Necessary Sacrifices

by R. L. King

  Stone had no way to tell time in the windowless room, so he didn’t know how long it was before the door opened again. He started out of his light doze and sat up as much as the manacle permitted as Canby entered, followed by a tall, stooped figure leaning on a heavy, gnarled wooden cane.

  Nessa Lennox.

  His grandmother.

  Another young woman entered behind them, carrying a chair. She put it down next to the one already there, then departed and closed the door leaving Stone, Canby, and Nessa Lennox alone in the room.

  “Hello, Dr. Stone. It’s good to see you again,” Nessa said, settling herself into one of the chairs.

  Stone glared at her, taking her in. She looked much the same as she had when he’d seen her at the window following the dinner party: her body was bent under her long black skirt and heavy gray shawl, her face lined and wrinkled, but her small dark eyes were as sharp and shrewd as ever. They were fixed on him, examining him with every bit as much attention as he observed her. It was unsettling, in fact, how her gaze traveled up and down his body, making him wish he was wearing more than just thin pajama bottoms.

  “I wish I could say the same,” he said, rattling the manacle for emphasis. “But given you’re holding me prisoner here…”

  “Not for much longer, I assure you.” Nessa leaned forward, both hands on the gnarled knob of her twisted cane. “You weren’t expected yet, but we couldn’t turn down the opportunity to lure you here so easily when you contacted us. So it was necessary to…improvise a bit.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Is someone planning to tell me what’s going on?” He’d already decided not to reveal that he knew about his relationship to Nessa—if he was to escape this place, it was best if he kept his secrets to himself, at least for now. He hoped his aura didn’t betray him, since whatever the women had given him to damp his magic had also prevented him from using magical sight.

  Canby had not yet sat down. She paced the room behind Nessa, watching their conversation but not participating.

  “Of course,” Nessa said. “You wanted to know about the sculpture.”

  “That’s a start,” Stone said. “What is it?”

  “It’s…difficult to explain. It’s a powerful and unique magical item, created for a specific purpose. But there is more to it than that. It contains…an entity.”

  “An entity?” Stone shifted, trying to find a comfortable seated position. The manacle was just short enough that he couldn’t quite do that, and he was finding it distracting. Finally, he swung his legs to the floor, shifted up to the top of the bed and sat up, still glaring at Nessa. “You’re telling me there’s some kind of…being inside that thing?”

  “Not a being, exactly,” Nessa said. Her gaze went distant for a moment as if she were trying to find the right words. “More of…a fragment of a larger entity.”

  A chill crawled up Stone’s spine. He thought back to whatever ritual they’d been doing—the one that his mother had tried to use him as a sacrifice for when he was a baby. Did this “entity” have anything to do with that? Had they been trying to summon something? “What kind of entity?” was all he asked, still unwilling to reveal his knowledge.

  “Again, difficult to explain. You’re familiar, of course, with the existence of other dimensional realms?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “The entity associated with the object resides in one of those realms.”

  Stone narrowed his eyes. “So you’re saying that…part of the entity is in the object, and the rest is on some other plane?” His mind went back to a similar situation he’d encountered shortly after he’d moved to the United States—where a malevolent extradimensional being had been trapped between planes in the basement of an old woman’s house.

  “Not…per se,” Nessa said. “It’s difficult to explain, even to someone with your extensive magical knowledge. Suffice it to say that there is an…association between the two. They are attuned to each other.” She looked away, and her hands tightened on her cane. “Anna was telling me that you believe the object was connected with William Desmond’s death. I am very sad to hear that. Why do you believe it is so? And how did you come into possession of the item in the first place? Did you find it among William’s property?”

  Stone didn’t want to answer. Rage grew in him again as he thought about Desmond—about how he hadn’t needed to die, and how he’d apparently been caught in the middle of this whole mess for no other reason than because his father had brought the object to him in desperation.

  Damn it, one of the finest magical minds in the world shouldn’t have died because of a mistake.

  Keep it together, he told himself. The more he knew, the better chance he’d have of escaping before these madwomen implemented whatever they were planning. And to get that knowledge, he’d have to share some of his own. He didn’t have to tell them the whole truth, though.

  “I found Desmond’s body, when he went missing and his daughter asked me to look for him. Verity and I found some faint traces of energy around it, though we couldn’t identify them. When I later found that thing in one of the warded vaults he’d given me access to, I recognized the same energy.”

  Nessa nodded, dropping her gaze for a moment. “Such a shame. I had thought the object destroyed many years ago. I had no idea it still existed. It appears William’s wards were potent enough to prevent us from detecting it, but not to keep its energy from affecting him. I am truly sorry about that.”

  Stone fixed her with a hard stare. “What about me? I handled that thing too. Am I cursed as well?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  He blinked. He hadn’t expected her to reply so readily, and her answer froze him. “So—I’ll die like Desmond did? Assuming I don’t go mad or you lot don’t kill me first, of course. I’m not counting on that being a fair assumption, honestly.”

  “No. Not like William did. It won’t take nearly that long, sadly, for reasons I can’t explain at the moment. But we’re not planning to kill you, Dr. Stone. That would be a senseless loss. I assure you, if you cooperate with us, we have ways of taking care of the object’s effects.”

  “So you’re saying—you can lift the curse, or whatever it is, if I play along with your little game?”

  “Crudely put, yes.”

  “What is your game?” he demanded, leaning forward until the manacle stopped him. Nessa was seated far enough back that even if he stretched his leg to its full length, he couldn’t reach her. “Are you going to tell me why you’ve brought me here? Does it have to do with whatever’s locked up inside that object?”

  “Indirectly, yes.”

  “What do you mean, indirectly?”

  “I can’t tell you that at the moment. All will be revealed in time.” Nessa rose, leaning heavily on her cane. “We will talk again later, Dr. Stone. I promise. Come, Anna.”

  She was dismissing him. Once again the rage rose, and this time, he didn’t try to stop it. “So, then,” he said, his gaze locked on the old woman, “are you planning to use any more babies for whatever ritual you’re preparing…Grandmother?”

  He knew instantly he’d hit a nerve. Nessa stopped, her grip tightening on her cane, and so did Anna. They both stared at him in shock. Both recovered quickly, though, their expressions returning to their usual calm.

  “You know, then,” Nessa said.

  “I know enough,” Stone said. “I know you’re my grandmother, and I know my father got hold of that item of yours when he broke up a ritual where my own mother was trying to sacrifice me.” He glared at Nessa. “Was that your doing? Did you order it?”

  “How long have you known this?” Nessa asked. Her expression was calm, her body relaxed now. Canby stood silently behind him, watching Stone.

  “What does it matter?” When she didn’t answer, he added, “Not long. It all came out after Desmond’s wil
ls were revealed. He’d left me a journal where he’d described how that thing of yours had driven my father mad.”

  “Your father should not have stolen it,” Nessa said. “We didn’t know he had—we thought he’d destroyed it, somehow.”

  “He was saving me!” Stone said, his voice growing louder. He made no effort to control it. “My mother—she must have been as barking mad as the rest of you lot—took me away before I was even born. Was that her intent all along? To string my father along until the pregnancy was over, then take off with me? Was that the only reason I was born? To be a sacrifice for your sick little ritual? Did you plan all of this?”

  Nessa settled herself back in her chair. “You don’t understand everything.”

  “Well, tell me, then!” Now he really was yelling. He probably shouldn’t have let his emotions get away from him, but at this point the physical and mental exhaustion, the unending series of gut-punches he’d taken, left him no other option. He was done with control, done with secrets. “Tell me what the hell you people want—what you did, and why you did it. You owe me that much, damn you!”

  Nessa’s untroubled gaze settled on him for several moments in silence. Then she looked up at Canby, and some communication seemed to pass between them. She turned back to face Stone. “I see no harm in telling you now, I suppose. As I said, there is much you don’t know.”

  She took a deep breath and looked off into nothingness for nearly a full minute. “Our group…our organization…has been around in one form or another for a very long time, Dr. Stone,” she said at last. “Hundreds of years, in fact. Anna was not lying when she told you of our purpose: to advance the study of magic through research and experimentation.”

  “What part of that involved sacrificing infants?” Stone snapped.

  Nessa continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Over the years, we have made many discoveries—some of which we’ve shared with the world, and some of which we’ve kept as our most closely guarded secrets. One of the latter was the existence of a being that some of our number discovered during one of their rituals, nearly two hundred years ago.”

  “What kind of being?”

  “An ageless, extremely powerful, and very intelligent one. At first, we had little knowledge of it—what it wanted, what it could share with us. Due to the nature of its home, the communication was, and always has been, imperfect. But nonetheless, we continued to seek contact with it over the intervening years. This effort was made more difficult by the fact that our home dimension and this being’s come into proximity only rarely—approximately every twenty years, give or take. We have learned to read the signs of when this proximity is soon to occur, so we can prepare ourselves.”

  “Prepare yourselves for what?”

  “To renew our communication. And, ultimately, to facilitate the being’s arrival on our own plane.”

  Stone clenched his fists. “So you’re trying to summon this thing over.”

  “We aren’t trying to ‘summon’ it, Dr. Stone. It wants to come. It has promised us immeasurable power and knowledge in exchange for our assistance.”

  “And you believe it?” Stone demanded, shaking his head. “I’m disappointed. Don’t you know these things never end well? I’d have thought you lot were brighter than that.”

  “Your opinion is irrelevant in this matter,” Nessa said, waving him off. “As I said, members of our group have been in contact with this being—communicating with it—for many years. We’ve tried numerous methods to complete the ritual of invitation each time the confluence comes into place, but every time something went wrong. Either the ritual failed unexpectedly, we didn’t have sufficient power at the time, we didn’t have the proper components, or something else. But each time we failed, we learned. We took the new data and incorporated it into our research. We searched this world and others for reference material to help us fine-tune our ritual.”

  “Sounds to me like the universe is trying to tell you something,” Stone said. “Like perhaps you shouldn’t spend all your effort trying to do something you don’t understand. Have you thought about a hobby? Knitting, perhaps, or—I don’t know—motorcycle repair? Or get yourselves a load of cats?”

  Behind Nessa, Canby’s eyes narrowed. She tensed and looked as if she might say something, but Nessa reached around and gently grasped her hand. “It’s all right, Anna. Dr. Stone doesn’t understand. That’s all right. He doesn’t need to.”

  She turned back to Stone, continuing her story as if the interruption hadn’t occurred. “Around sixty years ago, our ritual once again failed, but this time we were able to establish a rudimentary physical connection with the being, enough that it was able to send some of its energy through the conduit. We used this energy to create the item you had in your possession. This allowed us to maintain some level of communication with it even when the confluence once again faded. Around the same time, we obtained some valuable research material, and from this we realized one of our fundamental mistakes.”

  “Oh?” Stone brought his legs up so he was sitting cross-legged on the edge of the bed. “Do tell.”

  Nessa still refused to be annoyed by his tone. “We had known for many cycles that certain…sacrifices were necessary to prime the ritual. It is not something we were ever comfortable with, or proud of—but we long since came to terms with the fact that a small sacrifice would be a fair exchange for the vast and limitless knowledge the entity has promised us, and all the good we can do in the world with that knowledge.”

  Once again, Stone’s rage rose. He leaned forward, fists clenched. “Small sacrifice? You’re talking about infants, aren’t you? You’ve been killing children to power your insanity.”

  “Yes,” Nessa said, still calm. “One infant for each time we’ve attempted the ritual—so one every twenty years. The blood of an innocent is required. As I said, we wish it were not so, but our research is quite clear on the matter. For our previous rituals, we obtained children who weren’t wanted—who likely would have died before they made it past infancy.”

  Stone couldn’t believe what he was hearing. This woman—his own grandmother—sat in front of him, speaking of killing infants to fuel a magical ritual in much the same way a snake owner might speak of feeding baby mice to her pet. His fists tightened again. “You—you’re mad. The lot of you,” he said in a tone of deadly calm that hid his growing anger. “It’s bad enough that you’re hunting down orphans to murder, but—your own flesh and blood? You—what—had my mother get pregnant just so you could take her child and—” He trailed off, unable to finish as the sheer magnitude of what these women were doing began to sink in.

  “Unfortunately,” Nessa went on, once again not acknowledging that he’d spoken, “we made a crucial discovery after our attempt sixty years ago. It seemed that it was not only an infant that was required, but a male infant with a strong potential for magical talent. The more powerful, the more effective the ritual would be.”

  Stone gripped the edge of the bed. “So…you did do it,” he whispered. “You’re serious. My mother—you sent her to—”

  “Your mother—my daughter—was a loyal and devoted member of our group,” Nessa said. “I never forgave your father for killing her. But yes. She volunteered to make her own sacrifice for our greater good. We identified your father as the strongest unmarried mage of his generation in Britain, and your mother set out to win his heart. Our research also indicated that a joined union had a stronger potential to produce a child who would suit our needs.”

  “And…she…agreed to this?” Stone felt numb.

  “Of course. As I said, she was dedicated to our cause. I was proud of her. She was a beautiful woman, my Acantha. Beautiful and brilliant. She could have had any man she desired.”

  “Acantha?” Stone’s gaze came up. “My mother’s name wasn’t Acantha. It was Peregrine.”

  Nessa gave him a gentle smile. “No, Dr. Ston
e. Her name was Acantha Lennox. We arranged for her to present a different identity to your father, to avoid any potential… associations.”

  Stone looked at the floor, for a moment unable to process what Nessa Lennox was telling him. “The attendant…” he said dully. “The one my mother had with her at the house. She was one of you too, wasn’t she?”

  “Ah, you know about that as well?” Nessa seemed surprised. “You’re quite well informed, Dr. Stone. I’m impressed. But yes, you’re correct. She was.”

  “And my father—he never caught on to any of this?”

  She chuckled. “Oh, no. He was remarkably easy to deceive, I’m happy to say. It made the whole thing much easier than if he’d been one of those modern fathers who had to be involved in every aspect of the pregnancy. No, he was rarely even home, and when he was, he showed no interest in the process. Acantha was able to use the portal to return here several times. We have certain…methods we used to infuse magic into the child—into you—while still in the womb, to increase your magical potential for the ritual.”

  “And then…when she was ready to deliver, she and her attendant returned here,” Stone said dully. Then he glared. “They nearly killed my caretaker, you know. For someone who claims to have a conscience about murder, you’re not backing it up very well.”

  “That was unfortunate too,” Nessa said. “Acantha told me he didn’t trust her, and acted as if he suspected something. If she had killed him, your father would never have found her, and never encountered our ritual object.”

  “But he’d also never know what happened to me—and I’d be dead,” Stone said. He stared at hard at her. “I…I don’t even know what to say. You’re all mad. And now you’ve got me here—why? It’s been nearly twenty years since the last time—do you plan to try the ritual again, with me as the sacrifice?”

  “Oh, no,” Nessa waved off the suggestion. “You’re far too old for that, Dr. Stone—and I daresay no one would call you ‘innocent’ any longer. And in any case, we’re not doing the summoning ritual—not yet. The time isn’t yet right. The reason for your presence will be revealed soon. The preparations are almost finished.” She stood again. “Until then, I believe it’s almost time for another dose of elixir. Don’t worry, though—it’s only the magic damping this time, not the sedative. We need you awake and aware for what’s to come.”