The Stone (Lockstone Book 1)

by Seb L. Carter

  “It means you must live and that you won’t be sacrificing yourself today to that one’s dark cause.” She referred to the fomoire.

  It figured. Even dying on his own terms was something to be stolen from him.

  Brighid raised a hand, and in an instant—if there even existed such a thing in this altered state of time—Liam found himself standing on solid ground. He fell to his knees, the pants he wore soaking from wet ground. They were in an alleyway. The lockstone was with him too. The world around him remained frozen.

  “How are you doing this?” Liam asked her.

  “It’s not easy,” she said. “Time magic is nearly impossible without an extreme source of power. But where I am, there are a hundred more of the Seelie Court lending me their strength. Willingly, so I am able to communicate with you freely and put a stop to this whole thing before it all goes too far.”

  “I don’t understand,” Liam said.

  “You will. Trust me, you will in time. You are important, Liam Coyle, descendant of Fionn mac Cumhaill, the First Councilman. Your destiny is one that will earn you many more titles.”

  “What am I supposed to do now?”

  She smiled serenely. “Give it the stone,” she said.

  Liam’s eyes widened. He was immediately suspicious. “What? That’s not going to happen.”

  “As I said, Liam, the only way to turn all of this around is to go through. There is no stopping it now. What’s done is done. We can’t repair the holes in the Veil, and the only way to do so is to let its failure come to pass.”

  Liam was sure he wasn’t hearing her right. This couldn’t be happening.

  “You, as the descendant of the first mortal king, have the strength and the power to start all over again. You will lead great armies against the Unseelie Fae, and you will have us at your side to lend you aid.”

  “But you’re saying I have to let the Veil fall to do it,” Liam said.

  “There is no other way.”

  Liam shook his head. “I refuse to believe that,” he said.

  The world screamed. It took Liam a second to realize it was only the sound of the timeline resuming again.

  And Apocalypse…Brighid was gone.

  So what did that mean?

  A crash happened above. Liam looked up to see dust shooting out from all sides of the building where he’d just jumped from. The windows on the top floors busted out. On the street, a cacophony of screams rose as people walking on the sidewalk all stared up at the top of the building. But, as the glass rained down on them in small shards, the screams of surprise became cries of pain and fear.

  Trust me, Liam heard whispered.

  And up above, circling around the building, Liam saw the fomoire.

  The fomoire’s flight path lurched, and it hovered in the air, its great wings flapping on its back to keep its heavy frame remaining at that altitude. People on the street saw it, and they scattered, screaming as they ran for cover, those that were still on the street after the raining glass.

  Liam backed up. He, too, was planning on running for cover. He gripped the stone tight, and he turned to run. As he did, he heard the scream of the fomoire from high. A glance over his shoulder confirmed it had seen him—and that it was heading directly for him.

  The alley branched at an intersection, and Liam turned down one way to get himself out of sight. He tried some of the doors along the way, but they were all locked.

  A crash behind him said he didn’t have any more time, so he continued to run.

  At the entrance to the alleyway, he stopped and turned on a main street. There was no way he was going to get away from the beast, not when it could take to the air and cover more ground than Liam was capable of running. He stopped.

  He held the stone out.

  Brighid said he should give it to the creature. Liam gripped the stone tight in his hand.

  He was going to give the fomoire the stone to it all right.

  He turned around and focused. The magic still rose easily, still powered by his touch with the portal to Tir na Nog, and he lifted the stone up above his head to unleash as much of his strength as he could muster magically. A flash of wicked light swirled around him and centered around the stone.

  As the fomoire swooped in close to him, Liam let the power go.

  The surge of power hit the beast, and the air around it detonated with a blue fire that played off the surrounding alleyway.

  He let out a scream. A triumphant cry. He could no longer see the fomoire. It was obscured by the jet of flame that swirled in the air where it once was.

  With a scream, the fomoire landed on the ground.

  Its skin swirled with blue energy, the energy that Liam shot at it. The fire danced over its body, and the thing smiled. A chilling smile that showed sharp, black teeth as it absorbed the energy of Liam’s magic.

  He looked at the stone in his hand. The soul of the fomoire was inside it.

  How could he have been so stupid?

  He turned and ran, shoving the stone back into the bag. He cussed at himself once again.

  He’d just charged that things batteries.

  Chicago, IL - Tellus, Inc. Headquarters

  Patrick and those he was with, Brodie, Katina, and Nina, ran down the stairwell to the unfinished floor and commandeered an elevator left open by the tactical team. As they boarded and started down, the rumble came from above. Patrick could only guess. The dome collapsed.

  The elevator they were in shook in the shaft, and Patrick thought it might fall. The girl, Nina, scuttled back against the wall of the elevator and hugged her knees. Brodie and Katina braced themselves against the walls, as did Patrick. But, somehow, the elevator managed to remain.

  “Probably should’ve taken the stairs,” Katina said.

  They were well on their way down when the rumbling above them settled down again.

  “Hopefully that killed a bunch of them,” Nina said. She hugged her knees.

  Patrick sympathized with her sentiment. But he remembered all too well the way the one he’d shot in the head had somehow managed to recover. They weren’t dealing with something normal. This wasn’t just another bad zombie movie remake. These creatures were aided by magic, by forces that had apparently been foreign to this world for centuries. Though, with a glance toward Eoin and the other two, maybe magic wasn’t so foreign to the world.

  “We need to get to Liam,” Patrick said. A pain of sadness shot through him, one that, despite his years of training to maintain composure, he found difficult to contain. “To his body, I mean.” He spoke with a heaviness to his voice, one that echoed the weight on his conscience. Liam had been right: But for Patrick’s involvement in this whole thing, Liam would be alive, probably studying or working at the coffee shop. If Patrick had simply turned down Cyril’s offer in the first place, Liam would be alive. He sunk down onto the floor of the elevator next to Nina.

  “Bigger problems may be out there,” Brodie said.

  “We need to find Eoin,” Katina said.

  “We don’t even know if he’s alive. If the Fae-touched got to him, he probably one of them by now,” Brodie said.

  Katina balled a fist and hit Brodie on the arm. Brodie hollered in pain, staring at Katina with a sudden flash of anger.

  “Fuck you,” Katina said. “Don’t talk like that. We need him.”

  “It’s not my fucking fault he decided to be a hero,” Brodie said.

  Katina crossed her arms. “We should have stayed to make sure he was okay.”

  “We didn’t have a choice, as you recall,” Brodie said, still rubbing his arm.

  “He’s right,” Patrick said. “We would’ve been killed or worse by those Fae-touched.” Like the rest of the tactical team they’d come to this building with.

  “Thank you,” Brodie said.

  Patrick looked up at him with a glare. Now wasn’t the time, he wanted to tell him.

  Brodie added, “It’s not like I don’t care about the guy. I do.” He tur
ned to Katina. “He’s resourceful. Maybe he got off the roof. Right?”

  Nobody answered.

  The elevator doors opened on the lobby— a lobby abuzz with police and firemen.

  “Are you hurt?” A fireman in full apparatus, complete with a breathing unit, rushed into the elevator to help them off.

  Patrick got to his feet. “We’re fine,” he said. Patrick guessed he was lucky he lost his weapon in their attempt to flee. Otherwise, this scene would go a lot differently.

  “Don’t send anyone up there,” Katina said. She left the elevator.

  “What are you talking about?” the fireman said.

  “Listen to the woman,” Brodie said.

  Patrick helped Nina to her feet and off the elevator.

  The firemen wouldn’t listen. He knew that much, though. They would go floor to floor until they hit upon the penthouse, and it was only a matter of time until they met the fae-touched stuck on the roof. Or worse, on their way down.

  He didn’t know how else to convince them otherwise. They were doing their job. They were men trained to run to a disaster while everyone else ran away.

  “You need to quarantine this building,” Patrick said. “There’s anthrax on the upper levels. Military grade. Don’t let anyone go up there.” He had to try.

  The fireman looked at him. Patrick did his best to communicate truthfulness to the guy.

  Apparently, it worked as he turned around, and, in the microphone attached to his shoulder, he put out the call for possible chemical weapons in the building.

  That meant they needed to hurry. They’d want to talk to Patrick and the others. Already the police were trying to corral them out of the building and probably into squad cars.

  But all of that changed when the uproar of screams came from outside. People rushed past the front doors to the building.

  Katina and Brodie were already to the doors and on their way out. Patrick pulled Nina along with him and they ran outside.

  As they exited the building, Patrick saw the dark, demonic figure. Bigger than it had been on the rooftop. It took up a large amount of space on the street.

  Patrick ran to a nearby fire engine, and he stepped up on the side, using the ladder, so he could see above the people running away from the creature.

  There was a widening pocket of street between the fleeing people and the beast. And it was moving in their direction. And it was chasing something.

  No, it was chasing someone.

  Patrick had to squint. His mind said it was impossible, but his heart soared.

  “Holy shit!” Patrick said. “That’s Liam,” he said to the others.

  The creature was chasing Liam.

  Patrick didn’t have time to question the hows. He didn’t care how. But the person running was unmistakable as he sprinted away from the beast, carrying that damn stone.

  There was little doubt. He saw Liam, a very much alive Liam.

  Without really thinking what he was going to do, he pulled open the door to the fire truck. It was unmanned, but the engine was running. He moved in behind the wheel, and he put the fire truck into drive and stomped on the gas.

  Chicago, IL - The Loop

  Liam hadn’t thought it possible that this creature could be more terrifying than it already was.

  He was sad to learn he was wrong.

  There were no cars on the road in front of him due to the police perimeter, and Liam ran down the center of the street. He was tired. He was certain that his legs would give out. But it was surprising the reserves of stamina one could find in the human body with a large demonic creature right on their tail. Other people ran too, clearly fleeing the creature that the fomoire had become, a larger, more menacing demonic beast.

  Up ahead, he saw flashing lights. Police cars and fire trucks. He knew where he was, and he was heading back toward the building where all of this started in the first place.

  People were getting clogged, those fleeing the nightmare likely caught up in the police barriers that had been set up when they first arrived at the building and Chicago PD set up a tactical command center.

  He made a decision. He wasn’t about to run this thing through a crowd, not only because he could get caught up too but because it would only cause more panic and fear among a crowd already scared shitless. Instead of continuing to run on the same street, he turned at the intersection and ran on the sidewalk down another street just as a siren from a large firetruck caused a group of running people to dive aside.

  The firetruck barreled toward him, and it picked up speed as it got closer. From behind him, the fomoire screamed as it made it to the corner.

  A sound of crushing and twisting metal. A bomb went off. There was nothing else that sound could be, and Liam tripped and fell to the ground.

  This was it. He would be caught.

  He rolled over onto his back.

  The firetruck was planted into a wall of the building, a large corner of the building taken up by the crushed form of the fomoire sticking out at odd angles from the shattered concrete.

  What just happened?

  For a second, there was a blessed silence as Liam struggled to catch his breath. Sweat poured down his forehead and into his eyes as the door to the firetruck opened.

  He wiped at his face with the palm of his hand, and a flood of emotion ran through him when he saw…

  “Patrick!” Liam sat up.

  Patrick noticed him. He staggered in his direction, clearly with a limp, probably from the crash. He looked over his shoulder at the broken fomoire, then back to Liam. “I think we just won,” Patrick said.

  He was close enough that he fell to his knees, and Liam didn’t hesitate this time. He bent up and fell into Patrick’s embrace.

  “I thought you were dead,” Patrick said.

  “I thought the same about you.”

  Patrick managed a laugh. “It’s good to be wrong.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, it is.” Liam hugged him even tighter. When they parted, he looked into Patrick’s eyes. “God, I missed you,” he said.

  Patrick smiled. “We’ve only been together a couple of days.”

  It was Liam’s turn to smile. “Apparently, we’ve been looking for each other for millennia,” he said.

  A laugh erupted from Patrick, and he nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Nina?” Liam asked him suddenly.

  “She’s good. She’s safe.”

  Liam let out a sigh of relief.

  “Let’s go. She’s just back there.” Patrick pointed over his shoulder toward the Tellus, Inc. building. He stood up in spite of favoring a leg that caused him to hop a bit until he tested his weight on the ball of his foot.

  Liam stood up and took Patrick’s arm and put it over his shoulder. “Yeah, let’s go.”

  They took a step.

  Twisting metal screamed through the street.

  The fire truck started to move. It bounced once, then it shoved backward, the front cab of it bouncing back at an odd angle and falling over on its side.

  “Fuck this thing,” Liam shouted.

  He was about to turn and run when an ambulance screamed around the corner. It swerved to miss them and stopped on the sidewalk. The back door opened.

  It was Katina. “Get in!” she yelled.

  Liam didn’t have to be told twice. He and Patrick both scrambled for the back of the ambulance and climbed in.

  Once inside, Katina slammed the door shut, and she pointed a thumb over her shoulder. “Look who we found,” she said.

  Eoin and the two FBI agents. He was glad to see them.

  And Nina. Tears sprung to Liam’s eyes when he saw her.

  “Hold on!” Brodie’s voice came from the front seat. The ambulance lurched forward, and they were off.

  Thirty-Eight

  Chicago, IL - The Loop

  The ambulance siren wailed, and it was tough. There was no gurney—which was a good thing, really, or it would’ve been a lot more cramped back there—so Liam was s
tanding in the open center of ambulance as it lurched back onto the road. But he braced with a hand on the ceiling until he could get a seat in the back where he could look out the window of the ambulance’s back doors.

  The fomoire had regained its footing again. A wing hung limply at its side. At least that meant it couldn’t fly. Maybe they could actually get out of this.

  A short-lived thought as the beast crouched down low and flung itself up into the air. It hit an apex, flapping its one good wing and started to come down again. When it landed, it was considerably closer.

  “You might want to step on it,” Liam yelled.

  “Yeah, I see it!” Brodie called from the front. “It’s an ambulance! It can’t really go much faster.

  Give it what it wants. The voice came to Liam. Brighid.

  He wasn’t about to do that. He did his best to ignore it.

  Behind them, the fomoire leapt into the air again, and this time, Liam had to crane his neck to peer up through the window at the creature as it disappeared into the darkness between the tall buildings in the Loop.

  “Hold on!” Brodie yelled. “We got traffic.”

  The fomoire landed, this time much closer. Close enough that it started running to try to catch up to the ambulance—and the stone still in Liam’s grasp.

  “Give it what it wants.” Brighid was in the ambulance, standing in the center.

  Everyone in the ambulance screamed. The FBI agents reached for guns that, apparently, they’d left behind, probably on the rooftop.

  “You’re insane!” Liam stood as much as he could. He faced her down.

  “I told you to trust me,” she said. “Give it what it wants.”

  Liam held the stone. “You want it to have the stone so bad, you do it!”

  “You have to give it,” she said. “Or it won’t work. Of your own free will.”

  He was silent. The ambulance lurched as Brodie apparently swerved up onto the sidewalk, blaring the ambulance’s horn and siren. He almost fell. But he was still able to consider what Brighid told him.

  A sacrifice. This thing needed a sacrifice to unlock the stone.

  He looked back to Brighid. “You want me to sacrifice the world to bring down the Veil.”