Mortal Imperative: An Alastair Stone Urban Fantasy Novel (Alastair Stone Chronicles Book 24)

by R. L. King

  “Sir…” Aubrey’s grip tightened, and both his smile and his eyes were kind. “It’s all right. It’s being take care of. I like my doctor. He might not be the best in the world, but he does a fine job. He puts up with me, even though I don’t go to see him as often as I probably should.” He paused. “I’ll tell you what you can do to help me, though.”

  “Anything.” He put his own hand over Aubrey’s; if there was any tremor, it was probably coming from him at the moment. “Just tell me. I’ll do whatever’s necessary.”

  “Just…go on as you’ve always done. Don’t treat me any differently.” His expression turned more serious, but his eyes still twinkled. “I’m not dying, Alastair. Not for a good long time, anyway. The way medical science is advancing these days, I’ll probably die of something else long before this gets me.”

  At the word “die,” Stone’s hand tightened involuntarily. “Aubrey…”

  “Shh…” Aubrey extricated his hand and patted Stone’s. “Come on,” he said more briskly. “You asked me to tell you what was going on, and I’ve told you.” He held up the trowel. “Right now, I’ve got to see to these vines before the rain comes back.” Glancing at the sky, he added, “I think I’ve only got another hour or so of sun, so I’d best hurry.”

  Stone took a slow, deep breath. He still felt disassociated, like his consciousness was floating somewhere above his body, looking down on the scene. “Yes. Of course.” He paused, then added, “Do you want me to help you?”

  Aubrey laughed, a genuinely merry sound. “Oh, sir! I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh at you. But honestly! We both know the only thing you’re worse at than cooking is gardening.”

  Stone joined him in laughter, maybe a little too loudly. “Fair enough. You don’t want old ‘black-thumb’ here killing off your fragile little plants.” He swallowed as the laughter died. “But…in exchange for doing what you ask, I want you to promise me something. Two things, actually.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “First, if there’s anything you need—anything at all—to help you or make things easier for you, you’ll let me know.”

  “I promise.”

  “And second…you won’t be a stubborn old goat and insist on doing things that aren’t safe, just to prove you can.”

  Aubrey chuckled. “Like you do, sir?”

  He sighed. “No. Not like I do. Promise me. No climbing on the roof, or cleaning the gutters, or anything like that.”

  “I suppose this is probably the time when I should tell you I haven’t been doing any of that for years.”

  Stone stared at him. “Seriously?”

  “I’ve been hiring a couple of young men from the village to do those kinds of repairs.” Again, he chuckled. “I’m stubborn, but I’m not a fool.”

  “You mean all this time I’ve been worrying about you climbing about on the roof like a monkey, and—”

  “In any case,” Aubrey interposed firmly, “you needn’t worry about me keeping my promise.” His expression grew more serious. “Now—shall we have nothing more to say about this?”

  Stone didn’t want to agree with it. He wanted to go out and scour the world for the best doctors, the most cutting-edge treatment techniques, anything to make this go away.

  But he couldn’t make it go away. And continuing to harp on it would do nothing but damage his relationship with one of his dearest friends.

  You can’t fix everything, Stone. Not even with magic.

  “All right,” he said softly, and when his voice shook a little, he didn’t do anything to stop it. “Nothing more.” He sighed. “I suppose I should go. I’ve still got my little puzzle to deal with, and I’m getting nowhere with it.”

  “I’m sure you’ll work it out, sir.” Aubrey crouched next to the vines, returning to arranging the mulch with the trowel. “You always do.”

  Not always, he thought.

  “I hope you’re right,” was all he said.

  He was grateful he could take the ley line straight back to his Encantada house instead of using the portal, because the last thing he wanted to do right now was have Marta Bellwood notice he had something heavy on his mind. And she would notice.

  There was another thing he had to concern himself with: Verity’s mention that Marta might be considering giving up the restaurant and returning to England. That would no longer affect him, but it would certainly affect many other mages who lived in the area or traveled to it. If she did decide to leave, something would have to be done, and quickly.

  Stop it, he told himself in frustration. It’s not even a problem yet. It’s nothing but a second-hand rumor. You’ve got enough other problems on your plate without worrying about potential ones.

  Raider was happy to see him as he hurried upstairs to his study, but he didn’t stop to do more than quickly bend down to scratch the cat behind the ears on his way by. He retrieved his phone from the desk and glanced at it, noting he’d missed several texts and three voicemails while he’d been in England.

  He paged through the texts, determining they could wait, and then cued up the voicemails. The first was from Beatrice Martinez, reminding him about a meeting later in the week. The second was a telemarketer trying to interest him in a timeshare. He picked up the phone and started toward the door, erasing the second message and preparing to erase the third if it was of the same type.

  A familiar, fearful voice came through the speaker, stopping him in mid-step.

  “Dr. Stone? It’s Laura Grider. Oh, I do hope you get this soon. I don’t know who else to call, or what I should do. Frank’s disappeared.”

  26

  “So now another ghoul is missing?” Verity asked, shocked.

  She, Jason, Amber, and Ian were all gathered in Stone’s living room early that evening, heaping their plates with the Chinese takeout he’d brought to feed them.

  He’d asked them to come without giving them much information, telling them only that he needed their perspective on some new developments. Ian was already there, of course, and the others had immediately agreed to drop what they were doing and come over.

  He’d called Laura Grider back immediately after listening to the voicemail message, and she’d answered on the first ring.

  “Oh, Dr. Stone,” she’d said, sounding like she’d been crying. “I’m so sorry to bother you again, but I didn’t know who else to call. Frank is gone.”

  “Gone? Please, Laura, calm down. I’ll help you if I can, but you’ve got to tell me what’s happened. What do you mean he’s gone?”

  “I think he mentioned to you before that he works part time at a golf shop. We don’t need the money, but he likes to get out of the house and socialize a bit. Yesterday, he didn’t come home. I tried to call him, but the call went straight to voicemail. I called the shop, and they told me he’d left at the normal time. They said nothing seemed odd about him.”

  “And this was yesterday, you said?”

  “Yes. Yesterday evening.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t return your call sooner. I was away from my phone.” He paused to think. “I suppose he didn’t say anything to make you believe he’d made any discoveries.”

  “No. Nothing. In fact, he was looking forward to coming home that evening. I’d made his favorite dinner, and we were going to take Pepper out for a nice walk together.” She sniffled, and her voice shook more. “Dr. Stone…I’m so scared he’s going to end up like…”

  Like Chris Belmont. She didn’t say it, but he heard it nonetheless. “We don’t know that yet. This could be completely unrelated.” While he didn’t think it was, there was no point in agitating her further. “And I assume you didn’t call the authorities.”

  “No…” She swallowed. “Frank would be upset if I did that, and I don’t blame him. We’re all so afraid someone will find out about…you know.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “But…I did do something else. And that’s why I’m so worried.”

  “What did you do?”
r />   She sniffled again. “Frank and I…we both have that thing on our phones where we can track each other’s location. We trust each other completely, and I use it so I’ll know when he’s coming home so I can have dinner ready. I checked it yesterday. And…he didn’t show up.”

  Stone frowned. “Didn’t show up? Perhaps he turned his phone off.”

  “He wouldn’t do that. And I know he keeps it charged. We were only away from each other for about four hours.” She took a deep, shuddering breath and let it out. “Can you help? Can you do anything? I know we keep asking you for more, but—”

  “I’ll do what I can, Laura. I promise. I can’t come back there right now, but I want to check with some friends. Then I’ll see what we can do to find Frank. Until then—have you got a friend you can stay with?”

  “I…do. She’s part of the colony, so she’ll understand.”

  “Good. Do that, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” Of course, he didn’t tell her he was worried someone might come after her next, but the thought did cross his mind.

  Now, several hours later, he faced Ian and the others from his overstuffed armchair, ignoring the Chinese food as he described Laura’s call and his visit to England to investigate Miriam Padgett and her mother. He hadn’t told any of them—not even Ian—that he’d spoken with Aubrey.

  “Shit,” Jason murmured. “This is looking worse and worse.”

  “Do you think Richter and his people took Frank, too?” Amber asked. “Maybe they needed more ghouls for whatever they’re working on?”

  “Who knows?” Stone spread his hands. “The part of this that’s disturbing me the most is Miriam Padgett’s involvement. If she’s really Cheltham, I haven’t got a clue about how she could have gone from a frumpy shopgirl to a necromantic mastermind in less than a year. That’s simply not possible.”

  “Are you absolutely sure it’s her?” Verity asked.

  “Not a hundred percent, but fairly sure. Wait!” He raised a finger. “Hang on. You saw her too. Eddie found the photo on the Web. Let me show it to you and maybe you’ll have better luck determining if we’re looking at the same person.”

  He hurried upstairs, grabbed his laptop, and brought it back down. It took him a bit of scrolling to find the photo. He passed it across to her. “What do you think?”

  “You’ve met this Cheltham person?” Jason asked Verity. “When?”

  “A few months ago. Doc and I were looking for another wild talent.” She shot a glance at Stone—obviously she wasn’t ready to share the whole story about Sharra yet. Instead, she took the laptop and studied the photo.

  Everybody watched her until she looked up.

  “Well?” Jason asked. “Is it her?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. I’m sure of it.” Her gaze hardened. “That’s her.”

  “How do you know?” Stone asked.

  “Hard to say. Something about her eyes. I mean, this woman is chubbier and looks like she’s afraid of her own shadow, but that’s easy to change. You can’t change your eyes.” She handed the laptop back, fixing a level stare on Stone. “I want a piece of that bitch if you go after her, Doc.”

  Jason, Ian, and Amber exchanged glances at her sudden vehemence, but nobody asked.

  Stone was barely paying attention. He looked at the photo again. “Okay, so you’re sure it’s her, and I’m fairly sure. I’ll take your word for it. But that leaves us back at our original question.” He pointed at the photo. “How did she go from that to the woman we dealt with at Berrycliff Manor in less than a year?”

  “You did say you thought that Ben Halstrom guy was working with Richter,” Ian said. “Could he have identified magical talent in her?”

  “No.” He glanced at Verity. “You’ll have to take my word for that, but I know Halstrom wasn’t active at that time.”

  “And even if he did,” Verity said, “it’s still pretty much impossible for her to have learned that kind of magic in that short a time. I mean, Doc only took three years for his apprenticeship, and that’s considered really fast.”

  “Exactly,” Stone agreed. “And necromancy is bloody advanced magic. For a rank beginner to get that good at it that fast, something unusual had to be going on.” He wondered briefly if one of the dragons had somehow taught her, but his impression from Kolinsky was that all of them hated necromancy, regardless of their differences in other areas.

  “Maybe she’s working with somebody else,” Ian said. “Somebody you didn’t see when you dealt with her before.”

  “Yeah.” Jason swallowed a mouthful of chicken chow mein. “Maybe Richter was working behind the scenes. It’s possible he could know necromancy, right?”

  “Possible,” Stone mused. “It’s the best idea I’ve heard so far, at any rate.” Especially if Richter is a scion, he thought. That could explain his strong magical talent, and why the dragons were remaining hands—or claws—off, despite their hatred for necromancy.

  “Let’s look at this another way,” Amber said, pulling out a notebook. “When did you say Miriam Padgett disappeared?”

  “Last July. Her mum said her last visit was on a Saturday at the end of July, and she didn’t return the following week.”

  Amber wrote that down, with Jason leaning in to peer over her shoulder.

  “And Eddie said Miriam’s related to James Brathwaite?” Verity asked.

  “Very distantly. The family lost their fortune—you remember, Ian, that’s why their ancestral home is a boarding school now. We had to hunt through mundane records to locate her at all.”

  He got up and began to pace. “It’s possible she might have located some of Brathwaite’s old papers among her things, but it hardly seems likely. She lived in a little one-bedroom council flat. And if the family’s magical talent had long since died out, I doubt they’d have kept anything like that. Her mum seemed more like the photo-scrapbook and school-papers type than the necromantic-rituals type. Even if she had it, she’d have had to get rid of it before she moved into the care home.”

  “Maybe she gave it to Miriam,” Amber said.

  Stone sighed, stalking around behind the sofa. “I can’t help thinking we’re missing something here. If Miriam’s the one behind this, somebody had to be teaching her. Maybe it’s Richter, but how would he have even known she existed?”

  “Maybe he knew about the Brathwaite connection,” Ian said. “Maybe he just got lucky—you know, found her and somehow tested her for magic. If this Halstrom guy could do it, maybe somebody as powerful as you say Richter is had another way to do it.”

  “Yeah,” Jason said. “You can spot magic power in somebody, if you check closely. I know you can—you did it with V. So if he suspected Cheltham might have inherited it, maybe he grabbed her and did the same test.”

  “I suppose…” Stone muttered. It wasn’t a bad hypothesis, but he still felt like they were leaving something out.

  “Wait!” Verity said, jerking up a hand, nearly vibrating with nervous energy.

  Everyone turned to look at her in anticipation.

  “You said Miriam disappeared at the end of July, right?”

  “Yes…” Stone said, tilting his head. “And?”

  She pulled out her phone and began scrolling through something. “Hang on a minute.”

  “V, what are you—” Jason began.

  She ignored him and kept scrolling. “I thought so!” she said in triumph. She held up the phone and pointed at a series of photos on her camera roll.

  Stone leaned in to look. “Those are photos you took at the Surrey house, when the far side of the east wing caved in. What does that—”

  “Don’t you see?” She stabbed a finger at the photos. “This might be nothing—but don’t you remember when this happened?”

  It hit him like someone had dropped a rock on his head. “End of July…” he murmured. He stared at her. “Bloody hell.”

  “I’m not following,” Amber said. “What happened at the end of July?”

  Ian w
as the next to catch on. “That was when the whole business happened with the house—the attack by those skeleton things, and the ritual.”

  Verity nodded several times, then forced herself to calm down. “Doc…I know this sounds batshit crazy…but a lot of stuff involving magic is batshit crazy. Could it be possible…could there even be a tiny chance…that when you kicked Brathwaite’s echo out of your body when he possessed you, he didn’t die?”

  Stone’s whole body went cold. “Dear gods…”

  “Wait a minute,” Jason protested. “Are you sayin’ this guy might still be floating around somewhere?”

  “He was before,” Ian said. “Mages don’t make echoes very often, but when they do, they’re powerful.”

  Amber looked between them. “Hold on. Explain this in small words for the mostly mundane in the audience, okay? An echo?”

  “Echoes are like ghosts,” Stone said. “Essentially they are what mundanes call ghosts. And somehow James Brathwaite’s echo managed to hang about, imprisoned under my house, for nearly two hundred years. He got out when we discovered the catacombs underneath it.”

  “And this thing possessed you?” Amber exchanged glances with Jason, and Stone didn’t miss the what kind of bunch of weirdos did I sign on with? look.

  “Yes. That’s not supposed to be possible, but I’d used a potion that temporarily separated my spirit from my body, so we could fool the other echoes in the house into thinking I was dead so they’d leave. We didn’t know Brathwaite was hanging about too. It was essentially like letting him walk into an empty house and take up residence.”

  “You’re…kidding.”

  “Not a bit.”

  “You just said all that like it was a normal thing that people talk about.”

  “To be fair,” Verity said wryly, “it kind of is, especially around Doc. Might as well get used to it.”