by R. L. King
Stone continued tracing the tendril, following it as it ranged outward and to the southwest. It didn’t seem to be going far enough to indicate Ralph was still in Daly City, where the murders had occurred. In fact, it appeared from the strength of the tendril that he wasn’t far away—probably in San Francisco somewhere.
It was getting close now. Stone could sense it, the connection growing stronger as it approached the target. He focused his concentration, putting a bit more power into the casting to make sure he didn’t lose it at the last minute.
Careful…careful…
And there he was.
Stone tensed in triumph as his end of the tendril and the one issuing from the target met and formed a connection. “Got you…” he murmured. “Now I just need to get a bead on you, and…”
The connection wavered.
It flickered, losing potency, its bright-red structure dissolving in a chaotic mishmash of energy. For a few seconds this confused Stone, but then he realized what must be happening. “No, Ralph!” he said, clenching his fists. “Don’t do this. Damn you, don’t—”
The connection collapsed, sending feedback ripping back along Stone’s end of the tendril before it, too, vanished.
Stone staggered back, and would have fallen if strong hands hadn’t grabbed him and held him up.
“Hey, hey,” Blum said, sounding scared. “Come on, man, don’t faint on me. Sit down.”
Stone blinked several times as the detective supported him and then pushed him down onto one of the wooden crates. His heart hammered, and sweat dotted his forehead. “Bloody hell,” he panted. “I’ve never experienced that before—and I hope never to again.”
“What happened?” Blum demanded. “It seemed like you found him, and then—”
“I did find him.” Stone waited a moment until his breathing returned to something close to normal and swiped his hair off his forehead. “I know where he is.”
“So then, what happened? Why did you—”
“He’s dead.”
They got out of there after that. Stone quickly gathered up what he could of the ritual circle, refusing to say anything else until they were in Blum’s Honda heading toward the place the ritual had indicated.
“So what happened?” Blum asked again. “I thought you guys couldn’t find people if they were dead.”
“We can’t. He wasn’t dead when I found him.”
“Wait a sec…” The detective cast a quick glance in his direction before returning his attention to the road. “You’re sayin’ he died while you were trackin’ him?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. The psychic feedback was…quite unpleasant.” Stone slumped in the passenger seat with the window open. He still felt queasy and overheated, even after using more power than he’d wanted to block the worst of the feedback.
“So we’re gonna find a dead body where we’re goin’.”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell if he killed himself or somebody else killed him? I hate goin’ in without backup, but nobody’s gonna believe this. I’ll call it in if we do find him, but it’d be nice to know if I should be expectin’ anybody else.”
“I’m not certain, but I didn’t sense anyone else. My guess is he killed himself.” But why? That was the hard question. Why would Ralph kill himself at the exact moment when Stone’s tracking spell reached him? That seemed, as Jason was fond of saying, too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence. Had Ralph somehow sensed the magic? Or, if not Ralph, something around him?
The same thing, perhaps, that had compelled the man to murder three of his own family members?
Before Stone could say anything else, his mobile phone buzzed. “Just—keep going straight,” he told Blum. “We’re getting close. I need to take this.” He put the phone to his ear. “Stone.”
“Doc? It’s me. Where are you? Are you okay?”
Damn. Stone mentally kicked himself—between everything that had been happening lately, he’d forgotten he was supposed to meet with Verity tonight for a magic lesson. “Bugger. I’m sorry, Verity. Are you at my place?”
“Yeah, I let myself in, but everything’s dark. Didn’t we have a—”
“Yes. Yes, we did. We—” He held up a hand at Blum, who’d poked his arm and shot him a questioning look as they reached an intersection. He pointed right and focused back on Verity. “I’m terribly sorry—it completely slipped my mind. I’m doing a—sort of consultation thing with the police up in San Francisco. Can we meet tomorrow instead?”
“Uh—sure. No problem. Consultation thing?”
“I’ll tell you later. Must go now, though. Tomorrow, same time. I promise I’ll be home.”
“Okay. I’ll see you then. I’ll come by a little early if you want and cook dinner. I have a new recipe I want to try out on you.”
“Ever the guinea pig, me. Sounds good. See you then.”
Blum glanced over again as Stone put the phone away. “Miss an appointment?”
“My apprentice. We had a lesson scheduled tonight, and I completely forgot about it. Turn right here.”
“Shit, sorry about that.”
“Not your fault. I’ve been—stretching myself a bit too thin lately.” Stone pointed. “Up there, I think. That tatty little motel.” He hadn’t been paying much attention to their surroundings until now; while he’d been on the phone, they’d turned onto a side street lined with trash cans, clapped-out cars, and ramshackle buildings.
Blum parked the Honda in front of the office. “Where to?”
“I can’t say for certain—the spell isn’t that precise when a place like this with a lot of people is involved.”
“That’s okay. C’mon.” He walked into the office.
Flashing his badge at the desk clerk and giving a description of Ralph quickly got him a room number. “He checked in last night,” the clerk said, looking at the record. “Paid cash. He looked nervous. Kept lookin’ over his shoulder. He wanted or somethin’?”
“Thanks,” was all Blum said. He stalked back out of the office, motioning for Stone to follow him. Together they trooped upstairs to a room at the end of the row, looking out over the place’s half-drained, mosquito-trap swimming pool.
“Stay back,” Blum ordered Stone, pulling his gun from its concealed holster. “Just in case you were wrong.”
Stone knew he wasn’t wrong, but faded back nonetheless, keeping a close watch on the door.
Blum knocked loudly. “Mr. Gallegos? Ralph? Are you in there? This is the police.”
No answer.
“Shit,” Blum muttered under his breath. He stared at the door, but made no move to open it.
“What is it?”
“I can’t just bust in there. Not without a warrant, and definitely not on the say-so of a guy who did a magical ritual and said he was dead.”
Stone tilted his head. “Well…what if the door were already open?”
“But it’s not—”
The lock clicked, and the door swung open a couple of inches, just enough to reveal dim light coming from inside the room.
“You know, I could get to like workin’ with you, Stone.” Blum slipped on a pair of gloves from his pocket and pushed it open the rest of the way. “Stay out here. It’s bad enough the clerk might remember you—can’t have any evidence you were in the room.”
“The clerk won’t remember me,” Stone assured him. “Go on in.”
Blum entered the room. A moment later, Stone heard him call, “Well, you were right. He’s dead.”
Stone moved to the doorway, but didn’t enter the room. He didn’t need to. From where he stood, he could easily see the balding, rotund figure lying on the floor face-down. A large puddle of blood had pooled around his head. It looked fresh.
“Well, fuck,” Blum said. “He hasn’t been dead long. Looks like he cut his own throat—there’s a knife on the floor here.”
Stone couldn’t see the knife from his vantage point. “What do you want me to do, Detecti
ve?”
“I gotta call this in. I’ll have to tell ’em I got an anonymous tip sayin’ he was here. But before I do, can you take a look at the place from there? Do your…magic thing before anybody around here gets curious?”
Stone wasn’t sure it would do any good at this point, but he shifted to magical sight and swept his gaze over the part of the room he could see. At first he didn’t notice anything, but then he tensed.
“Something?”
“Shh.” Stone sharpened his focus. There were definitely magical traces of some kind hovering around Ralph’s body. They were faint, and he’d never seen anything quite like them before, but he was sure they indicated that the man’s suicide probably hadn’t been entirely his idea. The traces seemed to concentrate near the head of the ratty old bed, but Stone couldn’t make out why. “Is there something up near the top of the bed? On or near the nightstand, perhaps?”
“Uh—There’s a bottle of booze. And—holy shit.”
“What?” Stone almost entered the room, but stopped himself.
“There’s another one of those chess-piece things here.”
8
An hour later, Stone was on his way back to Palo Alto, his mind whirling with speculation about Ralph Gallegos.
Blum wouldn’t let him in the room, but after he’d called in to report the body, he’d carefully noted the location of the chess piece, snapped some photos of it, and then brought it out for Stone to examine.
“I shouldn’t do this,” he said, glancing around. By now, a few curious people were coming out of their rooms to see what was going on. “You sure nobody’s gonna recognize you?”
“Don’t worry—they won’t remember anything about me.” Stone had been maintaining his disregarding spell since they arrived at the motel; fortunately, it didn’t use much of his rapidly waning power, since he didn’t have much left to use.
He’d been right—whatever magical energy he’d noticed in the room was mostly centered on the item. This one resembled the one from the chest: both were made of the same gold-veined black material, and both included a crack down the middle, although the crack on this one was more diagonal than horizontal. The differences were that this one still had gems in its “eye” indentations where the other hadn’t, and it had a somewhat different design. It still looked like some kind of upright animal or humanoid creature, but clearly not the same one as the other piece.
The other difference was the this one still glowed with magical energy.
It wasn’t much, and it was already fading; Stone suspected it wouldn’t be longer than another hour or so before this piece was as inert as the other one. He’d examined it carefully with magical sight, but found the energy unfamiliar. He’d never seen anything like it before. If pressed, he might even have said that it was a different kind of magic than anything he’d ever encountered. All he could be sure of was that the object was very old, and had been quite potent at one point.
“Any ideas?” Blum had asked, glancing nervously toward the parking lot. “They’re gonna be here any minute, and it’d really be better if you weren’t here when they got here.”
“We can talk later,” Stone had told him. “I’ll need photos of both items, at least—unless you can convince your people to let me borrow this one.”
“Photos I can do. Borrowin’ it—maybe I can talk ’em into letting you have it for a while—you know, expert opinion. But don’t count on it.”
Stone nodded. He’d expected it. Even with somebody on the force who knew what he was and what he could do, it would be an uphill battle to convince anybody else he could be of that kind of assistance. “All right, then. I’ll clear out and catch a cab back to the station. Call me tomorrow.”
Blum rubbed at his neck. “You got anything you can give me?”
“Just one speculation.”
“I’ll take it.”
“These items are definitely magical. My guess is they’ve got a specific purpose, and when they do…whatever it is they were meant to do, they’re destroyed.”
Blum frowned. “Like one-shot items? They do their thing and go poof?”
“It’s just a guess. But based on the condition of both of them, and the fact that I can still sense magic around this one, I’d say it’s a good one.” He glanced up as a black, four-door car rolled into the lot. “I’d best be off.”
“Yeah, okay. Thanks, Doc.” He sighed, looking back into the room. “I wish we coulda found him before he offed himself, but I guess this is better than nothing. I’ll call you.”
Now, as the BMW sped south in the fast lane of highway 280, Stone tried to organize his thoughts.
What was the purpose of those strange items? Why had the mage who owned the storage locker had them in the first place? Had he known what they were and what they were capable of, and thus put up the ward around the chest to keep them safe? He had no idea, and since the mage was dead and it sounded like his son had no idea of his father’s magical abilities, he’d be unlikely to get answers there.
Another nagging question troubled him as well: what kind of magic did the things possess? He’d seen most types, both black and white, in his career. This seemed to be neither. Non-attuned magic was rare—the only example he’d seen in many years was Trevor Harrison’s strange magical source. It wasn’t as if those two had anything in common, though—the overwhelming sense Stone had gotten from the tiny item was of both great age and immense power. Whatever these things were, they were old. Possibly thousands of years old. And magic had been a lot different in those days.
Why had some seemingly-benign old mage had them at all?
And were there more of them out there somewhere, hiding in other mages’ collections, just waiting for their chance to strike, or were these two the only ones that remained?
He squeezed the steering wheel in frustration as he reached his exit. It didn’t seem as if there’d be any way to find out. Even if Blum could get him some time with the item, the magical traces on it would be long gone by then. He couldn’t track them.
His only possibility would be research—if he could get photos of the items, he could send them to Eddie, and possibly even ask Kolinsky about them. Though he already owed Kolinsky more favors than he was comfortable with.
Right now, he didn’t have time to deal with it. The ritual and maintaining the disregarding spell at the motel had drained nearly all of his magical reserves, which meant he had more pressing concerns.
9
Stone stared down at the white card on his desk. Phoebe S. Such a normal, harmless sort of name. She could have been one of his students, a clerk at a shop, or a waitress at a restaurant.
But she wasn’t any of those things—or at least if she was, he didn’t care. All he cared about was that she was a woman he was about to call to find out if she would let him pay her to allow him to siphon magical energy from her body.
He clenched his fist and looked at the clock on his office desk, then glanced up to make sure the door was still closed. Having a student or Laura the admin aide pop in while he was making this call could potentially cause all sorts of problems.
Just do it. Call her. You know you’ve got to do something, and you don’t have too many other options.
It was ten thirty-five a.m. He’d have to leave for his eleven o’clock class in ten minutes or he wouldn’t make it across campus on time. After that, he’d have just enough time to grab a quick lunch before his appointment with Beatrice Martinez at one, and if he ended up getting a reprimand for all his bizarre behavior lately, he didn’t think adding that emotional baggage to his current guilt would make the conversation go any more smoothly.
Just call her.
He picked up the phone and punched in the number before he could second-guess himself again. He wondered if she’d answer personally, or if he’d have to go through some kind of service. Was this a business she ran, or just something she did on the side?
The line picked up. “Good day to you,” said a pleasant fe
male voice. “If you’re calling this number, you know why. Please leave a message and a phone number where you can be reached.” A tone followed—not a beep, but a pleasant bong.
“Yes—er—” Stop sounding like a bloody schoolboy asking for a date, you prat! “I got your number from a mutual friend, Mr. Kolinsky. I understand you offer a service I’m interested in discussing with you.” Brilliant. Now you sound like you’re trying to solicit a call girl. He left his mobile number before he could say anything else embarrassing, and hung up.
She didn’t call back before he had to leave for his class, so he gathered his briefcase and overcoat and headed out, his mind still far away from the lecture he’d be giving.
The phone didn’t buzz again until he was jogging back to his office. The students had had several questions after the lecture, so he’d skipped lunch. He slowed to a fast walk and pulled out the phone. “Yes, Stone here.”
“This is Phoebe. You left me a message.” It was the same pleasant voice as before; it sounded businesslike and brisk now.
“Yes. Er—” He glanced around to make sure nobody was paying him any attention. It was already ten minutes to one—he’d have to keep up a quick pace if he didn’t want to be late for the appointment with Martinez. “As I said, our mutual friend Mr. Kolinsky gave me your contact information. He said you might have an…opening in your schedule.”
“I do, yes. Tomorrow, in fact. I’m available before three-thirty, if that works for you.”
“I can make it work.” He glanced at his watch again. “I’ll have to call you back to sort out the details, though—I’ve got an appointment in ten minutes. Where are you?”