped out as he’d hoped they would be: he’d expected to find Jason’s whereabouts and thus be able to track him down. Finding out he was alive but currently untrackable had not even occurred to him, so he hadn’t made any contingency plans to deal with it. Where could he start looking if he had no idea where Jason was?
It didn’t take Stone long to answer that question.
Chapter Six
It was a little before four o’clock when Stone found the place off Foothill Road in the twisting, oak-strewn maze of upscale homes the locals called the Arbolada. The road was narrow, bounded on either side by decorative rocks, and he had to drive almost a quarter-mile past the small makeshift memorial before he could find a place to pull off and park. He tossed his overcoat in the back seat and hiked back along a narrow dirt path, with the road on his right side and a low wall of light-colored stone on his left, sparing only a brief glance for the few cars that passed slowly by.
He continued working through possibilities as he walked, considering and discarding several astral or ethereal entities that could potentially be responsible for abducting Jason—but none of them fit. It didn’t help that his head still throbbed as if someone was riding on his back and whacking him periodically with a mallet. The ibuprofen had taken care of the worst of it, but the rest would take time. Lost in thought, he reached the memorial almost before he knew it.
He approached it slowly, stopping to examine it from a respectful distance. The memorial had been constructed against the same low wall facing the road: a collection of wilting flowers, greeting cards, teddy bears, spent candles in holders, photos, and other memorabilia carefully piled around a white wooden cross with ASHLEY written across the horizontal bar in black block letters, and two hearts in red drawn below it on the vertical. On the other side of the wall stretched a small vacant lot dotted with mature oak trees. The ground there was covered by a thick carpet of dead leaves, and showed evidence of having been recently disturbed.
Stone sat down on the wall with his back to the field. After making sure his defenses were up, he bowed his head and closed his eyes, reaching out with his magical senses. Anyone who saw him would probably assume he was merely reflecting or praying; he didn’t think that would arouse any suspicion near such a place.
The first thing he noticed was that the location of the girl’s murder was not where the memorial had been constructed. The astral world practically roiled with emotion here, the normal calm tranquility that would no doubt suffuse such a peaceful residential area shattered by leftover traces of terror and pain. Stone shook his head, letting his breath out slowly. This kind of thing was always hard on the observer, and the more violent the energy, the tougher it was. Ashley had not died slowly, or easily.
All this emotional pain was not doing the vestiges of his headache any good at all, but it had to be done. He adjusted his mental shields to filter out most of it, dimming the scene from a bright riot of reds and jagged shapes into something more muted. He concentrated on finding any traces of Jason, since at this point nothing he did would bring the unfortunate Ashley back from the dead.
The specific site of the murder was easy to spot: it was a flaring knot of ugly reds beneath a large oak tree about halfway back on the right side of the vacant lot. Without letting his focus slip, Stone carefully rose, climbed over the wall, and headed toward the spot. Whatever investigations the police had conducted in the field appeared to be completed, as he saw no sign of crime-scene tape or anything else that indicated he shouldn’t be here.
Approaching slowly, he stopped several feet from the site, appearing to be interested in something in a completely different direction. If there were any police lurking around here waiting for the murderer to return to the scene of the crime, it wouldn’t do for them to find him carefully examining a spot that they probably hadn’t even publicized. Closer now, he reached out again.
And there it was.
Jason had been here.
Stone shut his eyes tighter, trying to more precisely locate where his friend had been, and what kinds of emotions he’d been experiencing while he was here. Had he come upon the scene of the murder and tried to help? That seemed very much like him—even stumbling drunk, there was no way he’d ignore the desperate pleas of a terrified teenage girl from somewhere off in the darkness. But if whatever had killed her had been supernatural in origin—
But—no.
Without consciously realizing what he was doing, Stone retraced his route back to the wall, hopping over it and back to the narrow path that passed for a sidewalk here. The sense of Jason was stronger here than it had been closer to the scene of the murder. And—
It seemed...unaffected.
Stone frowned. It had already been long enough since Jason had been here that the emotional residue was beginning to fade, especially when it had to compete with the relative excess radiating from the murder site. But what little Stone was able to get puzzled him. Jason had been here, and had been...unfocused, a little frustrated, but mostly just—
—well, for lack of a better word, normal.
The way he would have been if he’d done exactly what his friend Chris Merrill had said he’d done: walked back to his motel from a party after having too much to drink.
Could it be that he had walked past here, but not encountered anything to do with the murder? Perhaps the girl had already been dead by the time he came by, or hadn’t been killed yet. There was nothing in the traces that indicated to Stone that Jason had been disturbed, angry, or in any way affected by the experience of a teenage girl having her throat cut in close proximity to him.
Wait...wait...
He moved a bit up the street, following Jason’s likely footsteps until he was fifty feet or so past the memorial. He walked slowly, careful not to trip as most of his awareness was not currently in the real world. As he continued to trace Jason’s path, the unfocused, unremarkable quality of Jason’s essence began to change. He stopped, relaxing, letting the impressions wash over him, taking them in.
There it was. Still not fright, exactly: certainly not terror. But a definite sense of wrongness, as if something had happened that was out of the ordinary. It still couldn’t have been the murder, not unless Jason or his unseen abductor had taken special pains to obscure the indignation, protectiveness, and outright rage that Stone knew would be pouring off his friend in waves if he were confronted with such a scene. But something about it was defin
itely not right.
The “weird thing” that Jason had called about? Maybe he’d found it right here.
Not that that gave Stone any idea what the hell it was.
And nor, for that matter, did it give him any idea where Jason was now.
He paused, sitting back down on the wall, and closed his eyes. His headache protested against this level of concentration, but mages didn’t get very far into their training if they gave up at the first hint of pain. This time, instead of looking at the spot where Jason had experienced the incongruous emotions, he looked back the way he’d come, back toward the murder site.
This time, from this angle, it was clearer. A tendril of reddish energy, originating somewhere near the scene of the murder, twisting and undulating against the peaceful backdrop of oak trees and meandering lane, hovered in the air. Stone turned slowly, following it outward with his magical senses. It reached the spot where Jason had stopped and then changed directions, moving in a generally southerly direction. He couldn’t see an end to it.
He paused, considering. He’d seen this sort of thing before: usually when there was a tendril like this, it meant there was some connection between its point of origin and wherever it reached. Already it was fading: he doubted it would last the remainder of the day. He didn’t have much time. Whether it ended at wherever Jason was being held or where the murderer was hiding, it didn’t matter. Either way he would find answers.
He hurried back to the BMW, taking the risk that the tiny tendril wouldn’t collapse on itself during the time it took him to get to the car and return here. As it was, he’d have to do something he didn’t like doing: drive while his magical senses were active. Wherever the tendril reached, he was fairly sure it wasn’t within walking distance, and he didn’t have time to take the chance that it was close enough to reach before it faded.
