Stonecast

by Anton Strout

  “What happened?” Rory asked, dropping her dance bag.

  I paused, trying to keep myself together before answering. “Stanis happened.”

  Rory’s eyes went wide. “You saw him?!”

  Marshall let go of me and spun around quick.

  “Is he still here somewhere?” he said, whispering as he peered off into the darkness surrounding us.

  I shook my head.

  Rory leaned down and picked up one of the broken puzzle boxes at her feet. One of the drawers—once secret—slid out and fell onto a pile of books. “What the hell was he fighting that caused this much damage?”

  “Stanis wasn’t fighting anything,” I said. “He did this all himself.”

  Rory stepped back, narrowing her eyes at me. “Lexi, do you know how insane that sounds?”

  “I do,” I said. “And I wish I had a different answer for you. But honestly, I don’t. This was all Stanis.”

  “Why would he do this, especially to you?” Marshall asked, flipping one of the upended couches back over before collapsing onto it.

  “We freed him,” I said. “Now he serves a different master.” Just saying the words out loud sent a sharp pain through me.

  “How?” Marshall called out.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know how they did it,” I said. “I just know they did.”

  Rory’s eyes lit up, and she raised her voice in disbelief. “Hold on,” she said. “Stanis left—went with Kejetan—to protect us . . . I mean, really you, right?” I nodded. “This is how he does that?”

  I looked at the couch to see Marshall shaking his head.

  “We freed him,” he contested, “so he didn’t have to serve anyone. That was the whole point!”

  Rory looked around the room. She pulled the art tube off her back, put together her pole arm, and scooped up a half-torn book with the end of it. “And whoever did this to him made him a dick,” she said.

  “Rory!” I scolded, more out of frustration than anger with her. She was right.

  Marshall stood. “So if Stanis is serving a new master, and they put him up to this . . . did he actually get the secrets he came for?”

  “I think I have an answer for that,” I said, going to the spot where I had laid my backpack down earlier. I undid the upper straps and pulled out the heavy stone book from within. “No.”

  “That book right there is great power,” Marshall said, pointing to it. “Alexander knew it. It’s why he hid it all away from the world. You put that much power out there, and people are going to want it; and not all of those who wish to wield great power want the same thing. In your hands, Lexi, and with your motivations, there’s a chance you’d be asked to join the Justice League. In another person’s hands? Totally Legion of Doom.”

  I nodded. “Stanis knew I had the book on me, but . . . he went out of his way to stop me from talking about it.”

  “But why not just take it?” Rory asked.

  “Because despite who or whatever is controlling him now,” I said, “Stanis is still in there somewhere, trying to keep us from harm. He could have crushed me and taken the book, but he didn’t. Stanis is in there with whatever else is in control, and he’s fighting to find ways around it.”

  “So what do we do?” Marshall asked.

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure. There’s a good chance that if he sees me again, Stanis will be forced to take the book from me, or do something . . . worse.”

  “How do you take a gargoyle down?” Rory asked.

  I glared at her. “Rory!”

  She shrugged. “Sorry, Lexi. It’s just . . . I know it’s Stanis and all, but if it comes down to you or him, I’m always going to choose you.”

  Everyone was silent for a moment before Marshall spoke. “I’m afraid I’m with Rory on this one, Lexi.”

  “I don’t care what anyone thinks about what the Servants of Ruthenia might force Stanis to do,” I shouted. “I won’t believe even then he would hurt me.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want to find out the hard way,” Rory said, just as loud, getting up in my face. “Lexi—”

  “No,” I said, interrupting. “I’m taking Stanis back. They made him like this, and I’m taking him back. He won’t hurt me. I know it.”

  “I’m not willing to take that risk,” Rory said, stamping her pole arm on the floor.

  “Ladies,” Marshall said, speaking up. “Stop it.”

  “No,” I said. “Let’s have this out. So this is how we operate now, Rory? At the first sign of trouble, we abandon our friend when he needs us?”

  “You haven’t seen him in months,” Rory countered. “You don’t know what’s been going on or what’s happened to him. For all you know, he’s just as likely to snap your neck because his new master told him to do it. There may be Stanis’s soul still in there somewhere, but someone else is calling the shots, and that body is still—what’s Marshall’s word . . . ?”

  “A construct,” he said, “but listen. We can’t fight like this . . .”

  “We don’t abandon our own,” I shouted back in Rory’s face.

  “Ladies,” Marshall repeated.

  “Stay out of this, Marsh,” Rory added.

  He ran to the two of us, pulling us close. “Wish I could,” he said, lowering his voice. “But we’ve got a bigger problem.”

  “What?” I asked, the word coming out short, just as testy as I was feeling.

  “I think I heard something,” he said. “Something from within the building.”

  Like a campfire being doused with water, all the fight went out of me. Rory, too.

  The three of us stopped, turning to listen, and when we heard sound coming from the back stairs of the building, we all spun to face it. Rory raised and readied her pole arm, but I put my hand over hers, forcing her to lower it, which she did, but only a little.

  “Stay sharp,” I whispered. “Just . . . you know, don’t stab my parents if it’s one of them.”

  Rory looked offended. “I think I can manage not stabbing Doug and Julie,” she whispered back.

  A shadow rose into view as it cleared the stairs leading up onto the floor, but it was not the shadow of my mother or father, which I was pretty sure I’d know by now. A lone figure advanced slowly into the room, unrecognizable until it stepped in a section of moonlight streaming in from one of the windows.

  “Holy hell,” Marshall whispered. “It’s the ghost of Sean Connery.”

  “Not quite,” I said, standing up, relaxing a bit. Seeing Desmond Locke was a relief compared to the myriad horrors I imagined shambling up those stairs—Kejetan’s stone men or maybe something worse.

  “Mr. Locke,” I said, in turn startling him as his eyes darted our way.

  “Well, well,” he said, brushing off his pant legs as he stepped with care into the room, picking his way through the debris. “Have I caught you at a bad time, Miss Alexandra?”

  I gave a weak but pained smile. “Not exactly the greatest timing, Mr. Locke,” I said.

  He glanced to the pole arm in Rory’s hand, then over to Marshall.

  “No?” he asked, a tight-lipped smile crossing his lips. “Would you care to tell me what happened to Alexander’s library and studio, then?”

  I looked to both Rory and Marshall, each of them staring back at me expectantly, no doubt curious what I was going to say. I was curious, too.

  “I think we had a break-in,” I said after a moment, which was, while technically true, the most vague answer I could give without lying. “Someone trashed the place.”

  “So I see,” he said, not looking away from me, his eyes searching mine for answers.

  I kept my own steady, refusing to give in to whatever type of intimidation the man hoped to use on me. It might work on my father given the religious sway Desmond Locke held over him, but it wasn’t going to work wit
h me.

  “Pardon, sir,” Marshall asked. “But what exactly are you doing here? This building is supposed to be closed for repairs and renovations, isn’t it? And it’s late.”

  Mr. Locke gave Marshall the simplest and most patronizing of smiles, which I wanted to smack off his face.

  “I might ask the same of you three,” he said. “As a point of fact, I believe I already have.”

  “This is my home,” I reminded him, snapping. “I have every right to be here any damned time I wish. Which, Mr. Locke, is more than I can say for you. The only reason you’ve been allowed here before is due to my father’s good graces.”

  Desmond Locke’s smile faltered for half a second and he shifted his posture, turning his attention from Marshall back to me.

  “Perhaps it’s time we had that little talk I mentioned the other day when I ran into you down in the foyer,” he said, his smile falling from his face.

  “Are you serious?” I asked, his request flipping my bitch switch to full-on mode, unable to stop myself at his nerve. “The last thing I want to hear about right now is your ‘spiritual guidance’ or its stranglehold over the rest of my family.”

  “Alexandra,” he started, but I shut him down.

  “I think you should leave. Now.”

  Rory stepped forward, moving through the rubble toward him. “I’ll show you out,” she said.

  Desmond Locke sighed. “I had hoped to avoid confrontation,” he said, reaching into his coat. “But I’m afraid I will have to insist on that conversation now.”

  Even in the low light of the room, the gun in his hand caught the glint of the moonlight outside. Despite my dealing in a lot of arcane and crazy things, the purely mundane weapon set off another kind of panic in my heart.

  Rory saw it, too, but ignored it and kept moving for him.

  “Stop your little friend, Miss Belarus,” Locke said, angling the gun toward her.

  Rory was already raising her weapon, but I was pretty sure the gun could go off a lot faster than her closing with him, regardless of her prowess with the pole arm.

  “Rory, don’t!” I said, fighting to stay calm. This was exactly the type of danger I had hoped to keep both my friends out of, yet here we were, in it nonetheless.

  Thankfully, Rory stopped, but she kept her weapon still raised.

  “I’ve got this one,” I said.

  “You sure?” she said, remaining poised for action.

  “Positive,” I said, and breathed out one of my words of power. Broken bits of stone statuary were spread out all around us, littering the floor of the art space, and I called out to them with my will, the connection snapping to within me.

  Reaching out with my mind’s eye, I aimed the pieces at Desmond Locke and shot them through the air at him. The pieces responded in perfect unison, flying at the man, but just as they were about to hit their target, several of them shattered. The rest followed suit like stone bits of popcorn popping, forming a giant cloud of dust that hung in the air around Locke.

  My friends and I backed away, all coughing, but within the cloud itself I could see there had been an invisible barrier surrounding the man, made visible now only due to our circumstance.

  As the dust cleared, Locke stepped forward as calm as could be, his hand wrapped around something hanging from his neck. When he opened it, I saw a variety of lanyards and chains, talismans and charms hanging from them all.

  Desmond Locke’s eyes went first to Rory, her pole arm now hanging in her hand at her side. Gone were the kind, jovial eyes of the man who had come to visit my father in our home for years. His stare was dark, purposeful, his whole face deadly serious.

  “Put that thing away,” he said to Rory, pronouncing each word like an angry father talking to a child. “Before someone truly gets hurt around here.”

  Rory looked to me, her eyes full of reluctance, but I nodded. Moving slowly, she took apart the sections of her weapon and, with care, slid them back into their individual compartments within the art tube.

  “Much better,” he said, then added, “thank you.”

  “What is going on here, Mr. Locke?” I asked. Nothing made a lick of sense to me. Then again, it was hard processing anything sensible with a gun pointed at you. That and all the events of the night had my thoughts going a mile a minute, without hope of any actual destination or understanding.

  Desmond Locke turned to face me, a modicum of his old self returning to his eyes, perhaps because no one else was brandishing a weapon in the room except for him. “As I said, I’d like to have that little chat now.”

  Marshall laughed, but it was short, nervous, and forced. “I say we let the man talk,” he said, his hands up in the air like he was being robbed.

  I remained standing, with my hands at my side, calm on the outside but screaming on the inside.

  Months ago, when I was simply being chased on a regular basis by cultists serving Stanis’s father, this type of interior panic would have sent Stanis to my rescue. But now? That time and bond was past, as was that kind of rescue. It formed an unsettled emptiness in me, mixed with genuine fear for my life. Not just mine but those of my friends as well.

  I didn’t dare try anything else with Desmond Locke, for fear of their lives more than mine. I raised my hands, slow, until I stood there like Marshall was.

  “Fine,” I said, not able to hide all of the bitter anger behind the word. “You want to talk? Talk.”

  Desmond Locke shook his head, looking around at the destruction in both the art studio and library halves of the entire floor.

  “Not here,” he said, cocking back the top part of his gun, something within it clicking. “Whatever did this might return.”

  “So where, then?” I asked, desperately hoping that the “whatever” that did all this would show his ass now.

  “Come with me,” he said, falling in behind Marshall, the gun pressed close to my friend’s back. “And trust me, you don’t want to find out what happens if you don’t.”

  “Do we have a choice?” I asked, starting to pick my way toward the stairs leading down through the building, but Mr. Locke didn’t respond, simply driving us down through the old building and out onto the street.

  Hopefully, he wasn’t leading us all to our death.

  Ten

  Alexandra

  I never liked being down in the Wall Street area in the evenings. Once the suits and market makers had left, the neighborhood always became a bit of a ghost town. That night, however, it was a shame because as Desmond Locke’s driver pulled up in front of an abandoned and dilapidated church that sat in the shadow of Trinity Church on Trinity Place, I would have loved there to be a crowd around so that the three of us might stand a chance of escaping into it.

  Instead, Desmond Locke stepped out of the car first, then gestured us out of it with the business end of his gun.

  I stared up at the old church in front of us, the building one of my great-great-grandfather’s, but one that was relatively unfamiliar to me. It was more garish than his usual design, lacking the Gothic integrity of most of Alexander’s work in Manhattan, which I suppose made it no surprise that the building looked completely abandoned.

  Its heavy wooden doors were boarded over with a mishmash of slats and boards, but despite their appearance, Locke guided us toward them. Once in the shadowy arch of the cruciform base of the church, he moved to the boards blocking the door. He grabbed at one of the solid beams, then easily lifted it on a hidden pivot point, which allowed him to swing open the mass of boards, revealing a cleverly disguised entrance into the building behind them. They swung away as one, and Locke, again gesturing with the gun in his hand, forced us in through them.

  Once inside, he secured the door before he turned and motioned us forward through the entryway into the church proper.

  I pushed through the inner doors, but what greeted me
was nothing like what I expected. The large open nave I thought would be filled with rows and rows of pews and kneelers was instead bustling with activity that gave it more of an office-warehouse vibe. The left side of the enormous area was filled with office space and cubicles behind a half wall, and people working in there. The other side was stacked high with caged-off shelves crammed with boxes, books, and sundry other items I couldn’t identify from where I stood.

  I stepped into the space of the main aisle down the middle of the room, taking it all in as the four of us walked along.

  “This doesn’t exactly scream church to me,” I said.

  “Nor should it,” he said, continuing on. “Let’s just call this a different affiliation of mine.”

  I threw him a suspicious look. “I take it my father isn’t part of this particular religious affiliation?”

  Desmond Locke shook his head.

  “I should say not,” he said. “And I wouldn’t exactly call the Libra Concordia a religious endeavor, although its roots can be traced back through various denominations of Christianity.”

  I stopped walking. “Libra Concordia?”

  “Balance,” said Marshall, stepping forward. “With one heart.”

  “Very good, Mr. Blackmoore,” Locke said. “You know your Latin.”

  Marshall shrugged. “Dead languages and gaming go hand in hand.”

  Locke laughed at that. “Apparently, they do.”

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  Rory stepped over to one of the open gates of the caged-off area and reached through it for one of the boxes on the shelves. “What is all this?”

  Locke reached for her hand to stop her, but Rory’s reflexes were quicker, and she pulled away before he could grab her.

  “We call it the Hall of Mysteries,” he said, “for lack of anything more imaginative, and it is just that.”

  “How did you accumulate it?” I asked.

  “We’ve amassed a great many findings over the years, things the Church might look upon as . . . miracles.”

  “Or damnation,” Marshall added. “If any part of this is what I think it is . . .”