The Stone (Lockstone Book 1)

by Seb L. Carter

  With Brian Grazinski, though, both of them wearing tank tops and shorts, Liam’s knobby knees touching against the skin of Brian’s exposed thigh as they passed the bottle back and forth to one another and threw back long, irrational drinks of sweet vodka, a carelessness passed between them.

  They lay back against one another. Liam’s heart pounded when Brian turned to him, their eyes inches apart and the touch of Brian’s breath on his cheek. Brian made the first move to touch Liam’s stomach. On top of his shirt at first, but his thumb kneading the fabric of Liam’s shirt as they fell into a shuddered-breath silence amidst a scent of alcoholic sweet apples. Then it was Brian’s hand that moved down to the space of skin exposed between the waist-band of Liam’s shorts and the hem of his shirt. Brian’s hand lifted the fabric and touched Liam’s skin in a way that Liam had only ever dreamed about and thought impossible. Brian took that euphoric first step, and he kept going. Liam was drunk, but the actions of that moment, the unbelievability of it all, made him present. Crystal clear, an important turning point in his life.

  They kissed, then they pulled at one another’s clothes until they had them all off and the both of them wavered naked in the middle of Liam’s room. They took one another in their hands and relished at the feel of someone else touching those parts that only they had touched themselves. It was a different, strange, and intoxicating feel to hold another guy in hand, so similar to his own yet so much the same that it didn’t feel alien and weird at all.

  It felt right.

  Neither of them spoke. They both moved and twisted into one another. For all the talk on the outside how unnatural this moment should be to a strained sense of morality, it was entirely natural. There was nothing more right in the world than what Liam was doing with Brian on the floor of his bedroom. Hands and mouths knew exactly what to do. They were both fulfilling something, opening doors in their souls, and who else could put in those doors to be thrown open but God Himself?

  When they finished, they fell together onto Liam’s bed, and that’s where they remained…

  Until Becky stood at the foot of Liam’s bed the next morning with her hands on her round hips and her lip-sticked mouth hung open.

  Liam expected the worst when he saw her standing there, instantly awake and fearful of what was going to happen next. Brian woke up too, and he scrambled from the bed to find his clothes.

  “Wait,” Becky said. Her voice was conversational, not harsh. It froze them both to stare at her as if at any moment, a storm might break. But Becky only lifted her hands and apologized. “You don’t have to leave, Brian,” she said. She turned and started for the door. “I’ll go make us some breakfast, and we’ll talk.”

  And that’s what she did. Liam and Brian both moved sheepishly into the kitchen where the scent of bacon on the stove filled the room. Liam sat down like it was some surreal movie scene in which he and Brian were only observers and not active participants. Becky smiled at them like nothing had happened as she made the eggs and finished the bacon. The toast was buttered and jam was laid out.

  Three plates were set out on the table, and Holly, Liam’s baby sister was in her high chair. Becky sat down with them, and she served each of them generous helpings of eggs and bacon. When she finally sat down, she moved the plate away from her a bit and folded her hands on the table while she stared at both Liam and Brian.

  She reached over and put a hand on Liam’s. “You know, I always thought, but I never knew for sure.” She patted his hand and gave him a warm smile, then she turned her attention to her plate. “Let’s eat.”

  “You’re not mad?” Liam asked her after a few wary mouthfuls of egg and bacon that he barely was able to taste, even though he was certain they were well made and perfectly seasoned. The nerves in his stomach stole away all flavor.

  Becky stopped and stared at him. “Honey, God no.” She looked to Brian then back to Liam. “Why would I be mad that you finally figured out a big part of your life? Who could get mad at that?”

  “Don’t you go to church?” Brian asked.

  “Of course I do,” she said. “And I’m thankful for it. But do I believe everything they tell me in church?” She cut her sunny-side-up eggs with a fork and knife, then she stopped. “I believe what’s in my heart. That’s what God tells me is true. God’s telling me that you’re both beautiful boys who are on a journey that’s going to be hard enough, so somebody’s gotta be there to give you a soft place to land when things get tough.”

  After a moment of her words sinking in, Liam dropped his own fork and knife, and he got up from his chair to go to Becky. He hugged her tight. She returned the hug, and Liam cried into her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” Liam said through his sobs.

  “Honey, you got nothing to be sorry for,” Becky said.

  Brian was there by them, and Becky lifted an arm to encircle him too. They stayed that way for a good long while until Liam pulled away. “What about dad?” he asked.

  She patted Liam on the cheek. “You let me handle him. I’ll see how it is with him, and then you and I can decide if it’s the right time to tell him or not.”

  “What if it’s not?”

  “Well, honey, if it’s not, I’ll work on him until it is. And we’ll get him there, step by tiny step until he has the strength to give you as big a hug as I’m willing to give you every day.” She smiled up at him through tears twinkling in her eyes.

  Liam had never felt so much love for Becky as he did right then.

  Chicago, IL – Present Day

  “Why didn’t you call me last night?” Nina stood at the handoff station at work.

  Liam didn’t really notice her at first, instead staring at the milk as it moved inside the stainless-steel steaming pitcher. He kept seeing the old man’s face, that look of terror when he saw Liam after tossing him the stone. Then the sickening thud of him being hit by the cab—the sound of the old man’s bones snapping yet another auditory terror to add to his interminable memory of horrific things. But when he was hit in the face by a wooden coffee stirrer, he startled back to himself.

  “Hey,” he said with some surprise.

  Nina’s eyes were wide. She stood with her hands on her hips, and an angry stare. Her tight-curled hair fell over her forehead, an Afro blow-out that framed her light-brown face and touched down on her shoulders. Nina was Asian in her facial features with high cheek bones, her eyes had no prominent crease and the inner corner of her eyes folded like her mother’s, a woman from China, but her hair was thick and curly like her father’s, an African man originally from Nigeria. Her skin tone was a tawny beige.

  “I asked you a question,” Nina said.

  Nina was Liam’s best friend since he first started at DePaul University. They met during orientation when she sat down beside him because she said he looked lonely. He’d wanted her to leave, but she persisted. And the rest was history. She often showed up at his work to drink coffee and study. Except today, clearly, she wasn’t waiting for a coffee drink. She was there to stare Liam down until he nervously glanced at the milk he was frothing with the espresso machine’s steam wand.

  Justin, Liam’s roommate, stood behind her with a sheepish expression. He shrugged. “I thought you told her already.”

  “No, he did not,” Nina said. She answered Justin, but her eyes bore into Liam.

  Liam didn’t have to ask what she was angry about. “I don’t know, it was late,” Liam said over the scream of milk, his eyes cast down. He turned off the steaming milk, and he finished up the latte he was making and called the name of the person on the cup. “I had a paper to write,” he said to Nina.

  “Really? Seriously? That’s what you’re going with?” She had her hands on her hips. Her curly black hair made her seem all the more imposing. The way she stared at him when she was angry always enhanced that feeling like he was deep into trouble. She had a way of putting him in his place almost without trying. Liam told her once that she was going to be a good mom with kids who were perfect angels
because they’d never want to come face to face with that angry stare of hers. That, of course, was when she said she didn’t want kids until she was the CEO of her own fashion brand. “You went up to your room and did homework. After all that?”

  “Yeah, dude. You pissed her off.” Justin gave Liam an apologetic look.

  Liam shot him a hard stare that, he hoped, communicated just how unhelpful Justin was being. He always thought of Justin as the type to put two cats into a bag to see how the fight turned out. He wasn’t vindictive, and, now that Liam knew him, he doubted very seriously that he would actually cause harm to an animal, but there were times that Justin seemed to take pleasure in the chaos in his life. It could be an asset to help him get through life, or, like now, it could cause someone—like Liam—to want to strangle him in his sleep. “She barely let me say two words on the way over here,” Justin said.

  “I think I’m more mad that I had to find out from Justin,” Nina said. “It clearly wasn’t too late for you to tell him everything.”

  “He’s my roommate. He walked in on me,” Liam said with a shrug.

  Honestly, after watching a homeless man get run over by a taxi, Liam wasn’t sure what to do last night. He didn’t write a single word of his paper. There were a lot of police and flashing lights. It was all too vivid a recall of that night in 2010. He stood against a dirty brick wall and answered cop questions as best he could. He never told them about the stone, just that the old homeless man freaked out on him and ran into traffic. It was pretty much an open-and-shut case in their eyes, especially when witnesses were there to say Liam never touched the guy.

  Usually Nina was the first one he went to for anything. But this needed processing. This wasn’t something that college friends sit on a bed and talk late into the night about right away. He needed that time alone, time to stare at his walls in complete silence as he tried to come to terms with what he’d seen, what he’d felt.

  The memories stirred up.

  By the time Justin came home, it was going on 2 a.m., and Liam was sort of ready to talk about it.

  “I know. I’m sorry,” Liam said to Nina.

  “I’m going to order,” Justin said, backing away and moving toward the line at the cash register. “The usual?” Justin said to Nina, and Nina nodded.

  “You better be sorry, shithead.” She had strong words, but her anger was more feigned than serious. And in the space of a split second, she had a pouty lip and a sympathetic smile for him. She reached across the drink hand-off station. “So, you’re doing okay?” Nina asked him when Justin was gone.

  Liam shrugged. “Yeah. I was fine this morning,” he said. Which was a lie.

  She leaned against the drink hand-off station. “And now?”

  Liam paused. He shrugged. “Yeah,” he said half-heartedly. “I mean, I was literally the last person that this guy spoke to in his life. Ever. He gave me a rock, and he said it was from somebody named Thaddeus, then he ran out into the street and died.”

  “Yeah,” Nina said. “Justin mentioned that. Weird, right?”

  “Totally.”

  She shot him a glance like she still wasn’t over the idea that she had to hear about all of this from Liam’s roommate and not directly from Liam. “All that for a rock?”

  “Clearly, he was off his rocker,” Liam said.

  “Who’s Thaddeus?”

  Liam shrugged. “Somebody the guy made up, I imagine.”

  “Do you still have the rock?”

  “Yeah. It’s in my bag.”

  “I want to see it?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I do.”

  “It’s a rock.”

  Nina sighed, and she shifted her weight. “Just show me the goddamn rock,” she said.

  Liam smiled to hide what he was really feeling. He was scared of the rock. Every time he touched it, the rock seemed to want to get inside him. That morning, he’d held it in the palm of his hand. At first, he thought maybe it was his imagination, a feeling brought on by the weight of everything he’d experienced the previous evening.

  But as he turned the stone over and over in his hand, it wasn’t his imagination at all. It was like the stone had something over on him. It pulled to him and did funny things to his head. Even now that the stone was safely locked away in his locker, zipped up inside his backpack, it was always there at the back of his mind. But the expression on Nina’s face said she wasn’t going to let this go. “Okay. Fine. I’ll show you. But you’ll have to wait until I’m off. I have another two hours.”

  “I’ll be here,” Nina said. She picked up her backpack off the floor, and she slung it over her shoulder. “I’m not leaving until you talk to me. I have a lot of studying to do, so I have lots of time. Don’t think I’m letting you off the hook for not calling me last night as soon as you got to your dorm room.”

  “I never expected you would,” Liam said as he picked up the next cup with the coffee drink order written in cryptic letter combinations on the side, and he began to steam more milk.

  Chicago, IL

  Patrick sat in his hotel room with the glass door to the balcony open wide. The clock on his new phone said it was going on two in the afternoon. His new phone, not the one given to him by the professor the previous night. One of the first things he did was get a second burner phone. The one given to him couldn’t be trusted. The first chance he got, he disabled the phone’s ability to be tracked. He didn’t throw it out—it was their only means to contact him—but he wasn’t going to let anything else he did be monitored.

  He was twenty stories up in a hotel room far outside his pay grade. The wind was a little too cool this high up and for this time of year, or he was still adjusting to the change in climate from Kandahar to Chicago. The sounds were different here too, the constant dun of cars and honking horns, a perpetual hum of the city. The air smelled of lake water and exhaust. Still, he thought better when outside air hit him. And it never mattered the place before, even if he was still shaken from his previous attempts at using his talent.

  But he struggled.

  He sat on the bed in the hotel room, the curtains over the sliding doors billowing inward and carried out to flutter over the balcony. In one hand, he held the basic info sheet for his target. Liam Coyle (Yates) was listed as the kid’s name. Patrick had a hard time thinking of him as anything other than a kid. The kid’s birth date put him at twenty-three years old, only three years younger than Patrick, but the picture that Patrick held in the other hand made him think of a high-school kid barely out of braces and PE class.

  He started this case the way he’d always done: Stare at the basic information he was given until his heart burned like he was missing something, that thing being whatever it was he was meant to find. It really was that simple. Usually, anyways. When his superior officers asked about his talent, Patrick always gave them a complex explanation about number and probabilities, odd connections that he made in his mind that others might not be able to see. But it was really no more than sitting somewhere and staring at an object related to the person or thing he searched for. It worked without a visual aid too, even though it took a little more focus, breathing in and out like a Zen master until he formed a mental image. Not long after, in most cases, he was ready to go, given a sense of the direction where the person or object waited to be found.

  He’d learned very early on, back when he, himself, was a kid and still in high school, that it weirded people out when he told them how it really worked. He didn’t like calling it psychic. He didn’t believe in any of that stuff anyway.

  His talent was discovered by accident. There was a girl he thought he liked in high school when he was a gangly freshman. She was a pretty girl with blond hair that she pulled back and kept in a bouncy pony tail, and she wore tight sweaters and short skirts. She was a junior. Patrick followed her around and tried to talk to her. He’d turn up and be there whenever she rounded a corner or when she came out of the girl’s bathroom. At first, it was “cu
te,” she said. She joked openly, calling him her puppy dog. She made it very clear that she had a boyfriend and that, while he was “cute”, he was way too young for her, being she was a junior and all.

  He wasn’t even aware he was doing it at first. It came down to a matter of choices he made on his way to class. Instead of going the quickest, most direct route to a classroom, he’d suddenly have the desire to take a roundabout way. And he’d simply know in his gut to stop and wait at a particular spot. Then, sure enough, she’d come out of some classroom, the girl’s bathroom, or the locker room. After a while, she began to take a different kind of notice. Instead of calling it cute, her brow crossed, her face registered worry and fear, and she clutched her books closer as she hurried away. She told her boyfriend and others about it until a group of the big guys from the football team, of which her boyfriend was one, took him into the locker room and told him to stop following her by a punch in the stomach and shoving his face into a locker. After that, kids in his school called him creepy and a stalker.

  The counselor at his high school called him into her office. She was Mrs. Biederman, a lanky woman with short, brown hair who always dressed like she was about to attend a swanky art opening. Long skirts and blouses with billowy sleeves. She’d been contacted by a few of Patrick’s teachers who expressed concern by how withdrawn he was becoming and how it affected his grades. He went from being a straight-A student to failing to turn in his homework. Patrick told her why, and he even explained to her how it happened. She didn’t believe him when he explained that he was able to find people. She said it was typical of some teens his age to manifest these delusions of grandeur.