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

by R. L. King

  “I dunno,” Jason said. “Maybe it’s just gonna have to be a mystery, you know? I asked my friend to give me a call if they find out anything else, but maybe this is just one of those cases where it’s weird, but it doesn’t mean anything. I know you’re curious as hell about puzzles, but you might just have to let this one go.”

  Stone nodded reluctantly. “I suppose so. It’s just a shame to lose one of our number and not even know why. There are so few of us left these days.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” He paused; when he spoke again his voice was more animated. “Oh, hey, V called today.”

  “Oh? How is she?”

  “Great, apparently. She and Sharra are having a great time back there. She said they haven’t even really talked about magic much. They’re too busy going out to clubs and restaurants and just having fun.” He shrugged. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe this is what she needed—to get away from us for a while, and figure out what she wants to do with her life.”

  “Did you tell her that?” Stone asked, amused.

  “Of course not. Do I look like an idiot?” Jason was clearly trying to sound indignant, but his grin spoiled the effect. “She doesn’t know when she’ll be back—she said to look for her when she gets here.”

  Stone nodded and got up. “Well, thank you for the update on Dr. Brandt. It’s frustrating not knowing, but at least we have a bit more information now.”

  “Yeah. I’ll let you know if I get anything else—oh! Hang on!”

  Stone paused, eyebrow raised.

  “I almost forgot the other thing I was gonna tell you. It’s probably nothing, but I found it while I was poking around so I figured I’d pass it along.” He picked up a file folder from the coffee table, riffled through it, and handed Stone a photocopy.

  It was a copy of a newspaper article from the Los Angeles Times, dated three days after the end of the Occult Symposium. The headline read:

  Police seek public’s assistance to locate missing man

  The article included a picture, depicting a young man with longish, dark hair and a thin face. Stone frowned, looked up at Jason, then back down at the article. “Adam Darden, 24 years old, went missing from the Los Angeles area on the same day that Pia Brandt’s husband and daughter disappeared. And the police can’t find any sign of him either.”

  “Yeah,” Jason said, nodding. “Probably nothing. People disappear all the time. But—yeah. His mother said she had no reason to suspect he’d taken off on his own, and as far as she knew he wasn’t in trouble. No police record, gang activity, nothing like that. Seems like just your basic boring guy with a basic boring job.”

  Stone continued to stare down at the article without really seeing it. He said nothing.

  “Al?”

  “What? Oh—” He shrugged, handing the article back to Jason. “You’re right: it probably is nothing. The odds of there being a connection in an area with that many people are astronomical. Unless you somehow find out that he was at Disneyland on the same day, we can probably assume coincidence.”

  Jason nodded again. “Yeah. I’ll keep an eye out, though, and ask my friend to let me know if anything turns up.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Another three weeks passed. Stone wrapped up his classes, took care of all the administrivia of reading his students’ examinations and submitting their grades, and looked forward to some time away from the University. He hadn’t committed to any summer courses aside from a couple evening seminars, allowing him to devote his full attention to his magical research. He hoped he might finally make a breakthrough on Harrison’s notes.

  Verity remained back East. She’d called Stone a couple of times to let him know she was doing well, she and Sharra were still getting along great, and she was keeping up with the magical exercises he’d given her to keep her skills sharp during her break. True to her word, she told him that she hadn’t taken any magical instruction from Sharra beyond a couple of useful but minor techniques. She didn’t, however, know when she might be coming back. She and Sharra had a trip to New York City planned, and she was looking forward to that.

  “Don’t worry,” she told him. “I haven’t seen any trace of anything that looks like the Evil. I think there’s just so few of them now that they’re doing their own thing and leaving us alone.”

  Stone had almost forgotten about the situation with Pia Brandt by this time. Jason hadn’t turned up anything new, and neither had he (in truth, he’d been so busy that beyond his initial phone calls to his friends in England, he hadn’t done much else), so gradually the whole thing got pushed back until it dropped below his radar.

  This changed one mid-July day, when he arrived home to find a battered and heavily taped manila envelope waiting on his doorstep. He picked it up, noting it had come from one of his British mage associates, and took it inside.

  The envelope was stuffed full of clipped-together photocopies, with a brief note on top:

  Alastair:

  I wrote to a couple of friends in Germany, and this is what they turned up. I don’t read German, so I have no idea if it’s what you wanted—I’ll leave digging through it to you. Enjoy!

  Cheers,

  Eddie

  He took the envelope upstairs, cleared off his desk, and began unpacking it. When he had everything spread out, he found six individual papers ranging in size from a few pages to over a hundred. All were clearly scholarly publications, all authored by Pia Brandt, and all written in German.

  Stone leafed through them, pausing to examine the diagrams, graphs, and equations. He couldn’t read any of the text—he’d never bothered to learn German in school—but what he got from the illustrations was enough to make him tense with frustration at his inability to comprehend the rest of it.

  Pia Brandt’s papers, as near as he could determine, were all devoted to various aspects of magical portals: their creation, their refinement, and their interactions with ley lines. From the look of what he could understand, this was advanced stuff—even more advanced than what his late ex-girlfriend Daphne Weldon and her team had been exploring on the nature of temporary portals. He scrubbed at his hair with one hand, barely realizing that his breathing had picked up. There was so much here—he could see it! It was so tantalizingly close, but his own lack of knowledge prevented him from reaching it.

  He leaned back in his chair and thought about what to do. Of course, there were numerous professors at Stanford who were fluent in German, some he even knew personally. But all of them were mundanes. Aside from the fact that he had no desire to try explaining the meaning of detailed treatises on magical portal science to a non-magical audience, he also doubted that a mundane would have the proper grounding in magical vocabulary to do an adequate translation. He could tell from looking at the text that it described some highly advanced concepts—he wasn’t sure he would be able to make sense of them, and lately he had a fairly strong grounding in portal science.

  If he couldn’t take the papers to a mundane, he couldn’t read them himself, and none of his British friends could translate them either, that left him with only two choices: search out a bilingual German mage who would be willing to take the time and effort for a long, arduous translation project, or—

  Or.

  The second answer was not one he wanted to pursue, but the upside of it was that the obvious solution was close at hand and almost certain to agree to the job.

  It was simply a matter of what Stone would have to agree to in exchange that made him hesitate.

  The wards were still going strong around Stefan Kolinsky’s disreputable little shop in East Palo Alto, Stone noticed with some disappointment as he slipped through the unassuming front door. He hoped they’d be fading: if they were, then he could use the offer of refreshing them as a bargaining chip. Constructing wards that lasted this long without touch-ups took a lot out of him both physically and mentally—he usually had to budget at least half a day to recover afterward—but it was straightforward work and easy enough for him to
accomplish.

  He descended the stairs to the lower level, barely noticing the familiar bland décor as he headed toward the back of the shop.

  Like his establishment, Stefan Kolinsky himself didn’t look any different either. A tall, powerfully built man with gray-shot black hair and glittering black eyes, he lounged in his ancient leather desk chair like a panther on a branch and regarded Stone over steepled fingers.

  “Alastair. So good to see you. It has been a while.”

  “Hello, Stefan. Thank you for meeting with me. I know how busy you are.” He quirked a sardonic eyebrow: not once, during any of his visits to Kolinsky’s shop, had he ever seen another customer. He wondered if the man even had any. Not that he needed them. Like Madame Huan, another friend of Stone’s in an ostensibly similar line of work, what one saw on the surface was only a tiny fragment of how he actually plied his trade.

  “Indeed,” Kolinsky said, waving him to a chair. “I was just about to go out for a late lunch. I’ve heard good things about a little Greek place that just opened off Cowper.”

  Stone didn’t take the bait. He didn’t mind treating Kolinsky to an overpriced lunch at some trendy little bistro—he’d certainly done it before—but for this particular visit he wanted to get his cards out on the table at the beginning. As amusing as the dance usually was, today he wanted to avoid as much of it as he could manage. “I won’t keep you long, then.”

  “What can I do for you?” Kolinsky asked, gracefully acknowledging Stone’s polite rebuff with a nod.

  Stone held up his battered leather briefcase. “I’ve acquired a project I was hoping you might be able to assist me with.”

  “Oh?” Kolinsky leaned forward. “And what sort of project is that?”

  “Something you might find intriguing.” He opened the case and slipped the first of the six files from it. Or rather, a copy of the first of the six files. The original copies Eddie had sent him were safely back at his townhouse.

  As Stone expected, Kolinsky straightened a bit in his chair. The man was part spider and part dragon, possessed of a keen intellect and a curiosity about magical matters every bit as acute as Stone’s own. That was the main reason the two of them got along so well, despite being on opposite sides of the magical fence, morality-wise. The difference between them was that Stone sought out knowledge for its own sake, and as a means for him to learn more about the magical world. Kolinsky collected it like currency and used it to his advantage, trading it to any who would deal with him in exchange for other knowledge, contacts, secrets, and favors. For a man who rarely left the Bay Area, Stefan Kolinsky was probably one of the more knowledgeable people about worldwide magical goings-on that Stone had ever met.

  And that was what kept Stone coming back, even in the face of some of the “favors” the man had extracted from him over the years. Sometimes you had to deal with the devil you knew in the service of a greater cause. This was one of those times.

  He held up the sheaf. “This is a paper written by a woman named Pia Brandt. Have you perhaps heard of her?”

  “Not offhand,” Kolinsky said, his eyes still fixed on the paper. “Should I have?”

  “Not sure. I hadn’t, before last month. She’s a German mathematician by trade, and a magical researcher by avocation. She’s also gone missing, under rather mysterious circumstances.”

  Kolinsky’s eyebrow rose. “Oh? I’m sorry to hear that. I trust you don’t wish me to find her.”

  “Hardly. Though I daresay if I could convince you to take on the case, you might find more success than the police have so far.”

  “Flattery.” Kolinsky waved him off. “So what do you want, then?”

  “Translation services,” Stone said. “I’ve gotten hold of several of her papers and I’d very much like to see what she has to say, but they’re all written in German.”

  Kolinsky made a clucking noise. “For shame, Alastair. You’re admitting there’s something you don’t know?”

  “There are a lot of things I don’t know,” Stone said, shrugging. “I find new ones every day. But for now, I need these papers translated. I don’t care if you do it yourself or farm it off to your minions—there’s nothing secret about the contents.”

  “And what are the contents?” Kolinsky asked.

  “Portals. From what I can make out from the illustrations, they’re some seriously high level research on portal theory and ley lines. But that’s as far as I can get.”

  “Hmm.” Kolinsky unspooled himself from his chair in a graceful motion that belied his apparent age. “I might have some time. A project I was thinking about pursuing has fallen through, which leaves a hole in my schedule.”

  Stone gave him a thin smile. They both knew Kolinsky wasn’t fooling either of them: he was as interested in the subject as Stone was, and the opportunity to get hold of new research wasn’t something he would turn down. “You’ll do it, then?”

  “Possibly.” Kolinsky raised one shoulder in a languid shrug. “There is the matter of—compensation, of course,”

  “You’re welcome to make copies of all the papers, certainly,” Stone said.

  “Oh, I intended to do that anyway. Fascinating as I’m sure they are, though, that won’t be sufficient for the level of work that I’m sure will be required for a proper translation. You wouldn’t want me to misinterpret a variable somewhere, would you?”

  “Heaven forbid,” Stone murmured.

  “How many of these papers are we talking about?”

  He pulled the rest of them out. “Six. Total page count between all of them is around two hundred or so, plus another fifty in various charts, diagrams, and graphs.”

  Kolinsky nodded, but didn’t reply.

  “Well, what do you want to do it? I can’t charge up your wards for you, since I’ve done such a good job last time that they’re still at full strength. I guess I’ll have to do shoddier work next time.”

  Kolinsky chuckled. “I don’t think you’re capable of shoddy work, Alastair. It would wound your professional pride.” He paused, turning away from Stone as he thought. He was silent for several moments before speaking again. “No. Actually, you’ve come to me at an opportune time. I’ll do your translation for you. Personally. I’ll even—as you say—put a rush on it for you.”

  “And—?”

  “And,” he said, turning back and eyeing Stone with an expression a shark might reserve for a particularly tasty-looking surfer, “I have a little project you’re uniquely suited to help me with in exchange. In fact, we might even combine the two.”

  “Oh?” Stone kept his expression carefully neutral. One thing you did not do around Stefan Kolinsky was show any manner of weakness or indecision. In that respect, he could add “tiger” to his pedigree along with spider and dragon—any chinks in one’s metaphysical armor were to be exploited, no matter how much regard he held for the would-be victim.

  Kolinsky nodded. “I’ve got a summoning I’ve been meaning to do. I’ve come into possession of a formula that will allow me to bring over a spirit to help me with some of my more complex research. But I’m missing one of the vital components for it.”

  “And that is…?” Stone was not sure he liked where this was going, but he still didn’t show it. His poker face was damn good, and a significant bit of that was the product of his past interactions with Kolinsky.

  “Blood, my dear Alastair. Specifically, the blood of a white mage. Or—” he added with an amused smile, “—a pale gray one, at any rate, which is probably the best I can hope to get.”

  Stone drew a slow deep breath. Even by the standards of some of the things Kolinsky had asked for in the past in exchange for favors, this was a bit extreme. Still— “How…much blood?”

  “Oh, not much. Certainly no more than an ounce or so.”

  “You know, I could simply take my papers to someone else to translate for me. Someone in Germany, perhaps. It would be inconvenient, but so would giving you my blood.”

  Kolinsky affected
a hurt look. “Alastair. I’m not asking you to simply give it to me. That would be rude, and I certainly wouldn’t expect you to trust me that far. Besides, it needs to be freshly harvested. I want you to be present at the ritual itself. You can see exactly what I do with it…and verify for yourself that I destroy any remainder at the completion of the ritual. And I wouldn’t ask you to contribute anything that I myself am not also contributing.”

  “You’re planning to add your own blood to the ritual as well.” Part of Stone—the prudent part—was trying to beat feet for the exit right about now, but his curious part, which was much more influential, held it back. He had to admit that the idea of this ritual intrigued him. He’d never encountered one like it before. “And you’re summoning a spirit to help you with other research? I’m surprised you’d take the chance.” Every mage, white or black, knew spirits were dangerous things: even if you got what you were expecting, they didn’t like to be brought forcibly from their home dimensions to this one, and they were always looking for ways to subvert the summoning mage’s control. If they did that and they were relatively benign, they just went back home. If they weren’t—Stone remembered the little imp he’d tried to summon in his attic a couple months ago, using what he thought was a reasonable understanding of Harrison’s methods of drawing power. If Jason and Verity hadn’t come along when they did, even that little thing could potentially have killed him. True, it would have been difficult, but it wasn’t wise to take even weak spirits for granted.

  “That’s the beauty of it,” Kolinsky said, warming to his subject. “It’s a different sort of ritual, designed to persuade the spirit rather than enslaving it by brute force. That’s why I need the blood of a white mage. The ritual promises to be particularly useful when you need assistance with mental or magical tasks. It turns out that some spirits are quite good at that sort of thing. The implications are fascinating. I’m sure I could arrange to add your little translation project to the spirit’s to-do list, once it’s here.” His eyes glittered. “You know you’re curious, Alastair. It’s practically radiating from you.”