by R. L. King
“Nope. I don’t think so, at least.” He rubbed his head. “I mean, like I said before, they told me I’ve likely got a pretty good concussion, and that can scramble short-term memory. I still feel like I’m looking at the world through a couple layers of cotton.”
“I think that’s normal. You’re getting the best of care, so don’t worry about that. Give yourself a few days to lounge about and watch rubbish television. We’ve survived this long without you before, so I’m sure we can manage long enough to make sure you’re right as rain before you come back to work.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“Has anyone else been in to talk to you today? Martinez? Anyone from the police department?”
“Dr. Martinez called. She sounded really worried, so let her know I’m doing okay, will you?”
“Absolutely. What about the police?”
“I don’t think they really care how I’m doing.”
Stone mock-glared at him. “Did you tell them anything?”
“Just what I told you. I wish I could remember more, but…”
He was starting to look even more pale and tired, so Stone stood. “That’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Your job is to rest and get better, so I don’t have to deal with Hubbard grousing about taking time away from his writing. But take your time. We’ll look after your classes for you.”
“I will. Hey, thanks for stopping by.”
“Take care. And if you remember anything else, give me a call or a text or something, will you?”
“Sure thing, Mr. Holmes.”
Stone had reached the doorway when he remembered something else. “Oh, Greene?”
“Yeah?” Greene had already picked up his phone again, but turned from it to look up at Stone.
“You might not remember this, but it’s worth a try. When you arrived—when Kelso let you in—you had to sign in on a log sheet, right?”
“Yeah. He said everybody had to sign in.”
“Do you remember if there were any other names on it?”
Greene closed his eyes. Obviously, his concussion was making it hard to remember specifics. “Uh…yeah. There were three. One before yours, yours, and one other right before mine. I remember that because I noticed yours.” He chuckled. “Not that anybody else would’ve been able to read it. You’ve got the most illegible signature I’ve ever seen.”
Stone gripped the door frame, ignoring his last words. “One after mine?” So somebody else had stopped by the storeroom between five and nine p.m. “Do you remember who it was?”
“Sorry, I don’t. Definitely not Hubbard or Martinez.” His eyes were still closed, and now he clenched them tighter. “I think it might have been somebody from the Anthro department. Uh…oh!” He looked triumphant, like a little kid who’d managed the answer to a difficult math problem he hadn’t expected to get. “Yeah. It was Dr. Inouye. Her signature is so neat, and she always makes that weird curlicue thing with her I.”
“Brilliant. I’ll get out of your way now. Feel better, mate.”
“That’s the plan.”
Stone barely noticed his walk out of the hospital and to the parking garage where he’d left the BMW. He swirled Greene’s words around in his mind, trying to make sense of the limited new information he had.
He was more convinced than ever that whoever had broken into the storeroom had magical capabilities, and probably strong ones. They could easily have clocked Kelso over the head too—maybe even killed him—but they hadn’t, which suggested they were trying to be quiet about the whole thing. Maybe they hadn’t even realized Greene was inside, since it was so late, and had panicked when they spotted him. Also, Stone remembered the faint creak when the door opened. If Greene had been right and the place was “quiet as a tomb,” he definitely would have heard it.
The fact that he hadn’t meant one of two things: either the thief had used magic to enter the room—probably a combination of invisibility and a sound-damping spell, both well within the capabilities of most trained mages—or else they’d already been inside the storeroom. Perhaps Greene’s late arrival had interrupted their search, so they hid until they could get the jump on him. Either way, Stone didn’t think he’d have much chance of convincing Bertola to let him have a look around the place, at least not while the police were actively investigating. In fact, it was likely Martinez might decide it was too dangerous to keep the collection on campus now, and insist Hiram Drummond’s daughter have it moved somewhere else prior to the auction.
Come on—you’re getting ahead of yourself. Stone got into his car and drove out of the parking garage. He had another class this afternoon; perhaps he could find time to talk to Martinez after that.
He wondered what the thief had been after, and if they’d found it. As he headed back for campus, he tried to come up with a plausible way to find out if the book, the quills, or the African statuette had been taken. Perhaps there had been more to one or more of those objects than Stone’s initial scan had indicated, or perhaps one of the mundane objects had held magical significance. There had been a lot of books on the shelves, and not all books useful to mages were magical themselves.
He’d have to think about it later, though, after his class.
6
Stone’s phone buzzed as he left his class and headed back toward his office to call Martinez. He pulled it out and glanced at the text.
Hey, Doc. Call me if you have a minute.
He smiled. Verity. He supposed his questions for Martinez could wait a bit. He reached his office, closed the door, and tapped her number.
“Oh, good,” she said without greeting. “I was hoping you were around.”
“Something wrong?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you. I saw on the news that they had a break-in at Stanford and somebody got hurt, but they’re not saying much about it yet.”
“So, of course you assumed it’s got something to do with me,” he said, amused in spite of the gravity of the situation.
“Well…yeah. Can you blame me? You do have a track record.”
“I suppose you’ve got a point. And in this case, you’re right.”
There was a pause. “You’re okay, right?”
“No, I was the victim. I died, and I’m speaking to you from the Great Beyond.”
“Doc—”
He sighed. “Okay, sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t joke about it. There’s nothing funny about the situation. Remember Brandon Greene from the department?”
“Oh, God!” She gasped. She’d met Greene a few times in passing over the years. “Did he—”
“No, no, he’s alive. He was the one injured in the break-in, though.”
“What happened?”
He quickly gave her an overview of the events, telling her about the magic items he’d discovered in the collection but leaving out any mention of the strange pyramid. He planned to tell her about it at some point, but right now he had no idea whether the object had been the source of the thief’s search. Without more information, the whole thing could have been nothing but an unfortunate coincidence. And even if the thief had been a mage, it made more sense that they were after one of the magical items.
“So…” she said slowly when he finished, “you were in there earlier? That could have been you who got hurt? Maybe even killed?”
“Unlikely. Even if the thief used magic, I doubt they’d have managed to get the drop on me. Plus, we’ve proven it would take more than a knock on the head to take me out these days.”
“Yeah…you’re probably right. But it’s still kind of scary.”
“It is, and I feel terrible about Greene. But it’s probably just someone breaking in because they heard there were potentially valuable items being stored somewhat insecurely.” He still didn’t believe that, though, since there had been next to no publicity about the collection being held on campus prior to the auction.
“I guess so.” She didn’t sound convinced. “But be careful anyway. You know these things ha
ve a way of getting away from you.”
“It has been a few months since anything’s happened. I suppose I’m due.”
“Now see, that’s why you keep getting into the middle of these things.” She sounded like herself again. “Hey, I’m coming down there to have dinner with Jason and Amber tonight. Want to come? That was the other reason I wanted to talk to you.”
He considered turning down the invitation in favor of spending more time studying the pyramid, but once again reassured himself that unless the thief was considerably more powerful than he thought, they had no chance of getting anywhere near the inside of his home. To be doubly safe, he could pop it over to Caventhorne and store it in Desmond’s heavily shielded secret vault before he headed to Santa Cruz. “Er—sure. That sounds brilliant.”
“Jason said you don’t need to bring any wine—they’re busting out some of the stuff you gave them.”
“Can’t say no to an invitation like that, now can I?”
Stone thought about taking a bit of time to give the pyramid some further study before he left for Santa Cruz, but an accident on the road to Encantada slowed his trip home enough that he’d barely have time to take it to Caventhorne and put it in the vault before he had to leave.
It was too bad Jason and Amber’s house was nowhere near a ley line, which would have made the whole thing more convenient. As it was, by the time he secured the pyramid, returned home, and drove across Highway 17, he was nearly late.
Verity was already there. All three of them were in the kitchen, chatting as they tended the pans and set the table. The small house didn’t have a dining room and it was too cold to eat out on the deck, so they used the kitchen table.
“Hey, Al,” Jason greeted, shucking off a pair of oven mitts after setting a serving dish in the middle. “Thanks for coming. Been a while since you’ve been down here.”
“You have been busy.” Stone looked around in amazement. He hadn’t been to the house since mid-October, and in the meantime Jason and Amber had mostly finished remodeling the kitchen. It still wasn’t fancy, but they’d replaced the cabinets, the floor, the sink, the light fixtures, and all the appliances, and now the small space looked neat and efficient while still being inviting and homelike.
“Yeah, it’s taken some time because we had to work mostly nights and weekends, but we’re pretty proud of it.” He beamed at Amber. “Trust me, Al—when you get married, find yourself a woman who can do home repair. None of this shit about being threatened by it. She’s better at it than I am, and I think it’s amazing.”
Amber grinned. “Now, there’s a compliment I can work with.”
“Indeed,” Stone said, chuckling. “I’ll put that at the top of my list of criteria. Especially given that I’m rubbish at it myself.”
Verity laughed as she used magic to levitate another serving dish over. “Come on, Doc—you know as well as I do that you’d just pay somebody to do it for you.”
“True enough. But I must say, I envy your skill. It’s utterly beyond me how you could have managed going from…what it looked like before to this in such a short time.”
Jason waved him toward a seat. “You don’t have to be tactful—we know it was a dump. But that was fine—we saw potential.”
“And now the rest of us see it too. Well done, both of you.”
As they settled in and began eating, the conversation turned to more sober topics. “V was telling me about the break-in at the University,” Jason said. “I saw it in the news, too. Have they got the people who did it yet?”
“No idea. They hadn’t as of this morning.”
“She also said there were magic items in the stuff.”
“Yes. When I was in there, three of them were actively putting off magical energy. There was a book, a box of quills, and a statuette.”
“Do you think one of those was what they were after?” Amber asked.
“No way to tell. I do think magic was involved with the break-in, so it’s definitely possible. But I was only in there for an hour and a half, and I didn’t move much around. There were a lot of things in that room, none of them very well organized and some still in boxes. It’s possible the target was something I didn’t even see.” Stone debated whether to mention the pyramid. He didn’t intend to keep it from his friends, but still wanted to learn more about it before he said anything.
“I wonder how they even knew the stuff was in there,” Verity mused. “I mean, it kinda sounds like that situation a while back where those two salvage guys found the magical chess set—except they found it by accident. If somebody purposely broke in, they had to be looking for something, right?”
“That’s my thought,” Stone said. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll give Leo Blum a call and see if he can manage to get a copy of the police report. If we can figure out what was taken, we’ll be better off. But I think the detective was right: it’s going to take quite some time to check the room’s contents against the list of what’s supposed to be in there. It—”
His phone buzzed.
He pulled it out, curious. Most of the people who would call him in the evening were sitting around the table with him.
He tensed when he saw the number: Brandon Greene.
Holding up a finger, he tapped the button to answer. “Aren’t you supposed to be recuperating and watching mindless television?”
“Doing plenty of that.” Greene sounded better now, less fuzzy than this morning. “My brain is sloshy enough without adding soap operas and old game shows. I think they’re planning to let me out tomorrow, if nothing bad happens overnight.”
“Brilliant. I’m glad you’re feeling better. Is there something I can do for you? I’m not home at present, but if you need anything—”
“No, no, nothing like that. I just remembered something, and I thought you’d want to hear it.”
“Oh?” Stone leaned forward, tightening his grip on the phone. “Did you see the thief?”
“I wish. All I know is that it was a man.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I heard him talking to himself, when I was drifting in and out. That’s what I remembered.”
At this point, Stone was barely aware his friends were in the room. “What did he say? Do you remember any of it?”
“Yeah. Stuff like ‘Where is it?’ and ‘Why isn’t it here?’ It sounded like he was frustrated. Like he expected to find something in there, but he couldn’t find it. He was throwing things around quite a bit. He even bent down and shook me, and I felt him poking around in my jacket pockets. I got scared and played possum. That’s when I passed out again, so I don’t know if he ever found what he was looking for. I know he didn’t take my wallet, though, or my phone. Those were here in my stuff at the hospital.”
Stone went cold. Could it be—?
“Right, then. Thanks for letting me know. Did you tell the police yet?”
“Not yet. Gonna call them tomorrow. But you said you wanted to know if I remembered anything, so there you go. I gotta go now—I hear the nurse. Maybe I’ll get a sponge bath.”
“Probably just a sleeping pill. Take care, Greene. Thanks.”
Everybody was watching him expectantly as he put the phone back in his pocket. “That was Greene.”
“We figured,” Verity said dryly. “Any new developments? Sorry to be nosy, but you were sitting right here. Who heard something? Did he hear the guy talking?”
“Yes. Apparently, he was looking for something he couldn’t find. Greene said the man even looked in his pockets.”
“Huh.” Jason rubbed his chin. “But he doesn’t know what?”
“He says not. Says he passed out again, so he doesn’t remember.”
“So it had to be something small, if he thought Greene might have stuck it in his pocket.”
A tingle traversed Stone’s spine. “Yes…you may be right.”
Verity was eyeing him suspiciously. “You know something about this,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “Someth
ing you’re not telling.”
He almost asked her how she knew that, but didn’t. She was Verity, and she’d always been good at seeing through him when he tried to keep things from her. “You’re right. I do.”
Now they were all focusing on him, food forgotten. “What is it?” Jason asked. “You know what he was looking for?”
“I…believe I do.”
“What is it?” Verity asked.
“A small, pyramid-shaped object with symbols etched into three of its sides, and a pair of holes on the bottom.”
“That’s…oddly specific,” Amber said, frowning. “How do you know that?”
“Because I took it.”
They all gaped at him.
“You…took it?” Verity demanded. “Why?”
“Because it was stranger and more interesting than anything else in that room, and I wanted to study it. Apparently I was right about it being interesting.”
“Why is it interesting?” Amber finished the last of her chicken and washed it down with wine. “Before, you said there were only three magic things in there that you saw. Were you lying?”
Stone pondered his answer to that. “Yes…and no. It wasn’t magic, per se.” He gave them a brief overview of the experiments he’d done so far, both inside the storeroom and at home.
Jason whistled. “So…you’re saying it’s anti-magic? It does something to interfere with magic?”
“Yes, but only in a minor way. I had to move the other items very close to it before it started affecting them, and it didn’t interfere with the wards on the safe I locked it in.”
Verity was frowning too. “But is that all that weird? Are you saying magical science hasn’t figured out a way to block magic?”