Devil's Bargain: An Alastair Stone Urban Fantasy Novel (Alastair Stone Chronicles)

by R. L. King

  “Thank you. I’m sorry too—I know you two were friends. I’m afraid I don’t have any good news yet, though. The police are working hard, and I hope we’ll hear something soon.”

  “Oh, yes, God willing,” she murmured. She held a trowel in one hand, and swiped a cloth over her brow with the other. Her curious gaze fell on Stone.

  “Uh…this is a friend of mine. He’s—”

  “Alastair Stone,” Stone added smoothly, with a little bow in Mrs. Bond’s direction. “Pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Bond. My condolences on your loss.”

  “Thank you.” She stashed her trowel in the pocket of her apron and pulled her straw hat lower over her eyes, turning back to me. “I’ll leave you two alone, dear—I don’t want to intrude.”

  I got the impression she was wrangling for an invitation to come in for coffee, but I didn’t offer one. “We’re just stopping by to…pick up some papers the police were asking for. We’ll be out of here in a few minutes.”

  “Of course. It was good seeing you again.” She turned and trundled back toward her garden.

  “Sorry,” I told Stone as we reached the front porch. “She’s kind of a busybody, but I know she’s upset about Susan.”

  “Quite all right.” He glanced over his shoulder at Mrs. Bond. “Best if you pretend to give me a key, though, just in case she’s watching.”

  I rummaged in my purse and feigned handing him something. “How are you going to get in?”

  He mimed taking it, moving forward to shield the door with his body. Then he fixed his odd, intense stare on it and a moment later I heard the faint click of the lock disengaging. “Just like that.”

  I gaped at him, forgetting about Mrs. Bond. “You just—opened the door with magic?” I’d been watching him closely; he hadn’t pulled any lockpicks or other gear from his pocket. He hadn’t even touched the door.

  “I did. Come on, let’s get inside before she decides she wants to pop by for tea.”

  Stepping into Susan’s house felt strange. There’s something about unoccupied houses that feels different somehow. I can’t explain it, but I knew I wasn’t the only person who noticed it. You’d think the feeling would be the same for a place that had been vacant for a long time when its owners have been on vacation, or even one that was for sale or rent, but it wasn’t. As soon as I closed the door behind us and took a few more steps into the foyer, I felt almost like I was trespassing somewhere I shouldn’t be.

  Which technically was true, since we’d just broken in (magic or no magic, that was what we’d done). But that wasn’t what I meant. It was almost as if the house knew its owners, the people who’d infused it with life, were never coming back.

  Even more unsettling to me was how the place looked so casually lived-in. The typical clutter of a young couple with a baby littered the living room: brightly colored toys on the floor, a blanket tossed over the end of a couch and another one spread out on the floor in front of the television, a newspaper open on the coffee table. It made me shiver to think about how, when Susan had left with Emma, she’d expected to return and resume her life a few hours later. She’d probably intended to clean up when she got home, but then she never got home. She’d never go home again. Hot tears welled in my eyes, and I swiped my hand across my face to clear them. I didn’t have time to cry now.

  Stone was looking around the room with that familiar fuzzy expression. I wondered what he was looking for, then remembered what he’d said in answer to my question in the car. “That way you get, like you’re seeing something on the other side of the wall—does that have something to do with what you said about ‘seeing my aura’?”

  He flashed me an approving grin. “Well spotted, Ms. Huntley. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m looking at the magic in the room to see if I notice anything out of the ordinary.”

  “And…do you?”

  “Not here, no, but that doesn’t surprise me. Can you show me the child’s bedroom, and also your sister’s?”

  I’d never been inside the house, so we had to find them together. Susan and Chuck’s room was at the end of the hall, with the nursery next door. Stone went to the master bedroom first, stopping just inside the doorway to sweep his gaze around. I followed and stood next to him.

  To me, the room looked typical for a young couple: the bed was unmade and rumpled, the closet open and packed with clothes, the door to the bathroom shut. More clothes, both men’s and women’s, were scattered across the foot of the bed and the chair, and a pile of laundry overflowed a wicker basket in the corner.

  “Do you see anything?” I asked.

  “No. That’s why I’m saving the child’s room for last. Excuse me, please.” He slipped past me and entered the nursery.

  Unlike the bedroom, the nursery was spotless. A pink crib with a mobile hanging over it dominated the room, which also featured pink wallpaper with a cheerful zoo-animal print, a white-painted changing table, and a wooden rocking chair. My eyes grew hot again as I pictured Susan sitting in that chair feeding Emma, maybe humming a little tune to her as she did. Not for the first time, I regretted my stubbornness in not trying to mend my difficult relationship with my sister. Now it was too late.

  “Are you all right, Ms. Huntley?” Stone was watching me now instead of the room.

  I started to say yes, I was fine, to give the rote reply everybody gives when asked that question, but then I shook my head. “Not…really. This is bringing up a lot of thoughts I’m not very proud of. My sister and I weren’t all that close, for various reasons.”

  “I’m sorry—this shouldn’t take long. You can wait out in the front room if you like.”

  “No, let’s just get it over with. What are you going to do?”

  He held up a finger, then scanned the room with his fuzzed-out gaze again. After a couple of minutes, he turned back to me. “Not getting much here, but that’s all right. Probably means the child wasn’t taken from this house.”

  “But…you can still find her, right?” Even worse than trusting this near-stranger to use magic to locate my missing niece was the idea that he couldn’t use magic to locate her.

  “Oh, I think so.” He strode forward and snatched a pink-and-white stuffed rabbit from the crib, holding it between thumb and forefinger like it was a dirty diaper. The fur on one of its floppy paws was matted, as if it had spent a lot of time in Emma’s mouth.

  “This one has the most emotional resonance around it. Appears…er…well loved.” He shoved the thing into my hands with an expression of faint distaste. “Bring that, and we’re done here.”

  Once again feeling like I was hanging on for dear life to the back end of a speeding train, I followed him outside and watched as he closed the door behind us and clicked the lock shut. “Where are we going now?”

  He didn’t answer, and I had to jog to keep up with his long strides as he headed back to the car. As we hurried down the walk, I spotted Mrs. Bond still working away in her garden. She raised her trowel in a goodbye wave, but didn’t get up this time.

  “Where are we going?” I asked again when we were underway. I held the stuffed bunny in my lap, turning it over in my hands.

  “Now, I’ll do a ritual to locate the child. You needn’t observe it if you don’t want to—I can call you when I’ve got results.”

  “A…ritual. You mean, like the one she used to kill Susan and Chuck?” My grip on the bunny tightened.

  “Well…in the most general sense, yes. But not for the same purpose. This one is a tracking ritual, not a sending. Have you ever heard the expression ‘as above, so below’?”

  I remembered seeing that while skimming through An Introduction to Witchcraft yesterday. “Yes, but I’m not sure what it means.”

  He chuckled. “To explain it in any detail would require a lecture you probably don’t want to hear right now, but in short, it means that what occurs in the spiritual realm is mirrored in the physical, and vice versa.” He nodded toward the rabbit in my lap. “Because the child—”


  “Emma,” I said, suddenly annoyed as his detachment. “Her name is Emma.”

  “Because Emma had invested considerable emotional energy in that rabbit, it retains a connection to her. Are you familiar with psychometry—where a mystic will ask to hold a ring or other object, and then give you readings based on the psychic emanations they pick up from it?”

  I’d never been to a psychic reader, but it was one of those pop-culture things everybody picked up from watching TV. “Yes. So…psychic readers are real? They do magic like you do?”

  “No, most of them are frauds,” he said cheerfully. “They put on a good show at best, which I suppose is worth something. But the principle itself is sound, and in the hands of a genuine practitioner can be quite powerful.”

  “So…” I said slowly, trying to keep up, “you’re going to take that rabbit and use it for a ritual to trace the…psychic emanations from it to wherever Madame Minna is holding Emma?”

  “Got it in one.” Again, he sounded approving. “Unfortunately for Emma, the ritual will consume the item—it’s called a ‘tether object’—in the process of doing the tracking. But I’m sure she’ll get over it. Better to lose your favorite toy than to be stuck with a nasty old witch, right?” He turned his attention back to the road. “Shall I drop you off somewhere? I suppose you’ll want to give your ex-husband a call and make sure your children are all right.”

  “I do, yes. And I want to call the police to see if they’ve turned up anything. If they’ve already found Emma, then none of this will be necessary.” I paused, looking first out the window and then back at the bunny in my lap. “But you don’t think that’ll happen, do you?”

  “Doubtful,” he admitted. “Stranger things have happened, of course, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

  I wasn’t counting on it. “I want to see,” I blurted.

  “See?”

  “The ritual. I want to be there when you do it. Can I?” Part of me—the “normal” part—couldn’t believe I was saying it. I just wanted Emma back. I didn’t need to watch some bizarre ritual used to find her. I wondered if Stone would smear himself with blood or dance naked around a magic circle chanting some weird incantation.

  He glanced at me, surprised. “Er—of course you can, if you like. I wouldn’t have thought you’d want to.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t either. But like I keep telling myself, if I’m going to buy into this whole thing, I might as well go all the way. Plus, I don’t want to take any more time than necessary. I keep feeling like the longer Emma is gone, the harder it will be to get her back.”

  “Well, it’s certainly in her best interests to find her as soon as possible.”

  “Where…will you do it?”

  “At my place in Palo Alto. I’ve got a ritual area set up, so I’ll just need to customize the circle a bit. You can make your calls while I do that.”

  I stared at him. “You have a ritual area set up? You…do this kind of thing a lot?”

  “More often than you’d expect, honestly. A ritual circle is a versatile thing—you can use them for all sorts of applications.”

  “I…see.” I took a deep breath. You’re doing this for Emma. Keep reminding yourself of that. “So…do a lot of people know about magic? You teach at Stanford, right? Do your students know about this? Do the people in your department?”

  “No. It’s not the sort of thing I let get around. As you might imagine, it could cause problems.”

  “But yet you’re telling me. Aren’t you afraid I’ll tell someone?”

  “Who would you tell?” He glanced at me again. “From what you’ve told me, people already think you’re a nutter because you’re convinced an old witch has stolen your niece away. How do you suppose they’d respond if you told them you were working with a magical practitioner to track her down and get her back from that witch?”

  He had a point, I supposed. “They’d probably haul me off and put me in a padded room for my own good. But I’m not going to tell anybody, so you don’t have to worry about that. You’re right—I’m already half convinced I’m crazy myself. I…I just want to get Emma back and get on with my nice, normal, witch-free life.” I paused, a shiver drifting down my spine. “Dr. Stone…”

  “Yes?”

  “So far, all we’ve talked about is finding Emma. If—when—you do find her, what then? How will we get her back?”

  To my surprise, he looked troubled. “Yes. That’s going to be the sticky part, I think.”

  The shiver intensified. “Why is that?”

  “Well…as I mentioned before, the problem as I see it is that it sounds like your sister did make a proper bargain with Madame Minna. She promised her firstborn child in exchange for having the man who assaulted her dealt with, and sealed that promise with a binding oath.”

  “But,” I spluttered, “She didn’t know what she was promising! She didn’t know anything about magic! And she didn’t even expect to have any children!”

  “That isn’t the issue. If you take out a loan and sign to repay it, the bank doesn’t care if you didn’t understand what you were signing. You’re still legally bound to pay back the money.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “So you’re saying…you can’t get Emma back? You won’t?”

  “No. I didn’t say that. I’ve never approved of those kinds of oaths, especially not when they’re made with mundanes.”

  “Mundanes?”

  “Sorry—non-magical people. Particularly those who have no understanding or awareness of the magical world.”

  “That’s what you call us? Mundanes?” Even though I felt like most of my life was fairly “mundane” and I had no problem with that, the word still seemed insulting.

  He waved it off. “Let’s not get sidetracked on semantics. The point here is that your sister was lured into making the oath, but magic aside, she also made a promise—and even mundanes can reasonably be expected to keep their word. I’ve already been working on the problem of how I’ll deal with that once we find Emma.”

  “But you can’t just promise to give up your baby! That’s not even legal!” I clenched my hands around the stuffed rabbit, then forced myself to loosen my grip so I didn’t rip its limbs off.

  “The magical world cares very little about mundane legalities, Ms. Huntley. Let me give this some thought—I might be able to find a loophole we can exploit. But first, we need to find her.”

  I remained silent as we reached Palo Alto and Stone took an exit. “Not far now,” he told me. “My place is near downtown.”

  Downtown Palo Alto—he must have some serious money, I thought idly, if he could afford to live there. “Dr. Stone?”

  “Hmm?”

  I swallowed, not sure I wanted to ask the next question. “What if…you can’t find a loophole? What if she won’t give Emma up?”

  “Then we’ll have to get her back another way.” His voice took on a hard edge.

  “Another way?”

  “Yes.”

  “What…do you mean by that? Are you going to…fight her?”

  “If it comes to that, yes.”

  “An old lady?”

  “An old witch. And one with some considerable power, from the look of it.”

  I looked at the bunny, then at him. His gaze was fixed straight ahead, his posture tense, his jaw tight. “What about you? Do you have enough power to beat her?”

  “We’ll have to see. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Because even if I can beat her, breaking an oath like that has unavoidable consequences.”

  My fingers dug into the stuffed rabbit. “What…kinds of consequences?”

  He didn’t answer.

  14

  Alastair Stone’s place in Palo Alto turned out to be a perfectly normal freestanding townhouse on a tiny lot, along a tree-lined street mostly occupied by larger homes. It looked like the kind of place a well-off college professor might live in, but not a guy who threw around terms like “magical ritual” witho
ut rolling his eyes.

  He let me out before pulling the Jaguar into a narrow, single-car garage, then waved me through into a small kitchen. A neat stack of folded newspapers lay on the breakfast bar.

  Stone tossed his leather briefcase on the counter. “Right, then, let’s get on with it. Looks like my housekeeper’s been here already—I keep telling her not to tidy up my newspapers, but she never listens. Come on.”

  I followed him to a sturdy door, which he unlocked and then switched on an overhead light to reveal a flight of stairs leading downward. “You lock your basement?” I asked. “I’m surprised you even have one.”

  “Yes, that was one of the reasons I chose this place. And yes, I keep it locked. It wouldn’t do to have your mundane housekeeper wandering into your ritual space.” He shuddered. “I don’t want to think about the problems she could cause if she decided to tidy up down here.”

  After getting my first glimpse at the room downstairs, I thought she’d be more likely to run away and call the police, but I kept that to myself. Instead, I looked around.

  The space was definitely a basement, and looked like one: concrete floor with old rugs scattered over it, rough wooden shelves, no windows, light from another bulb hanging from the ceiling. But that was where the resemblance ended. I stopped at the foot of the stairs, taking in the collection of musty tomes, bottles of various liquids, and boxes on the shelves, and the series of posters depicting diagrams and more rows of symbols.

  Then I saw the circle.

  It looked like something out of one of those creepy horror movies I’d always been too scared to sit through, like a thing you might use to summon the Devil. It was painted on the concrete floor in white paint, complete with weird squiggly lines, strange symbols, and a bunch of straight lines running from one side to the other in several places. At least it wasn’t a pentagram—that was something, I supposed.