Another screech jerked his attention back to his surroundings again. It was much louder. Closer. It came from beyond the twisted and broken gate.
As he stared up the long driveway, he saw movement up where the asphalt curved. He shined his flashlight.
It took him too long of a moment to process what he actually saw. People running. A crowd of them, maybe a hundred or more. They ran in quick motions, arms pumping like seasoned sprinters.
“Hello?” Pete called out to them. Then the pertinent question popped into his head: What are they running from?
Or what are they running to?
One of them leapt from the pack. Pete barely had time to register that it was a face streaked with blood, a male face, wearing torn clothing that looked like it had been ripped. A black wound was at his throat.
Before Pete could even lift his gun, the man leapt into him and vaulted away in a roll from the force of his jump. Pete was knocked to the ground, and his world suddenly began to spin and blacken. The gun he held was gone. So was the flashlight.
Others from the pack reached him. They stood around him in a circle. The fear of it caused him to snap back to consciousness. All of the people were bloody, their eyes black. Pete tried to scramble away, only to run up against the rough-stone wall of the guard house. The people moved weird. They stared at him with their black eyes, their skin pale, faces twisted and evil and full of sharp teeth. None of them made a move toward him, though, and Pete got the sense that they were waiting for something. As he watched one of them, a once-pretty, dark-haired woman with one of her breasts exposed, her rich-fabric dress torn from her chest—figures he would be drawn to watch her over all the others—he noticed something weird about the wound she had on her shoulder. Pete could have sworn it looked as if it knitted closed, the skin pushing back together like it was healing at an impossible rate. In fact, several of the others with similar wounds, all of them healing.
There was a man, dressed in a guard uniform, with a stump of a hand—that was growing back, small fingers protruding out from pale flesh like a new seedling.
One tall man pushed through the others, coming to stand in front. Pete sensed that this was what they were waiting for. He was a big guy, at least 6’ 2”. He was naked to the waist, the body like a seasoned soldier, and he wore black pants that looked like they were part of a business suit. He sucked in air with his broad shoulders rising and falling as he watched Pete. Overhead a dark creature circled with black wings. He could see it. A bat-like form that blotted out the deadening sky.
The big man was at least six feet from where Pete sat. Before he knew it, the big guy was inches from Pete’s face.
“Izh-tak nul fatoum,” the big man said. “Izh-tak nul de Morrigun.”
The big man was on top of him. His hands pushed Pete’s shoulders hard into the rough-stone wall, and the man buried his face into Pete’s neck. At first, it was weird. He couldn’t figure out what the big guy was doing, except somewhere in his mind, he realized the guy was biting down. Only when he pulled away, his face dripping with Pete’s blood, did Pete realize that the man had bitten off a large hunk of Pete’s neck. That’s when the pain finally registered.
But before Pete could cry out, he felt the changes taking place. He felt the rush through his body, the electric pulse of something beyond, something bigger than himself.
And he heard her.
Prepare for my coming.
His last thought as Pete was that the voice he heard was beautiful, so beautiful that he thought it might bring tears to his eyes.
“I am preparing,” he said to nobody in particular. “I am preparing for the coming of Morgauna.”
Somewhere in New Mexico
As soon as the house fell, Eoin Corbett enacted the fallback plan. They were to get to the secondary objective by whatever means necessary and regroup.
Eoin arrived at a house blended into the mountainside, a chalet built of rich pine wood milled from the surrounding forest. This was a house that was never supposed to be occupied, never used, at least not by the Council. It was maintained completely off the books, a house unstaffed and entirely secret. The house was his father’s idea. At the time, Eoin thought it a frivolous idea, an unneeded expense. He jokingly believed his father simply wanted a place to escape to in an effort to silence the constant demands placed upon him as Archon of the Council. They would have no need for this house, Eoin believed.
Did his father know what was coming?
As Eoin got out of a dented and partially scorched Mercedes he’d used to smash through the front gate, it hit him. The whole way here, the drive down, he’d managed to shove any personal thought out of his mind, instead working over what had happened, where it all went wrong. He thought if he could figure out where it started, maybe there was some way to stop it. Even after everything, he still wanted to hold onto hope.
But now, in the crisp and dry New Mexico evening with a chilly wind blowing down from the mountain, he leaned heavy against the car. He fought to stand until he finally settled into a crouch, his hands covering his face.
Randall Corbett was dead. His father. Dead.
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.
He watched it happen. His father was overtaken by a pack of those monsters. Instead of changing him, as they’d done to others caught just as unaware as they all were, they ripped his father apart. Driven by hatred. His father had been singled out for revenge.
He thought his father would never die. Now his father was dead.
The cut on Eoin’s chin shot a flare of fresh pain into his cheek and down the side of his throat as he covered his face with his hands. Battle wounds. He’d barely escaped with his life. The cut on his chin was from a dark claw.
The Fae-touched.
It was a name of a beast once used to frighten the children of the ten family lines. Go to sleep lest the Fae kings and queens send their Touched to snatch you from your beds. Fairy tales, but all fairy tales were told with a seed of the truth rooting and rutting beneath them. At least to those who understood the inner workings of the Council as he did.
And now all of Aelhollow was gone.
Aelhollow had been more than a house. It had been a community tucked away from the outside world and left to thrive on its own. A town complete with a central market, a school, a bank, stores for grocery shopping. They were almost entirely self-sufficient. A place that had managed to live off the grid of outside existence while also maintaining a strong connection to the outer world.
Aelhollow had simply been the center of all their operations since it was understood to be a key nexus point for the Veil. Nexus points were locations where the barrier between the worlds—the Veil—was at its most volatile and susceptible to be breached. The Council was tasked with forever keeping the Veil locked, the very foundation upon which the Council itself formed. Long before the first settlers ever set foot in Colorado in 1626, there was Aelhollow.
But now even Aelhollow had fallen.
Eoin stood, unable to fathom the loss of his own father, much less an empire. Had it really come to this?
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.
He had no time to mourn. He pushed off from the car and made his way toward the side entrance to the house. He needed to understand where it all went wrong and what he might do to stop it. And he needed to see if anyone else had made it here. He hoped there would be more evidence of others already inside the house. Maybe they had used some alternate means of transportation to get here. Those in the know, the other Anax like himself, the leaders of their families. He hoped the other Anax had been able to access the emergency info, broken the wards against knowledge of this house, and to spread it among their families so that more could have a destination, a place to escape to.
His own family, the Corbett line, were all cut off. He’d tried to contact them. He had to assume the worst. But maybe others were more successful. This house was a refuge of last resort, a place to regroup and mount an attac
k against whatever assaulted them.
There were plans in place, but they were plans made with the belief that a network would still be in place, that an attack on a chapter house would occur with the promised aid of other chapter houses, Aelhollow chief among them. All their plans required cooperation.
But he seemed to be the only one there.
He couldn’t be the only one left, could he?
Eoin went from room to room in the house to find them all empty. Nicely furnished, a ski-lodge feel that was entirely expected from the exterior of the house. There were seven bedrooms upstairs and several seating areas.
The kitchen was fully stocked, but that was the case in any of the houses they had across the globe. When he checked into the kitchen, the magic of the spells woven into the refrigerator and the pantry whispered on his skin, spells to keep the food forever fresh as the first day it was purchased. Some of the Council houses quite possibly still had fresh food in them from sometime in the previous century. It wasn’t out of the question.
He found the stairwell leading down off of the kitchen. Down there, he would find the control center. They hadn’t gone to the trouble to hide the room here as much as they had in the main chapter houses.
There was no granite chamber for a lockstone either.
Here, the control center was a theater room converted for the purpose. Instead of plush seating facing the large screen, there were computer work stations. It was set up to become a place of coordination in the case of an emergency. His father had seen to it that there were stations covering all ten locations where the lockstones were kept. There were other houses, other weak spots along the Veil, but those ten were the most important. They formed the net that kept the Veil in place. They were the cover for the keyholes from the other world—from Tir na Nog.
The large screen at the front of the room was made to show all ten computer screens sectioned off or to zoom in on whatever station needed closer viewing. Eoin powered them up to see what information he could gather and if there were any survivors to be expected.
Each machine was made, once logged into with the correct password and biometrics—and the right whispered spell to unlock the wards—to connect automatically to the mainframes of each of the ten houses. The response from Aelhollow’s computer, he expected. When it stood at the screen to connect, it hung in an attempt to connect. Eoin watched the nine other screens, hopeful that at least some of them would show a working chapter house. With even one chapter house, he had hope, a chance to mount a defense.
The other houses connected to show houses with no activity, no indication that anyone was alive in them. But he looked for the notification at the bottom of each sectioned part of the main screen, the symbol for the lockstones to indicate that the lockstone was present and still functioning on site.
The chapter houses closest to him connected first. Seattle, La Jolla, Aelhollow. He knew the fate of those houses already. Their screens indicated that the lockstones were missing from their underground chambers.
But his heart froze when he saw the feeds from Vienna, from Dublin, from Nepal in the Himalayas. Johannesburg, Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, and Moscow. The indication was there on the big screen in the front of the room, even if he found it difficult to comprehend. The lockstones, all of them were gone. He stood at the back of the room, unable to move. It was more severe than he thought. Far more critical. This was the worst-case scenario.
Their entire network, everything the Council built up over the course of millennia, had been taken down in only a few hours. The thought threatened to send him spiraling downward into despair, and he fell back to sit in one of the desk chairs.
Until a proximity alarm sounded in the room and brought him to his feet again.
Eoin bounded from the room and took the stairs two and three at a time. He peered out of the windows at the front of the house to look out over the driveway and the mountains beyond, careful not to expose himself too much. He saw movement. Someone was definitely here. He had a gun, but that was only back up. Instead, he focused his willpower into his hands. The skin on his palms tingled and sweat as the magic gathered, ready to be unleashed.
Eoin walked toward the entry way as the door opened. A woman.
She froze where she was, framed by the doorway as the heavy door swung open, and she returned Eoin’s gaze. She was a tall woman, equal to Eoin’s height at just under six foot, and she was dressed casually in blue jeans and a cable-knit sweater. Her hair was a dark brown, pulled back into a tight pony tail. She was pretty, like an ivy-league co-ed who spent her life living well and who took care of herself.
“Hello,” she said, glancing toward the power in his hand. “You planning on using that?” Her eyes caught the blue glow of magic flame coming from his hand. Wisps of blue flame came in and out of existence.
Eoin squint at her, a moment of recognition from training sessions at Aelhollow. “You’re a Stavros,” he said.
“That’s right. Katina Stavros. I was assigned to the La Jolla house.” Her eyes kept jumping focus from meeting Eoin’s gaze to the fire on his palms. “And you’re Eoin Corbett,” she said. She remained where she was as if she was deciding whether to run or to stay. “I followed protocol. I wasn’t followed.” She held her hands up to show they were empty. Eoin sensed no magic being used on her either, so he loosened his grip on his own magic, and Katina Stavros visibly relaxed.
“Are you alone?” Eoin asked her.
She nodded with a grim expression on her face. “It was an ambush. We never saw it coming,” she said.
“How many were at your chapter house?”
“Fourteen. Besides myself,” she said. “The usual nine and five assistants. I escaped because I was out of the house buying supplies.”
“And the keepers are all dead.” It wasn’t a question.
She nodded. “Heads cut off,” she said. She closed the front door.
“You were an assistant?”
“Replacement,” she said. “Neeland Mayfair was stepping down from his post.”
Eoin nodded. “Come in. We need to talk,” he said. “I assume you’re hungry.”
“I can eat,” she said from behind him.
In the kitchen, from the pantry, she grabbed a box of Corn Diggers still in their original packaging from the 1970s. Eoin sat on a stool at the long marble island in the center of the kitchen.
“How did it happen?” he asked her.
She spoke with her mouth full of crispy corn chips. “Dunno,” she said. “Like I said, I wasn’t there.”
Eoin squint at her like he was unsure what to make of that. “You said you were out buying supplies? I thought everything took place in the early morning hours.”
She popped another chip into her mouth. “The supplies I needed weren’t the type acquired during normal business hours. Can’t exactly get a camahueto horn from Walgreens.”
He nodded. She must be more magically oriented. All of them on the Council had exposure to magic. Others made it their main focus of study.
She ate quietly, except for the crunch of her decades-old corn chips. “How are there not more of us left?” she asked.
“There’s one more.” A male voice in the doorway startled Eoin, and Katina too. They both reacted by gathering power to them. Katina’s magic, Eoin noted, had more flare, more color. She accessed more of the elements. She was definitely a magical study.
The man was tall with an olive complexion and had a mustache. He wore a tattered flannel and blue jeans with holes in the knees and carrying his jacket gripped in one hand. “The door was unlocked,” he said, thumbing over his shoulder the way he came. “I let myself in.”
Eoin loosened his grip on the power first. He recognized the man from the day they all met at Aelhollow. “Maystone, right?” he said.
The man smiled. “Good memory. Brodie Maystone,” he said. He walked further into the kitchen.
After a glance and a nod from Eoin to indicate it was okay, Katina gave up her power
too, and she crossed her arms. “Where were you?”
“Seattle,” Brodie said. “I was one of the guardians.” He looked grim. Eoin had an idea of what the expression on his face meant: Guardians were there to protect. He’d failed. But they all had in one way or another.
While they all sat in the kitchen, recharging, Eoin told them about what he’d found in the control room.
“So what do we do now?” Katina asked.
“I think our best bet lies in Chicago,” Eoin said.
Katina cocked her head at him. “Chicago? What’s in Chicago?”
“Liam Coyle,” Brodie said. “We were looking into him. Tough kid to find.”
Eoin knew. He knew all too well. “He’s the only one who might be able to put a stop to all of this,” Eoin said.
Nine
Chicago, IL
Liam woke thinking about the stone. He found his Aunt Jonie sitting bedside. She lay with her head back on the vinyl chair in the hospital room, really a room with curtains on three sides and one pulled partially closed that gave a view of a busy ER.
“What’s going on?” Liam asked.
Aunt Jonie reacted like she’d been shocked. She sat up straight and peered over at Liam. “You’re awake!”
“Yeah, I guess so.” There were monitors attached to him, and he was wearing a hospital gown. A needle stuck in his arm attached to an IV drip. Of what, he wasn’t sure. “What happened?” Liam asked.
Aunt Jonie wore a weird smile. She shrugged. “They’re not sure. You’ve been out for a little while. They’re running tests.”
“Tests?”
Aunt Jonie stood up and came closer to his bedside. “Just standard stuff, they said. You passed out, and your friends said they couldn’t revive you. They want to make sure it’s not something internal. But the doctor said that he really thought it was dehydration and a lack of sleep.” She reached up and felt his forehead. “I knew I should’ve put my foot down and kept you home.”
The Stone (Lockstone Book 1) Page 12
