The Madness Below: An Alastair Stone Urban Fantasy Novel (Alastair Stone Chronicles Book 20)

by R. L. King

  “Look closer,” she said, with a significant glance toward Noah.

  Stone shifted to magical sight. He’d been doing that before, but mostly focusing on the area around them as he looked for the Ordo men. Now, he redirected his attention farther out, to the lake itself. “Oh, bloody hell.”

  He could barely see it out at the edge of his vision, but it was definitely there: somewhere toward the middle of the lake, a column of glowing, unhealthy green energy shot up into the sky until it was lost amid the thick clouds.

  “What is it?” Dez demanded, still holding tightly to Noah’s arm.

  “Well,” Stone said slowly. “The good news is, I don’t think we need to hike up that trail after all.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  He glanced at Noah again, trying to work out how to say it without terrifying the boy. “I think the thing we were concerned about—the second stage—may be happening already.”

  She gasped. “You mean, the kids have already—”

  “I think so. I see something out there, in the middle of the water.”

  “How can that be?” Verity asked. She’d pulled out the map of the area and was examining it with her flashlight. “Did they go out in the middle of the water in a boat and do it? How could they—oh, wait a minute!” She pointed. “Is that an island?”

  Stone bent toward her, peering at the map. The area representing their location was tiny, with the lake only a quarter-inch wide. When he looked closely, he could barely make out an even tinier speck in the middle, so small it might have been a dirt smudge. It would have been easy to miss before, since they weren’t focusing on the lake. “Could it be?” he demanded to Dez.

  Her eyes went wide. “You know, you could be right! I’d forgotten about it until you mentioned it, but I think there is!”

  He thrust the map under her nose, moving Verity’s flashlight beam so it illuminated the spot, and pointed with a pen tip. “There. Is that an island?”

  She leaned in closer. “Yeah—I remember it now. I didn’t think it was important, since everything was so focused on the campsite and the hiking trail. It’s not very big—maybe two or three miles from end to end. If I’m remembering right, there’s an abandoned campground out there, that you could only get to with boats. It’s been abandoned for maybe ten, fifteen years. The owners went bankrupt and nobody wanted to buy it.”

  “That’s got to be where they are,” Verity said, picking up on Stone’s urgency again.

  “No doubt.” He glanced across with magical sight again. The green shaft was still there. Could it mean whatever heralds the kids had summoned had completed their ritual, or were they only just starting? And where were the kids themselves?

  No more time to waste. “We’ve got to go. Let’s get this boat unhitched and into the water.”

  Dez didn’t move. “I—I can’t go, Dr. Stone.”

  He turned back to face her. He’d been afraid of this. “Dez—”

  She didn’t look at him, and pulled Noah in protectively closer. “I’m sorry. I can’t risk Noah’s life. It’s too dangerous to take him out there, and I can’t leave him here alone. You can take the boat if you want to, but…I can’t.”

  Stone paused to take a couple of breaths before responding. She was right, of course—he couldn’t blame a mother for prioritizing the safety of her child over everything else. But she didn’t see that if they didn’t get out there and stop that ritual, her child and everyone else’s child would be at risk.

  He glanced at Verity, then at the boat. “I haven’t the foggiest idea how to run a boat like that. Do you, Verity?”

  She shook her head. “Like I said, I was too young to help when we used to go boating—and ours wasn’t like this anyway.”

  Stone’s heart pounded harder. “Damn…” he whispered under his breath. “And it’s too far to levitate—even I’m not sure I can hold a spell that long in these conditions, so I’m sure you couldn’t do it, Verity. And even if we did manage it, we’d be exhausted by the time we got there.” He let out a loud sigh, pacing along the side of the boat, and took another look at the lake. The green column was still there—was it brighter now, or was that just his imagination?

  “All right,” he said, trying to cover his fear and frustration with briskness. “How hard can it be, right? I can drive a car—I should be able to manage a boat. Dez, can you tell me what I need to know? We start by backing it over near the dock, right?”

  “There’s got to be a landing down there,” she said, looking miserable. It was clear she didn’t like this idea any more than Stone did. “But—I don’t think you should do it. It’s not like driving a car. If the water was smooth, it wouldn’t be too hard to get across. But on choppy water like that, all kinds of things can go wrong. And if you don’t know what you’re doing—”

  “I haven’t got a choice, have I?” he snapped. “We’ve got to get over there before they finish that ritual, or we’re all buggered.” It was a clear indication of how stressed he was that he would use profanity around a ten-year-old boy, but at this point he was beyond such considerations. “We’ve got to take the chance—or at least I do. Dez, I completely understand that you don’t want to put your son in danger. Just tell me what I need to know, and I’ll do it. Verity—you don’t have to—”

  “I’m coming, Doc,” she said firmly. “Don’t even start with that again. I’ll do what I can to help.”

  Stone nodded once. “Yes. All right. Of course you will. Dez, please—what have we got to do?”

  Dez looked even more miserable than before. She gripped Noah even tighter, pulling him in close to her side. She looked at him, at Stone, out toward the lake, and then at the boat, then clenched her fist.

  “Damn it…” she muttered, and seemed to reach a conclusion. “All right. Okay. Here’s what I’ll do. Here’s all I can do. I’ll take you out there. If I send you out there on that boat in those conditions without knowing what you’re doing, you’re going to get yourselves killed and I don’t want that on my conscience. So I’ll take you out to the island. Then I’ll drop you off and bring Noah back over here. I’m sorry, Dr. Stone—I really am. I want to help you, but I can’t risk my son. I’ll get you there, but you two will have to deal with—whatever you find out there. Is that okay?”

  Noah, who had obviously caught on to the fact that he was the reason why his mother and these two strangers were so upset with each other, bowed his head and buried it in his mother’s side. “I’m sorry…” he mumbled.

  “It’s all right, honey,” Dez mumbled back, stroking his back. “It’s okay.” To Stone, she said, “Okay?”

  Stone nodded. In truth, he’d never thought Dez, as willing and brave as she was, would be much help in the fight against whatever the Lurker’s pawns had brought over. It would be safer for her and her son to be on this side of the lake if anything went wrong. “Yes. Thank you. We can handle things once we get over there.”

  With that decided, Dez returned to something closer to her normal, decisive self. “Okay. Let’s get moving, then. We need to get the cover off the boat and our gear stowed inside.”

  Stone hurried to help her unhook the cover from the rest of the cleats surrounding the boat, and used magic to pull it free and toss it near the Jeep. As he’d suspected, the craft had a small cabin covering the driver’s area and the instrument panel, along with padded benches along both side of the stern. The name Heart’s Desire was painted on the side of the bow.

  Dez clambered inside and tossed bright red life vests to Stone and Verity, then jumped back out holding a smaller one. “Put those on,” she ordered, and bent to wrestle the small one onto Noah, who stood still and didn’t resist as she buckled it around him.

  Stone and Verity quickly donned their own vests, then began gathering gear from the Jeep and tossing it into the boat. Stone forced himself to move quickly but deliberately, ever mindful of that queasy, growing green column on the island. When Dez finished buckling Noah up, she hurried
over to undo the chains and brake lines connecting the trailer to the Jeep.

  “Okay,” she said when she finished and everything was loaded. “Noah, you stay with Verity while I back the boat up to the landing. Dr. Stone, if you can give me a bit of your kind of help guiding it down, it will make things go faster.”

  Getting the boat in the water proved to be harder than either of them expected. Under normal circumstances, all Dez would have to do was back the Jeep up until the boat and the trailer were in the water, then push the boat back and pull the trailer from beneath it. Now, though, the choppy water buffeted the small craft, slamming it into the dock and making it difficult to keep it on an even backward course. Stone ended up having to use careful magic to guide it back, and then used a stronger telekinetic spell to shove it off the trailer and hold it steady until Dez pulled the Jeep forward with the trailer. “Grab the line!” she called from the open window. “The rope! Wrap it around one of those posts!”

  Stone did as instructed, splitting his concentration to bring the colorful nylon rope up and loop it securely around the nearest wooden post. The rain was coming down harder now; he blinked water away as the drops hit him in the face and trickled into his eyes. “There!”

  Dez drove forward until the trailer was out of the water, then leaped from the Jeep and hurried back to the boat. “Okay, let’s go. I don’t think anybody else will be using the landing today. Everybody get in. Noah, be careful. Let me help you. You sit up here with me.”

  It wasn’t easy to clamber into the boat with it listing crazily from side to side in the rough waves and slamming into the dock, but Dez remained confident as she settled Noah into the shotgun seat, shrugged into her own vest, and got the boat’s motors fired up. “Good thing we hadn’t drained the gas out for the winter yet,” she yelled over the wind.

  “Let’s go!” Stone yelled back from one of the rear benches. The chilly wind ripped through him and Verity back here, without even the scant protection of the small cabin, but he barely noticed. His gaze was fixed on the green column, which he was certain had grown brighter since they’d arrived.

  Dez, her hand sure on the wheel, turned the boat around and pointed it toward the island. Even in this weather the waves weren’t nearly as high as they would have been if they’d been on the open ocean, but they still tossed the boat in every direction. Stone was grateful he didn’t get seasick, and it looked like Verity didn’t either. She sat grimly across from him, scanning the water ahead.

  “What are we going to do when we get there?” she yelled, having to pitch her voice louder to be heard over the waves and the wind. “Do you have a plan?”

  “It will depend on what we find,” he yelled back. “If the kids haven’t summoned the heralds yet, we’ll be in better shape. They shouldn’t be hard to deal with.”

  “Why do you think they’re doing it on the island? Shouldn’t they have gone back to wherever the Lurker was hiding?”

  “Who knows? If we manage to deal with this, we’ll need to go back up there and try to locate its hiding place. My guess is it wanted a place closer to water.”

  “Well, it’s got that,” Dez yelled grimly from the cabin. The boat made a sickening lurch to the left and she spun the wheel to compensate. Water splashed in, soaking Stone and Verity.

  “I’m scared, Mom,” Noah moaned. His small, gloved hands gripped the seat arms as if he expected to be tossed overboard. “I’m cold, and I think I’m gonna be sick again.”

  “It’ll be fine, baby. We’re going back soon. We’ll wait for Dr. Stone and Verity, and then we’ll go home and sit in front of the fire. Maybe there’s a hockey game on. You’d like that, right?” Her voice sounded shaky and full of cheer, but one look at her aura told Stone how scared she was, and how much she didn’t want to do this.

  “Doc?”

  Stone turned back to Verity. “Yes?”

  She leaned closer to him, so she could talk without Dez and Noah overhearing. “What if the kids have summoned the heralds? It sounds like whatever they are, they’re pretty tough to deal with, right? Mindless and single-purpose, defending their ritual against anybody coming near?”

  “Yes, well, I can’t predict what we’ve no idea about. We’ll just have to be smart and careful. They might be strong, but we’re not mindless. That will be our advantage.”

  She nodded, then bowed her head. She obviously still had something on her mind.

  “Verity?”

  “I was just wondering what will happen to the kids when they finish the ritual. It didn’t say anything about that in any of the stuff Eddie and Reverend Blodgett were talking about, did it? Will they help the heralds in the summoning? Will the heralds kill them? Will they come after us?”

  Stone hadn’t considered that. “Good question, and I don’t have an answer.”

  “I don’t want to have to kill them. They’ve been through enough already, and none of this is their fault.”

  He reached across and gripped her hand. “I know, Verity. I don’t, either. But we’ve got to stop that ritual. You understand that, right?”

  “Yeah. I do.” She squeezed back. “Don’t worry—I’ll do what we need to do.”

  “I know you will.”

  It was getting hard to maintain their seats on the bench as the little boat bucked and lurched in the gray water. It pitched forward, its bow dropping down and sending their gear sliding forward until it slammed into the back of Dez’s and Noah’s seats.

  “Is there a place for us to land out there?” Stone yelled.

  “There’s a dock, but it’ll be hard to get close to it in this.” She didn’t turn toward him, her gaze fixed firmly ahead as she fought a sideways roll. Instinctively, she shot her arm across to hold Noah in his seat. “I’ll get you as close as I can, but you may need to—” She raised her hand high and wriggled her fingers, which had apparently become her go-to gesture for “magic.”

  “Not a problem. We can do that.” Stone checked to make sure Noah wasn’t watching them, then used magic to gather some of the gear they’d brought. He dropped a backpack in Verity’s lap and hooked his arm through the strap of another one. “Is there anything else we can take with us?”

  “I’ll give you my shotgun if you want it. Do you know how to shoot?”

  “I don’t. Do you, Verity?”

  “I’ve shot one once, for about half an hour. Jason took me to the range last year.”

  “Better than nothing, then.”

  They were getting closer. In addition to the green column, which looked like it was coming from the interior of the island, he could now see narrow, rock-strewn beach and a thick line of trees beyond it. What he couldn’t see, despite narrowing his eyes and squinting hard, was either a dock or another boat. If the kids were here, how had they gotten here? Had there been a boat at one of the other campsites? Was that perhaps why they’d chosen to drive farther up the road? “Where’s the dock?” he yelled to Dez. “I don’t see it!”

  “Me neither. I’m not sure it’s even still there. Want me to try steering around the side?”

  “No time. Get us in close while we finish gathering the gear.”

  Verity was scrambling around, doing a surprisingly good job of maintaining her balance on the uneven, shifting deck. “What’s in this locked box back here?” she called.

  Dez jerked her head around. “Flare gun, among other things. Good idea. Take that with you too. If nothing else you can use it to signal when you’re finished.”

  Verity used magic to pop the padlock and pulled out the bright orange flare gun and a box of flares, passing them over to Stone.

  “Okay!” Dez yelled. “We’re getting pretty close now. I don’t dare go any closer or we’ll risk running aground on these rocks. Can you get out from here?”

  “Yes. Hold on!” Stone shrugged free of the life vest and tossed it aside, then donned one of the backpacks and shoved the flare gun and flares in his coat pocket. Across the boat, Verity was doing the same thing. Dez passed
the shotgun and shells back to her.

  “Mom, what’s going on?” Noah was looking scared and confused. “Are they leaving?”

  Dez fixed a stern I’m your mother and you’d better listen to me stare on him. “Baby, I want you to do exactly as I tell you, okay? Close your eyes and put your head down, like you’re saying a prayer. Do not open them until I tell you. Okay?”

  “But, Mom—”

  “Do it, Noah!” she snapped. “Now!”

  Noah hesitated for only a second longer, then bent his head forward and wrapped his arms around it.

  “Go!” Dez yelled, gesturing to Stone and Verity.

  Together, they lifted off the deck and drifted toward the shore. It wasn’t easy—levitation wasn’t flight, and the buffeting winds tossed them back and forth, but they made slow and steady progress in the right direction. Stone focused his attention ahead of them, using magical sight to check out the green column. It was brighter. Did that mean the ritual had—

  “Doc!” Verity screamed, her voice bright with terror.

  He jerked his head back around toward her, expecting to see her in some kind of difficulty, but she hovered there a few feet from him, still clutching the shotgun. “What is it?”

  “Look!” She pointed back toward the water, just as a loud, wrenching crunch rose over the rushing of the waves and the patter of the rain.

  “Oh, bloody hell, no!”

  Noah shrieked in terror as another sharp gust of wind hit the Heart’s Desire, spinning it halfway around. Already it was listing to one side, taking in water from a long, uneven tear in its hull. As Stone and Verity watched, the waves carried it forward toward the shore, scraping it across more rocks beneath the surface, and then jerked it backward, out toward the open water.

  25

  Stone didn’t hesitate. The boat was going down, but they still had time if they didn’t panic. “Dez!” he boomed, throwing in a little amplification magic to make sure they heard him. “Gather up the rest of the gear! We’ve got you!”