Circle of Stone

by R. L. King

  Circle of Stone

  Alastair Stone Chronicles Book Nineteen

  R. L. KING

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

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  Books by R. L. King

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2019 by R. L. King

  Circle of Stone: Alastair Stone Chronicles Book Nineteen

  First Edition, September 2019

  Edited by John Helfers

  Cover Art by Streetlight Graphics

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people, except by agreement with the vendor of the book. If you would like to share this book with another person, please use the proper avenues. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Prologue

  Ben Halstrom sometimes suspected he was the unwitting star of one of those TV shows where they follow you around with hidden cameras and screw up your life so the viewing public can get sadistic jollies watching you try to deal with it.

  The hidden-camera part probably wasn’t true—Ben wasn’t interesting enough for anyone to want to base a TV show around him—but the rest was spot on. And he wasn’t dealing with things very well these days, in all honesty.

  It was after ten o’clock, most of the nearby streetlights were out, and he’d just returned to his delivery van to discover the tires slashed and the back door standing open. There’d only been a few packages left back there, but of course all of them were gone.

  Which meant Julio, his boss, was going to nail his ass to the wall when he found out. He was surprised the van itself wasn’t gone.

  He slumped against its side and contemplated his next actions. He had a spare in the back—the thieves hadn’t stolen that, at least, but even if he had a clue how to change a tire, one spare wouldn’t get him very far. He could call the insurance company for a tow, but he was pretty sure Ma had let the coverage lapse—if she’d ever had any in the first place.

  Ben wasn’t entirely certain what was in the boxes he delivered, usually to shadowy characters in sketchy neighborhoods, but that was mostly because he didn’t want to know. It was safer that way. Ben might have been unlucky, but he wasn’t stupid. Julio paid him decently, in cash, to deliver the packages without getting nosey about what was inside, and that was exactly what he did.

  He could call Julio, of course. He probably should call Julio. After all, what had happened wasn’t his fault. He’d locked the van, parked it under a streetlight that had been functional when he left, and made the delivery quickly. He couldn’t control everything that happened in bad Oakland neighborhoods.

  Yeah, right. You’ll be lucky if he just fires you. What if Julio said he had to pay back the cost of the stolen goods? What if he sent some more of those shadowy characters after him?

  Ben let out a little sigh that was almost a sob. Wasn’t it about time for the universe to give him a fucking break?

  He pulled out his phone and stared at it for a moment, then glanced around to make sure nobody was nearby and punched a number.

  “Hello?” The familiar voice answered immediately.

  “Ma? It’s me.”

  “Where are you, Ben? You should have been home an hour ago. Are you all right?”

  Ben closed his eyes. His mother sounded like she always did—perpetually worried with a hint of a whine in her tone. “I ran into a little trouble, Ma. Somebody slashed my tires. I’m not sure what to do. I’m scared to call Julio.”

  “Oh, Ben…I told you I didn’t think you should be working for that man, but—”

  “Never mind, Ma. Not important right now. But I gotta figure out what to do.”

  “Call a cab. Forget the van. Get home. We’ll worry about Julio later.”

  “I can’t do that. I don’t have enough money for a cab. And if I leave the van here somebody’ll steal it, and then I’ll be in even worse shit.”

  “Don’t swear, Ben.”

  He took a deep breath, dreading what he was about to say. Once again, he glanced around to make sure he was alone. So far he was, which didn’t surprise him too much. This was a rundown, light-industrial end of town, and most of the buildings were vacant or abandoned. He’d made his delivery to two guys in a car behind a warehouse, and they hadn’t stuck around afterward. “Listen, Ma…I think I’m gonna have to use a little…you know.”

  “No! Don’t you even think about that!” Her voice came strong and strident this time, brooking no argument.

  It was exactly what he’d expected her to say. “Look, I know you don’t like it, but—”

  “No, Ben. You mustn’t. I don’t want you using any of that…horrible stuff. It’s only gonna mess you up. Do you want to end up like your father?”

  Now scorn and disgust had crept into her tone. She said father in much the same way somebody else might say cannibal killer or child molester.

  “Dad’s dead, Ma. And I gotta do something.” It was getting chilly. He stuck the hand not holding the phone into his pocket and watched a dark sedan roll by, tensing until it disappeared around a corner. “You want me to walk home? That’s a long way.”

  “Give me a few minutes. I’ll try to find somebody to call and see if they can pick you up. Just wait there, all right? It will be fine.”

  It wouldn’t be fine. Ben was sure of that. If some random mugger didn’t get him before he got the hell out of here, Julio certainly would. But what could he say? At twenty-six, he’d long passed the time when he might have the courage to defy his mother. “Yeah, whatever. Fine. Hurry up, though, okay? I don’t want to hang around here much longer. Have ’em call me and I’ll tell ’em where I am. I might have to move around.”

  “Just wait,” she repeated. “Trust me. And don’t use any of that
…stuff. Promise me.”

  He didn’t want to, but again, what could he say? “Yeah, okay, Ma. I promise.”

  He’d barely hung up when the phone rang again. He almost answered it right away, figuring it had to be his mother calling back for more information, but then he got a look at the number.

  Julio.

  Fuck.

  He’d be wanting to know why Ben hadn’t made the next delivery yet.

  “Fuck…” he whispered, and jammed the phone back in his pocket.

  He needed to get away from here. If Julio sent anybody after him before Ma got through to somebody to pick him up, he’d be screwed. He couldn’t afford to be caught standing here next to a van with an empty cargo compartment and four slashed tires. Maybe he could just hide somewhere nearby and keep an eye on things from a distance until the call came. Or just get the hell away.

  The phone rang twice more in the next ten minutes, and both times Julio’s number showed on the screen. Ben had been hiding behind a dumpster in an alley a few blocks down from where he’d parked the van, but after the second call he knew he’d have to do better than that. Julio’s men would sniff him out like bloodhounds if he stayed outside.

  Sorry, Ma, he thought, rising. Can’t help it.

  In truth, he’d lied to his mother more times than he cared to admit about using that stuff. She hated it more than anything else—Ben wasn’t sure if she hated it because of his father, or hated his father because of it, but either way, it wasn’t something he brought up around her if he didn’t want to get his ears yelled off. Neither was the fact that Dad had taught him more of it than she knew about before he died when Ben was fifteen.

  He slipped around the corner and crept to the edge of the warehouse, peering around it to see what was nearby. The streetlights were in even worse repair here; he was fairly sure the buildings around this area hadn’t seen any life besides squatters and drug dealers for at least a couple years. Probably longer.

  Where the hell was Mom’s friend, anyway? They should have called by now. He yanked the phone from his pocket again and swore softly under his breath.

  The screen was blank. He hadn’t charged it last night, and now the battery was dead. No help was coming.

  Guess I’d better get walking. If he kept going and used a little of Dad’s mojo to keep anybody from noticing him, eventually he’d get out of this blighted area and back to someplace nicer. Hell, if he could find a 7-Eleven, they usually still had pay phones out front. Whether they were still functional was another matter, but what else could he do?

  Ben crept along the other side of a warehouse sprayed with gang tags. He moved down the street, keeping to the shadows, remembering what his father had taught him. He wasn’t very good at it—Dad had died before he could teach him more than the most basic techniques—but it didn’t take much.

  The warehouse stood next to a lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. Coils of razor wire topped it to a height of almost eight feet, and beyond it, Ben could see the dark bulk of a building with a few derelict vehicles parked at haphazard angles out front.

  As he approached the fence, an odd tingling began in his fingertips. He stopped, puzzled, flexing his hands, but the sensation didn’t go away. In fact, it migrated further up his arms. It wasn’t unpleasant—weird, but not painful, almost as if his arms had gone to sleep.

  What the hell was happening to him?

  He looked at the building beyond the fence. As he did, he switched to the special kind of vision his dad had taught him, the one that let him see weird nimbuses of light around people’s bodies. His dad had called them “auras,” and told him he should never reveal to anyone else that he could see them.

  “They’re your ace in the hole, kid,” Dad had said. “You can tell a lot about a person by looking at his aura: whether he’s upset, sick, horny, or pissed. You can use it to get out of a bad situation. You can even use it to cheat at cards.”

  Ben had never used it to cheat at cards. He didn’t like people very much, preferring to keep to himself as much as possible, and was far too much of a coward to risk anyone accusing him of cheating. But he did use it to help him figure out people’s moods. It had gotten him out of a lot of scrapes, including quite a few when Ma was on the warpath.

  Right now, he was using it to see if anybody lurked near the building. He hoped if it was really abandoned, he could lift himself over the fence (another trick Dad had taught him) and hide there until Julio’s men left the area.

  What he saw made him gasp, gripping the chain fence and staring, wide-eyed, at what was beyond it.

  If there had been any people outside, he’d have seen their outlines in whatever color their aura was. That was what he’d been looking for.

  But he didn’t see any outlines of people.

  Instead, the whole building was glowing.

  Ben swallowed hard. He’d never seen anything like that in his life. It was like the abandoned warehouse had its own aura, a pulsing yellow-green that extended a couple of feet past its walls.

  “What the hell…?” he muttered under his breath.

  Was he going crazy? Had Ma been right all along, that using Dad’s mojo would mess him up in the head?

  He should get the hell out of here, that’s what he should do. He should run away until he couldn’t run anymore (which wouldn’t have been far—Ben was hardly a paragon of endurance) and hide somewhere until he could find a phone and call Ma.

  But…the building was calling to him.

  If anybody had asked him to explain that, he couldn’t have done it. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could describe in words. But nonetheless it was true: something about that eerie yellow-green glow seemed to connect with something inside Ben, and suddenly he wanted nothing more than to get closer to it.

  Without thinking, without considering how potentially stupid and dangerous his actions could be, he drew on the powers his father had taught him to use, lifting his body up and over the chain-link fence and the razor wire. As soon as his feet hit the ground he was moving, half-jogging across the expanse of open land toward the building. The beckoning sensation increased with each step until he stood in front of a pair of wide double doors locked with a padlock and chain.

  The lock was a flimsy thing and took hardly any effort at all to pop. In fact, it seemed easier than usual—maybe because he was so nervous. With one final, quick look over his shoulder to make sure nobody was sneaking up on him, he slipped inside and closed the door behind him.

  For a moment he saw nothing he didn’t expect to see: a cavernous, nearly empty space with corrugated walls, high, dusty windows, and a concrete floor. The whole place smelled of old oil and dust; a faint hint of stale urine and spoiled food suggested homeless people might have used it as a squat at one point. A few broken crates were stacked against the south wall, and someone had left the burned-out husk of an abandoned truck not far from a rusted roll-up door.

  The tingling sensation persisted. His body sang with it now, and it was only then that Ben remembered he’d switched off his special sight. He switched it back on.

  He staggered backward several steps, barely catching himself before he fell over and cracked his head on the floor. “Holy…fuck…” he muttered.

  In the center of the empty space was something he couldn’t begin to comprehend. In the couple of years his father had secretly taught him how to use the mojo, he’d never even come near anything like this.

  It was about ten feet high, a few more wide, and irregularly shaped. Ben’s first thought was to remember the pictures of amoebas from his high-school biology textbook. Either that, or something out of Star Trek.

  It was also the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  As much as it terrified him, its bright yellow-green edges shifting and dancing in the empty darkness, it compelled him too. It was like one of those big cats at the zoo—a tiger, or a lion. They were huge and menacing and you just knew they’d eat you without a second thought if they could get near y
ou, but there was beauty in the menace, too. You wanted to run, but you also wanted to touch them.

  More than anything in the world, Ben Halstrom wanted to touch that dancing light.

  He barely noticed his feet moving as he approached it. Something in the back of his mind told him this might be the biggest mistake he’d ever made in his life, but something else—something with a voice that was both more subtle and more compelling—urged him on, whispering in his ear that this was what he had been born for.

  The closer he got, the more the tingling increased. It suffused his whole body now, arcing and thrumming through him like he was a miniature power plant with electricity flowing in a circuit from his head to his limbs to his core. It felt wonderful. He could hear it now, too, thundering in his head like a cascade of water tumbling over a cliff.

  What would happen if he touched that glowing mass?

  Would his life change?

  Would he be instantly vaporized?

  Either way, it didn’t matter. At this point, he could no sooner walk away from it than he could return the packages stolen from his delivery van.

  At this point, whatever would happen was inevitable. Ben didn’t know it, but it was.

  He was two feet away from it now.

  He stretched out his hand, and the shifting yellow-green energy reached out to meet him. When the two touched, the thundering feeling swelled until he thought it would pull him to pieces—but still it didn’t hurt.