Gathering Storm: An Alastair Stone Urban Fantasy Novel (Alastair Stone Chronicles Book 17)

by R. L. King

  Apparently Mitch had picked up the same overtones, because he looked suddenly concerned. He rattled the doorknob and appeared surprised to find it locked. “Cathy—open the door! Please!”

  “No. Go away, Mitch. It’s better this way!”

  “Cathy!” Mitch took a step back and gathered himself, obviously intending to kick the door down.

  “Wait!” Stone whispered. “Let me.”

  “How are you gonna—”

  He moved forward, shielding the knob with his body, and used magic to pop the lock. “Try it now.”

  Mitch didn’t ask questions, but instead grabbed it and flung open the door. He surged inside. “Cathy!”

  Stone pushed in behind him. What he saw shocked him into forgetting to use magical sight. “Bloody hell...”

  Mitch’s sister, a young woman who appeared a year or two younger than he was, sat cross-legged in the middle of her bed, wearing a floppy T-shirt and pajama bottoms. Her straggly blonde hair hung down in a jumbled curtain over her face. In one hand she held something that glinted in the dim light filtering in through the room’s closed drapes, raising it over her opposite wrist. “Stop!” she yelled. “If you come closer, I’ll do it! I swear to God, I’ll do it!” She fixed her crazed gaze first on Mitch, then on Stone.

  Her eyes were the same solid, golden yellow of the strange portal from the mill.

  11

  “Cathy! Don’t!” Mitch made as if to lunge forward, to grab her, but stopped himself. Panting, he reached out toward her. “Please—put that down!”

  Behind him, Stone shifted to magical sight. Cathy’s aura lit up, blazing the same bright yellow as the glow he’d seen back at the mill last night. Her eyes glowed in the same color but brighter now, shining out of a face streaming with tears.

  With barely a thought, he summoned a precise telekinetic spell and pulled the razor blade free of Cathy’s hand, gently but inexorably tugging it from her grip.

  “No!” she screamed. She tried to hold on to it, but Stone’s spell was too strong. The blade flew from her hand and sailed across the room, landing on the floor in the midst of a pile of laundry.

  Cathy screamed again, then flung her hands up and collapsed onto the bed, sobbing. “No…no…you should have let me do it...It’s better…it’s better…”

  Mitch swallowed hard, turning back and forth between Cathy and Stone, his face awash in confusion. “What just happened?”

  “No idea. What’s going on here? What’s happened to her?”

  “Make it stop…” Cathy sobbed from the depths of her balled-up comforter. “Oh, please, God, somebody make it stop…”

  “This has been going on since we got back from the party,” Mitch said softly. “She’s worse now…not sure why. Before, she just refused to come out and see anybody, because of—” He gestured at her, obviously referring to her eyes.

  “Just the eyes?” Stone asked. He took a tentative step closer to the bed, still with magical sight up. Her aura looked strange and disjointed; on closer examination, he could see flashes of blue among the brighter gold, along with jagged streaks of red indicating her mental turmoil.

  “No…not just the eyes. But that’s the part folks can see. That’s what Reverend Oakley said…” He turned away from Cathy and lowered his voice to a whisper. “…said maybe meant she’s got the Devil inside her. He’s been prayin’ over her ever since, but it hasn’t helped.”

  Stone sighed. Mundanes—it never failed. Every time anything supernatural occurred around them, assuming you could get them to acknowledge it at all, they invariably blamed it on the Devil. Stone didn’t believe in the Devil, but if he did, he was certain the old bastard would have more important things to do with his time than spend it turning teenage girls’ eyes solid yellow and trying to drive them mad.

  “Do you mind if I try to talk to her?” he asked gently.

  “Why? There isn’t anything you can do to help, is there? I just wanted to show you—” Once again, Mitch looked as if he regretted bringing Stone up here.

  “There might be. I don’t know. But it’s worth a try, isn’t it? You said yourself Reverend Oakley’s approach isn’t working.”

  The stricken young man shrugged. “Fine. Go ahead, I guess.” He glanced at his watch. “Dad’ll be home in about an hour, so we need to clear out before that. He won’t be crazy about me bringing strangers home.”

  Stone, with magical sight still active, pulled the white wooden desk chair next to the bed and sat down. “Cathy…can you hear me?” He used a soft, persuasive tone.

  Cathy hitched a sob and remained face-down in her blankets. “Who are you? Go away! I’m disgusting…”

  “You are not disgusting. Please…will you talk with me for a few moments? I want to try to understand what’s happened. I might be able to help.”

  “Nobody can help.”

  The depth of despair in her voice gripped at Stone. How horrible it must have been for this miserable young woman to spend the last two weeks shut up in a dim room, refusing to allow anyone but her family and the local clergyman to even look at her. The room smelled sour, a combination of sweat, unwashed clothes, and a faint hint of something floral. He hadn’t noticed it before, but a radio played softly from somewhere unseen.

  “Cathy…please. Mitch has brought me here because he thinks I can help. My name is Dr. Alastair Stone.” He used his title in the hope that if he was lucky, the girl wouldn’t ask questions about what kind of doctor he was. “Come on. Look at me. I promise, I’ll do everything I can to help. What have you got to lose, if you were already thinking about suicide?”

  Behind him, Mitch gasped a little at the starkness of his words, but they seemed to get through to Cathy. Slowly, still shaking, she rose from her slump and cast a tentative glance at Stone, her glowing, solid yellow eyes unsettling and expressionless with no irises or pupils. “How…how can you help?” she muttered. “Nobody can help.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I can,” Stone admitted gently. “Not unless you tell me what’s happened to you. Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know what happened!” She scrabbled at the blankets, clutching them in thin, clawed hands.

  “Do you remember the party? At the mill? Do you remember being there with your brother?”

  Her gaze fixed on him, and she tilted her head. “You’re…different.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shook her head violently and clamped her eyes shut. “I just want it to stop.”

  “You want what to stop?” Stone struggled to keep his voice even, comforting. “What’s happening to you, Cathy? Are you in pain? Is something hurting you?”

  “No…it doesn’t hurt…but it won’t stop!”

  “What won’t stop?”

  “The colors!” she wailed, snatching a pillow and clutching it tightly to her chest. “The colors! They’re everywhere! I want them to stop! I’m going crazy!”

  Stone looked up at Mitch, who hovered at the foot of the bed, his posture tight with tension. “What’s she talking about, ‘the colors’? Has she mentioned this before?”

  Mitch gave a miserable nod. “None of us know what she’s talking about, though. She says she sees these weird glowing colors all over the place—especially when people are around.”

  Stone went still. Bloody hell, could it be—?

  With care, he turned back to face Cathy. “Cathy…I want you to answer a question for me. Can you do that?”

  She muttered something unintelligible into the top of the pillow.

  “When you say the colors are ‘everywhere,’ do you mean literally everywhere? All around you? Or just around people?”

  “What are you—” Mitch began.

  Stone held up a hand to stop him. “Tell me, Cathy, please. Where do you see the colors?”

  She swallowed, her head still buried. “Mostly…around people. But…other places too. People are brighter. And they won’t stop! I can’t shut them off!” More red flashes erupted around her aur
a.

  “All right…” he murmured. It was getting harder to keep his voice even as it began to dawn on him what must be going on here. “All right. We’re going to sort you out, Cathy, I promise. Can you look at me, please?”

  “Don’t want to…too bright…hurts my eyes.”

  “What’s she talkin’ about?” Mitch demanded. “It sounds like you know what’s going on here! How can that be?”

  “Just—give me a moment. Please. Cathy—what do you mean ‘too bright’?”

  “You!” she wailed. “Who are you? What do you want? You hurt my eyes! All that weird purple and gold light—it’s too bright!”

  Stone regarded her in wonder as her words confirmed his suspicions.

  Somehow, the strange phenomenon at the mill had done something to this young woman, allowing her to see auras. Not only see them, but be unable to not see them, as if she were in a constant state of magical sight. It would be terrifying enough for and unprepared mundane to get a glimpse of the astral realm, but if she couldn’t shut it off it was no wonder it had nearly driven her to suicide.

  Mitch’s strong grip on his arm jolted him out of his thoughts. “What is going on here?” he yelled. “If you know anything, you tell me right now or get out of here!”

  Stone took a deep breath. This would be tricky. He stood and walked over to the window, where he looked out into the front yard. “I’m—not entirely sure I know what’s going on. But I have some ideas.”

  “Well, tell me.” Mitch joined him at the window, glancing down at his watch. “If we’re not out of here before Dad gets back—” He swallowed. “Look—I just want my sister back to normal. Whatever this is, I want to help her. If you know what’s wrong—”

  “All right,” Stone said. “If you really mean that, I might be able to help. You say you go to church—so you’re used to taking things on faith, right? That’s what I’m going to ask you to do here. I can help, but I can’t explain everything. Fair enough?”

  “I…have no idea what you’re talking about. But if you can help her—”

  “I think I can. I’ve never seen a case like this before, but I’ve dealt with things that are…similar. I think whatever it was that happened at the mill affected your sister differently than it did anyone else. You too, to an extent—that’s why you remember what happened and no one else does.”

  Mitch’s face was wreathed in confusion as he looked back and forth between Cathy, the view out the window, and Stone. “I don’t get it, Dr. Stone. I’m sorry, but you’re not makin’ sense.”

  “I don’t have to make sense. That’s where the faith part comes in.” Stone began to pace. “But I think what’s happened is that the phenomenon, whatever it was, opened your sister up to seeing…something called auras.”

  “Auras? What are those?”

  “Well…some say they’re the energy that surrounds every living thing. Some people claim to be able to see them.”

  “Wait…” Mitch’s suspicion increased. “Are you talkin’ about some kind of psychic stuff? You know, like palm reading? That stuff’s all fake. Everybody knows that.”

  “Do they?”

  “Well—yeah. Don’t they?”

  “Apparently Cathy doesn’t think so. You said you’d have faith—are you willing to do that?”

  Mitch looked like he wasn’t sure whether to scream, punch Stone in the face, or run from the room. Finally his shoulders slumped. “Yeah. Okay. Guess I don’t have much choice, do I? So these…aura things are real?”

  “They are, yes.”

  “Can you see them?”

  “I can.”

  He looked back and forth between Cathy and Stone again. “But—if you can see them, how come you’re not—”

  “Like her? Because I’ve got a lot more experience, and this didn’t get thrust on me without any warning. I suspect that something in the energy you were all exposed to at the mill opened up a sort of…window for Cathy.”

  “So…what does that mean? If it’s a window, can we…close it?”

  “That’s what I’m going to try to do.”

  “How?” Mitch glared at him. “What are you, Dr. Stone? You know, come to think of it, it seems pretty damn weird that you just showed up in town from outta nowhere just after this happened.”

  “Not really. As I told you when we first met, I’m interested in this sort of thing. It’s part of my job to be interested, so I keep my eyes open for odd occurrences like this one.”

  “So you’re sayin’ this isn’t the first one?”

  “Well, it’s the first one like this I’ve encountered,” he admitted. “But certainly not the first strange phenomenon I’ve investigated. I’d offer to send you a couple of my academic papers, but frankly you’d probably find them quite dull. I find them a bit dull sometimes, and I wrote them.”

  Stone’s words seemed to settle at least a small bit of Mitch’s suspicion. “So…what are you gonna do? How can you help her? What’s makin’ her eyes like that?”

  “I’m not certain. But if I had to make an educated guess, I’d say it’s connected to the energy she encountered at the mill. It’s as if it’s attached itself to her and she’s…channeling it somehow.” He chose his words carefully, aware of how easy it would be to lose his audience. If Mitch decided he was a crackpot and kicked him out of the house, he didn’t have much hope that Cathy would come to a good end. “Tell me—did anything odd happen with her last night, somewhere before nine o’clock? Before I called you?”

  Mitch glared at him. “How did you know that?”

  “What happened?”

  He gripped the windowsill. “I don’t know if it was nine exactly, but right around there she screamed. Really loud, like she was in pain or somethin’. Dad and I ran upstairs to check on her, but by the time she got there, she was asleep like nothin’ had happened. If we hadn’t both heard it, I’d figure I was havin’ some kind of bad dream. But we did. He went back downstairs and fell asleep in his chair after that, and not too long after you called. That’s…that’s why I decided I had to show you what happened with her.”

  Stone nodded. “I thought something might be wrong last night. I could hear it in your voice when we spoke.”

  “So what’s it mean? Why did you expect it?”

  “Because I did see something out there. I thought I’d dealt with it, but apparently your sister might be its last connection.”

  “Connection?” Mitch thrust his hands into his pockets. “What the hell are you talking about, connection? What do you mean, you dealt with it?” His voice took on an edge of anger that was a clear substitute for panic.

  Stone sighed. He’d been afraid of this: Mitch’s strong desire to help his sister had driven him to step farther outside his comfort zone than he ever would have done under normal circumstances. Stone admired that—he always admired mundanes who were willing to widen their worldviews—but in this case, he didn’t think it would be enough. Mitch Kirkson wasn’t Stan Lopez or Edwina Mortenson. Trying to open his eyes to the wider world of magic would be pointless, take time they didn’t have, and would likely cause more problems than it solved.

  All of that would make things more difficult, but sometimes it was best to know when to cut and run.

  “Listen.” Stone strode across the room and gripped Mitch’s shoulders. “Here’s the bottom line, Mitch: I think I can help your sister. I’m fairly sure I can. But I’m not going to explain to you how I’m doing it. I can’t. You don’t have the frame of reference for it, and I haven’t got time to give you a crash course. So my question for you is this: are you willing to trust me, for the chance to get your sister back to normal?”

  “But—”

  “No,” he said firmly. He didn’t like doing it, but they had less than half an hour before Mitch’s father was due back from church, and already he wasn’t sure that would be enough time. “Yes or no, Mitch? Do you want my help or not?”

  Even without magical sight, he could see the young man’s strug
gle. Mitch’s expression shifted between anger, suspicion, and despair, and his entire body thrummed with tension.

  “Mitch…?”

  Cathy spoke from the bed, her voice shaky and barely audible.

  Stone turned. He’d nearly forgotten about the actual, living girl in the bed in his focus on what had afflicted her.

  Mitch approached the bed, moving with hesitation. “Hey, Cath. You okay?”

  With effort, she pulled her face out of the pillow and opened her eyes, fixing her brother and Stone with her eerie, flat yellow gaze. “I…want it.”

  “What?”

  “I-I want him to help me, if he can. I can’t take this anymore, Mitch.”

  “But—Cath, weren’t you listening to him? All this stuff about auras? It’s…wrong. Reverend Oakley says—”

  “Reverend Oakley says I’ve got the Devil in me.” Her voice still shook, but it was stronger now. “I don’t believe that. I don’t feel…evil. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want the colors to stop. I want to be normal again!” To Stone, she begged, “Please…if you can help me…please do it.”

  Stone gripped her shoulder. “I think I can.” He glanced at Mitch. “It’s up to you. I can’t do it if I have to worry about you braining me with a lamp or something while I’m working. It will take concentration. Can I trust you to stay out of the way?”

  “What are you gonna do?” Mitch’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not leavin’ you alone with her.”

  “You don’t have to. Just sit down over there and stay out of the way. We don’t have much time.”

  “Please, Mitch.” Even with her flat yellow eyes, Cathy’s expression was pleading. “Do what he says. Dad’ll be home soon. If he can’t help me…you might as well send me to Morris Park before I try to kill myself again.”

  For several seconds, the tense silence hung thick in the air, interrupted only by the faint strains of the rock tune coming from the unseen radio. Finally, Mitch growled and slammed his fist down on the end of Cathy’s bed. “Fine. Do it, if you can. God help us.”