The Seventh Stone: A Novel in the Alastair Stone Chronicles

by R. L. King

  She laughed. “Just like your dad. Always thinking you have control over everything. It’ll be fun proving to both of you that you don’t.” She patted him again. “Anyway, I’ve still got a few more preparations to make, so we’ll have to chat later. Don’t go anywhere.”

  Ian heard her boots crunching on the uneven floor as she walked away. He could still hear her moving around behind him, so she hadn’t left him alone, but she didn’t seem to be paying attention to him any longer. He clamped his eyes shut, straining harder against the manacles, trying to wiggle one of his limbs free, and at the same time fought to focus his concentration on gathering any shred of magic inside him that Trin might have missed when she drained him.

  As hard as he tried, though, nothing came. Except for magical sight to assure him he hadn’t lost his power permanently, he could have been as mundane as he’d been before Trin first discovered him.

  Think, Ian, he told himself, and stopped struggling. He wasn’t going to get out of here using either magic or brute force—that much was clear. If he was going to help his father, he’d have to use his wits.

  He had no idea if they’d be enough, though.

  70

  Stone flung the BMW down highway 280 toward Los Gatos, his disregarding spell at full strength and his attention fixed firmly on the road ahead.

  He’d refused to say anything more as he strode to the car following the ritual, barely pausing long enough for Verity and Jason to get in before he was off.

  They kept quiet until they reached the freeway, and then Verity spoke from the back seat: “Doc, tell us what’s going on. What happened to your other apprentice? You’d never talk about it before.”

  Stone almost didn’t answer. Even the after nearly ten years, the memory of what had happened with Ethan Penrose on the night Adelaide Bonham’s mansion had burned down still tore at him sometimes—even though he knew in his rational mind that what happened hadn’t been his fault, he’d never stopped blaming himself for it.

  “It’s not something I wanted to talk about,” he said at last, a ragged edge to his voice.

  “Tell us,” she said gently. “Please.”

  Jason remained silent—he’d learned long ago that when dealing with Stone when he was in one of his moods, Verity had a much better shot at success than he did.

  Stone gripped the steering wheel harder, picturing Ethan’s tousled blond hair, gray eyes, and easy grin, clear in his mind’s eye even after all this time. The kid hadn’t been the most impressive of talents—certainly nothing compared to the burgeoning well of power he’d sensed in Ian—but he’d been excited about the prospect of learning magic, and eager to impress Stone. And Stone had failed him—there was no sugarcoating that fact. “It was a long time ago,” he muttered.

  “Yeah…I know that part. Not long after you got to the U.S., right?” She kept her voice soft, comforting, non-confrontational, letting him tell it at his own pace.

  He glanced at her, flicking his gaze up to meet hers in the rearview mirror. Sometimes he marveled at how naturally she put him at ease, providing a cool and soothing presence even when his emotions were surging around like a furnace and all he wanted to do was remove himself from all human contact. Even Imogen Desmond hadn’t been as good at it as she was. “Yes. A couple of years after.”

  She waited.

  Stone rubbed his jaw. If he was going to take his friends into the middle of this situation, he owed them the whole story. That didn’t make it any easier to tell, though. “Ethan Penrose was seventeen. He was supposed to be apprenticed to Walter Yarborough—you remember him, right, Verity? You met him when we were in England.”

  “Oh—right. The…er…old-fashioned guy with the big mustache.”

  “That’s him, yes. Ethan was supposed to go to England to study with him, but then his mother fell very ill around that same time and he refused to leave her. Walter called me and asked me to take him on, since he lived in San Jose and it would be much easier for him to study while still looking after his mum.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t think I was ready to take on an apprentice yet. I had quite a lot going on, and frankly I just didn’t want to be bothered. But Walter convinced me to change my mind.” He sighed, tightening his grip again. “Things went well for a while. Ethan wasn’t a tremendous talent, but he applied himself and made reasonable progress.”

  “What’s this got to do with the place in Los Gatos?” Jason asked, apparently satisfied he could speak now without driving Stone back to silence.

  “I think I told you about that bit before. Adelaide Bonham’s nephew Tommy Langley was a friend of mine, a fellow professor at the University. Adelaide was convinced her house was haunted, and Tommy wanted me to disprove it and set her mind at ease.”

  “Except it was haunted,” Verity said soberly. “Or possessed, or whatever, by some kind of extradimensional entity stuck between its home plane and ours.”

  “Right. And somehow Trin and her friends found out about it, and wanted to harness its power. She also found out about Ethan, and decided he could be useful. So she seduced him—what seventeen-year-old virgin mama’s boy wouldn’t be bowled over by an attractive older woman showing interest in him?—and set him to learn as much as possible about what I’d discovered about the entity.”

  “And you had no idea about any of this?” Verity asked.

  Stone shook his head, shame gripping again. “No. Because I was rubbish as a master. Sure, I taught him magic. That’s all I thought I needed to do. I barely paid any attention to anything else about him. I had no interest in being a surrogate father figure for him. Perhaps if I had taken more of an interest, he’d still be alive now.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice.

  From behind him, Verity’s hand closed over his shoulder. “Doc, you know that’s not true.”

  “I don’t know it, though.” Stone shrugged free of her hand. “That’s the point. If I’d spent more time getting to know Ethan as a person, and not just a magic student, he might have opened up to me about Trin, trusted me with his concerns. Instead, I kept up my hands-off approach, and as a result, let her turn him black and use him to feed her information about my progress with the entity.” He closed his eyes, only briefly because he had to watch the road, and bowed his head. “And then, when she was finished with him, she betrayed him and tried to use him as a sacrifice to help bring that thing over.”

  “Shit…” Jason whispered.

  “Yeah…” Verity echoed. “That’s…terrible, Doc. What happened? Obviously it didn’t work, because that thing’s not here.”

  “No. It didn’t work. We—Tommy and I—disrupted the ritual before it completed. Trin killed Tommy. Ashed him right in front of me. Her two friends died too, one from feedback from the disruption, the other in the fire started when the ritual blew up. We fought—I was badly injured, but I managed to complete the incantation to drive the thing back into its own dimension and seal the gateway.”

  “And…what happened to Ethan?”

  Stone could barely speak the words. His hands shook on the wheel, and he had to slow down so he didn’t drive off the road. “Ethan…saved my life. He got me out of there somehow, before the whole place collapsed around our ears. I have no idea how he did it, honestly, but he did. And then…he died. I was unconscious at the time—as I said, I was badly injured. Ended up in hospital for days after. I never got a chance to say goodbye to Ethan…to thank him for what he did for me, and apologize for everything. The doctors didn’t even allow me out to attend his funeral.”

  Verity and Jason both remained silent. After a moment, she reached over the seat and squeezed his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Doc.”

  “So am I.” Stone took a deep breath, and when he spoke again his voice was both stronger and harder. “But I haven’t got time for reminiscence now. Trin isn’t going to do the same thing to Ian. I don’t care what kind of thing she’s taken up with—this ends tonight
. I’ll rip whatever’s left of that place to splinters before I allow her to harm him.”

  Despite his own words, Stone couldn’t help feeling a thrill of bitter memory as they pulled up in front of the rusted iron gates separating Adelaide Bonham’s old property from the world. He hadn’t been back since that night so many years ago—he hadn’t had any desire to see the place again, and had no idea what kind of state it was in. He stopped the car and used magic to shove the gates open. Outside, a light, chill rain had begun to fall.

  “I thought you said the house burned down,” Verity said. “Are they doing a ritual out in the rain?”

  “I don’t know if it burned down completely. I’d be surprised if it did, actually. That place was built like a fortress. It was definitely uninhabitable, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the entire structure burned to ash.”

  “I’d have thought they’d tear it down and rebuild years ago,” Jason said. “Isn’t property in this area worth a fortune?”

  “It is, and I don’t know. If I had to guess, though, I’d say it probably had something to do with a combination of legal snarls and the fact that Adelaide was quite a stubborn old lady. She may have been unwilling to let anyone do anything with the property while she was alive. Remember, she’s only been dead for less than a year, and these sorts of things don’t always move quickly.”

  The road to the house was almost a quarter-mile long, winding through heavy growths of trees. The road itself was in poor repair by now, with weeds growing up through it in so many places it was sometimes difficult to determine where it led. “Somebody’s been here recently,” Jason said, pointing to where the BMW’s headlights illuminated bent patches in the weeds.

  “Not surprised they aren’t trying to hide. I think they wanted us—or at least me—to come here eventually.”

  “We need to be careful,” Verity said. “If they know we’re coming, they might have set traps.”

  “I’m counting on it. And yes, we’ll be careful. But we’ve got to move fast.” Stone’s memory came back stronger than he’d thought it would, given how little time he’d spent at Adelaide’s place—he recognized the last curve before they’d reach the house proper. He pulled the car off the road as far as he could and switched it off, dousing the lights. “Let’s walk from here—if they’re in the house, they might see our lights if we drive up.”

  Before they could get started, though, he stopped in front of them and held up a hand. “One thing before we go.”

  Jason sighed. “Al, aren’t we past the whole ‘do you really want to do this’ and ‘last chance to back out’ thing by now?”

  “That isn’t what I was going to say. I know better at this point. If I tell you to stay behind you’ll just follow me anyway, so at least this way I can keep an eye on you.” He glanced over his shoulder with magical sight, checking to ensure nothing was sneaking up on them. “But I do want to make sure you know how dangerous this is likely to be. Trin’s smart and tricky, and she’s got a lot more punch than I remember. That means she probably is working with someone—or something—else. If we’re lucky, they don’t know we’re coming, and we’ll use that to our advantage. But it’s vitally important that you stay on your guard at all times.”

  “Yeah.” Jason moved the front of his leather jacket aside to reveal his gun in its shoulder holster, and pulled the bottle of elixir from his inner pocket. “If the shit hits the fan, I’m ready.”

  “We’ll be fine, Doc,” Verity added. “I don’t think it’s us who are in the most danger anyway. She wants you.”

  “Yes, but she won’t hesitate to use the people I care about to get to me.” Stone swiped damp hair off his forehead. “Come on—I don’t fancy standing around in the rain longer than we have to. Verity, use your disregarding spell on yourself and Jason. I’ll do the same—between the two of us, perhaps they won’t notice us until it’s too late.”

  They pressed on, staying just off the road. There was no light up ahead, and the cloudy sky obscured the moon, so Stone risked a faint light spell so they didn’t trip on the uneven terrain. It made for slow going, but they moved as fast as they could until they rounded the turn.

  “Shit…” Jason whispered.

  The structure rose in the middle of a wide, open space choked with tall weeds and even some small trees. Verity eyed the jagged beams sticking up from the massive, tumbledown structure. “That place must have been huge.”

  “It was. Nearly as big as Caventhorne in its prime.” Stone shifted to magical sight again, scanning the hulk for any signs of auras inside, but saw none. It was clear the upper stories were uninhabitable—where they even existed at all—but even the ground floor took up a significant amount of area. And that didn’t even count what Stone knew to be an extensive network of basement space. It would take them far too long to search it all.

  Jason seemed to come to the same conclusion. “Al, I know you’re not gonna like this, but unless you know where they are, I think we might have to split up.”

  Stone blew air through his teeth in frustration. “I don’t like that idea—not at all.”

  “I don’t either,” Verity said, “but I think Jason’s right. If we stay together, it’ll take us the rest of the night to search—maybe longer. We can’t afford to wait that long.”

  “It sucks, but it makes sense,” Jason said. “V and I can stay together and go one way so we can use her magical sight to spot any auras, and you go another.”

  “That might be what she wants, though,” Verity said. “She’s after Doc. If we separate—”

  “No,” Stone said firmly. “You’re right—it’s the only way. I still don’t think they know we’re here, but we can’t count on that. This thing Trin’s got on her side is the X-factor. We don’t know what it knows, or what its capabilities are.”

  “Doc…” Verity said slowly. Her voice sounded strange in the darkness.

  “What is it?”

  “You said before that when you were here before with your old apprentice, Trin and her friends were trying to bring something over, and you sent it back. Is there…any chance it might be back? That it’s the thing she’s allied herself with?”

  Stone hadn’t considered that—he’d been too focused on Ian. “That’s a damn good thought,” he admitted. “But I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?” Jason asked. “Might be why she came back here in the first place.”

  “I’m certain I sent that thing back and sealed the gateway. The boundaries between dimensions might still be thinner here, but that thing—it’s hard to explain. If it was back, I doubt it would confine itself to this kind of plan, or have any patience with Trin and her vendetta against me. I touched its mind—it was terrifying. It wasn’t a ‘make subtle plans and be patient’ sort of thing. More of a ‘roll over all of humanity and devour it’ type.”

  Verity didn’t look convinced. “So why would she bring Ian here, then?” She waved her hand around. “This place is a dump, and it’s raining. Surely there are a lot better places to have a ritual.”

  “More comfortable, certainly.” Stone turned back toward them. “But I’m certain Trin is trying to send me a message, and put me off my guard. And I can’t let that happen. Much as I hate to do it, I think you’re right—we need to separate to cover more ground faster.” He glared at them. “But do not take any chances. I want your word on that. If you spot anything suspicious, get yourself somewhere safe and call me. I’ll do the same. Don’t let her catch you alone. Do I have your word?”

  “Yeah,” Verity said immediately, and after a few more seconds, Jason nodded. “Don’t worry, Doc—I don’t want to face her alone either. Let’s be smart about this.”

  Stone pointed. “You two take that side. I’ll go the other way. And remember, Trin isn’t the only thing to worry about. I’m sure that place is structurally unsound, so mind where you walk. Check in periodically with a text message.” He pulled out his phone and kept it in his hand so he could feel it vibrate.

/>   “Got it, Doc. Be careful.” Verity gave him a quick hug and she and Jason took off toward the far side of the house. As soon as Stone dropped magical sight, they faded from view, Verity’s powerful disregarding spell already taking effect.

  I hope that isn’t the last time I see them alive, a little voice in his head said.

  He didn’t let himself listen to it, though. Instead, he pictured Ian’s face, and imagined what Trin and her unknown associate might be doing to him. Gripping the phone tighter, he strode off toward the other side of the house.

  He’d deliberately chosen the direction of the main basement for himself—or at least as much as he could remember it in the dark after ten years, with his reference points buggered up by the fire. If Trin was trying to mess with his head, she’d probably go for the full show if she could manage it. That meant if she could do whatever she was doing in the same location where the last ritual had taken place, she would.

  He stopped a moment and listened, trying to catch any unusual sound, but all he heard was the gentle patter of the rain. She wasn’t going to make this easy.

  It didn’t matter, though. He set off again toward the house, making sure his shield was at full strength. If she was here, he’d find her.

  71

  “Do you have any idea where we’re going?” Jason spoke under his breath, barely loud enough for Verity to hear.

  “No, other than that they’ve got to be inside somewhere. I can’t imagine them doing a ritual out in the open, even in this light rain.” Verity trudged forward, using her faint light spell to illuminate their path. “We’ve just got to get inside and look around, and hope I spot an aura before they spot ours.”