Blood Brothers

Blood Brother

## Blurb

**Magic is Thicker than Blood**

Alastair Stone figures using tracking magic to help Jason Thayer and his new wife Amber find a missing child will be a good diversion. At least it will take his mind off a summer that, without Verity around, is shaping up to be a lot less eventful than he’d hoped.

But when the boy’s kidnapper turns out to be a mage—one who’s using the public portal network to steal children for some mysterious purpose of his own—Stone, Jason, and Amber are thrown into a terrifying web of mystery, mad science, and deadly peril.

If Stone can’t figure out who the kidnapper is and why he’s obsessed with these children, it won’t only be the kids who are in danger. As the shocking facts come to light and the madman sets his sights on his pursuers, Stone and his friends might not survive long enough to learn the sinister truth.

## Plot

Alastair Stone is relieved to hear from Jason one summer day. Verity is off finding herself, it’s summer break at Stanford, and he’s nearly finished what he can do with his personal portal without more difficult-to-obtain components. So when Jason invites him for dinner and to discuss a case he’s working, Stone agrees readily.

A local boy has gone missing without a trace, or ransom demand. Jason asks if Stone would track the boy, since Verity would ordinarily do it, but isn’t available. The spell not only indicates that the boy is alive, but not far away. Stone, Jason and Amber track him to a house, but he and another person, male, are gone, though very recently. Amber scents that the boy is drugged, and now has the kidnapper’s scent, as well. She also finds a scribbled note with an address – A Passage to India, where the only portal for hundreds of miles is.

## Quotes and One-liners

Verity to Stone: “You’re…overpowering. There’s something about you, about your…presence…that just…takes over everything it gets near. I don’t think you even realize you’re doing it. ...sometimes it’s a little hard to shine when you’re lighting the place up so much just by being there.”

At the restaurant, Amber scents them both in the portal room, and a staff member remembers seeing an ordinary-looking guy coming in just before closing, but he’d been alone. They find the kidnapper’s rented car in the parking lot, also with both scents and the smell of whatever drugs the boy was given. Meanwhile, Stone is trying to reason out why a mage would kidnap a mundane thirteen-year old.

The case, now officially a kidnapping, is on the news the next day. Jason shows Stone evidence photos showing ritual components found in the trash, but the candles were never burned. It’s likely Stone’s tracking ritual interrupted whatever the kidnapper had been planning to do.

Alastair and Jason manage to finagle their way in to question the boy’s mother, despite the fact that the case was now officially in the hands of police. She has no helpful information, other than her son wanted to live with his more permissive father. She said she and her ex both spoiled the boy, though, since they’d had to try for years with fertility treatments just to have him. Alastair asks Jason to look into the father, though he doubts the man is involved. Still, if he were from a mage family, that might be pertinent.

While they wait for some break or lead, the three resume normal activities. Amber invites Stone to lunch one day and tells him that she and Jason are unhappy about the way Verity is treating Stone. She points out that what’s come between them is more than ‘philosophical differences’. Verity is inadvertently stringing him along, and Stone is too gentlemanly to object directly. Stone reluctantly admits he’d been thinking some of the same things. Shortly after, Jason calls to say the boy has been found, alive – in Dallas.

The boy wandered into a convenience store with no memory of where he’d been for the last few days. Leo Blum tells Stone that the boy was interviewed, but he can’t help much since the case is out of his jurisdiction. Their commiseration about the need for mages and law enforcement to cooperate, though, gives Stone an idea to bounce off Verity as a step toward, or alternative to her plan to create a mage council.

Jason passes on that the boy’s body and clothing yielded no evidence of where he’d been – all traces had been magically removed. Watching the tape of his interview was no help, either, since even under hypnosis, the boy’s memory was a complete blank from the time he disappeared, to the time he reappeared in Texas. Stone asks Marta to put the word out to portal keepers to be on the lookout for this apparently bland, unremarkable middle-aged man. She tells Stone about the Dallas portal keeper, Jasper Lewis, and Stone pays him a visit.

Jasper is adamant that no one had brought a child through the portal. However, one of the maids in his motel remembers a nondescript man with a small woman. The oddity is that she can’t recall what the woman looked like, as if every time she looked, her eye was directed elsewhere. Someone picked the pair up in a high-end car, as if they’d been waiting.

Meanwhile, Gina has turned up four other disappearances where the boys turned up a few days later with no memories of the events. More, there were another five cases five years prior, all with the same details. No girls were ever taken, the boys had all just entered puberty, and all of the cases happened near portal locations. Eddie and Ward have no insights to offer; if the man is looking for magical talent in pubescent boys in the US, their resources on magical families wouldn’t help, being largely confined to the UK. Ward does suggest, though, that finding one of the boys from the prior cases might help. The current victims are all minors, but at least some of the prior ones have to be adult now, and Stone can question them.

Two of the boys from the prior cases would have been 18 by now, but one committed suicide. The other lives in Gary, Indiana. Stone contacts the man, Roy Darner, and meets him in a local bar. Darner is reluctant to talk, but he’s down on his luck, and Stone’s offer of money persuades him. His case is the same as the others, but he has nightmares of being retrained on a table in some kind of lab, with candles and the like around him. Stone persuades Darner with more cash, and he agrees to let Stone hypnotize him. As a result, Alastair gets a good look at the face of the kidnapper in Roy’s memories. Feeling positive he’d recognize the man, Stone leaves the bar – and is hit over the head, everything going black.

He wakes a few times, briefly, before he becomes aware enough to realize he’s been buried alive. Someone thought they’d killed him – the wound certainly felt bad enough – and buried him in a shallow grave. In great pain, thirsty and hungry, Stone manages to disinter himself and begin half-crawling to find help. His wallet, phone and notebook are all gone. He manages to get into the office of a nearby construction site where there’s bottled water, candy bars, and a phone. He calls Jason, who says they’ll be ‘right there’. Stone wonders how, until Jason says he and Amber were in Indiana looking for him; he’s been missing for three days.

After convincing Jason and Amber not to take him to a hospital, Stone goes with them to their hotel, where he can shower, eat, and have Amber look at his head wound. She assures him he should have died from it. This reminds him of two previous occasions when he ‘should have died’, but current events take precedence and he can’t dwell on it. Jason tells him that Roy Darner is dead, ‘car accident’. Stone says he has a very good idea of what the kidnapper looks like now, so Jason says he’ll see if Blum can help with a sketch artist.

While discussing Jason’s plans to buy a house, Stone is confronted with Jason’s questions about how he’s still alive. Jason is aware of Stone’s poisoning by Marciella Garra (Stone and Claw). Alastair admits that it’s been on his mind as well. He has no answers, though, and asks Jason to keep any speculation to himself, even from Verity and Amber.

Stone gets his sketch from Blum’s artist and takes it to Jason’s office for Gina to scan and search. While she’s doing that, Jason explains that they still haven’t managed to find any connection between the boys taken, though Gina points out that all but one are blond. With little else to do, Alastair contacts his supplier to ask whether she can obtain a rare substance he needs to complete it. She tells him she had it, but had only just sold it to another mage. She can’t reveal her customer, but agrees to ask if he’ll sell it to Stone if he contacts her again, as well as keep looking for more. He has a gig with the Cardinal Sin, but he plays poorly with so many distractions on his mind, the absent Verity chief among them. Jason calls during the set and asks Stone to come to the office as soon as he can get away; Gina has found a connection between the boys.

All of the boys were conceived with the help of a fertility clinic, three different ones across the country. All are now out of business. Alastair speculates that, whatever the kidnapper is doing, he’s doing at these clinics, ‘enhancing’ the children before implanting the embryos. Then he has to wait until puberty to check to see if they have magic. Unable to sleep that night, Stone bounces ideas off Raider and suddenly comes to a conclusion.

The mage, a blond, is choosing blond couples at the clinics because he’s fertilizing the eggs with his own sperm, along with whatever alchemical magic he adds. Another interview with the local boy’s mother confirms that her son was conceived via one of the clinics, but she doesn’t recognize the man in Stone’s sketch. The doctor was blond though, she thinks. She recalls his name, and Stone passes that on to Jason for Gina to research.

When he returns home, a man is waiting for him, an FBI agent. He asks why Stone is involved in the case of the missing boy, especially now that he’d been returned. He seems to know a lot about Stone’s activities in other police cases, though he says all the primary investigators involved speak highly of him. He wonders, though, how Stone seems to get around so easily and so quickly. In order to satisfy the man and keep him on the case rather than looking into Stone’s life, he gives him the information he and the others have uncovered. The agent hadn’t known there were other similar cases, nor about the fertility clinics. Still, Alastair is not happy that he’s beginning to be noticed in places he’d rather not.

Jason reports that they identified the kidnapper, sort of. He worked at all three clinics under three different names. But he isn’t the man in the sketch. Stone is more convinced now that there are at least two men working together. A new disappearance has been reported, as well. Only this time, the boy hasn’t turned back up. Possibly, the men behind this have found what they were looking for.

Meanwhile Stone’s supplier has had no luck finding his substance for the portal, but suggests that, since the man is American, Stone might find him at the annual Symposium in Chicago. Stone had already promised not to attend, because Verity will be there trying to drum up support for her mage council idea. He gets a brainwave, though, and calls the woman back and sends her the police sketch, thinking it’s a longshot. But she says yes, that’s the man who bought the material from her. Now Stone *has* to go to Chicago.

The reunion with Verity is awkward, but she at least agrees he had to come to find the kidnapper. And of course she’s happy to see Jason and Amber. She has a get-together planned with folks interested in her ideas. There are three other gatherings planned at different venues, so Stone, Jason and Amber split up to each attend one and search for the kidnapper. The group text updates back and forth, but all three gatherings seem to be busts, and fairly boring.

Stone gives his up and heads to the hotel bar, where Verity is sitting, dejected. She says he was right, she’s not getting anywhere with her ideas. Stone reassures her, and tells her his idea about mages working with law enforcement, if they could identify those 'in the know' from magical families. Their discussion is interrupted when Amber reports that Jason hasn’t been checking in, and she can’t find him. He was seen leaving with someone, but no one could remember what they looked like, or even gender.

Stone calls the Chicago portal keeper and asks him to shut it down, and not let anyone leave until Stone says it’s OK.  Verity does a ritual in an empty conference room, but while she finds Jason, the connection keeps trying to fade away. They pursue, and find the latest missing boy unconscious in a nondescript building kitted out as a lab. Amber says Jason was there, but isn’t now. A voice tells them Jason is safe. A man speaks to them from a closed-circuit TV, saying he doesn’t intend Jason harm and, hopefully, he’ll survive the experiment he intends. Something about Jason is unique, and may be just what he needs.

While Stone dismantles the circle the boy is in and Amber searches the place, Verity tries another ritual to find Jason. But he’s warded now, and the spell keeps failing. Amber is beside herself with impatience. Then Stone remembers – the boy is the man’s son. He may be able to use his blood to track the perpetrator. They take some blood from the unconscious boy, call the police with an anonymous tip, and leave to find another place to do the ritual.

When they find where the magical tether leads, it’s the home of the now-elderly fertility doctor, not the kidnapper. Stone realizes they’re brothers, this one apparently being the eldest. The man, Julius Whitworth, explains that he and his brother, Melvin, are actually twins, but Melvin got magic while he didn’t. Julius didn’t care, but Melvin became obsessed with imbuing Julius with magic, somehow. Julius went along with it, becoming a fertility specialist so Melvin could use his DNA and alchemical mixtures to produce magical children, after which he’d have the key to giving Julius magic. As he’s aged, Julius has cared less and less, and become more distressed as his brother’s methods – trying to kill Stone to hide his tracks, for example – have become more ruthless.

Julius leads them to a clandestine lab and gives them the codes to get in. An illusion still blocks the way and Julius is about to show them how to pass it when Melvin intervenes, again from a CCTV. They can see Jason’s shadowy figure on a table in the background. Melvin is upset that Julius brought them here, but elated that he may have the breakthrough he’s needed. Jason is an ideal subject as an adult mundane from a magical family. And, when he ordered his associates to kill Stone, he also had them take his blood. He’s infused it with an alchemical preparation and injected it into Jason.

Julius is appalled, and tells Melvin he never wanted any of this, especially when Melvin started killing people. He demands he stop immediately and turn Jason over. Disappointed in his brother, Melvin hits a failsafe designed to keep his research out of others’ hands. The building begins to rumble, and there’s a brilliant flash of light and a roar of “No!”.

As the building begins to come down and Verity shields, Stone and Amber try to get into the basement lab. But Jason appears from a hidden elevator carrying Melvin Whitworth, then collapses. They scramble to get everyone out of the building. Melvin is dead from head trauma, but Jason is coming around. But Stone notices that Jason’s aura is different – darker than it had been. Amber takes Jason to the hospital while Stone hides Melvin’s body in the rubble. Then he, Verity and Julius follow.

The doctors intend to keep Jason overnight for observation, but he’ll be fine. He tells Stone privately that Melvin’s treatment did do something to him; when the failsafe went off, he was able to fling equipment and rubble aside like it was nothing, as well as break through the elevator doors. Stone says they’ll look into it once he’s back to 100%. While Stone is with Jason, Julius has a massive heart attack and dies.

Back at the Symposium, Verity’s session doesn’t go well. But Stone encourages her to keep trying, perhaps from the alternative angle he suggested. She apologizes for things she said to him and asks if they can start over. Stone says no, he will always love her, but once they became intimate things changed, and not for the better. Their separation has worked out for the best.