by R. L. King
Homecoming
Alastair Stone Chronicles: Book Twenty-Three
R. L. King
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Don’t miss Alastair Stone’s next adventure!
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Books by R. L. King
About the Author
Copyright © 2020 by R. L. King
Homecoming: Alastair Stone Chronicles Book Twenty-Three
First Edition, September 2020
Edited by John Helfers
Cover Art by Gene Mollica Studio
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 by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people, except by agreement with the vendor of the book. If you would like to share this book with another person, please use the proper avenues. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Prologue
Watch out for the storms.
It was one of the first things Liria remembered learning from the time she was old enough to take her first toddling steps in the sheltered areas of her band’s camp.
It was the first thing all of them were taught. The most important thing they all needed to know to ensure their continued safety and survival. The thing that was reinforced in every lesson.
Be aware of your surroundings. Watch for storms. They can appear anywhere, without warning, and getting caught in them unprotected means certain death.
Liria had forgotten that advice today, and now she was going to pay for it with her life.
She looked at her older sister. Prysha was dressed much as she was, in a loose-fitting, sand-colored tunic, cloak, and headwrap, with soft boots and baggy trousers. Only her solid-black eyes were visible.
They looked terrified, and that scared Liria more even than the manastorm rushing toward them.
“What do we do?” Her voice shook, carried away on the scream of the wind. To her senses, optimized to pick up the tiniest hint of magic, the world looked like a mishmash of harsh, discordant colors fighting with each other for supremacy. They ripped and tore at the air, shooting off in all directions, swirling, clashing. The normal, ordered patterns of magic usually present in the safe areas of the Wastes were gone now, destroyed by a fast-moving, ravenous force that couldn’t be stopped or diverted or outrun.
The only thing to be done was to avoid it, and it was already too late for that.
“Prysha, what do we do?”
Her sister looked at her, and her eyes spoke when her voice failed.
She didn’t know.
This was the first time Liria could remember when Prysha didn’t have the answer.
From the time she was a tiny child, she had idolized her older sister—followed her around the camp, tried to learn the same crafts and skills even when her chubby baby hands were too clumsy to manage them, lingered with wide-eyed wonder at the edges of Prysha’s activities, did her best to learn the lessons of survival and hunting and gathering quickly and make her sister proud. After their parents had been killed by another sudden manastorm—all the more reason for the sisters to heed the elders’ warnings—Prysha had stepped up to take care of her. The two had become nearly inseparable as Liria grew older, their bond not only of blood, but of love.
Liria never doubted her sister’s ability to keep her safe, nor her own to watch out for Prysha. They had the band, certainly, but their closeness was something special.
“We’ve got to run!” Prysha yelled over the wind.
“We can’t outrun a manastorm!” Liria shot a desperate glance around. Behind them, the whole sky was lit up with the crazy, horrific colors now. Had the band managed to get under cover and avoid it? How stupid the two of them had been for wandering off in search of plants for their potions. How foolish to get so caught up in their conversation that they hadn’t maintained their vigilance.
“We have to try! Come on!” Prysha grabbed her arm and took off running away from the storm.
Liria could do nothing but follow. She was small and slight, as all the Travelers were, but she could run fast when she had to. Her legs were strong and her thin body was healthy. Maybe Prysha was right—maybe they could outrun the storm. It could change direction, or they could find a hole to hide in. The bands used magic to hollow them out sometimes on their wanderings for just that purpose, but they were hard to see when running this fast. A magical shield would be pointless—neither hers nor Prysha’s was strong enough to hold off something like this.
She jerked her head to look back over her shoulder and gasped, nearly faltering in her stride.
The storm was moving faster. That was the worst thing about them: they didn’t follow any rules. Sometimes one could fly across the land with the speed of a wyvora, then suddenly slow until it remained in the same place for long stretches of time. There was no way to tell or predict what the storms would do. Even the oldest and wisest of the Travelers couldn’t do it.
“Prysha, we’re not going to make it!”
“Look!” Prysha shouted, pointing forward. Her grip on Liria’s arm tightened.
Dragging her gaze away from the onrushing storm wasn’t an easy thing, but Liria forced herself to do it, to drive down the terror that the instant she took her eyes from it, it would leap forward and devour them.
As soon as she focused forward, though, she almost forgot about the storm.
There were people up ahead.
Three of them.
And…something else.
Something…round. Glowing. Shifting with controlled magic.
“What is that?” she yelled, legs pumping harder. “Who are they? We have to warn them!” They couldn’t be fellow Travelers—if they were, they wouldn’t be facing away from the manastorm, staring at the glowing
thing in front of them. Hadn’t they seen the storm?
Prysha’s hand clamped onto Liria’s arm. Her stride suddenly jerked as her ankle gave way, and then her grip dropped away as she screamed, flailed, and fell.
“Prysha!” Liria yelled, pulling up short and spinning back around. The whole sky was full of the colors now.
Her sister lay on the ground, eyes huge and black, hands scrabbling at the dirt as she struggled to drag herself forward. “Run, Liria!” she shrieked. “Run! Run!”
Liria almost didn’t listen. She almost dashed back with the vain hope that she could manage to drag her larger, heavier sister fast enough to get them both free of the storm. But then, as she watched in growing horror, the leading edge of the storm hit Prysha.
Her sister’s scream rose and kept rising until it became an otherworldly shriek joining with the clamor of the wind. Her legs juddered and jerked as the magic forces tore the skin from them, working its way inexorably up her body.
“Gooo!” she screamed, flailing her hands like one of the dolls on strings Liria used to play with as a child.
Liria’s nerve broke, and she ran. She spun around, panting, heart pounding, and took off toward where she’d seen the other people and the glowing circle. It wasn’t far away now. The wind whipped her tears away as her sister’s shrieks grew louder, louder—and then ceased.
As she drew closer to the glowing circle, the whipping wind behind her grew closer too. It snapped at her clothes, almost as if it was trying to pull her back. She thought about giving up—it would hurt for a moment, sure, but it would be over fast—but something inside her wouldn’t let her do it.
It felt like she’d be betraying Prysha if she did it.
She kept going.
The three people around the glowing circle seemed finally to have figured out something was wrong. Liria could see them better now, and her steps faltered.
Oh, no…
Their long, colorful, high-collared coats were clearly visible now, whipping wildly in the wind as they ran away. What are they doing out here?
The Talented—the mages from the floating cities high above—never came out into the Wastes.
What was that glowing thing they’d been examining?
Had they built it?
No time to worry about it now, though. She kept running as behind her the storm grew closer.
She wasn’t going to outrun it.
She wasn’t fast enough.
The Talented weren’t either. It was too big, stretching too wide. Unless it stopped on its own or changed direction, they were all dead. A quick glance over her shoulder verified it: the storm was at her heels now.
She made her next choice with no conscious thought, no consideration, no hesitation. She was dead anyway—what difference did it make what killed her?
As she put on a final burst of desperate speed and dashed directly into the center of the glowing circle, the last thing she saw was the clashing, horrific colors of the manastorm as it rushed over the space where she’d just been.
“Hey! What the hell is that over there?”
Liria didn’t open her eyes.
She didn’t know how long she’d lain where she’d fallen, but it didn’t matter. It was as if something had drained all the energy from her body, holding her down to the damp ground as effectively as if she’d been bound to it.
The one time she’d tried to open her eyes, she’d been astonished as much by what she hadn’t seen as what she had. The sky above her was black, dotted with thousands of stars, framed by towering trees. More vegetation rose around her body. The air was cold and crisp.
This wasn’t the Wastes.
But worst of all, she couldn’t see the magic.
The forces that had been a constant in her life since birth were…gone.
The magic was gone.
Where was she?
Where was the manastorm?
Where was her band?
“Whoa, dude, is that a girl?”
More voices surrounded her, swirling in and out of her consciousness. Their unfamiliar language meant nothing to her, so she focused on taking in the sounds, trying to make any sense of her surroundings. She tried again to rise, but her body refused to obey. She felt sick and weak and drained.
Shadows fell over her, and then a bright light nearly pierced her closed eyes.
“Holy shit, she’s gray.”
“She’s got green hair. What the hell?”
“She looks sick, man. We gotta get her some help.”
“You think she’s, like, an alien? From outer space?”
“Where’s her spaceship? We should try to find it.”
“Shut up, dude. Don’t be an idiot. Come on—let’s get her back to camp. We gotta call somebody to help her. She might be dyin’.”
Strong hands took hold of her shoulders, lifting her from the ground. Her body erupted with pain, her neck sagged, and she didn’t remember anything else.
1
“So, V’s coming back next week. Did she tell you?”
Jason Thayer’s tone was deceptively casual, but Alastair Stone didn’t miss its careful undercurrent.
“She did. We spoke a couple of days ago. She says she’s been enjoying her travels, but she’s ready to come home now.”
It was nearly noon on a hot late-July day. The two of them sat in Jason’s tiny office at Thayer Investigations, where Stone had just arrived to join his friend for lunch.
Jason, his chair balanced on two legs, regarded Stone with a tilted head. “You two okay?”
“We’re fine.” Stone spoke perhaps a little too quickly. He’d been grateful both he and Jason had been busy over the last three weeks since they’d returned home from the Occult Symposium in Chicago; it meant they’d both had good excuses not to discuss topics better left to settle for a while.
Now, though, Jason looked thoughtful. “Look, I know it’s none of my business—well, mostly not, anyway. But I’m gonna come right out and ask anyway, and you can tell me to buzz off if you don’t want to answer. Are you and V really okay?”
Stone gave a thin smile. How did one answer that? There were a lot of ways he could do it, and all of them would be true. “I…think we are,” he said at last.
Jason lowered his chair with a thump. “She wouldn’t say anything about it when we talked. Said it was between you two, and that’s cool. But I can’t take this whole walking-on-eggshells thing much longer. So will you just tell me so I can move on?”
If it had been anyone other than Jason asking, Stone probably would have told him to mind his own business. Without a doubt, it would have been easier if they’d discussed it right away, as soon as they returned home, but some things never changed: Stone’s go-to method for dealing with this sort of thing was to bury himself in work. Fortunately, he’d had a lot of work to bury himself in. Between Melvin Whitworth’s notes, his portal research, and the paper he was trying to finish before the fall quarter began, he’d had enough to occupy his mind that he hadn’t needed to dwell on anything else.
“We’re fine,” he said again. “Honestly.”
Jason narrowed his eyes. “Are you…still together?”
“No.”
“No?” Clearly, that wasn’t the answer he’d been expecting.
“We’ve decided…mutually, I might add…to step back.” He raised an eyebrow. “You shouldn’t be surprised. You and Amber were all for it, apparently.”
“That’s…not quite true.”
“Not quite true. But true enough.” Before Jason could say anything, Stone held up his hand. “It’s all right, Jason. It’s good. I promise. It was the right choice. I think I’ve known it for a while now, but didn’t want to admit it. And I think Verity did too.”
Jason didn’t answer. He looked down at the papers on his desk and sighed. “Yeah. Still sucks, though.”
“Does it?” He shrugged. “Am I altogether happy about it? No. Is Verity? I don’t think so. But I think it’s best we realized it now
rather than later. We were looking for different things.” He smiled. “Don’t worry, Jason. Bloody hell, you worry more than anyone I’ve ever met. Verity and I are still friends. Things are still good. We’re talking more than ever now, actually. It’s…” He settled back in his chair. “Let’s just say it was a good thing that’s time has come, and now a lot of tension has been lifted. That’s a positive thing for both of us. And that’s all I want to say about it. Gods, we sound like a couple of old women on a bloody soap opera.”
Jason chuckled. “We kinda do, don’t we? Okay. Fine.” He looked at something over Stone’s shoulder, and his expression clouded. “So, any progress on the other thing?”
That was a question he’d asked several times, and Stone had always given him the same answer. This time, he was pleased he could finally offer a different one. “I believe so, yes. That’s why I asked you to have lunch with me. You didn’t think it was so we could witter on about your sister, did you?”
“Yeah, pretty sure that wasn’t it.” He leaned forward. “Did you find anything?”
Stone couldn’t blame him for his eagerness. Initially, he’d planned to check Jason right away for any changes following his imprisonment in Melvin Whitworth’s lab. It was still unclear whether the treatment Whitworth had given him, infusing him with some proprietary alchemical blend to try inducing magical ability, had caused any changes. It was still possible the burst of strength that had helped Jason escape Whitworth’s crumbling lab was nothing but adrenaline.