Gathering Storm: An Alastair Stone Urban Fantasy Novel (Alastair Stone Chronicles Book 17) by R. L. King

Author:R. L. King [King, R. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Magespace Press
Published: 2019-03-09T22:00:00+00:00

21

Stone barely acknowledged Marta Bellwood’s greeting as he trudged out of A Passage to India’s dining room the following day. He gave only a perfunctory wave before hurrying out, pausing as the door swung shut behind him.

His shoulders slumped with fatigue. He’d gotten next to no sleep the previous night, between trying to write down everything he could remember about what had happened before he forgot any of the details, and tossing uneasily in bed as he fought with a mind that refused to quiet.

When the figure had disappeared and left him alone in the clearing near Clyde’s friend’s hunting cabin, he’d immediately tried to find it, to track it back to wherever it had come from. He’d run to where he’d last seen it, kicking his magical sight to maximum intensity, focusing on locking in on any leftover magical energy he could use as a trace.

He’d found nothing. It was as if the figure had never been there at all—or else it was good enough to hide its tracks sufficiently to thwart Stone’s efforts. The latter hypothesis unnerved him: he knew his own power level, and these days there wasn’t much out there that could hide from him.

When it became clear he wasn’t going to follow the figure, he turned his attention back to the rift itself. The illusion concealing it was a weak one, obviously designed to deter mundanes from getting too close to it. Unlike whatever the orange-hued figure had been doing to hide itself, its efforts to hide the rift were easy to undo. Once Stone cleared away the last of the illusion, he spent the next hour examining the rift from all sides, taking readings, and making notes. He even tried tossing a few twigs and rocks through it, but all of them simply flew through and landed on the other side, rather than disappearing as he’d expected them to. So whatever this thing was, it wasn’t a portal—at least not for physical objects.

What it was, though, was a power source. Stone wasn’t sure whether Clyde had been a latent talent; as with Mitch and Cathy Kirkson, he hadn’t had time to perform the level of examination necessary to determine that for sure, and now that Clyde had been vaporized, he’d lost his chance. But whether he was or wasn’t, the shifting anomaly was putting out some significant power.

Stone remembered what Clyde had said about his cousins Pete and Louie not showing any sign of the “superpowers” he himself had gained. That might have been true, or the rift might have bestowed different abilities on them—ones that hadn’t manifested in obvious ways. After all, Clyde might never have discovered his healing abilities if the bear hadn’t attacked his beloved dog.

It didn’t matter, though: Clyde was almost certainly correct that the Sixes had murdered Louie and Pete, which meant all three of his potential test subjects were firmly out of his reach. All he had left was the rift itself. It was letting in power from

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