Blood and Stone

by King, R. L.

  The tendril was still there when he slowed down next to the spot where he’d last seen it. He shifted his vision over and drove as slowly as he dared, hoping it didn’t leave the road and force him to exit the car and set out overland. With a corner of his mind he activated one of the focus objects he wore, a ring with a blocky purple stone, and fed some of its stored power into keeping a lock on the tiny red thread. It was somewhat like trying to follow a glowing laser beam at twilight, with only the faintest of clouds to delineate its path.

  It took him back out of the Arbolada and toward Ojai Avenue, surprisingly keeping mostly to the road. That suggested to Stone that he was following a person rather than a supernatural entity. Things like spirits and other summoned beings rarely followed roads—in fact, most of them didn’t even acknowledge their existence. But humans—even those possessed or otherwise controlled by these spirits and beings—did.

  Quite likely, he was following the murderer.

  He couldn’t get a sense of Jason anymore; that required too much concentration, and there would be no way he could keep enough of his mind on the road to avoid running into parked cars or being pulled over for erratic driving. So he continued on, taking a right and continuing to the southwest.

  There was a fair bit of traffic on Ojai Avenue, since by now it was getting to the beginning of what laughably passed for an evening commute around here. He eased the car onto the main drag, keeping the tendril in his peripheral vision while he readjusted most of his attention to the mundane world. It meandered out and then moved southwest again in a short time, so he took the first left to continue down a road called Country Club Drive.

  He couldn’t look too closely because he had to re-establish the tendril’s position, but the road looked about like he’d have expected something called “Country Club Drive” to look: the BMW cruised past pricey homes, open fields, and the entrance to what was apparently a major local resort. Trees lined both sides of the road, obscuring all but the most fleeting glimpse of the opulent houses, most of them set far back from the road behind tall gates.

  Another several minutes of careful driving brought him to the end of Country Club Drive, to a T intersection with Creek Road. He paused, grateful that there was very little traffic on side roads in this town, and then made a right turn, still following the tendril.

  It led him for another mile or so, snaking along a narrow, twisty road heavily flanked by trees on both sides, before veering abruptly to the left and disappearing into the forest. Stone found a place to pull off, locked the car, shrugged into his coat, and followed it.

  He walked slowly through the trees, the carpet of leaves crackling under his feet. Ahead, the tendril drifted along in a still mostly southwest direction. It was stronger here. He was getting close.

  He paused at that realization, thinking fast. He couldn’t just blunder into whatever was up ahead. He had no idea whether anyone was there, whether they were watching or waiting. Did they know he was coming? His mental defenses hadn’t pinged any attempts to breach them, which meant that whatever had touched him back during the ritual either hadn’t found him yet, or was intelligent enough not to try a direct confrontation.

  Or it was strong enough to do it without him noticing. Which was not a thought he wanted to have right now.

  It could be nothing—a dead trail, or a deliberate wild-goose chase. If the thing had tracked him back to his body fast, it would have had plenty of time to set up something while he’d located the memorial and examined the area. He didn’t think that was the case, though. Paranoia was definitely a good thing when you were dealing with the supernatural realm, but too much of it could get you killed just as fast as not enough. He had to press on and see what he’d find.

  So, he compromised. He couldn’t keep an invisibility spell up long enough for it to do any good—that was not one of his strongest areas magic-wise, and a few minutes was all he could manage without exhausting himself. His “don’t notice me” spell, however—the one he’d used on the BMW as he violated several speed limits on his way down here—came as second nature. It might not protect him from any powerful beings from the spirit world, but if there were any live humans here it should hide him well enough that he could do a bit of recon from a safe distance and then decide his next move once he’d gathered more useful information about what he was facing.

  He put up the spell, gave it a bit of power from his ring to maintain it, and continued forward.

  Step by step, the twisting red tendril grew brighter. Stone broke through the trees into a dusty area about the size of a small parking lot. The only thing he could see was a weed-strewn paddock surrounded by a wooden fence, the sort where a horse might be kept, and on the paddock’s far side, a ramshackle building that could have been a large shed or a small barn. Its doors, closed now, looked as if they would swing out into the field when opened.

  The whole place had a deserted, unkempt feel to it: the dusty field showed neither horse droppings nor any sign that human beings had been here recently, and the weeds had nearly taken over the area around the barn itself.

  The red tendril snaked through the paddock and disappeared, as Stone knew it would, into the barn.

  He glanced around to make sure no one was approaching from behind him, then took a deep breath. This could be a big mistake, but he didn’t have a choice: if Jason was in there, then he had to find him. He faded back behind a tree and spent a moment not only reinforcing his concealing spell, but also adding more power to his mental and physical shield spells. At the very least, it was unlikely that something would catch him completely unaware and get a full-strength shot off against him. He wished he’d brought more focus items with him: all he had right now was a pair of rings, and he was holding one of them in reserve in case of emergency.

  As prepared as he was going to get, he stepped back out into the light (it was a good thing it was summertime: at least he didn’t have to do this in the dark) and moved along the fence toward the barn.

  It was grandiose to call it a “barn”: a single-story structure, it was about the size of a two-car garage, its wooden sides faded and cracked under what might at one time (probably before Stone was born) have been a coat of vibrant red paint. The double doors in the front were fastened with a hasp through which a rusty lock dangled, its shaft hanging open. The sense of isolation was strong: Stone was sure even without his magical senses that there were no living beings inside that barn, human or otherwise.

  If that were true, then either Jason wasn’t here, or—

  But no, that kind of thinking wouldn’t do him any good. He didn’t have time for it. He stepped forward.

  The smell hit him with almost palpable force before he made it all the way to the barn. Fetid, rotten, with a barely discernible coppery tang overlaying it, the odor rolled out of the many openings between the slats of the building. It wasn’t a physical cloud, but it might as well have been. Stone paused, taking a slow, deep breath.

  This was not good.

  This was not good at all.

  Still, as bad as the physical smell was, the sheer psychic taint bathing the area was worse. Stone took a step back, pausing to adjust his mental barriers to block most of it out, but even his formidable defenses couldn’t turn all of it aside. Something horrific had occurred inside this humble building.

  Something—or someone—had suffered torment behind those weathered doors.

  For a few seconds, he thought about just leaving now: going back to town and alerting the police that he’d found something they needed to see. But two things made that impossible for him: first, that whatever was dead in there could be nothing but a horse, cow, or other large animal. The smell was too strong to be a small one, but this place was a barn. Maybe someone had left an animal in there to die, or killed it for whatever reason and left the carcass. It would be pretty embarrassing if the big-city Englishman brought a squad of cops up here only
to show them the last mortal remains of Bessie the Cow. Sure, it wasn’t likely—that kind of crushing psychic residue would require a level of conscious suffering he didn’t think an animal had the capacity to experience—but it was possible.

  That wasn’t the main reason he didn’t leave, though. With the teenage Ashley’s murder having happened so recently, he honestly didn’t think the police would have a problem with citizens reporting potential repeat performances, even if they did turn out to be false alarms. Especially if they turned out to be false alarms.

  No, the main reason why he remained here—why he steeled his will, squared his shoulders, and moved to climb over the fence, slide the lock off the hasp, and push open the barn door—was that he had to know what was in there.

  He had to know it wasn’t Jason.

  He winced as the door swung open a bit, creaking, catching against the dirt and weeds on the ground. With more room to get out now, the stench was nearly unbearable. Stone pulled a handkerchief from the inner pocket of his overcoat and pressed it to his mouth and nose; it helped a bit, but not much.

  Even with the numerous chinks and holes piercing the barn’s wooden skin, it was still quite dim inside. The sliver of light let in by the open door illuminated a dusty floor with a few stray bits of hay clinging to it, but the rest of the interior space on either side and the rear was lost in dappled shadow. Leaving the door open, Stone summoned a small light spell and shone it around.

  He stared, an electric ripple running up his spine and stiffening his body.

  Whoever had created the scene inside, they had taken no pains to conceal their handiwork. On the side farthest away from where Stone stood in shocked immobility, a dark form lay on the dirt floor, its limbs splayed out as if it had been deliberately arranged that way. He had to move in closer to see the details; when he did, reluctantly, the form resolved itself into a human body.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath, and then forced himself to hold his light spell higher and examine the scene more closely.

  It wasn’t Jason.

  Nothing else was immediately obvious except that it had been, at one time, probably male. All that remained now was a collection of blood-soaked limbs, matted hair, filmy staring eyes, and a messy clump of internal organs spilling from the body’s abdominal cavity. It was more obvious at close range that the corpse’s arms and legs had been purposely arranged, spread-eagled and arms extended like it was trying to create some kind of macabre snow angel. Insects, both flying and crawling, hovered and writhed in and around the body, and gobbets of dark blood stained the ground everywhere around the immediate vicinity. Stone glanced down to make sure he hadn’t tracked through it on his way in, but it seemed to be confined to the area just around the body.

  In fact, he realized, “confined” was a very good word to describe what he was seeing. It was as if the body and the area around it had been somehow enshrouded within an invisible dome that limited the spread of blood to a carefully delineated area.

  His eyes widened as the implications of that sunk in.

  What he was seeing here was not just an area, but a crude yet carefully constructed circle.

  That was all he was able to take in before something slammed into him from behind.

  Chapter Seven

  Stone staggered forward, barely catching himself before he pitched headlong into the gory tableau on the ground. He flung himself sideways, recovering his balance against the barn’s side wall and wheeled, readying himself for another attack.

  There was nothing there.

  Breathing hard, he hurried to the door but did not poke his head out yet. Whatever had hit him had put a lot of force behind it: even through his shield, it still felt like someone had whacked him between the shoulder blades with a large, pillow-covered hammer.

  What the hell—?

  And then he felt it again: the same terrorized impulse that had gripped him during the ritual. The near-overwhelming compulsion to flee, to run, to put as much distance between himself and this scene as he possibly could.

  “All right, you bastard,” he growled under his breath. “Big mistake, trying to play that game with me.”

  He stepped out into the paddock, and once again something slammed into him, from the front this time. The force drove him backward into the wall of the barn, but his shield, still at full strength, took up the brunt of the impact. Something shimmered in front of him, dancing away. Without conscious thought he gathered energy and flung a blast of pure arcane power in the direction of the shimmering thing, and was rewarded by a flare of red in the air several feet in front of him.

  Something else hit him from the side, throwing him into the fence. He rolled, panting. There’s more than one of them? This was not good. He could already feel his shield losing a bit of potency—it would hold for a while yet, but if he had to take too many more of those hits, he was going to be in trouble. Not to mention the fact that he wouldn’t be able to fling those blasts of energy many more times either. Diverting more power from his ring to supplement the shield, he dragged himself back to his feet. “Who the hell are you?” he yelled. “What do you want?”

  He didn’t think he would get an answer, but it couldn’t hurt to take a shot. The terror was trying to worm its way into his head again: sweat beaded on his forehead and his heart raced, but he clamped down his mental defenses and forced himself to ignore it. His gaze darted around, trying to pick the shimmering figures—at least two of them—out of the dusty afternoon sunlight.

  Another one hit him, from behind again. He pitched forward and went down on his face. Three?

  Maybe getting the hell out of here wasn’t a bad idea, actually. He had no idea what he was up against, and trying to fight three (or more?) of them, whatever they were, on his own might be a Very Bad Plan.

  He scrabbled up to a sitting position, paused to reinforce the shield again (it didn’t work quite as well this time—he could feel its energy fading even more with each successive impact) and raised both hands, this time sending out a crackling wall of force that, with any luck, would hit at least one of them. It wouldn’t hurt much, but it might drive anything it hit back far enough that Stone could put some distance between himself and them.

  His trick worked. Two more red spots flared about six feet off the ground, shoved backward by Stone’s magical bulldozer. They darted around and faded back to near-invisible shimmers, but didn’t approach.

  Stone’s mind continued spinning out plans and possibilities as he got himself upright and began backing off in the direction he’d come. Had these things been here all along? Were they watching the barn, and only triggered or summoned when someone entered it? Would they have appeared for anyone, or were they tuned to only attack those who might threaten them? Even though they were strong, Stone didn’t think they were the murderers—or at least not the masterminds of whatever this operation was. “You’re here somewhere, aren’t you?” he murmured, eyes flashing. “The host of this little party, I mean, not your lackeys. Show yourself.”

  There was a ripple of something almost like mocking laughter inside his head, but nothing more. One of the little shimmering figures struck him again as he was climbing over the fence. He fell awkwardly, landing on his side, his breath knocked from him.

  Two of them came down to pummel him this time, taking turns, ramming him into the fence like a series of one-two punches from a heavyweight boxer. Stone rolled into a ball and activated his second ring, pouring more power into his shield. Clearly, they could keep this up longer than he could resist it.

  I need to get out of here.

  Closing his eyes, he lashed out with an undirected blast of force, risking more power than he wanted to. His headache, which by this point had mostly faded, spiked into his forehead again. The satisfaction of seeing one of the shimmering forms flare brighter red and fly to pieces in front of him didn’t make up for th
e growing fear that he was in deep trouble.

  Fast, brutal combat spells were not something he, as a white mage, was adept with. He could use them, sure—in fact he’d gotten rather good with them, his more frequent use of them than was strictly proper for “respectable” white mages contributing to the slight darkening of his “pale gray” status, and his ongoing study of the powerful methods used by the mysterious and unconventional gray mage Harrison had made them come more easily than they used to—but even then, they weren’t something he went out of his way to cast if he had other options. Especially not since he didn’t dare to use Harrison’s magic and risk burning out his own.

  Right now, he wasn’t coming up with too many options.

  He rolled back up, his heart doing its best imitation of a heavy-metal drummer. The two remaining shimmers had backed off, flitting to and fro a few feet away. Stone took another step back toward the tree line, keeping the two of them in sight. They remained still. Were they going to let him go?

  The strange laughter sounded in his head again. He got a brief image of Jason, too brief for anything but mere identification, and then yet another impact struck him, this time down low. It took his legs out from under him; as he hit the ground, two more took their turns from behind him and rolled him over and over, back toward the barn. His shield shrieked in protest, its smooth surface glowing red in the spots where they’d hit it. Normally invisible, it began taking on the pinkish tinge that told Stone it wouldn’t hold against too many more of those attacks.

  More than a bit of desperation drove his actions now. He got back to his feet more quickly than he thought possible and staggered toward the tree line as a thought poked itself into his mind from somewhere: maybe the things had been summoned from the crude circle around the corpse, and were tied to that location. If he could get far enough away from them, maybe they wouldn’t be able to follow—or at least maybe their power would wane to the point where he could deal more effectively with them.