by R. L. King
It was a good thing he’d powered up his focus ring, at least—if he had to forget to charge something, better the phone than the extra energy that would help him maintain his disregarding spell at full strength.
He slipped away from the crowd and hid behind a tree long enough to cast it, then sauntered off toward the building as if he had no reason not to be there. This was an industrial-strength version of the spell, one he didn’t use very often because it took almost as much power to maintain as true invisibility. Anybody seeing him would notice him but assume he was part of the scenery, like one of the techs or other support personnel. The ring would give him maybe twenty minutes, but if all went well he wouldn’t need that long.
The building was a small one, not affiliated with any particular department. Stone had been inside it once, to deliver a seminar for Mortenson when she’d been called unexpectedly out of town, so he knew it contained two medium-sized lecture halls, a few smaller classrooms, and some offices that were usually vacant. The front doors were propped open, with two uniformed cops stationed outside, one on each side of the doorway. Other figures, some wearing suits, some uniforms, and some in vests marking them as part of the crime-scene investigation unit, periodically entered or left. Two police cars, a coroner’s van, a couple of unmarked sedans, and a black CSI van were parked in front.
Stone observed the scene for a moment, confident that as long as he didn’t approach the building, they wouldn’t have a chance of noticing him. Things would get dicier as soon as he went inside, though. He made a mental note to work on designing some kind of remote-viewing spell—it would be a hell of a lot easier to sit in his car two blocks away and scope the place out from a distance.
But he didn’t have that now, and he had to see what was going on in there. If Archie was starting to kill people two at a time, that had to mean something. Perhaps if he’d left sigils at the scene again, they’d reveal more about what that might be.
He couldn’t just march right in through the front door, though—that would strain even the full-strength version of the spell’s ability to keep him from being noticed. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. The building had to have at least one other exit, which would certainly be locked, but locks posed little deterrence for him. If he could get in without anyone spotting him, the spell’s illusionary magic would take over and make him look like he belonged there as long as he didn’t do anything to draw attention to himself.
He glanced one last time at the activity outside and then hurried around the back of the building. Good—they hadn’t stationed anybody back here. Even better—he spotted a closed door.
It only took him a second to pop the lock, slip inside, and close the door behind him. He paused for a moment, taking a couple of deep breaths.
The smell of decomposition was strong in here. Not as strong as it had been inside the house in Gilroy, but strong enough to indicate that the bodies had been here for a while—probably since sometime late last night, unless Archie was starting to double up on his jobs.
He was standing at the end of a hallway that bisected the building and ended at the open front doors he’d spotted before. Doors lined the hall, but it wasn’t hard to see where the party was, even without magical sight. Halfway down on the left side a set of double doors was open, as was a similar set about twenty feet further down. From where he stood, Stone could hear the crackle of police radio chatter and the voices of the investigators and techs as they called back and forth to each other across the lecture hall.
Again forcing himself to move like he belonged here, Stone headed down the hall and paused in the open doorway to get a view of the scene.
For a moment, he could do nothing but stare.
Archie, or more likely his designated butchers, had been busy.
There were indeed two bodies, both male, and they were still there. Archie had deviated from his usual MO this time: neither of them were dismembered. Instead, one hung in front of the whiteboard at the front of the lecture hall, his arms spread wide, impaled on what looked like two stout spikes driven through his chest just below his shoulders. He’d been stripped and skinned, his exposed muscles red and shiny in the hall’s harsh overhead fluorescents. Something else looked off about him too, but it took Stone a moment to identify it.
The top of his skull was missing, neatly sheared off, and a grotesque, dark-red crater yawed where his brain should have been.
A coverall-clad technician pushed past Stone and entered the room without giving him a second glance. Stone, fixed on the scene in front of him, barely noticed.
The other body was laid out on the lab table in front of the whiteboard. He too had been skinned. His head was intact, but his torso had been sliced from sternum to abdomen, his nearly bloodless viscera erupting outward like a tangle of tentacles trying to escape a plastic bag. If he was missing any organs, it was impossible to tell from where Stone stood.
As with the previous scene, surprisingly little blood was present around either of the bodies.
Stone swiped a hand through his hair and let his breath out. He dragged his gaze away from the bodies and focused on the whiteboard.
He’d expected to see sigils, but once again Archie’s crew had deviated from their usual game plan. Instead of scrawling them around the torso of a dismembered corpse, they’d drawn them in blood on the whiteboard, like some kind of macabre project assignment. There were quite a lot of them—more than at any of the other scenes Stone had viewed photos of. Was that because there were two bodies? From his vantage point looking down into the tiered lecture hall, he saw no other sigils around the lab table or near the other body. Had the killers combined their invocation, or was one of the bodies a red herring? Perhaps someone who’d arrived on the scene unexpectedly?
Then he spotted them.
There were more sigils than the ones on the whiteboard, but he hadn’t noticed them immediately because they were on the ceiling above the bodies, scrawled in blood across the acoustical tiles.
And they were all the same.
Over and over, the same sigil, one he was well familiar with.
Stone.
He froze, rage warring with revulsion at Archie’s latest salvo.
This was bad.
No, this was worse than bad.
This was war.
He didn’t have much time left before his ring’s energy failed and he’d have to power the disregarding spell himself. He pulled out his notebook and began sketching the sigils on the board as quickly as he could. There was no need to get any closer to the scene and risk attracting unwelcome attention—he could see what he needed to from here. The sigils were the key, he was sure of it. Archie was sending him a message, and he’d damn well better decipher it fast.
He’d only gotten half of the scrawled symbols jotted down when a voice startled him from his focus. “Hey—who are you? Which team are you with?”
He turned, startled to find himself facing a short, wiry guy in a shirt and tie. The guy squinted at him in suspicion as if trying to figure something out.
It was the spell—he wouldn’t be able to get a good look, not through all that magic. But if Stone didn’t do something fast to get rid of him and he got more suspicious, there was a non-zero chance he’d be able to punch through even the strongest spell. If that happened, he’d be in deep trouble. Time to go.
“I was just leaving,” he mumbled in his American accent.
“Can I see your ID?” The man frowned, peering more closely.
“Sorry.” Stone spun away, ducking into the lecture hall. As soon as he was out of the man’s sight, he cast another spell, fading into invisibility. When the man appeared in the doorway, looking around in confusion, Stone slipped out the way he’d come and hurried toward the closed exit door.
Now the clock was ticking. His ring was nearly depleted, and he couldn’t keep the invisibility spell going for lo
nger than a minute or two. Damn them! He’d only needed a couple more minutes to copy down the rest of the sigils and get the whole message! As it was now, he had to hope it was enough to get the point across.
He reached the door and glanced over his shoulder. The man was back out in the hallway, but he was looking the other way, toward the main entrance. Stone used another bit of magic to open the door, not wanting to leave any fingerprints on it, and let it swing shut behind him. He didn’t drop the invisibility spell yet, but he’d have to soon. With luck, he could get out of there and be long gone before anybody figured out where went—if they ever did at all.
He’d made it only a short distance away before the back door slammed open and the wiry man appeared, his gaze darting back and forth. Now he had a uniformed cop with him. The cop had his gun out, scanning the area.
Stone looked around fast, trying to find an avenue of escape. There weren’t a lot of trees to hide behind here—at least he was standing on a walkway so he wouldn’t leave footprints for them to trace. He could already feel the invisibility spell flickering as his ring’s power flagged. If he didn’t do something soon, it would drop and leave him standing there in full daylight.
Damn you, Archie. Why the hell did you—
Hang on…
He smiled as a plan suddenly came to him.
Why not kill two birds with one…oh, never mind.
The spellwork would be tricky, but nothing he couldn’t handle. He hurried over toward one of the few nearby trees and ducked behind it. With a flick of his mind he dropped the invisibility spell and simultaneously cast two more—a levitation spell to lift him a few inches off the ground, and a powerful illusion. This illusion wasn’t designed to hide him, though. More to the contrary. And if he did it just right, it might even lead to some unexpected benefits.
When he floated from behind the tree and into view of the wiry cop and his uniformed partner, he appeared not as himself, but as a tall, thin figure in a long, black coat, white shirt, and jeans, with a pale, bony face. He grinned at the two cops.
You want to play, Archie? Let’s play, then.
“There he is!” yelled the wiry man, and the other cop brought his gun around.
Stone’s grin widened—he was sure on the mask he wore, it looked positively terrifying. He tweaked the illusion to emphasize the thin face’s glowing red eyes and lifted up a little further, just to leave no doubt that he was, in fact, floating two feet off the ground.
“What…the hell is that?” the wiry man yelled.
The uniformed cop was talking into his shoulder mic. He still had the gun trained on Stone, but his arm shook and his eyes were huge.
Stone spread his arms wide, then floated further upward. Time to go now—he couldn’t afford to get cocky or this whole thing could collapse on him. Give them a good look, and then get the hell out before they started taking shots at him or more backup arrived.
He slipped behind a tree and re-cast his invisibility spell, this time powering it himself. Moving fast, he floated across the courtyard and onto the roof of another nearby building, ducking down below the roofline so they wouldn’t be able to see him. Panting, heart thudding hard with fatigue and adrenaline, he dropped in a heap and finally let himself slump against an air-conditioning unit.
Despite the horrific things he’d seen, and despite the knowledge that Archie had indeed apparently declared open war on him, he couldn’t help smiling.
Your move, Archie.
He did get a ticket.
It fluttered under the BMW’s windshield wiper as he arrived back at the parking lot after taking a few minutes on the roof to recover his strength. The other illegally-parked cars had them too. He pulled it off and tossed it on the passenger seat.
He thought about checking in at the department office to see if anybody had any updated information or rumors, but decided not to—he didn’t want to answer the inevitable questions that would come up, given his past association with the police regarding the “Bay Area Butcher.” He’d get the update tomorrow, or tonight on the news. Today, he had more important things to do.
As he drove through campus on his way out, he already saw more police presence, both on foot and in patrol cars. He wondered if they were fanning out in search of the thin stranger with the glowing red eyes.
His message light was flashing when he got home. He plugged his mobile phone into the charger, grabbed a Guinness, and hit the button as he paced the kitchen.
The first call was from a rather frantic-sounding Mortenson, asking him if he’d heard there’d been a double murder at the University. The second was a telemarketer, and the third was a reporter asking to talk with him about the Bay Area Butcher case in light of the current murder.
The last one, from less than half an hour ago, was a voice he didn’t recognize—an older man. “Dr. Stone?” The voice was excited almost to the point of breathlessness. “My name is Simon Beal. I just got the message from Patricia at the Rosicrucian Library. I tried to call your cell phone but there was no answer.” A pause, as if he was getting his fervor under control. “Patricia tells me you might have some information about some ancient symbols I’ve been very interested in. Please call me back as soon as possible—I’m hoping very much that we can help each other!”
Chapter Forty
Stone quickly grabbed a pen and jotted down the phone number, which had a Los Angeles area code. He was about to call Simon Beal back when his mobile chirped.
He grabbed it, leaving it attached to the charger so it wouldn’t die halfway through the conversation. “Yes, this is Stone.”
“Dr. Stone? This is Grace. Oh, thank the Lord.” She, too, sounded breathless. “I heard on the radio that there was a murder at Stanford. I was worried that you were involved somehow. And then I couldn’t reach you—”
“Slow down, slow down.” Suddenly, everything was happening at once. “It’s all right. I’m fine.”
“Do you know anything about the murder? Was it—”
“Yes. And yes. Listen—Ms. Ruiz—I can’t talk right now. I need to call someone who might be able to help me shed some light on some things. Did you need anything else just now?”
“No…I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”
“Quite all right, for the moment. Are you? Nothing new happened down there, did it?”
“No. I—I still need to pray about this. It’s all been a lot to take in. But…please let me know what’s going on, when you find out. Whether I like it or not, I don’t think God wants me to give up on this.”
“Let’s talk later,” he said, impatient to call Beal back. “Watch yourself, Ms. Ruiz. I think things will start to happen fast now, so be careful. Stay at the church, or your apartment, or at least don’t go anywhere alone.”
“I will. You be careful too. I’ll pray for you.”
He tossed the mobile aside and punched in Beal’s number on his home phone. As he perched on one of the breakfast-bar stools and shoved a pile of old papers out of the way to make room for his notebook, he realized his heartbeat had sped up. Would Beal finally have the answers he was looking for, or at least something that might give him further insight? It was too much to hope for, but he still drummed his fingers impatiently as the line rang. Raider appeared from nowhere and leaped up on the counter, watching him from the other end.
“Yes, hello?” said a voice—the same one from the recording.
“Mr. Beal? This is Alastair Stone. You left me a message—”
“Oh! Oh, yes!” The man sounded excited. “Dr. Stone, thank you so much for calling. When Patricia told me about your research, I could hardly believe my good fortune.”
“Well, I hope we can help each other.”
“Oh, no doubt we can. You’ll have to forgive my excitement—this is a subject near and dear to my heart. I’ve spent years researching it, but reluctantly ha
d to put it aside when all my avenues of inquiry dried up a couple of years ago. To have something new show up out of the blue like this—it’s remarkable!”
“I do hope so.” Stone forced himself to keep his voice steady, the dispassionate tones of a scholar with no personal interest in the subject beyond the academic. “Can you give me some idea what you’ve discovered, Mr. Beal? I’d very much like to compare notes with you, if that’s possible.” He gently shoved Raider off his notebook.
Beal chuckled. “Try to keep me away, Dr. Stone. You say the word and I’ll be on a plane for the Bay Area before you can say ancient demonic language.’”
“Demonic language?” Stone’s hand tightened on the receiver. He hadn’t mentioned anything about demons to Patricia.
“Oh, yes! Didn’t you know?” Beal sounded positively giddy. “Of course it’s all hogwash, but I’m convinced the symbols represent some ancient culture’s idea of a demonic tongue. And there’s even a fascinating historical story around it that centers right around where you are.”
“What...sort of fascinating story?”
“I’ll give you all the details when I get there. I’ll have to take care of a few things here today, but I can be there by tomorrow afternoon. Would that be acceptable?”
“More than acceptable, Mr. Beal. I’ll clear my schedule.”
“Wonderful, wonderful.” There was a pause. “Dr. Stone, I was meaning to ask you—what’s your interest in these symbols? I know what they’ve got up there at the Rosicrucian Library, and it’s not the kind of thing you’d stumble on by accident, just paging through books.”
“The specifics are…a bit hard to explain. I’ll tell you tomorrow when we meet. But Patricia did tell you what I do here, right?”
“She did! I think it’s fascinating! In fact, I think I might have consulted with one of the other professors in your department—I don’t remember her name, but she was an older woman with gray hair—a few years back. I’m afraid she wasn’t very helpful, though,” he added ruefully.
