by R. L. King
He thought nothing of it when she asked him to come to her office one mid-November day a couple weeks later. He hadn’t seen much of her lately aside from a few meetings and passing her in the hall, but he figured she probably wanted to discuss upcoming exams, or perhaps ask him to take one of her classes so she could run some errands.
“Yes, come in,” she called when he knocked.
His first impression when he entered her office was that she was in a worse mood than usual. It wasn’t anything about her expression: she looked as professionally bland as ever, with only the faint hint of brisk, pursed-lipped disapproval he always got from her. But a quick glance at her aura revealed an alarming amalgamation of her usual red-purple mixed with the muddy darker clouds of emotional upheaval, and the brighter red flashes of annoyance or even anger.
He wondered what had upset her baseline level of grumpiness.
She looked up from behind her desk. “Please, sit down.”
He did as requested. “Anything wrong, Edwina? Did someone catch me sneaking cigarettes behind the bleachers or something?”
She flashed him an annoyed look, then squared up a stack of papers on her desk and took a sip from a mug featuring a series of astrological symbols.
Stone tilted his head. “Edwina?” This was odd—she was acting stranger than usual, and that was saying something.
“You might remember,” she said, nodding once and putting her cup down with a thunk, “coming by my office a couple of weeks ago to pick up some papers. You met Mr. Duncan.”
“Right. The ostentatious little chap with the ambitious handshake.”
She ignored that. “Mr. Duncan is the producer of a television show called The Other Side. Have you heard of it?”
“Er…” Stone tried to remember. He didn’t watch much television, but the name sounded vaguely familiar. “Give me a hint, would you?”
“They investigate various paranormal, supernatural, and occult phenomena around the country.”
Something clicked. “Oh, right. I think I remember some of my students mentioning it.” He narrowed his eyes. “That man Duncan is connected with it? What was he doing here, then? Looking for research? I thought that show got its research from the National Enquirer.”
Her expression began to look even more as if she’d bitten into a particularly unpleasant lemon. “If you’d watched it,” she said, rustling her papers again, “you might be aware that, unlike some others of its type, the people involved do make an effort to do their research beforehand.”
“All right, if you say so. What’s that got to do with me, though? Did he get the information he needed?” He checked her aura again; it still shifted around her with the unsettled look of someone in significant pain trying to find a comfortable position in bed.
“I met with Mr. Duncan at the request of a man named George Landry.” She glanced at Stone as if expecting him to recognize the name.
He didn’t. “Okay, and…?”
“Mr. Landry is a wealthy alumnus of the University. It seems he owns, among many other things, a building in a small town up in the Gold Country. He’d like to set it up as a bed and breakfast to be run by his nephew and the nephew’s wife.”
Stone spread his hands. “Edwina, I’m sorry, but if your point is supposed to be obvious, I’m afraid I’m not—”
“The building,” she said, and it was clear she was trying hard not to speak to Stone as if explaining to a three-year-old why he couldn’t drive the family car, “is reputed to be haunted. In fact, the whole town, which is mostly a ghost town but is gradually being reclaimed as a tourist destination, is supposedly rife with supernatural activity.”
Ah, it began to come together now—at least somewhat. “Okay. Okay. I get it. This Landry wants to feature the place on this show? Have them come and investigate it to find out if it’s really haunted?” He didn’t think he was entirely successful in keeping a look of amused exasperation from his face. Mundanes loved haunted houses. Never mind that most of the places that were supposed to be “haunted” really weren’t, and of the ones that did include some sort of supernatural phenomenon, a decent percentage of them had the potential to be actively dangerous. If they could find even a tangential connection to a long-dead former resident, they milked it for all it was worth.
“Yes.”
“So what’s that got to do with us? Did Duncan come by to ask you for any data we might have on the area?” That was nothing unusual—all sorts of people, ranging from police detectives to working psychics—used the department’s resources for their research and sometimes even consulted with Stone and his colleagues.
“He did want that, yes.” Mortenson fidgeted with her coffee cup. “But Mr. Landry also requested that I consult in an official capacity on the episode featuring the building and the surrounding town. He felt that the presence of someone with—legitimate academic credentials—would lend more credence to anything the crew might uncover.”
Stone frowned. “Well. That’s—er—brilliant. Sounds like just the sort of thing you’d be jumping at the chance to get involved in.” It was no secret around their own small department, as well as the larger Cultural Anthropology department they were part of, that Mortenson chafed under a constant impression that her talents weren’t properly appreciated. If something like this would help alleviate those feelings, perhaps she might loosen up a bit and tone down her defensive attitude. That would make life in the department easier for everyone.
Besides, better her than him. He was sure whatever “haunting” existed in that ghost town was about as supernatural as Mortenson’s desk. Sure, he’d been wrong before—spectacularly so on one occasion early in his career—but in this case he was glad he wouldn’t have to test out the hypothesis again. “When will you go? Did you want me to take over your classes while you’re gone, or will they be filming over the break?”
She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. Her hand tightened on her cup as her aura flared little flashes of bright red.
“Edwina?”
“I’m not going, Alastair.” She didn’t quite say it through clenched teeth, but her expression suggested that she wanted to.
Stone blinked. “You’re not? But I thought you just said—”
“I’m not going. You are.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Kristen showed up when Jason and Verity were halfway through the pizza.
Verity watched her work through the crowd. “You sure you don’t want me to make myself scarce so you two can have some time alone?”
“You stay put,” Jason told her, scooting over on the bench to make room. “You guys should get to know each other better anyway. I think you’ll get along great if you ever have enough time to talk.”
“You’re not afraid I’ll steal her away from you?”
“Nah, you’re not her type.”
“Hey, you two.” Kristen dropped onto the bench next to Jason with a loud exhalation, then leaned in to kiss him. “Sorry I’m late. Shift was a bitch tonight.”
Tall, blonde, and tanned, Kristen Bradley looked every inch the California surfer girl. She’d changed out of her EMT gear into jeans, scoop-neck T-shirt, and cropped leather jacket, with her long hair tied back in a no-nonsense ponytail.
Verity studied her for a moment with magical sight: her aura was bright green, strong and pulsing. The few darker spots shifting around the edges had probably come from whatever stress she’d had on the job. Verity had only met her a few times, and never for more than a few minutes, so she didn’t have enough background to get a good read yet.
“Bad day, huh?” she asked.
Kristen grabbed a slice of pizza, nodding thanks to the waiter who brought her a glass of beer. “Yeah. Lost one today, and that’s always hard. Car accident.” She shook her head in frustration. “Old lady died because some id
iot was messing with his radio instead of watching the road.”
Jason gripped her hand. “That’s rough.”
She shrugged. “It happens, and you have to deal with it. Tony says it gets easier with experience, but it never gets easy, you know? Anyway,” she added, picking up her beer and taking a long swallow, “I don’t want to talk about work for a while, okay? What’s up with you two?”
They chatted about various things: Jason’s current case (or at least as much as he could reveal about it, which wasn’t much), his and Kristen’s upcoming plans to go rock climbing, and what they were doing for the holidays. Verity concentrated on her pizza and let them talk, her mind still on her earlier conversation with Jason.
These thoughts weren’t new to her—this was just the first time she’d ever revealed them to anyone else. Jason had reacted as she’d expected him to, with a combination of big-brotherly protectiveness and strong motivation to make her happy, neither of which was what she wanted.
The problem was, she didn’t know what she wanted. She’d been studying with Edna Soren for almost a year and a half now, nearly as long as she’d been with Stone. If a magical apprenticeship lasted around four years, that meant she only had a year left before she’d be on her own.
On the one hand, as she assured Stone when he called her periodically to check on her progress, her experience with Edna had been good for her—perhaps just what she’d needed when she’d had trouble clicking with Stone’s style. When she’d started working with him at just shy of eighteen (damn, but that seemed like a long time ago now!) she hadn’t even known magic existed, let alone that there were different flavors of it even within the black/white paradigm that drove modern magical study. It wasn’t until Stone had arranged for her to remain with Edna for a different perspective that she’d begun to discover her affinity for the irascible old woman’s style.
Edna and Stone were like night and day—or perhaps oil and water would be a better way of describing it. Despite his irreverent, cynical, and mercurial personality, Stone was the epitome of the old-school, classically trained hermetic mage, all about ego and will and power. Magic to him involved study, calculations, complex formulae—learning the rules of the universe so you could bend them. Stone made things happen because, damn it, he wanted them to happen, and if he wanted something, the Universe had better bloody well get out of his way.
That worked great until it didn’t—when the will failed, the magic failed along with it. That style could make big things happen, but it could also blow up in your face with catastrophic results. If the practitioner operated at Stone’s power level, the catastrophe could affect not just the caster, but significant portions of the environment around him.
Edna, on the other hand, was—for lack of a better word—more organic about her magic. Verity wasn’t sure if the old woman respected Stone personally, but she made no secret about her disdain for his magical style. She believed, and had done her best to teach Verity, that magic flowed from the energy of the Earth, and you’d have a better chance of making things happen if you learned to tap into that flow and work with it instead of trying to bend it to your own will. That kind of magic lent itself well to more subtle workings: restoring living things to balance, healing, nudging one variable here or another there, but always in the same direction as the “river” flowed. In Edna’s style, trying to impose one’s will against the natural inclination of the Earth’s own forces was asking for trouble, but if you went with the flow, you could do great things. Not flashy things, but ultimately more permanent and profound changes.
And therein lay Verity’s fundamental problem: for a while, she’d been convinced that Edna’s style was what she’d been looking for, and that her affinity for things like healing meant the old woman was a better fit for her as a master than Stone was. For a few months she’d felt settled, and even managed to rationalize her boredom with her surroundings as homesickness.
Lately, though, she wasn’t so sure. As much as she’d tried to corral her whirling thoughts and actually come to some conclusion about her way forward, she remained frustratingly indecisive—one foot in Edna’s world, with the thrill of feeling an injured living thing responding to her touch and returning to its natural state, and one foot in Stone’s, with the equally compelling pull toward forcing sheer, raw power to obey her commands.
Would she ever make up her mind, or would stay stuck between the two paths like a toddler with too many toys to choose from?
“V?”
She snapped out of her thoughts to find Jason watching her with amused concern. The pizza platter was empty, as was his beer glass. “Uh…Oh. Sorry.”
“Want to check back in with us mortals?”
“Yeah, uh…sorry. Lot on my mind.” She shot a significant glance at him, but she was pretty sure he knew the gist of what she’d been thinking about. “What’s up?”
“We’re about done here. I gotta get back to work—got a surveillance assignment tonight, and Fran’ll rip me a new one if I let the guy give me the slip.”
Verity nodded. She wondered if Jason would have to work this hard once he had his license. “Yeah, I should get going too. The bus should be here soon.” Edna didn’t need the truck often in the evening, but tonight had been an exception.
“Hey, I’ll give you a ride home,” Kristen said. “It’s not far out of my way.”
“Nah, it’s okay. I’m sure you want to get home and crash.”
She grinned. “Don’t argue. It’ll give us a chance to talk. And I won’t be able to crash for a while anyway. Gotta decompress a little first.”
It would make things easier. “Okay, thanks.”
They said their goodbyes, and Verity followed Kristen out to her SUV. Soon they were on the road, headed back toward Ojai. Neither of them spoke until they were rolling at a comfortable sixty down the freeway.
“So,” Kristen said, “Jason tells me you’re staying with the lady who takes care of the Hot Springs.”
“Yeah.”
She glanced over, clearly taking in Verity’s spiky dark hair, leather jacket, ripped jeans, and scuffed combat boots. “I don’t want to pry or anything, but you don’t exactly look like the outdoor type. You guys related or something?”
“It’s…kind of a long story. You know Jason and I were up in the Bay Area for a while, right?”
“Yeah. He said you were working at some Indian restaurant. He didn’t really go into what else you were doing there, though. Like I said, I don’t ask if he doesn’t offer. Not my business.”
“Speaking of things that aren’t my business…” Verity began. “Feel free to tell me to shut up if it’s not.”
Kristen chuckled. “I don’t have a lot of secrets. Shoot.”
She looked out the window, watching the freeway roll by. There wasn’t much traffic this time of night, just the occasional set of headlights flashing by on the other side, headed back toward Ventura. “You and Jason are getting pretty serious, aren’t you?”
“That a problem?” Kristen’s tone was neutral.
“No! Uh…No. Not at all. I’m glad he’s met somebody.”
She shrugged. “I’m not sure what you call ‘serious.’ We like hanging out together. I think we’re both just willing to have fun for now and see where things go.”
“Yeah, makes sense.” She paused, fidgeting with her seatbelt. “We were talking a little tonight, before you got there. I’m thinking I might go back up north.”
“Really? I got the impression you guys don’t have much up there anymore. So you’d go and Jase would stay down here?”
“Yeah. He’s got to finish his training, and anyway, I’m sure he’s in no hurry to go anywhere.” She grinned, though she didn’t feel much like grinning. Idly, she shifted in and out of magical sight as they exited the freeway and headed through Casitas Springs, w
atching the auras of the occasional person or animal they passed.
“So why would you go back? Where would you stay?”
“That’s the part I’m still working out. I might be able to get my old job back at the restaurant. And…that’s part of the reason I’m staying with Edna—the lady at the Hot Springs. She’s teaching me some stuff. And I’ve got another teacher up north. I’m thinking about going back to him for a while.”
“That the British professor guy Jase mentioned, the one you guys go up there to see sometimes? I don’t remember his name—Alex, or something like that?”
“Alastair. Alastair Stone. Yeah, he’s the one.”
Kristen tilted her head. “So you’re learning something from an old lady out in the middle of nowhere and some Stanford professor? That…kinda doesn’t make sense.”
“It does…but that’s not something I really want to go into right now.”
“Hey, not a problem.”
Verity decided she’d better change the subject before things got uncomfortable. “So how did you decide to become a paramedic?”
Kristen answered promptly, apparently as happy to get off the subject as Verity was. “I’ve known I wanted to be one since junior high. We got in a car accident on vacation—a semi hit us and knocked us off the road. My little brother broke his neck. If it hadn’t been for the paramedics, he would have died.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah. He’s okay now—he’s down at Pepperdine—but it was pretty rough for a couple years. For a while I thought I might want to be a doctor or nurse, but I figured I didn’t want to be cooped up in a hospital all day. This way, I can help people and be outside, and no day’s ever the same.” She sighed. “But I could do with a few less like today.”
