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

by R. L. King

  “Pia? Did you open the box?”

  She took a couple of centering breaths. “Oh, Mark. They—they cut off—”

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice a little husky. “I’m all right, Pia. It hurts, but they fixed it up so it’s not bleeding. They said to look at it your way, so you’d know they aren’t lying.”

  Pia knew what he meant by that, of course. She shifted to her magical sight and examined the aura surrounding the finger. It was weak and fading—in a few more hours it would be gone completely—but right now it glowed with the medium shade of cyan blue that was so familiar to her over the years—as familiar as his voice, or the color of his eyes, or the way his forehead crinkled when he laughed.

  Moving with slow deliberateness, she closed the box again, shutting the gruesome trophy away from her sight. “Why, Mark?” she whispered. “Why are they doing this? Who are they?”

  “I don’t know, Pia.” There was a muffled sound, then he came back on the line. “I can’t talk anymore. Please—do what they say. Go now. Take the note and the box with you. And don’t tell anybody. They’re watching you, Pia. If you tell anyone, they’ll kill us.”

  She took a breath. “All right. All right. I’m coming. Tell Anna I’m coming.”

  “Thank you, Pia.” And then the line went dead.

  For a few moments, Pia could do nothing but sit there on the bed, shaking, trying to get her mind to work properly. She was supposed to be a genius, both in her mundane field and her magical one. She’d always been known for her quick mind. So where was it now? She felt like her brain was packed in the same toilet paper that encased her husband’s severed finger inside the small box.

  She tried to figure out what else she could do. She couldn’t call the police: if the kidnappers knew she was a mage—if they were mages—then their threat about watching her was probably a true one. They could be watching her now.

  She thought about contacting someone from the symposium, one of the other mages, but quickly discarded that idea as well. She had no good friends here, just people she’d met briefly and chatted with for a short time. Even the ones she’d had longer conversations with at the get-together dinner, like the Japanese animal expert and that intense young Brit, hadn’t connected with her on any kind of personal level during their discussions. It had been all about the work. It was even possible, she realized, that one of those people she’d met that night was behind this. Another ice-bolt sliced through her body at that thought. She couldn’t count on any of her magical colleagues for help, because the more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that one of them—or more than one, even—had to be behind it. It still didn’t tell her why, though.

  In any case, it didn’t matter. They had Mark. Worse, they had Anna. If they were watching her now, she had to act. Even if whatever they wanted from her resulted in her own death, she would do everything she could do to save Anna. She would insist that they take her to her daughter, to prove she was still alive and unharmed, and then she would unleash magical Hell upon them. She was not skilled in combat magic—in fact, she had not cast a harmful spell in over twenty years—but like any mother bear whose child was threatened, she would do whatever she had to. She’d even resort to black magic if that’s what it took to save Anna.

  She tucked the box containing the finger into her purse along with the note, ran her hand over her hair to straighten it, and left the hotel room.

  Twenty minutes later, the taxi dropped her off in front of the steakhouse where they’d made reservations. After the cabbie drove off, she glanced around the parking lot in the vain hope that she might spot Mark and Anna there, but of course she didn’t. Clutching her purse tightly to her she crossed the lot and went to the corner where she’d been instructed to wait. People moved past her without noticing her; she was glad, because she was sure she was sending off waves of fear visible in the air around her. Cars whizzed by one after the other on the busy street, and she glanced at each one in turn, wondering which one would stop.

  She didn’t have to wait long. She’d been standing there for less than five minutes when a boxy gray van with no side or rear windows made a smooth stop at the curb in front of her. The back door slid open and a shadowy figure leaned out. “Inside,” was all it said in a voice that was impossible to identify. She couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman.

  Taking a final look around and wondering if anyone would ever see her, her husband, or their daughter alive again, Pia stepped into the van. The door closed and the van moved back into traffic. Before she could get oriented, someone slipped a dark bag over her head.

  “Please tell me what this is about,” she begged. “Why are you doing this?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” said the voice. She thought it was a man, but she couldn’t be completely sure. “Just keep quiet. We’ll be there soon.”

  “Are you taking me to where Mark and Anna are?” She tried to keep the fearful tremor from her voice, but didn’t succeed.

  “We’ll be there soon,” the voice said again.

  The next fifteen minutes were some of the longest in Pia’s life. She sat, miserable, and listened to the thrum of the van’s engine and the sounds of the other traffic, knowing she was surrounded by other people but could do nothing to get help. There were things she could do as a mage to extricate herself from the situation, but her fear that doing so would sign her daughter’s and husband’s death warrants kept her still. That, and the thought that those who had abducted them were mages, too. She still had no idea what they wanted.

  The van moved over a lane and after a few more moments, most of the traffic noise abated. Five minutes after that, the van pulled to a stop.

  “All right,” the voice said, and a hand closed around her upper arm. “Out, please. Watch your step.”

  The hand guided her forward for a few steps, then she heard the metallic creak of a door opening. When she was through, she heard it close behind her, and then someone pulled the bag off her head.

  She stood in a large, open warehouse that was completely empty. The lighting was dim, but she could make out two figures standing in front of her: a tall thin woman and a shorter figure that looked like a child. “Anna—?” she asked, taking a tentative step forward.

  “You’ll see her soon enough,” said the woman, stepping forward. She was blonde and hard-eyed. Pia thought she might recognize her, but wasn’t sure. “First we have to talk.”

  “I want to see her now,” she said, eyes narrowing. “Unless you show me that my husband and my daughter are alive and well, I have nothing to say to you.”

  The woman shrugged. “Suit yourself.” She gestured to someone behind Pia, and two men stepped forward and headed toward a flight of stairs leading up to a small second-story office.

  Pia watched them go. They disappeared inside, and a moment later the door opened and they re-emerged flanking two figures. “Anna!” she cried, surging forward.

  “Mama!” Anna yelled. She tried to run to her mother, but the man behind her grabbed her arm and held her back.

  “You let her go,” Pia ordered. “If you hurt my daughter, I’ll kill you all!”

  “No one’s going to hurt her,” the woman said. She watched as Pia ran over and tried to go to Anna, but the man in front blocked her way. “We talk,” she continued, strolling leisurely over, “and then you can have them back.”

  “So talk,” Pia snarled. “What do you want? I have nothing that you could possibly be interested in.” She had not once taken her eyes off Anna, except for a brief glance toward Mark. He met her eyes; his own were hooded with pain and exhaustion.

  “You do, though,” the woman said. “Come with me.”

  When Pia hesitated, one of the men grabbed her arm and steered her across to the other side of the warehouse. The woman and the child, revealed now to be a small dark-haired boy about Anna’s age, followed.

  “What do you want?” Pia demanded again. “I don’t have much money, and what I do hav
e is back home in Germany. It won’t be easy for me to get.”

  “It isn’t money we want,” the woman said. “Not at all. It’s your expertise.”

  “I don’t understand,” Pia said, confused. “What expertise?”

  So the woman told her, and then explained exactly what she’d need to agree to in order to save the lives of her beloved daughter and her husband.

  Pia stared, her eyes growing huge with shock. “You—can’t be serious,” she said. “How can that even be? How can you do that?”

  “Oh, it’s easy,” the woman said. “And it won’t even be unpleasant for you. I promise. It wasn’t for me. I enjoy it, in fact. It’s given me many opportunities, and it will for you too. You can even leave here with your family if you want to, once it’s over. No reason at all why you can’t work with us from your home.”

  Pia protested; of course she did. No one in her right mind would simply accept the monstrous offer the blonde woman had presented her with. It would be like acknowledging one’s own insanity. But in the end, after all the protests were made, her answer was inevitable. It had to be. It wasn’t as if she had any other choice, when it came down to it.

  Not one she was willing to accept, anyway.

  After that, it was over fast. The process was simple, and when it was over nobody paid any attention to the small pile of ashes that used to be one of the men from the van.

  “There,” said the woman, satisfied, looking Pia over. “See? Nothing to it. Your husband didn’t mind either, when it happened to him. And now you can work with us, and use your talents for something worthwhile. How do you feel?”

  Pia looked at her for a moment, and smiled. It was a strange and unwholesome smile, unlike any expression that had ever appeared on her face before. “I feel great.”

  The blonde woman grinned. “Just what I wanted to hear.” She paused. “Now, there’s just one more thing we have to deal with. What should we do with your daughter and your husband? I told you we’d set them free, and we will if that’s what you want.”

  Pia’s face showed no more emotion than if she were talking about some spate of unremarkable weather. “I don’t care,” she said, shrugging. “It would be easier to just kill them, yes?”

  The woman’s grin widened. “It would,” she said. “It would indeed.”

  They didn’t kill Mark yet—they would have to secure a suitable host for the Other inside him first, as they couldn’t afford to lose any of their limited number of soldiers now that they no longer had a steady supply coming in.

  Anna, however, provided sweet sustenance to all of them with her childish terror. Pia Brandt stood back and watched along with the rest of them, face slack, eyes half closed, and savored every last bit of it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The symposium ended Saturday night, and Stone, Jason, and Verity arrived back in the Bay Area late Sunday afternoon.

  The conference had gone well for all of them: Stone’s seminars were big successes, Verity made several new contacts among the younger generation of mages, and Jason had hooked up with one of the women at the restaurant and enjoyed a pleasant evening with her before spending several hours on Saturday afternoon accompanying Verity around to some of the more amusing of the seminars put on by non-mages. He now knew, for example, far more than he wanted to about how to determine whether his next pet had been an ancient Egyptian in a former life. Verity had even convinced him to have his Tarot read by a rotund little bald man in a turban: the man had apologetically told him that he saw dark times in his future, but Jason had just shrugged that off. Given everything they’d been through over the last few months, he’d have been surprised—and maybe even a little bored—if he didn’t have dark times in his future. His Saturday night with a freaky Pagan chick he’d met at the pet seminar had been anything but boring, though, and he didn’t even bother asking Verity what she’d done with her evening.

  Life returned mostly to normal over the next couple of weeks: Jason went back to his job as assistant manager of A Passage to India, Verity split her time between studying magic with Stone and cooking part time at the restaurant, and Stone resumed teaching his classes at Stanford.

  There was only one difference, one that caused Jason a fair degree of discomfort: ever since she’d returned from the conference, Verity had been going out a lot more in the evenings. When he asked her where she was spending her time, she gave him a vague answer about “hanging out with friends.” Since he knew one of the mages she’d met in Los Angeles was from San Francisco, he suspected Verity’s newfound night life was connected with him. Sure enough, when he confronted her about it one evening at their apartment while she was getting ready for another one of her outings, she readily admitted it.

  “It’s nothing to get worked up about,” she told him, rolling her eyes. “I’m not getting drunk or taking drugs or anything. Just going out to some clubs with Teddy and some of his friends. The rest of them aren’t mages, but they’re cool.”

  “So, you’re just going out with a bunch of people you don’t know,” he said, frowning.

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Yeah, and? You do it all the time. And besides, how am I gonna get to know anybody if I never do anything?”

  “Is Al okay with this?” he asked, ignoring her tone.

  Her narrowed eyes became a full-bore glare. “How should I know? As long as I keep up with my studies, he doesn’t try to run my life. You know, like you do?”

  “V, you’re just being stubborn. I’m not trying to run your life.”

  “Coulda fooled me, big bro.” She brushed past him and snatched up her leather jacket from a nearby chair. “Don’t wait up. I’ll be back when I get back. Maybe you should go meet somebody and get laid or something, so you can worry about your own life instead of mine for a while.”

  She swept out of the apartment, slamming the door behind her. Jason stood staring at it, unable to decide whether he should be seething, hurt, bewildered, or simply sad. He finally settled for all of the above.

  When it got to be after two a.m. and she wasn’t back yet, Jason called Stone. “Did I wake you up?”

  “No. Just doing some reading.”

  “Verity didn’t come over there, did she?”

  “She’s not home yet?”

  “Not yet.” Jason sighed. “I know I shouldn’t worry about her—I mean, she is eighteen, and I’m not her guardian anymore. But it’s not like her to stay out this late and not at least call me to let me know where she is. Hell, if I’m gonna stay out late, I give her a call to let her know. But she was pretty pissed at me when she left.”

  “Perhaps she’s just out with her friends and lost track of time.” A pause, then: “She’s capable of taking care of herself, Jason, at least against most mundane threats.”

  “It’s not the mundane threats I’m worried about. What if the Evil—”

  “The Evil hasn’t showed its face in months. I’m not saying it isn’t possible, but I’d first go with the more likely explanation: that she’s an eighteen-year-old woman and she’s out having fun with her friends. And besides: I’d say with her ability, she’s probably better equipped to deal with the Evil than we are.”

  “So…you’re not gonna do anything about it? She’s your apprentice. Can’t you just tell her—I dunno—not to do that? She won’t listen to me. I don’t even try anymore.”

  Another long pause. “She’s my apprentice, Jason, not my ward. She’s an adult. I can direct her with regard to magical affairs—that’s what she agreed to when she agreed to apprentice herself to me. But I can’t control her social life or her non-magical activities. As long as she keeps up her studies satisfactorily, that’s all I can ask of her. And all I’d want to, frankly. There’s a reason I don’t have children: I don’t want that kind of responsibility over another person.”

  Jason glared at the phone, but he knew Stone was right. “I guess we just wait, then.”

  “Trust her a little, Jason. I know how you are—you want to prote
ct everyone you care about. But you have to give them the freedom to make their own decisions. And sometimes to make their own mistakes.”

  Stone was fast asleep, papers spread out around him on the couch, when a knock on his door awakened him. He glanced at the clock: A little before seven a.m. He got up and dragged himself to the door, running his hand through his tangled hair. Nobody who knew him would make the mistake of showing up on his doorstep this early. “Who is it?” he called through the closed door. His voice sounded rough, like he’d had three or four cigarettes with a whiskey chaser.

  “It’s me.”

  Stone opened the door. Verity stood there, dressed in her club gear: black leather jacket, black miniskirt, fishnets, combat boots, dramatic makeup, spiked leather dog collar. The makeup drooped a bit, especially around her eyes. She looked like she might have been crying, something Stone had never seen before.

  “Well,” he said after a moment, tilting his head. “I’m not sure which of us looks worse.” He stood aside and waved her in. “Why didn’t you just use your key?”

  She gave him a strange smile. “I knew you wouldn’t be awake, and I didn’t think you were expecting me. I thought knocking was smarter.”

  “Good call.” He led her into the kitchen, waved her toward the table, and started making coffee. “Are you all right? Nothing happened, did it?”

  “I…had a fight with Jason.”

  “Oh?” Stone raised an eyebrow.

  She nodded. “I got back to the apartment around 2:30. I’d been out clubbing with Teddy and some of the others, dancing—just having a good time. Jason was still up when I got home.” She picked up a magazine and riffled through it. “I told him I didn’t want to get into it right then, but he wouldn’t listen. We had a huge argument. I figured this was probably about the earliest I could come over without you telling me to get lost.”