Stonecast by Anton Strout

words of power. Broken bits of stone statuary were spread out all around us, littering the floor of the art space, and I called out to them with my will, the connection snapping to within me.
    Reaching out with my mind’s eye, I aimed the pieces at Desmond Locke and shot them through the air at him. The pieces responded in perfect unison, flying at the man, but just as they were about to hit their target, several of them shattered. The rest followed suit like stone bits of popcorn popping, forming a giant cloud of dust that hung in the air around Locke.
    My friends and I backed away, all coughing, but within the cloud itself I could see there had been an invisible barrier surrounding the man, made visible now only due to our circumstance.
    As the dust cleared, Locke stepped forward as calm as could be, his hand wrapped around something hanging from his neck. When he opened it, I saw a variety of lanyards and chains, talismans and charms hanging from them all.
    Desmond Locke’s eyes went first to Rory, her pole arm now hanging in her hand at her side. Gone were the kind, jovial eyes of the man who had come to visit my father in our home for years. His stare was dark, purposeful, his whole face deadly serious.
    “Put that thing away,” he said to Rory, pronouncing each word like an angry father talking to a child. “Before someone truly gets hurt around here.”
    Rory looked to me, her eyes full of reluctance, but I nodded. Moving slowly, she took apart the sections of her weapon and, with care, slid them back into their individual compartments within the art tube.
    “Much better,” he said, then added, “thank you.”
    “What is going on here, Mr. Locke?” I asked. Nothing made a lick of sense to me. Then again, it was hard processing anything sensible with a gun pointed at you. That and all the events of the night had my thoughts going a mile a minute, without hope of any actual destination or understanding.
    Desmond Locke turned to face me, a modicum of his old self returning to his eyes, perhaps because no one else was brandishing a weapon in the room except for him. “As I said, I’d like to have that little chat now.”
    Marshall laughed, but it was short, nervous, and forced. “I say we let the man talk,” he said, his hands up in the air like he was being robbed.
    I remained standing, with my hands at my side, calm on the outside but screaming on the inside.
    Months ago, when I was simply being chased on a regular basis by cultists serving Stanis’s father, this type of interior panic would have sent Stanis to my rescue.
But now?
That time and bond was past, as was that kind of rescue. It formed an unsettled emptiness in me, mixed with genuine fear for my life. Not just mine but those of my friends as well.
    I didn’t dare try anything else with Desmond Locke, for fear of their lives more than mine. I raised my hands, slow, until I stood there like Marshall was.
    “Fine,” I said, not able to hide all of the bitter anger behind the word. “You want to talk? Talk.”
    Desmond Locke shook his head, looking around at the destruction in both the art studio and library halves of the entire floor.
    “Not here,” he said, cocking back the top part of his gun, something within it clicking. “Whatever did this might return.”
    “So where, then?” I asked, desperately hoping that the “whatever” that did all this would show his ass now.
    “Come with me,” he said, falling in behind Marshall, the gun pressed close to my friend’s back. “And trust me, you don’t want to find out what happens if you don’t.”
    “Do we have a choice?” I asked, starting to pick my way toward the stairs leading down through the building, but Mr. Locke didn’t respond, simply driving us down through the old building and out onto the street.
    Hopefully, he wasn’t leading us all to our death.

Ten

    Alexandra
    I never liked being down in the Wall Street area in the evenings. Once the suits and market makers had