Blood and Stone

by King, R. L.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  “Al?”

  “Hmm?” Stone, slumped into the corner of the big black BMW’s soft leather passenger seat, didn’t stir. His reply was more a rumble than a word.

  “You awake?”

  “Must I be?”

  They were cruising up Highway 101, Jason at the wheel because Stone hadn’t trusted his concentration enough to make the two-hour drive, and he’d refused to ride in Jason’s elderly Ford when more upscale alternatives were available. Jason hadn’t objected in the slightest. Currently, they were on the open stretch between Santa Barbara and Santa Maria, and Stone had been asleep for most of the way so far.

  “Just got a couple things I want to say. We haven’t had much chance to talk since I—got back.”

  Stone shook his head to clear it, dragging himself to a more upright position in his seat. “I doubt I’m fit company right now, but if you don’t mind monosyllabic replies, be my guest. Where are we, by the way?”

  “About a half-hour north of Santa Barbara.”

  He nodded. That meant Santa Maria, their destination, was still another half-hour away. Glancing at the clock on the dash he saw that it was a little before eight. A bit late to be paying social calls, but this wasn’t exactly your standard Emily Post sort of situation. He ran a hand through his hair, yawned, and made a “go on” motion at Jason. “Talk, then. If I drop back off, punch me or something.”

  Jason didn’t take his eyes off the road. “I’ve been thinking about the fight up at the Hot Springs.”

  “What about it?”

  “You nearly died up there, Al. And it was my fault.”

  Stone frowned. “Why was it your fault? You didn’t hire that bear, did you?”

  “You needed power, and I didn’t have it to give you. I still don’t know why it didn’t work.”

  “I don’t know either. But don’t worry about it. I shouldn’t be depending on your power anyway.”

  Jason continued to steadfastly avoid looking at Stone. He didn’t reply.

  “Jason?”

  “Eh, never mind.”

  “There’s something else going on here, isn’t there?”

  “What makes you think that?” Jason’s tone was wary.

  “Because I know you. Because I’m good at reading people. Because you’re being evasive.”

  “You’re half asleep. Sorry I woke you up. Just get some rest and I’ll tell you when we get there.”

  Stone scrubbed his hand over his face and tried to clear some more cobwebs from his brain. He sensed this wasn’t a discussion that could be improved by cobwebs. “Come on, Jason: out with it.”

  There was a very long pause. The scenery, an endless progression of scrubby brush punctuated periodically by trees, flashed by. “I had a lot of time to think while that thing had me,” he said at last. His voice was inflectionless.

  “About what?”

  He shrugged. “About my power. About how that thing was just—taking it. I thought I could control it. I thought nobody could use it without my permission. That was what you said.”

  “It’s what I thought,” Stone said. “Even the Evil couldn’t do it.”

  Jason’s face twisted, and his voice came out harsh. “I couldn’t stop it. I tried, but I couldn’t do it. I felt like some kind of gas pump. Some kind of fucking cow.”

  “Jason—”

  He shook his head. “Don’t, Al. You can’t fix it. I know that. This is all about me and my head.”

  Carefully, Stone said, “You think that’s why you couldn’t—”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He did turn for a moment to look at Stone before returning his attention to the road, and his expression was hard. He sighed loudly. “I don’t know what to think, Al. I don’t even know what I bring to this party anymore. Not really.”

  Stone’s eyes narrowed. “Why would—”

  “I mean, look at me,” he said, still in the same harsh tone. “You two can do magic. Even after all this time I still have a hard time getting my mind around that. My friend and my sister can shape the fucking world with their brains. And what can I do? I can stand in the back and give you the juice to help you do it better. Like you two are the varsity team, and I’m the fucking waterboy.”

  Stone sat up a little more, all vestiges of his mental cobwebs gone now. He stared at Jason, momentarily struck speechless by his friend’s sudden ferocity. Clearly this wasn’t something new—from the sound of Jason’s words, it had been building up for a long time. Had he missed it? All those times when he’d relied on his friend for supplemental power, was this how Jason perceived it? “Is that what you think?”

  “How can I not think it?” His hands gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles whitened. “Even Stan is a real cop, at least. I couldn’t even make it through the academy without getting my ass expelled. And look at me now. I work at a restaurant. I dick around with my car. I lift weights. Meanwhile, my sister’s learning more magic, and my friend, when he’s not teaching college and portaling back and forth between here and England, is shooting lightning bolts out of his hands.” He sighed loudly. “Ah, screw it. Don’t worry about it, Al. Really. This is just something I gotta work through.”

  “Jason, if you don’t want me to—”

  “I said don’t worry about it,” he said in an I’m done talking about it tone.

  Stone was silent, leaning back and looking out the window without seeing anything. He wanted to say more, because Jason had the wrong idea about how he, Stone, perceived him. Yes, all right, he had to admit that he might have been guilty of taking Jason’s power for granted on occasion, especially when he needed an extra jolt to do a particularly difficult or power-intensive spell. Still, he didn’t do that often, and usually it was only in life-or-death situations. He had begun to wonder if Jason’s inability to provide the power that had always been there before was more psychological than physical, and his friend’s current outburst all but confirmed it. If he had felt he was being used before, even subconsciously, then being kidnapped by an extradimensional being and held in near-suspended animation while being mined for the very thing he believed he had to consent to give could easily have pushed him over the edge and given him some sort of mental block about allowing anyone—even his closest friends—to make use of his ability.

  He wished he’d spent a little more time studying psychology. He had no idea if he even should try to help Jason work through this—would any attempt at doing so just be seen as another effort to use him? For now, he decided to let it go. Maybe Jason would work through it on his own. If he brought it up again, Stone would take that as an indication that he might want some help dealing with it. Until then, however, he would simply have to rely on his own power. It wasn’t as if that weren’t usually enough anyway.

  “You think Stan and Edna will be okay?” Jason asked into the silence. His tone was back to normal—mostly—but he still looked straight ahead.

  “I think so,” he said, taking the cue. They had decided it wouldn’t make sense for all four of them to go to Santa Maria, so Edna and Lopez had elected to remain in Ojai at Lopez’s house. Stone had lent Edna the tome Suzanne had given him, asking her to take a look at it and see if she could identify anything useful in its pages. Lopez didn’t say anything about it, but Stone could tell he was relieved to have a night off. Not everyone was used to the sort of pace he and Jason tended to keep while trying to deal with a problem.

  Suzanne, after Stone had assured her that her “mantra” would keep the spirit out of her mind, had remained in her home, promising not to allow anyone except the four of them inside and to watch carefully for signs of possession in anyone around her.

  “I just had a bad thought,” Jason said suddenly after they had driven another ten miles or so.

  “I suppose it can join the party,” Stone said. “What is it?”
<
br />   “This thing, and the little ones it summons, possess people to kill them. We figure it sometimes kills people just to get the power to spawn more little ones, so it’s not limiting itself to killing descendants of the Spanish. Does that mean it can possess anybody?”

  Stone shrugged. “I don’t know. So far, everyone we know of that they’ve possessed has been to further their ends: either to generate more minions, to get something done like when they grabbed you at the motel, or to kill descendants. We’re all but certain that they can’t pass as human like the Evil could, so by necessity they’re limited in what they can do.”

  “So you think that’s why it hasn’t possessed, say, the cops? Casner?”

  “It tried it on Stan once—but that was up near the shrine, and he was able to throw it off.”

  “When were you gonna tell me about that?”

  “I forgot about it—a lot’s been going on, and there’s been no sign of a repeat performance. My theory is that it’s hard to possess police and other people with more disciplined minds, but I don’t know.” He scrubbed at his face. “What I do know is if we start going down that road, we’ll paralyze ourselves until we can’t act. For whatever reason it seems fairly focused even when it isn’t directly killing victims. I hate to bring this up, but perhaps that’s what it was using your stolen power for: to allow it to work outside its purview more than it normally would be able to. I don’t know.”

  Jason nodded. “Just a thought.” He paused. “What makes you think this Carly will talk to us after we come all the way up here? The way Suzanne sounded, she’s pretty much done with the whole bit.”

  “We’ll just have to persuade her,” Stone said. “If I’m right, and she is the linchpin in this whole situation, I don’t plan to let her get away with keeping her head in the sand because she’s unhappy about her life.”

  “You can’t exactly kidnap her and toss her in the trunk,” Jason said. When Stone didn’t answer, he glanced over. “You can’t, right?”

  “Of course not. But I can be very persuasive when I want to be. If that’s necessary, then that’s what I’ll have to do.”

  They pulled into Santa Maria around 8:30. The sun was down now, the night warm with a sliver of a moon. Stone consulted the map, and soon the BMW was rolling down a narrow street populated mostly by apartment buildings along with a few small, older homes.

  “This doesn’t look like a great part of town,” Jason said dubiously. “You sure you got the address right?”

  “Quite sure. It should be right up ahead.”

  Carly Rosales’s address was an upstairs unit in an older, two-story apartment building, set far back from the street behind two other similar structures. Jason opted to park down the street a bit; after they got out of the car, Stone put a disregarding spell on it and pulled on his overcoat, then the two of them hiked up the narrow driveway toward the rear of the complex.

  The cars parked along one side were all older but well-maintained, the buildings in decent repair despite their age. The entire area had the look of a working-class neighborhood trying very hard not to slip into something more disreputable and so far mostly succeeding, though how long that would continue was up for debate. It was a far cry from the luxurious Arbolada digs of Suzanne Washburn, or even the comfortable two-story home of Karen Blanco. Stone and Jason exchanged glances, but neither spoke.

  Each building in the small complex had four apartments: two on the first floor and two on the second. Carly’s building was the farthest back, next to a chain-link fence bordering what looked like a large vacant lot. It was hard to tell for sure, because the street lights here were only sporadically functional, and the lot itself had no illumination. As Stone and Jason walked from the front of the complex to the back, the air was full of the noise of dueling stereos coming through open windows; somewhere nearby a couple was having a loud argument in one upstairs apartment, and a baby wailed in another.

  There were no lights on in Carly’s upstairs apartment. Even her porch light was off. Stone stood back while Jason knocked; they waited several minutes but no one answered. “I don’t think she’s home,” Jason said. “Unless she’s—”

  Stone shifted to magical senses. The general aura of the area was muddy, disturbed, and uneasy, but it was nothing like he’d noticed outside Karen Blanco’s place. As far as he could tell, no one had died violently here; it was simply that the complex’s prevailing emotions were not positive ones. There were too many other conflicting signals for him to get anything else definitive. He shook his head.

  “What do we do?” Jason asked. “You want to wait until she comes back?”

  Stone supposed he should have expected this: though it would have been convenient to have Carly sitting at home waiting for them to arrive, things didn’t generally work out that way. She could be anywhere—visiting a friend, out at a bar, on a date and not even planning to come home tonight. “Let’s wait a short while,” he said. “Perhaps she—”

  “Shh!” Jason whispered, holding up a finger.

  Stone raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “I thought I heard something,” he said, still in a whisper.

  They both listened, but aside from the complex’s ambient music and domestic discord, nothing else rose to catch their attention. After several minutes had passed, Stone pushed himself off the building where he’d been leaning. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll try back later.” He headed back toward the stairs.

  A window behind them shattered outward in a loud crash and a shower of tinkling glass shards.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Stone and Jason whirled. In the scant illumination from the neighbor’s porch light, they immediately spotted the area outside the far window at the end of Carly’s apartment covered in sparkling bits of glass. Pale curtains wafted outward in the faint breeze.

  They moved as one, rushing over to see what had happened. Stone expected to see some large item, or someone laid out in the space where the window was, after being tossed forcibly out or perhaps drunkenly staggering near the window and tripping to fall into it. But there was no sign of a person or object, just the glass.

  As they drew closer, though, they could hear voices. “What the fuck—?” came a man’s deep tones, followed by what sounded like a woman moaning in pain.

  Jason poked his head in through the opening. “Carly? You okay?” he yelled.

  Another moan, followed by a slap, and a harsh “Shut up, bitch!” from the man.

  “In!” Stone ordered, moving behind Jason.

  “Yeah.” He was already clambering carefully over the blasted-out frame into the room.

  Past him, Stone saw a figure rise in the darkened room, moving swiftly toward Jason as he was vulnerable. He pointed his hand at the figure, focused his will, and the man yelped as he was flung forcibly into the back wall.

  Jason got the rest of the way in as the guy was recovering, and Stone hurried to join him. He spotted a lamp on the nightstand and flipped it on.

  The tableau that presented itself in the newly lit room was obvious in its purpose. They were standing in a small bedroom, with a tousled double bed, single nightstand, and simple Ikea-style dresser. A woman lay sideways across the bed, sobbing and half aware as she struggled to pull her jeans back up. On the other side of the room, rising from where Stone had tossed him none too gently, a man was scrambling back to his feet. He was tall, wide, and bald, with colorful tattoos on both forearms. His jeans, too, were pulled down, and that was hindering his efforts to get up.

  “Stay down, dirtbag,” Jason growled.

  “Who the fuck are you?” the man demanded, glaring first at Jason, then at Stone. “What the fuck happened?” His voice was slurred; the tang of alcohol in the room was strong.

  “I’d listen to him if I were you,” Stone said with a raised eyebrow. “I suspect if you try to get up, he’ll have something to say
about it. And if he doesn’t, I will.”

  The man clearly didn’t consider Stone’s words to be a threat. He continued trying to push himself up the wall with one arm while dragging his pants up with the other hand. “What the fuck?” he roared. “Get the fuck outta here, faggot!”

  “Suppose we ask the lady who she’d like to stay,” Stone said, as Jason moved in and loomed over the drunken would-be rapist. Stone himself backed up toward the bed. “Ms. Rosales, are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” she sobbed. She, too, sounded very drunk. “He—” She gestured vaguely toward the man. “We were drinking, and—”

  “Hey, she asked for it,” the man yelled. He’d succeeded in getting his pants up, but couldn’t quite manage “standing upright” yet. “Fuckin’ bitch led me on!”

  “Al, lemme hit him. Just one,” Jason growled. “I’ll make it count.”

  “Call the police, Jason. Much as I share your desire to teach this man a bit about modern-day dating etiquette, we don’t have time for you to get thrown in jail for assault right now.”

  For a moment Jason looked like he would argue, then he sighed and headed to the phone on the nightstand. Like Stone, he didn’t take his eyes off the man.

  Carly had gotten her jeans pulled back up, and she sat up, trying to get herself under control. She swayed for a moment and then leaped up, bolting for the bathroom. In a moment, they could all hear her being loudly sick.

  The bald man switched his glare back and forth between Stone and Jason, then at the smashed window. Clearly he was trying to decide if it would be a good idea to make a run for it. Jason, still on the phone, casually walked over until he was standing in front of the opening.

  “Just settle down,” Stone advised the man. “You’re not going anywhere until the police arrive.”

  Drunken rage suffused his face. “Shut up, you skinny fag!” he yelled, and surged forward in a head-down charge toward Stone. Stone flung him back into the wall with a casual gesture before Jason, who’d just hung up the phone, could get there. He landed on his ass against the same wall as before. This time he stayed down, glaring ineffectual fury at his captors.