The Witchstone Amulet Read online

  Hunter gently pulled himself off Darren’s face and smiled at him. “Let me get the door. I, uh, don’t want my cat to get out.”

  Darren pulled back. “You have a cat?” He looked around the room with part interest and part concern. Maybe he was allergic.

  He didn’t, but it was the only thing he could think of in the moment. The last thing he needed was one of the neighbors walking by his open door and seeing Darren trying to eat off his face like this was the start of a zombie apocalypse.

  “She’s shy,” Hunter said, slipping out of his bear grip. He tugged the hem of his T-shirt back below the belt line. “You probably won’t ever see her.”

  If this went anywhere, he’d have to fess up about not owning a cat or make up a new lie about what happened to it. His mind was already racing to come up with plausible scenarios. She ran away. Had to give it up. It died unexpectedly. Or he could actually get a cat. He’d always wanted a pet. He’d be home more now, at least….

  He closed his eyes and sighed. What was he doing? He knew exactly what this was. After tonight, Darren would ghost him. He was too anxious about getting exposed to his teammates. Hunter would never see him again.

  Did that bother him? He wasn’t sure yet.

  “I’m surprised you’re single,” Darren said. “To be honest.”

  Hunter shrugged as he closed the door. How was he supposed to respond to that? That the one-on-one thing really wasn’t his thing? He was a pack animal by nature and knew how to negotiate a group, but seemed to fumble when faced with the dynamics of two. It always felt awkward. Pretend. He never knew what to talk about, so he talked about what he knew, and guys wanted to hear about a relationship with thirty other guys only so much. Most came to him with a preconceived idea of what it would be like to date a rugby player—and left disappointed. They expected him to be something he wasn’t.

  A few stuck around, willing to accept the time he doled out. But Hunter always caught himself choosing to spend more and more time with the squad until the guy stopped coming around.

  “Ask anyone who knows me. They aren’t surprised,” he said, turning the deadbolt into place. The room fell into a thicker darkness without the light from the hallway. The only light now came from the orange streetlight outside the window.

  “You always make jokes when you’re nervous?”

  “Who says I’m nervous? I’m the picture of self-possession.”

  “Right.” Darren had drifted over to the collection of pictures that hung on the wall by the window. Amber light from the street angled across the small collection of frames.

  “Your mom?” he asked. He swayed a little as he leaned in, betraying that he was drunker than he was letting on. Hunter nodded, but Darren probably couldn’t see it. “You two seem real close.” Something about the way he said it sounded like an accusation.

  “You could say that,” Hunter said.

  “No dad in any of these. You mentioned him back at the bar. Not close I take it?”

  “He left when I was a kid. Haven’t heard from him since.”

  “Shit. Sorry. Your mom is beautiful. I can see where you get your looks.” He flashed a smile at Hunter. “She live here in Chicago?”

  “She died last year.”

  “Fuck. Dude, I’m sorry. I keep putting my foot in it tonight, don’t I?”

  “It’s all good.” He tried to sound nonchalant, but suddenly Darren felt like an intruder. More reservations were worming into his brain. This wasn’t going anywhere, so what was the point? A pint of ice cream on the couch with an old rerun would be better company right now.

  “Big place. Live alone?” Darren seemed quick to change the subject. He stepped away from the pictures as if they were to blame for the sudden awkward silence that landed in the room.

  “Not big on feeling confined.”

  “Ironic. For a guy that spends his time locked in a scrum.”

  Darren was right, he supposed. It was ironic. But there was something different about a scrum. He was surrounded by his squad, his pack. People he trusted. When the ref yelled “engage” and everyone started pushing, he was part of something larger, part of something powerful. “Can I get you something to drink? A beer?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Hunter crossed the room toward the light switch on the opposite wall. He tripped over something in the middle of the floor and stumbled. What the hell had he left there?

  He thumbed the switch and warm light flooded the room. Hunter froze. Darren’s eyes shifted back and forth to take in the scene.

  The apartment had been ransacked. Overturned furniture. The contents of every drawer dumped onto the floor. Someone had rummaged through the entirety of his belongings and left them in a pile in his living room.

  “Dude… I think you’ve been robbed,” Darren said.

  He looked around in disbelief, the shock sinking deeper. No, I always live like this, Hunter thought dourly. His gut soured with the thought of someone rummaging through his space. He spun about, making a quick inventory of all the things of value that were probably gone, lost to the fuckers that had done this.

  But his large TV still hung from the wall. The PlayStation was still underneath it in the cabinet. Even his laptop was sitting on the coffee table right where he’d left it.

  If not the electronics, what were the thieves searching for? He had no cash in the apartment. No real valuables.

  Had they broken into the wrong apartment?

  Hunter circled around the debris.

  “Careful,” Darren said. He pointed to the floor by his feet. Wineglasses were scattered around, most of them broken or cracked. “You want me to call the police?”

  Hunter nodded. “Yeah. That’d be great.” His mouth was dry, and his body felt numb. He surveyed the chaos, searching for something that was missing, but his mind couldn’t pinpoint anything that should be there that wasn’t. Everything of value was still there, only tossed aside as if unimportant. It didn’t make sense.

  He stepped into the kitchen. Every cabinet door was spread wide, every drawer pulled out. And all the contents had been dumped unceremoniously onto the hardwood floor. Plates, utensils, cookware. Hunter took ginger steps through the debris and checked the back entrance—chained and locked.

  How had the thieves even gotten in?

  Darren, standing at the threshold of the kitchen, dug his phone from his back pocket and tapped at it with his forefinger.

  Hunter drifted down the short hallway to his bedroom, his mind in a weird disconnected fog. The door to the bedroom was ajar. Distantly, he could hear Darren on his phone talking as Hunter swept the door aside with his arm and stepped inside. Every drawer of his dresser had been pulled out and the contents dumped onto the bed or the floor. Every garment he owned was ripped from its hanger and tossed from the closet.

  His skin crawled with the idea that some unknown creep was in there. On the bed, casually dispersed among the clothes, was a tube of lube and a flesh-colored silicone cock he kept in his bedside drawer. His mouth tightened. He didn’t know why, but knowing some thief had handled them felt humiliating. It made his insides twist.

  They’d be thrown in the garbage now.

  He circled around the room, again searching for something—anything—that was missing. The small television on the dresser was still there. His guitar rested on the stand in the corner. It sat askew on its stand—clearly the thief had picked it up to examine and put it down again.

  He scanned the floor, kicking aside clothes to see what was beneath them.

  He spotted the box sticking out from under the bed and his heart dropped into his stomach.

  The small red-painted wooden box, decorated with scrolling symbols, had belonged to his mother. In her will, she had stipulated he was to cherish it and keep it and its contents safe. It was important, she’d said. She wouldn’t say why. But it was more important than he could ever imagine.

  It was the only thing of hers he still possessed.

  The
wooden box had a simple latch on the front and two iron hinges on the back. The box was on its side, open, with the red velvet lining hanging out. It was empty.

  “The police are on their way,” Darren called from the other room.

  “Okay,” he managed to call back.

  Maybe it had just fallen out. Maybe it was on the floor somewhere, underneath all the layers of clothes. He’d find it, he told himself. It was still there.

  He started to pull up clothes and toss them onto the bed, slowly at first, forcing himself to maintain calm. Each time he exposed a portion of the floor, expecting to find it—but nothing was there. He grew more frantic. He got down on his knees and dug under the bed. Still nothing.

  His heart raced with near panic. He tried to tamp it down, not wanting to accept the truth that it was gone, but he was losing the battle.

  The box had been kept in the closet up on the shelf. Maybe it was there. It could have possibly fallen from the box when the thief grabbed it. He stomped across the room to the closet door, kicking aside the debris.

  He grabbed the knob and gave it a turn.

  The door burst open, crashing into him as the man in black exploded from the closet. Hunter flailed as he stumbled backward. A shirt slipped under his heel on the hardwood floor, and he fell against the side of his bed. The man bolted from the room.

  Hunter recognized him immediately. The strange little man from the bar. And in that split second, Hunter’s attention zeroed in on the man’s hand. Something was clenched inside his fingers.

  His mother’s broach.

  Shouting to Darren, he scrambled to his feet. He dashed out into the hallway, pinballing against the wall, knocking picture frames to the floor, and gave chase. In the dining room, Darren sat on his ass, rubbing at his cheek, and the door to the apartment was wide open.

  “Fuck,” Hunter growled, and hit the stairwell at full speed. He leaped down the stairs, two or three at a time.

  Before Hunter was even past the second floor, he heard the familiar squeak of the front entry door. The thief was already out of the building. The little fucker was fast.

  Thick and bulky, Hunter wasn’t built for speed. He was losing ground. Desperate, he leaped the whole length of stairs to the next landing below. His momentum crashed him into the wall. He righted himself quickly and renewed his pursuit.

  As he blasted out of the front door, he looked left and right for a sign of the thief. He caught sight of him slipping into the gangway between two buildings about half a block down. Hunter leaped into a sprint again, pumping his arms to get his sizable bulk moving faster. As Hunter entered the gangway, the thief was at the alley and veered left. Hunter was gaining some—but he wouldn’t be able to maintain this pace long. Already, his legs were tightening.

  Only one yellow streetlamp lit the narrow alleyway. The rest was shrouded in the night. Hunter could just make out the dark form sprinting in the distance. His footfalls echoed off the brick of the buildings.

  As Hunter reached the alley behind his building, the thief made a sharp right and disappeared down another narrow alleyway.

  Hunter had him. It was a dead end, ending behind a large condo building. The thief was cornered. Hunter drove himself harder, ignoring the stabbing pain in his side. As he rounded the corner, the thief was running at full speed directly toward the garage doors that lined the length of the first floor.

  What was he doing?

  The thief pulled something out from under his strange hooded cape. It was too dark, and Hunter was too far away for him to tell what it was. The man cocked back his arm and chucked it at the wide garage door. Hunter’s first thought was that it was his mother’s broach, that he was getting rid of any evidence. But no…. Hunter could see something dark and round sail through the air. It struck the garage door in the center.

  The air around the impact seemed to ripple outward like water, a dark and disturbing undulating wave. Lightless energy crackled around him, and the hair on his arms lifted and his skin prickled. Then a wall of force nearly brought him to a halt. He staggered to keep his feet, and when he looked again, a perfectly round section of the door was no longer there. It was simply gone.

  Hunter squeezed his eyes shut in disbelief. When he opened them again, the hole was still there. The center of it was moving, swirling, like a maelstrom of storm clouds.

  The thief made one quick glance behind him, picked up speed, and ran straight for it.

  Hunter couldn’t believe what he was witnessing—surely this was a strange optical illusion. The thief showed no sign of slowing down as he ran for the black swirling hole. When Hunter thought he was going to run directly into the garage door, the thief sprang, lifting one leg up like a track runner clearing a hurdle.

  And he was gone.

  Stunned in disbelief, Hunter lost some of his speed. How was that even possible?

  Then he realized the black circle was starting to shrink.

  No. Whatever was happening, the thief wasn’t going to get away from him that easily. He broke into a sprint again, kicking his legs as hard and fast as they would carry him, ignoring the burning in his lungs and the sharp pain in his side.

  By the time he reached the garage door, the circle had shrunk by half. It was barely wider than his shoulders. He dove for it, arms straight out in front of him.

  He expected to hit the solid door, but instead felt extreme cold as his arms entered the blackness. When his head and body followed, he was consumed by a nothingness so complete he felt as if the world had disintegrated around him. His skin burned with sudden intense cold. He tried to pull air into his lungs, but there was nothing there. He panicked—tried to flail about, fight toward something, but he no longer had control of his body.

  Then, his consciousness abandoned him.

  3

  HUNTER ROSE out of a dark fog to realize his face hurt. Specifically his cheek. Something hard and sharp bit into the skin. He pried his eyes open and peeled himself up.

  Harsh sunlight stabbed through the slits, forcing his lids closed again.

  Daylight? Some part of his muddled brain was troubled by that. It should be dark, but he wasn’t certain why.

  His first thought was he was at a match, that he’d had the wind knocked out of him after a hard tackle. Wouldn’t be the first time he’d had his noggin rattled. But no, he didn’t hear any of the sounds he expected—the referee’s whistle, shouts from the crowd. He only heard the wind and the squawk of a strange bird some distance away.

  He lifted his torso off the stony surface underneath him. Tiny rocks jabbed into the meat of his palm. He forced open his eyes again, squinting. Beneath him were old flagstone tiles, weathered and cracked. Sprigs of stringy grass sprouted from the seams between them. Overhead, a dome of unblemished azure.

  The side of his face stung. He gingerly touched around his eye. It was puffy. Tender. And his eye wouldn’t open fully. The black eye.

  Fragments of his memory started to reassemble, like he was taping a ripped photo back together. The match was over. He was drinking at the bar after. He’d then left the bar with… with….

  Fuck, what was his name? They’d cabbed back to his apartment. And….

  The break-in. The guy hiding in his closet. The chase down the alley. It was all piecing back together.

  That had been nighttime. Ten o’clock at least. Now he could feel the sun warming his face above him, which put it at around noonish. How did he end up here, some twelve, fourteen hours later?

  His head throbbed behind his eyes. He’d had a bit to drink, certainly, but not enough to experience a blackout. Had someone tampered with his drink? He felt rough all over—sore and stiff, like he’d been tackled hard by a cement truck, and felt oddly disconnected somehow. But not hungover.

  As he pushed himself up and eased onto his knees, he dried his eyes with his T-shirt sleeve. His forearm brushed against his cheek and dislodged a tiny stone embedded there.

  He was in the remains of an old stone building.
Very old.

  All that stood was a portion of a wall and the crook of one of its four corners. The rest had been reduced to a rocky foundation no higher than the grass around it. Whatever this place had once been, it had been abandoned for centuries.

  The ancient building lay in the middle of a wide field that seemed to stretch for eternity in all directions. An ocean of yellow grasses surrounded him. The tasseled tops flowed as if an invisible giant raked his fingers across the top. With the sun overhead, figuring out one compass direction from another was futile. The land rose up into rolling yellow-green hills one direction. A heavy band of brown streaked across the horizon in another. A forest?

  He knew of no place like this around Chicago. Ireland, maybe. But not the Midwest.

  What the hell was happening?

  More memories percolated out of the fog in his head. The hole in the wall that the thief had jumped through. How he’d followed immediately behind him.

  A sickly tightness bloomed in the pit of his gut, a wave of unease that threatened to inflate and consume him. This was all very wrong.

  He clenched his fists and shoved the impulse to panic back down. No, he told himself. Something would explain all this. It had to.

  He needed information. With a groan, he rose up. Every muscle complained and resisted him. He brushed off the dirt and pebbles from his jeans and T-shirt and shook more loose from his dark hair. His legs were wobbly, and it took a moment to trust he was stable enough before he swept the inner boundary of the ancient building. Tucked in the lee of the standing corner, he found the remains of small campfire. He lowered next to it, elbows on his thighs. Someone had spread out the coals. Hunter floated his hand over the small mound of charcoal chunks and gray ash. Cold.

  His thief?

  That didn’t make any sense. He was less than a minute behind him.

  He grunted and shook his head. Ridiculous. That bizarre hole in the wall hadn’t brought him here—the idea of that was idiotic. Something else had. It didn’t matter that the last thing he remembered was jumping through it. Somehow, the thief must have knocked him out, brought him to this place, and then abandoned him….