by T. K. Thorne
A Camel Press book published by Epicenter Press
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design by Scott Book
Design by Melissa Vail Coffman
House of Stone
Copyright © 2021 by T.K. Thorne
ISBN: 978-1-60381-789-9 (Trade Paper)
ISBN: 978-1-60381-790-5 (eBook)
Printed in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to my
beloved and brilliant brother Dan Katz,
who is always there when I need him.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Acknowledgements
The first person to read my work is always my husband, Roger. I’m grateful to him for his patience and keen eye as an editor and for his constant support. He is my rock. My family has always given the priceless gifts of their support and belief in me, especially my sister, Laura, who is my cheerleader and the queen of my Super Fan Club.
Thanks also to my literary agent and friend, Kimberley Cameron, and to everyone at Camel Press, especially Jennifer McCord. Both Kimberly and Jennifer have kept me going with their belief and enthusiasm in the Magic City Stories, not to mention their wisdom and advice.
Appreciation to my beta readers and to the professionals who offered technical assistance—Birmingham Deputy Chief Henry Irby; Dan Katz, communications engineer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab; Pat Curry, retired homicide detective and medical examiner investigator; Dr. D.P. Lyle, medical forensics expert; Sally Reilly, Esq., and David Brody, Esq., and former Jefferson County District Attorney, Brandon Falls.
Finally, I want to thank all the readers who love the story and the characters. I love Rose, Becca, and Aunt Alice, as well, and am grateful that they allow me to write their adventures.
Chapter One
Witches and warlocks abide in Birmingham, Alabama in three ancient Houses—Rose, Iron and Stone. They arrived over two centuries ago to draw their powers from the abundant ores beneath and around Red Mountain. I’m the only living witch with the blood of two Houses and that makes me possibly the most dangerous thing since the atom bomb.
I’m also a police officer, a detective.
Before I discovered magic was real, I assumed I was a normal person, not knowing there was a possibility of being anything else. Unsure what to do with a psychology major and art minor, I pondered my next move after college, but the concept of a career in law enforcement never entered my mind. After graduation, I moved to Birmingham, drawn, I thought, by the desire to come home after living as a military foster child all over the map.
But it was magic that drew me back. The red diamond pendant, the rose-stone I wear under my blouse, is an heirloom of my House, the family I knew nothing about until I met my Great Aunt Alice. According to her, the rose-stone is the real reason I returned to this city—to claim it.
Whatever the reason, I found myself here and needed a job, and the police department was hiring. Entry level for all officers is a mandatory twenty weeks of police academy training and an additional sixteen weeks in the Patrol Bureau as a street officer paired with an FTO, a Field Training Officer. After that, the norm is several years duty in Patrol. You have to pay your dues with time on the street. It was interesting, challenging, sometimes boring, sometimes intense, often frustrating, and occasionally rewarding. Earning the respect of police officers did not come easily.
I loved it all.
I also loved being outside, wandering the nearby woods on Red Mountain, but for the past four months, since I came back from the hospital, I have not set a foot outside the door I am staring at—the front door of Aunt Alice’s house.
“Rose, dear,” Alice says from the kitchen in her native British accent. “You look very nice. It’s good to see you in something besides a tee shirt and jeans. I know it’s hard, the first day back to your job after a long—” Her mouth twists in sympathy at my expression. “I’m sure everything will work itself out.”
“Of course it will,” I reply automatically. One hand goes to my throat to contain the unpredictable panic that begins with an erratic pulse. I eye the short distance to the door. I’m not supposed to be afraid to walk out a door. I’m supposed to be the one who charges into danger. But four months ago, my world changed. Being kidnapped and tortured by a madman can alter a girl’s perspective. I learned to be afraid. Now I don’t trust myself to do my job.
On the far side of that door, I will walk into the light of a spring morning on the city’s Southside, a residential area built between the 1880s and 1920s sandwiched between Red Mountain on its south and to its north, the sprawling
red brick university and medical complex of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, known simply as UAB. The houses on Southside sit close together like gossiping widows, the residents a diverse mix of classes, races, and professions. Out there on its narrow streets and aging, cracked sidewalks is normal life—people going to work or getting kids ready for school. Magic is something they read in books. Not part of real life.
I’m a rookie in both worlds—a rookie cop and a rookie witch, struggling to understand the power within me. Not that I have everything figured out about being a cop. I thought I became one because I needed a job, but now I understand that what I really wanted was to be a hero, to make up for being a coward when a man killed my family. When I crawled out my bedroom window to escape him, I was only five years old. But survivor’s guilt is not rational. Deep down, I believe I abandoned my family.
The bane of studying psychology is that I’m the subject of my own psyche dissection. My name is Rose, Rose Brighton, but my personality reflects the thorny part of that name. It’s not a giant leap of analysis to realize I avoided close relationships all my life to keep from being in a position of letting down people I cared about. No people to care about, no letting them down.
That didn’t work out so well. . . .
That failure—my best friend, Becca—thanks to me, now lies on her stomach, hands under her chin, on the living room floor before the TV. Though we are both twenty-two, Becca follows the colors and movements of the cartoon characters with the avid attention of a young child.
Will she fall apart when I step through that door and leave her behind?
Helping to care for her is the reason I moved into my Great Aunt Alice’s house, along with her three cats and an assortment of potted plants from around the world. I ache for solitude, but I want Becca back.
Four months ago, she followed me into a mining tunnel and cave beneath Red Mountain, whose slope I can see from the kitchen window, and into hell at the hands of the head of House of Iron, a hell I call the Ordeal. I came out a wreck, physically and mentally. A four-year-old boy came out with life-threatening burns. Becca came out stripped of memory and personality. My partner did not come out.
Becca’s natural ash-white brows knit in concentration as she follows the cartoon. My friend is trapped inside her damaged mind. Somewhere she is screaming. Or maybe it’s my mind that is screaming . . .
Catching sight of me, she scrambles to her feet and grabs my hand. With a huge crescent smile, as if she has discovered a secret, she drags me to Alice’s bedroom to stand before the old-fashioned oval mirror, the kind in a carved wooden frame that tilts.
Still grasping my hand, she points to me and says, “Rose-Red.” Then she turns her forefinger on herself. “Snow-White.”
“What?”
It’s the first time she has spoken since the Ordeal.
I stare at her, hardly daring to believe it. Weeks ago in the basement of this house, I held her head in my lap, and she opened her eyes to see me for the first time since the Ordeal. Not that her eyes had been closed, but they hadn’t “seen” anything since Theophalus Blackwell, head of House of Iron and the warlock who killed my family seventeen years ago, wiped her mind with a touch.
Since that awakening in the basement, Becca has taken tiny steps, learning something new about the world she has forgotten, but her attention span is extremely short. She can’t focus on anything for more than a few seconds. Until this moment, she hasn’t spoken a word.
I don’t cry, but my nose starts to run.
She repeats the designations. “Snow-White. Rose-Red.”
Only on her third try can I force my mind from the fact that she has spoken words and try to figure out what she’s actually saying. Then it hits me: the Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Not the one with the dwarfs, something older. I can’t remember the whole story, but it’s one my adoptive mother read to me—two beautiful sisters, one dark and one light, and magic bushes that grew red and white roses.
Becca is beaming into the mirror. Other than the fact that we are both too thin, she is right that we are opposites. Her snowy eyebrows lift in delight with herself. She doesn’t need the words she can’t find. I can read those brows. Before the Ordeal, she penciled them a yellow-brown, and I called them her “golden arches.” She never changed her white hair, but she wore contacts in addition to coloring her eyebrows to keep people from staring at her albino eyes that can shine red in a certain angle of light and freak out people who don’t know her.
At the sound of her favorite cartoon in the living room, she drops my hand and trots off in that direction. I stare at the hand and realize it’s shaking, and I’m light-headed. Maybe I’m not as ready to go back to work as I think I am. Among other things, I’ve had a serious head injury and those are unpredictable. That saved me from having to describe exactly what happened. The police department had to explain unexplainable things—my melted handcuffs and burnt hands; the charred remains of my kidnapper; the burns that nearly killed a little child and did kill my partner; and a young woman who was pretty much catatonic. Becca’s condition was attributed to a severe case of traumatic stress syndrome. There wasn’t enough left of Blackwell to reach any hard conclusions. It’s still an open homicide case. Their best theory about what happened was that my kidnapper’s (now-melted) electric cattle prod set off an explosion. They decided that a spark from the prod ignited with some kind of gas—possibly acetylene—that burns at extremely high temperatures, though no gas container was found at the scene. One of Blackwell’s henchmen had fled, so it was assumed he took that evidence with him.
But it was none of those things.
It was me.
In me, the blood of two Houses flows. It is a deadly magical combo, two separate powers that I smashed together to stop Theophalus Blackwell and have no idea how to control. But no handcuff-and-flesh-melting inferno has erupted from me since the Ordeal, so maybe I’m safe to be around.
Reluctantly, I lift my gaze to meet Rose-Red’s in the mirror, eyes the same deep green as my Great Aunt Alice’s, the telltale sign of a witch of House of Rose.
“You can’t hide in this house anymore, Rose,” I whisper.
I have been hiding, ignoring phone calls from Detective Tracey Lohan, my only other friend beside Becca. He finally gave up and just sent a text saying he’d been promoted to the Homicide Unit and to call him when I was ready. The doctor and department psychologist have now cleared me, and I have to come out of this turtle shell that is my aunt’s house—the shell that I’m both afraid to leave and desperate to escape.
I take a breath and turn from the merciless sheen of the mirror. Today, I break out of the shell. Today, I will report to the Burglary Unit in navy pants, a white blouse and navy blazer, an outfit the old Becca helped me pick out when she was . . . herself . . . because my sense of fashion involves which tee shirt to wear with jeans. As a patrol officer, I never had to worry about clothes, because I wore a uniform. But detectives don’t wear a uniform.
Back in the living room, Aunt Alice gives me a questioning look.
“Becca said something,” I tell her. “She spoke.”
A sparkle wakes in Alice’s eyes. “That’s a big step.”
Alice did her best to heal Becca with her own magic, but the damage to Becca’s mind was too deep. Alice had to stop, hoping nature would do the rest.
Becca has resumed her position on the floor, a foot from the TV screen, this time with her legs folded under her, as limber as a child.
Alice watches me watch Becca. “It is not your fault.”
Becca mimics the expressions of the cartoon characters as if she’s trying to figure out how to “do” emotions.
I want to smash something.
“Rose, look at me.”
There’s nothing to smash except Alice’s potted plants. I drag my gaze from Becca to my diminutive aunt. I have to look down because we ar
e standing, and her head comes to the bottom of my chin. She looks about half of her 100-plus years. Even inside her own home, she wears a red wig and contacts that change her green eyes to brown. She’s right to be cautious. Not only are we the last witches of the House of Rose—she is supposed to be dead.
As if she senses my distress, my little gray cat, Angel, removes herself from the company of Alice’s three cats and weaves a figure eight between my legs, rubbing her head and the ragged piece of her left ear against my ankles, marking me with her scent as her property, according to Alice. Why Angel wants to claim me is beyond comprehension. I am cat illiterate.
“What happened to Becca is not your fault,” Alice repeats stubbornly. “You did what you had to.”
Her words are ants scampering across the surface of my brain. I hear them, but they have no meaning. This has not stopped her from saying them at least once a day.
I change the subject. “Are you sure I can leave?”
Alice glances at Becca. She knows I’m not talking about my own health. My body has healed of its injuries—a head wound, shocks from a cattle prod, and severe dehydration. The cadre of doctors at UAB have had to admit no signs of damage remain visible.
Under the skin is a different matter.
“I think it will be a good thing for you to return to work. And you worrying about Becca is not going to change anything. It will work itself out one way or another. But perhaps you should have a cup of tea first.”
Aunt Alice’s answer to all of life’s problems is a cup of tea.
“I don’t have time.”
“Well, don’t worry about anything here. Becca and I will be fine.”
I nod, my insides a churning mixture of guilt, frustration, and—admit it—fear. In addition to the Ordeal, I’ve been shot at, bludgeoned with a car, and remain a target of an unidentified enemy within House of Iron. With a deep breath, I check that my gun is indeed in its special compartment in my purse, along with my badge case, and head toward the door. I know it’s best not to say goodbye to Becca and upset her. But it feels cowardly to slip out.
Nothing I can do here, I tell myself, shifting the purse over my shoulder. I’ve already killed the man who broke Becca’s mind. I just have to live with the consequences.