Game of Stone: A Novel in the Alastair Stone Chronicles by R. L. King

Author:R. L. King [King, R. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Magespace Press
Published: 2018-03-11T22:00:00+00:00

30

Stone didn’t call Phoebe back.

Over a month had passed since he’d last visited her. He kept the card with her phone number in his wallet, and more than once he pulled it out and contemplated making the call, but every time he’d put it back without doing so. He’d even thought about calling one of the other two contacts Kolinsky had given him—perhaps with someone different, the vision of Phoebe’s stricken face and ashen skin wouldn’t haunt him.

He didn’t call them, either.

The quarter at the University was drawing to a close, which meant he was busier than usual—not only teaching his courses, but attending meetings, conducting office hours, and answering students’ questions when they stopped him in the halls or on his way across campus. No more candidates for the open position had turned up, so he and Hubbard still had to take up the slack. Apparently, as much of an honor as the endowment from Adelaide Bonham was, it didn’t translate into a saner workload. Not yet, anyway.

The white figurine set remained quiet. Despite the tweaks he’d made to the wards, Stone still checked it often throughout the day, whenever he got the chance. It lay in its padded wooden box, the four broken pieces dead and lifeless next to the glittering three that remained. He even checked in with Leo Blum again to make sure no odd crimes had turned up that he’d forgotten to mention, but the detective assured him that, as far as he knew, the crimes around the area were all of the normal and expected variety.

The dreams weren’t helping—and even less so during the times when they weren’t dreams. The first time he woke up in the early hours of the morning, heart thudding, sweating, from a dream where he’d drained Verity to ash and reveled in the sensation of her power singing through his veins, it worried him. The second time—this time featuring one of his students that he’d spent an office hour with earlier that day—it scared him. But when he caught himself fantasizing about drawing power—just a little—from the barista at the shop where he got his morning coffee, it terrified him.

And of course, the more he tried not to think about such things, the more the thoughts intruded into his daily life. It was like trying not to think of a purple zebra—everywhere he looked, purple zebras with enticing auras paraded in front of him.

Stop it, he told himself. You don’t need it. You haven’t even been doing much magic lately.

That was true. Aside from checking the white figurines, popping back over to England a couple times to catch up on Ward and Eddie’s progress, and occasionally snatching glances at passing auras, he hadn’t been performing any other magic that would require an expenditure of power. He tried to convince himself it was because he didn’t need to do any magic right now, but he knew the truth.

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