Circle of Stone: An Alastair Stone Urban Fantasy Novel (Alastair Stone Chronicles Book 19) Read online

  At this point, whatever would happen was inevitable. Ben didn’t know it, but it was.

  He was two feet away from it now.

  He stretched out his hand, and the shifting yellow-green energy reached out to meet him. When the two touched, the thundering feeling swelled until he thought it would pull him to pieces—but still it didn’t hurt.

  How could it hurt when it so obviously belonged with him?

  Ben left the warehouse a few minutes later. By the time he lifted himself back over the fence to the dark street beyond, any memory of what had occurred with the strange, beautiful thing inside the warehouse had left his mind as if it had never been there.

  He hitched a ride home. He’d never have been brave enough to do that before, but now it didn’t seem like he had much to worry about. He wasn’t sure why, exactly, but he felt more confident tonight. More secure. More convinced that nothing would hurt him. He amused himself by watching the aura of the car’s driver, a tough-looking middle-aged man who’d taken pity on Ben when he’d found him trudging down the street in a bad end of Oakland.

  He thanked the man and hurried to his apartment, a rundown duplex a few blocks off MacArthur Blvd. The lights were out inside; he hoped that meant Ma was asleep. It would be easier that way—he wouldn’t have to explain what had happened, why he was home so late, and what he was going to do about Julio. He didn’t know what he was going to do about Julio. He needed some time to think about that.

  At the last moment before he got too close, he paused to use his special senses to check the area. He wouldn’t put it past Julio to send somebody to wait for him, and the last thing he wanted right now was to deal with some goon.

  No auras sprang into view near the front of the duplex, which surprised him a little. Maybe Julio had other things to deal with tonight, and he’d send somebody tomorrow. With a rare jolt of courage, maybe brought on by his strange confidence, he decided he’d get ahead of the situation—as soon as he got inside, he’d call Julio himself, explain what had happened with the dead phone and the slashed tires, and hope his boss would take pity on him. Maybe he could work some extra hours to make up for the stolen goods. It was worth a shot anyway.

  As soon as he opened the door, he smelled something. The usual, familiar aromas were still there: Ma’s spicy cooking, the acrid, lingering hint of her cigarette smoke, and the faint hint of the strong, floral perfume she liked. Those smells always made Ben feel like he was home. As annoying and whiny as Ma could be sometimes, he still loved her and wanted her to be happy.

  The other smells, though—they didn’t belong here. Even fainter than the perfume, he picked up a faint mishmash of something coppery and something sharp and sour.

  “Ma?” he called. “You up?” Ma slept lightly, and she’d probably been in her bedroom, reading one of her trashy gossip tabloids while she waited up for him.

  No answer.

  “Ma?” Louder this time.

  Still nothing.

  He checked the kitchen, finding only the dishes from tonight’s dinner drying on the rack and the tangy traces of spaghetti.

  “Hey, Ma, this isn’t funny.” He hurried through the empty living room toward the back of the duplex. The place had only three other rooms: his bedroom, Ma’s, and their shared bath. The door to the bathroom was open, showing it too was empty.

  He passed his own room, glancing in through the open door, on his way to Ma’s room. Her door was open a crack, but no light appeared through it.

  “Ma?” He knocked softly. His heart began to pound as he realized the unusual smell was stronger back here than it had been when he’d come in. An uneasy feeling he couldn’t explain began to creep through his body.

  If she was in there asleep and he pushed open the door without waiting for her to respond, she’d be pissed. She didn’t like him seeing her in her nightie. “Ma, last chance,” he called, louder this time. “If you don’t answer, I’m comin’ in.”

  She still didn’t answer.

  Ben swallowed hard and pushed the door open, and switched on the overhead light.

  “Oh, shit…” he whispered.

  He took in the scene in an instant, as if time slowed down for him.

  His mother was in there—held in the grip of muscular man wearing dark clothes and a mask. The way her body hung limply in the man’s grasp, Ben knew she was dead even before he saw the bright red blood around her sagging neck. She was indeed in her nightie, but now the pink flowers were stained with more blood. Her eyes were open, her mouth stretched in a silent scream of terror. One of her sturdy legs was oddly bent, a pink slipper hanging precariously off her small foot. The guy held a knife in one hand.

  Another man—this one with a baseball bat—stood on the other side of the room. He held it cocked and ready as if he’d been expecting Ben.

  “Nice and easy, kid…” the one with the bat said. “Hands where we can see ’em.”

  Ben barely heard him. “Oh, Ma…” he whispered. His voice shook, and so did his body. Who were these men, and why had they done this to his mother?

  The answer came to him on a wave of rage.

  Julio.

  Julio ordered this.

  These guys killed my mom trying to find me for Julio.

  Ben stopped shaking. The sight of his mother’s slumped body drove away the terror, replacing it with a cold, clean anger.

  “You bastards killed my Ma,” Ben said. His heart still pounded, but his voice seemed to come from someone else. Despite the knife and the baseball bat, he felt no fear.

  “Where’s the stuff, fuckwit?” the man holding his mother demanded. He let her drop to the floor as if she were no more important than a discarded bag of garbage. “Where’s the shipment?”

  “You killed my Ma,” Ben repeated. He raised his hands, feeling the odd, electric power surging through him again.

  “Your own fault, kid,” the man with the bat said. “It was an accident, but you shouldn’ta tried to hide from Julio. That don’t work. You should know that. Now we’re gonna take it outta your ass.” He stepped forward, raising the bat.

  Ben wasn’t entirely sure what happened after that. It was as if something had taken him over, forging his body and his rage and his grief into something terrifying. He gestured, and the man with the bat sailed back and slammed into the wall so hard Ben heard a loud crack. He wasn’t sure if it was the man’s back or the wall, and didn’t care. The man slid down the wall to the floor, dropping the bat.

  “What the fuck?” the one with the knife yelled. He wasted no time, lunging across the bed at Ben and swinging his weapon in a deadly arc.

  Ben didn’t hesitate. He used his power—the power he’d never been very good at, much to his dad’s disappointment—to grab the knife and force the man’s hand around until its blade jammed itself into his throat. Blood erupted along with a desperate gurgle as Julio’s man scrabbled at the hilt, but it didn’t take long before he lay next to the other one.

  “You killed my Ma, you motherfuckers!” Ben screamed. Powers forgotten now, he resorted to a more primal response, rushing around the bed to plant kick after savage kick into both men: their sides, their heads, their guts.

  He went on like that for a long time, but the rage eventually faded, leaving him exhausted and sobbing. “Aw, Ma…” he moaned, not wanting to look at her bloody body lying on the floor.

  He shifted to his special sight and looked for any sign of life; his mother was dead, he knew that. So was the man with the knife sticking out of his neck. The other man’s aura, muddy and dull yellow, flickered faintly, but Ben no longer had any desire to finish him off. Whatever force had taken him over was gone now, and all he felt was tired.

  I gotta get out of here. Julio might send more guys. Or the cops might come and think I killed Ma.

  He didn’t want to leave her, but what choice did he have? Gently, he patted her pudgy hand, his breath catching in his throat as he noticed her red-painted fingernails. She’d just gotten a manicure a coup
le days ago, and had been so proud of it. “I’m sorry, Ma,” he whispered. “I love you.”

  He paused to throw up in the hallway on the way out.

  Nobody stopped him as he left, carrying only a duffel bag stuffed with clothes, a few other necessities, and a small wad of cash from Ma’s secret stash. He felt guilty about taking her money, but she wouldn’t need it anymore. He had no idea where he’d go, only that he had to get away.

  Ben kept moving, holing up in abandoned or vacant buildings, never staying in one place for longer than a day. He thought often about leaving—getting the hell out of Oakland at least, and maybe even California—but he didn’t. Something he couldn’t explain held him here, and he didn’t argue with it.

  It was easy to avoid the cops. He figured they were probably looking for him—perhaps they knew he’d killed Julio’s man or even thought he’d killed Ma—but it didn’t matter. His skills, the ones Ma had never wanted him to use or even talk about, were better now. Things that had been hard or even impossible for him before were now easy. He could float to upper floors of buildings, disguise himself as someone else, even turn invisible. Getting money was simple too: all he had to do was lift someone’s wallet or wait for a shopkeeper to turn her back with the register open. He didn’t steal anything but money—not yet—because he didn’t want to deal with trying to sell it, but cash was cash.

  It was on the third day of his hiding that he made another discovery: his aura was different.

  Even when using his special sight, he didn’t often look at his own aura. It was what it was: a pale, rather boring orange that he sometimes wished was more interesting like others he saw. Dad had told him aura color had nothing to do with anything, but it was easy for him to say: Dad’s aura had been a beautiful shade of green that Ben had always envied.

  But that morning, while he crouched on the roof of a three-story building watching a shop across the street, he happened to look down at his hand while he had the sight active. What he saw nearly made him lose his balance and fall off the roof.

  After scrambling back, panting, and letting his heart rate return to normal, he switched the sight on again and stared down at himself.

  The orange was still there, but now a second color accompanied it, wrapped around its outer edge: a pale yellow-green, flickering and kinetic, almost as if he had a wreath of flame around his aura. Something about the color seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place where he’d seen it before.

  His breath came faster. Was something wrong with him? Was he getting sick? He’d seen sick people’s auras before, but they were never brighter—in fact, it was usually the opposite. They dimmed, with darker patches floating around in them. They certainly didn’t add a second color.

  What was going on?

  Ben gave up his stake-out of the shop across the street. He turned himself invisible and floated down, pulling his A’s cap down low over his eyes. How was he supposed to figure out what was happening to him? It wasn’t as if he could ask anybody. He didn’t know any other people like him.

  He wished Dad were still alive.

  He saw three more people with the same weird, flickering yellow-green edge to their auras in the next couple of days.

  He’d taken to using the special sight more, checking out people’s auras as he passed them on the street. Most looked the same as always, but every now and then he’d spot someone else with the “extra” bit. None of them had anything in common: one was an elderly woman, another a leather-jacketed teenager who glared back when she caught him staring, and the third was a bagger in a supermarket. Other than the extra aura color, Ben didn’t notice anything odd or unusual about any of them.

  He had a flash of insight later that night. He lay huddled, half-asleep, on the bed in his fleabag motel (they took cash and didn’t ask questions, two things that were currently very important to him), fighting off another wave of grief about his mother, when a thought struck: what if those people he’d seen were like him? What if the extra yellow-green aura meant they had his abilities, or at least the potential for them?

  That was definitely something to investigate.

  His flash of insight proved correct. Over the next few days, he went out among people all over town, scanning auras until he spotted more with the yellow-green flicker.

  There weren’t many. He never saw more than one at a time, and even after walking around for the better part of a day he identified fewer than twenty of them.

  He could be wrong, of course: the color could mean something completely different. But something—the same something that kept him from fleeing Oakland, though he didn’t consciously realize it—told him his initial guess was right.

  He decided to test it one day when he spotted a chubby teenage girl slouched in an alley smoking a joint. At first she tried to proposition him, offering him a good time at the other end of the alley for twenty dollars. Instead, he offered her the twenty to listen to him for a few minutes.

  Ben had no idea what he was doing: how do you tell somebody about this kind of thing? About magic, he told himself firmly. Ma was gone now, rest her soul, and he didn’t have to worry about her disapproval anymore.

  To his surprise, the words came easily. It almost seemed as if some other force was speaking through him, turning his usual uncertain tones into something more compelling.

  “I can help you,” he said. “You’ve got something special—something not many people have—and I can teach you how to use it.” At her angry look, he clarified, “No, I’m not talking about anything sexual. I’m not like that. Please—let me just show you. I promise, you’ll want to see this. I won’t stop you if you want to leave after.”

  At first, the girl was skeptical. She glared at him and almost took off—but then he showed her what he could do, and told her he thought she might be able to do it too. Wasn’t it worth a few minutes’ time to be sure?

  Using the same technique his dad had used on him all those years ago, Ben talked the girl through how to use the special sight. She forgot about the time—forgot about everything else, including leaving—when she managed to do it after a few minutes’ practice. The way she looked at him, wide-eyed, half-amazed and half-scared, brought a grin to his face.

  Because now he had an idea.

  In a week he’d gathered five of them into his group: all young, all street kids with nowhere to go, all possessing the same weird, yellow-green flicker around their auras. None of them could see it, even when he’d taught them the sight. Ben wasn’t sure why, but once again he didn’t question it.

  And the kids didn’t question him. Maybe it was because they were afraid of him. Maybe it was because he was teaching them something they couldn’t learn on their own, something they could use to better themselves. Hell, maybe it was some kind of street-kid loyalty. Whatever the reason, when he explained his plan to them, they went for it right away.

  “Nobody gets hurt, right?” asked Daisy, a foster-kid runaway. “I don’t wanna hurt nobody.”

  The others nodded in agreement, some with more conviction than others.

  “Nobody gets hurt,” Ben assured them. His confidence had grown as he taught them more magic, and the fact that they all followed his instructions—him, the guy who’d always been scared to get out of his own way before—emboldened him further. He felt almost parental to these kids, none of whom was older than seventeen. He wanted to help them make something of themselves. If that meant a few rich assholes lost some of their extra cash, then who cared? It wasn’t like they’d miss it. “I’ve got plans, and if you all stick with me, I’ll teach you more of this stuff and we’ll all make money together.”

  “What if maybe we just go off on our own?” Patch asked. She was the chubby girl he’d first identified, her faded jeans covered in the embroidered appliques that led to her nickname. “We know this stuff now. Maybe we don’t need you, yeah?”

  “Shut up, Patch,” said T-boy, a short young man whose muscular body belied his sensitive nature. Of Ben’s
five recruits, he’d taken the most strongly to the growing bond between the group members. “My old man beats me, my mom’s a drunk, and my big brother’s a gangbanger. I like it here.”

  “I’m glad you like it,” Ben said. “I hope you all do. But you’re wrong, Patch—you don’t know this stuff. Not much at all yet. I got lots more to teach you if you’ll stick around. We can get a lot more by helping each other out than we can on our own.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” Patch looked away, but Ben could see by her aura that he was on his way to convincing her.

  “Okay,” he said. “Have a seat and let’s go over the plan for tonight.”

  Sometimes Ben felt his mother’s disapproval as an almost tangible thing, weighing him down as he continued forging his little band, teaching them the stuff Ma never approved of—but as time went on and they pulled off more and more successful jobs together, the feeling began to fade. The little group felt like more of a family than it ever had—he would never admit it to anyone, and he hoped Ma wasn’t spying on him from Heaven, but maybe even a little more than his own real family. Nobody had ever looked up to him before, and it felt good.

  Life had taken a dump on Ben Halstrom—but that was over now. Now, he was going to use the thing he was born to do and get something for himself and this band of mismatched kids.

  That felt good too.

  1

  Alastair Stone wondered, not for the first time, if he’d taken on more than he wanted to deal with right now.

  He swiped a hand across his forehead and paced his basement library, examining the piles of boxes and the other components heaped along a table shoved against one wall. Next to them, a series of tomes opened to various bookmarked pages scattered along with drifting pages of scrawled calculations. The whiteboard on the other side of the room was so thickly covered with more scribbled formulas that a mundane looking at it would probably think Stone was trying to work out the secret of time travel, or perhaps how to launch a rocket to the moon. An obscure Pink Floyd album played softly from a hidden speaker, though he’d ceased hearing it at least half an hour ago.