An Empire of Stones

by Bella Forrest

  “Okay, okay—we’ll go, I promise. Just tell me if you have enough to eat and drink?”

  “I do. I think I must have stolen food from the castle last night. I have stuff here. I’m fine, really.”

  I had a sudden urge to laugh. He was a million miles away from fine, and we both knew it.

  “Do you know how you got into the castle?” I asked.

  “The passage here…I just have to follow the stones—that’s all he wants me to do. That’s all the voices tell me to do. But once I get the stones, I’ll be set free—they promised they would set me free.”

  “That’s good,” I cried back, my voice breaking. “That’s great. I’ll be waiting for you tonight, and I promise I’ll never let you out of my sight again, okay?”

  “You shouldn’t do that!” he called back. “It’s not safe. Just let me get the stones, and then this will all be over.”

  “Benedict, is the…creature—or the voices—with you now?” I asked.

  He was silent for a moment.

  “No, they’re not. They’ll come back later—tonight. They’re strongest at night time.”

  “Do you know what they want apart from the stones?” I asked, and Tejus leaned in closer.

  “No. Just the stones…Queen Trina said that it was a benevolent power, or something. I don’t think she’s right though, Hazel—I don’t think it’s a good creature. It gets stronger all the time…and darker.”

  Bile lodged in my throat. I had an urge to smack Tejus in the face. Of course Queen Trina was involved in this. I should have known. But more importantly, Tejus should have known—he should have known the moment she’d tried to kidnap me, and locked her somewhere where the sun wouldn’t shine, just like my brother was locked up now.

  That woman would be a corpse before I left Nevertide. She would never again be able to inflict the harm on another human that she had inflicted on my brother.

  I exhaled slowly, trying to push aside my rage in order to concentrate on Benedict alone.

  “We’ll get through this okay?” I told him, placing my palm on the stone, wishing that I could just see his face.

  “I know,” he replied, sounding doubtful.

  “We will. It’s going to be okay…Remember you’re a Novak, Benedict. We get through stuff like this.”

  “Thanks, Hazel,” he replied, and I knew that somehow, despite the hopelessness of his current situation, Benedict had somehow managed to crack a smile.

  Rose

  We had chosen some of the missing kids’ files at random; I didn’t like relying on luck one bit, but we had no other avenues left open to us. Hopefully at least one kid among the five we had picked out would be able to give us some sort of lead. If they didn’t, then we would pick out another five and start again.

  We had split ourselves up: Claudia and Yuri were traveling to Portugal to speak to a missing boy’s mother, Corrine and Mona were off to the northwest coast of France to follow up on a missing girl, Ashley and Landis were following a lead in Guernsey, while Caleb and I were looking into the case of another missing boy in Plymouth, England. Corrine and Mona had equipped us with umbrellas before dropping us off at our respective destinations on their way to theirs.

  Once our feet hit solid ground, Caleb and I found ourselves standing in a small seaside town, opposite a row of bed-and-breakfast hotels. We were looking for the Rusty Anchor, where Maurine Grey lived with her three sons—one of whom had been missing for exactly two weeks, the same timeframe in which we suspected our kids had gone missing from Murkbeech.

  It was tourist season in Plymouth. Everywhere we looked people were milling about with their families, eating ice cream, riding on the countless merry-go-rounds that fronted the sea edge, and slurping from iced sodas.

  “Easy for someone to go unnoticed in this crowd,” I observed to Caleb.

  “No matter how unusual they might have looked,” he muttered, nodding to a group of teenagers dressed up in elaborate medieval costumes—obviously they were going to some sort of fan convention or fancy-dress party.

  The Rusty Anchor was the last house on the block, painted a bright pink with blue signage. It looked like a cheery, happy place, with brightly colored drapes in the windows and a neat, orderly garden out front, decorated with various seashells and wind chimes. Sitting out front on a bench to the side of the entrance was a small boy, I guessed around twelve or thirteen, who was looking moodily out to sea.

  “Hello.” I approached, smiling.

  The boy studied Caleb and me, looking faintly surprised at our GASP uniforms. I instantly regretted not wearing civilian clothes—in this happy little seaside town, we really stuck out.

  “Are you from GASP? Are you here about my brother?” he asked, his surprise turning to fascination as he studied our faces intently, no doubt looking for the key indicators of our vampirism.

  “We are. We’ve come to speak to your mother. Is she Maurine Grey?”

  “Yeah, that’s her.” He jumped up from the bench. “I’ll go and get her.” He darted indoors before I could stop him. I’d wanted to tell him to stick around. Sometimes kids made more interesting witnesses, as they tended to be more observant on the whole and less stuck in daily routines that blinded them to the goings-on around them.

  “He’ll stick around anyway,” said Caleb with a wry grin, reading my mind.

  A few moments later, a woman appeared at the door. I could instantly tell that Maurine Grey was a typically happy-go-lucky sort of person; she was dressed in bold colors and her hair was pinned up in a neat chignon with a headscarf. Today, however, her mouth seemed unnaturally pinched, and her brown eyes tinged with red.

  “Are you here about my Christopher?” she asked, her eyes earnest and desperate.

  “We are,” I replied. “I’m Rose and this is Caleb, we’re from GASP. There were some questions we wanted to ask.”

  “Do you think it’s supernatural, then?” she squeaked.

  “We can’t be sure, but there have been other circumstances where children have gone missing recently, most likely through supernatural causes, and we wanted to see if there were any similarities between the other incidents and your missing boy. Would it be okay to come in?”

  Maurine hastily stood aside, opening the door wide.

  “Of course! Thank you for coming all this way.”

  We were ushered into a large kitchen-cum-dining area—guests’ leftover breakfast plates still sat on the assortment of mismatched tables.

  As we sat down at one of the cleaner tables, a sharp thump came from the hallway, and then the young boy peered around the doorway.

  “James!” Maurine scolded. “Pick up whatever you’ve dropped and wait outside while I talk.”

  “Actually, would it be okay with you if he stayed? There are a couple of questions I’d like to ask him too, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  She hesitated, and I could see the reluctance in her eyes. She obviously didn’t want her son being more affected by the disappearance of his brother than he already was.

  “It’s nothing too intense,” I persuaded her gently. “It’s just that kids can be very perceptive.”

  She nodded. “Well, he’s certainly got a story to tell…not that anyone’s believed him so far. But none of my boys are liars. They’re good boys, Rose.”

  She called her son in, and we went through the interview process with Maurine first. There wasn’t a lot she could tell us that hadn’t already been put in the report. However, the cold hard facts in the police report did seem to indicate a runaway. Christopher had been in trouble with the police in the past, mainly for small, stupid acts of vandalism. The way his mother told it leant away from that conclusion. Christopher might have been high-spirited, but she didn’t for a second believe that he’d left home of his own volition.

  “What do you think, James?” I asked when Maurine had finished her account.

  “I think my brother was taken,” he replied stoically. “We were going to see Zombie Death Hous
e at the cinema the night he went missing. There is no way he would have missed out on that—not in a million, trillion years.”

  Inwardly I sighed. Thanks to Benedict, I knew teenage boys fairly well. If the police had heard that information and taken it seriously, then they would have reconsidered their approach—that fact alone suggested that this was an abduction and not voluntary. Still, I couldn’t jump to conclusions, not yet.

  “And did you see anything unusual or out of the ordinary the night that Christopher went missing? Did he say anything to you?”

  Maurine looked down at her hands while James nodded with a solemn expression.

  “I did. I saw massive, huge birds in the sky, about the same size as a one-man speedboat. I’ll show you—wait a second!” He jumped up from his seat and rushed out of the room again. I heard him thump up the stairs, and a few moments later stampede back down them again, clutching a kid’s encyclopedia. He already had it open, and shoved the book in front of Caleb and I. On the left-hand page was a large picture of a vulture.

  “I swear this is what I saw—because it had that weird beak and those funny legs.”

  I glanced at Caleb, who was studying the image intently.

  “Are you sure this is what you saw?” he asked.

  “I’m not totally, totally sure, but I definitely saw birds—three of them. Before Chris went missing. He had gone to the chip shop with his mates, and was going to pick me up afterward by the doughnut shop, but he never came.”

  “Other than their size, did you notice anything unusual about the birds, like human faces or other human body parts?” I asked. Maurine looked absolutely horrified.

  “Like the Hawks?” the boy asked.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “No, these weren’t Hawks or Harpies. I thought they might be, at first, but they were different—just birds.”

  “Do you have any idea where they might have come from?” I asked, knowing it was a long shot.

  The boy shrugged. “I saw them come from the sea. I don’t know more than that…maybe they came from miles away.”

  “What do you think?” Caleb asked, looking intently at the boy.

  “I think Chris was abducted by genetically modified birds, or evil sprites that ride on the back of birds—and they came from a different dimension.”

  “Oh, honestly, James!” His mother rolled her eyes. “You’ve got some imagination.”

  I smiled at Maurine. It amazed me sometimes how despite the world at large knowing about supernatural creatures, some still lived in complete skepticism.

  After the interview concluded, we thanked James and Maurine and then let ourselves out. Back on the busy street, Caleb and I called Corrine to inform her of what we’d learned.

  “That’s interesting,” she mused. “We’ve had reports of strange bird behavior here—no one’s seen anything like what your kid described, but the birds native to the area started behaving weirdly around the days of the girl’s disappearance. Apparently, there was a mass migration of all species, a load of them traveling inland, away from the sea. The girl who went missing was last seen by the ocean. Her parents are convinced that she’s drowned, but thankfully no one’s found a body.”

  “A mass migration because a predator was heading their way?” I asked.

  “Could be,” Corrine replied. “Maybe worth speaking to a specialist. I’ll get someone on it.”

  “Thanks. See you shortly.”

  I hung up, and looked around the bay.

  “There should be loads of them,” Caleb murmured as the penny dropped for us both. It was high season in a fishing town, and everything looked completely normal…apart from the complete absence of seagulls.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t notice earlier,” I whispered. How had we not picked up on the absence of their great honking cries as they scavenged every morsel of food in sight?

  “So,” I recounted, “giant birds appearing to come from the sea in both England and France—who are unlikely to be Hawks. I’d be interested to see what Ashley and Landis have to say…Guernsey’s an in-between island, so if they’re seeing and hearing the same thing regarding the bird population, then we need to assume that these predators are coming from a small island somewhere in Atlantic.”

  “Right.” Caleb nodded. “We should also ask Corrine and Mona about the likelihood of a portal on an island – or in the sea. These birds are obviously coming from somewhere.”

  I agreed. If there was an island holding oversized birds in the ocean, then it would have been reported by now. Instead, the creatures had gone unnoticed by everyone but that small boy…which meant that they could come and go in secret. And a portal was the most efficient way to do that.

  “Let’s return to The Shade. We need more witches for this one—trying to locate a portal in the North Atlantic Ocean isn’t going to be easy.”

  Ruby

  I didn’t let up on the pace as I traveled the single road to Queen Trina’s kingdom. The forests and meadows rushed past me in a blur, and I hung on for dear life as the bull-horse’s brute strength cantered along.

  Part of me still wished that I was with Varga, making my way back to Hazel and Benedict and Hellswan castle. But I also knew that I couldn’t live with myself if I ignored the multiple warnings I’d had about Queen Trina, and stood by doing nothing while Ash got further and further entwined in her kingdom.

  Hazel would understand; she would do the same thing for Tejus—I knew she would. But it still didn’t make me feel much better. I did wonder why Tejus hadn’t confronted the queen. If both he and Varga were wary of her, and Trina had already crossed a line by trying to undermine Tejus in the trials, why hadn’t they done more to stop her? Was it something to do with her and Tejus’s romantic history? It seemed like a poor excuse to me. The only conclusion I could come to was that they were trying to avoid an all-out war between the two kingdoms…but if that was the case, then it seemed strange to me that most of the ministers seemed to remain on courteous terms with the queen, from what I’d seen at the trials.

  It was baffling.

  And my butt was starting to hurt. I could see the Seraq palace in the distance, and figured that I was probably okay to slow down to a trot. The bull-horse was panting heavily now anyway, and the last thing I wanted was for it to collapse on the ground, only miles from the relative safety of Ash.

  I relaxed my hold on the reins as we moved at a steadier pace. My body was in agony from the ride, and I flexed my arms and hands, trying to shake out the tension. We turned a bend in the road, bringing us onto more arid land, with bushes and rocks rather than the thick forests that had surrounded me for most of the journey. It was warmer here too—the sun shone down brightly, a far cry from the gloom of Hellswan. I was starting to almost enjoy the ride when a carriage clattered up the road behind me.

  Before I could start to canter again, remembering Varga’s warning, the carriage was almost level with my bull-horse. I recognized the insignia on the body of the carriage—it was the same decoration as the carriage I’d ridden out of Queen Trina’s kingdom.

  “It appears you are back already, human.” Queen Trina smiled from the window of the carriage, her copious amounts of gold jewelry gleaming in the sunlight.

  Damn.

  I had no idea what to do. Instinctively, I wanted to continue galloping toward the palace, racing to reach Ash, but I also knew that I had to keep the woman in the dark. Ash wouldn’t just leave the kingdom on a few words of warning from Commander Varga, or the suspicions I had—he’d heard them and ignored them already. Which meant I would need to stay with him, living in the palace until I had gathered enough concrete evidence for Ash to believe me when I said she was up to no good.

  “Hello, your highness.” I nodded back to her, taking the decision to make polite small talk until she got bored and hurried off to her home. “I’m just visiting Ash.”

  “You left yesterday. I hope the fires didn’t trouble you too much—terrible tragedy for the He
llswan kingdom.”

  “I managed to escape them. I stayed at the Memenion kingdom.” I stated.

  Her eyes lit up briefly, and her smile became wider.

  “How interesting,” she mused. “Though I am so very glad you’ve chosen to return here, Ruby. Ash has been missing you.”

  I wondered where Ash was. Two ministers drove the carriage, leaving Queen Trina in the compartment. I sincerely hoped he was still back in the palace, and I wouldn’t be left alone when I arrived.

  “Thank you, your Highness,” I murmured, hoping the conversation would now come to a close.

  “That creature looks rather uncomfortable to ride. They’re not really made for creatures of your size, I suppose. Why not join me in here? There’s plenty of space.”

  No, thanks.

  “Thank you,” I replied as graciously as I could. “But I need to stay with the horse—it doesn’t belong to me. I can’t just abandon it.”

  “Well, of course not!” she replied gaily. “One of my ministers will ride it back to the palace while you and I enjoy a more leisurely experience.”

  My heart sank. What could I say to that without sounding rude and ungrateful? The last thing I wanted to do was anger Queen Trina at this stage. If she became suspicious that I was wary of her, no doubt my freedom to roam the castle would be restricted, and I’d never get to the bottom of Queen Trina’s true nature.

  “Okay, thanks,” I replied, trying to return her smile as genuinely as I could. It was difficult.

  The carriage came to a halt, and I pulled on the reins of the bull-horse. It resisted at first, huffing and snorting out of its massive nostrils, rearing away from the carriage.

  I know how you feel, buddy, I thought.

  Eventually the beast settled down, and one of the ministers took the reins from me as I disembarked. Queen Trina opened the door of the carriage and moved over so I could come and sit beside her. A few moments later we were off.