The Other Side: A Novel in the Alastair Stone Chronicles

by R. L. King

  “She didn’t know—or wouldn’t say. She seemed scared. Said a lot of ‘weird and dangerous’ stuff went down around here.”

  “Tell me something we don’t already know. This whole fucking town is weird and dangerous.” He walked in silence for a short time, then said, “Maybe we should look into trying to find out who runs this area. Gangs, syndicates, whatever. If they’re the ones the message was aimed at, it might help narrow down who’s sending it.”

  “How are we gonna do that? Ask Roper?”

  “Yeah, I’ll give him a call. And we should try to track down Ames. Maybe he can tell us something.”

  “His ID’s got a fake address in L.A.”

  “He was in town, though. There’ve got to be records somewhere. Somebody must have seen him.”

  Verity sighed. “We’ve only got two or three days to do this. I—” She stopped. As usual, she’d been scanning the area ahead of them with magical sight, and she’d just spotted the telltale glows of at least three auras just inside an alley two buildings ahead. She slowed her pace but didn’t stop walking, and lowered her voice to a murmur. “Some guys up ahead, in the alley to the left.”

  Immediately, Jason pointed across the street. “There’s the bar,” he said more loudly, indicating a small place a few doors down.

  Verity picked up on his ruse right away. “Joe should be there by now,” she said in the same tone, keeping magical sight up as together the two of them diverted to start across the deserted street.

  Three figures detached themselves from the alley’s darkness and sauntered after them.

  “Keep moving,” Jason murmured, picking up his pace a bit.

  Across the street ahead of them, two more figures rose up from behind a parked car. Verity glanced behind her: the other three had spread out, two flanking them from either side and the third remaining behind them.

  When their intent became obvious, Jason stopped. “What do you guys want?” he called. Under his breath, he muttered, “Got any of those magical shields handy?”

  “Yeah, I got this.” She hoped she could back up her words. “Not revealing magic yet, though.”

  The figures moved closer. All of them were young, white, and male, dressed in jeans and leather or sports-logo jackets. Two wore baseball caps, and another a stocking cap pulled low over his forehead. It was the latter who spoke. “Look what we found. A couple of little lost tourists.”

  “We don’t want any trouble, guys,” Jason said.

  One of the others laughed. “That’s okay. We do.”

  “Got any money?” another asked. That one wore no shirt under his open leather jacket; the glow of a nearby streetlight revealed a large tattoo on his chest depicting a bird of prey gripping a pair of large dice with both faces showing fours.

  “Flat broke,” Jason said. His tone remained calm and even.

  Verity could see otherwise, though. In magical sight, his blue aura was agitated. In contrast, the auras of the five figures now ringing them glowed confident, almost excited. Every one of them had dark patches indicating that they weren’t in the best of health—Verity had seen the same look in heavy drinkers and drug abusers.

  “Well, ain’t that too bad,” Stocking Cap said. “Guess we’ll just have to take it some other way.” He leered at Verity. “How ’bout it, bitch? You wanna give it up to save your boyfriend, or we gonna have to kill ’im and take it?”

  One of the baseball-capped guys grinned. “One time each. Maybe two. We’ll see.”

  “Yeah, that’s gonna happen,” Verity said. Her heart pounded, but not all of it was fear. She wondered if any of these guys were Evil. Guess I’ll find out soon…

  “Oh, it’s gonna happen.” Stocking Cap swaggered another couple steps forward. “You guys’re askin’ the wrong questions. Ain’t nobody told you to keep your little tourist noses outta what don’t concern you?” He made a sudden slashing motion. “Get ’em!”

  As one, the five attacked from all sides.

  “Stay close,” Verity said. She gathered magical energy around her and released it in a concussion blast radiating out from where she and Jason stood. She couldn’t get a lot of power with that kind of spread, but it should be enough to knock them back.

  It was. The five attackers staggered backward and fell over, yelping and cursing. “What the fuck?” Stocking Cap yelled.

  Jason didn’t waste time. As soon as the concussion wave went off, he dived forward toward the closest attacker, the one with the chest tattoo. As the guy scrambled back to his feet, Jason hit him with a hard right cross, sending him tumbling again.

  The rest of them were no slower in getting back up, but they didn’t immediately rush forward again. “What the fuck was that?” another one yelled.

  “You wanna see it again?” Verity asked. She still didn’t see any guns, which meant she could hold off on the shield for now. She hadn’t learned to make it invisible like Stone could, so as soon as she put it up, she’d reveal her magical abilities.

  Two of the others, apparently having convinced themselves that they’d all just simultaneously tripped over their own feet or something, ran back in. Verity heard their footsteps pounding behind her and whirled, this time using a levitation spell to propel her over their heads to land a few feet past them. She grinned as she spun—she felt like a ninja!

  Jason, meanwhile, had flattened the guy he’d punched, but Stocking Cap and the other one had leaped onto him, trying to take him down.

  “Hey!” Verity yelled at the two guys she’d jumped over. “I’m over here! Can’t you losers even beat a girl?”

  The two whirled, both looking confused. One pulled something from inside his jacket. Verity stiffened when she spotted the glint of a handgun. “Gun!” she shouted. She was already puffing—offensive magic was a lot harder than healing, and she was out of practice. “Jason!”

  Jason snapped his knee into the groin of one of the guys on top of him, then threw off the other one and leaped to his feet, looking around. “Where?” he yelled.

  “Right here, motherfucker!” the guy screamed. He swung the pistol around at Jason and fired.

  Verity acted first—she grabbed the guy’s arm with a telekinetic spell and yanked it upward as it went off with a roar, then followed through with the spell to fling the guy across the street into one of the parked cars.

  “Fuck, the chick’s got mojo!” Stocking Cap yelled. “Go! Go!”

  As suddenly as they’d shown up, the five attackers scrambled up and scattered into the night, running in five different directions.

  Verity, panting, pointed toward one and readied another spell, but Jason grabbed her shoulders. “Let them go,” he said. “Come on—let’s get out of here before the cops show up.” He was puffing too, but not as hard as she was.

  “But—”

  “Let ’em go, V,” he repeated. He gripped her arm and started off in the direction of where they’d left the car. With his other hand, he swiped blood from his face where one of his attackers had slashed it, probably with a ring.

  Verity’s heart still pounded fast, adrenaline coursing through her. She didn’t want to let those assholes get away! She wanted to show them why it was a really bad idea to go after a mage, damn it! She—

  She remembered something, and all the fight went out of her at once.

  “Jason—did you hear what they said?”

  “What? About asking the wrong questions?”

  “That too. But the one guy said ‘the chick’s got mojo!’ They know about magic!” She turned her head to look back the way they came, switching on magical sight, but no one appeared to be following them.

  “Holy shit, you’re right.” Jason said. “Come on—let’s get out of here before they come back with friends. If they know about magic, maybe they know people who can d
o it. We need to regroup.”

  “Damn straight we do. If those guys know about magic and they didn’t come after us randomly…”

  “Yeah. Sounds like we poked something we shouldn’t have.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  By the time Stone slipped out of the party (no one appeared to notice him go) and headed down the road from the winery, the clouds had shifted a bit more and the moon provided enough illumination that he didn’t have to risk the light spell. He pulled up the collar of his overcoat, cast a quick disregarding spell in case anybody at the crew’s makeshift collection of trucks and campers was paying attention to late-night wanderers, and started off toward the Brunder place.

  He wasn’t sure exactly what he expected to find—his best guess was nothing—but he figured it couldn’t hurt to get a little magical recon in before Duncan expected him to troop through the place with Riley and the others, pretending to be startled by random house-settling noises.

  As he drew closer, he had to admit Mortenson had been right: the place certainly did look the part of a haunted house. His memory flitted once again to Adelaide Bonham’s massive, solidly-built mansion in Los Gatos (he wondered idly how old Adelaide was doing—if she were even still alive, she’d be well into her nineties now), but while that place had been imposing and impressive, it still had the look of a home that had been continuously lived in. Vacant houses, no matter how well cared for they were, had a certain quiet desperation to them, regardless of whether they were mansions or humble one-bedroom abodes. It was hard to put into words, but even mundanes noticed it: it was as if the soul that drove the place, that made it a home rather than just a house, had departed. Even new, never-before-occupied houses were different from those that had been abandoned—a new house had not yet been infused with the energy of its occupants, while an abandoned one, particularly one with a long history or a deep emotional connection to its residents, almost seemed to be wreathed in an aura of mourning. It was one of the explanations for so-called “haunted houses”: buildings contained energy from their dwellers, and sometimes the echo of that energy remained with the structure long after its living heart had perished or moved on.

  The two-story Brunder mansion rose up, dark and imposing against the night sky. In the faint moonlight, Stone couldn’t make out much detail, but that was all right—detail wasn’t what he was interested in. Oddly, he didn’t see any lights shining from inside. Hadn’t Randy Yates mentioned that he and his wife lived on the premises? Perhaps they’d gone to bed already in preparation for a no-doubt big day tomorrow, or else the light from their living quarters wasn’t visible from the front part of the house.

  He shifted to magical sight, keeping the disregarding spell up, and began to walk around the house’s perimeter. A rusting wrought-iron fence surrounded it, interspersed with crumbling stone columns at regular intervals. As yet, Stone didn’t enter the property itself, confining his path to the area just outside the fence even though he could easily have crossed over without effort at several points where it had deteriorated sufficiently to leave openings almost wide enough to drive a small car through. The front yard was choked with tall, untidy weeds until about ten feet from the house, where a cleared swath made a small killing zone probably mandated by fire-safety regulations. From all around the place, the darkened windows watched Stone’s progress like cold, dead eyes.

  Magical sight revealed little. The sodden weeds provided their dim, green glow, and occasionally a brighter green glow caught his eye as a mouse or squirrel darted through the underbrush in search of food. He sharpened his focus and could just make out the faint energy of the ley line he’d spotted back by the ruined sawmill. It didn’t surprise him that it ran straight through the middle of the Brunder house, but aside from that, he noticed no other odd glows or other magical manifestations. It might be different inside, but from out here, the place was as dead as the rest of the town.

  He rounded the back corner of the fence and immediately spotted light coming through a pair of rear windows covered by heavy drapes. So the Yateses were home. Slowing his steps to make sure he didn’t make any unexpected noise even though it was unlikely he’d be heard from this far out, he crept past the lighted windows toward the other side.

  So far, his trip had been as much of a bust as his walk this afternoon. With the exception of the faint traces of magical energy he’d spotted behind the hidden cave back at the winery, Brunderville seemed to be exactly what he thought it would be: a supernaturally uninteresting little ghost town in the arse end of nowhere. Unless anything turned up inside the house tomorrow, he was ready to write off the Brunderville Curse as something invented by the locals to scare newcomers on cold, dark nights.

  He briefly contemplated levitating to the mansion’s second floor and taking a peek, but it hardly seemed worth the effort or the threat of discovery, since he’d be inside the house tomorrow. Instead, he kept going, intending to round the far corner and head back to his room.

  He’d made it halfway when something caught his eye off to his left, in the direction of the hillside. He stopped and stiffened, crouching and making sure the disregarding spell was still running at full strength. Had someone spotted him? That seemed unlikely, but—

  There it was again! A flash of light in the distance, winking intermittently on and off as if someone with a flashlight were skulking through the trees.

  What would someone be doing up there at this time of night? As far as he knew, there weren’t any houses up there; in fact, only a short distance farther away was the edge of the Shangri-La vineyards.

  Intrigued, Stone shifted back to magical sight and scanned the area. He spotted it immediately: an orange aura glowing brightly amid the paler green of the trees.

  Somebody was out there.

  Intrigued, Stone stayed where he was and watched it for a couple minutes. He couldn’t make out anything more about it—at this distance, it wasn’t even clear whether it was a man or a woman. The color didn’t give much away either, since orange was a fairly common color for auras, and he’d seen several people with it during his scans of the dinner group and the party. He hadn’t made an effort to catalogue which aura colors went with which people, beyond Celina Wanderley’s blue/purple, which had been unusual enough to catch his attention.

  As he watched, the aura shifted back across an area comprising perhaps a couple hundred feet. The brighter glow of the flashlight bobbed around, appearing and disappearing as its holder passed behind trees. Stone frowned. Was whoever it was looking for something? It certainly appeared that way. He double-checked his disregarding spell and headed in that direction. If he could get closer, he might be able to get a better look at the person. It was probably nothing—maybe a roving security guard hired by the winery to make sure none of the newcomers messed with the vines. But why would television crewpeople from a ghost-hunting show have any interest in a bunch of grapevines?

  As he continued north from the Brunder place, the ground began to slope gently upward. Barely visible in the shifting moonlight, a narrow, overgrown dirt track—probably an old fire road—disappeared into the trees.

  Stone paused. If he followed the fire road it would make for easier walking, but if the person he was following was off in the forest he might lose them. However, if he left the road and ventured into the heavily forested area, he’d lose the moonlight and be forced to either use a light spell or trust that he could blunder around in the darkness with only the aura for a guide without falling in a ravine, tripping over rocks or fallen trees, or tipping the person off to his presence with all the noise he’d no doubt make. The disregarding spell was great for keeping him from being noticed, but it relied on deception. If he tromped through the underbrush like a moose, his quarry wouldn’t be able to miss him.

  Reluctantly, he chose the road. If he kept magical sight up and the aura in sight, he should be able to get close enough
to it to determine who it was without revealing his presence. Muddy from the rain and heavily rutted, the road climbed about fifty feet up the hillside and then made a meandering turn to the right, in the direction of the vineyards.

  Off to Stone’s right, the orange aura continued moving through the trees, the flashlight still bobbing. So far, he couldn’t see anything else but more trees. He tightened his sight’s focus a bit and picked up the ley line again; it had passed through the Brunder place and continued on a lazy northeasterly course until he lost track of it. Could whatever the person was looking for have something to do with that? Unlikely, since as far as he knew the only person up here with any magical talent was himself. Even if Celina Wanderley had been telling the truth about her “sensitivity,” she was one of the few whose auras he would recognize immediately. Ditto for Mortenson, though even if she did have a shred of psychic ability, Stone couldn’t see her traipsing around in the mud and the cold of an unfamiliar forest in the middle of the night.

  He followed the road around the bend and kept walking in the direction of the aura. It kept up its back-and-forth path, seemingly unmindful of Stone’s approach—or else the person simply didn’t care whether he was there. Sometimes it would stop for a few seconds, shining the flashlight’s bright beam around as if re-establishing its bearings, and then start off again in a slightly different direction.

  As Stone got closer, he waited until the aura began moving in his direction again, then stepped a little way off the road and put a large tree trunk between it and himself. If the person kept up his or her current path, they would pass only a few feet away from him, and he should be able to get a good look at them. He peered with care around the trunk and waited.

  The figure didn’t seem to have noticed him. It moved slowly and carefully closer, continuing to shine the flashlight beam alternately at the ground and around the area, as if going back and forth between choosing a safe path and keeping up whatever mysterious search it was conducting.