by R. L. King
He cursed the beings who had brought it here: he had, many times throughout his life, been accused of arrogance—the very act of magic, at least the way he practiced it, consisted of reshaping reality to conform to one’s will, which he supposed was a pretty accurate definition of the word. But what the Evil had done—what Trin had done—was beyond arrogance. She had summoned something she had no hope of controlling, and set it to a task that, if they were lucky, would only bring about the deaths of thousands of people. And that was just the initial wave, as it claimed its promised reward for what she had asked it to do.
Anger—rage—flowed through him, driving away the despair, but doing nothing to help him decide on a course of action. He had only seconds now: the thrum of the portal had grown so loud that it physically pounded in his ears and in his psyche, deafening him to everything but its unnatural heartbeat. If he couldn’t somehow affect it—divert its attention at the very least—from that portal, the ley lines would finish doing their jobs and the portal would become part of the landscape of the earth, as permanent and immovable as a mountain or an ocean.
But how could he get its attention if it wouldn’t fight? It seemed that its entire purpose was to provide its energy to the portal, to keep it propped up until nature took its course. Somehow, Trin had figured out a way to summon it, promise it blood in payment, and convince it to do this job. Just as—
He froze.
His body went so still that he might have been a statue.
He’d said it before: it was just like a much more ambitious version of the ritual he’d done with Stefan, what seemed now to be years ago.
That spirit, too, had seemed unstoppable.
But he had stopped it.
And then, instantly, he knew what he had to do.
He had done it before, without the ley lines. He didn’t know if they would help this time. He didn’t have time to care.
Fixing his gaze on the spirit, he raised his shaking arms.
He focused his mind.
He touched the conduit and felt the raging tide of energy straining to break free, held back by nothing more than his own will.
He couldn’t just nudge it open this time. That wouldn’t be enough.
The portal’s hum grew louder, and louder still.
It was now or never.
This would probably kill him. He knew that.
He pointed his hands at the spirit and opened the door.
The power came.
The pain came.
And together, they were wonderful.
Jason, Verity, and Sharra skidded to a stop about fifty feet from Stone.
“What’s he doing?” Verity yelled, her eyes so huge that the whites were visible all around them.
“Holy shit…” Jason whispered. He too stared, unable to believe or to process what he was seeing.
He wouldn’t have thought, after looking at the towering, shining, multi-hued portal, that anything could possibly draw attention away from it.
He was wrong.
One moment, Stone stood there, head bowed, shoulders slumped, looking like he would pass out any second. The next, his head had jerked up, his body going rigid like someone had just plugged him into an electrical outlet. His expression went from hopelessness to a sharp, fierce clarity, his eyes shining with purpose. And then he raised his hands and—
—and his entire body began to glow with some kind of unearthly, silver-gold light that shone so bright it was hard to look straight at it. The light grew in intensity until Stone was nothing more than a humanoid sun standing there in the dust and the darkness. From his hands, which were pointed at the spirit, erupted what Jason could only later describe in terms of a large-diameter hose and impossibly high pressure. Stone wasn’t so much casting the magic as directing it—his teeth were gritted, cords stood out on his neck, his whole body braced as if against some unseen onslaught that tried to sweep him off his feet. He looked simultaneously in agony and in ecstasy.
The force itself glowed with the same silver-gold light that Stone himself was wreathed in; it wasn’t lightning, nor fire, nor kinetic energy, nor any of the other types of damaging spells Jason had ever seen Stone throw. “What—the hell—” he began, without looking away. He couldn’t look away.
Verity didn’t answer. Neither did Sharra. They were as transfixed by the scene as he was.
Four things happened then, almost simultaneously:
The deluge of searing magical energy struck the spirit high up on its “body,” in the place where a human’s chest would be.
The spirit screamed—it wasn’t an audible sound, but a psychic one—and winked out of existence as if sucked into the vast maw of the world’s biggest vacuum cleaner. A whole series of small reddish-purple forms flew through the air and slipped into the same hole, which then disappeared into itself as if it had never been. Verity and Sharra both clutched their heads, let out little grunts of pain, and dropped as one to the hard dusty ground.
For a moment, so briefly that Jason wasn’t even sure he’d seen it properly, a series of massive crisscrossing lines became visible, running straight and true in all directions as far as Jason could see, and converging on where Stone stood, his hands still upraised, facing the portal.
The portal erupted, its strange heartbeat picking up speed until it thrummed so quickly that it became a single sound.
And then it disappeared.
Just like that, it was gone: no cosmic vacuum cleaner, no explosion, no sound. Just…gone.
Jason, breathing hard, looked back at Stone. He had stopped directing the weird energy. For a moment he just stood there, unmoving, looking up at where the spirit and the portal had been.
And then he dropped like someone had cut his strings.
Jason took a step toward him, but it was then, at last, that his injury and his exhaustion finally caught up to him. He could offer his body no amount of convincing that there was still something he needed to be awake for.
As he dropped to his knees and lost consciousness, the last sight he saw was the stars overhead, obscured only by the drifting smoke of the fires around the playa, and the bright searchlight of a single helicopter as it moved in slow circles around the area.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The first thing Stone noticed when awareness returned to him was a persistent, annoying beeping. He didn’t believe in any sort of afterlife, but he supposed the joke would be on him if hell turned out to be nothing but being stuck in a room with a rhythmic, incessant electronic beep that you could never stop.
Or maybe this was heaven. In hell, the beep wouldn’t be rhythmic.
He opened his eyes.
Either the afterlife looked like a utilitarian hospital room, or he hadn’t managed to kill himself after all. He still wasn’t sure which.
He tried to sit up a little, just to see if he could. His body felt like it was encased in lead, but nothing hurt. Good drugs, most likely.
Almost as if they’d hidden motion sensors in his bed, the door opened and a woman in purple scrubs appeared. “You’re awake,” she said, smiling. “How do you feel?”
He considered. He didn’t have a good answer for that. His mind struggled to bring back the details of what had happened to him, but they all careened around like he’d tossed them into one of those old-time rock tumblers. “Er—” was all he managed to get out.
She fluffed his pillow, checked the small collection of beeping machines he was attached to, and nodded. “It’s okay,” she said. “I know you’ve been through quite a bit. Just relax. Your friend Jason has been wanting to see you—okay if I let him in?”
Jason. So Jason was alive, still. Mentally he ticked off one item on his list of things he could stop worrying about. He nodded. “Thank you.” His voice came out croaky and rasping, like he hadn’t used it in a while.
She nodded and left, and in a moment Jason appeared in the doorway. He looked tired and paler than usual, and his arm was in a sling, but when he saw that Stone was awa
ke his face lit up in a grin. “Al!” He hurried in, dropped the paperback novel he’d been reading on the nightstand, and gripped Stone’s arm, hard. “Damn, man, it’s good to see you alive. How do you feel?”
“How—should I feel?” His voice was coming back now, and a fraction of the leaden feeling was lifting. “How long has it been, since—”
“Three days,” Jason said. “We’re in Reno, by the way, if you care.”
“Reno…”
He nodded. “Yeah.” He let out a blast of air and settled into the chair next to the bed. “You’re lucky you missed it. The whole thing’s been an enormous clusterfuck the last few days.”
Stone realized that Jason was alone, and he stiffened, sitting up to look past him. “Verity—?”
“She’s fine. Sharra’s fine too. They passed out—something at the end must’ve overloaded their circuits, but they woke up pretty soon after. They’re back at the motel right now getting some rest. I’ll call ’em and tell ’em you’re awake.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“You tell me what happened. What the hell did you do? How did you—” He glanced around to make sure nobody was coming into the room. “—how did you get rid of that spirit, and the portal? I’ve never seen you cast anything anywhere near that big, Al. Whatever it was, it almost killed you.”
Stone ignored his question, fixing an intense gaze fixing on him. “They’re gone, then? The spirit? The portal?”
Jason nodded. “Oh, yeah. They’re gone. You did it, Al. I have no fucking clue what you did, but you did it.”
Relieved, Stone sank back to his pillows, feeling another portion of the lead weight lifting from his chest. “Tell me what happened after I passed out.”
“It was a mess,” he said, shaking his head. “I checked out too, for a while—when I woke up, V and Sharra were already awake, and kind of guarding both of us to make sure nobody messed with us. Eventually the authorities showed up, but it took a while for them to get there. Helicopters, planes first—the ground stuff took longer. And the media, of course.” He picked up the TV remote from Stone’s nightstand and flicked on the small set suspended from the ceiling. “Take a look for yourself. It’s all that’s been on for the last three days.”
The TV was tuned to CNN, and the banner across the bottom read “TERROR AT BURNING MAN.” Above it, cameras panned over a postapocalyptic early-dawn scene, showing fleets of emergency vehicles and the ghostly forms of shell-shocked, dust-wreathed people wandering around in dazes. Behind them, clouds of blackened smoke billowed up from the remains of fires. “They’re saying it was some kind of terrorist attack,” Jason said. “Because of all the guns they found, and people with gunshot wounds. But they don’t have a fucking clue about what happened. And they can’t even start to figure out what was up with the weird black thing and the glowing thing. They both showed up on a few people’s fuzzy videos, but—” he spread his hands as if to say I got nothing.
Stone bowed his head. “How many dead?” he asked softly.
“They don’t know yet. They’re still cataloging. A lot of people didn’t have ID on them, so it’s hard. Estimates are about one to two hundred. Couple thousand injured, about half of them seriously. They’ve been airlifting people to hospitals all over Nevada and northern California. They didn’t want to move you too far because they didn’t know what the hell was wrong with you.”
Stone raised a questioning eyebrow.
Jason shrugged. “You didn’t have any injuries worse than a lot of bumps and bruises, but you almost died two or three times before they got you back to the hospital. They said it was like you had a massive case of shock, but they couldn’t figure out what was causing it.” He paused. “It was that spell you cast, wasn’t it? Whatever it was. That’s what did it to you.”
Stone nodded, remembering the way the magic burned its way through every pathway in his body—it had been the best thing he’d ever felt in his life, and the worst. “Probably. It was a risk, but I had no other choice. I didn’t know how else to deal with the spirit. Wasn’t sure it would even work.”
“Damn glad it did.” He paused. “Al?”
“Yes?”
“I—saw something, right before I passed out. I’m not even sure I really did. But—it looked like I saw a bunch of pipelines crossing over each other and coming together right where you were standing. And—I saw a whole lot of those things—like remember the one inside Gordon Lucas? I saw them flying into the spirit before it disappeared. V said it was—eating the Evil. Do you think it ate them all before it left?”
Stone thought about that. “I don’t know. But it certainly sounds like it did. Did they find their bodies?”
He shook his head. “From what I hear, some pretty famous people are missing. A mob boss, a big-time actress, some huge televangelist from down South—some of the witnesses on site said they saw them there, but nobody can find them.”
Stone nodded, satisfied. “It sounds like we might have finally seen the end of the organized Evil, then.” He sighed. “A high price to pay for it, all those deaths. But ultimately probably worth it for the deaths that will be prevented in the future.”
“Yeah…” Slowly, Jason stood. “I guess I’d better let you get some rest. I’ll go call V and let her know you’re okay. She’s been worried.”
Stone noticed he wasn’t moving with anything like his usual athletic grace. “Are you all right, Jason?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I’m okay. I think all things considered, I got off pretty easy. If it takes getting shot in the arm to get rid of the Evil, I guess it’s worth it.” Waving, he crossed to the door. “I’ll come back later tonight and bring V. We’ll find out when you can get out of here so we can go home.”
“Brilliant,” Stone agreed. He hated hospitals. Glancing down, he saw that Jason had left his paperback. Automatically, he raised a hand and focused on levitating it over to him.
He froze.
His body went rigid as the door closed behind his friend.
Heart pounding, he concentrated once more on the book. He used same familiar flick of his mind that he’d used thousands of times to manipulate everything from paperback novels to Volkswagen buses.
Nothing happened.
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Table of Contents
STONE AND A HARD PLACE
THE FORGOTTEN
THE THRESHOLD
THE SOURCE