Showing results by author "R. L. King" in All Categories

The portals are closed. The Evil have lost their pathway between their home and ours. No longer does humanity need to worry about extradimensional bodysnatchers with a thirst for pain and terror pouring through to wreak destruction on Earth. So that means Stone, Jason, and Verity can rest for a while, right? Yeah, maybe not. The problem is, while there might not be any new Evil coming through, a whole lot of very powerful, very angry Evil are still stuck on our side.

A whole new world. When Alastair Stone chooses to remain in captivity to save his son, he has no idea how much his life is about to change. While he does manage to break free from his bizarre prison, his newfound freedom doesn’t come without a price. Everything around him is different - the world, his friends, what he thinks he knows about what he left behind. And despite all the power he commands, he can’t do a thing to fix any of it. Worse, he’s still bound by an oath he made to his captor - and that contract is now coming due.

Alastair Stone is intrigued when he’s asked to look into a bizarre series of murders united by intricate and unsettling symbols carved into the victims’ bodies. As the deaths pile up and the killer seems able both to travel and commit his crimes without a trace, Stone learns the murders aren’t only linked—they’re parts of a malevolent, massively powerful ritual with an ancient demonic artifact at its root.

When Kolinsky asks Alastair Stone to investigate a curious anomaly near a familiar location, Stone is ready to find a connection between the two. What he's not ready to find is an old friend he thought was dead for eleven years. A friend who's got more than one shocking bombshell to drop on him - including an unexpected companion - before she goes on the run and disappears.

Alastair Stone had long thought the ability to interfere with arcane energy to be the holy grail of magical study. Until a piece of an item capable of doing just that turns up in a collection of mundane occult art, and someone nearly kills one of his colleagues while trying to steal it.

Sometimes the biggest events begin with the smallest incidents. This time, it’s another one of Jason’s strange cases: a missing man a tracking spell can’t trace. It isn’t long before the man turns up. Except he’s…different. And he’s not the only one. A new magical affliction is creeping through the world, permanently altering people’s auras and changing their astral forms. As Alastair Stone and his friends struggle to understand it and trace its source, he soon finds he’s got another, far more personal, issue to deal with.

Still coming to terms with recent events, Alastair Stone is shocked when someone from his past—someone he still feels guilty he couldn’t save—resurfaces in his life with a desperate claim that he’s the only one who can help her. She may be right. He’d thought the Evil—extra-dimensional beings with a taste for human fear, misery, and rage—had settled down. But now it appears they’ve got a new plan—and a new leader.

Alastair Stone knew it would take a big sacrifice to end the Evil's hold over our world. He was ready to make that sacrifice - but he expected it to be his life. Never in his worst nightmares did he think it would be his magic. Despairing and grief-stricken at the loss of the abilities that defined his existence, he's on the fast track to self-destruction when a dear friend convinces him to take a desperate last chance. He heads to Las Vegas to find the only man who might be able to help him, but instead finds some old allies in dire need of his own help with a deadly threat.

For Alastair Stone, problems rarely come one at a time. He’s busy helping an old friend with a case of blackmail, when he’s contacted about a mysterious wave of minor crimes in the Oakland area - one that might involve magic. He asks Verity to look into it. When tragedy strikes, and the petty crime spree leads to a friend's disastrous near-death, Stone hurries home to investigate the situation himself. What he finds suggests terrifying new connections to a problem he thought he’d already dealt with.

Alastair Stone and fellow professor Edwina Mortenson go together like punk rock and patchouli. So when an unwilling Stone is "volunteered" to participate in a paranormal TV reality show with her, neither of them is thrilled about it - even if the ghost town they’ll be filming in is supposedly the site of a powerful curse. As if dealing with Mortenson, the show’s overbearing producer, and its prima-donna star weren’t bad enough, Stone soon uncovers evidence that the town’s curse is very real - and it’s resurfacing again, more deadly than ever.

Alastair Stone needs a vacation. He’s literally stepping through the portal to his home in England, when an old friend calls with a horrific tale of a grisly multiple murders committed by teenagers just back from a school camping trip. It doesn’t take long to convince Stone that the supernatural is involved. Goodbye peaceful vacation, hello magical investigation.

When Alastair Stone’s former apprentice Verity approaches him with the story of a drugged and caged Changeling she spotted at a magical black market in Europe, Stone is quick to offer his aid to locate the victim. Once on the Changeling’s trail, though, Stone and Verity soon discover they have stumbled upon the tip of a horrific iceberg—a shadowy organization operating deep underground, kidnapping specifically-targeted Changelings for an unspeakable fate.

When mage Alastair Stone’s fiancée dumps him for loving magic too much and her not enough, he never sees it coming. Craving a change, Stone picks a big one: moving halfway around the world to teach occult studies at Stanford. He expects to pick up where he left off, resuming a quiet life of study and putting the past behind him. But when a gang of cannibalistic serial killers targets the area, he’s certain their origin is supernatural. Drawn into the case after stopping a murder, he soon encounters a bizarre secret society.

Alastair Stone, determined to harness enigmatic mage Trevor Harrison’s potent power source, takes a desperate chance - he travels to the dimension where it originates, hoping to convince Harrison to teach him its secrets. He should have expected things wouldn’t go as planned. Stranded without his power in an exotic, unfamiliar world rich in magic and ruled by tyrannical practitioners, Stone knows his only chance of getting his magic back is to find Harrison - a man who has good reasons for not wanting to be found.

After five years in Los Angeles, Bron has come to terms with living as a mundane. Following a horrific ritual accident that cost the life of her mentor, she wants nothing to do with magic ever again. That’s becoming a lot harder now that her new best friend Nick is the grandson of LA’s biggest magical crime lord. And harder still when her mentor’s daughter shows up and drops a bombshell on her: The ritual accident might not have been her fault at all. Worst of all, somebody’s stirring up the magical crime families from behind the scenes, trying to set them against each other.

After 15-year-old Alastair Stone is caught performing magic at his prestigious boarding school, he can hardly believe his good fortune; not only isn't he punished, but his father arranges a trial apprenticeship - three years early - with one of the most powerful mages in all of Britain. He'll have a month to prove himself, or he'll be packed back off to school. But when Alastair arrives at his new master's vast, remote country house, he soon finds that his teacher's draconian style and exacting standards aren't the only challenges he'll have to face to pass his trial.

Nick Morgan knows there’s no magic in the world, no matter how much he wants to believe. Magic is for suckers, but fortunately, for his job as a sham fortune teller to Hollywood’s fading stars, there are plenty of those around. When somebody starts peddling a new miracle beauty potion to the town’s never-ending supply of wannabe actors, Nick’s suspicious. But his suspicion becomes terror when it turns the niece of his best client horrifically ugly and kills her right in front of his eyes.

When a police detective approaches Alastair Stone to consult on a grisly occult-related murder, he initially considers it nothing more than an intriguing puzzle to fill a few dull late-summer hours. But then the detective becomes a victim, and the murderer begins taunting Stone, daring him to discover the truth before more of his friends join the list of targets. As he delves deeper into the case, Stone soon learns that the murderer isn't human - and has committed similar crimes in the past.

Things are looking up for Alastair Stone. He's just moved into his new house, Jason's opening his investigation agency, and best of all, the university has finally hired a new professor for the occult studies department. Carefree days never last long for Stone, though. The smart, sexy new professor turns out to have secrets - dangerous secrets. When he agrees to help her track down a powerful, magical artifact, Stone is drawn into a deadly conspiracy involving a mysterious and reclusive clan, alchemical mayhem, and crimes even more horrific than either of them suspected.

Alastair Stone has barely begun to recover from the death of a friend when he’s rocked by yet another. It looks like natural causes, but a grief-stricken Stone isn’t convinced. As England’s magical community comes together to mourn the shocking loss, Verity meets a group of powerful female practitioners who offer to teach her potent new magical skills. Meanwhile, Stone’s shocks have only begun as new revelations come to light.