by King, R. L.
By the time they reached the area, got a couple motel rooms in Woodbridge, and grabbed dinner at a local restaurant, it was already almost eight o’clock. “It’s getting late, Al. Do you want to wait and do this tomorrow morning?” Jason asked.
“Not really. If we can get in, I’d like to get this taken care of now. The sooner we do, the sooner we can find that portal. Occoquan’s only a couple of miles up the road.”
He navigated them unerringly to where the ice cream parlor used to be—now it was a small art gallery. It was closed. He turned right and headed up the road. Jason watched the scenery go by: it quickly changed from shops to houses, and then to widely spaced driveways separated by thick trees and bushes. Stone almost missed the turnoff because the storage building was marked by only a small sign.
The driveway went up a hundred feet or so, then opened onto a parking lot full of dark, idle rental trucks and dumpsters, a two-story building with large rollup doors around the outside, and a pair of smaller doors at the front.
They parked near the building and got out to check these latter doors. The first one read OFFICE and the other one had a small hand-lettered sign that read After Hours Use Key.
Jason looked around nervously. “Al, I know this is probably overkill, but can you put your ‘I’m not here’ spell on the car? I don’t want to come back out and find somebody’s slashed the tires. It’s a long, cold walk back to town.”
Stone didn’t seem to think that was overkill at all, and did as requested. “I should have you start doing this,” he told Verity. “Remind me to have you practice on vehicles when we get back home.”
Verity grinned. “That’ll be fun. I’ll hide your new car and see how long it takes you to find it.”
“Yes, you do that. And then you’ll get to experience some of the spells I haven’t taught you yet.” Stone tried the key in the lock on the second door. There was a click, and the knob turned in his hand. “So far, so good,” he murmured. Examining the key, he said, “212. Second floor.”
They entered and closed the door behind them, looking around for the stairs. The place was pitch dark, but Verity pulled a flashlight from her bag and quickly found a timer-based switch, bathing the wide, corrugated-metal-clad hallway in harsh fluorescent light. They trooped up the metal stairway, Jason bringing up the rear after verifying that the door to the outside world was closed.
They found space 212 easily: it was at the end of a row and one of the few lockers with a normal-sized door instead of a larger roll-up one. “You know, I once saw a movie where the guy went to look for something in one of these and he ended up finding a severed head in a jar,” Jason said, his words echoing in the quiet.
“If we find any heads,” Stone said, “they’re all yours. I just want the notebooks.” Moving slowly, as if expecting it not to work, he slid the key into the lock.
It turned easily.
“Maybe somebody up there finally decided they like us,” Verity said.
“Don’t say that yet,” Stone warned. He swung the door open.
Verity shined her flashlight in, revealing a narrow space filled with an untidy floor-to-ceiling pile of cardboard boxes and other junk. A dusty scent wafted out; clearly the place hadn’t been disturbed in some time.
“We’re gonna be here awhile,” Jason said with a loud sigh.
“With any luck they’ll be near the front,” Stone said. “Everybody grab a box and go through it. Put aside anything that looks likely: notebooks, stacks of paper, anything. We’ll sort through them when we’ve finished.”
They set to work, occasionally running back down to the end of the hall to reset the timer on the lights before it expired. Most of the boxes were full of old clothes, books, magazines, and similar items, but they also contained enough notebooks, binders, and stacks of loose paper that they had amassed two tall piles by the time they got through the front layer of boxes. Jason looked at his watch: an hour had passed. At this rate it would be after midnight before they got out of here.
But as Stone hefted another box and dropped it with a thump on the floor, Verity called, “Hey, I think I found it! Help me with this!”
Jason hurried in past the first row to find his sister pointing at a lidded banker’s box halfway down a stack. Scrawled on the front of it was a single word: Alastair. “I think you’re right,” he said. “Either that, or it’s a whole box of pictures we can use to blackmail Al with.”
“Very funny.” Stone came around to look. “Less comedy, more muscle.”
They got the box out and dropped it on top of the one Stone had put down. Jason got out his pocketknife and sliced the tape holding the lid on.
“Pay dirt,” Stone said in triumph, as soon as he got a look inside. “Good old Daphne and her OCD win the day.” He began pulling out old-fashioned composition books one by one until he had five of them. Each one was carefully labeled: Project Aperture, with a range of dates. The rest of the box was packed with empty binders.
Stone glanced at each notebook. “They’d been working on this for quite some time,” he said, surprised. “These go back nearly eight years.” Tucking them into a smaller box and the box under his arm, he turned to Jason. “Can you stack the rest back inside? I want to get back to the hotel and start looking at these as soon as possible.”
Jason grumbled about being used as slave labor, but did as requested and began hustling boxes back into position. Verity helped him by levitating some into place: she’d gotten better at it, and didn’t drop any. Stone locked the door when they finished and they headed back down the hall, down the stairs, and out the door to the parking lot.
They had let the outer door close and lock behind them and were halfway to the car when several figures detached themselves from the shadows behind the rental trucks and slunk toward them.
“Bugger,” Stone muttered, tightening his grip on the box of notebooks.
Verity glanced around, trying to take them all in at once. “Evil?” she whispered.
The figures moved into the dim light illuminating the main part of the parking lot. There were six of them, all male, ranging from a hulking figure off to the right to a small skinny one directly in front of them. One of them held the leash of a large, growling Rottweiler. Jason stiffened, stepping forward to put himself between Verity and the group. “You guys want something?” he called.
Oddly, they didn’t look like gang members. If anything, their shabby clothes and strange gazes marked them as homeless, more similar to the Forgotten than the DMW. The skinny one grinned, looking past Jason to Verity. “You could say that,” he said with a leer.
“What’cha doin’ out here by yerselves this late?” another one asked. Taller and wider than the first speaker, he was dressed in a haphazard collection of tattered and mismatched clothes, topped by a bright red-and-yellow-striped scarf.
“How did you know we were here?” Stone asked. His voice was strong; he looked wary, but not frightened.
The hulking one emitted an incongruously high-pitched giggle. “Saw your car, dumbass.”
“People don’t come here this late very often,” the skinny one agreed. “When they do, they usually come out with good stuff. Got any good stuff?” He leered at Verity again, then noticed the box Stone was carrying. “Whatcha got in the box?”
“That ain’t any of your business,” Jason said. “And if you look at my sister like that one more time, I’m gonna rip out your eyes and shove ’em down your throat. Got it?”
Verity laughed, a short, harsh, and entirely non-humorous sound. “Don’t worry, Jason. I can take care of myself now. But the help’s appreciated.”
Stone was focused on something else, though. “You saw the car?” he asked.
The wide one in the scarf looked at him like he was an idiot. “Yeah. How hard is it to see a car?”
“Uh...I don’t see no car,” said the one with the dog
, a short squat dark-skinned guy in a hoodie and a too-big military jacket. He looked around the parking lot, confused. The skinny one went over to him and spun him until he was facing the parked car. “Oh! There it is,” he said, grinning. The two of them both turned back to face Stone, Jason, and Verity.
“You’re Forgotten,” Stone said. It wasn’t a question.
“We’re what?” the skinny one demanded.
“Ain’t nobody gonna forget us,” the wide one said. He glared at them. “You ain’t gonna forget us, if you don’t hand over that box. What’s in it? Money? Dope?”
“You’ve got—abilities,” Stone continued, ignoring his demand. “That’s how some of you saw the car and some of you didn’t.”
A couple of them looked at each other nervously. The skinny one, however, just looked annoyed. “Shut the fuck up. Ain’t none of yer business what we do. Now hand over the box—and yer wallets, too. And jewelry, if ya got any.”
The wide one let out an unwholesome laugh and pointed. “Yeah. And we gonna borrow that pretty little chick you got there, too. Just for a little while. Don’t worry, we’ll give ’er back when we’re done.”
Verity glared. “Fuck off, you smelly perv. Not in this lifetime.”
“Better be careful,” Jason advised. “She’ll turn you into a frog, and it won’t be pretty.”
Stone shook his head. “Honestly, you lot had best be on your way. We’re in a hurry, and this is getting tiresome.” He made a ‘shoo’ gesture. “Off you go, now.”
One of the men who hadn’t spoken yet stepped forward. Tall, missing one eye, his face traced with map of scars, he didn’t look amused. Instead, he moved up to stand in front of Stone. He stared into the mage’s face as if he expected something to happen, and seemed quite surprised when it didn’t.
Stone flashed a wicked grin, which was probably a mistake, but he clearly didn’t care. “Oh—did I forget to mention that your little party tricks won’t work on me?”
The scarred man roared with fury and threw himself at the mage, but Jason was expecting that and moved faster. He swung for the man’s head and was rewarded with a satisfying thunk as his fist connected. The man reeled off, stunned.
“Get ’em!” yelled the skinny man, moving forward.
The fight didn’t last long. Stone didn’t even put the box down, and Jason waded in looking like he’d been waiting for months for a good brawl like this. He took on three of them himself while Stone and Verity stood with their backs to the wall of the building and sent the remaining attackers careening telekinetically off in various directions.
“Shit! What the fuck are you people?” screamed the skinny guy as he suddenly found himself plopped un-gently atop one of the rental trucks. Verity, meanwhile, put the guy with the dog on top of the building, while Stone lifted the dog itself and watched it freak out for several seconds as it pumped its legs frantically in midair like a confused cartoon character. He let it down and it streaked off into the darkness trailing its leash, without a backward glance at its master.
In less than two minutes three of the attackers had taken off, two were in a stunned heap on the ground next to the car, and the guy on top of the building was screaming for somebody to get him down. “Should we?” Verity asked, puffing.
Jason shrugged. “Might as well. Better if he doesn’t try to explain to the cops how he got up there.” He too was breathing hard and would probably have a shiner in the morning from where one of the bums had got a lucky shot in, but he looked invigorated, glad to finally be able to do something useful.
“Allow me,” Stone said. He held up a hand and directed it toward the guy, who was still yelling. “Quiet up there if you want down,” he called.
The guy poked his head over the edge of the roof line and switched from yelling to be let down to screaming obscenities at Stone. “All right, have it your way,” the mage said, turning away and heading for the car.
“Get me down!” the guy yelled. “What are you? What the fuck are you people?”
Stone grabbed him none too carefully, lowered him until he hovered about three feet off the ground, then dropped him. He landed hard, butt-first on the pavement, and screeched in pain.
“Get outta here!” Jason yelled, moving toward him. The bum scrambled to his feet and took off, disappearing into the night after his friends.
Stone, Jason, and Verity, after checking to make sure no one else was hiding nearby, got into the car and headed back to their hotel.
“What the hell was that about?” Jason demanded. “Those weren’t Evil, were they?”
“Nope,” Verity said. “I tried evicting a couple, and nothing happened.”
“Were they Forgotten? I’ve never seen Forgotten like that.”
“Makes sense, I suppose,” Stone said from the driver’s seat. “Never thought about it before, but I’d imagine whatever’s making the Forgotten the way they are doesn’t discriminate. There’ve got to be some bad apples in the barrel somewhere. I think we just met some of them.”
“So they’re some kind of—I dunno—Dark Forgotten?” Jason sighed. It was bad enough that the Evil were around, without having to worry about bums with magical powers and bad attitudes. “Great. More stuff to watch out for.”
“Well,” Stone said, looking satisfied, “at least they don’t seem that hard to deal with. And now we know about them, which gives us a leg up.”
“We should ask Lamar and Marilee about them when we get back,” Verity said. “I wonder if there are any in our area. They’d probably know.”
Stone, however, no longer seemed interested in discussing the Dark Forgotten or whatever they were. He drove a little too fast, obviously anxious to get back to the hotel and get started on the notebooks. When they arrived, he barely had the car parked before he was out and gathering up the box.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said over his shoulder.
“You need any help?” Verity asked.
He shook his head, already preoccupied. He hurried across the parking lot with his prize, leaving Jason and Verity to watch after him.
Jason sighed, amused and exasperated. “Come on,” he said. “Might as well get some sleep while we can. I have a feeling once Al figures out where that portal is, we won’t be doing any resting for a long time.”
A loud knock on their door awakened them. Jason fumbled around until he located the clock on the nightstand. It was nearly four a.m. “Mm?” he mumbled, not nearly loud enough for anyone outside the room to hear.
“Jason! Verity! Open up,” Stone’s voice called. He knocked again.
“Go away, Al! It’s four in the fucking morning! Come back tomorrow!” Jason rolled over and pulled the covers over his head, but Verity had already gotten out of her bed and padded to the door.
Stone practically erupted into the room when she opened it. He was still dressed and not only did he not look tired, he looked positively energized—but in a manic sort of way that made Verity stare at him in confusion. “What is it?” she demanded. “Is something wrong?”
“Tell him to go ’way,” Jason growled from beneath several layers of covers. “Whatever it is, we don’t want any!”
Stone carried one of the notebooks. He dropped it down on their little two-seat table and opened it to a page he’d bookmarked. “Jason, get up. You’ll want to hear this too. Time for sleep later. We need to get going soon.”
Verity sat down across from him. “Going where? Did you find something already? That was fast.”
Stone waited while Jason dragged himself out from under the covers and sat up, running a hand back through his tangled hair. “Okay,” he said, still looking grumpy and half-asleep. “I’m awake. What’s so important that it couldn’t wait till tomorrow? Do you know where the portal is? Do you know what’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with it yet,” Stone admitted.
“I might never know that—though there are still a lot of notes to go through. But at least I have a better idea of what’s going on now.”
Verity leaned forward, trying to make sense of the densely packed handwriting and cramped diagrams on the page Stone had opened the notebook to. “So where’s the portal?” she asked. “Are we close?”
“That depends on which one you’re talking about,” Stone said. “There are two.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Two?” Jason and Verity both demanded at the same time, staring at Stone.
“One was bad enough!” Jason added. “How the hell—”
“Where are they?” As she spoke, Verity continued trying to resolve the notebook’s scribbled text into something that made sense, but clearly wasn’t getting anything useful.
“There aren’t any specifics, unfortunately,” Stone said. “We’ll have to do some more digging to get those. But one appears to be in some small town in West Virginia, of all places, and the other one is somewhere near Las Vegas.”
Jason shook his head. “I don’t get it. Why would they need two? I thought the whole point was that you didn’t have to have one at both ends. You just build one of these things, point it at an existing permanent one, and bam, you’re there. Right?”
“And why would they put one in West Virginia?” Verity demanded. “That’s out in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it? It seems weird that they’d pick that over any other place. At least Vegas kind of makes sense...”
Stone held up his hands. “Slow down, you two.” He shoved a hand through his hair, which looked as if he’d been doing that a lot tonight. “As I said before, portals aren’t my speciality—but I’m wondering if this two-portal setup might be what caused them to run into trouble. It looks like they might have been trying to construct some kind of simultaneous gateway in two places at once.”
“Has anyone ever tried that before?” Verity asked.
“Not that I’m aware of. I told you, even setting up a single so-called ‘normal’ temporary portal is beyond the skill of all but the most highly trained mages.” He shuddered. “A gateway between two of them, though? As far as I’m aware, that’s unthinkable at our current level of understanding.”