The Stone (Lockstone Book 1)

by Seb L. Carter

  “Of human sacrifice,” Glenda said. Now she faced Kyriakos fully as did Zach.

  “The Christian religion is based on the sacrifice of one man,” Kyriakos said.

  “He was a man who gave himself willingly.”

  “As did many of those who went to sacrifice in the times before Christ,” Kyriakos said. “And medieval Irish texts speak of burying sacrificial men beneath churches in order to consecrate the ground. The Christian church’s hands are not entirely clean, Agent Alvarez. But the sins of our ancestors should not be visited upon their descendants.”

  “Today we don’t call it sacrifice, Mr. Holder.” Glenda was on the edge of her chair. She looked almost ready to pounce. “Today we call it murder.”

  The air in the office shifted. Zach noticed it, and it caused him to tense. Glenda didn’t seem to take note. But Zach could almost taste it, much in the same way he felt the ritual rooms in the houses before he even laid eyes upon them. Or the odd excitement that shot through his gut before he went into the house in Seattle. And Kyriakos appeared different too. Darker, somehow. It was subtle enough that Zach could almost believe it was due to a shift in the light outside the window of the mega-mansion. But that wasn’t it. There was much more involved. Something was about to happen.

  “What work?” Zach asked suddenly. “What is it that you do at Tellus, Inc.?” He addressed Nona, but he gave Kyriakos his warmest smile. Glenda shot him a subtle yet withering look for interrupting her. But the tension in the air faltered, and Zach gulped down his sudden rise in nerves. He watched Nona, but he felt Kyriakos’s gaze on him again.

  Nona took in a breath and sat up straighter in her chair. The beamed smile was back in her face. “On the outside, we create life solutions to make the home lives of our customers more satisfying,” she said.

  “You make furniture,” Zach said. “I read it on your company’s web sites.”

  “Yes. But we do much more than that,” Nona said. “Our ultimate goal at Tellus, Inc. is to bring balance to the world.”

  “Lofty goal,” Glenda said. Zach wished she hadn’t interrupted. He wondered if his partner recognized the threat in Kyriakos or not.

  Kyriakos stepped in again. “A goal isn’t worth pursuing unless it has the chance to change the world for the better. Why bother with goals that don’t enhance one’s legacy?” he said.

  Glenda leaned forward. “Stephen Penrose talked about a second coming. Do you think that’s where he got this idea from, your goals of changing the world?”

  Nona moved back into her chair. She shot a glance to Kyriakos. It was quick, but Zach caught it. He wouldn’t be surprised if Glenda did too. Nona was waiting to see if Kyriakos would respond. When he didn’t, she spoke again. “We’ve covered the mental state of my distant cousin, Agent Alvarez,” she said.

  Glenda paused and cocked her head. Zach’s stomach twisted in knots once again. He suspected there was another line of questioning about to take place. “I thought these were different families,” Glenda said.

  “All indelibly tied to one another.”

  “So, Stephen Penrose is your cousin.”

  “Distant,” Nona said. “Everyone in the ten families involved in this corporation and beyond are now related to one another somehow. We can each trace our origins back to a single event in history, a great battle that took place on what is now the British Isles. That is our origin story, and over the centuries, our family lines have blurred.”

  “Cousins marrying cousins,” Glenda said.

  “Christianity believes that all life came from two people. I’m proposing that our lineages originate from ten different families.” She smiled. “It’s not as prurient as you choose to make it sound.”

  Glenda opened her mouth to say more, but Zach interrupted again. “Do you know a man named Liam Coyle?” Zach asked her.

  Nona said nothing. But there was a change in Kyriakos’s eyes, a slight squint as he seemed to assess Zach. Zach suddenly felt as if he’d said something wrong, making him both nervous yet intrigued.

  “I’ve heard the name,” Kyriakos said with a noncommittal expression. “He was the son of a woman I once knew.”

  Full attention returned to Kyriakos again. “We found a dossier with a lot of information about him in it.” Zach paused to see if that fact gave any sort of response from Kyriakos. It did not. “Do you know where we might find him?”

  “I haven’t seen Liam Coyle since the day he was born,” Kyriakos said.

  “Can you think of any reason why someone, Stephen Penrose or otherwise, might want to kill him?”

  “No more than I can assess his motives for killing twenty members of our families.” Kyriakos smiled. “I’m not versed in psychology like yourself.” He studied Zach, and this time the change in the air wasn’t from anything exterior. It was from Zach’s nervousness of the man’s scrutiny. “Behavioral psychology, correct? A graduate of Cornell’s master’s program?”

  Zach did his best to not show any sort of reaction. Is that what he was doing in those two hours, researching him and his partner? He suspected that a reaction is exactly what a man like Kyriakos would want. Even though he was supposed to be the assistant, Kyriakos was certainly an alpha male. He needed for anyone he came into contact with to turn belly up, yield the throat, and submit. “That’s right,” Zach said. “Clearly you’ve done some homework.”

  “I would be a terrible assistant if I didn’t,” Kyriakos said. “What is your family lineage, Agent Shepard, if I may ask?”

  “I’m sorry, but this isn’t an interview about me,” Zach said. “This is about getting to the bottom of a motive behind the murders of twenty people.”

  “Indulge me,” Kyriakos said.

  He looked to Glenda for any help, but she didn’t seem ready to offer any. Maybe she thought that if Zach went along with it, Kyriakos or Nona might be encouraged to open up more about their relationship with the murderer, Stephen Penrose. Or maybe she was angry with him for cutting her off during an interview when she was getting to the meat of some answers. Zach bit the bullet and answered the question. “England and Ireland, mostly. My mother’s family was Norwegian.”

  “How far back have you traced your origins?”

  “The 17oos. My grandmother had a strong interest in genealogy when she was alive. She left my mother all her research. I’ve glanced through them once or twice.”

  “You should never trust someone who doesn’t know where they come from,” Kyriakos said.

  “Most people aren’t aware of their heritage,” Zach said.

  Kyriakos smiled. “And you question why ten families have relied on one another for so long with little intervention from the outside.”

  Zach wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so instead, he stood up. “I think we’ve taken up enough of your time,” he said. They’d get nothing else from Kyriakos Holder. Or Nona either, for that matter. But he already knew this was a scene played for their benefit. There was only one power in that office, and it certainly wasn’t Nona Burwell.

  Nona stood up too, and so did Glenda. But Glenda’s expression said she wasn’t quite done with either of them, and Zach expected that there would be a lot he’d have to suffer through when they were free and clear of this house. He doubted she’d even wait that long. He was probably in for it as soon as the front door shut. Truth be told, though, he’d be glad to be out of this office and out of Kyriakos Holder’s line of sight.

  They shook hands with Nona, and before Nona could even sit down, Kyriakos was standing next to them.

  “We can show ourselves out,” Zach said. And he felt lucky when Kyriakos agreed to let them leave on their own.

  If he was really lucky, he’d never have to come back to this house again.

  Sixteen

  Chicago, IL - Ravenswood

  At the house, while Patrick went in search for the keys, he’d given Liam a wet washcloth pulled from a drawer in the kitchen and told him to clean as much of the blood off himself as he could. P
atrick tried to remove the stone from Liam’s hand, but Liam refused to give it up.

  As he searched for the keys, he also took some time to check the house to make sure no one was going to come down and surprise them. He’d retrieved his gun, and he held it at the ready. It hadn’t done much good with the woman before, but he hoped that this time, maybe he’d be able to surprise whoever was left. The house was oddly empty, though.

  That is until he went into the attic and saw where everyone had gone. The scene froze him in place for longer than he could afford. But it was a stunning scene. Staggering, if he was being totally honest, even for somebody like himself who had witnessed serious atrocities while fighting the Taliban. There was a whole mess of questions in that attic room, but those questions weren’t Patrick’s primary concern at the moment.

  When he returned to the kitchen with the keys—they were on a table near the front entrance of the house, along with a cell phone and wallet with Liam’s DePaul student ID in it—Liam still held the wash cloth in his hands and had barely worked at any of the blood streaking down his face. He stood, eyes wide open as he stared at the bloody mass, the remains of the woman who had managed to hold Patrick captive and throw him around like she was an 800-pound gorilla and Patrick was a banana. That whole situation he found himself was just one more thing from the day that was going to take some serious thinking later, once they were safe. Patrick was very capable of compartmentalizing whatever situation he was in to accomplish a mission objective.

  But Liam was a different story. The thousand-yard stare wasn’t just a phenomenon from the movies.

  “Hey,” Patrick said to him. He put both his hands on Liam’s shoulders and tried to meet his far-off gaze. “Look at me.” Patrick snapped his fingers. He’d been in enough combat situations to recognize shock when it presented itself. “You need to stay with me. We need to focus and get out of here, okay?”

  Liam’s eyes finally met his, and after a brief pause, he nodded.

  “Let’s get you cleaned up,” he said. He turned on the faucet and wet the cloth again. Cold water, and when Patrick touched the rag to Liam’s face, Liam flinched. “Whoa! It’s okay.” He held the cloth up for Liam to get a look at it, and this time, Liam was a little more responsive. He focused on the cloth, then he nodded again.

  Patrick continued cleaning the blood from Liam’s face.

  “We’re going to get out of here,” Patrick said.

  Liam’s gaze had drifted back to the old woman, and Patrick physically turned Liam so that his back was to the woman’s corpse.

  “We’re going to get you safe, you understand me?”

  Liam stared at Patrick again. “I killed them,” Liam said.

  Patrick concentrated on cleaning the blood. “You did what you had to,” he said. He didn’t care to give much thought to the number of dead people in this house.

  Liam shook his head and backed up. He shoved Patrick’s hands away. “You don’t understand.”

  “No, Liam, I do. Trust me—”

  “No! You don’t!” At least Liam was more responsive, more reactive now. “I did it! There was a light from the stone, but it was me. I know it. I’m the one who made it happen like it did.”

  “What’s with the stone?” The stone was still gripped in Liam’s hand. Patrick had thought Liam used it to bash some heads in. He hadn’t really thought much of it beyond that. But what he’d seen upstairs in the attic pointed to a lot more. The weirdness he witnessed with the woman said he was in the presence of something he couldn’t even begin to understand yet.

  Liam looked at the stone in his hand, then he turned to look at the dead woman. “It’s not a good stone.”

  “Then let’s leave it.”

  Liam flinched away from Patrick, even though Patrick hadn’t done anything to touch him. “No! I can’t leave it.”

  “Why not?”

  Liam didn’t say anything at first. He shook his head. “I don’t know. The stone found me once. It’ll find me again.”

  Patrick shook his head. “That’s crazy.” But even as he said it, he thought again of getting thrown against the wall by a middle-aged woman, a woman who hadn’t even touched him. And he thought of the times he’d been frozen by some unseen force. A stone that sought a person out suddenly didn’t seem so crazy anymore. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on here either. But what I do know is that we need to get to a safe place, and we need to get you cleaned up enough to do that.”

  Liam looked like he was going to protest, but Patrick took a quick step toward him.

  “I want to help you,” Patrick said. “That’s why I’m here. That’s why I found you. I know I need to help you.”

  Liam made no other movements to step away from Patrick. He stared up to meet Patrick’s gaze.

  “Can I get you cleaned up?”

  After a moment, Liam nodded, so Patrick stepped in and continued wiping the blood off Liam’s face, just enough that anyone seeing him in the car wouldn’t cause a flurry of phone calls to 9-1-1.

  They rode in the car parked on the driveway in front of the house. Patrick drove, and Liam sat in the passenger seat. Patrick wanted to say more. He wanted to find some words to tell Liam how to deal with it, but everything he thought of to say didn’t seem to fit this particular situation. He’d been told during his training that sometimes killing another person was simply part of his duty. He’d sworn an oath to uphold the safety and sovereignty of these United States, and to do so even if it meant taking the life of an enemy of the country. Liam wasn’t cut from that cloth.

  Patrick reached a hand over and took Liam’s into his own. The conduit of seeming electricity picked up between them, and it caused Liam to take in a sudden breath and snap out of it enough to turn to face Patrick.

  “You’re not alone,” Patrick said. He had to watch the road as he drove, but he also met Liam’s haunted gaze.

  Liam curled his fingers around Patrick’s hand. He didn’t say anything, but Patrick noticed a subtle change in the way Liam looked at everything else. He was still damaged—there was a dull gleam in Liam’s eyes that, Patrick realized, had always been there, a sign of a clouded past—but there was also a fresh sense of alertness that wasn’t there even moments ago. The change told Patrick a lot. It gave him hope. It wasn’t dissimilar to what he’d seen on the battlefield. Soldiers were struck with the horror of what they’d seen. Of what they’d done. But the ones who pulled through somehow managed to, like himself, shove it down to deal with it later. Patrick had done a lot of shoving in his own life. He was probably going to pay the price for it down the road when he had thousands of dollars in therapy bills well into his old age, but for now, he needed to keep a clear head in order to work.

  And his work was no longer to help Cyril get Liam. It was to keep Liam safe.

  Patrick understood what he was giving up. Two of his SEAL team members were still in captivity. That was not lost on him. But two had also been released. He might still get to have the best of both worlds. Two highly trained operatives spent a lot of time in the place they were being held, and no doubt, maybe even right now, they were both talking to military officials about what they’d seen, what they’d heard, how it smelled, what the sand looked like. Every piece of intel shared brought them closer to finding the two remaining members of his team. No doubt they were wondering where he was. He believed he’d be able to tell them he was doing everything he could to see them to safety. And that had been the truth.

  Until now.

  Now, all he could do was hope for the best.

  Patrick laced his fingers into Liam’s hand and drove them to the motel room.

  Chicago, IL - Near West Side

  When they finally got to the motel, a drive far longer than Liam would have liked, considering it was getting into the early evening hours in Chicago and traffic was unrelenting, Liam let Patrick guide him inside.

  It was a dingy motel room, but after everything he’d been through, it was like coming to a sanct
uary. A motel room probably wasn’t the safest place, but Patrick had a gun. Being in the presence of another gun, even after all these years, should have been a cause for concern for Liam. It wasn’t, not tonight. If any of those people, the ones from the house, came at them in this motel room, Liam wouldn’t hesitate to pick that gun up himself and use it.

  But then all those people were dead.

  They were dead by his own hand.

  That was the message that continued to play on repeat in Liam’s mind: Though he didn’t know how, Liam understood his part in their deaths. He’d been holding the stone when it happened. Somehow the stone had used him as a wellspring of power. The stone was still using him. Even now, as Patrick moved him into the bathroom, Liam found himself reluctant to let it go.

  But Patrick was insistent. It wasn’t a fight. If anything, Liam only put up a silent protest, moving the stone out of Patrick’s reach until Patrick made a quicker movement for it.

  “No,” Liam said when Patrick finally tried to pry his fingers from around the stone, but he’d only said so because he worried what the stone might do to Patrick.

  But Patrick touched the stone. And he could touch it—he was allowed to touch it. There was no shock, no feedback like what Nina felt. Most important: Patrick wasn’t reduced to a smoking pile of bones. He was unaffected. Reluctantly, Liam let him take the stone from his hand and set it on the counter.

  The stone free, Patrick picked up a washcloth and got it wet just as he had at the house. Only this time, Liam didn’t struggle. There was no argument as Patrick moved the cloth over Liam’s skin and wiped away more of the blood they’d hastily cleaned off back at the house.

  The entire time, Patrick kept his eyes locked with Liam’s, and when Liam tried to look away, Patrick lightly turned Liam’s head with one hand to return eye contact once again. Neither of them spoke, but Patrick’s eyes told Liam everything he needed to hear.