by King, R. L.
“Don’t we all?” Stone said with a raised eyebrow.
“Yeah, but I get the feeling your definition of ‘sense’ covers a lot more territory than Pete’s does. Or mine, up until yesterday.”
Something occurred to Stone. “Did you get any other details about this new murder?”
“Like what?”
“Was there a sort of—crude circle of blood around the body? It might have been hard to see if the investigators weren’t specifically looking for it.”
Lopez frowned, squinting. “I didn’t ask. Is that important?”
“It could be. If you could find out—and also if there was one around the first victim—I’d appreciate it. What was her name, by the way? And did they ever identify the male victim on Creek Road?”
Lopez pulled a small leather-covered notebook from his back pocket and flipped through it. “First vic was the sixteen-year-old girl, Ashley Reed. Local kid, family’s been in the valley forever. Good student, cheerleader, popular. Nobody had any good idea of what she was doing wandering around the Arbolada at that time of night. Second one—turns out he wasn’t a drifter after all, which is what they thought originally. He was a twenty-seven-year-old male named Paul Gardo. Local lowlife, stoner type. Nobody called him in as missing because his roommates said he tended to wander off for days to ‘find himself’ in the wilderness. ‘Finding himself’ apparently being a euphemism for ‘smoking lots of weed.’”
Stone nodded. “All right, then. Let me just bring a few things in and if you’re ready, we’ll get started.”
An hour later, they were in Lopez’s pickup, driving along Creek Road toward Ojai. “Anywhere in particular?” Lopez asked. “Or you just want me to drive around?”
“Just drive around for now,” Stone said, only half-listening as he magically scanned the area.
Lopez had advised against taking Stone’s BMW, and had, in fact, suggested that he put it in the garage. “People around town are definitely getting spooked over these murders,” he said, “And a lot of ’em know you were a person of interest. Having a distinctive car parked out in the open might not be the wisest thing right now.”
Before they’d left, Stone had insisted on spending the time it took to put up a ward around Lopez’s house. Lopez had trailed behind him as he walked the perimeter muttering under his breath and pausing near each door and window to concentrate for several seconds before moving on. “This is just weird as hell,” the cop had said.
Stone shrugged. “Just a precaution. It will keep most things from getting in—the ones it can’t stop, it will at least take a reasonable bite out of. And I’ll know if anybody tried to get in while we were away.”
“Magic burglar alarms. What’ll they think of next?”
It was a beautiful day, with a cloudless, bright blue sky overhead. Creek Road was two lanes wide, several miles long, and wound its tree-lined way past neatly kept homes and long stretches of unoccupied forest. They passed several bicyclists, a few walkers, and a couple of teenagers riding horses.
“Anything yet?” Lopez asked as he slowed down to go around a small knot of brightly-colored cyclists.
“Sort of. I’m getting some definite impressions of magic, but they’re fleeting. I think we’re going to need to park and hike around a bit. Too many people here. Is there a particular place the urban legends focus on more than any other? I remember reading something about a bridge—”
“Yeah, we’re almost to that now. It’s over by Hermosa Road. There’s a bridge, and right near it is a campground. A lot of the folks who claim to have seen Char Man say it was near the campground.”
“Let’s start there, then.”
They reached the campground in another five minutes. Lopez parked the truck in the large, mostly empty lot, and climbed out. He pulled two daypacks from the back seat and offered one to Stone.
“What’s this?”
“You don’t get outside much, do you?” Lopez asked, amused.
Stone raised an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”
He looked the mage up and down, taking in his black Pink Floyd T-shirt, faded jeans, and black Doc Martens. “Well, first of all, you’re so pale you look like you’ll spontaneously combust in the sunlight. Even if you don’t, you’re gonna fry without a hat or sun protection. At least you brought sunglasses and left that coat home. That’s a start, I guess.” He waved the pack. “You’ve got sunscreen, water, and energy bars in there, along with a flashlight and a topo map of the area.”
“You make it sound like we’re setting out for a long journey, not just wandering about in the forest for a couple of hours.” Stone protested, but he took the pack nonetheless. He removed his own black duffel from the truck, unzipped both, and transferred his magical paraphernalia to the backpack.
Lopez shrugged. “Better safe than sorry.” He wore a long-sleeved blue chambray shirt, jeans, his cowboy boots, shades, and a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. His service pistol was attached to his belt in a holster. “Oh, right.” He reached into the back seat and tossed Stone a hat much like his own.
“No. Thank you, that’s quite all right. I’ll take my chances,” he said, tossing it back. He did, however, dig out the sunscreen and apply it liberally.
“Suit yourself.” Lopez grinned and put the hat back in the truck. “Lead on, then. I’ll follow and make sure you don’t trip over any mountain lions while you’re looking at magic butterflies or whatever.”
Stone didn’t even bother trying to defend his nonexistent woodsman skills—it would have been pointless, and they both knew it. Instead, he hoisted the pack onto one shoulder and set off toward the campground proper.
For the next hour, Stone tramped through the trees with Lopez a few steps behind him, looking for anything odd in the area’s magical signature. It became a progression: pick a direction, walk for five minutes or so, stop and take bearings, and then re-orient and repeat. As was often the case when he was doing this kind of work, Stone lost track of both time and exactly where he was.
Finally, Lopez stopped. “Al?”
Stone paused, finishing the reading he was doing, and then turned back. “Yes?”
“You realize we’ve been out here for over an hour, right?”
He looked surprised, and glanced around at their unfamiliar surroundings. “Have we?”
Lopez shook his head, exasperated. “Are all mages like you? You’re like a damn cat following a mouse or something. Do you even know where we are?”
“No idea,” Stone said cheerfully.
“And how would you propose to find your way back to the truck?”
He shrugged. “Easy answer: follow you. Slightly more entertaining answer: turn invisible and levitate myself high enough until I can see the road, then go that way.”
Lopez stared at him. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Not at all. That’s what I usually do when I get caught up in what I’m doing and forget to pay attention to where I am.”
“Oo-kay,” Lopez said in a long-suffering tone. “So, more to the point: have you found anything? Or are we just wandering around out here because we really like mosquitoes?”
Stone crouched down, his tone growing once more serious. “It’s hard to say. There’s definitely something, but it’s not just here. I’m getting impressions of something more interesting—” He paused, closed his eyes, and turned himself around until he faced roughly southeast. “—that way,” he finished, pointing. “But it’s not close. I think it would be a considerable hike, judging from how weak the signal is.” He opened his eyes and rose to his full height. “Is there anything over in that direction?”
Lopez pulled out his map without bothering to remind Stone that he had one in his own pack. He unfolded it and spread it out on a fallen log. “Gets pretty remote over there,” he said, pointing. “See—there’s a fire road, but mostly it’s just a whole lot of tree
s.”
Stone studied the map. “Can we go up there? Is the road accessible?”
“Should be. It’ll take a while, though.”
“Then we’d best get started.”
They weren’t as far from the truck as the amount of time they’d spent walking might have suggested, due to the winding, circuitous route Stone had taken while seeking magical traces. They got back to it in a half-hour, and Lopez pulled onto Creek Road again, continuing back toward Ojai. After about a mile, he turned right onto a small unmarked road.
“Keep an eye on that map,” he told Stone. “I don’t get out here very often, and these roads can get a little tricky.”
Stone did as instructed, occasionally glancing up to get a quick magical look around. Lopez soon turned on to another road, and the truck jounced and shuddered along over the uneven, intermittent paving. “You sure about this?” he asked Stone.
“I’ll let you know.”
He grinned. “Good thing we didn’t bring that fancy ride of yours, huh?”
Stone merely grimaced in reply.
They drove for another half-hour, making yet another turn onto yet another road. This one abandoned all pretense at pavement; it was little more than a wide, rutted dirt path occasionally overgrown with clumps of tall weeds.
“I hope we don’t blunder into any freelance pot farms out here,” Lopez said as one of the tires hit a pothole that nearly bounced both him and Stone into the headliner. “Most of the hippies around this area are pretty mellow, but occasionally you’ll get your antisocial types who have an objection to anybody coming to visit.”
Stone wasn’t listening. He’d mostly given up on reading the map at this point. “We’re getting closer,” he said in a distracted tone. “It’s getting stronger.”
They reached a crossroads; the terrain ahead was growing more thickly forested in both directions. “Left, right, or straight?” Lopez asked.
Stone closed his eyes for a moment. “Right.”
Lopez nodded, swinging the truck around. “I sure as hell hope you know what you’re doing,” he said. “And I’m really glad I filled up this morning.”
The dirt road narrowed even more as it snaked through the thick trees on either side. Stone sat silent in the passenger seat, head bowed slightly, eyes closed. He paid no attention to the twists and turns as Lopez slowed down to keep the big vehicle on the road. It was barely wide enough for a single lane, the branches of the old trees forming a sun-dappled canopy over their heads.
“Here,” Stone said suddenly, his head snapping up. They’d just negotiated a particularly sharp switchback and were heading down a gentle grade. “Stop here.”
Lopez pulled the truck off the road as much as he could. There wasn’t really room to park without more than half of the truck still poking out into the lane itself. “You sure?” he asked. “This isn’t—”
Stone was already getting out. He stood for a moment, eyes closed, then grabbed his pack from the seat. “I can feel it,” he said. “It’s not too far from here. It’s strong. I think we’re near a ley line.”
“A what?”
“A sort of—natural conduit of magical energy,” he said, already heading into the trees. “Think of is as a power line, only magical.”
Lopez hurried after him. “So, what’s that mean? Are there a lot of these things around?”
“They’re all over the earth,” he said. “I don’t think there are many around this area, but I don’t have my map that shows them. And as for what it means: performing any sort of magic on or near a ley line gives it extra power. You can do things that you might normally not be able to do. And if you can find a place where two or more of them intersect, the power goes up considerably.” He scrambled down a slope, struggling to stay upright as his boots slid on the carpet of dead leaves that covered the whole area, and plunged into a copse of trees. Lopez followed.
Stone kept up a quick pace for another ten minutes, moving unerringly through the forest. There was something here, he could tell. Without a ritual he wouldn’t be able to get the exact nature of it, but he was certain it was related to the energy he’d picked up when he’d examined the site of Ashley Reed’s murder—the same energy that had led him to the barn and Paul Gardo’s body. He didn’t even turn back to see if Lopez was still behind him, though he could hear the man crunching through the leaves a few yards back.
As he continued, the energy in the forest began to change. At first he didn’t feel it: it was similar to what a person might feel if the ambient temperature around him was gradually increased a degree at a time. The fact that his breath was coming harder and his limbs felt heavier was probably just due to the fact that he’d been pushing himself too hard and his body was telling him to slow down. But Lopez’s breathing sounded the same as before, and he hadn’t slowed. It couldn’t be—
Abruptly he stopped. Lopez nearly barreled into him from behind. “What?” the cop demanded. “Why are you—”
Stone held up a hand. “I need to check something.” He pulled off his sunglasses and swiped a hand over his forehead. It came away wet, and his T-shirt was sticking to his shoulder blades. Something was going on here. He looked over at Lopez, who was watching him with concern. He looked a little tired, but he wasn’t panting or sweating.
“You okay?” Lopez asked. “You look a little overheated.”
“I’m all right.” He pulled a water bottle from his pack and took a long drink, still breathing hard. “Can’t you feel it?”
“Feel what?” He frowned. “You sure you’re all right?”
Instead of answering, Stone shifted fully to magical senses. There was no doubt about it: something was wrong with the arcane energy in the area. Instead of the ordered patterns and bright, clear auras of the healthy earth and trees that normally characterized a natural area like this, the currents of magic were muddy, distorted, somehow ill. Something had happened here that had disrupted the very astral energy of the entire region. Just being in it was making Stone feel queasy.
“Al, buddy, tell me what’s going on.” Lopez’s voice held concern and nervousness.
Stone took a deep breath. “There’s something wrong here. Magically.”
Chapter Twenty
“What’s that mean? Like somebody died here or something?” Lopez started looking around as if expecting to see dismembered body parts strewn across the mulch of dead leaves.
“No. It’s far larger than that. A mere murder—or even more than one—wouldn’t be enough to cause a disruption like this. Whatever happened here, it was either quite large, or it went on for a very long time.” He took a couple deep breaths and let them out slowly. Normally, this kind of thing would be like catnip for his professional curiosity. He had never seen anything like this in all the years he’d been practicing magic. Now, though, he was having a hard time keeping his concentration straight.
“So it’s—what—some kind of magical pollution?”
“That’s a very good way to put it, yes.” Stone took another drink from his water bottle and swiped sweat and damp hair off his forehead again. He forced himself to think. “I was right about a ley line running through here. That would explain why Ojai has been subjected to so many supernatural events: magical things have an affinity for ley lines, and tend to gravitate toward them.”
“Is that bad?” Lopez asked.
“Not in and of itself. A lot of populated areas exist near ley lines. Usually the magical and mun—er—non-magical worlds don’t interact much. A person would have to be at least somewhat magically aware to even notice anything at all, and even then most interactions are harmless. But this—” He made a wide, sweeping gesture to take in the area around them. “—this is different. This is—corrupt. That’s the best way I can describe it.”
“Is this what you were looking for?” The cop sounded dubious as he looked around. “I mean—everythi
ng looks fine to me. No weird, twisted trees or three-headed squirrels or anything like that—”
“I don’t think this is new.” Stone slowly turned around, scanning the area. “It feels like it’s been here for a long time. I can’t explain it, exactly, but it does. It feels like black magic, but not the kind that I’m familiar with.”
“Wait—you know black magic?” Lopez’s brows arched suspiciously.
Stone shook his head, holding up a hand to forestall his protests. “I don’t practice it. But I’m familiar with its methods.” With an obvious effort, he gathered himself. “Come on. I don’t have time to explain it all now. I want to see if I can find the source of this.”
Lopez eyed him. “You look like you’re about to pass out. Are you sure you can do this?”
He nodded. “It’s uncomfortable, but I don’t think it’s harmful. Like I said, it’s old. I think it was very potent once, but magical power wanes over time.”
“What are we looking for, then? At least let me help.”
“I don’t know. If I had to guess, I’d say—some sort of ceremonial area, or a graveyard, or—I’ve no idea, really. Something man-made, though, almost certainly.”
“Okay. How about if we split up and look around a little? Keep each other in sight, but we can cover more ground that way.”
Stone wasn’t happy about that idea, but it made sense. “All right. But keep close. If there is something dangerous up here, I can’t protect you if you’re too far away. And if you see anything even the slightest bit odd, call me right away. Don’t approach it or examine it too closely first.”
Lopez nodded, looking apprehensive. After a moment, he picked a direction and moved off.
Stone paused for a few seconds, closing his eyes again to see if he could get even a slight sense of which direction he was looking for. He swallowed a couple of times, pushing back the growing nausea with an effort of will. You’re not ill, he told himself firmly. Just get on with it. His head felt light and fuzzy, like he’d had a couple of strong drinks. Just focus—
