Core of Stone

by King, R. L.

  “We should go,” Verity said. “If you’re leaving tomorrow, you’ve probably got some packing to do, yeah?”

  “A bit,” he said. “Always leaving things to the last minute, me. It was good to see you both, though. Let me get you those books before you go.”

  He headed upstairs, and had made it all the way to his study before he remembered that he’d left the books in his attic ritual space, where he’d been looking through them a few weeks ago to determine if they’d be suitable for Verity’s upcoming lessons.

  The ritual space that was sealed behind a ward he could no longer pass through, and locked with a magical lock he could no longer open.

  Sudden rage and despair tore at him. “Damn, damn, damn!” he snapped, slamming his fist into the wall. Pain flared bright and sharp, bringing hot tears to his eyes. Clutching his injured hand, he sagged against the doorframe.

  “Dr. Stone?” Verity called from downstairs. “You okay up there?”

  “Fine,” he said through gritted teeth, probably not loud enough to carry down to her. His knuckles throbbed, sending off spiking knives of pain every time he moved his hand.

  Great. Just brilliant.

  You’ve got to stop this. Stop acting like a child who’s lost his toy! You can cope with this, damn you.

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and then Verity was there. Her eyes widened when she spotted him. “Did you just hurt your hand?” she asked uncertainly.

  “It’s fine,” he said, still through his teeth. It took all of his will not to stuff the injured hand under his other arm.

  “That doesn’t look fine. Let me see it.” She moved forward, reaching out to him.

  He started to recoil, but stopped himself. It was his own bloody fault he’d hurt himself because he couldn’t handle watching his own apprentice using the magic he’d taught her. He let her gently take his wrist and pull his hand out where she could see it in the overhead light. “What did you do?” she asked, shocked. “It’s swelling. Did you crack your knuckles on something?”

  “Hit the doorframe in the dark,” he said. Oh, right, she’ll believe that one. Why don’t you tell her an anvil landed on it?

  More footsteps, and Jason stood behind Verity. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s not a bloody convention,” Stone snapped. “I buggered up my hand a little, is all.”

  “Come on, sit down,” Verity said. She steered him into the study and waved toward his favorite ratty leather armchair in the corner. “I’ll fix that up for you.”

  “I can do it myself,” he said, even though he knew if she took him up on it, he’d probably have to go to the emergency room and get it seen to after she left. “No need to—”

  “Shh,” she said, and knelt down next to the chair. “C’mon, you know I’m better at healing than you are. Quit being macho and let me take care of it.”

  “Fine,” he said. He leaned back and let her arrange his arm on the armrest. If he didn’t move his hand at all, the pain merely throbbed without flaring.

  While Jason hovered in the background, obviously unsure of what to think about the situation or what to do, Verity raised her hands and held them over Stone’s, about three inches above it. She closed her eyes and murmured under her breath; instantly he felt a warming relief settle over his hand. A glow of golden energy surrounded it, shifting and undulating almost like a liquid. The warmth seemed to sink in past his skin, and a strange, deep-down itching sensation replaced the throbbing in his knuckles. Stone had been healed enough to know not to resist this effect; it was disquieting, but that was how the spell did its work.

  After a few moments, Verity let her breath out, lowered her hands, and opened her eyes. “There. How’d I do?”

  Stone raised his hand and flexed his fingers, testing it out. “Full marks,” he said. “Thank you. Well done.”

  “Good deal. Can’t have you going off to England with a messed-up hand.” She stood. “So, about those books—”

  “Oh. Right. Er—I can’t find them just now. I think I lent them out and forgot about it. I’ll hunt them up for you when I get back, all right?”

  She tilted her head and gave him an odd look, but shrugged. “Sure, no problem. I’ll just keep up with my regular exercises until we get started again.” She paused, then turned to her brother. “Jase, can you give us a sec? I want to talk to Dr. Stone about a couple magic things.”

  “Uh—sure.” Jason looked confused, since Verity had never had a problem with him being around when she discussed magic. “I’ll be downstairs.”

  When he was gone, she turned back to Stone. “Can I ask you something?”

  Careful… “You can ask me anything,” he said, keeping his expression neutral. “No guarantees I’ll answer, though.”

  She studied him. “Is everything okay with you?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “I dunno. But I heard you yelling something up here. Couldn’t make it out. And…” she pointed “…there’s a dent in your wall.”

  Stone glanced sideways and sighed. She was right: the section of wall next to the door sported a shallow, fist-shaped depression. He wondered why he ever expected he’d be able to keep the fact that something was wrong a secret from her. Her perceptiveness and strong sense of empathy were what made her so good at the kind of magic she excelled at. “No,” he said at last. “Everything isn’t exactly okay at present. But it’s something I need to work out on my own.”

  Her gaze shifted between the dent and his face. “And you don’t want to tell me what it is.”

  “Not really. There isn’t any way you can help. You just need to let me get on with it and see what I can sort out.”

  She remained silent for several seconds, examining the dent. “Does it have anything to do with the Evil? Because you know I can help with that.”

  “No,” he said. “Nothing to do with the Evil.” It wasn’t exactly the truth, but it wasn’t exactly a lie, either. He patted her arm. “Thank you for fixing my hand—that was really quite a foolish thing I did there. I’ve just—got some things on my mind right now.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But promise me if you need help, you’ll call. You know Jason and I will drop everything and come running.”

  He closed his eyes briefly. Sometimes their loyalty overwhelmed him. “I know that, Verity. And I appreciate it more than you know. I promise—I’ll call if you can do anything.” He was making a lot of promises these days that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep. No point in stopping now.

  She gave him a quick, hard hug. “Okay, then. I better let you get packing. Say hi to Aubrey for us, okay?”

  “I will.”

  He followed her downstairs; Jason loitered in the kitchen, paging through one of the newspapers from the untidy pile on the breakfast bar. “You guys done plotting to take over the world?” he asked, tossing the paper back.

  “For tonight,” Stone said.

  “Still working out what to do about Australia,” Verity said. “That place is hardcore.”

  Chapter Five

  Stone caught a plane to Las Vegas from San Francisco late the following afternoon. Las Vegas—or at least the part he was concerned with—lived mostly by night, so he saw no point in arriving early and having to wait around. He didn’t pack much; he figured he’d find Harrison and talk to him or he wouldn’t, and either way there would be no point in remaining in town more than a short time. In any case, he’d have to be back a few days before the start of the quarter at Stanford to settle back in after the summer and prepare for his classes.

  He also didn’t call ahead. He’d considered it last night after Jason and Verity left, and had gone as far as to look up the number for the Obsidian Hotel and Casino, but in the end he decided he wanted to go in person and see how far he could get. This wasn’t something to trust to phone calls.

  While
sitting in the plane during the short flight, he leaned against the window, closed his eyes, and thought about what he would find, and how he would proceed if he did—or, more likely, if he didn’t.

  Trevor Harrison, who apparently had some connection to the Obsidian though Stone never found out its exact nature, was an odd duck on many levels. Stone couldn’t say he liked the man exactly; in that respect, Harrison was similar to his black-mage associate Stefan Kolinsky. They often had mutually compatible goals, or could offer useful information or aid if the proper payments were offered, but Stone didn’t fully trust either of them. Especially after he’d watched Harrison murder a squad of survivalists in cold blood merely because they’d been possessed by the Evil.

  Because of his unusual—possibly unique, except for Stone’s rudimentary skills—magical style, it wasn’t correct to call him a black mage, despite his seeming callousness about killing in service of his ends. He certainly wasn’t a white one. Whatever he was, he’d made it clear during their association that he operated by his own rules, even more than Kolinsky did.

  Stone wondered if he’d find Harrison in Las Vegas, or if he was even there any longer. A few days after he’d disappeared into the portal and Stone had thought him certainly lost, the notebook containing the basics of his magical techniques had shown up at Stone’s townhouse. But it hadn’t included any identifying marks: no postmark, no return address, not even a stamp. It had been delivered by a private courier. Clearly, Harrison had no wish for anyone to find him, nor to try to contact him.

  Well, Stone thought with some bitterness, we don’t always get what we want, do we?

  By the time the plane touched down at McCarran Airfield a little after seven, the sun had nearly completed its descent. He retrieved his luggage and took a cab into town; if he ended up needing to drive, he could always rent a car later. He hadn’t made any reservations or plans, purposely leaving his options open.

  “Where to?” the driver asked.

  “The Obsidian.”

  “You got it.” The driver hit the meter and joined the stream of evening traffic. Stone slouched in his seat and watched the scenery go by: out this far the buildings were more drab, more like those one might find in any large city, though even here some of them bloomed with flashes of bright color. Las Vegas was a town that put its best foot forward when the sun went down; during the day even the massive pleasure palaces of the Strip had a dusty, unimpressive look, but at night they came alive.

  As they drove, Stone thought about when he’d been here with Jason and Verity a few months back. They’d been on the run most of the time then, trying to keep their heads down and avoid the Evil. Las Vegas, with its endless stream of transient down-and-outers, was ideally suited to host the Evil. Many of them, even after they came through the portal, remained in the area, crawling over the town like cockroaches instead of being sent off for parts unknown by their unseen coordinators. No doubt many of them were still here, a thought that hadn’t consciously occurred to Stone when he’d made his decision to come.

  That could prove problematic. He’d have to be careful. He wondered if any of them would recognize him at this point, and tried not to think about how vulnerable he was without his magical protections. It probably would have been wiser to ask Jason and Verity to accompany him—wiser, but out of the question. He’d just have to maintain a low profile and avoid going off on his own. If he could find Harrison, he shouldn’t have to.

  Just because he and his friends had eliminated the Evil’s leaders didn’t mean that all the soldier-level Evil had simply gone poof and vacated their hosts. All it meant was that the centralized hubs of control the leaders had maintained were gone now. That, in turn, could mean any number of other things, the most likely of which were that one or more soldier Evil might step up and try to fill the vacuum, or the soldiers might simply settle in, embrace their roles and their hosts’ lives, and go on about their business. If they chose the latter, they’d still need to seek out locations of emotional energy to keep themselves fed, but that shouldn’t be hard in Las Vegas. Hell, all they had to do was go down to Fremont Street and park themselves in one of the seedy joints on the periphery of the tourist traps, and they’d suck in enough despair and hopelessness to keep them happy in perpetuity.

  Not a bad setup—would they risk discovery by seeking revenge on Stone even if they found him? He glanced into the rearview mirror at the cabdriver’s eyes, and wondered if he might be harboring an Evil soldier.

  Stop it. Even here, they can’t be on every street corner.

  He saw the Obsidian before they reached it. It was hard to miss: as one of the tallest hotel/casino structures on the Strip, its featureless, mirrored black tower poked upward, somehow darker than the sky around it. The only color relieving its solid black was the name OBSIDIAN written vertically down its side in electric blue.

  As they pulled in and the cab took its place in the row of others jockeying for a place to stop long enough to offload their passengers, Stone glanced up at the massive marquee out in front, emblazoned with a popular singer’s name in six-foot-tall letters. No longer did Shane Tarkasian and his red-hot magic act dominate the Obsidian’s main showroom. Stone wondered what had become of him; the last they’d seen him was when they’d dropped him off at the hotel and left him in the care of Harrison’s assistant Nakamura. It had been a risk, leaving a formerly Evil-possessed mage alive, but by the time the ordeal had been over, they’d all lost the taste for any more bloodshed.

  The cab slid to a stop, and the driver got out to retrieve Stone’s bag from the trunk. Stone paid him, grabbed the bag, and headed inside. The early-September heat wasn’t as oppressive as it was in high summer, especially this late in the day, but getting out of the air-conditioned cab still felt like stepping into warm oven.

  Stone wasn’t a fan of Las Vegas in general; the trip he’d taken with Jason and Verity had been his first time there, and it had mostly confirmed his suspicion that the place suffered from a distinct lack of taste. As monstrous hotel/casinos went, though, he found the Obsidian to be the least objectionable of the bunch. This was mainly because, unlike the others, the Obsidian made an effort to tone down the bells and whistles and dancing neon-encrusted glitz as much as possible in favor of as much class as it could manage while still performing its function.

  He pushed his way through the black-tinted revolving door and inside, where the temperature once again dropped to frigid, at least as compared to the outside. Off to his left, he spotted the registration desk, a long, low structure made of gold-veined black marble with a single strip of electric-blue neon running near its top. He hadn’t made a reservation, but that didn’t seem to be a problem; the efficient clerk, dressed in the hotel’s ubiquitous black blazer, set him up with a room in less than five minutes.

  He didn’t stay in it long; just long enough to hang up his clothes and take a quick shower. Before he left, he paused to sit down on the bed, calm his mind, and concentrate on shifting to magical sight. He tried not to expect anything—if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be disappointed. But after five minutes and nothing, the despair was as strong as ever. This whole trip was pointless: even if he managed to track down Harrison, it wouldn’t matter. It had been too long. If it was coming back, it would have done it by now.

  He didn’t slam the door on the way out of the room, and claimed that as a small victory.

  Chapter Six

  Back downstairs, Stone considered the best way to try to find Harrison. He could just walk up to some random black-jacketed employee and ask, but that hardly seemed the appropriate approach. He’d probably just arouse suspicion, and if Harrison wasn’t here (and therefore the protections against the Evil he’d put in place at the hotel might not be anymore, either), drawing too much attention to himself was a bad idea.

  Especially since his ability to protect himself against an attack without his magic was severely diminished. He still had his
wits, but he’d have to rely on them now more than ever.

  Time to start thinking like a mundane, whether you like it or not.

  Another option was to pick up one of the house phones and ask for Harrison, but once again he didn’t like that idea. He wanted to do this in person.

  This time of the evening, the casino crowd was heavy; the muted flashes, buzzes, and bells of the sparsely occupied slot machines, along with the shadowy figures parked in front of them, gave the place an eerie, slightly unworldly feel. From where he stood at the edge of the casino proper, he could just see a few of the various pits: blackjack, roulette, the occasional wheel of fortune. Most of the dealers and croupiers tended full tables, but a few stood alone, looking bored.

  Well, then. Let’s decrease some boredom, shall we?

  He probably could have made a fortune as a poker player, back when his magic still functioned. In a game where tells and emotional cues were so important, the ability to read auras would give him a nearly insurmountable advantage. That assumed, of course, that some disgruntled losing player didn’t plug him in the back when he wasn’t looking, convinced he was cheating (which, of course, he was; just not the way his opponent suspected).

  As he walked past the slot machines toward the pits, he wondered idly if any of his fellow mages did just that. After all, “mage” wasn’t a job that tended to make one wealthy, unless you came from wealthy families like both Stone and his old master did. Most of them gravitated toward jobs that allowed them to use their Talent in a surreptitious way: stage magic, psychic reading, running a “magic supplies” shop in some new-age community, or, as in Stone’s own case, teaching. Stone didn’t need a job, technically—he had enough money squirreled away from inheritance and investments that he could live comfortably without ever having to work—but as he often said, idleness would drive him insane. He was grateful now that he did have the job at Stanford, since if he was forced to live without his magic for a while, it would give him something to do.