Heart of Stone Read Online Free PDF Page A

cupboard. He had the handgun back in his hand.
“We need to go into town. I need to work tonight and we need to
sort out about your guns. There are times that I might need to be
elsewhere and you’ll need to be able to protect yourself”. He
winced. “Unfortunately they got to your uncle when I was last away.
I felt his terror but came back too late.” He let out a deep sigh
then handed the gun to Tyra. “This is a Walther PPK, made famous I
believe by a certain fictional spy. It takes a nine millimetre
round and has the advantage that the front sight and the trigger
guard aren’t likely to catch on clothing if you have to pull it out
of an inside pocket quickly. It will kill at close range. Make sure
you have it on you at ALL times”.
    Tyra felt the weight of the gun in her
hand, not too heavy. “I have a gun license for a basic shotgun and
rifle for vermin control but nothing like this or the amount of
weapons that must be in that safe. The police are going to say I
don’t have an adequate reason for them”.
    Simon nodded. “That’s why we need to
go into Boswell, we’ll give them a reason.”
    “ And report last night,”
Tyra could hardly forget her fright from the evening
before.
    “ We won’t because the cops
can’t touch ‘them’, and it would be dangerous for them to even try.
We’ll go to the pub instead”.
    Tyra raised her eyebrows, she still
didn’t even know who ‘them’ was, but she was starting to get a
sense of Simon’s character and guessed he’d only explain further
when he felt like it.
     
     
    Tyra thought Simon would have zapped
himself into town rather than ride with her in the car but he
seemed happy enough to be a passenger. She put the Sube into low
gear and kept the revs up, vaguely remembering her four-wheel
driving instructor having once said that these 4WD station wagons
didn’t have a lot of torque low down. Although none of the car
nerds she’d ever met seemed to be able to explain exactly what
torque was. She secretly expected they didn’t really know either.
Once she got going she kept a steady pace until they were up and
out of the crater. Whether by Simon’s mental powers or luck the
trip out wasn’t too bad. She’d have to look at getting a better
track benched into the hill, whatever that would cost she didn’t
want to think about right now.
    “ Simon, I’ve had a
recurring nightmare all my life. Not about me but about a gorgeous
man with long fine braids of blue black hair. That’s
Thex?”
    “ You know it
is.”
    “ Oh come on please, what
about a bit of ‘what-when-why’?”
    “ A hundred thousand years
ago, more or less, a species of being that was trapped between the
planes of existence wanted out. We think they might have been the
souls of some of the more evolved dinosaur predators that roamed
your earth before an asteroid hit them 650,000 years ago. Most life
reincarnated into equivalent animal forms but possibly not all.
Life in The Between probably isn’t that great so we guess it was a
case of the grass being very much greener on the other side.
They’re basically egoistic greed driven creatures but they didn’t
want to suffer on the plane of existence below them, which is where
they really belong, so they went to the next level above instead.
Over time they had evolved in The Between and developed technology.
They found a way to use a substance called dark light, a kind of
anti-light if you will, to create doorways to this plane. They have
more of an affinity with the mineral world than they do plant or
animal life. Your world and others like it were rich in durable
minerals and pretty gems so they decided that this part of the
universe would be a good place ‘set up shop’, build an empire and
have a life of luxury. They hid so well on your planet that most of
your kind have never suspected they even exist, except very early
on when they openly posed as gods. Thex and his team tried to stop
them from entering your plane of