Core of Stone

by King, R. L.

  Regardless of this mage’s background, though, Stone didn’t feel any particular qualms about his likely fate. The kid had murdered several of the Forgotten just since Stone had arrived, and several more Underground residents, both Forgotten and otherwise, before he’d shown up. Sure, maybe the majority of Las Vegas society barely considered those living in the Underground to be human, but the fact remained that this kid was a mass murderer, and one that the mundane cops—even if they weren’t crawling with Evil—would find difficult to deal with. All it would take was one shot at casting an illusion, and the kid could have everything from his freedom to a bloodbath as he spurred the cops to shoot each other as they tried to take out the “monster.”

  He kept going, trying to put the mage’s future out of his mind. Before they could implement their plan, they needed to find the kid, and that was by no means a certainty. If he had killed several of the Forgotten today during his earlier raid, that might mean that he could afford to sit back and rest for a while—or to go off and do whatever it is he used the power for when he wasn’t creating monsters in the sewers.

  He’d almost reached the T intersection where he and Luke had encountered the mage before. One good thing he realized as he stopped before the tunnel split: the path back to the Forgotten’s area wasn’t as complex as he’d thought it was when he was bumbling along in the dark. He saw now that he’d taken a wrong turn that had led him in a direction that had actually taken him further away from the Forgotten. He wouldn’t make that mistake this time. In addition to the lantern he carried, he also had a tough flashlight and a spare set of batteries in his coat pocket. Things would have to go catastrophically wrong for him to be left in the dark again.

  And there was always the gun. He trailed his hand over its unfamiliar grip. He didn’t like guns, and had in fact never held one before today, let alone fired one. He’d had to ask the man at the gun store to show him how to load and fire it, on the pretense of wanting it for “home defense.” It felt strange hanging there in its holster attached to his belt—strange and heavy and completely out of place. He was certain that if he had to use it, he’d botch the job somehow and end up shooting either himself or someone on his own side.

  Don’t think about that either. If things go as planned, you won’t even have to draw the damned thing.

  He shone his lantern around the intersection’s corner and glanced both ways. The blocked tunnel was still blocked, the open tunnel was still open, and the metal door was still stubbornly closed and locked. There was no sign of Luke’s clothes or the ash that had been his body; either the mage had taken the clothes with him, or Malcolm had sent out a party to retrieve them after they found Stone.

  That was the insidious thing about black mages: they could kill essentially without a trace. Couple that with the fact that Stone had never encountered a police organization that knew anything about magic, and pinning a crime on a mage would be nearly impossible. He wondered, if the kid managed to get the drop on him, if he’d end up as a pile of ash. Mages were harder to “ash” than mundanes, but he wasn’t sure yet which team he was playing for, or whether a mundane who used to be a mage retained his standard magical protections.

  He won’t get the drop on me, he told himself sternly. He had to keep moving. He had no doubt that Malcolm would keep his word and send out a search party after a half-hour had passed, and that could complicate matters if the mage and his illusion showed up then.

  He turned back the way he’d come, with the plan to take the passageway he’d run down before when he’d lost his light.

  “Man, you pretty stupid,” a drawling voice said from nowhere, somewhere behind him.

  A low, rumbling growl from the passageway he’d just come from added emphasis to the words.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Stone spun, trying to look everywhere at once. The hallway behind him was still clear, though the sound of disembodied laughter echoed around the right side of the T passageway.

  The roar behind him grew louder. He whirled again. The monster was there now, filling the hallway leading back toward the Forgotten’s base, its wide, scaly shoulders brushing the walls, its gaping, tentacled mouth wide open, rotten-fish stink rolling off it in waves. For a moment, it looked, sounded, and smelled so lifelike Stone caught himself wondering where it could have come from—the side passageway? Had it been following him all along?

  But no, of course it wasn’t. It wasn’t even really there!

  He forced himself to concentrate again as it leaped toward him, then ducked and, hoping he hadn’t made a fatal miscalculation, launched himself straight at the thing. For a second he was inside its mouth, viewing its sharp, yellowed teeth from the vantage point of someone it was in the process of swallowing, and then he was through, pelting down the hallway. He got a brief impression of two startled figures behind the monster and felt something slash wildly at his arm, but then he was past, his lantern-light bobbing and darting in crazy patterns around the dark tunnel.

  “Get ’im, you morons!” a voice yelled—the one that had first spoken. “Don’t let ’im get away!”

  Stone ran, dodging and weaving from side to side, leaping over piles of trash, trying his best not to let them get a bead on him if they had guns of their own. His arm burned, and he felt warm wetness soaking the sleeve of his coat, but he couldn’t worry about that now. He heard footsteps behind him, and the monster’s loud, bellows-like breath huffing along with his own. He kept a tight grip on the lantern and kept going, grateful that, despite his recent lack of exercise, his legs were still in good shape from all his long-distance runs around Palo Alto. He thought for a second about trying to draw his pistol and fire a wild shot behind him to try to scare them back, but didn’t—the odds were far greater that he’d drop it, giving his assailants a new weapon. Better to rely on what he was good at, and right now, in the absence of magic, that was running.

  Apparently they didn’t have guns, or they’d have shot him by now. He was already nearly halfway back to the edge of the Forgotten’s territory. He wouldn’t have to lead them much farther before his trap kicked in—or at least he hoped it would kick in. After that, it would be up to Verity and the Forgotten.

  Just like last time, something hard slammed into him, but this time it was two somethings. One hit the center of his back, the other his right arm—the one that was already bleeding. He bit back a cry as he went down, crashing to his outstretched hands, trying to get his legs back under him so he could keep going. They were so close now—

  A hand fell on his back, yanking him up by the collar of his coat and smashing him into the wall. His lantern dropped to the ground and rolled away. Suddenly there were three faces clustered around him. Behind them, the monster hovered, shifting from foot to foot as if it were impatient to be off. “Kill ’im!” yelled one of the figures.

  “C’mon, Blitz! Waste ’im and let’s get the hell out of here!” He punctuated it with another slam against the curved tunnel. Stone managed to bend his head far enough forward that it didn’t smack into the hard concrete. This time, anyway.

  He got a brief look at the three of them: young, ragged, with sneering faces full of confidence. The one in the middle, Blitz, was a little older—late teens, twenty at most, tall and gangly. He wore a leather biker jacket that was too big for him, and it took Stone only a moment to recognize it as Luke’s.

  Blitz’s eyes were fixed on Stone. “You’re the guy from before,” he said. “The one that saw through my monster.” He took a step back and looked Stone up and down. “You ain’t one o’ these bums down here. You ain’t dressed like ’em.” He pushed the edge of Stone’s long coat aside, revealing the revolver in its holster. “And look what we got here,” he said, motioning to one of his cronies. The kid slipped the gun out and stared at it like he’d just found a bag of gold.

  The leader patted Stone’s cheek, hard, more like a slap. “You wasn’t gonna sho
ot us, now was you, man?”

  “Not unless it was necessary,” Stone said.

  “Oh, listen ta him!” the crony with the gun said in a singsong. “Like fuckin’ Prince Charles or somethin’!”

  “Prince Charles in the sewers,” the other one said with a giggle. His eyes were strange, wandering, like he wasn’t all there.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Stone said. “You don’t have to kill people.”

  Blitz grinned. “That’s what you know, Your Highness. Which ain’t shit.”

  “Kill ’im, Blitz!” the crazy one said. “I like to watch you turn ’em into little dust piles. Can I have ’is coat?”

  “Wait!” Stone said, as Blitz appeared to be considering it. He hated what he was going to have to do, but he didn’t see another way out of this.

  “What?”

  Stone called up all the acting ability he could manage, and did his best to look terrified. “Don’t kill me!” he begged. “I can help you. Why kill me when you can have so much more?”

  Blitz considered. “What you mean?” Behind him, the monster seemed to be straining at an invisible leash, making mini-lunges toward Stone.

  Even with the ability to see through the illusion, Stone still found the thing uncomfortably realistic-looking…and smelling. Its breath was making him dizzy. “Look,” he said in a pleading tone. “I’m helping them out. If you take me hostage, they won’t shoot you. They can’t see through your monster anyway. I don’t know why I can, but none of the rest of them can. I can get you into their hidden areas. The part you can’t find. They’ve got more people there. Women. Kids. Old people. Please…just don’t kill me, and I’ll show you.”

  Blitz’s eyes narrowed. “Why’d you do that?”

  “Because I don’t want to die,” he said, checking himself at the last second before adding you idiot. No sense in antagonizing the unstable people, especially when one of them was waving a loaded gun around. “You keep me alive, pretend I’m a hostage, pretend you want to talk to them. Once you’re in, you can kill them. I don’t care. I’ll show you their secret hideouts.”

  “Hey,” said the one with the gun. “Whatcha think, Blitz? You can power up, and we can hit that place over by Bonneville later after they all dead.”

  Blitz looked back and forth between Stone and his two cronies. Then he glared at Stone and got back in his face again. “You fuck with us, man, I’ll kill ya, just like that!” He snapped his fingers. “Just like I did with your friend before.” He hooked a thumb toward himself. “See, this his jacket, your friend. He don’t need it no more.”

  “I want his coat, Blitz,” the crazy one whined. “That thing’s sick. Lemme have it, okay?”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Blitz said. Then, to Stone, “Hand over the coat.”

  Stone, still pretending—well, mostly pretending—to be frightened, slid out of his coat and held it out. Blood dripped from his arm where one of them had slashed him, but the coat had provided armor against most of it. The crazy kid snatched it and shrugged into it, grinning.

  “Okay,” Blitz said. “Let’s go. But I’m warnin’ ya—you even make me think you gonna make a funny move, you gonna be a pile of ashes. Got it, Prince Charles?”

  Stone nodded.

  They started back down the passageway toward the Forgotten’s area. Blitz walked next to Stone, and the kid with the gun was behind him, with the barrel digging into the small of his back. The one who’d stolen his coat stalked around up ahead. Behind all of them, the monster slunk along, its vile breath wafting over everyone in front of it.

  “How—how do you do that?” Stone asked, continuing to make his voice shaky. “That thing’s not real. I can tell. But it smells real.”

  Blitz laughed. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, man.”

  “Is it…some sort of image projector or something?”

  “Shut up,” the kid with the gun said, and prodded Stone with it for emphasis.

  But Blitz seemed in a talkative mood. “It’s magic, man,” he said.

  “You mean some sort of trick? Like David Copperfield or something?”

  Blitz snorted. “Them guys is fakes. The whole lot of ’em. Copperfield, Siegfried and Roy and their fuckin’ tigers, Tarkasian…all posers. All except me. I’m the real deal.”

  “Come on,” Stone said, rolling his eyes. “You needn’t insult my intelligence.”

  “I ain’t,” Blitz said. He grinned. “See, I’m evolved.”

  From what? Stone’s mind offered, but he didn’t share that particular insight. “You’re telling me that thing is magic? That’s absurd. There’s no such thing as magic.”

  “That’s how come you got caught,” Blitz said. “You normies just don’t know how to expand your minds, y’know?”

  The one in Stone’s coat giggled. “Expand your mind…” he repeated. Then something seemed to occur to him and he began feeling around in the coat’s pockets. “Hey, where’d my joints go?” He scrabbled more frantically. “I had a whole, like, six joints! Did you lift ’em, Randy?”

  “It’s not your coat, dumbass,” the one with the gun said.

  “Oh, right.” he redirected his search to his jeans pockets.

  “Not now,” Blitz ordered. “Save it till after. And shut up.”

  They were getting closer now. Blitz seemed to realize it, because he put a finger to his lips and started moving slower. The monster faded to near-invisibility.

  “Remember,” Blitz said to Stone, “you do what you’re s’posed to do, or you’re dead.”

  Stone nodded, widening his eyes. “You’re—not going to kill me, are you?” he asked in his shaky voice.

  “Not if yer a good boy,” Blitz said.

  Even without risking the use of his ability to see auras, Stone could see he was lying. He hoped Verity and the others were ready, and that his apprentice, at least, was quick enough to pick up on the updated situation. The unpredictable factors would be the other Forgotten. If they started shooting, things could get ugly.

  Uglier.

  “Hang onta him,” Blitz ordered, pointing at Stone.

  The one with the gun, Randy, grabbed his arm—mercifully the uninjured one—and took a tight grip. He raised the gun and pointed it at Stone’s head. “Gimme a reason.”

  Stone didn’t move. But was that a bit of a quaver he detected in the kid’s voice? Was that a bit of a shake in his gun hand? That could be good, but it could also be bad, depending on where his trigger finger was.

  Blitz prodded him in the back. “Go.”

  The monster was back again. It lumbered forward, passing through all four of them, and took up its position at the front of the group.

  They rounded the last corner. Up ahead, Stone could see the faint forms of the construct he’d rigged—the wires and the crystals and the mirrors. They were nearly invisible in the dim light.

  Any minute now, he’d know whether he’d done the job right.

  The monster roared and launched itself forward.

  “Go, go, go!” Blitz yelled, shoving Stone. Randy dragged him forward by his arm, keeping the gun raised.

  The monster passed beneath the archway.

  The construct let out a sound like an angry electrical appliance. It flashed and popped, and part of it pulled free of the concrete and sagged down a couple feet from the ceiling. It flashed one last time, bright like a camera flash, and then went still and quiet.

  For one terrifying moment, Stone thought he’d failed. The thing hadn’t worked. He’d let the Forgotten down a second time.

  Then the monster disappeared.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  To his credit, the shocked Blitz reacted faster than Stone hoped he would. “What the hell?” he shouted, taking a step back, waving his arms around. “What the fuck?” His voice pitched higher, taking on a crazed edge.
/>   Next to him, Randy gripped Stone’s arm so hard it hurt and ducked behind him. “Nobody move, or I’ll blow this guy’s head off!” he screamed.

  Stone froze, feeling the gun barrel shoved against his temple. He didn’t dare try to rip his arm from the kid’s grasp, since he didn’t know if he was strong enough to do it cleanly.

  “C’mon!” Blitz yelled. “Everybody out where I can see ’em! Do it or he dies!”

  “Do it,” Malcolm called, holding up his hand. His voice shook a little, but he sounded mostly calm.

  Slowly, the group of Forgotten milling around at the back of the room moved closer. Stone forced himself not to look at the piles of trash behind which the riflemen—and Verity—hid. None of them had stood up.

  “Everybody get yer hands in the air! Show me you ain’t got no guns.”

  The Forgotten did as they were told.

  “What the fuck did you bums do to my monster?” Blitz yelled. “What did you do?”

  “Just walk away,” Malcolm said. “Just walk away now, man. There’s enough room down here for all of us. Let the Doc go.”

  Blitz laughed. “Aw, fuck, that’s a good one, old man! You think a buncha smelly old bums gonna scare us off? We the new order, man. You listen to us or you die.”

  “You ain’t fit to wear that jacket,” Malcolm said. “You stole that off somebody who coulda whipped all yer asses in a fair fight.”

  “Shut up!” Blitz ordered.