Stone 02 Kato

by DB Reynolds

  Grace swallowed hard. “What about the other two scrolls. Were they magic, too?”

  His eyes narrowed, as if he knew why she was asking. “They were. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, it’s just . . . I knew they weren’t a language. There was no linguistic pattern to it. So I figured the characters might be symbols instead, like mathematics. I have a friend who teaches mathematics at a nearby university.” She sucked in a breath. “And I made him a copy.”

  “Grace,” Kato muttered, shaking his head, “what have you done?”

  Chapter Five

  GRACE GAVE HIM an outraged look, but Kato was already on the move, his blade sliding out of its scabbard with the nearly silent hiss of steel on old leather. Now that he was actively searching for it, he was catching sporadic whiffs of malevolence lingering in Grace’s building. It was almost certain that Grace had conjured up a demon with her unintended spell work. But it also seemed that the creature had tried to cover its tracks, and that shouldn’t have been possible. Certainly some demons were clever enough to hide their presence, but not from him. He might not have known precisely which sort of dark magic was at work, but he still should have detected the stench of it, no matter how well it was masked. Which meant that whatever evil was at work was something he’d never encountered before.

  But then, he’d been gone from the world a long time. Just as this world’s magic had weakened, perhaps the magic of other worlds, other dimensions, had grown stronger.

  “Wait,” Grace called from behind him as he strode for the door. “You can’t just walk down the hall with a big-ass sword—”

  He glanced over his shoulder with a look a supreme disgust. “You would rather I go into battle without a weapon?” he growled, and then he was out the door and moving down the hallway.

  “I would rather you not go there at all!” She was rushing after him, which wasn’t the smartest choice on her part. As far as he could tell, she wasn’t a soldier of any kind. He wasn’t one of those men who disdained women as warriors, not like his brother Damian who’d refused to share the field with the women warriors of the Amazon queen. But Kato had been observing Grace for months now during her work at the museum, and he’d seen no indication of a warrior’s bent.

  He spun to confront her. “Something happened here recently. Something violent. What was it?”

  She stared at him for a moment, her eyes wide with dawning understanding. “A man was murdered. They’re not sure exactly when, but probably early yesterday morning. Why?”

  “You saw the demon at your museum. You saw what it could do. What do you think would happen if another just like it manifested here?” He gestured around, indicating the building full of unsuspecting people.

  “Oh, God,” she breathed. “It was downstairs, right below me.”

  “And almost certainly looking for you instead.” He drew a breath, on the verge of telling her to go back to her condo, but then he remembered that she’d written the scroll there. It was no coincidence that the demon had manifested only one floor down from her. The multiple dwellings stacked upon one another in a single building could easily have confounded the demon’s dimensional crossing, and it had erred in choosing its victim. But it wouldn’t stop with one death. As long as it remained free, everyone in the building was in danger, but especially Grace.

  “Follow me. Stay close, but beware of my blade.” He didn’t wait for her nod of agreement, just turned and continued down the hall, slowing when he reached a closed door that was different from the others, with a heavy handle, and no number.

  He paused there to sort out the scent. The demon hadn’t gotten as far as this floor, and it definitely had not manifested inside Grace’s condo. No matter its wiliness in concealing its scent, the demon could not have hidden something as powerful as a dimensional breach point from him.

  But the scent was much stronger behind this door. Blade in hand, he slammed the door open, and found only a staircase that seemed to run up and down the entire height of the building. Kato nodded to himself. The demon’s stench would travel much more easily up an open stairwell like this, than through the metal elevator box which he and Grace had used earlier.

  Now that he knew these stairs existed, he wondered at Grace’s decision to use the elevator at all. Had she thought him too weakened by his ordeal to climb stairs? On the contrary, he would have welcomed the physical exertion after so many years of inaction. He went down two flights, perversely disappointed when the scent trail had him exiting at the very next floor.

  “Kato.” Grace’s whisper hissed down the empty stairwell, as he opened the door. “The police will arrest you for going in there.”

  He didn’t know who “the police” were, but he was confident in his own magic. These police would see whatever he wanted them to see, or nothing at all. He turned left out of the stairwell, following the demon’s trail, passing several more closed doors before he came to one that was crisscrossed with yellow tape. He hadn’t needed that marker to tell him this was the right unit. His nose filled with the acid stench of demon. He didn’t know what kind it was yet, but there was no question a demon had been here. Just as there was no question that it was now gone.

  He sheathed his blade effortlessly, and then turned to confront Grace, who was still with him, either because she was too foolish to know better, or because she had courage. Preferring to believe the latter, he raked his gaze up and down her slender form, smiling when he saw the metal object in her right hand. He recognized it as a weapon born of this world and called a gun. He knew there were many varieties, but had no understanding of how they worked. Nonetheless, he was happy to see that she’d armed herself, and from the steadiness of her grip, he assumed she was skilled in its use.

  He lifted his chin to indicate the gun. “Do you use that?”

  “I can,” she said, meeting his eyes steadily. “I have.”

  “Good.”

  Her grim stare became a scowl at his next words.

  “It won’t do much to hurt a demon, but it might slow it down enough for you to run away.”

  “Or maybe it’s more powerful than you can understand,” she snapped back at him.

  The verbal blow struck harder than it should have. He’d had a lifetime of people deriding his intellect, after all. But though he’d proven himself over and over, the seed of doubt was always there. Why else had Sotiris used that failing as the basis for his curse?

  He was no longer an untrained boy, however. No unblooded young man. He knew his worth, and he knew one thing for damned certain—he might not be familiar with modern weaponry yet, but in this world or any other, his knowledge of dark magic reigned supreme. He wasn’t a mere student of magic, he was magic. The power of the Dark Witch lived inside him, and he’d happily test his abilities against any modern weapon.

  Giving Grace a cool look, he turned back to the doorway. Thinking the strips of bright yellow tape might hold some kind of warding spell placed there by Grace’s police to keep people out, he ran a careful finger along one surface, not touching, but hovering a hair’s breadth away. And felt nothing.

  He shrugged, then drew his belt knife and slit the strands down the middle, before turning his attention to the locked door. It was like Grace’s, with one locking device in the knob, and a second, stronger one just above it. If he’d had time, he could have used his blade to destroy both locks, but time was short. He was reluctant to give away his presence by using magic, but practically speaking, anyone looking for him would have been aware the moment he broke the curse and stepped free. And if that wasn’t enough, there had been his battle with the demon at the museum. So he placed a hand over the heavier lock and released a brief, hot surge of power. The door popped open.

  “This will be beyond your abilities,” he said bluntly, without turning around. “Stay here.”

  Grace made a soft sound of protest, but after rustling around briefly—most likely taking up station at the doorway, with her gun—she obeyed his order.


  Kato registered her position automatically, but all of his thoughts, all of his senses, were focused ahead of him. There was blood, a lot of it. The iron reek stung his sinuses and seemed to slide up into his brain. He’d always hated that smell. But overlying the iron, and burning even more strongly, was the stink of demon.

  He knew what he’d find in the bedroom, but he had to see for himself. It would have been better to have a fresh scene, but there was no chance of that. The murder had happened too long ago, and the authorities in this world were efficient. There was still evidence to be had, however. Evidence of the sort that the local police wouldn’t know to look for, because they didn’t possess the senses to detect it. Evidence that might tell him what kind of demon was responsible for this killing.

  Kato stopped short in the doorway, staggered by the magnitude of violent energy still left in the bedroom. Violence of any kind left an energy signature, and violent death was the most powerful of all, so he’d expected some residue. But this. . . . Kato stepped into the room, letting the energy swirl around him, fighting the urge to shudder as it crawled over his skin. He swore softly. The demon hadn’t only killed the man, it had torn him apart—and while he’d still been alive. There was a brutality to this attack that was unusual, even for demonkind. They tended to be more efficient, at least in their kills. They might rip an arm off for the sheer pleasure of torturing their victim, but most of them enjoyed the pump of fresh blood too much to destroy their victims before they were dead.

  That could mean one of two things: either this was a very young demon on its first kill, or, even worse, a very old demon who’d been driven mad. But had it already been mad when it was summoned? Or had the summoning included some twist in the manifestation that had then driven the creature insane? Kato didn’t know yet, but he would before this was over.

  “Kato!” Grace’s whispered call drew his attention away from the blood-soaked room. “The police are here,” she hissed even louder. “We must have triggered an alarm!”

  He clenched his jaw in irritation. He needed to determine what kind of demon he faced, and how to defeat it. If only Grace and her police would leave him alone to work. However, he was smart enough to know that he didn’t want to be found standing in this room. His clothes and his weapons weren’t exactly of this time period, and he knew too well how suspicious people could be. Especially those with any sort of authority behind them.

  He took a final look around and, more importantly, inhaled deeply, memorizing the scent of the killer. And then he turned on his heel and strode back toward the door, where Grace was waiting anxiously, waving her arm in a “hurry up” gesture. He gave her a dismissive glance. She might know guns better than he did, but he didn’t need her to tell him how to evade the enemy. Even—no, especially—if that enemy was the local authority.

  Flicking his hand, he concealed them both behind a wash of magic. It didn’t make them invisible—nothing could—but it would convince anyone looking their way to look elsewhere, and to see only what they expected to find. Which certainly wasn’t an ancient warrior and a scholar.

  Hooking a hand around Grace’s arm, he urged her back down the hall to the stairs. She stiffened in alarm when the elevator opened and discharged several men in uniform. But Kato kept them moving as they slipped back into the stairwell, holding the heavy door so it closed with a quiet click that couldn’t be heard over the noise of several men moving toward the death scene.

  GRACE WAS INTRIGUED. She’d felt a frisson of energy a moment before Kato started dragging her away, and she knew something of magic. Those university courses might have dismissed it as mumbo jumbo, but they’d gone into the belief structures of the tribes that practiced it. She’d been fascinated, but frustrated by the lack of in-depth research into magic itself, rather than its societal effect. So she’d read everything she could find on her own, including a lot of fantasy fiction. She still didn’t come close to understanding it, but she knew enough to realize that Kato had done something to conceal their presence, even if she didn’t know how he’d done it. When the police had spilled out of the open elevator doors, bristling with guns and looking for someone who might be the killer, they’d walked right past her and Kato as they’d snuck into the stairwell.

  She probably should have been freaked out, and maybe she was a little, but she was mostly intrigued. She was a researcher, after all. One who spent most of her time studying the written word of ancient scholars, their philosophies and beliefs. There was a lot of magic in those old cultures. Modern scholars dismissed its inclusion as a way for ancient man to explain things he didn’t understand, but maybe it was more than that. Maybe there really had been magic, and the modern world with all of its technology had killed it. Or maybe magic still existed, and people simply didn’t know about it. She glanced at Kato, who was ignoring her.

  “How’d you do that?” she asked his back.

  He was standing in the sunlight again, staring through the glass door, just as he’d been when she’d first gotten up this morning. He slanted a quick look over his shoulder, but didn’t say anything, and she sighed. Something she’d said back there had offended him. Something to do with her gun, which was a compact Glock 23 that her parents had given her as a housewarming present when she’d bought this condo. It wasn’t her first gun, but her parents didn’t know that. They’d bought her a gift certificate for shooting lessons at the same time. She hadn’t needed those either. Her jaw tightened as the hot winds from her nightmare blew through her thoughts once more, bringing the scent of gunpowder and death.

  She already knew how to use a gun; she wouldn’t have been carrying it otherwise. And that’s all he needed to know.

  She didn’t know why any of that should piss off Kato, however, so she couldn’t make it better. Even worse, she had a feeling there were going to be lots of similar misunderstandings in the future. He was a man out of time. How could they possibly “get” each other?

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” she offered. “Maybe something to eat?”

  His posture remained unyielding, but he turned enough to say, “That would be kind. Thank you.”

  Grace grimaced at the formality that had replaced his earlier politeness, which had bordered on friendly. She put her gun back in its usual drawer after verifying an empty chamber, then flicked on her electric kettle and opened the refrigerator door to survey their options. She wasn’t much of a cook. She’d been raised in a household that employed a full-time private chef, so there’d been no homey mother-daughter cooking lessons around a warm stove. She’d learned the basics on her own when she’d gone away to college, but for one person, it was easier to rely on take-out or frozen dinners.

  “How about some scrambled eggs?” she asked without looking up.

  “Eggs . . . would be welcome.”

  Realization suddenly hit Grace, and she felt like an idiot for not seeing it sooner. If she bought his story about being trapped in stone—and what other possibility was there? She’d been talking to his damn statue for the last year—then that meant he hadn’t eaten in. . . . Good God.

  “Are you hungry?” She turned to him in sudden urgency. “Like really hungry? I mean, when was the last time you ate?”

  He looked at her then, really looked at her. He had that same calm about him that he’d had almost since the moment he’d broken out of his stone. Even when he’d been fighting the demon, there’d been a confidence, a surety that he’d win. And since then, despite all the new things he’d been exposed to and everything he’d had to learn on the fly, he’d been totally self-contained, absorbing each new bit of knowledge and making it his own. He’d spoken of his brothers, the warriors he’d fought with, but it seemed to her that he was most accustomed to being alone.

  “I didn’t know hunger or thirst while under the curse,” he said quietly. “But now that I’m awake and free. . . . My last meal was the breakfast I shared with my brothers before the great battle.”

  He seemed so sad when he
said that. It broke her heart. “How many brothers did you have?”

  His sensuous mouth curved into the tiniest semblance of a smile. “My mother had only one son, but I had four brothers. They were my brothers in battle, great warriors all, and one of them the most powerful sorcerer who’d ever lived.”

  Grace wanted to ask more questions. She was dying to know more. But, despite that little smile, talking about his brothers seemed to make him even sadder, so she switched back to food. “You’d probably prefer fried eggs, but I’m not sure I can manage that. I’m not much of a cook.”

  “Whatever you prepare will be welcome.”

  She sighed. He was back to that cool formality. “Look,” she said, “I don’t know what I said to insult you back there, but I’m sorry, okay? Whatever it was, I didn’t mean it that way.”

  He gave her that inscrutable look again. “I’ll need to see the scrolls, if I’m to track down this demon. Now that it’s free, it won’t stop killing.”

  A little hurt tightened in her chest that he hadn’t responded to her apology. She’d tried, hadn’t she? “They’re right here,” she said finally. Walking over to her desk, she pulled the folder with the copies out of her big purse, then walked back to hand it to him, since he hadn’t moved from his position in the sun. He took the folder without comment, waiting until she’d returned to the open refrigerator before crossing to the center island and spreading the three pages out.

  Grace gave a mental shrug, and resumed her breakfast preparations. Checking the date on the eggs, just to be sure, she pulled out the entire carton and started cracking. She had no idea how much he’d eat, but figured it would be a lot. It had been a few thousand years since his last breakfast, and she’d eaten meals with enough big guys to know how they could pack away the food when they were hungry. She opened the freezer and pulled out a bag of bagels. She always had those on hand, because that was her usual breakfast. And fortunately, she’d just bought a new bag, so there were plenty. She did a quick defrost on four of them and popped them in the oven. Then she dragged out her biggest frying pan, which was pretty big. She’d never used it before, but it had come with the set.