Stone 02 Kato

by DB Reynolds

  No, wait. She knew where he’d come from, but how the ever-loving fuck? She stared down the empty room, leaning out to see around the big, silent warrior. The overhead fluorescents cast a harsh light, but it was still enough. She should have been able to see his statue guarding the exit as always. But, of course, he wasn’t there. Because he was standing right in front of her, flesh and blood, staring at her.

  She scrambled to her feet. If she was going to die, she wasn’t going to do it quivering on the floor like a scared rabbit.

  “It was the spell,” he said in the same quiet voice, as if afraid she’d bolt if he spoke too loudly.

  She blinked a few times, trying to process the words. She got nothing. “Spell?” she repeated finally.

  His mouth curved upward the tiniest bit, hinting at a smile. “The scroll. The one you were copying. I know you were trying to identify it, to translate the language. But it’s not any language you know—”

  “I know quite a few,” she interrupted indignantly. In fact, she knew far more languages—ancient and modern—than anyone she’d studied with, students or faculty. She had a talent for it.

  “But it’s not a language,” he continued gently. “Not in the way you mean. It’s magic, a dark spell that was cast onto that paper long before you were born.” He frowned briefly. “Forgive me. I’ve been somewhat isolated. What date is this?”

  Grace regarded him silently, trying to decide whether she should give him the truth. But what the hell? What could it hurt to tell him what day it was? So she gave him the date, jumping it by a day since it was after midnight, so strictly speaking, it was tomorrow.

  His lips moved, silently repeating what she’d told him. His eyes closed. “So long,” he breathed, then looked at her. “But even so, your dating system obviously reset at some historical point, and I have no way to count the years before that.”

  “Maybe I could help,” she offered out of pure nosiness. “What year were you born?”

  He shook his head. “A very long time ago. But it’s not important. We need to focus on those spell scrolls you’ve been trying to translate. You have just enough magic—”

  She scoffed at that. “Magic? I don’t think so. There’s no such—”

  He cocked an eyebrow at her. “No such thing?”

  Okay, yeah. It was a stupid thing to say. First, there was the ancient warrior who’d come to life right in front of her, and then the, um . . . “What was that thing, anyway?” she asked.

  “A demon, from the . . .” he bent down to the floor and picked up the scroll she’d been copying, “. . . ah, the fourth level of hell. That explains it.”

  “Explains what?” she demanded.

  “The creature’s inexperience with this dimension. There are few initiates with sufficient magic to drag a being from the fourth level, or anything below the second, actually. This demon fought with rage, but little skill.”

  “I told you I don’t have any magic, I didn’t—”

  “Not you, the witch who cast the original summoning onto the scroll. You have just enough magic that it came into play when you copied her spell.”

  Grace had to sit down. This was suddenly all too much—witches summoning demons, and statues coming to life. She dragged her chair over and practically fell onto it.

  “Are you well?” he asked, rushing over to crouch next to her. “What do you need?”

  “To wake up?” She saw a cold bottle of water lying on the floor, probably from the fridge under the coffee maker. It wasn’t hers. She didn’t care. She reached for it and twisted the cap off with a crack of plastic, which told her it was fresh. Good enough. She drank half of it, then put the cap back on and held the cold bottle against her neck. This had to be a dream. Or a hallucination. Researchers, including her colleagues in this very room, were forever bringing back unusual plants and shit, keeping them on their desks. Who knew what weird spores could be flying through the air?

  “You’re not dreaming, Grace.”

  “Of course you’d say that,” she muttered.

  He laughed, and she couldn’t hold back her smile. It was a rich sound, full of genuine joy. She looked up and caught the tail end of his grin. And her breath caught in her throat. She’d thought he was handsome before, when he’d been made of stone, but he was so much more in the flesh. He was male perfection come to life, with chiseled cheekbones and full lips, and eyes that bore enough of an Asian cast to claim origins from that part of the world. What she could see of his body was . . . she didn’t have the words . . . he was magnificent. And even that didn’t do him justice.

  This was one hell of a hallucination she was having. Whichever one of her colleagues had contributed this spore needed to bottle the stuff. They’d make a fortune.

  “I need to go home and sleep this off.”

  “I don’t think sleeping is going to be enough, amata.”

  She knew that word. It was an endearment in Latin, or something close to it. She rubbed her forehead. She’d been tired even before a demon had sprung up out of nowhere. She was exhausted now. “I have to go home,” she said again, as much to herself as to him.

  She stood and yanked open the desk drawer where she kept her purse. She glanced around. Her desk was a disaster, but the scrolls were still there, held down by the weight of her desk lamp which had fallen onto the folder containing the originals. Her superiors would be horrified at the potential damage to the ancient documents, but since the alternative was for them to have been crushed under a demon’s foot while it burned away to nothing . . . she figured the lamp was a stroke of damn good luck.

  She automatically gathered everything up, surveying the destroyed office as she did so, thinking about the safest place to store the original documents. She considered taking them with her. It was against museum rules, but she’d already flaunted that when she’d taken one of them home to work on last night. On the other hand, taking all three seemed like too much of a risk. She thought for a moment, then opened the lone filing cabinet that remained standing behind her desk, albeit at nearly a right angle from where it had been, and pulled out a plain, brown envelope along with a box of museum-grade archival paper. Interweaving the original scrolls with sheets of the paper, she slid the whole collection into the envelope, and then buried it in the second drawer of the filing cabinet, where no one would think to look. Just to be safe, however, she locked the cabinet with a padlock that she’d brought in herself, which meant she had the only key. Overall, she wasn’t too worried. Despite the wreckage of the office, or maybe because of it, nothing would be thrown away or moved until it had been carefully inventoried. She wasn’t the only one working on irreplaceable documents.

  Clutching her key ring, which included the key to the filing cabinet, she pulled her briefcase-sized purse out of her drawer, and slid the manila folder with her copies of the scrolls into a side pocket.

  She slipped the strap of her purse over her shoulder and took a last look around. The computer entry log on the basement door would show she’d been the last one to leave. And there was video in the elevators and main hallways. They’d ask her about all of this, about the sudden storm of destruction that had destroyed a substantial workspace. And what would she tell them?

  She could go with the truth, tell them she’d inadvertently conjured up a demon when trying to copy a scroll, and that their warrior statue had come to life just in time to fight and kill the demon, which by the way, had then gone up in smoke. Poof. Literally. But not before it had trashed the whole office, trying to escape.

  Yeah, sure. That would work.

  She looked up and saw that the warrior was still watching her, his dark gaze so focused, and yet utterly patient, as if he had all the time in the world and wasn’t the slightest bit troubled by the fact that he’d been a fucking statue until she’d mistakenly summoned a demon for him to kill.

  “You’d better come home with me,” she said, resigning herself to living out the whole fucking nightmare. What did it matter? She’
d wake up in the morning, and life would go back to normal.

  The warrior nodded. “You have the scrolls?”

  “Right here,” she agreed, patting her purse and the folder with the copies. He’d probably meant the originals, but she didn’t correct his assumption. Somehow she didn’t think he’d appreciate the importance of following museum policy. “And the other copies—”

  “What other copies?” His easy expression vanished in an instant, replaced by a frightening intensity.

  “The ones I made at home. There’s one in my—”

  “We must go to your home then. Before it’s too late.”

  “Too late for what? The originals are all here.”

  He turned all of that intensity on her. “The danger is not in the original scrolls, or even the finished copy, but in the writing of it by a person of power.”

  “I told you, I don’t have—”

  “You may not be aware of it. I’m not sensing an abundance of magic in this world. But rest assured, the magic is there within you.”

  “So you’re saying—”

  “That you may have unleashed a demon in your home without knowing it.”

  Grace gave a little gasp, flashing back to the scream that had woken her this morning, and the dead man in the bedroom only one floor down from hers. No. It couldn’t be. A shuddering chill shook her from head to toe, as if she had a fever. Maybe that was it. She was sick. She’d go home, take some Tylenol, and this would all go away.

  She stopped on her way to the door, pausing beneath the blinking green exit sign and looking up at him. “What’s your name? If we’re going to hallucinate together, I should know at least that much.”

  He smiled again, that perfectly calm expression that said he knew his place in the world and wasn’t worried about it. “Kato Amadi,” he told her, and she noted for the first time that his voice was as deep as his chest. Nothing but the best for her delusions.

  “Okay, Kato Amadi. Let’s go home.”

  Chapter Three

  Pompano Beach, Florida

  NICODEMUS KATSAROS, known as Nicholas in this modern world, stretched out his long, lean frame and kicked his feet up onto the desk, staring at the ceiling while the voice on the other end of his phone droned on. It was the middle of the fucking night, and he’d been called away from a very pleasant diversion of the female persuasion on what he’d been told was an urgent call, only to find himself listening to some officious FBI prick with a stick up his ass tell him how many laws he’d broken on his last investigation. Did this guy even know what he did? The kinds of people he dealt with? Did the asshole own a fucking clock?

  “Look,” he said finally, interrupting the supervising special what-the-fuck-did-he-care agent. “I’ll call—”

  Nick dropped his feet to the floor and stood as every instinct he possessed, magic and human, all fired at the same time. He hung up without ceremony. Anything else would have been a waste of breath.

  “Lili!” He roared his assistant’s name.

  Light footsteps sounded in the hall, as his assistant—who kept the same weird hours he did—shoved the door open. “I’ve asked you to use the intercom, Nick,” she scolded. “It’s much more . . .” Her entire demeanor changed as she stepped into the office and saw his face. “What happened?”

  “Where’s Damian?” he demanded.

  She blinked at the unexpected question, and he could almost see her brain working as she paged through the assignments of his various agents. “He and Casey are on a retrieval in North Dakota, from that university dig.”

  “Get him on the phone.”

  Lili tapped her fingers on the smart phone that was her constant companion, and adjusted her headphone. “Damian, hold for Nick,” she said, her tone all business, which, even without the late hour, would have alerted his brother that something serious was afoot. A few more taps on her cell, and Nick’s desk phone rang once.

  He picked it up, waiting until Lili signed off before he spoke. “Damian. Did you catch that?”

  “Dark magic,” his brother responded at once, the words almost hesitant, as if he feared to jinx the possibility that what they’d both felt was real. “Do you know where?”

  “The west coast for sure, probably southern California. My instincts are telling me L.A. It’s a good start anyway.”

  “Do you think . . . ?” Again, Damian was hesitant to tempt fate by giving voice to what they were both thinking.

  “It could be an artifact that got triggered. I searched out that damn witch right after you all were cursed. It would have been just like Sotiris to throw Kato on his mother’s dubious mercy. She would have taken no little pleasure in his predicament. She probably would even have figured out a way to use him while he was trapped. Fucking bitch. But this can’t be her. By the time I found her, she was too badly weakened to have survived this long. She’d vested too much of her power in Kato and had resorted to selling her craft in order to keep her people loyal. She was handing out spells and amulets like fucking candy, especially at the end.”

  “Right, right. Okay, Cassandra’s checking flights now. Looks like . . . yeah, not great connections from here, and she drives like a bat out of hell, so—” Nick heard Cassandra, aka Casey, voicing her opinion on that description of her driving, but he also heard Damian’s laughing response. Those two were sickeningly in love. “We’re driving, Nico,” Damian said finally. “We’ll be on the road in ten.”

  “Call me when you get there. May the Fates smile.”

  “Those bitches owe us more than a smile. I’ll call.”

  Chapter Four

  KATO STOOD IN front of a big window the next morning, eyes closed, soaking up the heat and light of the sun. His flesh drank it in, his bones warmed for the first time in far too long. He was a child of the desert, born to survive in hot, dry sands that could swallow a man whole. But as deadly as the sun could be, it was also life. And he’d been without it for . . . he wasn’t certain how long it had been. Grace’s date had meant nothing to him.

  He glanced around, seeing the pure clarity of the glass window in front of him, the shining metal pipes that brought hot and cold water at the twist of a knob, the “refrigerator” that kept Grace’s milk and cheese fresh. And he remembered how they’d arrived at this place last night, in Grace’s “car.”

  He saw all of these things and knew he’d been trapped in that stone prison for millennia. Thousands of years. What had happened to the others in all that time? Where were his fellow warriors, the only brothers he’d ever known? Damian and Gabriel and Dragan. And their leader, Nicodemus? Could any of them still be alive? Or even worse, were they still trapped in stone as he’d been?

  He needed to find them, to free any of his brothers still imprisoned by Sotiris’s curse. But this world was so alien, he had no idea where to start. He knew a moment’s despair, but then he remembered standing with his brothers in the instant before they’d been cursed—the joy of battle lighting their faces, their fierce determination to triumph over their enemy one more time. He wouldn’t betray their courage by doing anything less as he faced this latest challenge.

  It would mean learning this new world, something that few of those who’d known him would have thought possible. As the only son of the Dark Witch, he’d been born flush with magic, but not for himself. His purpose for existing had been to serve as a power receptacle to feed his mother’s magical needs, not his own. And he’d been taught only what he’d needed to know in order to fulfill that destiny. He knew everything about dark magic. It flowed with his blood and harbored within his bones, and he could read and write spells nearly as well as the Dark Witch herself. He’d also been trained as a warrior, to protect not only the Dark Witch, but himself, because of his importance to her.

  But he’d never been taught to read or write any spoken language, not even the one he’d been born and raised with in his mother’s tribe.

  He’d been marked by that lack in his education for much of his life. His people h
ad praised him for his value to the Dark Witch, but, at the same time, they’d expected little else, equating his lack of education with stupidity. He’d learned at a young age to keep his own counsel, to remain silent.

  But then had come the call from the North, from Nicodemus.

  And everything had changed.

  Amadi Village, somewhere in the mists of time

  KATO WALKED ALONG the dirt road, the sun’s warmth chasing away the last chills of the night. To either side of him, the fields rolled with swaying stalks of golden grain, their dry scent mixed with the muddy, wet stench of the irrigation ditches that ran between the rows. And working those fields . . . he smiled to himself, aware of the lustful gazes of the women, their skirts hiked high on strong legs, breasts soft and free beneath loose, cotton blouses. The people of the village might deride his lack of education, but that didn’t stop the women—young and old—from offering themselves to his bed. Part of it was his magic. The Dark Witch might drain him at any moment, leaving him to lie helpless for days until his body restored itself to serve her future needs. But when he was flush with power as he was today, it burned in his soul and shone through his skin, as if a fire truly was banked within him. Even those who dismissed his intellect treated him with an awe bordering on fear because of it.

  To the women, he was forbidden fruit, flirtation with a dangerous lover before they settled down with a stable man to breed more workers for the field. They wanted to brush up against the magic in his flesh, to tangle with the physical beauty that the power had bestowed upon him. He was taller than any man in the village, stronger even than the hardened warriors who were his teachers. And he was handsome. Or so they’d told him. He’d never seen his reflection. Mirrors were forbidden to him lest evil make use of the duality of the image to weaken his shields and steal that which rightfully belonged to the Dark Witch.