Stone and a Hard Place (22 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Stone stood in the middle of a long room lit by flickering candles in sconces. Dressed only in a thin, hooded robe, he shivered against the frigid cold as the red light at the far end disgorged creatures one after another. They marched toward him, inexorably; he tried to move, to run, but his bare feet were rooted to the floor. His brain struggled to remember the formula for a spell, but the knowledge skittered maddeningly away. The things grew closer, closer, reaching out their hideous long-clawed hands—

“Dr. Stone! Wake up!” An urgent voice cut into the creatures’ gibbering advance. Stone gasped and opened his eyes.

Iona was leaning over him, backlit in her quilted bathrobe, looking worried. She put her hand on his forehead. “Are you all right? You were having some sort of nightmare.”

For a moment, he had no idea where he was. Then, through the vague haze of grayness, he remembered Tommy half-guiding, half-carrying him to the elevator and installing him in the same guest bedroom where he’d slept off the effects of the fatigue last time he’d been here.

“I-Iona?” he muttered. “What time is it?” He sat up, flinging off the covers, heedless of the pain in his ribs, and realized he was clad in nothing but his shorts. “Iona!” he protested, yanking the covers back up.

“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said, waving him off. “I needed to check you over for injuries and clean you up a bit. I’m a registered nurse, remember? You haven’t got anything I haven’t seen a thousand times before. Now—are you all right? How do you feel?”

Stone took inventory. His headache was gone, as was the grayness. The fatigue was still there, but at a fraction of its former intensity. All that was left was the pain in his ribs. “Not—bad, all things considered,” he said. “What time is it?”

“About two-thirty. Adelaide’s gone to bed, and Tommy went home. He wants to talk to you when you’re feeling better, though. He said he’d call you later today.”

“Great,” he muttered.
Just what I need—another round with Tommy.
Realizing that Iona was right about his misplaced prudishness, he pushed aside the covers again and sat up. “Where are my clothes? I need to be getting home.”

“You won’t leave this late, will you? You’re welcome to spend the night and leave in the morning if you like.”

“No, I really need to get home. I’ll come back tomorrow.” His mind went over the events of the evening, checking to make sure he hadn’t overlooked anything. “I’ll want to take another look at what I did to make sure it really is as safe as it’s likely to get, and I also want to look in the attic.”

“Of course,” she said. She pointed over to a chair next to the bed. “Your clothes are there. But are you sure you won’t reconsider? You were in pretty bad shape. The blood—”

He shook his head. “It’s nothing serious. Looks worse than it is. It happens when I overdo it, sometimes. Seriously, it was mostly just exhaustion, and most of that’s gone. I still have a lot to do, and I need to pick up some things from home before I do it.” He got up and began pulling on his jeans, T-shirt, and sweater.

Iona didn’t watch him dress, but she obviously had something on her mind. “Dr. Stone…”

“Yes?”

She looked at him, silent for a long moment. Finally, she said, “What—what’s really going on? What is it that you do? What did you do down there, and how do you know it’s going to work?”

He took a deep breath. “It isn’t going to work for very long. What I did amounts to nailing plywood over an open doorway to keep a tiger out. It’s going to get through eventually—I can only hope that the plywood holds it off long enough to come up with a more permanent solution.”

“And this—tiger—what is it?”

He sat back down on the edge of the bed and pulled on his socks and shoes. “Iona, I’m not sure you really want to know.”

“It’s something horrible, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“And—how did it get down there in the first place?”

“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you, but not now. After this whole thing is over, I’ll tell you. But I really think that you and Adelaide should consider going somewhere else for a while after your event is over. I’m not at all comfortable with your even letting it go on, but I understand the impact if you cancel it, and I think I’ve held off the problem long enough that things should be fine.”

She pondered that for a few moments. “Why are you doing this?”

“Hmm?” He finished tying his shoes and stood. “Have you got my coat, by the way?”

“It’s out front. I’ll get it before you leave. But I really want to know: why are you doing this? It’s obviously dangerous for you—you’ve already been injured trying to fight whatever it is down there. You barely know us. Why would you put yourself at risk?”

He gave her an odd smile. “Honestly, Iona, I don’t know. I’m never been particularly chivalrous, so the ‘save the damsel in distress’ thing doesn’t tend to work on me. P’raps it’s just that I like puzzles, and this is quite an intriguing one. Well, that, and I’ve grown fond of you and Adelaide. I don’t want to see you hurt. You didn’t do anything to deserve this—you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

She nodded slowly. “Well, I’m glad you’re here, for whatever reason.”

He tipped an imaginary hat to her and headed for the door, but stopped before he reached it. “Ah, that reminds me—when you get a chance, please talk to Adelaide. I’ll be needing an invitation to the event. I want to be there to keep an eye on things, just in case our basement-dwelling beastie gets up to more mischief than expected. Besides, it’ll give me an excuse to get my tuxedo cleaned.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Ethan was pretty sure that if he felt any better than he did right now, he’d have to check and make sure he hadn’t died and gone to his own personal vision of Heaven.

It was very late. He lay next to Trina (
Trin,
he reminded himself) in her bed. Both of them were naked and spent; Trin had spent the last hour showing him several different ways she knew to blow his mind and thoroughly pickle his hormones. The only reason they were taking a break now was because after two times, he’d been unable to rouse himself for a third without a pause to recharge. She dozed now, her arm draped possessively across his chest.

He went over the last several hours. The evening had been quite an education—far more, his traitorous brain acknowledged, than almost anything Alastair Stone had taught him as of yet. He had broad new horizons to explore, and many decisions he’d have to make.

He had tried Trin’s trick of siphoning energy from another person, and it had been amazing. He chose a girl and asked her to dance, then did his best to duplicate what Trin had done with the man. She’d given him some pointers beforehand, warning him to be careful and not to take too much, no matter how good it felt. “We don’t want to kill anybody,” she warned. “And we don’t want people to get suspicious. Just take a little from each person, so they feel tired. There’s no way they can trace that back to us.”

And so he did. His arms around the girl, he’d reached out with his magical senses and engulfed her aura with his own, feeling her life energy flowing into him. He stopped probably too soon, worried that he would hurt her, and she’d just sagged a little in his arms, giggling about having drunk too much. Ethan, meanwhile, felt like his nerve endings were on fire—a good kind of fire that burned away any dullness or pain or uncertainty. He’d felt
alive
with power.

When he’d returned to Trin’s table, she was grinning at him. “Way to go!” she said, stroking his arm. “Very nice for a first time! You could have taken a bit more, but better to go easy while you get a feel for it.”

“That was
incredible,”
he agreed. “And we can power our spells that way? We don’t have to get tired?” He remembered his first few attempts at levitating the coin, where he’d felt like he’d run a marathon at the end. Was that how Stone and other white mages like him did magic? It seemed so limited. Even with the power objects, you still had to use your own power to infuse them. It made you vulnerable.

Ethan was tired of being vulnerable.

“That’s right,” she said. “Why waste our own energy when there’s so much out there just ripe and ready for the taking? Like I said, they’ll never miss it.”

They each repeated the performance twice more before they left the club for The Three’s ritual space. It wasn’t far from the club, so they walked. “What are we doing tonight?” Ethan asked. “What’s this ritual about?”

“It’s just something we’ve been working on, to gather detailed information about a subject. It’s really Miguel’s thing—he loves all that research shit, mostly because it helps him stalk all his slutty boyfriends—but sometimes it’s useful to know things about people. If you know things, you can use them. Remember that.”

He nodded. She leaned in and kissed him, giving him a taste of what was to come later.

The ritual, aided by the power he’d claimed from the other clubgoers, had been a tremendous rush. Miguel had been waiting for them, and already had the circle halfway set up and ready. Trin helped him finish it, and then the two of them had given Ethan instructions on what they wanted him to do. Mostly it was like the other night: help hold the pattern steady and feed power into the circle, but they taught him the incantation they would be using and told him he would be joining in. “Just watch how we set it up,” Trin told him, squeezing his arm encouragingly. “You’ll see where there’s a break in the pattern that we leave for you. Just weave yourself in. It’ll be more obvious when you see it.”

She was right, it had. He had little trouble doing what he was asked to do, and the extra power he was wielding sang through his body like a drug. Rather than feeling spent and nauseated when at last they unclasped their hands, he felt like he could go out and run around the block a couple of times.

He stared at Trin. “I didn’t know it could be like this,” he breathed.

“Old Stone was holding out on you,” Miguel teased. “He didn’t tell you how awesome it is, did he?”

“He—said it was a rush. But a dangerous one. Addictive.”

Trin laughed. “Only addictive if you care about doing weak versions of magic. Otherwise, it’s the only way to go.”

Miguel had left shortly after that, and Trin had set about taking Ethan on a journey he would never forget. He shifted a little under her arm now, letting out a long sigh of utter contentment.

She roused from her light doze. “Ready to go again?”

“Not quite yet,” he said. “Soon.”

“Ah, youth.” She stroked his chest. “So much energy.” Rolling over on her back, she put her hands up behind her head, seemingly oblivious to the show she was putting on. “Ethan, can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“What are you going to do about Stone?”

“What do you mean, what am I going to do about him?”

She shrugged. “I saw the way you were tonight. It was like you were born for this. I’ll have to talk it over with Miguel and Oliver when he’s feeling better, but I’m pretty sure we do have a spot for you in our circle, if you want it.”

He stared at her. “Really?”

“Yeah. We might not be classically trained mages or anything—” Her voice clearly demonstrated her contempt for the concept. “—but we’ve got a good thing going here, and having another mage in our group will make us even stronger, so we can do bigger stuff. Plus,” she added, rolling on her side and letting her hand trail down his chest and abdomen and disappear beneath the covers, “that way I can keep you around more.”

He shivered at her touch. “I’d like that,” he said. He paused. “But the thing is, with my mother sick—I can’t really leave her.”

“You wouldn’t have to leave her,” Trin said. “We only do rituals a couple of nights a week, unless we’ve got something special going on. You could come up for those, and sometimes I could come down there. You could show me the South Bay. Maybe even introduce me to Mom.”

He nodded, not allowing his mind to engage in any further speculation. This was already better than he’d dared to hope. “I was thinking—” he said.

“Yes?” Her hand continued its wanderings, and she took hold of his with her other one and encouraged it to do some wanderings of its own.

“Well—I thought maybe I could keep things up with Dr. Stone for a while, too. You know—not tell him about this yet.”

Her smile was sly. “You want to keep learning from him and us, too. You’re devious, Ethan. I like that.”

“Well, you did say knowledge is good.”

“It is. And more is better.”

“He won’t be able to tell, will he?” Ethan suddenly looked nervous. “I mean, by just looking at me with magical sight? He can’t see that I’ve been doing—”

She shook her head. “As long as you don’t do anything ‘dark’ around him, he won’t be able to tell. At least not for a while. Don’t
worry,
Ethan,” she teased. “Everything’s gonna be fine.”

He nodded, his smile a little goofy. “Yeah, it is.”

“Hey, listen,” she said, gently stroking him in an effort to get things going again, “You know, if you’re going to stick with Stone for a while, maybe you can help us out, too, if you wanted to.”

“Yeah?”

She nodded. “I don’t know if you remember the other night—you were pretty drunk—but I was asking you some questions about that old house in Los Gatos that Stone was interested in.”

“Yeah, I remember that. Some old lady, and there’s something going on in her house.”

“Do you know anything else about it?”

“Like what?” He shivered, feeling himself begin to stir again.

“I don’t know. I’m just kind of interested in it, and I was hoping you might know some more.”

“Not really. I went with him that first night we looked around, but I haven’t been back since.”

She nodded. “Do you think you could—” her hand moved expertly “—find out a little more?”

He shivered again, looking confused. “You want to know about the house?”

“I want to know what Stone knows about it,” she said. “Can you get him to tell you? From everything I’ve heard about him, if you get him into lecture mode he’ll talk your ear off about whatever he’s got a hard-on about at the time. Just see if you can get him talking, then come back and tell me what he says.”

She smiled as her efforts down below the covers began to bear fruit. “Mmm, speaking of hard-ons, there we go. Do you think you could do that for me, Ethan? And don’t let on about why you want to know, of course.”

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak. “Yeah,” he grunted. “Yeah, I can do that.”

“You’re fantastic, Ethan,” she said, green eyes twinkling invitingly as she moved in for round three.