“Technically we haven’t even had a real first date yet.”
“Wow, you’re right.” Liam considered. “I guess that makes us both a couple of sluts who hop into bed before the date.”
“There were extenuating circumstances,” Patrick said with a laugh. “You needed to get your mind off everything.”
“That is certainly one way to refocus the brain. I gotta say, they teach you some real useful stuff at the CIA.”
Patrick laughed. Liam laughed too.
When they were done, Patrick nodded his head as he mulled it over. “I’m good with boyfriend,” he said. “All things considered.”
“All things considered,” Liam repeated. He put his hand back in Patrick’s, and he squeezed. “My boyfriend’s a spy,” Liam said with a grin.
“Yes.” Patrick leaned in for a kiss. “Yes, he is.”
There was a sound from one of the doorways leading into the kitchen. “Liam?” It was Eoin. He stood just inside. For a man who looked so confident most of the time, he seemed a little embarrassed.
“Yeah,” Liam said. “What’s up?”
“Sorry to interrupt,” Eoin said. “I just, uh… I just thought maybe I could take you downstairs and show you some magic control.” He held a hand up. “I mean, if you have time.”
“Sure,” Liam said. He scooted his chair back, still holding onto Patrick’s hand. “No time like the present.” After he stood up, Liam looked to Patrick. “You good up here all by yourself?” he said to Patrick.
“Yeah, I think I’ll manage.”
Liam took the stone with him. As he passed Patrick by, he leaned down close to his ear. “Still can’t believe I’m dating a real spy,” he whispered.
Patrick laughed.
Liam passed to follow Eoin, but then he stopped and turned around. Liam’s brow furrowed, and a strange, small smile touched his lips. “How did you know to come back, anyway? Back to the motel room, I mean. Your note said you’d be back around sunrise.” It was clearly sunrise now, and they were both no longer in the motel room.
Patrick met Liam’s gaze. That was the best way to cover when caught off guard. He put on a simple smile of his own. “Gut feeling, I guess.” Looking someone in the eye when lying to them made them more inclined toward belief.
Twenty-Four
Chicago, IL
It was 10 a.m. in the morning, and Zach stood with his arms crossed as he watched the video. Glenda was there with him along with a Chicago PD detective and two local Chicago agents of the FBI. The Bureau was called in on a local case due to the seriousness of the crime, a murder.
It was black and white, a little grainy, but still clear enough that it was possible to make out the facial features of people in the frame.
“Play it again,” Zach said.
The video rewound, and the technician started it again. The video was of a hallway—the hallway of a class building. In it, a college kid came from a classroom and stopped for a moment, peering down one direction of the hallway then down the other, like he was afraid. Then he took off at a brisk walk out of the frame. Then the video cut to another camera in the area, this one showing the back of the same student as he made his way past classrooms.
But the video glitched, and the screen went fuzzy. It was still possible to see, but the clarity of the images was lost. Now the movements were shapes on a screen rather than actual representations of people.
“What is that? What’s causing that?” Zach asked.
“I don’t know,” the technician said. He was a thick guy with greasy hair and heavy glasses, but he was supposed to be the best that the FBI had to offer in the way of video technicians in Chicago. “I tried buffering it out, but it’s in the data itself like something corrupted these bits of data. This was the best I could do.”
On screen, one shape stopped at a doorway—Zach knew it was a doorway because it was clear seconds ago—but then the shape shot backwards, the shape of the student they’d been following, out of the frame again. Then another shape came through the door and stood for several seconds.
As the second shape started moving toward the fallen student, the screen flashed white then faded away. Within seconds, the fuzziness in the picture fell away, and the man who was found dead in the hallway of the classroom building on DePaul’s campus lay on his back, eyes open, blood spilling from a wound in his chest.
The student moved around the man’s body. The fear was evident on his face. At the last moment, he turned and peered up at the camera like noticing it for the first time.
“Pause it,” Zach said. The tech paused the screen. The image was unmistakable. It’s why there were there, the name flagged them as tied to their investigation. Zach pressed his mouth tight. “That’s definitely Liam Yates.”
The school’s registrar confirmed it when it was investigated. They even had an updated photo in their files, and, side by side with the high school photo, they were the same person.
SSA Howard Nichols, an older guy who wore his experience in the deep lines of his face turned to Zach. “Why were you looking for this kid again?”
They put in an inquiry when they first arrived in Chicago to get info on a Liam Yates. They tried the Coyle last name, but that was a no-go, so they put in a search for Yates, and he turned up. “Big case we were working on back west,” Zach said.
Nichols squinted. “The serial case that blew up in Seattle?”
Zach glanced at Glenda before facing Nichols. “Yeah,” he said. “We found a file with this Liam kid’s name on it.”
Nichols shared his own glance with his partner, an agent named Vic Tanner. “Seems a little weird, don’t it?” Nichols said.
“Weird?” Glenda said. “Would it surprise you if I said that this is one of the less weird parts of the case we’re working on?”
The local agents had nothing to add to that. “Well, we’re about to head over to talk to this kid’s aunt,” Nichols said. “That’s who he lived with before starting school at DePaul. She was his primary contact in the registrar’s office. You want to know something else that’s odd?”
Zach quirked an eyebrow. “I’m all ears.”
“This same kid was involved in a murder-suicide back in Texas.”
Zach could tell from the nod Nichols gave him that he wasn’t too successful at hiding his surprise.
“This Liam Yates, his dad picked up a rifle and shot his mom and two sisters before turning the gun on himself.”
“Okay.”
“He was the only one spared,” Nichols added.
“Did he find them?”
“No,” Nichols said. “He was in the house. His dad shot himself right outside his bedroom door. I got the file for it on my desk. You’re welcome to give it a read after we go talk to the aunt.”
Yes, he planned to read that file. With everything going on, all the murders and this kid obviously connected, Zach had a gut feeling that there was something he wasn’t seeing, something related to what was happening now. He wasn’t sure why he felt that, but there it was. Sometimes in these things, it was best to just trust the gut and go with it. The gut doesn’t lie.
They drove in one large SUV to the aunt’s house. It was decided that Nichols would lead the questioning. He was the one working the local case, after all, and Zach would sit in to ask about his own connections to the case. Glenda and Nichols’s partner, Victor Tanner, would have to wait in the car.
Liam Yates was only a person of interest at this point, but they hoped to find him at his aunt’s house. Something happened that he was involved in. Maybe the kid shot the guy. The ME was still trying to figure out what killed him. Both the FBI and the local police were very interested in finding out why. Clearly the kid was spooked by something, so maybe this had a viable cause for self-defense.
Or maybe the kid was involved in something much deeper. Zach had the file for the kid’s murder-suicide in his lap as they drove. He wanted to read about his history in Texas and the murder-suicide of his father. In
the attached picture, the one sent over from the university from the kid’s student ID, he had big, blue eyes and a smile that hinted at something underneath.
The suicide attempts were in the kid’s file too. The local agents uncovered that after a little digging. Liam Yates had been admitted, not once but twice, to psych wards and recovery programs, once after slashing his own wrists and another from taking too many sleeping pills. The kid’s picture showed an innocent-looking face. In Zach’s time at the Bureau in the Behavioral Analysis Unit, he’d seen a lot of innocent looking people accused of doing some very bad things. The sense that there was something he wasn’t seeing, something big, was there again. He had to wonder what those blue eyes were hiding.
They pulled off the highway and drove up enough side streets that Zach was pretty well lost. It was a good thing he wasn’t the guy behind the wheel. That was Tanner’s job. Before long, they rolled to a stop across the street from a simple looking house, a working-class home with a brick façade, probably built in the 1950s. The neighborhood was decent, not rich, but not poor, spanning the gamut between lower-middle to upper-middle class.
When Tanner parked, Zach and Nichols got out and crossed the street. At the door of the house, Nichols rang the bell. He rang it a second time after a minute of waiting. No one came.
Zach peered in through the front window of the porch. Inside, it was a normal house, a simple living room, clean with a gray sofa that looked made of synthetic fiber and bright throw pillows that gave the room some color. It was a comfortable room.
Except for the broken glass.
“Nichols?” Zach craned his head to get a better view, and he saw it—a lamp turned on its side, the base of it shattered.
And there was more. Deeper into the house, in what Zach could see of the kitchen from his vantage point, chairs were sideways, and the wood of something was splintered.
“We got a problem,” Zach said. He reached in and drew his weapon.
“Whatchyou see?” Nichols came over to where Zach was standing, and he peered in. Quiet now, he drew his own weapon.
Zach stepped off the porch. He lifted a hand into the air to get the attention of Glenda and Tanner, then he did a whirl with his finger pointed skyward. He was going to check the back. Out of the SUV, both Glenda and Tanner stepped out with their weapons drawn. Tanner was already on his phone, very likely in contact with the local Chicago PD.
Gingerly, Zach stepped around the house, his gun aimed. Nichols went the other direction on the opposite side of the house. Glenda and Tanner would cover the front.
When they got to the back, Zach lowered his weapon. Out of shock more than anything else.
The entire back of the house looked as if a back hoe had chewed into it. The insulation stuck out in puffy pink, and the windows were broken, the aluminum siding bent and twisted in vicious shapes. What he could see inside the house, it was pretty much the same way. Nichols appeared around the opposite corner of the house, and he looked to Zach with the expression that, Zach was certain, echoed his own look of confusion.
Zach scanned the backyard. There weren’t any tracks he could see that could account for this much damage.
Zach went for the hole first. It was where a door might be—or where it used to be. The door was twisted, broken, and laying on the grass several feet away. There were concrete steps leading up to the back of the house. Carefully, he threaded through the debris to try to make his way inside. Halfway up the pile of rubble, in his black dress shoes, he almost slipped.
“I got you,” Nichols said. He caught Zach before he fell face forward into shards of window glass.
“Nice catch,” Zach said.
“They call me a pro,” Nichols said with a hint of a wry grin
Zach continued inside, then he turned around to help Nichols through.
The debris was worse inside. The wall was torn down, the boards that made up the bones of the house cracked and splintered. Zach stepped carefully until he found himself standing in a back sitting room. A television still played on one wall. How power was even still reaching parts of this house, Zach had no idea.
He kept his gun aimed too. Just because the place was torn up didn’t mean there couldn’t still be a threat hiding in a different part of the house. Not a good idea to get lax about anything now.
The path of destruction continued through much of the house. There was a master bedroom down a short hallway, and a second story to the home that had two other bedrooms and a community bathroom. But the place was empty of people.
Zach opened the front to let Glenda and Tanner in. By now, the police were out on the street, their lights flashing. Sirens wailed in the distance.
“I got something,” Nichols called out.
Zach hurried back to where Nichols bent down in the kitchen.
Blood. At least that’s what it looked like. They’d have to test it to be sure, but Zach was fairly certain what he was looking at.
“It’s a lot,” Zach said, “but it’s not a fatal amount. Somebody’s hurt.”
“You think our kid had something to do with any of this?”
“That kid?” Zach glanced around. “I don’t think anything human did this.”
“Anybody with access can drive a tractor if they try hard enough.”
Zach shook his head. He stood and touched something on the wall, four deep furrows. “Construction equipment didn’t do this,” he said.
The cuts in the wall looked like they were made by a rake of some kind. Or a very large hand.
Twenty-Five
Wilmette, IL
Liam followed Eoin through the house. He cradled the stone in his arm, carrying it almost like a football as Eoin took him into another room in the house, this one with wood paneling and a pair of oak desks facing one another in the back with computers atop them. Elsewhere in the room were Bugatti sofas made of leather.
“I thought you said we were going downstairs,” Liam asked Eoin.
Eoin glanced at him over his shoulder. “We are.” He went to a section of the wall where a large oil painting hung, and Eoin stopped. Liam almost ran into him. For a moment, Liam thought Eoin was studying the painting. It was a rather simple painting. Beautiful, of course, in that simplicity.
“What are we—”
Eoin stepped forward and touched his toe to a section of the baseboard. To Liam’s surprise, it pushed in, and the wall clicked open a crack.
Liam put his hands on his hips. “Cool,” he said.
Eoin glanced back at him as he pulled the door open the rest of the way.
“Kind of anticlimactic.”
Eoin paused to look at Liam.
“I mean, the secret passage is expected. We have secret societies, a secret conspiracy, so why not? A secret passage makes sense. But I would’ve expected there to be some magic way of getting in, like you’d have to work some sort of magic to turn off a protection spell. Some sort of spell that would zap who ever opened the secret door.”
Eoin smiled. “Who says there isn’t?” Beyond, there were stairs, and Eoin started down them. “There are wards on the doors. They’re tuned to the Corbetts or anyone given permission by my family.”
“What happens if they’re not given permission?”
Eoin brought his hands up to his head and made a little explosion sound with his mouth as he simulated his head exploding.
“Good to know,” Liam said.
“You should be fine,” Eoin said as they descended.
“Also good to know.”
They walked down L-shaped stairs with a landing and more stairs that went further down. They were deep underground now, Liam figured. “How far down are we going?”
“It’s a subbasement,” Eoin said. “The regular basement in this house is normal. Workout room, theater…”
“Theater?”
“Of course,” Eoin said. “Where we’re going is below all that.”
They finally hit the bottom level, and it opened into a seating area.
There was another painting across the room, one that dominated the entire wall. A battle scene. Liam stared at it. “I’ve seen this before,” Liam said.
“What?” Eoin asked.
Liam shook his head. “A dream, I guess.”
“That’s the depiction of the battle that removed the Fae from our world,” Eoin said. “It’s a battle that we revere. France has its Bastille Day, we have the Great Battle of Eridu.”
“What’s Eridu?”
“It’s in what is now Iraq,” Eoin said. “It was the first city, the city considered built by the gods. Once, Iraq was a lush environment as was most of what is the modern day Middle East. Vegetation was plentiful and forests dotted the landscape. It was the place that the Fae called Tir na Nog. Eridu was their capital.”
He studied the painting closer. “So, this is where everything got started.”
“Correct.” Eoin moved closer to it. He pointed to the central figure, the man holding up his hand. When Liam looked closer, he realized what it was: The Lockstone.
“So, that’s…”
“Your ancestor. Fionn mac Cumhaill. He was the king, the head general of the armies that defeated the Fae and erected the Veil.”
For a moment longer, Liam stared at the figure. He thought maybe he’d feel some sort of connection to the man in the painting. He even searched for it, some kind of magical thread that he would be able to detect. But it wasn’t there.
Liam took in the rest of the painting too, the creatures being defeated. “And are these the Fae? Kind of ugly.” He pointed to the twisted monsters that the painting showed fleeing.
“No, those are the Fae-touched.”
“The what?”
“They are the foot soldiers of the Fae. The Fae are an incredibly beautiful race. Their magic keeps them young and beautiful. The stories say that there wasn’t a single one of them that didn’t stop a human cold with their beauty.”
“Beautiful evil,” Liam said.
The Stone (Lockstone Book 1) Page 29
