Blood and Stone

by King, R. L.

  ALASTAIR STONE CHRONICLES: BOOK SIX

  BLOOD AND STONE

  R.L. KING

  Copyright ©2015, R. L. King

  Blood and Stone

  First Smashwords Edition, May 2016

  Edited by John Helfers

  Cover Art by Streetlight Graphics

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  To my mom, Cheryl King (1933-2011) who instilled in me a love of spooky things.

  Chapter One

  I’m getting too damn old for this.

  The thought hit Jason Thayer’s befuddled brain half a second before he doubled over and threw up into the gutter.

  It was somewhere on the far side of two a.m., and he was seriously regretting his decision to walk back to his motel room instead of accepting Ed’s offer to call him a cab.

  “It’s not far,” he’d said. “The night air will do me good,” he’d said.

  God, he was an idiot.

  The only thing worse than an idiot was a lost idiot.

  The party had been fantastic: Ed’s parents had a big spread, complete with bar, swimming pool, tree-filled back yard, and big-screen TV on which to watch the impressive collection of pornographic movies the guys had procured, and they’d kindly agreed to clear out for the night in order to allow their son’s friends to drink too much and get sick all over the deck. After all, Ed was only going to get married once, right?

  There weren’t supposed to be strippers—Ed had put up a token protest, complaining that if his fiancée found out about them he’d be spending his wedding night in the doghouse instead of the honeymoon suite. But they’d gotten a few shots into him, and before long he was cheering along with the crowd as the two eerily limber women had done things to each other that didn’t seem anatomically possible.

  Yeah, it didn’t get much better than this.

  Or at least it hadn’t before things finally started to wind down. One by one the guests tottered off, either to cabs called for them or to crash on one of the many couches or beds scattered throughout the house. Things were still going when Jason left, but he could see that the party maybe had another hour of life left and even through his alcohol-soaked haze he knew he wanted to get at least some sleep before tomorrow—preferably in his own bed, not surrounded by a bunch of snoring drunks.

  Throwing up at the bachelor party was one thing. Throwing up on the bride in the receiving line would be something else entirely.

  Now, weaving along a winding, rock-lined street that looked like all the other winding, rock-lined streets in this godforsaken excuse for a neighborhood, Jason was beginning to re-evaluate the whole cab thing. Ojai, a few miles north of his native Ventura, was a small town, and nothing was very far from anything else. But even the couple of miles he had to cover seemed like an interminable hike when his head was pounding, his stomach was doing the cha-cha, and his shirt reeked of sweat, nachos, cheap beer, and the not-so-subtle hint of whatever perfume the blonde stripper had been wearing way too much of.

  She’d been one fine-looking lady, though. Tall, tanned all over (and he meant all over), and built like a brick shithouse—whatever the hell that was supposed to even mean. He had vague memories of trying to coax her into one of the bedrooms with him as she ground herself on his lap in time with the driving beat of the music, and of her laughing cheerfully and calling him a “naughty boy” before sashaying off to rejoin her fellow performer in the front room. Ah, well. He’d tried. Nobody could say he hadn’t tried.

  High school had been less than ten years ago, but despite the good time he’d had at the party, he’d gotten a good headful of the reason why clichés got to be clichés: because they contained at least a little bit of truth. You really couldn’t go home again—not like the way things used to be, anyway. The guys—chubby party animal Shane, athletic ladies’ man Kurt, and longhaired wannabe jock Chris, who everybody called “Cramp” for reasons best left in the past—had been his best buds through high school in Ventura. They’d hung out together, dated the same girls and never committed to one, played on the same sports teams, and got into trouble on weekends. Not too much trouble, since Jason already had his mind set on the police academy even at that point, but enough that high school overall was a pretty good time in his life. A time before a lot of things had gone, as his friend Alastair Stone would say, “pear-shaped.”

  Now, though, with his stomach roiling and his head feeling like somebody had used it for home base, high school seemed another lifetime ago. None of the others had left the area: Shane sold shoes at the mall in Ventura; Kurt, after losing his dream to play pro ball to a bad throwing-arm break in his senior year of college, worked at his dad’s landscape supply company; and Cramp, who’d never seemed to know quite what he wanted to do with his life, still lived at home and held down a dead-end job at a local hardware store. When the four of them had gotten together for dinner in Ojai prior to tonight’s party, Jason had a hard time joining in with their conversations, and even as great as the party had been, some small corner of his mind just wanted the night to be over. Even though he’d only lived in the Bay Area a year, the apartment he shared with his sister in Mountain View already felt more like home than this did.

  Swaying back and forth, he grabbed onto a street sign for balance and glanced up at white letters that swam across it: Foothill. He was on Foothill Road. Assuming he was facing the right direction, he should be able to keep going for another quarter mile or so and he’d be close to Ojai Avenue, the town’s main drag. His motel was there, maybe another mile up the road. But once he got to Ojai Avenue, he was home free.

  First he’d have to get walking, though.

  He rolled his head back and stared up into the black carpet of stars peeking through the canopy of ancient oak trees, one hand clutching the street sign to keep him from falling over backward. You could actually see them here, since there weren’t too many streetlights and most of the houses, set far back from the street, were dark by now. He almost never got up to Ojai when he’d lived down here; back then, he and his friends considered it nothing but a boring little bedroom town full of rich people, old hippies who hadn’t quite figured out the Sixties were long gone, and artsy-fartsy weirdos. Still, a little slow-down and back-to-nature wasn’t altogether horrible after the faster pace of the Bay Area. He’d go crazy if he had to stay here long, but a few days wouldn’t be so bad.

  Come on, dummy. You can gawk at the stars all night, but it’s not gonna get you back to the motel any faster.

  He pushed himself off the sign so hard he almost fell over, lurched back to a mostly standing position, and started off in the direction of Ojai Avenue again. It couldn’t be much farther, right?

  Then he spotted the shadowy figure up ahead.

  He stopped, blinking, trying to decide whether what he was seeing was really there, or if it was just another illusion brought on by too much booze. But no, it sure looked real: a tall, slim form climbing over the low wall separat
ing the packed-dirt sidewalk from a leafy, tree-filled vacant lot.

  “Hey,” Jason called amiably, waving a hand. He wondered if the figure was drunk too. Maybe they’d climbed over the wall to puke discreetly in the leaves, and was now coming back to the road to do exactly what he himself was doing: trying to walk back to wherever they were staying.

  The figure stopped at the sound of his voice and stood in the middle of the path, staring at him. It didn’t return his greeting. Jason frowned, his brain trying to get itself around whatever odd cues this person—he couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman—was putting out.

  Cautiously, he moved closer. “Hey,” he said again. “Nice night, huh?” His voice sounded very slurred, and he almost laughed.

  The figure tilted its head to one side. “Nice...night,” it agreed. Its voice was creaky and oddly inflected, as if it were unfamiliar with using it. It sort of sounded like a male voice, but it was still impossible to be certain.

  “You sound drunker than I am,” Jason observed. “You—”

  Then he got a look at the figure’s eyes.

  He shouldn’t have been able to do that, since there were no streetlights in the vicinity and very little light from the moon. But there they were anyway—

  —and they were glowing.

  I have got to be plastered. Jason shook his head a couple of times, figuring it would drive off the weird vision and make the world make sense again.

  But no, the figure’s eyes still glowed faintly, in a most disquieting shade of red-orange.

  “What the hell—?” he began, but the figure merely turned and disappeared back over the wall. Jason could hear it rustling through the leaves.

  He stood there for a few more moments, listening to the sound of the stranger recede until it was gone, wondering if he’d really heard or seen it at all. That had been fucking freaky, was what that had been.

  Naturally, the first thought that followed “fucking freaky” was I gotta tell Al about this.

  Somehow (he’d never be quite sure how, but God had a reputation for looking out for drunken idiots), Jason made it back to his motel. It was right on Ojai Avenue, and in an even better stroke of good fortune, all the rooms were on the ground floor. God might be looking out for drunks, but even he had limits, and Jason suspected stairs were probably among them.

  He fumbled his key into the lock and stumbled into the room. Blearily, he noticed the digital clock on the nightstand read 2:57.

  That was way too early to call Al, who would flay him alive if he called at three in the morning. And he could do it, too. Flaying was something Alastair Stone was really good at. The thought made him giggle, for no apparent reason.

  “Okay, then,” he muttered. “Lemme just sleep for a while. Need to sleep anyway. I’ll call him in the morning.”

  Yeah, that was a good idea. Just get some nice sleep, and call in the morning.

  That was the best idea he’d had all night.

  Chapter Two

  It was ten a.m. on a late-summer Saturday morning, and Alastair Stone was only just now getting home.

  He hummed an old Zombies tune as he came in through the garage, still mulling over the previous night. The show, a new local band at a little hole-in-the-wall club on Castro Street in Mountain View, had been excellent, and what had happened afterward had been even better. Her name was Kelly, she was a paralegal, and she’d even fixed him breakfast before seeing him off. Not just perfunctory coffee and toast, either. She’d made eggs. They both knew it wouldn’t go any further, and that was quite all right. He didn’t make a habit of that sort of thing, but sometimes an enjoyable night was just an enjoyable night.

  Stone tossed his keys on the counter, threw his overcoat over a nearby chair, and glanced at his answering machine. As usual, its red light was flashing. He punched the button almost idly, only half-listening. Whoever it was, they could wait.

  The first two messages were typical: old Hubbard up at Stanford wanting to discuss something about his syllabus, and some survey monkey trying to solicit his opinion about vacuum cleaners. He picked up his coat and was heading out of the kitchen when a familiar voice issued from the speaker: “Hey, Al? It’s Jason. Call me back when you get a chance. Think I found something weird going on down here that looks like it’s right up your alley.”

  Stone paused in the doorway. Jason had left a couple of days ago to attend an old friend’s wedding and recapture the nostalgia of his youth (or something—that second part was mere speculation). He was due back in a day or two; Stone hadn’t really paid that much attention to the details. But—’something weird’ that might be ‘right up his alley’? Interesting. He leaned on the counter and played through the messages again (erasing the survey monkey), listening more carefully this time. He could hear a hint of something odd in Jason’s voice, like he was trying to sound flippant, but wasn’t completely hiding the fact that something had spooked him.

  That wasn’t unusual: a lot of things spooked Jason Thayer. He was a good friend, and a good guy to have around if you were planning to be in a bar fight, but even after all this time he still did everything he could to avoid playing in the same sandbox with things that went bump in the night. Only problem was, when your two most frequent companions were a mage who moonlighted as an Occult Studies professor and a sister who had recently discovered her own fledgling magical abilities and who snarfed up anything weird and freaky like it was catnip, that could pose more than a bit of a problem. The end result was that Jason’s version of ‘weird’ could be anything from a few unexplained knocks in a dark room all the way up to a full-blown extradimensional portal in the walk-in fridge of the local McDonald’s. You never could tell with him.

  And of course he hadn’t left a phone number. Stone hunted around in the untidy pile of papers and old mail on his breakfast bar until he found the scrap where he’d jotted down the name of the motel, just in case there was some emergency.

  Nest Motel, Ojai. Ojai—he vaguely remembered hearing something about it. Artsy little tourist town somewhere near Ventura, which was where Jason and his sister Verity were originally from. He picked up the phone, got the number for the motel, and asked the bored-sounding clerk to ring Jason’s room.

  There was no response. A generic answering-machine voice picked up and told him to leave a message, which he did.

  He then proceeded to get caught up in his latest magical research and forget about the whole business until late the following morning. In the middle of hunting for some books he needed, it occurred to him that Jason hadn’t called back yet, and that was odd. Even if he was sleeping off a hangover (which was entirely possible, given his reasons for the trip), it seemed strange that he hadn’t at least checked in to explain his previous cryptic message. Stone shoved aside a stack of books on his desk and picked up the phone.

  Once again, the clerk (a different one this time) put him through to the room, and once again, he got voicemail. Stone frowned. Normally this wouldn’t have even tripped his suspicions: Jason had gone down to Ojai to hang out with a bunch of old high-school friends and attend a wedding, which meant he’d probably just had too much to drink and decided to sleep it off at a friend’s house instead of driving back to his motel.

  However...

  Stone’s mind kept going back over ‘something weird’ and ‘right up your alley.’ That last part practically screamed that whatever Jason had found, it was from Stone’s side of the street—or at least he thought it was. And even considering Jason’s level of (dis)comfort with the supernatural, Stone doubted that he’d have taken time out of his busy weekend of debauchery and school-days sentimentality to call if it hadn’t been something worth calling about.

  “Jason, if you can rouse yourself from your sybaritic stupor long enough to call me, I’d appreciate it. You’ve got me curious now, and you know how rude it is to get me curious and then leave me hanging. So call
me.” As he hung up he realized he’d sounded a little too grumpy, but he wasn’t kidding about the curiosity thing. When it had any connection to the supernatural, Stone half-expected cats to start coming up to him on the street any day now to say, “Dude, dial it back a bit.”

  He sighed. It was probably nothing. Just Jason overreacting again, and probably embarrassed to admit it. Stone would have a good time teasing him about it when he came back home.

  The phone remained stubbornly silent for the rest of the day, which made Stone even more annoyed because the anticipation was making it impossible to devote his full concentration to his spell research. This stuff wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to be distracted while you worked on—slip a variable or transpose two symbols in a spell formula, and all kinds of nasty consequences could occur. Some of them were merely amusing, while others (admittedly requiring a major error in the formula) could take out entire city blocks. The only certain thing was that whatever happened wouldn’t be pleasant.

  Finally, Stone ran a frustrated hand through his hair and tossed his notebook aside. Maybe it was time to go out and find something to eat. He couldn’t remember if he’d bothered to stop working to grab something for lunch. I really need to see about finding a new housekeeper, he thought while heading downstairs. Another one who can cook. And preferably who isn’t possessed by an extradimensional hitchhiker. He wished Verity were around, but she’d left town before Jason had to go on a camping retreat with friends back east. She was off in the middle of nowhere for a couple of weeks at least.

  He was heading out toward the garage when the phone rang. He strode across the kitchen and snatched it up. “Yes?”

  “Who is this, please?” A male voice. Not Jason.

  Stone narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean, ‘who is this?’ You called me. Who are you?”