by R. L. King
She flashed him a dazzling smile and a thumbs-up, then went back to her duties.
Doubt rose within him as he mounted the stairs. He was certain he was about to be humiliated. At the top were double doors painted black and festooned with frightening figures in fluorescent paint that glowed under the club’s black lights. Two large men in matching suits lounged on either side of the doors. When they saw Ethan, they looked at each other and smirked. “Back downstairs, kid,” one of them said, pointing back the way Ethan had come. “Invitation only up here.”
Here goes nothing. “I’m with Trina’s group,” he said, injecting as much confidence as he could into his words. “My name’s Ethan Penrose.” Calling on the memory of his elation when he realized he really was a mage, he met the speaker’s gaze with a steady one of his own and waited.
The two bouncers glanced at each other. “Yeah, right,” said one, but the other held up a “wait here” hand and slipped inside.
After a moment he came back, looking stunned. “Damned if he isn’t,” he muttered. Ethan had to read lips to get it, but he grinned as the other one, looking equally flummoxed, opened the door and motioned him inside.
The Nightmare Room was much smaller than the one downstairs, and once the door was shut, almost all of the sound from there was blocked, replaced by the beat of another band Ethan could see on a stage at the other end of the room. This music wasn’t pounding or loud; it was eerie, atmospheric, and downright creepy. Ethan loved it. Feeling much more confident now, he glanced around taking in the scene and looking for Trina.
The room was dotted with tiny tables only big enough for two people—three if they were very friendly. Opposite the band was a small bar manned by a slender young man in a black suit. There was sort of a dance floor in the middle, but nobody was dancing; the closest was that a few couples, both opposite sex and same, stood around with their arms draped over each other, swaying in time with the strange rhythm of the music. Ethan wondered how many mages there were in here.
Then he spotted Trina. She was sitting at a table at the edge of the room, lounging in her chair like she owned the place, and flanked by two young men, one blond and one dark. All three were dressed in black: leather and ripped denim and hints of velvet and silk. Even fashion-blind Ethan could tell that they weren’t following trends here, they were setting them. A flash of jealousy rippled through his mind at the sight of the men—he wondered if they were the “friends” she’d spoken of, and realized that subconsciously he’d just assumed they’d be female.
She spotted him and grinned, motioning him over. She said something to the blond man, who got up, grabbed a chair from another table, and plopped it down. He and the dark-haired man pushed their chairs back to make room; Trina herself didn’t move.
“Hey,” she greeted. “I hoped you’d make it. Was beginning to wonder. The door guys give you any trouble?” It was still a little hard to hear in here, but much better than downstairs.
“Nah,” Ethan said, trying his best to sound nonchalant.
“Excellent.” She indicated first the blond man, then the dark-haired one. “These are my friends, Oliver and Miguel. Guys, this is Ethan, the one I was telling you about. He’s one of us.”
Oliver nodded to him. “Another one, huh? Cool. Not many of us around the area.” He motioned at the chair. “Take a load off.”
Miguel looked him up and down as he settled into it. “Hey,” was all he said.
Trina raised a hand, and in a few moments a cocktail waitress in a leather miniskirt and bustier came over with a tray, setting drinks down in front of each of them. “You do drink, don’t you, Ethan?” she asked.
“Uh—” He glanced at their arms. None of them were wearing the wristbands from downstairs. “Sure,” he said, a little defiantly. “Thanks.” Picking up the glass, he took a sip. It was spicy, and had an odd aftertaste.
“So,” she continued to the other two. “Ethan’s an apprentice. Yeah, I miss those times. Pain in the ass, but looking back it was a helluva trip, having all that potential and knowing what you were gonna be able to do.”
Miguel nodded. “You got that right.” Addressing Ethan, he said, “So, what are you learning? How long have you been at it?” He threw back half his drink and fixed him with a snaky smile.
“Still pretty new,” Ethan admitted. “My—um—master likes to take things slow.” The word sounded so strange, so old-fashioned.
Miguel raised an eyebrow. “Really? So do I. Maybe I should hook up with him sometime.” Trina shot him a look, but he just grinned.
“Don’t worry,” Trina said. “It might seem slow now, but before long you’ll be doing things you never believed were possible. That’s what rocks so much about magic. There’s really no limit to what you can do—well, no limit except your own will, and how far you want to take it.”
“We could help you with that, you know,” Miguel said, watching the band.
“You—can?”
He shrugged. “Sure. We could show you a few things. That’s the way it is with mages. We learn from each other.”
Ethan hid his nervousness under taking another sip of his drink. What had Stone told him about seeking out supplemental instruction? He’d made a huge point back at the beginning about setting the pace, and Ethan would just have to live with that. “I—” He took a deep breath. “I probably shouldn’t. I’m not really supposed to be studying anything outside of what Dr. Stone’s teaching me.”
Oliver snorted. “Yeah, of course not. He’d say that, wouldn’t he? He just wants to control you, man. They’re all like that, the old guard. They want to keep everything under wraps. They don’t even understand the way magic can sing if you let it.”
“He’s not old,” Ethan protested, nettled. “He just wants to make sure I learn it right.”
“Yeah, c’mon, Ol,” Trina said, giving Ethan an encouraging smile. “Don’t try to mess with his training. That’s not cool. It’s up to him what he wants to do.”
“Yeah, okay,” Oliver conceded. “Sorry, man.”
They fell silent for a while, listening to the music and watching the writhing bodies. Miguel got up at one point and said something to a slim man in a tank top and tight jeans, and a couple of minutes later the two of them were draped over each other, swaying on the dance floor. The sight of them drained a little bit of Ethan’s jealousy away.
Oliver caught him looking. “Miguel’s a slut,” he said. “What can I say?”
Ethan didn’t know how to respond to that, so he just shrugged and smiled. He was hoping that Trina would ask him to dance—there was no way on Earth he was brave enough yet to ask her—but she seemed content to just lean back and watch the room. Occasionally little groups of people would filter by their table and greet her and Oliver like they were some kind of royalty. They even smiled at Ethan, and he realized that somehow he’d finally managed to work himself into the circle of people who were genuinely cool—even if he was only a little way in. It was better than he’d ever done before.
“Are there…a lot of mages here?” he asked, leaning in closer so no one outside their table would hear.
Trina shook her head. “Not really. A lot of wannabes, but I haven’t seen any others with the real deal, besides us.”
He nodded. “Dr. Stone said we’re pretty rare.” It felt good to say we.
“That’s why we’ve gotta stick together,” she said, smiling at him.
Ethan couldn’t help smiling back. Something about her eyes and the way she looked at him just turned his insides to jelly. He glanced down and realized he’d finished his drink without even noticing.
“So, I take it you didn’t have any trouble getting away?” she asked as Miguel came back to his seat. “Didn’t you say your mom was sick or something?”
“She’s in the hospital,” he said. “There’s nobody home but me right now. And she wants me to get out and have fun.”
Trina nodded. “What about Dr. Stone? Did you have to clear it with him?�
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“Nah.” Ethan shook his head. “I think he might be sick or something, too. My lesson schedule’s been spotty because of my mom, but he called this afternoon and said we wouldn’t be starting again until Monday at the earliest. He sounded kind of weird on the message. I didn’t tell him I was going out tonight.”
“Way to go,” Oliver said, exchanging a glance with Miguel. “Just because he’s your teacher doesn’t mean he runs your life.”
“Yeah,” Ethan agreed. “Yeah. He doesn’t.” He accepted another drink from the leather-clad cocktail waitress and smiled.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Stone didn’t remember falling asleep—or maybe passing out—on the old leather sofa in his basement sanctum, but the pounding on the door snapped him out of an uneasy dream of blood and screams and something about a carnivorous house eating a television set. The first thing he realized when he awoke was that he was face down, with one leg hanging off the edge of the couch and his foot dragging on the floor. The second thing he realized was that every part of his body was screaming at him.
“Bugger...” he muttered, glancing at the clock. After seven. He’d missed his next dose of painkillers by nearly three hours.
The door pounded again. “Alastair?” Megan. “Are you down there?”
“In a minute,” he tried to call, but it came out as a feeble croak.
This was not going to end well.
He reached down, put his hand on the floor, and tried to push himself up, but the only thing he succeeded in doing was to set off some sort of large-scale explosion centering around his cracked ribs. Clamping his teeth around a shriek of pain, he rolled over and landed on his back on the floor. It was a very good thing that this was one of the spots where he’d covered the concrete with a rug, and another that the old couch was so saggy that he didn’t have far to fall. Even so, his ribs throbbed anew.
He lay there, panting, and considered his next options. Somehow, he was going to have to get up, stagger across the room, and drag himself up the stairs, all before Megan freaked out and called the fire department to break the door down.
Wait, wait, he told himself. She doesn’t know you’re down here.
Where the hell else would I be? The car’s still here—she’s not going to be thick enough to think I just nipped out for a walk.
Why had he given her a key to the place, again?
He was wasting time. Gritting his teeth, he reminded himself that this whole thing was his fault, and if he hadn’t been such a lazy mage he wouldn’t have gotten himself hurt in the first place. Pain wasn’t a valid excuse when it was your own doing.
He crawled over to the table, every movement feeling like someone was stabbing him in the side. When he got there he grabbed the edge and hauled himself to a kneeling position. At least his knees were all right. That was something.
With some satisfaction and very little memory of having finished them, he noticed several objects laid out on the table: a half-dozen crystals, a ring with a blocky purple stone, and a necklace with a pendant in the shape of a miniature felinoid skull with horns. He shifted his sight a bit (which caused his already pounding head to throb warningly) and noted that all of them glowed with power like tiny suns. At least he’d done what he’d come down here to do in the first place. It was probably why he felt even worse than he should—infusing focus objects with power took a lot out of him—but at least he’d taken the first concrete steps toward making sure that he’d be ready if somebody tried to jump him again.
The thought gave him a bit more energy. By sheer effort of will, he pulled himself to his feet, swaying back and forth like a drunken toddler. Fighting down a wave of nausea and dizziness, he began moving toward the stairs.
“Alastair, are you down there?” Megan’s voice sounded far away: the door was quite thick on purpose, bound with metal on the inside. The fire department, should she decide to call them, would be in for quite a surprise if they tried to knock it down.
Gathering all his strength, he called, “Coming!” He hoped she heard him, because he wasn’t going to be able to do that again. He’d nearly shouted himself off his feet, and there were still the stairs to deal with.
You never truly think about how hard it is to climb a simple flight of stairs until various parts of your body are registering their protests in ways that are impossible to ignore. Stone gripped the railing and used his arms to drag himself up one step at a time, pausing on every third to get his breath back. That was another thing about cracked ribs: it hurt to breathe. By the time he made it to the top he was swaying again, blinking back the gray fog settling around his head. He grabbed the doorknob, yanked the door toward him, staggered out and closed it behind him before Megan could do more than stare at him in shock. Then he took two more steps forward, tripped, and barely caught himself before his full weight fell into her arms. “Evening,” he managed, trying to summon up a cheery smile.
Megan caught him and held him up long enough to hustle him over to a chair. Her expression warred between anger and worry in equal measure. “Alastair—what the—?” Pausing to compose herself for a moment, she continued, “What the hell were you thinking, locking yourself down there? What were you even doing down there? In the basement?”
He leaned forward, letting his head drop into his hands. “Don’t shout, Megan,” he slurred. “I’m—sorry. Lost track of time.”
She sighed, a long-suffering sound that anybody who spent more than a casual amount of time with Stone was very familiar with. “How long were you down there?”
He considered shrugging, decided that wasn’t smart, and rolled his head back and forth in his hands. “I don’t know—fell asleep. Three-four hours or so, I think.” In the vague periphery of his senses, an interesting aroma wandered by. Food of some sort. He realized he hadn’t eaten since this morning, and he was ravenous. “Something smells good...”
“I brought Chinese. Figured you wouldn’t want to go out. But I’m wondering now if I should be taking you back to the hospital.” She made a move like she was going to smack him in the head. “God, you’re such an idiot sometimes. You couldn’t have just stayed in bed like a good boy?”
He shook his head. “I’m a bad boy, Megan,” he muttered. “You can spank me later—might be fun. Right now, though, be a love and bring me my happy pills from upstairs, will you? Then I’ll be delighted to join you for Chinese food and bad television.”
Half an hour later, the painkillers had kicked in, and Stone was feeling significantly better. He sat slouched into one side of the overstuffed sofa in the living room, poking at a carton of kung pao chicken with chopsticks and paying no attention to whatever terrible rom-com Megan had found to watch. She wasn’t paying any attention to it either. She fished her briefcase from off the floor, dug in it, and tossed something in his lap. “Saw that today. Thought you’d like a copy for posterity.”
It was the Stanford Daily, the campus newspaper. Unfolding it he saw his own face, taken from his university ID card, staring at him from beneath the headline “Professor Attacked, Robbed in Campus Parking Lot.” He skimmed the article: the details were sparse, and neither the campus police nor the Palo Alto department had managed to catch the attackers yet. The article urged students and faculty to be cautious when walking on campus after dark, and to use the buddy system whenever possible or call for an escort. He tossed it back at Megan. “At least they spelled my name right.”
“The whole thing makes me nervous,” she said, clutching it. “Thinking there are thugs wandering around campus—a couple of my colleagues are scared to walk to their cars now.”
Stone leaned back, trying to remember something that had caught his interest before. The medication fogged his mental processes a bit, but he almost had it. Something relevant to what she was saying—
Then he remembered. “Megan—you said something about the air being let out of my tire, didn’t you?”
She nodded. “That’s what they told me, yeah. Why?”
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nbsp; “Maybe nothing,” he said slowly, pondering. “But I’m just paranoid enough to wonder if p’raps they were after me specifically.”
She stared at him, chopsticks full of chow mein hovering halfway between her carton and her mouth. “Why would you say that? Why would anyone want to beat you up? You don’t have any enemies you haven’t told me about, do you?”
If only you knew. “It just seems odd that they’d do that rather than just jumping me. There were two of them, and at least the one I saw was bigger than I was. They wouldn’t have had any trouble with me if they’d attacked, rather than risking being seen messing about with my car. I’m not exactly that imposing.” Physically, anyway. Unless they knew he was more than he appeared to be, and they wanted to make sure they got their hits in before he could fight back.
“But I don’t get it. What would they gain by it? What would make you a better target than someone else?”
He shrugged. It didn’t hurt, which was nice. He decided that he really liked his happy pills, and wouldn’t forget to take them again no matter how preoccupied he got. “No idea. P’raps the combination of driving a nice car and parking in a remote area made them think I’d be easy money. There are plenty of people around there who drive nicer cars than I do, but most of them park them in more populated lots.” Of course this wasn’t what he really believed, but once again he had to come up with a plausible explanation that would satisfy Megan.
“Maybe so,” she said, but she didn’t sound like she believed it either. “Oh—one other thing, before I forget. Tommy Langley was asking about you. I saw him at the cafeteria today. He said to tell you he hopes you heal up quick so your little group can all go out and get drunk again soon.” She rolled her eyes, clearly indicating her opinion of this activity.
“I’ll get right on that,” he assured her.
They settled back, ostensibly to watch the movie, but Stone’s mind was actually far away. Megan’s mention of Langley had sent it off in a different direction, reminding him of what had been going on up at Adelaide Bonham’s mansion. He wondered if she’d had any more incidents, and remembered that even if she had, his promise to Langley effectively prevented him from investigating them. His foggy brain then served up the absurd possibility that the thing in her house and what had happened to him could be linked, but the thought almost made him chuckle aloud. As far as he’d ever seen, frightening entities hiding in dusty old mansions didn’t hire thugs to beat up mages, no matter how powerful they might be otherwise.