The Infernal Heart

by R. L. King

  “Edwina…” He let his breath out slowly. He should have known this was coming. In her own prickly way, Mortenson was every bit as curious—some would even say nosey—as he was, especially regarding anything that even had a whiff of the otherworldly around it. “I don’t know what to say. I can’t really discuss it, but I can tell you that it’s fairly clear that whoever’s killing people thinks they’ve got some connection to the supernatural. But that’s as far as I’m willing to go.”

  She spread her hands. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You and Mac are both so…pragmatic about the whole thing. But if you’d seen what I’ve seen…”

  Careful…Stone took a step toward the door. The last thing he wanted to do was get into it with her about all her “spiritual contacts” and “psychic events.” Mortenson was damned sharp and a hell of a lot less airy-fairy than she looked on the surface, but that didn’t mean she didn’t believe. Trying to discuss the subject with her was like walking a thin beam across a shark-infested tank: the temptation to either let her have it with both barrels about what was really happening on the spooky side of the street or to shut her down with a few carefully-aimed bits of sarcasm made it a subject he preferred to deflect whenever possible. It was just easier that way, since he had to work with her every day. “Edwina, I’m not going to change your mind. You believe what you like. I’m not officially involved anymore, but I promise you, if I see anything odd going on, I’ll give it all the consideration it deserves.”

  She narrowed her eyes, frowning. The remaining vestiges of the helpful cat enthusiast dropped away in favor of her usual chilly, formal self. “Of course,” she said. “I’m quite sure you will. Anyway, I should be going. I’ve got some things I still need to do tonight.”

  “As do I. Thank you again for the help with Raider. I’m sure we’ll get on like old mates now.”

  She got out of there fast, and Stone stood in the entryway for a moment after the door closed behind her. The next few days at work were going to be fun, he was sure. At least they were back to their usual relationship. He’d appreciated Mortenson’s help, but the chatty cat lady had unnerved him a bit. It was sort of like how a child felt the first time he saw his teacher at the supermarket. Just…wrong.

  Ah, well. He did have things to do tonight. He turned back toward the stairs to find a furry form sitting at the top, watching him with wide green eyes. Damn—forgot to close the door.

  “Well, Raider,” he called. “Are you going to behave yourself now? Did Auntie Edwina convince you no one’s going to eat you if you stop hiding under the furniture?”

  Raider licked his paw and said nothing.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Stone didn’t get up to campus until after noon the next day. Brandon Greene fell into step with him on the way to class. “Did you hear there was another one of those weird murders?”

  Stone stiffened. He hadn’t checked the news yet—he’d awakened to find Raider curled up at the foot of his bed, and spent the morning going back over the files Johnny Cheng had sent him while the cat watched from the other side of the table. “I did not.”

  Greene dug a newspaper out of his backpack and offered it. “Yeah, in Brisbane this time. They’re not releasing too many details, but it says that based on the MO they suspect it’s the same killer.”

  Another one. Perversely, Stone was grateful the victim wasn’t somebody he knew—the killer obviously had some agenda far more important than taunting him about his inability to figure out what the hell was going on. This was six now, that he knew of, and they were coming closer together. How much more skin, blood, and body parts would the demon need? “I’ll read this later,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “So you’re not consulting anymore? I thought since you were in the paper, maybe you already knew.”

  “Not…anymore. Seems things got a bit strange for the department, so they cut me loose.”

  Greene nodded. “Not surprising. Cops don’t go for that kind of stuff. Too weird for their straight-arrow brains.” He zipped up his backpack, waved, and hurried off.

  Stone paused there a moment, looking down at the paper. As usual, it was light on details—but he didn’t need details. He could practically picture the crime scene in his mind. He wondered if he could convince Captain Flores to send him a copy of the sigils from this one as well.

  As he started up again and headed for his class, he made up his mind: he’d been planning to head to England tomorrow and spend the day studying, but if he wanted to get anywhere with this before more people were murdered, he’d have to step up his game. He couldn’t afford to wait for things to come to him anymore. He’d go this afternoon, get a few hours’ sleep, and start in the morning.

  He hoped Raider could handle being left alone for a day or two. Maybe at this point the cat might like having the place to himself for a while.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Stone handed off his last class of the day to his teaching assistant and took the portal to England a little after three o’clock. Even though it was almost eleven when he arrived, Aubrey was waiting for him at the house.

  “I told you not to wait up for me,” he told the old caretaker. “It’s not like I’ll get lost on the way.”

  “It’s likely the only time I’ll see you.” Aubrey closed the heavy front door behind them. “What sort of magical problem are you working on this time?”

  “Aubrey!” Stone made his best mock-hurt face. “How do you know I didn’t miss you, and couldn’t bear another day away from you?”

  “Because I don’t see any sign of head injury, sir,” Aubrey said mildly. “So, what is it this time?”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow. I need to do some research, and I want to get a start on it. Go to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning. Or perhaps the afternoon.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve put fresh linens on the bed in your suite and aired the place out—not that you’ll use it.”

  “Doubtful,” he agreed. “But thanks, Aubrey. I appreciate the thought.”

  “You’ll appreciate this one more,” he said, holding up a large thermal bottle. “I’ve made some of that vile coffee you fancy—the stuff that corrodes the inside of the container. This should keep you going for the night, I think.”

  Stone grinned. “You’re too good to me.”

  His destination, after Aubrey headed back to his spacious apartment over the garage, was down a wide hallway blocked off with three chairs covered with a large white sheet. Nobody but Stone ever ventured down this hallway anymore—even Aubrey didn’t bother cleaning it—because if they used it, they’d have to heat it. Even in the summer (not that it ever got as hot here as it did in California, something Stone missed about home) the temperature in this part of the house never rose above “mildly chilly.”

  If anybody were to get the idea that Alastair Stone was harboring one of the finest magical libraries in all of Europe in his ramshackle old manor house, there were several places they might logically search for it. None of those places would get them anywhere. As far as Stone knew, the only people other than himself who currently knew its exact location numbered two: Aubrey and Jason Thayer. He’d never even brought Verity here, though he supposed he should remedy that someday, especially since her magical training had now reached the level where she could benefit from some of the tomes on the shelves here.

  He opened a door hidden behind a powerful illusion, descended a flight of stone stairs, and crossed the vast basement with careful steps to avoid sending up too many clouds of dust. He used only a dim light spell; he knew his way through here in his sleep, negotiating the looming piles of sheet-covered furniture rising on either side of him like an explorer in well-traveled territory. Before long he arrived at what looked like a blank wall covered by an enormous, dusty tapestry depicting a medieval pastoral scene.

  He didn’t bother pushing it aside, but simply walked through it
, ending up at the top of yet another stairway, this one longer, narrower, and rougher. A wave of his hand lit a series of magically glowing sconces along the carved walls. He hurried down the steps and opened a final door, this one a heavy, wooden, iron-bound thing.

  This area was one of the oldest parts of the house, excavated in a location featuring three intersecting ley lines and created before most of the rest of the place had been built. Stone wasn’t sure how old the library was, but if forced to make a guess he’d imagine somewhere north of three hundred years. His father had once told him that he was the sixth in an unbroken line of male mages who’d lived here, though he’d never gotten around to researching his genealogy. Must ask Aubrey about that sometime. The old man probably either had records somewhere or knew where to find them.

  Stone paused to form the pattern in his mind that would get him through the last set of wards, then worked the complex magical lock on the door. He shoved it open and stepped inside, feeling as if he’d finally come home. The familiar scents of wood polish, old books, and dust carried him back, as they always did, to the countless hours he’d spent here in his younger days.

  He threw his briefcase on the table and paced the room, scanning the shelves. Jason hadn’t believed him when he’d told him that he knew the name and location of every book in this room. He hadn’t written down any filing system, nor had any of his mage ancestors; when he’d been a boy before his apprenticeship, one of the tasks his father had set him to when he was home from his boarding school for holidays was studying the books down here and memorizing their names, locations, and purposes.

  Even though the shelves rose high above his head, the room contained no ladders, and no catwalk surrounded them at the one-story height. Stone identified the books he wanted, levitated upward and pulled them one by one, then drifted back down and settled them on the table next to the briefcase.

  When he was finished with the first round, he had a stack of ten of varying sizes, from a tiny book with perhaps a hundred pages to a tome nearly two feet high and five inches thick. Most of them covered ancient magical languages, while the remainder described various types of demons and other malevolent spirits and how they might be summoned. He sat down, opened the coffee jug, pulled the copies of the sigils from his briefcase, and selected the top book on the stack.

  By the time he looked up from his reading and checked his watch, it was nearly four a.m. The coffee was long gone by now, and his eyelids had begun to droop alarmingly over an hour ago.

  Worst of all, he was getting nowhere.

  He slammed his current book shut in frustration. Nothing in any of his reading had even come close to the situation back in San Jose. There were descriptions of how to cure skin (human or otherwise) and use it as a bookbinding or as vellum for spells, or as the covering for various magical items, most of them deeply unpleasant. He’d found plenty of instances where blood could be used—everything from ingredients in alchemical mixtures or ritual preparations to a method for locating an individual anywhere in the world. Body parts were also often used in the nastier types of rituals, and some ancient cultures believed that consuming parts of one’s enemy’s body imparted a portion of that person’s power to the eater. Stone pursued that angle briefly, but it didn’t make sense: the people the demon or its agents had killed hadn’t been powerful, and they almost certainly hadn’t possessed any magical abilities. True, he hadn’t seen all the crime scenes, but his instincts told him he was going down the wrong road with that idea.

  He stood and began pacing the room. This was the first time in a long while that his library had failed him. Even the language avenue hadn’t turned up anything useful: he’d found numerous examples of both various types of so-called “demonic” script and Enochian, but he could already read Enochian and none of the demonic examples resembled the sigils on his photocopies. He had more possibilities, but they represented even more remote chances of giving him what he was looking for.

  Stone sighed. He’d been hoping he could return home tomorrow with some answers, but clearly that wasn’t to be. He was going to have to call in some help. Trying not to think about what Raider was doing to his townhouse in his absence, he shelved the books, gathered up his papers, and headed back up toward the main part of the house.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  When he awoke the next morning (closer to afternoon, if one was being honest) he made some calls while allowing Aubrey to indulge his all-too-rare chance to fix him a proper breakfast and catch up with news. An hour later, he headed off to the tiny village station to catch the train into London. By the time the black cab pulled up in front of his destination, it was after two.

  The little rowhouse along a shabby, narrow side street in Hackney wasn’t much to look at from the outside. Nothing distinguished it from its neighbors, a series of stalwart brick residences that looked as if they’d teleported here bodily from some time in the 1940s and never bothered to update. It didn’t even have a house number, in fact. It didn’t need a disregarding spell to keep anyone from noticing it—there simply wasn’t anything of interest to notice.

  The man who answered Stone’s knock looked like he went with the house. The wiry little guy with angular features, buzz-cut hair, and a mouse-brown sweater had the same threadbare, lived-in look and the same feeling of being just slightly out of phase with the rest of the world.

  He broke into a big grin. “Well, wouldja look at what the cat’s dragged in!” His accent was Cockney, so thick that most Americans would have to concentrate hard to penetrate it.

  “Good to see you, Eddie.” Stone shook his hand and allowed the little man to steer him into a dim, dusty entryway and close the door behind them.

  “Arthur’s already here. We ’ad a bet goin’ that you wouldn’t roll in until after three.” He glanced at his watch. “Guess he wins that one, so I’m buyin’ the first round tonight.” With a stern mock-glare, he added, “You are comin’ to the pub with us tonight after, and there’s no arguin’ about it.”

  “Let’s see what we find out,” Stone said.

  “Don’t you worry. ’Ave I ever failed ye before?”

  Eddie Monkton was a wizard with research (both literally and figuratively) but Stone hoped this wouldn’t end up being his first failure. He followed him down a narrow hallway (seriously, this place was clearly built for people with smaller proportions than the average human—as thin as Stone was, every time he came here he felt as if he needed to turn sideways while navigating its passages) and into a sitting room.

  The room hadn’t changed either, and probably never would. The busy wallpaper, moldering floral rug, and stuffy, old-lady furniture always put Stone in the mind of a place where one would come to be given a stern talking-to by one’s ancient grandmother. The fact that he’d never known either of his grandmothers didn’t change this fact: it was sort of an archetypal ‘proto-gran’ thing.

  The only occupant of the room stood up when Stone and Eddie entered. Arthur Ward, a handsome, studious-looking black man around Stone’s age, put aside a large briefcase and smiled. “Stone, how are you? It’s been a while. Did you ever get that business with the possessions sorted?”

  “I did, yes.” The last time the three of them had been together, with a couple of others, had been in this very room two years ago when he’d consulted with them following a break-in of his library.

  “So this is a new one, then.”

  “It is. And I’ll admit it’s got me stumped—and more to the point, it’s got my library stumped. So you two are my last hope before I’ve got to look at more extreme measures.”

  “I always like a good puzzle,” Ward said. “And you realize, of course, that I’ll never let you live it down if Eddie or I manage to work it out when you couldn’t.”

  “At this point, I’d be relieved enough to have it done that you’re welcome to bring it up every time we see each other for the next twenty years.”<
br />
  “Can’t pass up an offer like that,” Eddie said, settling himself on the end of an ancient loveseat. “Let’s hear it, then.”

  Stone began at the beginning, giving them the whole story of the murders from the point Johnny Cheng had showed up in his office, all the way through to the session with Raider and the attack and strange sighting at the construction site. He didn’t leave anything out—it felt good not to have to censor his words, to hold back bits of the story because the listeners wouldn’t believe him or would eye him as if sizing him up for a berth at the local mental-health facility.

  When he finished, he spread both the crime-scene photos he’d gotten from Cheng and the photocopies of the sigils from the other murders across the fussy little coffee table.

  Ward and Eddie leaned in to look. “Somebody ’ad it in for these blokes,” Eddie said at last, swallowing hard. “That’s some kind o’ mess ’e made.”

  “That’s the thing, though,” Stone said. “I don’t think he knew any of the victims. I have no idea why he chose the ones he did, except for Cheng, but I’m convinced the entity I saw in Raider’s mind didn’t commit the actual murders.”

  “You think he sent those things from the construction site to do it,” Ward said.

  Stone nodded. “I don’t think they’re human—I think he created them somehow. Possibly that’s what he needed the body parts for.”

  “Could be,” Eddie said. He pulled out a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and perched them on his nose, examining one of the photocopies more closely. “I’ve seen symbols like this. I know I ’ave.”

  “Where?” Stone leaned forward in his chair, gripping the arms. “Do you remember where, or when?”

  “Keep your knickers on.” Eddie held up a hand, but didn’t lift his gaze from the page he was studying. “Let me think, will ya? You know ’ow many ancient languages I go through every week, tryin’ to track down answers for you lot? It takes me a little time to work it out.” He examined the page for a few more seconds, then leaped up out of the chair. “Talk among yourselves,” he called over his shoulder, then disappeared through a doorway still carrying the sheet.