House of Stone

by T. K. Thorne

  “Why do you think she’s lying?”

  “Well to start with, she minored in theater as an undergrad.”

  “Interesting, but that doesn’t mean she’s lying.”

  Uncomfortable, I take a bite to give me a moment to think, something I probably should have done before I spoke. The weird thing is that if I didn’t know she was lying, I would have believed her. But I saw her take that bottle from her pocket. She has to be lying. I’ve gone over every instance where I had a vision. Visions of the past have always been true, though visions of the future are changeable. I wish someone in House of Rose with my ability were alive to help me understand it. According to Aunt Alice, my mother had it to some degree. Obviously it didn’t help her avoid being murdered, which blows the hell out of Alice’s theory that a vision appears when needed. Alice knows about using the “living-green” for healing, and she has premonitions, not visions—advance warnings about little things, like a feeling that a visitor is coming—but her advice about scrying wasn’t terribly helpful.

  I finally respond about why I think Stokes is lying. “I don’t know. A hunch.”

  “There’s no evidence it was anything but an accident.”

  “Why are you defending her?”

  He scratches his chin. “I’m just following the facts. We don’t have a report in hand yet, but I talked to the medical examiner’s office.”

  “That’s pretty speedy results, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but since we wanted to check for insulin overdose, they had to draw the sample quickly. According to my contact there, post mortem blood glucose values are negligible for everyone and pretty unreliable, and insulin is metabolized very fast. The samples have to be taken quickly or frozen ASAP to preserve it.”

  “So what did they say?”

  “No poison involved or other suspicious substances in his body. Basically, the results are inconclusive, but they don’t rule out an overdose. Apparently a very tricky determination when the victim has Type 1 diabetes, which he had.”

  I take a moment to absorb this. “How do we know Miss Stokes didn’t give him too much insulin? That can kill someone, can’t it?”

  “It can and she might have.” He pauses. “But what makes you think it wasn’t accidental?”

  That damn trap again. I can’t explain it without admitting that I “saw” Stokes take an insulin bottle from her pocket. No way I’m telling Tracey that. Even though I didn’t grow up with the constant admonition of secrecy like other children of the Houses, I’m not a complete idiot. To start with, I’d be considered a nut and fired. If I “proved” I had the ability to see into time, people would freak. More so if they knew there were others with “powers.” The path of logic wends inextricably on: All the Houses would be ostracized, maybe targeted by hate groups—see the X-Men movies. The government could decide to quarantine us or “study” us. If they determined we weren’t “human,” we wouldn’t even have constitutional rights. As conspiracy-theory as it sounds, it’s not a path to go down, and I certainly don’t have the right to put Alice or members of House of Iron or House of Stone at risk.

  “I know it’s your first homicide case—” Tracey says.

  “Don’t patronize me, Lohan.”

  “I’m not. It’s just you aren’t easy to read, you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s hard to figure out what’s going on in there.” He points to my head.

  If only he knew what a mess it was in there.

  “You mean I’m not being rational?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. You’ve been through a lot. I’m just saying if you need somebody to talk to—”

  “Thanks. I’m fine.”

  “Right.”

  “Lohan, they sent me to a shrink. I wouldn’t be back here if I hadn’t been cleared.”

  “I’m not talking about psychoanalyzing you. Just saying if you need a friend, I’m available.”

  I’ve never been good at friends. I told Becca it was because growing up in a military family, we moved around too much to really make them. That did make it challenging, but it wasn’t the whole truth. Kids make friends quickly. When I was eight, my father was stationed at Merritt Field in Beaufort, South Carolina. I made a friend, a boy my age who didn’t mind that I was a tomboy. In the sticky summer heat, we climbed gray-bearded oaks near the briny rivers that wound through base housing, throwing rocks at floating sticks we pretended were alligators or enemy subs. We decided we would be together forever, even cut our fingers and mingled our blood, but six months later, his father was reassigned, and I never saw him again. Since then, with the exception of Becca, friendships have been scarce and surface things. Tracey’s offer feels genuine. I just don’t know what to do with it.

  “Thanks,” I say. “But right now, I need to talk about Crompton’s murderer.”

  “Rose, you can’t make a murder out of an accidental insulin overdose.”

  I stayed at my computer when everyone else went to lunch, checking the Web for clues. Assuming I’m not unbalanced or misunderstanding my gift, Dr. Benjamin Crompton was murdered. Why?

  No criminal record. Married. No children. An affair with his assistant who wielded the murder weapon. Could be a big life insurance policy involved. Could wife and lover be in league?

  Before going to UAB, Crompton was a researcher at Johns Hopkins. He’s been at UAB as head of Public Health for the past ten years and was in charge of something called The Edge of Chaos. According to the Internet, The Edge of Chaos is a “project of the School of Public Health that brings together academia, business, and the community to find real and workable solutions to wicked problems.”

  Hmm. Diabetes is certainly a wicked problem. The disease makes the top ten list for causes of death in the U.S. But why would a grad student want to kill someone helping to solve it? Or maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree. Maybe Laurie Stokes is an actress, and those tears weren’t real. Maybe Crompton dumped her and was going back to his wife. If I can’t have you, no one else can.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Tracey asks as he plops in a chair next to mine.

  “Just looking around.”

  “Are we over our spat?”

  “Are you going to respect my intuition?”

  He grins. “Nope. I’m a fact man.”

  “Well, I’m a gut girl. Sometimes.”

  “A fairly stubborn gut girl.”

  I sniff, reminding myself of Alice. “Ever hear of the Edge of Chaos?”

  “Sure. That’s the threshold of my house on laundry day.”

  “Seriously.”

  He frowns. “It’s someplace on UAB campus, I think. I’ve never seen it.”

  “It’s a collaborative space, and Crompton was in charge of it.”

  Both of Tracey’s eyebrows lift, reminding me of Becca and sending a spear of guilt into my chest about being away from her so long. She’s got Daniel now, I remind myself. That’s the flip side of the claustrophobic crowding in Alice’s house.

  “A collaborative space?” Tracey asks.

  “They have a lot of meetings.”

  “They could come here for that,” he says, his arm arcing to embrace the entire admin building.

  “Be serious.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And what are or were you studying anyway?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “I couldn’t find where Dr. Crompton teaches any classes. You said he was one of your professors.”

  Tracey nods at the computer screen. “You’re pretty good with that thing.”

  “Since I was transferred to Burglary with no experience or training and transferred to Homicide with no experience or training, I’m doing the best I can. How did you say Crompton was your professor?”

  “Wait a minute. Sounds like you’re interrogating me.�
��

  I hold his gaze. “Just a question.”

  “Not this semester, a couple of years ago. He taught biochemistry.”

  My nose wrinkles. Anything with the word “chemistry” is not in my vocabulary.

  “A brief sojourn into my father’s field of study.”

  “It’s hard to imagine you in a white coat and glasses.”

  He chuckles. “Now on to more important matters. Have you eaten lunch?”

  “Haven’t you eaten?”

  “Nope. Went to visit my father. Want to grab some food at Taj India?”

  Glad to have the mystery of Tracey’s class with Crompton solved, I snap closed my notebook. “Now you’re talking my subject.”

  Chapter Seven

  That night after supper, Alice and I remain at the kitchen table. The kitchen is the heart of her house, and Alice has refused to modernize, other than replacing the cracked Formica counter tops. By now, the cozy room is a familiar comfort—the yellowing wallpaper with small pink flowers, pots brimming with herbs on the windowsill, and a beautiful oak table she brought from England. The chairs, however, are early American, or so Becca (before the Ordeal) informed me.

  Meals and tea are served with delicate china plates and cups. I think I own a few plates in my house, which is only a block down the street, but mostly I used paper plates at home, when I bothered with plates. A paper towel usually sufficed.

  The braided rope rug in Alice’s kitchen covers the entrance to the basement room where Alice hid after she “died,” now my room. At night, when I’m ready to retire, we pull it back so I can exit if I need to, but once I’m upstairs in the morning, the rug goes down, the table over it. The secretive design of the hidden room makes me wonder if it was used to hide liquor during Prohibition.

  Angel leaps into my lap and settles into a comforting ball. It’s just the cats and Alice and me in the kitchen. Nora has retreated to the living room to watch television. Daniel and Becca play a board game on the floor—or, at least, Becca is trying to play. I think Daniel is adjusting the “rules” and simplifying it to help her out.

  A parade of long tails—black, black with white tip, and one dark seal—caress my knees, accompanied by occasional, plaintive meows. These three cats belong to Alice. I think they are unhappy that Angel is in my lap, especially Charlie, the Siamese, who is sort of head cat and usually asserts his right to first choice. Alexander, solid black as a proper witch’s cat, watches from an empty chair, and Boo Boo is rubbing Alice’s leg, his white-tipped tail flipping with approval when she leans over to pet him.

  Talking softly—though Nora seems totally absorbed in one of the sit-coms she watches continuously but never laughs at—I tell Alice about the homicide and the vision. “I need to know how to control the visions.”

  She sighs, wrapping her small hands around the warm comfort of an after-dinner cup of tea. “The conscious mind can’t control it, any more than it controls the pumping of your heart or the release of enzymes in your body. It works on a subconscious level.”

  I frown. “Then how can you heal people at will and how can warlocks from House of Iron make people do whatever they put in their minds?”

  “The same way you can override the autonomic mechanisms that keep you breathing. You learned somehow to hold your breath or slow it down or speed it up. Your brain has to find the connection.”

  “I thought we just needed to pull on the living-green.”

  “Magic is something we do with the energy from the living-green.”

  “What do you mean something we do? I thought the magic was the living-green?”

  “No, coal is an element that we draw on for energy. We use it, transform it into magic or what appears to be magic. As I’ve said before, I think that on the quantum level—”

  My great aunt is a scientist—she’s not only been a medical doctor in her long life, she was also a physics professor and is just as likely to launch into an explanation about quantum theory as she is to comment on the weather. Sometimes I have no idea what she is talking about.

  “Alice,” I say quickly to keep her from jumping down the quantum rabbit hole, “I appreciate the fact that magic might just be something we don’t understand, but what I need to know right now is how you use it.”

  “Our House uses it to heal.”

  I flinch. Healing is what witches do, but I can’t heal a mosquito bite.

  “I know that, but how do you make it work . . . in non-physics terms?”

  “As I said, I don’t know, any more than I know exactly how my body works to pick up this cup of tea.”

  I must look perplexed at the interjection of tea, because she elaborates—“I don’t consciously know how to send the message to my muscles and control just how much they contract. I just think it, and my brain and body does the rest on an unconscious level. But, I can tell you that I believe I use the energy to accelerate the body’s own healing powers, which are quite amazing.”

  As if aware of my disappointment in not being able to use the living-green to heal, she adds, “Healing isn’t the only power of our House. As you know, I get occasional premonitions and, in more rare cases, a witch can have the gift of seeing into time, as you do.”

  But my mind is whirring with what she said about the ability to speed up the body’s own healing processes. It suddenly occurs to me that there might be a common element involved between healing and my ability with visions—time. Maybe I have been thinking about it all wrong. Could healing be a matter of altering time? And is that what I do, too?

  Alice has told me her theories about how time may actually flow in two directions from the Big Bang. I’ve also been privy to hear how there are possibly multiverses where time flows a little differently in each and how I may be peering into that.

  I share my thought about time and how it might be related to healing.

  “Oh, that is fascinating. I have never looked at it that way,” Alice says, excitement in her voice. “But House of Iron draws on the energy in iron ore to manipulate minds, alter a normal person’s thoughts. I don’t see how that could be related to time.” She frowns, either at the concept or the canned audience laughter from the living room.

  Whatever it is, the nature of our magics is complex. Other than the inferno resulting from combining magics, it’s a fortunate limitation that the powers of witches and warlocks cannot be used directly on other members of a House. They also don’t work in water or when a significant volume of empty air—a high-rise building or an airplane—separates us from the earth.

  “What about being in an airplane?” I ask. “Isn’t there something about that and how time flows differently for that person?”

  “Yes, Einstein’s theory of special relativity, but it’s related to movement, to speed, not to heights.”

  “Maybe time moves differently through different mediums, the way water and gravity slow down and bend light.”

  “That is a novel idea,” she says. “The theory of general relativity says gravity can bend space/time and gravity decreases with distance from the Earth.”

  “Maybe water affects gravity. I’m certainly lighter in water.”

  “That is the effect of the water’s thrust, at least as far as we know. I’ll have to give it some thought.”

  “What about House of Stone?” I ask. “You’ve barely ever mentioned them.”

  “Actually, I don’t even know who they are. They are the most secretive of the Houses and guard their members’ identities obsessively. All I know is Family lore—that they use the energy from limestone to augment their strength.”

  It is no coincidence the three Houses moved from Britain to Birmingham, Alabama. Uniquely, perhaps in the world, in this city is the presence in close proximity of coal, iron ore, and limestone—the three elements needed to make steel. It catapulted the area from a cornfield to a boomtown so quickly, it s
eemed like magic was involved and earned the new town the moniker of “The Magic City.” Normal people have no idea of the irony.

  “Then it’s not the living-green, the coal itself, that produces magic,” I muse aloud. “It’s me.” I can feel my brow furrow in frustration. “I need to learn how to control it.”

  “How did you learn to hold your breath?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “And I have no idea how to teach you to do it. I know that focusing is part of it, but sometimes it is like looking at a distant star at night.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “If you look at the star directly, it disappears, but if you look to the side of it, you can see it.”

  Great, that is so not helpful. Focus, but don’t look directly. I sigh in frustration. “What about the rose-stone? Is there anything you can tell me about using it?”

  “I thought you had used it to reach the living-green,” she says. “Remember, the first time, sitting in your backyard?”

  I do remember, of course. It’s not something I’m likely to ever forget—that first rush of golden warmth, the connection that made me feel as if, before that moment, I had never truly been alive.

  “I just used it to focus,” I say. “You told me I didn’t need it to access the living-green, and you were right. I don’t.”

  “And—?”

  I’m getting even more frustrated and stand, pacing the length of the kitchen. “I guess I’ve learned how to pull the energy, but the visions seem random. The rose-stone has never seemed to be directly involved in that. I know from my mother’s letter that it can hold power somehow.”

  I don’t mention the reason I’m desperate to know more about that. I need to know how to contain the inferno that results when the powers of two Houses come together. What if I do that accidentally or under emotional duress? The only time it happened, I mixed a minuscule amount of the living-green, all that was available to me at the time, with the magic of Iron. If the inferno that roared out of me is magnified based on the amount of power I can normally pull—I don’t even want to think about what I’m capable of.