Blood and Stone

by King, R. L.

  Except for the collection of squad cars, media vans, and other vehicles parked in its driveway and two deep along the curb in front, and the corresponding crowd of people milling around on the sidewalk. Stakes had been driven into the lawn and the flowerbed along the front walk and crime scene tape stretched out between them, cutting the front of the house off from everyone. Behind it, two cops stood on the porch, making notes and ignoring everything outside the tape.

  Casner pulled his black SUV into a spot a short distance down the street. “Damn vultures,” he muttered. “It’s getting worse. They’re sending them up from L.A. now.”

  He swung around in his seat to look at Stone and Jason, both sitting in the back. “Okay, I want you two to stay with Lopez. You do what he tells you, walk where he tells you, and don’t walk where he tells you not to. You’ll have to put on gloves and booties before you go in, but do not touch anything. You’re not staying long. I don’t have time to babysit you guys right now. If I see either of you anywhere but stapled to Stan’s ass, you’re outta there. Got it?”

  Stone nodded. “Yes.”

  Casner started to get out, then stopped. “Oh—one more thing. Do not talk to the media. At all. They’re gonna be barking at us as we go in. Just ignore them. You’re a couple of deaf-mutes.” He glared at Stone. “And for God’s sake, don’t tell them what you do.” When Stone and Jason both nodded, he opened the door and got out, motioning for them and Lopez, who was in the shotgun spot, to do likewise.

  As soon as they approached the house, they were accosted by a knot of reporters, photographers, and cameramen with large rigs on their shoulders. Stone shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his overcoat, bowed his head, and strode with Jason behind Casner and Lopez, who parted the sea of media with curt commands and hand gestures. They passed under the crime-scene tape and through the front door, which stood slightly ajar.

  “I hope you guys have strong stomachs,” Casner said as they all donned plastic gloves and slipped paper booties over their shoes in the tile-floored entry. “I hear this one’s even worse than Creek Road.”

  Stone was sure he was right. Even out here, the stench of blood and the fainter tang of the beginning stages of decomposition were thick. He edged his magical senses open, not wanting to get hit with the solid wall of psychic feedback that would accompany such a scene, and followed Casner and the others into the rest of the house.

  They passed through a living room that appeared undisturbed, mostly neat but cluttered with the items that made up the daily business of family living: newspapers, a stack of books on an end table, a boxed board game on a coffee table. A pair of technicians in coveralls were busy examining the scene. Casner didn’t stop, but led them through and down a short hallway. He turned, gave them a stern you’d better remember what I said look, and then stepped inside to make room for them.

  The hallway opened onto a large family room. On the right side was a breakfast bar with a cutaway leading into a kitchen. A pool table filled the left side, and the far wall was dominated by a large fireplace, its mantel covered with trophies and the photos of various smiling people, and a big-screen television set. An overstuffed sofa, strewn with a few stuffed toys, faced the television.

  Right now, the room resembled some kind of hellish abattoir.

  Stone stepped just into the room, moved aside so he wasn’t blocking the doorway, and stared.

  The bodies had been taken away by now, but the horrific aftermath of what had occurred was still clearly in evidence. Blood was everywhere: pooling on the floor, splattering the green felt of the pool table, drying on the backs of the chairs. Two more investigators in coveralls and booties moved carefully around the scene, taking photographs, placing small plastic markers with numbers on them, pausing to make notes.

  Stone noticed the circle immediately. It was even less obvious this time: there was no “dome” effect to contain the blood, but it was there nonetheless, in the middle of the floor. He opened more of his magical sense and the circle lit up with arcane power. He swayed, paling a bit as the psychic energy from so much violent death in such a small place hit him like a wall. This fresh, it told him the story of what had occurred almost as clearly as if he’d watched it himself.

  “You okay, Al?” Jason murmured. He was looking more than a bit pale himself.

  “Don’t you dare puke on my crime scene, Stone,” Casner snapped. “Go outside if you’re gonna do that.”

  Stone shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m not ill.”

  “Getting a vision?” Casner couldn’t keep all the mocking from his tone, but to his credit he tried.

  “They killed each other,” he whispered.

  All three of the others looked sharply at him. “What?” Lopez demanded.

  “There were three of them,” Stone said in the same soft tone. He didn’t sound like he was answering them, but just speaking to the air in general. “Man, woman, and child. Girl.” He glanced over at the mantel, noting that one of the larger photos showed a man, woman, and little girl about eight years old standing on a beach. All three had dark hair; they stood next to a blonde girl around the same age who must have been a friend of their daughter’s. “The adults were sitting there—” he pointed at the sofa “—watching television.”

  “How the—” Casner began, but Lopez held up a hand to silence him.

  Stone paused a moment, adjusting his mental barriers to attenuate some of the psychic onslaught while still allowing him to visualize the scene. “The little girl came out of her room. I’m not sure what time—that’s not clear. She went to the kitchen and got those knives.” He gestured at where three large bloodstained knives, including a meat cleaver, were scattered around the room, each with its own numbered tag. He took a deep breath. “She brought them to her parents.”

  “I’m sorry,” Casner said firmly. “Maybe you believe this stuff, Stan, but this is fuckin’ crazy. I don’t have time for this.” He started to turn away.

  “Look at the circle, Lieutenant,” Stone said, his voice soft. “There was one at the third murder too, wasn’t there? The woman.”

  Casner stopped. “So you’re telling me that this family killed each other. Just like that. The kid brought them the knives and they just started carving? Do you realize how goddamn insane that sounds?”

  “I know,” Stone said. “I do realize it. But I also realize that a woman stabbing herself with a letter opener looks quite insane as well.” He pointed. “Look at the way the bodies fell. Look at the blood. You tell me, Lieutenant. I don’t have any experience analyzing this sort of thing. I’m just giving you the impressions I’m getting.”

  Lopez’s voice came, even and rational: “He’s right, Pete. You know he is. If somebody showed me this scene and didn’t tell me anything about it, I’d say they stood in the middle of the room and hacked at each other, crazy as that sounds to anyone with a shred of sanity.”

  “Pretty ferociously, too,” Jason added. “Look at the spatter: it’s all the way out to the walls in some spots.”

  Casner took a breath. “Even if that’s true,” he said, “what am I supposed to do with that information? What am I gonna tell people—that a suburban family hacked each other up with knives on a nice weeknight at home? Why would they do that?” He glared at Stone. “Even if you’re giving me the what—and I still don’t believe you, there’s gotta be another explanation—that still doesn’t give me the why. Where’s the motive? Did they all go batshit at once? Is there something in the AC? Did they all eat a big helping of magic mushrooms for dinner?” He sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe you guys should clear out now. I humored you—you had your look, but—” He paused, looking at Stone. “Hey, are you trancing out on me again?”

  “There’s someone else here,” Stone said, very quietly.

  “What?” Casner frowned. “You mean a ghost or something?”

  “No.” He closed
his eyes for a moment, focusing. Somewhere nearby, a tiny flare in the midst of the conflagration of violent astral energy, was— “That way,” he said, pointing. “In the back yard, I think, or near it.”

  Casner sighed. “I don’t have time for this. Stan, can you take him out and figure out what the hell he’s talking about? I need to talk to the CSIs. And don’t tromp through the scene.”

  There were no police or investigators in the back yard, which was large and included an above-ground pool, a shed that looked like it had been converted into a playhouse, a picnic table with a big gas barbecue, and a lot of outdoor toys spread across the area. Either they hadn’t deemed it interesting, or they hadn’t gotten to it yet.

  “Be careful,” Lopez said when they arrived. “Let’s not walk around too much. What are you picking up?”

  Behind him, Stone paused again. The astral interference was somewhat less intense out here, blocked by the house’s walls. “Over there,” he said, nodding toward the playhouse.

  Lopez put his hand on his gun in the holster, but Stone shook his head. “We’re not looking for a murderer.”

  Moving carefully, the three of them crossed the back yard until they were standing outside the playhouse. Lopez motioned for them to stay put and he took a couple of steps forward until he could peer into one of the windows. He stiffened.

  “Tell me it’s not another body,” Jason begged.

  Lopez shook his head. He moved over and opened the door of the playhouse. “Come on out, honey,” he said gently. “We won’t hurt you.”

  Nothing happened. Stone came over next to him and looked inside. After a moment, so did Jason.

  A small blonde girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, huddled in the back of the tiny house’s shadowy interior, hidden behind some stacked boxes. Clad in lightweight pajamas with smiley faces on them, she had her knees drawn up under her chin and clutched a threadbare stuffed lion like it was the last anchor holding her to earth. Her eyes, big and scared, looked up at the three men from a tear-streaked face. She didn’t speak.

  “That’s the girl in the picture on the fireplace,” Jason whispered.

  Stone nodded. He took a step forward and crouched down. “Hello,” he said, keeping his voice soft.

  She swallowed. “Are you a p’leeceman?” she asked in a shaking, barely audible voice.

  “I’m a friend of policemen,” he said. He nodded toward Lopez. “This nice man here is one of them. What’s your name?”

  “O-Olivia,” she whispered.

  “That’s a very nice name,” Stone said. He turned his head and whispered, “Someone should go get Casner.”

  “On it,” Jason said, hurrying off.

  To the girl, he said. “What are you doing out here, Olivia?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Does your friend live here?”

  She shook her head.

  “No?”

  Again, she shook her head. “They hurted each other.” Her small, scared voice sounded much younger than her apparent age.

  Stone took a deep breath. He wished now that he’d let Lopez handle this; he had no idea how to relate to children, and usually limited his association with them on purpose. However, this one seemed to be responding to him, and he didn’t want to jeopardize the fragile connection. He supposed Casner would have his head for talking to her at all, but he wasn’t feeling too charitable toward the lieutenant at the moment. “They did?” he asked. “Your friend and her parents?”

  She shook her head again. “They hurted each other. I thought they would hurt me, but they all just looked at me and then kept doing it.” Tears sprang to her eyes again. “I want my mommy,” she sobbed.

  “Where’s your mommy, honey?” Lopez asked. “I’m a policeman, like he said. If you tell me where to find her, we’ll make sure you get back home.”

  “No!” she sobbed even louder. “I am home. My mommy and my daddy and my sister—they hurted each other!”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Holy shit, this just keeps getting worse,” Lopez said.

  Stone didn’t answer; he hadn’t had much to say since they left the Ayala residence an hour ago, given a ride back to the station in one of Casner’s men’s cruisers. They’d reclaimed Jason’s gear and his car from the police and headed back to Lopez’s place after deciding there was too much chance somebody might recognize them from the crime scene if they went anywhere public. Currently, they sat in the living room, all looking some degree of shell-shocked.

  “That poor kid,” Jason agreed with a nod. “How the hell didn’t they figure out there was another kid in the family and she was missing?”

  “Give ’em a break, Jase,” Lopez said. “The cops around here aren’t like the big-city guys. Most of ’em won’t see one scene like that in their whole career. They probably took a sweep of the area looking for the murderer, but the space she was hiding in was too small for an adult, so they let it go.”

  “What’s gonna happen to her?” he asked.

  “I’m sure they’ll find somebody to look after her until they can find a relative.” He sighed. “What I want to know, though, is why she was unharmed. Did you hear what she said? It was chilling: ‘They looked at me and kept on hurting each other.’ Can you imagine what that must have been like for a kid that age? Hell, for anybody. Kid’s gonna be in therapy for years. But why did they kill each other and not her?”

  Stone glanced up. “I wonder...” he murmured.

  They both turned to him. “What?” Jason asked. “You got an idea?”

  He nodded slowly. “I think I might. But I need to know something first. Stan, could you check something for me?”

  “Maybe,” Lopez said, his tone guarded.

  “Can you find out if Olivia was the Ayalas’ natural child?”

  He frowned. “Natural? You mean like born to them?”

  Stone nodded again.

  Lopez looked reluctant, but he headed out to the kitchen and a moment later they heard him muttering into the phone. Jason shot Stone a quizzical look, but he didn’t reply. After a moment Lopez came back in. “They found somebody who knew the family,” he said. “You’re right. Olivia was adopted. They didn’t think they could have any kids, so they adopted her. Then a year later they got pregnant with Rose. That’s the other girl, the one who—” He let that trail off and looked at Stone. “So what’s that mean?”

  Stone came up from where he was slouched into one corner of the sofa. “It means,” he said, “that I think I might understand the motive now.”

  “You wanna share?” Jason asked.

  The mage addressed Lopez. “Remember what Dr. Garcia said about the tablets? About the curse?”

  Lopez looked confused for a moment, then light dawned and his eyes got wide. “This Faces guy—they wanted him to get revenge on the blood of those who’d wronged them.”

  “The blood,” Stone said, nodding. He sat very still as the enormity of that sunk in. “He’s hunting down the descendants of anyone that these people—whoever they were—thought had harmed them. With ‘them’ either being their own little group, which is bad enough, or the entire Chumash people.” He turned to Lopez again. “Who would the Chumash believe harmed them?”

  “I dunno—the white man?” Lopez shrugged. “I told you, that was a long time ago, and I didn’t really pay that much attention in class.”

  But Jason was shaking his head. “You said this was a long time ago, right? Hundreds of years?”

  “Almost certainly,” Stone confirmed. “Why?”

  “It’d be more specific than that,” he said. “I did pay attention in class: we had to build Popsicle-stick Indian villages and all that stuff in grade school, and I actually thought it was pretty cool. It wasn’t the generic white man who screwed over the Chumash. It was mostly the Spanish, with their European diseases. They wiped out a
huge percentage of ’em when they first came here.”

  Stone was nodding. “Yes, it makes sense.”

  “So, you’re saying it’s killing the descendants of the Spanish explorers who came here?” Lopez asked, frowning. “From hundreds of years ago? That could be thousands of people, if you count anybody with a connection to any of those bloodlines.” He paused. “You asked me before if we could find out if the victims were related in any way. But that’s not it, is it? The only thing they have in common is that they were all descended from these Spanish settlers—or whatever other group those guys thought messed with ‘em. So if both sides of the Ayala family were, but Olivia wasn’t because she was adopted—” He let his breath out. “Casner’s not gonna like this. And how are we supposed to protect these people, if we can’t even figure out who they are? A lot of people don’t even know who they’re related to going back that far. Do we even need to? If this is a curse, is there a way to—I dunno—break it, so it can’t affect them anymore? You know, like destroy that shrine thing?”

  Stone shook his head, dropping back into his slouched position. “Breaking the curse is what we’re trying to do, ultimately. But I wouldn’t want to try destroying the shrine until we know more about it. It’s too closely tied in with the area. I’m not even sure we could, but even so, destruction without knowledge can be dangerous.”

  “Anyway, that’s not the only thing we need to figure out,” Jason said suddenly. When Stone and Lopez both turned to him, he asked, “Where’s this thing been all this time?”

  “What do you mean?” Stone raised a questioning eyebrow.

  He shrugged. “If you’re right, and it’s been running around killing these descendants, then how come there’s not a huge trail of bodies going all the way back to however many hundreds of years ago it was first summoned?”