Synopsis

The unthinkable has happened. The enemy has recovered the lost Stones of Sumer and have managed to neutralize the Prophecy of Tarkus. And now the only person capable of deciphering the runes written on the ten stones has been captured. Madeline Alleyn will risk everything to keep the meaning of the rune stones away from her captor, but how can she when these people can open minds as easily as turning a page. She must keep their enigmatic message from her enemies. Her only hope lies in her daughters. Can they rescue their mother in time to prevent Prometheus Erazmos from gaining this knowledge? Stonehenge is the key, but what terrible secrets does this ancient monument hold?

Excerpt

Three girls and a man crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs. Phoebe groaned, rolled away from the thing poking her in the back, and reached up to the knot forming on her throbbing head. The pain was a good thing: it meant she was alive. But alive where? Had Rhea’s black hole deposited them near their home in upstate New York? Not likely. She glanced around the gloom—woods, a forest maybe. Even some strange, savage land would be okay as long as that crazy man they’d barely escaped from hadn’t tracked them here.

Phoebe reached out into the dark with her mind. Could these be the woods they had often visited growing up? The National Forest near Seneca Lake was big enough to get lost in for days. And then there was that story of the wild man living there. An urban legend maybe. Phoebe wasn’t sure. Weird that Rhea would bring them here. She reached out with her mind again. No one.

Nothing seemed broken, so she got to her knees and saw Dione lying flat on her back a few feet away. She looked paler than usual, like death. Steven Dryer lay sprawled to the left. She studied his still form, regret bubbling up in her. He’d discovered the triplets by accident. He hadn’t known of their power, but had gotten a good taste of it since meeting them. Too bad for him. They’d captured him and with their abilities forced him to help. It was a debt he owed anyway after stealing from their mother. There was no way he could escape them, but he’d slowly come to understand his purpose in all this. He was meant to help their family, and because Phoebe had gazed into his mind, she knew him, all his predilections, every nuance of him. She knew he would keep helping even without her control. And because of this knowledge it wasn’t much of a gamble to trust him. He’d come through big time and been brave in the face of that bastard’s attacks at the museum.

Only Rhea seemed to have managed a smooth landing. Phoebe reached out with her mind, feeling for Rhea’s aches and pains. She knew then that her knees had taken a beating. She’d been thrown to the ground with enough force to break them, but Rhea seemed ok otherwise. The four of them were still alive, and that was the only thing that mattered. Not their tattered nightclothes or soiled appearance.

Phoebe managed to stand on shaky legs and tried to get some sense of the direction they’d taken, of the length of time they’d been borne aloft. It was useless. She doubted even Rhea would know. The disturbance that had been their grandmother’s quantum trace and the explosion that had destroyed the museum had eliminated such sensory perception.
She managed to shuffle to where Rhea was bent over Dione, crying. Di was unresponsive, the result of the attack earlier that very night. Phoebe went to Dryer next and tried to stir him with a mental probe but gave up soon after. Her skills were still new. She wouldn’t risk damaging him.

About the Author

Stanley P. Brown always had heroes as a child. Born in Plaquemine, Louisiana to Joseph Harry, a painter, and his wife Vivian, a homemaker, these heroes mostly took the form of his big brother, Harry, and those populating the pages of Marvel Comics. Realizing he didn’t have the right stuff to be a superhero himself, he concentrated on academics at Louisiana State University and The University of Southern Mississippi, where he earned his doctorate in Exercise Physiology. He went from there to his first academic post at The University of Mississippi. Others followed, as did many scientific publications and several textbooks. But the call of storytelling remained strong in him, and he answered that call with publication in 2017 of his debut novel, The Legacy. Veiled Memory and Fallen Wizard followed in 2018. The Third Factor, the sequel to Veiled Memory, came in 2020. The completion of the trilogy, The Stonehenge Chronicles (VM and TTF and the Untitled final), will be done next year. A fourth fictional world is in the children’s chapter book, The Captain of Tally Ho, which is not yet published. Sequels are planned for all his novels.

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