A flash blinded him for a moment and left after images on his vision and knocked him back toward the center of the room. The strike reverberated through his arm. Pain shot up into his shoulder.
He dropped the stone to the floor and tried to keep from screaming as he lay on his back and cradled his arm.
What the fuck was that? These weren’t ordinary windows.
He sat up. The window was unharmed.
Clearly smashing the windows was out. And he wasn’t about to try again.
The pain subsided enough that he could pick up the stone again as he struggled back to his feet. He was trapped. He’d have to wait to see whatever his captors had in mind, and he didn’t expect it would be anything good.
He was afraid to sit near the walls. Sitting near the door was out. He put his shirt back on, and he took a seat off to the side of the room. He didn’t want to sit in the center of the circle because that felt weird to him. The circle seemed to him more than just a decoration that somebody thought was cool. There was something about it that Liam didn’t like. It made his gut twist in knots. Instead, he took a seat on the opposite side of the door, cross-legged, and he waited.
It wasn’t a long wait. There was a sound coming from the direction of the closed door, and Liam got to his feet. If anyone was going to come in here to do him harm, he intended to be standing.
And he intended to fight back as much as he could. How, he wasn’t sure, but he had every intention of kicking at least one ass on his way down.
The door opened, and a man filled the space. He moved into the room followed by others. A woman, followed by another man. Then another.
“What’s going on?” Liam asked.
No one spoke to him. The man who entered first walked up to Liam and reached for his arm. Liam batted the man’s hand away, and he backed up. But the woman who’d entered was behind him, and she grabbed his other arm. She was much stronger than her roughly short stature made her seem. Liam dropped the stone.
They all stopped.
“Pick it up, please,” the woman said to him.
“Why?”
“Pick up the stone, please.”
“Tell me what’s going on first.”
“Pick up the stone, please.”
Liam stared at her. The guy who’d tried to grab him first was on the other side of him. Did he really have a choice? More people kept coming into the room, moving deliberately into the room and coming to a stop at the edge of the circle. He was outnumbered, so he bent down and retrieved the stone that had fallen from his hand.
The man and the woman took him by the arms and guided him to the center of the circle. Now he was beginning to understand why he didn’t like the circle. When a group of weird people want you to stand in the middle of the circle, that’s probably the worst place to stand in the entire room.
Liam gripped the stone in front of him like he was ready to use it, even if he didn’t really know how. He just hoped that it would work like last time and shoot blue lights out of his hands that would take care of the problem for him.
But he lowered the stone a bit when he realized that each of them carried a stone of their own. When he stared closer at them, he realized each stone was very similar to the stone he held in his hand. They were smaller, more like a small statuette with a base about the size of a palm than the one he held that his fingers couldn’t quite reach around.
Nine people moved into the room. Each of them was dressed normally. The way they stood around him in the circle with him in the center made it feel almost ritualistic. Is that what this was? A cult thing?
Was he about to be sacrificed?
“What the fuck is going on?” Liam demanded.
Nobody answered him. They all stood eerily silent. They didn’t even talk amongst themselves. They simply stood at the edge of the circle, evenly spaced apart.
When the last one took her space at the circle, then the words began.
The spoke in a language that Liam didn’t recognize. He felt like he should. There was a kind of familiarity to it, like maybe it was something he’d heard before. A lyrical type of language that, if it was a different circumstance and if he was in a better frame of mind instead of being held captive, he might actually think was quite beautiful.
In the room, the air grew heavy, thick. The air after a heavy rain on a hot summer day. It clung to his skin and made him feel as if he was being covered by an invisible cloth.
Liam still held the stone. His arm lifted above his head. It wasn’t a choice he made. His body decided simply that his hand with the stone in it needed to be above his head.
The people around the circle each lifted their stones too.
Their words reached a crescendo. The daylight coming into the room from the windows was suddenly drowned out by a new light, one coming from each of the nine stones held above their heads. When Liam looked up at his own stone, his, too, was glowing. A kind of greenish-blue light.
The nine people raised their heads like they were looking up to the ceiling. Their sing-songy words filled the room in unison.
Liam saw her again. Apocalypse Annie. She stood well outside the circle, no one else taking notice of her. “What’s happening?” he asked her. Pleaded with her.
She didn’t answer him. She had only an expression of sadness, of worry. Then she was gone.
The light from Liam’s stone shot out in nine directions, a solid sheet of light as if it was a laser of some sort. It wasn’t dissimilar to the light that shot out the first time when scar face was trying to kill him.
The voices all stopped at once. Liam was splashed with something.
Before he could even figure out what it was and why the sudden silence, all nine people dropped to the floor.
All nine of them missing their heads.
The stones they held remained floating. The nine heads remained in the air too, mouths agape, eyes lit by some internal light and their mouths releasing a blue light that reached up to the nine floating stones. Almost as if it was draining from the heads into the stones.
Then, without warning, all nine stones shattered.
Liam tried to duck, but he was unable to move, his hand still held by some invisible force above his head. Glass shattered on all sides. A wind touched Liam’s face and blew his hair, whipped his shirt and pants.
The air was soaked with the copper scent of blood.
He wasn’t even aware that he was screaming into what seemed like whole minutes later. He screamed so loud his throat hurt.
The light coalesced and grew brighter until it was a bright pinpoint floating in the air once occupied by the nine stones. Liam could feel heat from that light on his skin until he thought for sure this was how it would end, with him in flames, locked in place by some power he never even knew existed until a few days ago.
One by one, each pinpoint of light extended inward to the center of the circle—to the stone Liam held. He thought it would burn. He expected there to be intense pain. For a moment, he thought that the pain was too intense, that he simply wasn’t able to experience it yet.
But then everything quit and Liam was let go.
He fell to the floor. The stone clattered to the floor next to him. The room seemed dark.
It took him longer to realize that it was just his eyes adjusting to the light falling back to normal.
One thing didn’t make sense to him: He was still alive. And there were nine headless bodies in a perfect circle around him, all leaking blood onto the floor.
Elsewhere…
The call came.
Finally, the call came to its ears.
Deep beneath the ground, it stirred. A cavern lost to time, a dark place where it sought shelter so many millennia ago, though to it, time was perceived in a much different way. Millennia were whispers.
Long ago, it slept when the cataclysm happened and the world split in two. It slept when it could no longer sustain itself in the bastard world that this place had become. There was nothing lef
t for it to feed upon, and its only choice was to burrow deep down into a place closest to the core, the place where the power once flowed and was once a part of everything. In this black spot, the world still hummed a tune, even if the melody was lost. That meandering song was all that it had when it finally lay its head down upon the rock and pulled the dirt up around it. It fell asleep longing for the days when the magic was what moved the world.
But now it had startled awake. Its ragged grumbles shook the cavern, caused stalactites to shudder and fall from the ceiling to shatter into stalagmites.
It lay in the dark, unwilling to move. The power was weak, so weak that it wondered if something had woken it by mistake, that maybe this was merely stirring in its sleep. It searched, sent itself spiritually out into the world to taste of the air and perk an ear toward whatever song lay up above these days.
There was still no music. The world was a dead rock that had become its bed.
But no, there was something else.
A tendril.
A hope.
Memory of what it had lost. And how it might become whole again.
If it listened hard enough, it was there like a single note struck and carried trembling onto the wind. Just as it was doing now, deep beneath the earth, the world stirred again. The world that this place had become no longer dwelled in the arms of Morpheus.
It pushed itself from its slumbering place and moved through the stony cavern. Rock yielded to its form, crumbled before it as it made its way up again, up through the crust and the dirt until its black form finally kissed the night air as it ripped a hole from the earth and destroyed a structure that was in its way.
This world had lost its way. It had fallen into hubris. If the song was coming back, this world would no longer feel that pride. Its confidence would shake and fall.
This world would once again belong to Majesty.
Fourteen
Chicago, IL - Ravenswood
Liam got to his feet. He picked the stone up again. Part of him said he should leave it behind, let it go and try to forget everything that had happened to him. He grabbed the stone on instinct. A larger part of him understood that the stone was connected to him. The stone needed him. That was ludicrous to think, that a stone could somehow have wants and needs. But deep down, the connection was there.
Was this stone a part of him? That he couldn’t answer. But not being able to answer something was becoming pretty much par for the course.
Regardless, he was stuck with this stone.
He stumbled toward the attic door. He tried to avoid the widening pools of blood, but it was impossible. It was everywhere. It was even on him, washed over him like a stand-in for Carrie’s prom.
As he neared the door, he heard someone else coming up the stairs, so he turned and ran to a corner of the room so that he was behind the door when it opened. He gripped the stone in his palm and held it over his head. He might not be able to reproduce the magic light he’d used before—or that shot out and decapitated nine people—but he could, at least, bash some unsuspecting asshole over the head with it.
The door opened cautiously, like they expected Liam to be ready for them. Liam held his breath.
As soon as he saw a man come into view, away from the door, he lurched forward with the stone and brought it crashing down on the man’s head. The stone struck, but it was a relatively weak blow. The man still fell to his knees, but it wasn’t enough to knock him out.
Out of the corner of his eye, Liam caught more movement. He expected to be hit.
Only, he wasn’t. He was pushed back by something that seemed to take hold of his entire body. It reminded him too much of that feeling in the cab, back when he was frozen and unable to move. This little trick of theirs was becoming way too tiring. He thought he’d hit the wall, but he stopped.
The man he’d seen came into the room and helped his partner up off the floor. He was tall with a Cubs baseball cap on his head. The other guy, as baseball cap helped him to his feet, was shorter and going bald. The spot where Liam hit him on the head was angry and red.
“You all right?” Cubs hat asked. Shortie, the guy that Liam hit, nodded. He recognized Shortie as the driver, the same one who picked Liam up in Lincoln Park. Then Cubs hat turned to Liam, still frozen. “We’ll give you that one,” he said to Liam.
“What?” the driver said, still rubbing the knot on his head.
But Cubs hat rapped Shortie on the shoulder with his knuckles to shut him up. He glanced around the room at all the dead bodies before settling again on Liam. “It’s been a stressful day. We understand.”
Shortie looked like he wanted to say more, but he kept it to himself.
Cubs hat’s tone was almost mocking, and that pissed Liam off. But he was right. It had been a stressful day. He started off his day in the morning as a normal college student, and now, in the afternoon, he was a mass murderer. Because he was responsible. At least he felt like it had been him. The stone, somehow, had worked with him to do it. Again, that was an utterly ridiculous thing to think, but he had this sense that the stone was somehow alive, that it got inside his head and caused him to focus. The stone made him believe that he could do fantastical things.
“Let me go,” Liam said. Being able to speak was something of a surprise. He hadn’t been able to speak in the cab.
It seemed to catch both of his captors off guard too. “They said you’d be stronger,” Cubs hat said.
Who? Who was ‘they’? None of this was making any sense, and he’d had more than enough. “I just want to go home,” Liam said. And he struggled.
“Of course you do,” Cubs hat said.
Liam struggled again.
And he sensed something. It came to him like a conduit from the stone.
The stone was thirsty. That’s why it did what it did. And now the stone wanted more.
A warmth spread out from Liam’s center. A vibration, almost. It engulfed him and became a hum in his head, a kind of whine like air blowing out of a small hole in the fuselage of a plane hurtling through the sky.
The light of the room changed again, much as it had before when the nine people were killed—murdered, actually, isn’t that what happened?
Cubs hat took notice. So did Shortie. They both made movements with their hands. Words came from their mouths similar to what the nine dead people had spoken before, the same language at least, though not the same words.
Light began to form around the two captors. That alone, Liam found quite amazing. Except that he realized also that the lights were surrounding him too, only his was brighter.
Something in the air popped, and Liam found he could move again. Liam held the stone in front of him like it was some sort of shield.
Cubs hat cussed, and he let loose some sort of power that shot toward Liam. Liam flinched back as he waited for whatever it was to hit him. But as it neared him, the power dissipated. The light swirled from the stone, and Liam realized what was happening. It was all too familiar, something he’d seen twice already that day. And he wanted it to stop. He didn’t want to be responsible again for the death of anyone else.
But it was too late. The power escaped from the stone and hurtled toward the two men. Unlike whatever Cubs hat shot his way, Liam’s power didn’t dissipate. In fact, it hit with a force that surprised his captors. Their mouths opened wide, a soundless scream, as the power shot through them then around them. In seconds, both were overtaken by the bright, blue light.
And when the light let them go, all that was left were bones.
Patrick got inside. He used the back door of the house and found it locked. With an elbow, he smashed the window on the door and reached in, careful to avoid the jagged glass, to unlock the door. He already had his Glock in his hand, ready to use it if need be.
Once inside, he didn’t shout for Liam. He stood and listened for any movement, anything that might tell him how many he was facing. There weren’t any heavy footsteps coming his way, so he counted that as a go
od thing.
With his gun aimed in front of him, always covering his position, he moved further into the house. It was a small back entryway, a kind of mud room that led into the kitchen where he found a woman standing at the counter, wearing a simple yellow plaid house dress. She stood with her back to him as she worked at some vegetables on a cutting board. A dish cloth was slung over one shoulder.
“Drop the knife and turn around, slowly,” Patrick said. He had the gun trained on her head. At this range, it was a guaranteed hit.
The woman froze. She glanced over her shoulder at Patrick. What unnerved Patrick the most was how calm she remained. She was an older woman, probably in her mid-50s, her salt-and-pepper hair pulled back and away from her face. There was no fear in her eyes, only a squint of calculation. She put the knife on the cutting board and turned around with her hands raised.
“Step away from the counter,” Patrick said.
She did as she was told.
“Where is he?” Patrick demanded.
“Upstairs,” she said. “It’s already done.”
Patrick asserted his weapon, gripped it tight. “What’s done?”
“I know you can feel it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“How much easier it is now.”
Before Patrick could say anything else, all the woman did was close the fingers of her left hand into a loose fist, and Patrick was shoved back into the wall. A force of some kind that slammed into him all at once and threw him into the sheet rock that gave way when he hit and cushioning his impact, but only so much. Not enough to keep from knocking the wind out of him.
The woman moved toward him calmly. She no longer had her hands up. Instead, she wiped them with the dish cloth.
Patrick tried to regain his senses. His mind was shaken, blurry. The gun. Where was it?
“The balance is being restored,” she said, “and this world will soon be made whole again.”
With a lift of the woman’s hands, Patrick found himself brought up from the floor to stand upright, arms stretched out like he was about to be crucified.
The Stone (Lockstone Book 1) Page 19