by King, R. L.
Brilliant. He had two choices, then: leave the town—and Jason—to their fates and live with the guilt for the rest of his life, or remain, endure whatever suspicion and anger the town’s residents would doubtless throw at him and any further murder attempts the thing he was hunting wanted to try. That was assuming it didn’t figure out a way to frame him for yet another murder. The first one had been relatively easy to get out of, since there was no way he could have committed it and that was clear to even the most casual examination. He’d dodged a much closer bullet with the second one. He had no doubt that whatever this thing was, it had the capacity to learn from its mistakes. If there was a third time, he might as well prepare himself for a very long stay in a very small room.
He couldn’t allow it to get a third chance.
So that was his choice: he could leave, or he could stay.
And it wasn’t a choice. Not at all.
This thing had Jason.
This thing had killed Lindsey Cole, an innocent bystander, simply because she’d been associated with him.
Both of those facts made it personal.
And that meant he might have to end up doing some things he didn’t really want to do. Starting right now.
He shoved himself out of the chair, gathered up his books and notes, and reached for his coat. Five minutes and one phone call later he was back in the car and on the road.
Chapter Seventeen
Stan Lopez lived in a well-kept ranch-style home on a quiet side street in Oak View, a small community halfway between Ojai and Ventura. By the time Stone located it and knocked on the door, it was a little before six p.m. and the sun was just beginning its slow, late-summer descent.
Lopez answered at Stone’s first knock. He was wearing the same clothes as when he’d visited Stone at the police station earlier that day, except the plaid overshirt was gone and he’d swapped the cowboy boots for slip-ons. He eyed Stone for a moment. “Pete told me they’d let you go,” he said. “I’m glad. C’mon in.”
Stone took a moment to scan Lopez with his magical senses, and was relieved to find no trace of the greenish aura. “Thank you,” he said softly. He followed Lopez into a small living room dominated by a comfortable-looking brown leather recliner, an old sofa with a multicolored quilt thrown over the back, and a big-screen TV currently tuned to the news.
“You want a beer? This has to have been a bitch of a day for you. You look tired as hell.”
“I’ve felt better,” he admitted. “But no, thank you. Probably best if I avoid alcohol for a while.”
Lopez nodded, waving toward the seating area. “Sit down. I was just about to figure out what to do for dinner. You like pizza? I could call out, so we can talk without having to go somewhere. Too hot to cook.”
“Yes, that would be fine. Thank you.” Now that he’d roused himself to action, the fact that he hadn’t had anything to eat for nearly a day was making itself hard to ignore. He took a seat on the end of the sofa farthest from the TV.
Lopez headed to the kitchen to make the call, then returned a few minutes later carrying a Bud, a Coke, a stack of paper plates, and a roll of paper towels. He shrugged and grinned, putting everything but the beer down on the coffee table. “I’m not formal around here. Ever since the divorce, I’ve been reverting back to the bachelor lifestyle.” He set the soda can on the coffee table in front of Stone, then settled into his recliner, popped the Bud, and took a long swig. “Now. What can I do for you, Dr. Stone? You said you had something you wanted to talk to me about. Is it about Jason?”
Stone took a deep breath. Even though he’d already made the decision to do this, it still wasn’t anything like easy for him. “Indirectly it is,” he said at last.
Lopez’s gaze sharpened. “You found something about where he is?”
“No. Not yet. But I think in order to get any further in my search, I need to ask for your help. That’s not something I’m terribly comfortable doing, but in light of recent events, I don’t think I have a choice anymore.”
Lopez frowned. “Why aren’t you comfortable? I told you—Jason’s like my own son. I’ll do whatever it takes, whatever I can do to help find him. Why wouldn’t you want me to do that?” His eyes narrowed. “Is it because you want to do something illegal?”
Stone shook his head. “No, that isn’t it. Well—I don’t think so, anyway. Please, Sergeant: let me explain it in my own way. After I’m finished, you can ask whatever questions you like and I promise to answer them to the best of my ability.”
Lopez looked at him like he wasn’t quite sure what to make of him. “If it helps Jason, I’ll listen,” he said. “But like I told you before: call me Stan. I’m only ‘Sergeant’ when I’m on duty.”
Stone nodded. His gaze skimmed over the coffee table, which held a collection of newspapers and sports magazines. The topmost newspaper showed the headline about Lindsey’s murder. He closed his eyes as the images rose again. With an effort, he forced them away.
Lopez followed his line of sight to the table. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” he said, snatching the paper and shoving it under the stack. “Should’ve got rid of that before you got here.”
“It’s all right,” he said without looking up. A full minute passed before he focused on Lopez again. He sighed, rubbing a hand over his face and up into his hair. “Sergeant—Stan—do you recall what I told you about the message Jason left for me before he disappeared?”
“Yeah. You said he told you he’d seen something weird down here, and thought you might be interested.”
“Yes.” He paused. “You said you would do anything to help Jason, correct?”
“Anything legal,” Lopez said, frowning. “Anything else, I’m gonna need more details.”
“Does that include being willing to give me your word that you’ll keep the things I’m about to tell you between the two of us? Nothing illegal, I promise. Just—things I’d prefer not to have generally known.”
Lopez looked hard at him, his eyes showing confusion and a hint of suspicion. After a moment, he nodded. “Dr. Stone, if whatever you tell me isn’t about something illegal, and it’ll help Jason for me to know it, then you have my word that I won’t tell anyone else.”
Stone’s tense posture relaxed a bit. “All right, then.” He took a deep breath, remembering back to the time when he’d had a similar conversation with Jason in the sitting room of his previous home in Palo Alto. It hadn’t been easy then, either. Had it really only been less than three years ago? It seemed so much longer, now.
Casting about for the best way to begin, he finally said, “Jason left that message because he thought I’d be interested in what he found. But not because of what I do at the University.”
“Why, then? I thought you said you taught that occult stuff.”
“I don’t just teach it, Stan,” Stone said softly, his gaze fixed on Lopez’s face. “I practice it.”
Lopez stared at him. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I can show you. But I have to warn you: it will probably cause you some mental discomfort.”
“Mental discomfort?”
“Accepting a new worldview is never easy. And from the conversations we’ve had thus far and what Jason’s told me about you, I’ve got you pegged as a fairly pragmatic sort. But I can prove everything I tell you. Do you still want to see?”
Lopez continued to stare. Once again, Stone could see mental gears turning inside the older man’s head. He wished he didn’t have to do this; as uncomfortable as the whole thing was making Lopez, it was even harder on him. He was pretty sure that trusting someone—someone who was a virtual stranger to him, with only a close connection to Jason to convince him that the man was trustworthy—went against everything Lopez was.
If he’d miscalculated, if Lopez wasn’t mentally capable of handling what he was about to show him, or if his need to tell the st
ory of what he’d seen was stronger than his word, then Stone could be opening himself up to an extra-large helping of inconvenience. Sure, it was likely nobody would believe Lopez even if he did try to tell, but that would cause its own problems. A veteran cop who suddenly started spouting off about magic being real wouldn’t last long on the force, at least not without some intensive psychological evaluation. Stone felt like he was standing on the brink of something huge, and his next step would change the course of two lives. Three, if you counted Jason.
No pressure.
Lopez swallowed. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Stone the whole time. After another long pause, he nodded. “Yeah…yeah, I want to see.”
Stone nodded. He saw how much those words had cost the man, and he could also see more clearly now why Jason held him in such high regard. He sensed that Stan Lopez was a man who would walk through hell for those who mattered to him, no matter how scared he was. Stone just hoped his courage would hold through the sort of thing that nobody unfamiliar with the magical world could ever be expected to deal with.
Taking a deep breath, he raised his hand, pointing it at the unopened can of Coke on the coffee table. It rose up and floated over to him. He plucked it from the air, popped the top, and took a long drink.
Lopez nearly dropped his beer. He bobbled it, lurching forward to stare at the can in Stone’s hand. His eyes, normally crinkled in a deceptively easygoing squint, got so wide that Stone could see stark white all the way around. He struggled to speak, finally getting out: “What. In the fuck—?”
“Magic is real, Stan,” Stone said in the same soft, calm tone. “It’s real, and I can do it. Whatever Jason saw in Ojai, he called me because he thought it had something to do with the magical world. And judging from the fact that he disappeared soon after, he was probably correct.”
Lopez’s breath was coming fast. He swallowed a couple of times, then leaned farther forward and set his beer can on the table with exaggerated care, as if fearing it might explode. “You—” He pointed a shaking finger at Stone’s Coke can. “You—” Another pause. “I didn’t see that. Did I?”
In answer, Stone held up the can. This time he didn’t even bother gesturing at it, but merely sent it levitating up with a flick of his mind. It did a couple of circuits around the table, and then floated neatly down onto the table next to Lopez’s beer.
The doorbell rang.
Lopez didn’t move. His gaze kept darting back and forth between Stone and the can on the table. His mouth moved, but no sound came out.
Stone rose. “I’ll get that,” he said, heading to the door. He came back a few moments later with a large pizza box, after scanning the deliveryman for greenish auras and finding none. With casual ease he gestured at the table, magically sweeping the papers and magazines out of the way, and set the box down. “This smells lovely,” he said, levitating a paper plate over to Lopez. “Shall we?”
Lopez hadn’t changed position except for his eyes, which continued tracking everything that had moved around the table. They settled on the plate hovering in front of him. Finally, after swallowing a couple more times, he said in a strangled tone, “Ja—Jason knows about this?”
Stone nodded. “He has since the first night we met. I actually used magic to get him out of a scrape, and then took him back to my home afterward. He’d only just arrived in the Bay Area recently, looking for Verity.”
“Does—Verity know too?”
“She does, yes.” He purposely didn’t tell him that Verity could do magic as well; that was her secret to reveal if she chose, not his. Besides, Lopez was freaked out enough as it was.
Lopez reached up and gingerly took the hovering plate, as if he expected it to somehow zap him. He took a couple of long, slow breaths and let them out. “This…this isn’t a trick, is it?”
“No. It’s the real thing. I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true.”
“So you can—” He looked at the plate. “You can do—what else?”
“Quite a lot of things. You’ll forgive me if I don’t catalogue them for you right now—that’s hardly the point, and it won’t help us find Jason.”
Moving with deliberate slowness, Lopez leaned forward and opened the pizza box, motioning for Stone to go first. He did so, nodding thanks. The enticing aroma was making him realize just how hungry he was. Lopez took a slice, reclaimed his beer, and leaned back in his recliner. “You’ll have to forgive me, Dr. Stone,” he said, his voice shaking. “This is all—pretty damn freaky.”
“Quite all right,” Stone said through a mouthful of pizza. He was already halfway through his current slice and eyeing his next one. “I didn’t think it would be easy for you to accept. It wasn’t easy for Jason, either. Some people are—shall we say—more predisposed toward disbelief. People who are strongly grounded in the so-called ‘real world.’”
“Like cops,” Lopez said.
“Like cops, yes.” Stone liberated another slice of pizza from the box. “I do hate to do this to you, Stan—I know you really should have more time to process all of this. It’s a lot to take in so quickly. But there’s a fair bit more that I need to tell you before you’ll be able to help me find Jason. Do you think you could—for Jason’s sake—just accept that what I’m showing you is real, so we can go on from there? I promise I’ll answer your questions when I’ve finished.”
Lopez nodded slowly. “I—I’ll try,” he said. “But you got to give me a minute. This is a lot to swallow.” He took a long swig of beer. “Go ahead—keep going. I’m listening. And believe me, you don’t have to worry about me telling anybody else. They’d have me in a fuckin’ straitjacket if I tried.”
“Probably,” Stone agreed. “I’m not worried, though. If Jason trusts you, I trust you. But now that you have the basics, let me tell you how they relate to our current problem.”
Speaking in the same calm, professorial tone that he used for his classroom lectures at Stanford, Stone laid out the situation, beginning with the message Jason had left him and ending with what had happened with Lindsey. He paused several times to devour more pizza, and when he got to the part about Lindsey, his voice lost some of its cool objectivity and began to shake a bit. He forced himself to keep going—if Lopez was going to be of any help to him, he’d have to know what he was up against. He had to be able to decide for himself after hearing all the facts.
Lopez, for his part, didn’t interrupt. He sat back in his chair, munching pizza and swigging beer with a kind of methodical lack of awareness, his eyes fixed on Stone. He neither nodded, made any sound, nor moved more than necessary to continue eating. His only change of expression came when Stone got to Lindsey, at which point he briefly closed his eyes, then opened them again.
When Stone finished his story, he waited, watching Lopez. He had no idea how the man was going to react: Lopez’s poker face was as good as his own. The only sound in the room was the low drone of the TV, which had now switched to a game show.
Nearly two full minutes passed. Lopez leaned forward and dropped another slice of pizza onto his plate, then rose and picked up his empty beer can. He spoke in a quiet, even tone: “You want another Coke? Or something else?”
Stone nodded. “Another Coke is fine, thank you,” he said in the same tone. He waited while Lopez left and returned, setting another can on the table next to the empty one. Without thinking about it Stone scanned him, but he remained thankfully free of green auras. The man’s own aura was a clear, solid blue, shot through with jagged streaks of red: steadfast, but deeply disturbed. After another moment of silence, Stone ventured, “Are you all right?”
Lopez nodded. “Yeah.” He took a deep breath. “This is—” His eyes came up and met Stone’s. “Are there a lot of you—you—what do you call yourselves? Wizards? Warlocks?”
“The terms vary. In this part of the world, we usually use ‘mage.’”
“Mage.” He mu
lled that over. “So—are there a lot of—mages around?”
Stone realized that, no matter how much he wanted to move the process along and get started looking for Jason again, Lopez would need some time to work through this. He could speed things along somewhat, but there was no way he could bypass it. He leaned back on the sofa. “Quick answer: no. We’re fairly rare. The biggest percentage are what we call minor talents: they have a few tricks they can do, but they haven’t the innate ability or the desire to progress to the higher levels. Even those are rare, though. I doubt you’ve more than a few in the entire area.”
“What about you? You’re stronger than one of these—minor talents, right?”
Stone’s eyebrow rose. “I get the job done.”
“And—they—you, I mean—look just like regular people?”
Stone gave a mirthless chuckle. “You tell me. Do I look like ‘regular people’?” When Lopez didn’t reply, he continued, “They look like what they look like. I’ve met a couple who look like bankers, a few who go for the goth or hippie aesthetic, and most just look like your usual sort of person on the street. It just depends on the individual.”
Lopez was silent again, obviously struggling with something. “Can you—kill people with magic?”
Stone saw where he was going, and didn’t sugarcoat it. “Yes.”
“Shit...” Lopez let out a long breath. “I’m just thinking about unsolved cases. How many of them could have been—” He looked up. “You think these murders in Ojai are related to this magic, don’t you?”
Stone nodded.
“And Jason’s disappearance.”
Again he nodded.
Lopez shook his head, scrubbing his hand over his face. “Shit...” he said again, gaze rising to the ceiling. “I’ve got so many questions. I don’t even know where to start. And we don’t have time for me to ask them all.” He turned back to Stone. “Okay. Questions later. Action now. What do you want me to do? How can I help find Jason, and find whatever did this to those people?”
