by King, R. L.
“I suppose this isn’t the proper time to tell you it’s actually an old bathrobe, then?”
“Depends on what kind of bathrobe,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “And what you wear underneath it.” She smiled. “You know, that reminds me of when I was a little kid. There was an older girl who used to babysit me, and she and her friends had some kind of secret ‘witch club’ they belonged to. You know, all fairies and flowing gowns and magic wands and that kind of thing, and they got together and cast spells and made love potions and stuff. I used to look forward to her coming over because she’d let me try on her witchy robe. It was the prettiest shade of green. I wanted her to make me one, but she never did.” She giggled. “Her family was Japanese. I forget her name, but everybody called her ‘Mickey.’ I used to call her Mickey Mouse.” She paused for a sip of her drink. “Wow, I hadn’t thought of that in years. See? You’re good for me.”
“Well, I hope so,” he murmured.
They spent the next hour or so lingering over dinner and chatting about various subjects that had nothing to do with the supernatural, the murders, or Stone’s search for Jason. He felt guilty when he realized that he’d enjoyed it more than he’d expected to. It might have been at least partly the couple of drinks taking the edge off the worst of his pain, but Lindsey was every bit as intelligent and charming as he thought she was, and he found himself regretting that she didn’t live in the Bay Area. Maybe he might have been able to pursue something with her if she did. Ah, well, he thought. Enjoy it while it lasts, at least. Tomorrow it’s back to work.
By the time they left the restaurant and strolled back to his car it was a little after ten. He drove her to her house, a neat single-story place on a quiet street a couple of miles from the restaurant. As he pulled into the driveway and came around to open the door for her, he made an amused little bow. “Thank you for a lovely evening.”
She smiled almost shyly. “You—wouldn’t want to come in, would you?” she asked.
He smiled too. “Actually, I’d like that very much.”
Her living room was a lot like she was: neat and a little bohemian with a hint of whimsy. Her bedroom, a short while later, was even more so. “I’m glad I cleaned up in here,” she said with a little laugh. “You should have seen it yesterday: clothes strewn all over everything.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “You should see mine.”
“Maybe I will sometime.” She put up her hands and pushed his coat down off his shoulders. “Now why don’t we get you out of that coat and I’ll get us some drinks?”
“Brilliant,” he agreed.
An hour later, after she’d succeeded in getting him out of considerably more than his coat (and he’d returned the favor with pleasure), he lay next to her, looking out the window into her backyard with a lazy, satisfied smile. Her head was nestled in the crook of his shoulder, his hand gently stroking her hair. Whatever aches and pains he’d been feeling before had long since been banished by the drinks they’d had and the pleasurable time they’d shared.
“Mmm,” Lindsey murmured, her hand on his chest. “I think I might need to come up with a way to sell you a house, so I can keep you here. You can commute to Stanford, right?”
“Absolutely,” he said in the same tone. “It’s only—what—three hundred miles? No problem at all. Or perhaps you could come and sell houses in Palo Alto. The market is quite hot, I hear.”
She chuckled. “Oh, really? Well, we’ll just have to see how things go, won’t we?”
“Indeed...” His voice was slurring a bit as the drinks and the exhaustion of the day began finally to catch up with him, but it was a good kind of exhaustion. As he drifted off, still stroking Lindsey’s hair, he knew he would sleep well.
He wasn’t sure what awakened him. Perhaps it was some vestigial bit of the low-grade defenses he kept running at minimal power even when he wasn’t concentrating on them, or perhaps it was the sudden movement next to him in the bed.
Whatever it was, when his eyes flickered open sometime in the early hours of the morning, the first thing he saw was Lindsey looming over him, her arm raised above her head. “What—?” he started, confused.
The next two things his foggy brain registered were simultaneous: Lindsey’s eyes were glowing with a faint reddish orange color, and her arm, holding something, was plunging down toward his chest.
He flung himself sideways, and whatever she had in her hand sunk into the bed where he’d been. Still reacting purely on instinct, he rolled back over and gripped her wrist. Something fell from her hand and dropped with a tiny thump to the mattress. “Lindsey!” he snapped. “What are you doing?”
Enough light streamed in from the window that he could see her face. Her expression was twisted into a chilling grin, her eyes still glowing with that odd light. “Go back where you came from, mageling,” she whispered. Her voice didn’t sound like Lindsey: it had a rough, rasping quality that suggested something unfamiliar was using it.
“What?” Stone, still gripping her wrist, threw her over on her back and took hold of her other wrist as well, holding her down. “Lindsey, what the hell are you on about?”
“Go while you still can,” the voice that was not Lindsey’s whispered. “You cannot stop us. Your friend is ours now. Get out and we will spare you. Remain and we will use everyone in this town to destroy you.”
Stone stared, heart pounding. The half-sleepy fuzziness in his brain burning off, he thought fast. Shifting to magical senses, he took a good look at Lindsey and was not at all surprised to see the same faint aura he thought he’d spotted on the boy who’d tried to strangle him yesterday. “Let her go,” he growled. “Get out of her now, you bastard. Face me in your true form. And what do you mean, my friend is yours?”
She chuckled, an unwholesome sound entirely incongruous with her normally pleasant tones. “Give up, mageling. You don’t have the power to turn us away. Your friend is lost to you. Go now, or bear the guilt of what will come.”
And then, as suddenly as it had come, the eerie expression left her face and the glow left her eyes. Lindsey looked up at Stone, bewildered. “A-Alastair? What’s going on?”
Stone released her wrists and spun, trying to spot whatever had just vacated her body, but all traces of it were gone. He sat upright, puffing, teeth gritted in frustration.
“Alastair?” She touched his shoulder. “Is something wrong?”
He lowered his head into his hands, shoving his hair up into untidy spikes. “No...” he whispered.
Lindsey sat up next to him. “What’s going on? Are you all right?”
As he stared at her, the shocked realization came: she doesn’t have any idea why I’m agitated. She doesn’t remember any of it. She had no idea what had just occurred, that she had very likely just tried to murder him in bed.
Just like the kid at Bart’s.
He felt around next to him until his hand fell on the hard smooth form of what she’d dropped: it was a slender letter opener, its blade now bent to the side where the mattress had turned it. He looked at it in disbelief for a moment, then back at her. The thing might not have been enough to kill him, but if she’d managed to drive it into his chest in the right place it definitely could have made a good try at it. “I—” he began. He was shaking. Already his mind was putting together the implications of what the thing that had taken over Lindsey had said.
Bloody hell.
“Alastair, you’re scaring me.”
You and me both. He struggled to get himself together. “It’s—all right,” he said, concentrating on keeping his voice even. “I—must have had a bad dream or something.” Surreptitiously he dropped the letter opener over the edge of his side of the bed. She’d wonder in the morning what had caused the rip in the sheet, but right now that didn’t even rate on his scale of things to be concerned about.
He had much bigger problem
s than that.
Lindsey looked dubious, reaching over to switch on the light. Her eyes widened. “You’re pale as a ghost! And what happened to your neck?”
For a moment he didn’t understand what she meant, but then it came to him: ah, the bruises are finally making their appearance. He shook his head. “It’s all right,” he said again. “I’m fine. I’m sorry I frightened you.”
Still looking confused she raised her arms, rolling her wrists around. “My arms hurt,” she said. “Like somebody grabbed me or something.” She glanced sideways at him but said nothing. Instead, she pulled up the sheet to cover herself. “What did happen to your neck? You’ve got bruises. I—don’t understand.”
Stone took a deep breath. Right now, all he wanted to do was get out of here, get back to his rented house where he could try to figure out what the hell was going on and how he was going to locate whatever that thing was that had slipped into Lindsey’s body with indecent ease. Still—none of this was her fault. He owed her at least some minimal explanation. “I didn’t want to tell you,” he said, his tone dull. “We were having such a lovely evening, I didn’t want to upset you.”
“What—do you mean?” she whispered.
“You’ll see it in the paper tomorrow, no doubt.” Speaking in the same colorless monotone, he gave her the highlights of the attack at Bart’s. He left out the part about the boy’s confusion after it was over.
She gaped at him. “You’re—kidding. A teenage boy tried to strangle you? At Bart’s?” Her eyes narrowed. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“What good would it have done?” he asked, shrugging. He propped a pillow against the headboard and sat up the rest of the way. “All it would have done was worry you. It’s not as if he’s still at large—as far as I know they’ve got him in custody.”
Lindsey gazed into her sheet-covered lap. She said nothing.
Stone reached out to gently touch her shoulder, and felt it stiffen under his hand. “Lindsey, I’m sorry. Really. I knew this was a mistake, but—I wanted to see you tonight. I didn’t mean to cause you any distress. I should go.”
He expected her to try to stop him—part of him wanted her to—but she didn’t. She just nodded once, her expression half-miserable, half-frightened.
He dressed quickly and stood for a moment next to her side of the bed. “I truly am sorry, Lindsey,” he murmured, then turned and left the room.
She said nothing as he departed.
Chapter Fourteen
Nobody pulled Stone over as he drove back to his house, which was something of a wonder, all things considered. He didn’t feel the least bit tipsy anymore—the events of the last half hour had driven any remnants of that from his mind—but what he did feel was a bone-deep exhaustion that forced him to use every ounce of his strength and concentration to keep the big car on the road. Every one of his aches and pains from the past two days had returned, and from the way his body was protesting right now, they’d invited a few friends over to join the party.
All he wanted to do was sleep, but that wasn’t possible. He checked the wards again to make sure nothing had tried to get in, took a fast cold shower, put some coffee on to keep himself awake, and gathered up the stack of books he’d bought along with a notebook. All of this he carried to the kitchen table and then dropped wearily into a chair.
The first thing he did was write down everything he could remember about the encounter with the thing that had taken over Lindsey: the glowing eyes, the raspy voice, the details of the aura, and everything he could remember about what it had said to him. Then, leaning on his elbow with one hand buried in his hair, he studied its words and wondered what Jason—and now he—had gotten themselves into.
“Right, then,” he muttered, turning to a fresh page in the notebook. “Let’s see what we know about you.”
He wrote down his thoughts as they came to him, each on its own line:
More than one of them (“we”)
One leader and minions, or multiple equally powerful?
They know what I am, and that I’m looking for my friend.
They can apparently move in and out of mundanes at will. (mages? unknown)
Jason is “lost” (imprisoned? dead? using him for something? hostage?)
Guilt from “what is to come” (more murders?)
Can attack when not possessing a person (see barn attack) (same creatures?)
How many? At least three (from barn)
Can they hide aura?
He wrote the word “EVIL?” and circled it, then crossed it out. Whatever these things were, he was almost certain they weren’t part of that group’s scattered remaining force. For one thing, the Evil weren’t indiscriminate body-hoppers, especially the weaker specimens that were, as far as he knew, the only ones remaining. Even the strong ones chose a body and possessed it with at least tacit permission, and couldn’t vacate it except upon the death of the host. Although plenty of people existed out there whose goals aligned with the Evil, and thus they had never lacked for hosts, being forced to leave a host body killed all but the strongest Evil and diminished the others.
These things, on the other hand, seemed quite comfortable jumping from body to body while suffering no ill effects. In a way that made them more frightening, because they could be inside anyone, but both times Stone had encountered them, he’d seen the eerie greenish aura when he looked for it. If they couldn’t hide that aura from those who could perceive such things, then at least from now on he could see them coming if he kept his guard up.
Except that, at least from what he’d seen at the barn on Creek Road, they had some ability to attack even when they weren’t possessing a body. Unless the things that had attacked him at the barn were different from the ones that possessed mundanes.
How many different types of (quite probably related) things was he dealing with here?
Stone’s other hand went to his hair, pressing on his forehead as he struggled to wrangle his tired thoughts into some semblance of order. Another thing that had been true of both the boy’s possessor and Lindsey’s was that the mundanes seemed to remember nothing of the possession after being vacated, and aside from whatever the thing might force the body to do while occupying it, seemed to suffer no ill effects from being under the control of a new driver. That was something, at least. Not much, but something. Having to deal with a bunch of mundanes driven insane as their brains tried to process what had happened to them would make this effort even more difficult than it was already was.
And what about Jason? Where was he in all of this? The thing had said that he was “theirs now.” The most logical explanation for that statement was that they had possessed him, perhaps on a permanent basis, and hidden him somewhere. But if so, why?
Stone sighed and poured himself another cup of coffee. If Jason had blundered drunkenly into the scene of the first murder while walking back from the party, perhaps the entity had jumped from the murderer’s body to Jason’s. Why would it do that, though, instead of just killing him?
“Perhaps he was too formidable for it to cope with in its current body,” he mused, jotting that down in his notebook with a question mark. He and Jason were about the same height—an inch or two over six feet—but while Stone was thin, Jason had an athlete’s build and outweighed him by thirty or forty pounds, all of it muscle. Jason was also trained in martial arts and self-defense techniques. It would take a large or very strong man to be able to overpower him. A lot stronger than would be needed to overpower a sixteen-year-old girl, especially if she were caught by surprise.
Could that have been why he was able to get tantalizing glimpses of Jason’s aura during the tracking ritual, but never anything long enough to lock on to? Because whatever had possessed him had submerged Jason’s aura sufficiently enough to hide it?
And what of the fact that Jason was notoriously difficult to possess? At least that wa
s true with regard to the Evil, but Stone had no idea if that quality extended to other extradimensional beings.
He threw his pen on the table in frustration. None of this was helping him find Jason. Even if any of his guesses were correct, what good did they do? Before he could confront this thing, whatever it was, he needed to find out what it was. He knew more now than he’d known yesterday, which was good, but still nowhere near enough.
Perhaps he could figure out a way to talk to the boy who’d tried to strangle him, or Lindsey herself once she’d had a chance to calm down. He wondered if she’d even want to see him again after what had happened. The way she’d looked at him—hurt, confused, and a little angry—he supposed he couldn’t blame her. The whole thing had to be even more unsettling for her than for him.
He pushed the notebook aside and picked up one of the books: Ojai Lore and Legends, from the Third Eye Bookstore. Flipping through it, he found sections on some of the things Lindsey had told him about: Char Man, the ghost children who jumped off the bridge, and the decapitated motorcyclist all had their own sections, as did the vampire and a phantom bride she hadn’t mentioned. There were other stories as well, including some Chumash legends related to the beginnings of the Ojai Valley and the alleged healing power of some of its hot springs, but what interested Stone most was the number of legends or ghost stories centered around Creek Road. That had to mean something. One of the first things you learned when you studied magic—real magic—was that a lot of those spooky stories that mundanes wrote off as urban legends so they could keep their sanity properly tethered had their bases in fact. Maybe not exactly as told, because stories like that had a tendency to “evolve” as they were passed from person to person, but when you traced them back to their origins, almost invariably magic had its thumb in the pie somewhere.
Stone took up his notebook again and began making a list for tomorrow: Talk to the boy if he could. Talk to Lindsey, if she’d see him. Check out Creek Road and see if he could pick up anything from the area. If it was some sort of mystic hot spot, maybe he could get a better feel for where Jason was, or where these creatures had come through. If there was some sort of breach in the fabric of the dimensions that had let them in, odds were good that was where it was.
