Stone and a Hard Place (12 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Stone couldn’t get Adelaide Bonham and her haunted house out of his mind.

He woke up the next morning stretched out on the couch with a blanket over him. Megan was gone, but she’d left a note saying to call if he needed her, the Chinese leftovers were in the fridge, and thanks for a night of torrid and acrobatic passion which he probably didn’t remember a bit of. He chuckled and pocketed the note.

After a breakfast of painkillers and cold kung pao chicken, he dragged himself upstairs for a shower and a change of clothes, then went down to the basement and retrieved the items he’d built yesterday. He donned the ring and the amulet, stuffing the feline skull under his shirt, then stuck a couple of the crystals in his pocket and left the rest on the kitchen table. At least if anyone tried to jump him again, he’d have a fighting chance of showing them the error of their ways. Of course, even without the focus objects, he didn’t think they’d catch him by surprise again. Laziness about the world around him was a luxury he could no longer afford.

He lowered himself into the nearest chair, and tried to figure out what to do next. It was Saturday, so he had no classes. It was nearly eleven o’clock—he supposed he could call Megan, but decided not to. Like him, she needed her alone time, and he didn’t want her to feel obligated to hover over him like a protective mother bear. He was actually feeling better today, especially after the shower—he’d only taken one pain pill. He thought he’d even be all right to drive, should he have anywhere to go.

One thing was sure: he couldn’t go back to Adelaide’s house. Not if he wanted to keep his friendship with Langley. It wasn’t like the two of them were best buddies or anything, but Stone did like him enough that if he was going to break a promise, he’d need a better reason than ‘there’s something there, and it might be dangerous.’ He wasn’t even completely certain that the entity had been behind the TV explosion, but if someone had offered to bet him, he would have taken it.

If he couldn’t go to the house, he’d have to come up with some other angle to pursue. He leaned back in the chair and thought about it, halfway wishing that Ethan was there to bounce ideas off. The boy might not be far along in his magical training yet, but he was smart and picked things up quickly, and Stone did his best thinking when he had an audience to lecture to.

He thought about the entity—the spirit, or ghost, or whatever it was. Why was it there? He’d suggested some ideas while talking to Ethan at the house itself: that it had always been there, gaining power; that something had happened to “awaken” it; that it was newly arrived. He didn’t think the latter was true—things that powerful tended to put down roots and associate themselves with particular areas, buildings, or people. But if it had been there all along, then why was it only now causing trouble? How long had it been there? The house was very old, Langley had said: one of the oldest in the area. Had it been there since the house was built?

“Hmm...” he said aloud. If it
had
been there that long, maybe it had caused trouble before. Some similar spirits waxed and waned in their power, going dormant for many years before waking up again. Maybe this was one of those. The next step, then, was to find out more about the history of the house.

Fortunately, he had one of the best sources around for such things, easily available to him. Pleased to finally have a plan, he first drove to Green Library on the Stanford campus. After an hour of digging, he determined that what he wanted wasn’t there. The house was in Los Gatos, so perhaps the library there was more likely to have the information he sought.

The Los Gatos library did have some documents about the Bonham house. He had to ask the librarian to get hold of them, but she set him up with a couple of large bound books full of early newspapers, a box of microfiche reels, and a small stack of books chronicling the history of the town.

He left two hours later, his notebook full of scribblings that he’d jotted down while reading through the books and periodicals. None of it was much help, though: the house had been built in the early part of the century by the father of Edgar Bonham, Adelaide’s late husband. The elder Bonham had been a wealthy steel magnate, and had built the house as a gift for his beloved wife, who was sickly and couldn’t take the climate back East. As far as Stone could determine, the house didn’t have any kind of checkered past: he couldn’t find accounts of any murders or other crimes in or near it, and by all accounts Edgar Bonham Sr. had doted on his wife and she on him. He had died in the mid-1920s, and she’d followed almost ten years later. Edgar Jr. had been their only child.

This was interesting in a general sort of way, but it wasn’t giving him what he was looking for. He drove back to Palo Alto with a sense of frustration—he wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting to find, but he’d hoped that whatever it was, it would be sufficiently compelling to convince Tommy Langley to let him go up there again. Good as the information he’d found was, it wasn’t going to get him his wish.

He’d made it as far as Mountain View driving back up 280 when he realized there was one more place he could check. Mentally he almost kicked himself for not thinking of it before, or actually first. He sighed: he’d been out of the game too long, spending most of his time lately playing Occult Studies professor, and too little staying connected with the magical community around the Bay Area.

That was going to have to change, and no time like the present for it to start.

The only thing that East Palo Alto shared with its high-class sister city was part of its name. It was mainly a working-class town, but parts were becoming increasingly rundown, vacant, and in the process of being overrun by the sort of people that the police worked hard to keep out of Palo Alto, and the law-abiding, working-class majority in EPA worked hard to keep out of their neighborhoods. Stone never felt particularly comfortable driving through it, but the place he was headed was smack in the middle of one of the town’s worst business districts. If he wanted the information, he’d have to go where it was.

Parking the Jaguar, he glanced around to make sure no one was obviously watching, then summoned a small enchantment around the car to make it blend in with its surroundings. The eyes of anyone who wasn’t specifically looking for it would just slide over it like it wasn’t even there, or see it as the sort of car that routinely parked in the neighborhood. He’d have to make this quick: the initial enchantment wouldn’t last long unless he spent some effort shoring it up.

There were few active businesses or shops on this street; most of them were closed, their doors boarded up, their windows covered with graffiti-strewn sheets of plywood and stout bars. He headed directly for a small, nondescript door between two defunct shops: a liquor store and a purveyor of adult novelties, both of them awash in trash and gang symbols. The door itself was not marked; in fact, Stone knew that it held a more permanent version of the same enchantment that he’d put on his car. He knew this because he’d put it there, several months ago. That was the only reason he could see the door without uttering the passphrase that the establishment’s other customers would need to get past the blending spell. Opening the door, he slipped inside and quickly shut it behind him.

Inside, things looked significantly more upscale, if still a little threadbare. There was a carpeted stairway leading down and ending in another closed door; this one had a small bell hanging next to it with a dark red silken pull. Stone took the stairs slowly, favoring his ribs even though they didn’t hurt at the moment. When he reached the bottom, he tugged once on the pull, causing the bell to jangle an odd note, and then waited.

He hadn’t been here for quite some time. In fact, the last time he
had
been here was to renew the enchantment on the door. It was a favor to the shop’s proprietor, in exchange for some help the man had given him in the past. The place didn’t exactly make him nervous, but it did make him more watchful than usual. No sense taking chances.

The door swung open on a room that looked like a turn-of-the-century shop, all dark, soft carpet, glass cases, and wooden fixtures and shelves. The chandeliers hanging from the ceiling were lit with actual candles, adding a flickering eeriness to a place that was already strange enough as it was. Stone strode past the shelves full of old books, bones, desiccated animal parts, and similar objects without really seeing them. They weren’t what he was here for.

At the back of the store was an old-fashioned roll top desk, and sitting at the desk was a man. He rose and bowed as Stone drew closer. “Well. Alastair Stone. It
has
been a while. To what do I owe the pleasure? Surely the door—” He got a good look at Stone and his eyebrows rose just a bit, but he did not ask.

“Hello, Stefan. How are you?”

Stefan Kolinsky was somewhere indeterminately between fifty and sixty-five. He was a tall man, almost as tall as Stone, but more powerfully built, with dark hair swept up from a high forehead, glittering dark eyes, and a hawk-like profile. He wore a tailored black suit, somewhat old-fashioned of cut, without a wrinkle in it. Kolinsky was one of the few people around who could make Stone feel almost chronically underdressed, even though he’d been told that he actually cleaned up quite nicely on the rare occasions when he had to attend something formal.

“I am well, thank you.” Kolinsky’s voice was soft, with just a hint of an unidentifiable accent. “But may I ask why you’ve come? I suspect that you aren’t here to peruse my wares.” He looked rueful.

“Not today, no.” Stone glanced around the shop, making sure they were alone.

“Pity,” Kolinsky said, shaking his head. “One day I hope that you will see the error of your ways, and realize how much you choose to limit yourself.”

Stone raised an eyebrow. “I thought you’d given up on that by now.” Their words had the feel of familiar banter, like they were getting something out of the way before getting down to business. It wasn’t far from the truth. Stone didn’t exactly
like
Stefan Kolinsky, but he did respect him. He couldn’t help it, since the man was one of the finest magical minds on this side of the country. It was merely inconvenient that he played for the other team. As long as you kept a close eye on him and were very careful about the favors you asked, he could be a valuable source of information about all sorts of interesting things that most white mages wouldn’t go near.

Kolinsky chuckled. “Never.” Tilting his head, he looked Stone up and down. “What’s happened to you, old friend? You don’t look—well.”

“My own fault,” Stone said, shrugging. “Possibly related to why I’m here, but I doubt it. I’ll get right to it, if you don’t mind, so I don’t have to go back out and hide the car again. When are you going to get better premises, by the way?”

“This place suits me,” he said serenely.

“If you say so. Anyway—I’m looking for information about an old house. Probably nothing you’d have anything on, but I figured if you can’t put your finger on anything interesting, it probably isn’t there to find.”

“Indeed.” Kolinsky’s eyebrows rose like the ears of a dog who’s been offered an enticing scent. “Any particular old house?” He gestured, sliding another chair over next to the desk, and motioned for Stone to sit down.

Stone smiled. This was the reason he kept coming back to old Stefan. Not because his magic was as black as his suit. Not because he ran the only place south of San Francisco and north of Los Angeles where you could buy some of the more exotic of the items on his shelves (including the ones in the back that only the most select of customers ever got to see). No, it was because in addition to being a purveyor of things dark and arcane, he was also a formidable magical historian with a particular interest in the Bay Area. If it had to do with magic and had happened around here in the last two hundred years, odds were that Stefan Kolinsky could lay hands on some documentation about it. Or at minimum, he could come up with some pretty reliable rumors.

“It’s in Los Gatos, up in the hills,” he began. He told Kolinsky about the house, about Aunt Adelaide’s strange feelings, and about his own first impressions and subsequent suspicion that whatever was there, it was trying to hide from him. “I’m thinking that p’raps it’s been there a while,” he finished, “and possibly either gaining enough power to be troublesome, or else it’s coming into a potent period after a long dormancy. Either way, I need to know anything I can about what it might be, and whether it’s been seen before.”

Kolinsky thought about that, leaning back in his chair and steepling his fingers. “Why not simply go there again and find out for yourself?” he asked at last. “I am certain that you have the means to perform a ritual that would locate it and more precisely identify its nature.”

Stone blew air through his teeth. “Well, there’s the rub,” he said. He told him about Tommy and his determination that Aunt Adelaide wasn’t to be frightened by what he called ‘that fake occult bullshit.’

“Then it will be on him if something should happen to his aunt,” Kolinsky said, his tone revealing no emotion. “Why does this become your problem?”

“Because I don’t want to see a charming old lady hurt because her nephew’s mind is hopelessly stuck in the mundane,” Stone said. “That, and—”