The Stone (Lockstone Book 1)

by Seb L. Carter

  Hanks and Neufield both burst into the room, weapons drawn. “What the fuck happened?” Neufield said. He knelt next to Zach. “You all right?”

  Zach nodded. He felt at his body, at his neck where the blade that Penrose somehow managed to smuggle in—a sword! —was aimed for. “I’m all right,” he said.

  “He’s dead,” Glenda said. She faced the detectives. “It was a good kill. You know that.”

  Hanks’s mouth worked like he wasn’t sure what to say. “I don’t know what I know anymore,” he said. Then he turned to the other officers in the room. “Who processed this suspect?” he shouted. “Who the fuck missed that?”

  Penrose’s words played over again in Zach’s head. He forced himself up. “My family,” Zach said. “He said ‘they all know.’”

  Zach got to his feet, and he fumbled for the cell phone in his pocket. It took him long seconds to thumb through his contacts list to find Aubrey’s number again, a number that he’d taken off his favorites after a fight they had, an act he was now regretting.

  “Come on, Aubrey.” The phone was ringing. “Pick up. Pick up.” It continued to ring until her voice mail answered. “Fuck,” Zach said.

  He tried it again. More ringing. No answer.

  Glenda was at his side. “The Bureau will send somebody,” she said.

  And Zach could only stand, staring at his phone, suddenly helpless.

  Thirteen

  Chicago, IL

  Liam knew for sure that something was wrong when the driver refused to acknowledge his questions. He thought several times about ways to escape. None of them seemed feasible. He even gripped the stone in the palm of his hand and held it up like he might think about using it. That was the only thing that seemed to get the driver’s attention.

  “I wouldn’t,” the driver said, as if he knew what Liam was contemplating.

  “Wouldn’t what? What do you know? Where are you taking me?” Liam asked.

  But the driver went back to ignoring him, so Liam lifted the stone again.

  The driver lifted his hand balled into a fist from the steering wheel, and Liam felt himself in the grip of something, unable to move. He sat, frozen in the back seat. Perfectly frozen like the people of Pompeii after the destruction caused by Mount Vesuvius, their bodies covered in ash and their forms perfectly preserved. He couldn’t relax. He’d been moving up from his seat to raise his fist with the stone in it so that the driver could see. Now every muscle in his body was paralyzed. He could barely breathe.

  His mind remained active, however. He was acutely aware of every moment that passed in his current state. His eyes burned. He tried to blink but found he couldn’t.

  And he fought against it. First, he tried to will his body to work as it was supposed to in the way that he would lift an arm or kick out his leg. It was of no use.

  Liam could see the driver was taking him into Ravenswood on the far north side of the city. He had no choice but to watch. The way he’d been frozen in the back seat made it so that he sat like an interested child eager to get to their destination and leaning forward to watch every turn. They were on a residential street, a street lined on both sides with large houses, many of them converted into apartment buildings.

  The driver paused the car in front of one of the driveways of a tall three-story brick house, and he pressed a button on his visor that controlled an iron gate that slid open. Then he turned into the driveway and killed the engine. He got out without a word.

  Liam sat alone in the car, heat ticking in the engine. He tried to move again. He attacked at whatever had him frozen. Mentally, he hit at it and tried to will his body to respond to what his brain was telling it to do.

  Something stirred in the air around him, a kind of shimmering that he couldn’t tell where it came from. Like heat waves over hot asphalt.

  The driver opened the door on Liam’s side of the car just as Liam managed to break through the grip that held him tight. His control of that magic sent out a shockwave that blew the driver back into a wrought-iron fence.

  Liam didn’t waste any time. He took advantage of the moment, getting out of the car and making a run for the open gate of the driveway. He left his bag in the car, but he still gripped the stone.

  He made it as far as the end of the car before something hit him in the head.

  And his world went black.

  Elsewhere in Chicago

  Patrick focused on Liam, just as he had the first time he set out to find him. He expected difficulty, that it would take more to connect with him like it had the first time.

  But this time, it was surprisingly easy.

  Like a beacon on the horizon, Patrick knew exactly what direction to go. And approximately where he might find him. Never before had he been able to find a person using his talent this easily. It was something he’d have to ponder later on.

  He left the motel room and hailed a cab. He supposed he could use the ride sharing app he had on his phone, but he was in a hurry. A cab stopped promptly at the curb and waited for him to get in.

  “North,” he told the driver.

  The driver peered over his shoulder. “What address?”

  “North,” Patrick said again. “I told you.” This was a standard cabbie conversation when he was using his talent.

  “I need to know where to go, sir.”

  But how could he tell him the address when that’s not how it worked? “Do you have a map?” He at least could get a sense of the location—that’s how strong it was this time. He believed that if he could see it on a map, he’d be able to point at the general location.

  The driver turned his GPS device so that Patrick could see it.

  “Zoom out,” Patrick told him.

  The driver reverse-pinched on the screen with his forefinger and thumb and caused the unit to show a wider area of Chicago. Patrick focused again, and the sensation coursed through him like real liquid in his veins. “There,” he said. He pointed to the screen to a spot almost due north of where they were now.

  “Lincoln Square?”

  “Sure. Sounds good,” Patrick said. “I just need for you to go there. Quick. I’ll be able to tell you more once we’re closer.”

  The driver still gave Patrick a sidelong look, but then he pulled out into the flow of traffic.

  The trip up north took longer than Patrick would have wanted. Traffic in the city was stop and go in places, and they were forced to wait at stoplights that seemed to sit on red for longer than Patrick could take. His body felt full of kinetic energy, and several times he wondered if it would be quicker to get out and walked, maybe took the train. If he was better acquainted with Chicago’s train system, he probably would have considered that. But, since this wasn’t a standard operation for him, learning the infrastructure of a city hadn’t been a priority. He was kicking himself for it now. It meant he was at the mercy of those who could move him from place to place. Normally that wasn’t a big deal, but in this case, it made him restless.

  “Are you on something, buddy?” the driver asked him while they stood at a red light.

  “What?” Patrick stared at him, his eyes in the rearview mirror. “No. I’m not on anything.”

  “You’re causing the car to shake.”

  Patrick forced himself to sit still. “Sorry,” he said. He turned to look out the window again, this time chewing on his thumbnail.

  Why was this making him so jumpy? Yes, Liam was a nice guy. Undeniably, there was a connection with him. But it was more than that, wasn’t it? That was something he couldn’t deny either. A deep connection that touched in his ancient brain, like an instinct.

  That’s what it was, an instinct. He felt an instinctual attraction to Liam.

  Even as he arrived at this realization, he didn’t believe it.

  Was it love? Did he somehow fall in love with Liam?

  No, love was too simple a description.

  Fate. That was a better term. It was a term that felt right to him.

  A su
rge ran through him, and Patrick lurched forward. “Turn left here,” Patrick told the driver. “Next left you can take.”

  The driver complied, still leery of Patrick, apparent from the way he watched both him through the rearview mirror and the road out the front window, seemingly at the same time.

  But, this was it. This was the direction. He was much closer to Liam now, less than a quarter mile now. His team in Afghanistan had grown used to Patrick slapping the driver on the shoulder with a sudden order to make a turn. The cab driver should count himself lucky. At least Patrick hadn’t hit him yet.

  “Right. Up here. Next stoplight,” Patrick said.

  The driver took the turn.

  They were on a residential street, off the main roads. It was tree lined. Condominiums and single-family homes rose on either side. This was a neighborhood with some history. Many of the houses had a neat kind of craftsman exterior with big porches and wide lawns for being buildings in the middle of a large city.

  “Stop!” Patrick ordered. He peered out the window up at a large house with a black wrought-iron gate in front of the driveway. The entire house was surrounded by the same black fencing.

  This was it. Liam was inside.

  “Move up half a block, and let me out,” Patrick said. The driver did as he was told. Patrick paid the driver with cash, and he got out of the car. He stood on the sidewalk and tried to figure out how he was going to do this. Obviously, he had to go inside the house and get Liam out, but it was an operational risk. His talent normally allowed him a sense of how many were at a location. This time, however, it didn’t work. His sense of anyone else other than Liam inside the house was fuzzy. He didn’t know anything about the residence, how many people were inside, and whether they were armed or not.

  And all he had was a Glock 22 with two clips, not counting the one already loaded in the gun. He wasn’t a fan of his odds, but he didn’t have a choice.

  He was forced to rely on mundane measures. Without calling attention to himself, Patrick walked past the house where he sensed Liam. He acted as if it was a simple stroll down the street. Nothing else.

  He hoped to get a sense of who was inside, maybe see movement, but, for a group like the one pursuing Liam, he expected more. He expected to see guards standing outside, possibly with hidden weapons underneath bulky jackets. But there was no one. They hadn’t even bothered to pull the drapes in the large front window, no lights, and not much else visible. And that troubled Patrick. He began to doubt what he was feeling, that maybe Liam wasn’t inside the house after all.

  But even as he moved and reached out with his talent, he grew more sure that Liam was inside. In fact, this time, at least, he got an even more detailed, almost three-dimensional sense of where Liam was in the house. He was on the top floor.

  With a glance up and down the street to see who, if anyone, was coming—there was no one—Patrick moved into the space between the houses, a small pathway that led between the house on the right and the black-iron fence of the house where he sensed Liam. Normally in a case like this, he would have preferred the cover of night. But it was only the afternoon of a bright, sunny day. There was no telling how many electronic eyes were focused on him, from security cameras in people’s houses to city-controlled cameras that had become so popular in this day and age of terroristic threats across the globe. He kept his head down so, if it came to it, he’d be harder to identify.

  The fencing was tipped with pointed spikes. He moved to a cement column about midway between the houses. It was his best option. He reached up and grabbed hold of the wrought-iron, and he put a foot up on the cement column. With a pull, he hoisted himself up the eight feet or so of the fence. He was careful. The last thing he wanted to do was fall on one of the spikes as he pushed himself to the narrow space of the column. As quickly as he could, he hooked a foot up on top of the wrought-iron fence and swung his other leg over. A practiced move. This wasn’t the first time he’d had to scale a fence. It went quick and smooth, and he dropped down as quietly as he could onto the lawn of the house where he fell into a crouch.

  He waited to see if anyone rose an alarm. There was none. No sound at all except for the passing of cars and the honk of a horn far off in the distance.

  He searched for a possible way into the house, and he stood up.

  As he stood, his phone vibrated in his pocket—the first phone given to him by the professor. A signal of a phone call, not a text message. He’d been careful to silence it the moment he’d pulled it from the packaging. It only took one rookie mistake and a surprise firefight to always remember to silence cell phones before moving in to work.

  He moved to a trashcan on the side of the house and crouched down. The number on the screen had one name: Cyril.

  Patrick’s heart pounded. Why would Cyril be calling him now? He pressed the answer button and brought the phone to his ear.

  “We have much to discuss,” Cyril said before Patrick could even say anything.

  Patrick had only seen Cyril once. He was a man who looked about thirty and who had steely blue eyes over a thin face and a styled mustache and small goatee on his chin. But it was his voice that struck Patrick the most. A resonant voice that commanded presence. Cyril was a man who could whisper and his tone would still carry power to anyone within earshot. It was no different over the phone.

  “Now is not a good time,” Patrick said in as loud a voice as he would dare, being so close to the house where he believed Liam was being held.

  “On the contrary, Mr. Rowe. Now is the perfect time. I am calling to remind you that we had a deal.”

  Patrick’s fear fluttered. He searched around to the corners of the house for any sign that there was a camera. Was he seen? Cyril seemed to know something. It was in the way he spoke to him. “Of course, we do,” Patrick said.

  “I should also remind you that there are still two of your team in captivity,” Cyril said.

  Patrick grew angry. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I’m telling you because you’re about to make a very big mistake.”

  “Oh? And what mistake is that?” A part of him still wanted to go with the narrative that this was just bad timing on Cyril’s part, but the more informed part, the part of him that was trained to look at a situation and see the most logical conclusion, said that Cyril knew too much.

  “It will all be over for the boy in seconds,” Cyril said.

  “You’re going to kill him.”

  “No,” Cyril said simply. He paused on the phone.

  Patrick was about to demand more answers when every window on the top level of the house blew out all at once.

  And he heard a man screaming.

  Chicago, IL - Ravenswood

  Liam woke up—he wasn’t sure how long later. He tried to sit up, and his head immediately objected to the idea with a shot of splitting pain. Someone had hit him on the head. He remembered that much. He felt around on his head to the tender spot on the side of his skull, and he pulled his hand back for a look. There was no blood at least. It was just a solid hit from…who?

  He was alone in the room. It looked like it took up the entire footprint of the house. There were windows on all four sides of the room. The walls of the room were plaster and bare. The flooring was solid wood, finished to a high sheen. And in the center of the room, there was a circle in the wood. At first, Liam thought it was painted on, but as he moved closer to the edge of the circle, he saw that it was actual wood inlaid into the floor that was stained a different shade than the other wood. A perfect circle with each circle of the arc interrupting the piece of long plank of wood in the floor that it met.

  A door was on one wall in a space that looked like it housed a stairwell. Ignoring the pain in his head, Liam got to his feet and went over to the door to try it. Locked. Of course. Why wouldn’t it be locked?

  He searched around for anything else in the room, some other way out. When he went to the window, he could see that he was on the top floor, po
ssibly in the attic. The windows looked out over an expansive back yard and a quiet alleyway beyond. The tops of the mature trees gave him an indication of just how high up he was. He tried to lift the window open. He thought that maybe he could find a way out onto the roof that sloped down and away from the window, but it wouldn’t budge. The lock on the window pane was useless. Then he understood why: The windows were nailed shut. Elegantly done as opposed to haphazardly. The nails were hammered evenly around the window, but someone intended these windows to remain closed. Why would someone nail the windows on a third-story house shut?

  Unless the sole purpose of this room was to keep someone in.

  Liam started to panic again. He turned to look through the empty room for anything that they might have left behind, something he could use to break the windows.

  There, in the center of the room—in the center of the circle—he saw it: The stone.

  He ran over to it and picked it up. As he cradled it in the palm of his hand, he felt more at ease, like holding the stone offered him a sense of security. And maybe it was. He’d used the stone as a weapon before when scar face tried to take him out. He could maybe do it again. Whatever happened to him in the car—that weird moment of being frozen—the stone had helped him break out of that too. Hadn’t it? Somehow, he was able to break free, and if not with the help of the stone, then how?

  But the stone was also big enough to smash a window.

  Liam moved back to the window, and he brought his arm back, ready to smash the stone through it.

  He stopped, though. The glass would shatter and probably cut him. So, he set the stone down on the floor, and he pulled off his shirt to wrap around his hand and forearm. Then he gripped the stone again through the fabric of his shirt and reeled his arm back ready to smash the glass.

  With the stone, Liam gave the window a solid hit.