Necessary Sacrifices

by R. L. King

  He hoped this feeling that everyone could somehow figure things out from looking at him went away before he had to see Jason again. Otherwise that would be an awkward conversation.

  Raider greeted them at the door when they arrived back at Stone’s townhouse in Palo Alto early that morning, winding himself around first Stone’s legs, then Verity’s, as if to say Where have you two been? Verity dropped her bag and bent to pick him up, ruffling behind his ears and murmuring to him until he purred loudly.

  “So…” Stone said, surprised at the hesitation in his tone. “Do you want to…get some breakfast?”

  She answered without looking at him, still focused on Raider. “I think I’ll take a pass, if that’s okay. Not really hungry, and I’ve got some reading to catch up on.”

  “Oh. Right. Of course. So do I, actually.”

  He watched her as she picked up her bag and trooped upstairs, Raider following in her wake. He almost said something before she disappeared, but didn’t.

  She didn’t waste any time in her plans. When Stone arrived home from the University the following night he found her in the kitchen fixing dinner. “Hope you didn’t get takeout,” she told him, looking up from the pot she was stirring on the stove.

  “No. I didn’t think I was hungry, but apparently I was wrong. Whatever that is, it smells wonderful.”

  He set the table, and she waited until she’d brought out the dishes and they had served themselves before saying, offhandedly, “So…I called Sharra today.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yep. She said she’d love it if I come visit for a while.”

  “That’s good. Will you be leaving soon, then?” He kept his tone light and even, concentrating on pouring wine.

  “Yeah. I think I’ll head out tomorrow. She said she’ll pick me up in Lowell, at the portal.”

  Stone nodded. “I hope you have a lovely time. Do give her my best, will you?”

  “Sure.” She hesitated. “Doc—”

  “Any idea when you might be coming back?” He flicked his gaze up to glance at her, then back down at his plate.

  “Uh—no. Not yet. I’ll keep in touch, though. If you want me to.”

  “Of course I do. At least let me know when you’ve decided to come back.” He sipped his wine. “I’ll—do a bit of hunting on my own while you’re gone, and perhaps I can help you find a place you’ll like.”

  “Doc—”

  “And then, when you return, we can—”

  “Alastair.”

  He tensed, looking up, and waited.

  She met his gaze straight on from across the table. “I’m not running away. I want you to know that. I know you’re going to feel guilty no matter what I say, and there’s not much I can do about that. But listen to me, okay? Everything that happened was fine with me. I wanted it. I’m glad it happened—it kinda helped me deal with a lot of tension and feelings I haven’t really known what to do about for a while. Okay?”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  “All this is just me needing to get a little distance for a while, so I can work some things out. I don’t know what I want to do yet. I don’t think you do either, do you?”

  “No.” As he said it, he realized it was true. “I’ve no idea what I want to do. Except that I do want to see you through the rest of your apprenticeship, if you still want it.”

  “Of course I do. That’s why I came back to you.” She smiled. “Whether I end up going to England for a while or not, you’re the one I want to get my diploma from.” She tilted her head. “Do mages even get diplomas?”

  “Not…exactly. Though I suppose I could print one out for you if you like.”

  “Yeah…I’ll hang it in my room and hide it when my mundane friends visit.” She chuckled, then looked down with a sigh. “What I’m trying to say, though—and I want you to listen to me, okay?—is that I think this was good for me. Hell, I know it was. But I think maybe it’s…still a little soon, you know? That’s why I’m leaving for a while. So if you want to pretend it means anything else, I’m not cooperating. Got it?”

  He met her challenging gaze with more amusement than he thought himself capable of at the moment. She always did have a way of pulling him out of his own head. “Got it. You go off to Vermont and—do whatever it is you do with Sharra. Forget about all of this for a while, and I’ll try to do the same. And when you come back, we’ll—re-assess.”

  “That sounds like a good plan. Just—remember it when I’m gone, okay?”

  “I’ll do my best.” He took another sip of wine. “Did you tell Jason you were leaving?”

  “Yeah. I called him today. Told him Sharra had invited me back for a while. He…didn’t suspect anything. But then again, how could he? It’s not the sort of thing that would immediately come to his mind. He was just bummed that we couldn’t get together before I go.”

  “We’ll see each other again, soon enough. After this has…settled a bit.”

  “Yeah.”

  They ate in silence for a while, and tried and failed to make small talk about what Stone was doing at the University. Finally they gave it up and carried the dishes out to the kitchen in silence. “I’ll take care of these,” he said. “You’ll be wanting to pack, I assume?”

  “Yeah…I should do that,” she said. “Thanks.” Her gaze lingered on him for a moment, and then she drifted toward the doorway.

  He watched her go. As she was about to disappear into the hallway, he called softly, “Verity?”

  She stopped without turning. “Yeah?”

  He spoke before he completely intended to, perhaps because he was afraid that otherwise he’d never say it. “Don’t—just don’t run away from me, all right? Take all the time you need, but…come back.”

  She did turn then. She came back into the kitchen and hugged him. It was the same kind of hug she’d always given him, loving but not sensual. “I promise I will. I don’t have that many friends—no way am I losing one over this.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Another three weeks passed, taking Stone into early March. After Verity left, he tried to return his life to as close to normal as it could be—as normal as possible, anyway, after everything that had happened over the last few months.

  He was surprised to discover it wasn’t as difficult as he’d feared, in large part because there was enough work at the University to keep him as busy as he wanted to be. Edwina Mortenson, they all discovered, had left a larger hole behind in her absence than they’d thought. Despite a concerted effort on the part of the University to locate a replacement for her, as yet they’d had no success. Part of this was because the bureaucratic process for hiring a new professor didn’t move quickly (Stone’s own hire, nearly ten years ago, had been fast-tracked due to his impressive credentials and the suddenness of the need, but some of the processes had changed since then), and part of it was because professors of Occult Studies were simply a rare breed. There weren’t many of them out there in the first place, and of the few available, most were already comfortably employed elsewhere and didn’t want to uproot and change positions—especially given that even the substantial pay increase the University offered wasn’t enough to offset the Stanford area’s abnormally high cost of living.

  The department was small enough that Stone and his fellow professor, Mackenzie Hubbard, could cover most of the courses on their own, aided by teaching assistants and some help from a couple of the Cultural Anthropology faculty. However, due to the fact that Mortenson’s sudden death had occurred at the end of the term and thus too late to rearrange the course schedule for the following quarter, Stone and Hubbard were both forced to take on larger course loads and to divide up attendance at the various meetings Mortenson had, as department head and a whiz at the bureaucratic machinations and academic politics that both of her colleagues abhorred, previously handled.

  Th
e result of all this was that Hubbard, who preferred to keep his head down and do his job while using every spare minute to work on the latest in his growing stack of unpublishable horror novels, spent a lot of time grumbling about his increased workload, and Stone, who was looking for anything to take his mind off the recent situations with Mortenson, Desmond, and Verity, threw himself into whatever distractions he could find. He still hated the office politics and unrepentantly ruffled more than a few feathers in interdepartmental meetings whose participants were more used to Mortenson’s staid diplomacy, but at least it kept him busy. He rarely returned home, some carton of takeout food in tow, before eight o’clock on weeknights, and spent the rest of his time either reading magical tomes or half-asleep on the sofa in the living room with Raider curled up on his chest. He slept late on weekends, drank more than he should, and didn’t even bother going out to his usual small clubs to check out new local bands.

  The only exception was his Friday-night pub-crawling group, consisting of professors from several other departments. He roused himself the first Friday after Verity left, feeling it would be good for him to get out of the house, but the experience had been unsatisfying: he’d spent most of the evening staring morosely into his Guinness and responding to his friends’ attempts to draw him out with monosyllabic replies. They didn’t seem to hold it against him, fortunately; they knew about what had happened with Mortenson and the Other Side disaster, and he assumed they still thought he hadn’t worked through it all. He didn’t say anything to change their minds.

  It was a chilly, overcast March night when Stone stumbled into the kitchen through the garage door, briefcase in one hand, umbrella over his arm, and large order of kung pao chicken from the Dragon Garden in his other hand, and noticed the voicemail light on his phone blinking.

  He almost didn’t see it. It had been a miserable day all around, wet and windy, and the commute home, short as it was, had been lengthened to nearly an hour due to a multi-car accident on University Avenue. All he’d wanted to do was get home, fall on the couch, and do as little as possible until tomorrow.

  When he spotted the blinking light, he frowned. Almost nobody called his home phone anymore—not since he’d gotten the mobile and given the number to anyone he cared to hear from. Usually the calls to the main number were either someone trying to sell him something, or wrong numbers. Still, they were often enough people he’d forgotten he knew, somebody from some part of his past, or someone trying to reach him in a professional capacity, that he couldn’t simply ignore the messages.

  He sighed loudly, flung his briefcase, umbrella, and takeout carton on the breakfast bar, shrugged out of his overcoat and threw it on a nearby chair, and hit the button. With any luck, it would be some salesman and he could blow the message away so he could get on with the important business of becoming one with the couch.

  “Dr. Stone, my name is Terence Atthill.” The voice was crisp, older, and spoke in the kind of proper, BBC-accented English that immediately sharpened Stone’s attention. “I am a solicitor, working with the estate of Mr. William Desmond. I’m contacting you because you were named in bequests in Mr. Desmond’s will, and I’d very much like to discuss them with you. If you could return my call at your earliest convenience, I would appreciate it.” He left a number.

  Stone scrambled to write it down, then stared at the phone, his whole body jangling with tension. As strange as it might sound given William Desmond’s wealth and Stone’s close relationship to him during a significant part of his life, it had literally not even occurred to Stone that his old mentor might have left him anything. It wasn’t because he didn’t think it was possible—it wouldn’t have surprised him in the slightest to find out he was the beneficiary of the bulk of Desmond’s magical library and any other magic items his mentor might have around the London house and Caventhorne. But because his mind had been so thoroughly occupied by the one-two punch of losing both Mortenson and Desmond, not to mention Imogen’s new relationship with Clifford Blakeley and his own unexpected rendezvous with Verity, the thought of Desmond’s will had been the farthest thing from his thoughts. If he’d thought about it at all, he’d have assumed that by now, a few weeks later, everything had been taken care of and Desmond had found other beneficiaries for the magical books and items.

  But apparently he hadn’t been mistaken. In retrospect he should have expected it, he supposed: even a simple will took time to execute, and Desmond’s, both because of his vast holdings and his meticulous nature, had probably taken even longer for his cadre of solicitors to work through, dotting every i and crossing every t to make sure the old mage’s wishes had been followed assiduously before revealing the bequests to their various beneficiaries.

  Stone swiped a hand through his hair and continued staring at the phone. “Bloody hell…” he murmured softly. It seemed as if the universe was still conspiring to make sure his life wouldn’t calm down for the foreseeable future.

  He called Terence Atthill back early the following morning. Despite his usual tendency to sleep late, he didn’t have any trouble waking up this time—in fact, he’d had a hard time getting to sleep at all. Finally he gave up at five a.m., which would be one p.m. in London, and went to his study to make the call.

  After telling a prim-sounding receptionist who he was and why he was calling, he was quickly transferred. “Yes, Terence Atthill speaking,” came the same rich BBC baritone. “Am I speaking with Dr. Alastair Stone?”

  “You are. Sorry I missed your call yesterday.”

  “Quite all right, Dr. Stone.” He paused a moment, and Stone heard papers shuffling in the background. “I’m calling, as I said in my message, because Mr. William Desmond has made certain bequests in your name in his will.”

  “So you said.”

  “I wonder—would it be possible for you to come to London? I’d prefer to handle this in person, if it’s convenient for you.”

  Stone frowned. That was a bit odd, though again, with the size of Desmond’s estate, it might not be altogether unheard of. “Er—”

  Atthill’s voice dropped in volume, as if he were sharing a confidence. “I assure you, Dr. Stone, Mr. Desmond and I worked closely together for many years. Although I am not…part of your unique community, I’m well aware of its capabilities. Including the fact that travel to London is considerably more convenient for you than it might be for others.”

  Ah, so Desmond had confided in his lawyer—or perhaps even chosen him from among the many members of non-magical families who were nonetheless aware of magical society. That made a lot of sense. “Well—yes. I can come to London. I’ll need the rest of the day to make arrangements, though. Would tomorrow work for you?”

  “Yes, that would be fine. Just let me know what time, and I shall rearrange my appointments to accommodate you.”

  “Right…” Stone said slowly. “Thank you, Mr. Atthill. I’ll be in touch a bit later today. I wonder…”

  “Yes, Dr. Stone?”

  “Well—I wonder if you might give me some sort of idea of what to expect.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir. Mr. Desmond was quite adamant in his wishes, that all such business be handled face to face. If you couldn’t come to me, then it would be necessary for me to come to you.”

  Beatrice Martinez, head of the Cultural Anthropology department and Stone’s boss, wasn’t happy when he came to her office and announced he’d need another day off, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. Like everyone else in his own department and those directly above it, she was sympathetic to his situation with Mortenson, so everyone had been cutting him a lot of slack lately.

  “Are you sure you’re all right, Alastair?” she asked him before he left. “There are resources available, if you need to—”

  “No, no,” he assured her. “I’ll be fine. I’ve just got…a lot going on right now. I hope it will calm down soon—believe me, I’d like nothing
better than for life to get back to normal for a while.”

  Before he left, he called Imogen to let her know he’d be coming through the portal at the London house, so she could alert the staff to his arrival.

  “This is about Dad, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Yes. His solicitor rang yesterday. Apparently your father has left me something.”

  “Not at all surprised.”

  “He’s already spoken with you?”

  “Yes, a couple of days ago. Would you like to have dinner with me tomorrow night? I’m not sure exactly what Dad left you, but I have some guesses. We might need to discuss a few things.”

  He hadn’t planned on staying longer than necessary to attend the appointment, but she had a point, and he’d never turn down a chance to see her. “Yes, I’d like that. I’ll ring you after the meeting’s over.”

  He didn’t take anything with him this time, since he didn’t think he’d be gone for more than the day. He dressed in his most conservative suit and drove down to A Passage to India early the following morning. The restaurant wasn’t open yet, so he used his key, and a few minutes later he stepped through the portal at Desmond’s London house. He greeted a couple of staff members on the way out and caught a cab to Westminster.

  As he expected, the solicitor’s office was located in an imposing old stone building—no modern high-rises for any law firm Desmond dealt with. Atthill’s firm had the entire top floor. Stone took the elevator up, feeling decidedly out of place. He was glad he’d worn the suit, but even then the old firm’s palpable aura of stability, tradition, and general properness made him feel like he was back in school and had just been summoned to the headmaster’s office.

  Atthill’s firm’s office was, if anything, even more staid and conservative than the rest of the building. Stone got the same feeling stepping into their waiting area as he did when he visited Desmond’s homes—like he’d traveled back in time at least fifty years. The receptionist didn’t have any kind of computer terminal on her desk; Stone was surprised she even had a modern phone. He gave her his name and less than ten minutes later, the double doors to the rest of the office opened and a man emerged.