Alastair Stone Chronicles Box Set: Alastair Stone Chronicles, Books 1 through 4

by R. L. King

  If I can even believe that man, he reminded himself. The old guy had seen him giving money to Levine and wanted some too; judging from his state of inebriation, it was likely he’d have implicated his own mother for a tenner.

  Stone entered his study, dropped into his desk chair, and began making more quick notes in a larger notebook, copying the ones he’d made in the small one, and expanding on them while they were still fresh in his mind.

  Maybe he was just wasting his time. Even if the supernatural was involved with one or more of the killings, what the hell was he going to do about it? He had no illusions about being the one to solve the crimes—this wasn’t about that for him. Sure, if he found anything definitive, he’d find a way to inform the police without getting involved, but the uncomfortable truth was that he was simply curious about what was going on. It was a magical puzzle, and he’d never been able to stay away from those.

  Right now, though, he would have to wait. The decision he’d made about how to proceed meant he would have to share his findings with someone else: someone who wasn’t available on weekends.

  He closed the notebook and put it aside. It would have to wait till Monday. In the meantime, he had a stack of essays he needed to grade.

  On Monday afternoon, after his last class, Stone drove to the East Palo Alto shop of his old associate Stefan Kolinsky. He hadn’t visited Kolinsky in several months, and as he hoped, the wards around the place were beginning to slip. That meant that he could probably get away with reinforcing them in exchange for what he was going to ask for. Old Stefan never parted with any of his encyclopedic store of information for free, but sometimes if the requester approached him at the right time, the price was more acceptable than usual.

  He hadn’t made an appointment; Kolinsky didn’t like telephones, and anyone who had business with him knew when he would be available.

  As Stone expected, he found Kolinsky in the back of his shop, bent over his ancient rolltop desk. “Alastair,” Kolinsky said without looking up. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Hello, Stefan. How are you?”

  Kolinsky turned his chair around. He was a tall, powerfully built man in a meticulous and old-fashioned black suit, his obsidian-chip eyes glittering under heavy brows. “I am well,” he said. “To what do I owe the pleasure? Perhaps you might be interested in some of my wares?”

  Stone shook his head. “Not today.” Kolinsky was an unrepentant black mage, and his ‘wares’ were the kind of magical gear that one might need to cast the sorts of spells Stone avoided. “I have a puzzle you might find interesting, and I need some information that would be difficult to get anywhere else.”

  Kolinsky’s eyebrows elevated a little, a clear sign he was interested. “Indeed.” He indicated a chair. “Please—sit down and tell me about it.”

  Stone settled himself in the chair and began to speak. He told Kolinsky everything he’d learned so far, leaving out only Madison McClain’s name (he didn’t doubt Kolinsky would be able to find it on his own, but didn’t see the point in revealing confidential information himself). He told him about the murders, his investigation of the bar, the train platform, and the homeless camp, about the odd symbols he’d found in the alleyway, and about what Levine and the old man had told him in connection with the murders. As an afterthought, he added the information about the homeless people’s fear of shelters due to unexplained disappearances. When he finished, he leaned back and regarded Kolinsky. “That’s about it, so far,” he said.

  “Fascinating,” Kolinsky said. He had sat, nearly unmoving, his gaze fixed on Stone the entire time he had been speaking. “I am familiar, of course, with the murders—they’ve been in the papers recently. I suspected a possession in the case of the little girl, and perhaps the man at the train station as well. The others—you know as well as I do that there has been an upswing in the number and intensity of violent crimes over the past few years. I would have thought them merely examples of that. What makes you think they aren’t?”

  Stone shrugged. “Maybe nothing. The traces of satisfaction and pleasure in the alley seemed odd to me, especially after what the homeless man said about the men who killed the six at the camp.”

  “But if there were some sort of mental abnormality involved, then pleasure in killing isn’t that unusual.”

  “No, but four of them experiencing the same thing at once? That seems a bit hard to believe, don’t you think?”

  “Possibly.” Kolinsky leaned back and steepled his fingers. “So what is it you want me to do, Alastair? What kind of information are you looking for?”

  Stone paused to gather his thoughts. “It’s a bit open-ended this time. Anything about other similar murders in the area, to start with. Anything you can find about unexplained disappearances at homeless shelters, halfway houses, that sort of thing. I don’t know if the missing people are connected to the murders—or even if they’re really missing. I’m still convinced that they just left the area on their own and didn’t report back.” He pulled out his notebook and glanced through it. “Anything you might have heard on the black-magic grapevine about unusual murders—especially anything that might have a magical connection.”

  Kolinsky nodded. “I will see what I can do,” he said. “Come back in a few days.”

  “Thank you.” He waved toward the door. “And as payment, how about I redo your wards? They’re looking a bit ragged around the edges.”

  Kolinsky’s eyes glittered. “Getting off a bit cheaply this time, aren’t you?”

  “Who else are you going to get to set up wards that will last you six months without degrading?” Stone asked. “You’d pay a fortune for that if you had to find another mage as good as I am—if you could even find one willing to do it in the first place.”

  Kolinsky nodded, conceding the point. “Fair enough,” he said. “It is a start, at any rate. If I find anything particularly unusual, then we can renegotiate.”

  “Fine,” Stone said, rising. “Thank you, Stefan. I’ll look forward to hearing what you come up with.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Interlude

  Verity’s eyes flew open in the darkness.

  Disoriented, she lay still, holding her breath. The room was quiet and dark, the curtains still against the closed window, the soft glow of her alarm-clock face illuminating a few inches of her battered nightstand.

  3:27 a.m.

  She waited for several seconds, reaching out with all her senses. Something had awakened her. She didn’t just wake up for no reason in the middle of the night. Was it one of the staff walking past her door? The closing door of one of the other residents returning to his or her room after a trip to the bathroom? The blare of a too-loud radio or television in the far-off common room downstairs? She didn’t think it was any of those. They were all normal sounds around here, part of the fabric of her existence. There was no reason why any of them would start affecting her differently now.

  What was it, then? A bad dream? God knew she had enough of those, but it still didn’t seem right. Those kinds of dreams tended to jolt her awake in a cold sweat, the vestiges of whatever horror had sought to disturb her calm still alarmingly fresh in her mind. She took a deep breath, rolled over and pulled the covers up so she could snuggle under them.

  Scream.

  She gasped, jerking up. No mistake that time—she had heard it. It wasn’t close and it wasn’t loud—she probably wouldn’t have heard it if she’d still been asleep—but it was there. The desperate, inarticulate scream of someone in terrible pain, or fear, or both. Somewhere inside the house. Downstairs, maybe?

  For a moment she just lay there, trying to quiet her breathing, listening to see if the scream was repeated. It wasn’t. She’d heard plenty of screams during her time here—everybody had. Kids were always coming down off something, having nightmares, detoxing. Hell, she’d made a few of those screams herself, on some of her bad nights. That had been a while ago, though, thank goodness.

  She took a deep br
eath. The easiest thing to do would be to just roll over, pull the covers over her head, and go back to sleep. Now that she knew what had awakened her, she could easily rationalize it as somebody having a bad night. It wasn’t her concern. You learned early not to get too involved around here. Safer that way.

  But yet, something about that scream—it had sounded young. Too young to be in this place. She knew everybody here, and the youngest resident was fourteen, three years younger than she was. That scream had not come from a fourteen-year-old. She would have bet money on that, if she’d had any. What a child was doing here, she had no idea.

  Still trying to stay as silent as possible, she swung her legs free of the covers and sat on the edge of the bed. The wooden floor was cold under her bare feet—it would be winter soon, and the air was turning colder every day. They couldn’t afford to run the heater all the time, so they did what they could.

  She didn’t need to turn on a light—she knew every inch of this place like it was the home where she’d grown up. She padded across the room, pushed open her door—no locks here—and stepped into the hallway. On either side of her were a row of closed doors; to her left, a stairway led down to the kitchen, rec room, and other common areas. The hallway was deserted.

  Slowly and silently, she crept toward the stairs, stopping at the top of them to listen. Nothing. The house was as still as she’d expect it to be at nearly 3:30 in the morning. The faint odors left over from last night’s Mexican dinner still hung in the air, mingling with the ever-present whiff of dirty laundry.

  It’s not too late, she told herself. You can just turn around and go back to bed. Nobody’s seen you. You won’t be in trouble.

  But that was just a kid down there. And the scream—hadn’t everyone heard it? Why weren’t all the doors being flung open, people running out to see what was going on? She couldn’t have been the only one who heard it.

  They told her that she heard things—saw things—sometimes things that nobody else could hear or see. They tried to tell her that they weren’t there, but she knew better. They were there, all right. They were everywhere, all around. She even suspected that they were here, but she couldn’t be sure. They hid their traces well. She had found evidence, almost like a leftover trail of body odor or perfume that remained in a room long after the person had left, but nothing definitive.

  Nobody believed her, of course. She learned that a long time ago, and stopped saying anything about it. She’d been in places like this long enough to know how they worked. You kept your head down and your mouth shut, you did what you were told, and you tried to find ways to get by without attracting attention. She’d gotten good at that.

  And now, if she kept up her current course, she could end up losing all the credit she’d built with the staff, all the trust she’d earned. It would be so easy to just turn around and go back to her room.

  Then she thought of her brother. She’d been close to him years ago, when she was a little girl and he was a teenager. She’d idolized him, loving the way he’d take on neighborhood bullies or barking dogs to protect her. He protected everybody. That was just the way he was. And she wanted to be just like him—a protector of the weak, not a coward who’d slink back to her safe warm bed at the slightest sign of danger. She’d never be able to live with herself if that child was injured.

  She was at the bottom of the stairs before she realized she’d been moving. Again she stopped; again she listened.

  More silence. Had she been hearing things? Had it just been the tail end of a particularly vivid dream, perhaps brought on by the cry of a bird outside her window? That was—

  Wait.…

  What was that?

  She froze, standing just inside the open entranceway that led to the dining room and back toward the kitchen.

  Had that been a whimper? The sound of someone desperately trying not to cry?

  There it was again! It went on for a couple of seconds, then cut off abruptly, as if purposely muffled. Then she heard the low rumble of a male voice.

  It was coming from the kitchen. She was sure of it. She was also sure there was no way she could give up now. She had to know who the mysterious child was, and what the man was doing to him.

  Nearly tiptoeing now, knowing that if she made even the smallest sound she’d be discovered, she crept across the kitchen like a ghost in flannel skully pajamas. There wasn’t much past this point: just the pantry closet and the door to the basement, which was always locked.

  Now, though, she noticed that the door was open, just a bit. The tiniest crack of light poked out into the kitchen, softly illuminating a few of the blue and white floor tiles. And as she stopped near it to listen, she heard the whimper again.

  It was definitely coming from down there.

  She stopped, her breath coming a little faster. What was a distressed child doing in the basement? And what was a man doing down there with him? She couldn’t think of any possible way this could be anything good.

  What to do, though? Should she call someone? At least one of the staff should be doing rounds somewhere around the house; she could find them and bring them here. But what if they didn’t believe her?

  Or worse—what if they were somehow connected with whatever was going on?

  She closed her eyes for a few seconds, willing her brain to calm down and let her think. Call the police? No, they’d never get here in time.

  Did she dare check it out on her own? Maybe if she sneaked down there—

  She looked around the darkened kitchen for a weapon. The only light came from the tiny shaft from the basement door, the scant moonlight coming in from the window, and a small Mickey Mouse night-light plugged in near the toaster, but it was enough to show her that no weapons were forthcoming. Naturally they kept all the knives and other dangerous implements locked up. Even things like rolling pins were locked away out of reach.

  She could sneak back to her bedroom and look for something there, or—

  The child cried out again. “Nooo! Please…don’t—”

  That was it. Tossing all caution away, she flung the door open and pounded down the wooden stairway, looking wildly around for the source of the cry—

  —and stopped dead.

  There were no yard-care implements here. No chemicals. No spiders.

  There was only a featureless gray room with padded walls and a hard, concrete floor, illuminated by a bank of harsh fluorescent lights overhead.

  In the middle of the room stood a man, his back to the stairway, holding a young boy perhaps nine years old. The man hadn’t noticed her, the sound of her descent drowned out by the child’s cries. As she watched, shocked into immobility, the man laughed and touched the boy’s forehead.

  The boy screamed even louder this time, a sound of transcendent agony that rose to a shrieking crescendo, and then abruptly stopped. The boy’s eyes met hers over the man’s shoulder—pleading with her to do something, anything—and then—

  —he was gone.

  Just like that, the space where he had been was empty. There was nothing left but a faint smell of ozone in the air, a heap of disarrayed clothing, and a tiny, charred pile of what looked like ashes at the man’s feet.

  “NOOOOOOO!” Her own scream, of defiance and shock and disbelief at what she’d just seen, was almost as loud as the boy’s. She rushed forward, having no idea what she intended to do, but not caring. She had to do something.

  The man wheeled around, and she nearly stopped in her tracks again. His face was wild, almost inhuman in its ferocity. His eyes blazed with some weird inner light, and his mouth was stretched wide in a grin straight from the pits of Hell. He reached out, his fingers seeking her.

  “Go—AWAY!” she yelled. It was as if something alien had taken over her mind—she felt like whatever was happening, she was just along for the ride now. Instead of shrinking back from the madman lunging toward her, she held her ground.

  Holding her hands up as if trying to block him, she forced out with her mind.
She felt something, some kind of power, emanate from her and contact the man. For a moment a nimbus of strange foggy light formed around him. He screamed, clutching his head and dropping to his knees.

  She did step back now, staring at him as he writhed, obviously engaged in some fierce internal struggle. Then all the life went out of him and he dropped bonelessly to the floor. Some sort of nebulous, purplish…thing wafted up out of his body and hovered in the air above him. It oriented itself, then shot toward her.

  “NO!” she yelled again, and forced out with her mind as she had done before. She had no idea how she was doing this—it was instinctive, like breathing or crying. But it had its effect—the floating thing changed direction, darting around the room for several seconds and then heading straight up through the ceiling.

  She didn’t move for several seconds. She stood there, rooted to the spot, her numb gaze taking in the room, the pile of ashes and clothes, the unconscious (dead?) man. The weird insane expression had left him; he looked like nothing more than a nondescript, middle-aged man in a suit.

  When the compulsion to remain standing in one place left her, she did the only logical thing she could think of: she ran. Her only thought as she pelted up the stairs was to get away from the man, to find someone on the staff, to bring them down here and show them the man and explain to them about the ashes and the boy and—

  —She flung herself out the door into the kitchen. She didn’t see the shadowy figure standing there until she collided with it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Stone put the matter mostly out of mind for the next couple of days, focusing on catching up with some work he’d let slide while pursuing his investigation. As he suspected, neither Nancy McClain nor Dr. Barnett had contacted him again regarding Madison’s case, so he assumed that their concession to considering an occult connection for what had happened had been covered. He had kept a close watch on the local papers and the late-night news, but no more unusual murders had turned up. Maybe the whole thing was just a coincidence, and he was chasing shadows. He decided he wouldn’t mind that: he had too many other things to do, and if he was being honest with himself, he didn’t have the time to spare on this investigation.