by R. L. King
“What are you talking about?” Jason demanded.
“This…isn’t…magic,” Stone said, spacing the words out for effect. “Verity’s ability to drive the Evil out of a host isn’t a magical ability. It’s a Forgotten one.”
“So?” Jason was still confused.
“I get it!” Verity almost yelled in her excitement. “It’s a Forgotten ability, so I can’t use it because you did something to block my connection with whatever was causing me to be crazy.”
Stone nodded, looking pleased. “Bright girl,” he said. “Brighter than me, at any rate. If you end up studying with me, I won’t be able to slack off at all if I want to stay ahead of you. But yes, exactly. It appears there’s some sort of connection between the energy that causes the mental problems and the Forgotten powers. Block one, you block the other one.”
“So, can you lift the block? Will that be safe?” Verity asked.
“Yes, and it should be, if what you tell me about it needing to ‘build up’ is accurate. This should only take a short time, and then we can put it back in place. But the first thing I’ll have to teach you when this is over, even if you decide to go elsewhere, is how to control the block—to place it and remove it yourself. That’s for later, though. Let’s get this sorted before the kid wakes up and I have to put him under again.”
Lifting Verity’s block took less than a minute. “Now that it’s established,” Stone told her, “it’s easier to manipulate. Once you learn to do it on your own, it will literally be like flipping a switch on and off.”
She nodded. “Okay. Should I just try the same thing again?”
“It’s a start. We might have to experiment a bit.”
“If I can even do it at all,” she muttered.
“I think you can. I have a theory—since you’re a potential mage, you should, even untrained, be able to have more control over a mentally-based power, even if you don’t consciously know how to do it yet.”
She looked dubious. “I hope you’re right…” she said. Turning, she faced the boy again and resumed her “laying an egg” expression of concentration. “I want you out of there!” she growled.
The boy shifted in his seat again. It was subtle, but it appeared that there was some kind of internal struggle going on with him. “Is it working?”
“Keep going,” Stone said, his voice even. He was watching the boy as closely as she was. “Try touching his forehead. Might help you focus.”
Verity looked like that wasn’t her first choice for something to do: the boy’s face was dotted with a nasty case of acne. But after a moment she reached out and tentatively put one finger in the middle of his forehead. “Out!” she ordered again.
The boy’s squirming grew more pronounced. He appeared to be fighting his way to consciousness—or something inside him was trying to fight its way out. So far, Stone’s spell was holding. “It’s not working,” Verity said under her breath, her voice thick with concentration.
“It is,” Stone murmured. “I can feel—something—trying to fight you. Keep going.”
Verity leaned forward, putting her hands on each side of the boy’s head. “Leave…him…alone!” she yelled in frustration.
Without any warning, the boy lunged forward. Jason hadn’t tied his hands tightly, since all he was trying to do was keep him upright in the chair. Nobody had noticed that while they were all focused on his face, he had apparently been busy working his hands loose from the bindings. Flinging his arms forward, he locked his hands around Verity’s neck and the two of them overbalanced and went over backward with a crash.
Jason moved almost instantly, leaping forward and grabbing the kid’s arms to loosen his grip on his sister. The kid, though skinny, fought with the strength of a madman, his eyes blazing with hatred. “You—can’t—stop us!” he spat out through gritted teeth.
Stone was only a little slower than Jason, moving in to grab the boy’s other arm. Together they managed to pull him off Verity, who skittered away, puffing and scared. They struggled with him as he flung his body back and forth, apparently heedless to any damage he was doing to it. His only obvious motivations were to escape and to injure as many of his captors as he could before he did it.
“Do something!” Jason yelled to Stone. “Unless you want me to clock him one!”
Verity, however, had gotten back to her feet. She regarded the kid with a mixture of anger and disgust. “Get out of there, damn you!” she yelled. “I’m sick of screwing around with you!” She closed her eyes and pushed.
Just as suddenly as he had lunged from the chair, the boy went limp in Stone’s and Jason’s arms, his head slumping forward. At the same time, a dimly glowing ball of energy shot up out of him, hovering above his body for a few seconds. Like the one before, this one made a few quick and desperate darts around, hovering in front of each of its captors in turn, and then exploded in what looked like a feeble and silent white firework.
Verity let her breath out. “I…I did it,” she said, like she hardly believed it herself.
“That you did,” Stone said, puffing. Together with Jason he hustled the unconscious boy back into the chair. He checked to make sure he still had a pulse and was breathing, then turned back to Verity. “Nicely done. I was even able to get a couple of readings—though I didn’t expect him to go after us like that.”
Jason was looking at Verity with concern. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?” He shot a nasty glance at the boy, tempted to give him a good swift kick or two for his trouble.
She felt at her neck, then shook her head. “No, just scared me. He didn’t get a very good grip. That was pretty freaky.”
Stone nodded. “But the important question is—do you know what you did now? Do you think you can duplicate it at will?”
“I’m—not sure,” she said slowly. “But I think maybe I can. I did what you said—just pushed with my mind. But it seems like it takes some kind of scary thing to make it work right. Like I need to be afraid it’s going to hurt me or somebody else.”
“Hmm. Well, that’s better than nothing, I guess. It will have to do for now.” He motioned toward the boy. “Come on—let’s get him back to the van. We need to take him back where we got him.”
“Why can’t we just leave him here?” Jason asked. He wasn’t feeling too much like making life easy for this kid.
“Safer to take him back. I don’t think he’ll remember any of this—he’ll probably think he just passed out from drinking too much beer, or fell asleep. But we can’t give him too many reasons to question that—like waking up in a location he has no knowledge of. That could bring up awkward complications.”
“Okay, whatever.” Jason got the kid under his arms and hoisted him up, then hung back as Verity left the room first and headed toward the van. “Hey, Al?”
“Yes?”
“Did you really have any idea that her being a mage would make this any easier?”
“Of course not.” He raised an eyebrow. “She might be bright, but she’s still seventeen. I’ve got a few years of deviousness on her yet.”
Jason grinned as he resumed dragging the boy out of the room.
Chapter Forty-Three
After collecting Lissy (who was asleep, still clutching her glow stick) and Susanna (who guiltily scrabbled around trying to put out her cigarette before she got caught), they managed to drop the sleeping boy off in a shadowy corner near the side of the haunted house without incident. Of course, a little concealing magic didn’t hurt, either.
“So, now what?” Jason asked as they were once more on the road, heading back to the Forgotten’s current location to drop off their two guests. “Do you go back and try to work out how to build your cage?”
“Exactly,” Stone said. “Hopefully, by the time I finish, Lamar’s feelers will have come back with some solid information about where we need to look for our big baddie.�
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“Well, I hope it doesn’t take too long,” Jason grumbled. “I’m getting sick of being cooped up in the house, even though I know it’s not really safe to make too many appearances out in public right now.”
Stone nodded. “I know, and I sympathize. But you’re right—it wouldn’t make sense to go through all this effort to deal with the Evil, only to have you two get picked off by a couple of DMW because you simply had to go to the cinema.”
Once again, they were met by a small party of Forgotten before they even parked the van. Marilee and Benny looked relieved that Lissy and Susanna had made it back safely. “No problems?” Marilee asked as they all went back inside to say their goodnights, and Stone broke off to go have a quick chat with Lamar.
“Nothing,” Jason said. “But Al says we can’t really do anything else until we get more information about where the Head Evil Thing is hanging out.”
Marilee nodded. “I know. We’ve put the word out to every Forgotten group we know, but nothing’s come back yet. Like Lamar said, I think a lot of them are afraid. They don’t think it’s a good idea to poke at the Evil. We’ve spent so long hiding from them that going after them seems…suicidal.” She sighed. “Still, though, I’m sure something will turn up.”
“I hope so,” Jason said.
Stone spent the next three days once again splitting his time between his magic setup in the family room and his bedroom office with the door closed. The only time he came up for air was to disappear for about a half-hour after Verity complained of being bored and running out of new recipes to try. “Here,” he said when he returned, handing her a small stack of leather-bound tomes. “Start reading these. They’ll give you some of the basic theory and concepts behind magic. It’ll give you a leg up when you’re ready to begin your studies.”
She riffled through one, wrinkling her nose. “These look like math books,” she complained.
“Our sort of magic has a lot of math in it,” Stone told her. “Might as well get used to it if you want to be any good.”
She grumbled something noncommittal, but took the books to her bedroom.
On the third night, Stone was a little late for dinner. Jason was about to go hunt him up when he came down the hall and dropped into his chair, plunking a small object down next to his plate.
Jason looked at it curiously. It looked like an open cube a little smaller than a child’s building block, comprising eight crystals of varying hues held together by gold, silver, and copper wire. He was about to ask what it was when he remembered what Stone had been doing all this time. “Wait—that’s the cage?”
“That’s it.”
Verity regarded it with a tilted head. “It doesn’t look very powerful,” she said. “I thought it would be—I don’t know—bigger. How’s it work?”
“Well, it needs to be small so we can take it wherever we need to go without someone noticing it. Since I don’t expect we’ll be able to lure our big Evil out of his hidey-hole, we’ll likely have to go in after him. And if he’s some sort of powerful entity like a police chief or a politician, walking in with a large, strange-looking object hardly seems prudent, does it?”
“How’s it work?” Verity asked again. She extended a tentative hand and, at Stone’s nod, carefully picked it up and examined it.
“It’s attuned to the wavelength of the Evil, at least as much as I could determine it through my brief experiments with our young friend. When activated, it will create a magical field that, if we’re fortunate, will contain any specimen of the Evil that happens to be nearby.”
“Is it powerful enough?” Jason asked. He, like Verity, was dubious—the thing looked like something a moderately talented beginning jewelry maker might cobble together from spare parts.
“Well, the power doesn’t come from the object, but from me,” Stone said. “The object merely focuses it and attunes it to the proper energies.” He took it back from Verity, holding it up in his palm. “It also, I believe, has another serendipitous side effect.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not positive, since it’s impossible to test it here, but I’m fairly sure that it will resonate when it’s near the Evil.”
Jason’s gaze on the little thing sharpened. “You mean it’ll buzz or glow or something when it’s near somebody who’s possessed?”
“That’s the theory. If it works, it solves another problem that I was concerned about—that wherever our quarry ends up hiding, we’d have to take one or more of the Forgotten with us to help triangulate on its precise location.”
Jason let his breath out slowly. The thought of dragging Lissy and Susanna into a police precinct or office building or some other restricted, public place didn’t sound like a great idea. Something else was bothering him too, though. “Well, yeah, that’s a good thing. But this whole thing seems pretty sketchy. You keep saying things like ‘if I’m right’ and ‘if we’re lucky’ and ‘I can’t be sure, but—’” He shook his head. “It sounds like one big magical house of cards that will crash and burn on us if one of these ‘maybes’ or ‘I hopes’ of yours is wrong.”
If he was hoping for some reassurance from Stone, he was disappointed. “You’re absolutely right,” the mage conceded. “And I’m afraid that’s the best we’re going to get. We can’t spend too much more time planning—every day we take is another day something could go wrong. Especially with Lamar putting out feelers among other Forgotten groups. No offense intended to our friends, but having a whole army of mentally unhinged individuals in on the fact that we’re planning to hunt down and execute our enemy’s leader doesn’t exactly fill me with warm feelings of confidence.”
Either by coincidence or by design, they didn’t have long to wait. When Verity went out to get the paper the next morning, she found a small triangle-and-rays symbol chalked on the front porch next to it. She quickly called Stone and Jason out to look at it, and Stone looked satisfied. “Aha,” he said. “It appears that we have our sign.”
“You think they’ve found something?” Jason asked.
“Let’s go find out.”
The Forgotten were still in the same place; apparently they either felt safe at the mall storeroom, or else were risking remaining there a bit longer than was technically prudent so Stone and the others could easily find them. As usual, the reception committee came out to meet them; this time Lamar himself was among the group. “Good morning,” he said. “I see you got the message.” He looked uncharacteristically grim.
Jason handed over the large box of doughnuts and pastries they’d bought on the way over, and they all trooped back to the storeroom. “Something wrong?”
Lamar nodded. He waited until they were seated to speak. “The DMW are growing more active. They’re trying to find you—or any of us who’ve helped you. Three homeless people were found dead two nights ago not far from here. They’d been tortured. They weren’t Forgotten, but we hear things.”
“The Evil are getting closer,” Marilee said. Fear shadowed her wrinkled face.
Stone bowed his head. “Damn,” he said. He looked like he was wrestling with something, then finally said, “Perhaps you should just stay away from us. Stop looking for the Evil. We’ll find another way.”
Verity nodded. “Yeah. You shouldn’t risk it. If you guys got killed over this—”
Lamar shook his head. “We said we’d help, and we will. But some of the group are starting to have second thoughts. It’s getting harder to convince other groups to talk. But that’s why we contacted you. We think we found something.”
“You found him?” Stone asked.
“Or her?” Verity added.
“Well—yes and no,” Lamar said. “We’re closer, but we still have more work to do.”
Stone frowned. “What do you mean? You haven’t found him yet?”
“We’ve narrowed it down,” Marilee said. “It took a
while because he’s not nearby. We’re pretty sure that he’s in San Francisco. Or she,” she added, with a glance at Verity. “It took a while to get the information back because the Forgotten over there are very frightened. Apparently it’s much more dangerous to be homeless in San Francisco than it is on this end of the bay, even with the DMV on the rise down here. Many of them—not just Forgotten, but homeless in general—have disappeared without a trace. And naturally, the police can’t be bothered to try to figure out why, so the Forgotten learn to keep their heads even further down than usual.”
Jason looked disappointed. It was bad enough that the Evil were getting closer to tracking down the Forgotten, but he’d been sure they were finally going to get the answer that would lead them to their quarry. Now, though, it seemed like they still had a long way to go. “San Francisco’s a big city,” he said. “We can’t exactly drive around with Lissy in the back seat looking for readings. I’m betting there’s tons of Evil up there.”
“Well, it’s a start,” Stone said, clearly trying to make the best of it. “Do you have contact with the Forgotten up there? Can you ask them to help us narrow things down a bit?”
“We’re already doing that,” Lamar said. He sighed. “I’m sorry. I wish we could move faster, but there isn’t really much else we can do. Especially now. We have to be even more careful.”
“It’s okay,” Jason assured him with a sigh, trying to hide his frustration. The thought of having to go back to the rental house and spend an indefinite amount of time puttering aimlessly around in an attempt to kill time was a tiny version of hell for him. He wanted to do something. “You gotta keep yourselves safe. That’s the priority. We know you’re doing your best.”
“We’re going to have to move again,” Lamar said. “We’ve stayed here too long.” He gave Stone a small piece of paper. “Here’s where we’re going next. It’s in Mountain View.”
