Homecoming: An Alastair Stone Urban Fantasy Novel (Alastair Stone Chronicles Book 23)

by R. L. King

  He had no way to know, so he’d have to look around and keep his eyes open. He skimmed the trees, staying as close to the ground as he could manage. The rift could be large or small, concealed or out in the open—but whatever it was, if it was like the others, he’d need magical sight to see it. That made things inconvenient, but he was nonetheless glad it was true: at least that way, mundanes couldn’t spot it by accident. Based on his limited experience with the rifts, even most mages couldn’t spot them unless specifically trying. That was good too, considering there was one in the middle of Oakland.

  Damn—he’d never bothered to check if that one was on the globe last time he was home. He’d been too focused on the one in Colorado at the time. He supposed he’d always assumed it wasn’t, because it hadn’t been there before and he hadn’t realized until his recent visit that the rift dots were dynamic. He made a mental note to do that next time he was back in England. If the dot was present, he’d know the rift was still there. If it wasn’t, he’d have to go up there to check, and remove the illusions he’d placed to discourage anyone from going near it if it was gone.

  He paused in midair, re-checking the compass against the map. He’d traveled around half a mile now, and up ahead he could see a break in the trees. Probably where the lake is.

  The other thing about rifts, at least in Stone’s experience so far, was that while mundanes and most mages couldn’t see them, they could definitely still be affected by them. Based on what Kolinsky had told him, the rifts represented places where this dimension and some other one came into temporary contact with each other, lasting anywhere from a few days to several months. And what that meant was, because it was never the same dimension, no two rifts were alike. A couple had given odd magical abilities to mundanes who’d blundered near them; another had displayed visions of events happening decades in the past; yet another had shifted a small town—the one Verity had recently visited—out of phase so it effectively disappeared from this plane. The effect depended on which dimension was encroaching on this one, and how much.

  And since Stone had little knowledge of the properties of other dimensions—hell, he didn’t even know that much about Calanar, and he’d spent three months there—that meant he likewise had zero chance of predicting what any new ones might be getting up to.

  What he could do with a better chance of accuracy, though, was guess that Lund and his fellow campers probably hadn’t been close to the rift. If they had, they probably would have experienced at least some oddness. By all accounts, aside from discovering the strange green-haired being, nothing else unusual had happened to them. Jack Vargas had seemed completely normal to both mundane and magical sight.

  Stone stopped as the trees broke to reveal the small lake, exactly where he’d expected it to be. The sun was high now, throwing dancing sparkles over the surface of the water. It was beautiful out here—even though he didn’t personally enjoy camping, he could see how it might appeal to outdoor types like Jason and Amber.

  He wasn’t here to admire the scenery, though. He dropped lower, shifting to magical sight as he floated slowly around the lake’s perimeter. He stayed low, barely above the tops of the trees, and kept a disregarding spell running in case anyone was down there.

  If the rift was here, it was definitely harder to spot in the middle of the day. The glow of magic stood out much stronger against the night sky, but Stone didn’t intend to stick around here for several more hours and wait. He dropped a little lower, grateful once again for his Calanarian power that allowed him to maintain the spell much longer than he could have before, and narrowed his eyes, scanning the area and trying to pierce the thick cover of trees to catch any sign of strangeness closer to the ground.

  He was so focused on visual cues that he didn’t notice the slight tugging sensation.

  At first, he thought it had to be the wind pulling at his clothes—but there wasn’t any wind today. He stopped, hovering in place, looking down at his coat and expecting to see it fluttering.

  It wasn’t fluttering. His clothes weren’t moving at all, and he couldn’t feel any hint of air movement on his face or hands.

  But yet, something was still tugging at him—subtly, gently pulling him forward and to the left, away from the lake.

  It didn’t physically move him. He remained floating exactly where he was. He wasn’t even entirely sure it wasn’t his imagination.

  But no, there it was again: a faint but insistent sensation, like a tiny child taking his hand and trying to lead him away.

  Experimentally, he summoned a shield around himself, expecting the sensation to fade.

  Not only did it not fade, but it seemed to grow stronger. The tug was still weak, but it was definitely there now. No imagination about it.

  Stone shifted to magical sight, and what he saw made him start in surprise.

  Wispy tendrils of drifting, silvery energy had attached themselves to his shield, leading off toward the direction the tugging was trying to get him to go.

  Well.

  This was interesting.

  He dropped to the ground, his feet settling soundlessly in a thick carpet of old needles and leaves. The tugging persisted, and the tendrils followed him down, remaining attached to his shield. He thought for a moment they might be trying to draw energy from it, but that didn’t seem to be the case. It remained as strong as ever, and the tendrils seemed neither capable of nor interested in trying to breach it.

  He dropped the disregarding spell now that he was on the ground—if anyone saw him now, they’d just see another hiker tramping around in the forest—but kept the shield up. Slowly, pausing often to check whether the strange energy was affecting him physically, he allowed the silvery tendrils to lead him away from the lake.

  As he kept going, the sensation grew even stronger. It never became a full-fledged pull; every time he stopped it persisted but still didn’t move him on its own. Now, instead of a baby tugging on his hand, it felt like an energetic small child, or a dog pulling on a leash.

  Some part of his rational mind suggested this might not be the brightest thing he’d ever done, especially since he hadn’t told anyone specifically where he was going. The strangest thing, though, was that the energy felt…benign. He got no sense of menace or unease from it. In fact, if someone asked him to reveal the first word that came to mind to describe the energy, it would have been familiar. It danced around his shield like a playful kitten, and in spots almost seemed to mesh with it.

  Of course.

  He didn’t slap himself in the head like he was auditioning to be the fourth Stooge, but he felt like he should.

  Of course the energy felt familiar.

  Of course it was reacting to his shield, and his own magical force.

  He stopped again, pondering.

  He had a way to prove it, before he moved forward any farther, but it would require a small risk.

  Ah, well. Great discoveries never came without risk.

  Holding his breath and keeping his gaze fixed forward toward the source of the tugging, he dropped his shield and switched off magical sight.

  Instantly, the sensation vanished, as did the silver tendrils.

  Stone smiled. “There we go…” he murmured.

  His pleasure was short-lived, though, when the implications of what he’d just discovered sank in.

  To solidify his hypothesis, he summoned the shield again, and resumed magical sight. As quickly as they had disappeared, both the silver tendrils and the tugging sensation resumed.

  “Bloody hell. This is a problem.”

  Moving with deliberate care, he allowed the energy to pull him forward again. It continued to grow stronger, but never to the extent that he felt caught in the grip of anything. This wasn’t a magical tractor beam trying to suck him into a vortex.

  In a way, it was worse: it was the pull of like to like.

  The pull of Calanarian magical energy seeking its counterpart.

  Ahead through the trees, something brigh
t appeared.

  Stone stopped, but didn’t drop his shield or his sight. The light ahead was the same color as the tendrils dancing around the shield, gently throbbing, pulsing like a calm, steady heartbeat. The pull was strong now.

  He stepped forward into a tiny clearing, and there it was.

  8

  The clearing, barely worthy of the name, couldn’t contain the rift.

  It stretched out to both sides, fifteen feet long by ten high, its brilliant silvery glow nearly painful to look at. More tendrils danced around its edges, giving it the look of being surrounded by flickering quicksilver flames. Several of them still reached out toward Stone, licking at his shield. Caressing it.

  Enticing it.

  He took a few steps back, suddenly, irrationally afraid the thing would turn on him, the gentle tendrils changing to grasping vines and trying to yank him through.

  It didn’t, though. It remained where it was, its edges licking and flickering against the dark trunks of the trees. In several places, the trees’ branches pierced it, and faint traces of the silver energy clung to them as well.

  Stone no longer had any doubt: the creature—the being—who had come through this rift was a Traveler, and Calanar was on the other side of that rift.

  As suddenly as his fear had risen, a new feeling took its place: temptation.

  It was there. Calanar was a few steps away. All he had to do was keep walking, and he could be there in seconds. He could find Harrison, tell him what was going on, and together they could find the Traveler and bring her home.

  Stone took a single step forward, but then stopped, horrified he’d even considered it.

  “Idiot,” he murmured, and with that single word, the temptation died.

  You didn’t simply go traipsing through interdimensional rifts, even if you did think you knew where they pointed. Especially when considering where this one pointed.

  If a Traveler had popped through, that most likely meant the rift, the spot where Calanar and Earth intersected, was in the Wastes. The Travelers rarely went into the mundanes’ cities on the ground, and never set foot in the floating cities of the magical Talented. And stepping through into the Wastes was suicide.

  But why had she come through? Travelers were creatures of magic, changed by the wild, lethal arcane forces that swirled in Calanar’s interior following its catastrophic magical wars. They had learned to live in the inhospitable territory, but that didn’t mean they understood the rifts any more than people here did. Perhaps she’d wandered away from her band, ended up too close to the rift, and decided to investigate. Perhaps the pull was stronger on the other side, or she’d been more susceptible to it due to her higher innate magic. Perhaps her entire band had encountered the rift and the others had been sent elsewhere—or died. Perhaps she was an exile.

  Stone had no way to know, but ultimately it didn’t matter. She was here now, and the authorities had her—assuming she was still alive at all.

  What would they do with her? His mind flitted from one idea to another, none of them pleasant. Would they put her in a prison? Try to study her, thinking she was some kind of extraterrestrial being? Kill her? If she was already dead, would they dissect her like some kind of lab animal?

  Anger rose, and he clenched his fists. Mundanes always wanted to study what they didn’t understand. There certainly wasn’t anything wrong with that, but the ham-handed way they did it often ended in the destruction of the very thing they were trying to discover. Or worse, they destroyed it on purpose because they didn’t understand it, and for mundanes, lack of understanding often led to fear. It was one of the primary reasons mages had no desire to reveal their existence to the world at large: as powerful as they were, there weren’t that many of them relative to mundanes, and none of them wanted to end up as the subject of unwanted scrutiny, study, and experimentation.

  He continued to examine the rift, keeping magical sight up. It seemed easier, and after a moment he realized why: his magic these days ran on Calanarian energy. Ever since he’d gone black and turned his back on pulling his power from other people—even Jason—and Trevor Harrison had taught him the secrets of tapping Calanar’s instead, he’d found all of his efforts to be both more potent and less tiring. Standing next to this rift, bathed in pure Calanarian energy, he felt like he could do anything.

  It was a heady feeling—but one he knew couldn’t last.

  He’d have to do something about this portal.

  And therein lay the bigger problem.

  Two problems, actually: the first was the rift itself, and what he’d learned from Stefan Kolinsky. He was sure he could close this one, if he wanted to. It was large and would take some effort, and he wasn’t certain whether the Calanarian energy would make it easier or harder for him, but he could do it.

  But should he? There had already been potential problems from the three he’d closed before learning why it was a bad idea. Rifts functioned like tectonic plates, safely venting the rising energy generated by two dimensions drifting into proximity. If they were prematurely closed before the dimensions shifted back out of phase, it could cause unexpected—and possibly stronger and more dangerous—eruptions in other areas. Kolinsky had reluctantly shared this information with him to stop him from closing the rifts, and he’d just as reluctantly conceded that allowing them to open and close on their own was safer than intervening. Stone didn’t like it—the things caused problems wherever they popped up, in the form of unusual and unpredictable magical phenomena—but the alternative was worse.

  That was the first problem, and it was bad enough on its own. The second one might be worse. He was now convinced the being the campers had found was a Traveler, and if she was here, it meant she’d come through—or been pulled through—this rift. That wasn’t by any means universal—not all the rifts were gateways, and, his earlier temptation aside, even those that were provided no guarantee the portal would work in both directions. But if Stone managed to locate the Traveler, he’d need to find a way to return her to Calanar. If she was still alive at all, Earth’s relatively lower magic level was probably the reason she was ill.

  Even though he knew he couldn’t simply bring her back here and toss her through the rift, having it available could potentially make things much easier. If he could study it and determine whether it was a two-way portal, that could move him closer to a viable solution. Closing it would take away that option.

  Obviously, the best solution was to find Harrison and let him handle it. He certainly had a way to pop between Earth and Calanar using the Nexus, and he’d sent Stone home, back to the Obsidian, without difficulty. He could probably do the same with the Traveler.

  That wasn’t something Stone could count on, though. Harrison showed up on his own timetable and for his own reasons—and who knew when he’d even get the message from Nakamura? His assistant in Las Vegas didn’t seem to have a reliable way to contact him, so it would depend on when he decided to check in at the Obsidian. That could be tomorrow, or next week, or next year. So far, he’d shown no inclination to share his schedule with anyone else.

  Stone growled, pacing around in front of the portal.

  He had to do something. It was too close to the lake to leave it here without making some effort to conceal it. From the look of things, this wasn’t a popular camping spot, and the rift was far enough from the water that it was unlikely anyone would blunder into it, but not impossible.

  At least he was sure the authorities hadn’t found it. If they had, it would have been cordoned off already, and he’d never have gotten this close to it. That, in turn, suggested Todd and his crew might not be looking for magic.

  Stone chuckled. With her silvery-green hair, gray complexion, and solid-black eyes, a Traveler might resemble a classic “space alien.” If there truly was some shadowy government agency tasked with locating evidence of extraterrestrial life, that increased the probability he was dealing with mundanes here. And that, in turn, made rescuing the Traveler more likel
y.

  Assuming he could find her, of course. That would be the hard part.

  He couldn’t even do a tracking ritual, because he didn’t have a tether object. Hell, he wasn’t even sure tracking rituals worked on Travelers.

  That was for later, though. For now, he’d need to do something about this rift. And hope no other campers, shadowy government agents, or curious locals wandered into the area while he was doing it.

  Two hours later, he stood back and swiped his hair off his damp brow, surveying his work.

  Nobody had showed up while he wove the illusion to subtly redirect mundanes away from the rift’s vicinity. The day had grown warmer as he worked; by the time he finished, he’d tossed his coat over a nearby branch and his stomach was growling. He dug a bottle of water and an energy bar from his pack, devouring them as he paced the perimeter outside the clearing and checked for any flaws in the illusion.

  The one good thing about rifts was that, by their very nature, they existed at the crossing of two or more ley lines. It was almost always two, and this one was no exception, but illusions were easy to maintain. Even the slight compulsion magic he’d added to implant a subtle sense of unease in anyone straying too close wouldn’t require more than a tiny bit of stable energy to keep it running—at least long enough for Stone to figure out his next move. That was good, because this one wouldn’t be as easy as the one in Oakland for him to check on.

  He stood back, looking over the rift for a last time. He felt oddly reluctant to leave it, to turn his back on this little bit of Calanar when he wanted so much to return there. The temptation still nudged at him: Come on—the Traveler came through, so you could go back through the other way. That was all it was, though: a temptation. The same transitory impulse someone might get to steer their car into oncoming traffic—and just as easy to resist.