Heart of stone, p.1
Heart of Stone, page 1
Alastair Stone Chronicles: Book Seven
Heart of Stone
R.L. King
Heart Of Stone
Copyright © 2016 by R.L. King All rights reserved.
First Smashwords Edition: September 2016
Editor: John Helfers
Cover and Formatting: Streetlight Graphics
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 are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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To everyone who’s read and enjoyed the series. I’m grateful to every one of you, and I hope I can continue to entertain you for many years to come!
Chapter One
Magic is one of the most useful things in the world. It’s great for getting you out of scrapes, and equally great for making it so you don’t get into scrapes in the first place.
An abbreviated version of that thought flashed through Alastair Stone’s mind as he caromed off the edge of the polished wooden bar and made a mostly vain effort to keep his feet under him.
Of course, for magic to do those things, you had to be sober enough to remember to use it, and that was where his current problem lay.
This is absurd. Stone scrambled backward to get the corner of the bar between himself and the three hundred pounds of bearded fury lumbering toward him. I don’t get into bar fights. Jason gets into bar fights.
But Jason wasn’t here. And to be fair, Stone didn’t usually go to this kind of bar, either.
Get out of the house, he’d told himself.
Go drink somewhere besides your usual pub, he’d told himself. It could be interesting. You could stand to meet some new people.
In retrospect, the most infamous biker bar in Los Gatos had probably not been his best choice, despite the fact that one of his favorite local bands was playing there tonight.
Although to be fair, “biker bar” and “Los Gatos” were sort of like saying “strip club” and “Disneyland,” or “cockfight” and “daycare center.” The Highland Club’s notorious reputation as an island of lawlessness notwithstanding, it still resided on the tony main street of a town usually populated by computer millionaires and Ferraris.
Stone might have been looking for a break from his usual Palo Alto pub, but he wasn’t an idiot.
Actually, given current circumstances, the jury was still out on that one.
He scrambled backward again, trying to stay upright, but hampered both by his state of advanced inebriation and by his feet, which suddenly seemed to have grown three or four sizes and refused to cooperate with the rest of his body.
The biker, broad, glowering, and sporting a T-shirt reading LOUD PIPES SAVE LIVES and eyebrows resembling unbarbered caterpillars, swiped a mighty, beer-scented paw toward Stone as the surrounding crowd cheered him on. Stone somehow managed to dodge the blow, the only thing saving him being the fact that the biker was every bit as potted as he was.
“Hold still, ya fuckin’ skinny geek!” the biker roared, attempting another awkward lunge. The crowd stepped back, content to watch and offer drunken advice, but unwilling to get involved directly. Up on the stage, the band played on as if this sort of thing happened every night.
Stone slipped around the corner and ducked behind a table. It was at that point that his alcohol-soaked synapses initiated sufficient connections to remind him that he was, in fact, one of the most formidable magical practitioners in the western United States. Cowering behind a table against a man who probably couldn’t spell “magic” if you spotted him the first three letters was probably even more absurd than letting himself be dragged into this fight in the first place.
The good thing was that magic—at least the simple stuff required to deal with situations like this—came easily for him. When the biker shambled around the bar, his small piggy eyes cutting back and forth as he searched for Stone, he suddenly found that his legs were no longer performing as expected. One of his massive leather engineer boots slipped out from under him, yanked by an unseen force and pitching him backward with much comical flailing of tattoo-clad arms. The ensuing crash as all three hundred of his sweaty pounds impacted the bar’s wooden surface shook the length of it, rattling the other patrons’ beers like a hairy localized earthquake.
Stone took that opportunity to mutter a few words under his breath, summoning an invisibility spell around himself after a quick check to make sure no one was currently looking at him. He couldn’t hold the spell for long, but the back door was close, and he had a few seconds while the biker was still trying to right himself.
He skittered across the floor, shoved the door open, and dragged himself to his feet against the alley wall, puffing as his jaw throbbed in rhythm with his pounding heartbeat.
Well. That was fun.
Some minutes later, slumped into the corner of a cab seat that smelled like pastrami and feet, he had time to examine the events of the evening in more detail. If he’d been smarter—and had fewer drinks—he’d probably have known better than to let his natural propensity for sarcasm get the better of him when the biker had ordered him to vacate “his spot.”
Honestly, he was surprised the man had even understood the convoluted and anatomically impossible suggestion that Stone had offered regarding him, his motorcycle, and the “loud pipes” mentioned on his T-shirt. Ah, well. Live and learn.
Stone smiled, rubbing his jaw where the biker had connected with his first punch. He was going to regret all of this tomorrow when the buzz wore off and the long, slow hangover set in, but right now, his primary emotion was amusement.
That, and regret. He’d missed almost all of the band’s set.
At least he didn’t have to go to work early tomorrow.
Chapter Two
Stone almost called in sick the next day. He’d awakened sprawled across his bed sideways, still in his clothes, his hair in crazed spikes and his mouth tasting like he’d wolfed some roadkill and washed it down with a gallon of industrial waste.
Magical scholarship, unfortunately, was stubbornly silent on the topic of dealing with raging hangovers. Pity—there was a fortune in it for anyone who could figure out how to brew up such a concoction, but alchemy had never been his strong suit. He settled for a cold shower, a change of clothes, and a large cup of weapons-grade black coffee he picked up at Peet’s on the way to his Stanford office. By the time he got there, he was feeling at least passably alive.
His early-afternoon classes went better than he expected: for Stone, teaching was its own kind of drug, revitalizing him and driving off the last vestiges of the hangover. He prowled up and down the aisles of the tiered hall, regaling his Western Occult Symbology students with a lecture on the Salem Witch Trials that had them all on the edges of their seats. He had no false modesty about his abilities: he was good, and he knew it. Even with a stubborn headache and a bruised jaw that continued to throb after three Advil, he still managed to hold the interest of every student save one, a sleepy young man who looked like he’d indulged even more than Stone had last night. Stone left him alone: anything else would have been hypocrisy.
By later that afternoon, though, both the coffee and the Advil had worn off. He trudged back to his office, which was located about as far from the central core of the University as it could be while still being on campus, and told Laura, the administrative aide Occult Studies shared with a couple other small and obscure departments, that he wasn’t feeling well and was blowing off his afternoon office hour.
She tilted her head. “What happened to your chin?”
“Bar fight with a three-hundred pound biker.”
She nodded knowingly, no doubt thinking he’d slipped and smacked himself on the edge of the shower or something. “Okay, sure,” she said. “Hope you feel better.”
He thought about trying to get some work done when he got home. That lasted about as long as it took to drop onto the couch in the living room and start glancing through the research he’d left on the table from his last session. He didn’t even remember falling asleep.
He dreamed of Lindsey.
He didn’t do that often anymore. He had for a while, in the first few weeks after returning to the Bay Area from Ojai. Back then, the dreams had come several times a week. Now, four months later, they’d tapered off to a couple times a month.
They usually didn’t come at night, either. The dreams most often accompanied unplanned naps like this one, the involuntary shutdowns when his body informed him that regardless of his other plans, it was clocking out for a while, thank you very much.
The ones that occurred all too often these days.
It was probably the aftereffects of the alcohol that did it. He always seemed to forget about the side effects—or just ignored them, because the temporary release was sometimes worth the consequences. The hangovers he was used to. The nightmares, not so much.
The blood wasn’t the worst. Neither were the desperate screams, the confusion in her eyes, or the knife (in the dreams, it wasn’t a genteel letter opener, but a wicked-looking, oversized steak knife with a gnarled wooden handle) sticking out from her chest at a crazy angle.
The worst was the knowledge, deep down in the back of Stone’s mind, that her death had been his fault.
He hadn’t killed her. His rational mind knew that. He hadn’t plunged the blade into her chest. He hadn’t held her down as she struggled and died. He hadn’t even been present when it had happened.
He hadn’t been charged with her murder, despite strong evidence pointing briefly toward his guilt. Even so, sometimes the dream included bits and pieces from his brief incarceration, magnified from a few hours in a small local cell to a full-blown prison experience—something he endured because he knew it was what he deserved.
No, he hadn’t killed Lindsey Cole, former real-estate agent in a bucolic little resort town in southern California. But nonetheless, she was dead because of him. Because of what he was. And it looked like his subconscious had no intentions of letting him forget it any time soon.
The phone rang, startling him from his uneasy slumber. He jerked awake, his back protesting his awkward slumped position, half-on and half-off the overstuffed leather sofa. For a moment, his brain didn’t register the sound, thinking it part of the dream, which was already fading.
Bugger it—let the machine get it. Stone sagged back, running a hand through his tangled hair. He didn’t feel like talking to anyone right now. His heart still pounded as the blood and the screams and the guilt settled back down to rational levels, and his head felt like something was trying to beat its way out of it.
His gaze flicked to the clock as the phone rang again: eight thirty. That meant he’d been asleep for a couple of hours. On the coffee table in front of him, a disarray of items lay spread: three empty Guinness bottles from a couple of nights ago, a half-full carton of take-out chow mein he hadn’t bothered to carry to the trash, a pair of open tomes showing complicated diagrams, and a notebook filled with scribblings that grew increasingly illegible as they progressed down the page. Stone didn’t remember when he’d decided to give it up as a bad job and surrender to his fatigue, but he’d apparently stopped a thought in mid-sentence.
The phone rang again, and this time the machine picked it up. He heard the mutterings of his own voice on the message, a beep, and then another familiar one, this one female. “Dr. Stone? You there?”
Damn.
He blinked a couple times, sat up, and waved toward the other side of the room. The handset sailed toward him and slapped into his hand. “Yes, hello.”
“Hey, Dr. Stone.” Verity sounded surprised he’d picked up. “Didn’t think you’d answer. We haven’t heard from you in a while, so I thought I’d call and see how you’re doing.”
“Sorry.” His voice sounded growly, which wasn’t surprising. “Been busy lately. How are the lessons going?”
“Great!” Her enthusiasm came through clearly in her voice. “Things are still going great. Edna’s fantastic. I’m learning so much from her. Remember when I told you she was teaching me some more advanced healing stuff?”
“I do.” That had been a few weeks ago, the last time they’d spoken. The “advanced healing stuff” was part of the reason he’d arranged with Edna Soren to take Verity on for some “guest lecturing”—from the beginning of her training, his apprentice had shown a knack for the healing arts that Stone couldn’t match. “I take it you’re doing well?”
“Oh, yeah. She says I have a real talent for it. And…” She trailed off.
“And what?” He didn’t miss the uncertainty in her tone.
“Well…” She paused. “I don’t want you to take it wrong, but—I think my magic style is really meshing with Edna’s. I can’t wait to show you all the stuff I’ve learned.”
Stone wished his head would stop pounding. “Why would I take it wrong? That’s why I asked her to teach you—I thought it might be true. I’m glad things are going well for you.”
“That’s a relief. That’s kinda why I didn’t call, actually—I was afraid of how you’d react. I’ll tell you one thing, though—it’s boring down here, especially now that the holidays are over. When I’m not studying or helping out around Edna’s place, there’s not much else to do around here. Not without driving down to L.A., and I don’t want to take Edna’s truck that far. I miss the clubs, and San Francisco.”
“Well, you’ll be back eventually. You are planning on coming back, yes?”
“Oh, yeah,” she assured him, though he thought she might have answered a little too fast. “Absolutely—as soon as Edna kicks me out.”
“Well, good. Take your time. Learn everything you can—perhaps you can manage to get some of those healing techniques past my thick skull when you return. How’s Jason, by the way?”
“Busy,” she said. “I hardly ever see him, now that we’re not living together. Fran’s got him running like crazy, doing paperwork, studying the law, following cheating husbands—the whole bit.”
Stone nodded. Fran Bartek, he knew from previous conversations with both Verity and her brother, was Jason’s boss, a licensed private investigator he was apprenticing with as he accumulated enough hours to take the test for his own license. Stan Lopez, his late father’s associate in the Ventura police department, had set up the gig. “Well, tell him I said hello when you see him.”
“I’m surprised he hasn’t called you.” She paused, and when she spoke again, the pitch of her voice had changed, become more tentative. “Dr. Stone—?”
“Yes?”
“You’re—okay, aren’t you?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well—I know you kinda got used to having us hanging around, getting you out of your shell. And now that I’m not cooking for you anymore, have you gone back to getting takeout every night?”
Stone glanced at the half-empty carton of chow mein, then shoved it away with a sock-clad foot. “Of course not.”
“Dr. Stone…”
“Verity, really—I’m fine.” He forced cheer into his voice. “Everything’s fine. In fact, as soon as I get off the phone, I’m planning to check out a new club I heard about.” The lie came easily.
“Glad to hear it. We both miss you. You should come down here and see us sometime. Or maybe we can get up there one of these days.”
“Absolutely, let’s do that,” he agreed. They’d talked about it before, a couple of times since Verity and Jason had decided to stay down there, but between Stone’s own schedule and Jason’s grueling work hours, it hadn’t worked out yet. They hadn’t even managed to get together over the holidays.
“Hey,” she said, more slowly after a pause. “I know it’s none of my business and I’m sure you’ll tell me so, but are you—you know—seeing anybody?”
“You’re right,” he said. “That is none of your business.” She started to say something, but he cut her off: “It’s been lovely chatting, Verity. I’m glad you’re still doing well with Edna. Must go, though—I have a few things I need to do before I head out.”
“Okay,” she said, obviously accepting that no more information about his personal life was forthcoming. “Take care of yourself, Doc. I mean it.”
“I always do.”
She didn’t reply to that.
After she’d hung up, Stone remained slouched on the sofa. He sent the phone back to its spot with another flick of magic, then glanced at the remains of the chow mein. He noticed he didn’t even bother to take it out of the carton lately, and contrasted it with the evening meals he used to have with Verity and Jason.
He flung himself off the couch, picked up the carton, and carried it out to the kitchen. The place was pristine, except for an untidy pile of newspapers and unread mail on the breakfast bar. He glanced down at the pile; a section of a two-day-old paper lay on top, folded open to an article about the new club he’d mentioned to Verity—the one he had no intention of visiting. He’d thought the place looked interesting when he’d first seen it, but the idea of dragging himself out among crowds of overhyped revelers—even to see a good band—didn’t appeal to him lately. He’d slept for two hours, uneasy as it had been: that should give him the energy to spend the rest of the night working on the new ritual he’d been designing. And in any case, he doubted he’d be fit company for the rest of humanity tonight, given his current mood.
