by R. L. King
17
Stone couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken such care with a ritual.
It was nearly eleven p.m. by the time he got the circle set up the way he wanted it. He stood now, surveying his work, looking for any imperfections or flaws that might report a false result.
This was absurd. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t get another sample if something went wrong with this ritual. He looked down at the tiny bit of napkin in his hand, stained with a few dried drops of Ian Woodward’s blood, and was surprised to see it shaking a little.
In only a few minutes he’d know for sure. Blood rituals didn’t lie. He would know with certainty whether Ian was in fact his own son, or whether the boy and his unseen partners were playing some carefully constructed con on him.
Why, then, was he hesitating? Didn’t he want to know?
With great reluctance, a small part of him had to admit that he wasn’t sure he did.
If Ian was a fake, he could send him on his way with no guilt or hesitation. He didn’t take kindly to anyone trying to scam him, especially not in something this important. He could ignore any sob story the boy might try to play on him, and the kid would be lucky to get away unscathed.
But if he wasn’t a fake…
If Ian was the real deal, that meant he had an heir. Possibly—quite likely, in fact, given his family history—an heir with strong magical potential, who had no idea what he was. On the one hand, that would be cause for excitement: he could open up the world of magic to the boy, arrange his apprenticeship with someone he respected, and set him on a path he’d otherwise never have the chance to follow. He regretted he couldn’t teach the boy himself, but then wondered if in this case it might not be possible. Normally, parents made terrible masters—there was always too much emotional baggage tied up in the relationship, and children on the edge of adulthood generally wanted to get away from their parents’ rules, not sign up for four more years of them. But in this case, he had only just met Ian. They were nearly strangers, and at nineteen Ian was already fully of age.
Perhaps it could work…
Stop it, he told himself, annoyed. You don’t even know if it’s true yet. Get your ducks in a row before you start fantasizing about taking on another apprentice.
He looked down at the napkin piece in his hand, then at the brazier at the circle’s center. He’d spent a lot of time over the past couple of months working on this basement ritual area, enlisting Jason’s and Verity’s help to install a handsome slate floor inlaid with bits of granite, marble, and even tracings of silver, bronze, and gold around the circle itself. It was a beautiful thing, intricate and nearly as large as the one back at his home in England.
“Come on,” he said aloud. “Just get it over with and you’ll know.”
He was about to step into the center of the circle when his mobile buzzed.
Annoyed that he’d forgotten to switch it off, he pulled it out.
It was Jason. “Hey, Al.” He didn’t even bother asking if he’d called too late—anybody who knew Stone at all knew if it was before midnight, he wouldn’t be asleep.
“Jason. What can I do for you?”
“I’ve got some information back for you on that lady you asked me to check into. Sorry I didn’t call earlier, but I got hung up on another case.”
“Quite all right.” Not sure whether he was relieved or frustrated about this temporary postponement of his ritual, he dropped into a nearby chair. “What have you got?”
“Okay. I found Jessamy Tanner. You’re right—she died early last year, in a little town called Winthrop, Ohio. Thirty-seven years old. She slipped and fell in her bathroom and cracked her head on the corner of the sink. By the time her husband found her, she was dead.”
A twinge of regret gripped Stone. Such a senseless, pointless end. Jessamy might have had her problems, but she’d been fundamentally a good person who only wanted to get out from under her parents’ thumbs and make a life for herself. “What else?”
“I got that part from the local papers. Had to do a little more digging for the rest. You’re right—she did have a son named Ian Woodward, which was her maiden name. He’d be nineteen now, but apparently he ran away from home when he was sixteen.”
“Indeed? And they never found him?”
Jason paused, and when he spoke again, his tone was troubled. “I’m…not sure they really looked. I couldn’t get all the details, but it seemed like Ian and Bobby Tanner, the man Jessamy married when Ian was ten, didn’t get along very well.”
“Yes, that’s my understanding as well. But you couldn’t find out why?”
“No, couldn’t get anything else about that yet. I can dig deeper if you want—”
“Not yet, but I might take you up on it later on. Where’s Bobby now? Did you locate him?”
“No. That’s the weird part. He was kind of a big deal in their little town—prominent in the church, owned the local building-supply store, coached Little League. When he and Jessamy got married, he moved the family back there so they could be closer to his parents. Real straight-arrow type.”
“So?”
“So…he just disappeared, a few months after Jessamy died. Like, one morning he didn’t show up to work, and nobody’s seen him since.”
“That is odd,” Stone agreed, frowning. “They did look for him, right?”
“Oh, yeah. His parents spent a fortune on detectives trying to track him down—especially since he left his and Jessamy’s younger son, a four-year-old boy named Mikey, with them the night he disappeared.”
“Did they get anywhere?”
“No. I actually talked to one of the detectives they hired, and she told me it was one of the strangest cases she’s ever worked on. Nothing was missing from the house. He didn’t pack anything. He didn’t take his truck, which was still in the garage. No bank withdrawals or pings on his credit cards. It was like he disappeared into thin air. And from everything I understand he was crazy about Mikey, so it seems weird that if he took off somewhere, he didn’t take the kid with him.”
“It does,” Stone said. “Any idea why he left?”
“Not really. Naturally when his wife died, the police investigated. It’s not the first time a domestic dispute ended up with somebody getting killed. But he was never arrested for anything.” Again, Jason’s tone took on a strange edge.
“Something you’re not telling me?”
“Well…like I said, I didn’t get too deep in yet, but from talking to a few of the locals, I got the impression that Bobby Tanner was a real hardcase. Nice guy, but very old-school, fire-and-brimstone religious. You know, the kind who believes the man is the head of the house and the woman should submit, that kind of thing.”
“So you think perhaps Jessamy might have done something to anger him, and he reacted badly.”
“There’s no direct evidence of it. But there is suspicion something like that might have happened, yeah. Whether it was an accident and he panicked or deliberate, I’m not sure anybody could ever say. Unless they find Bobby and question him, of course.”
“Assuming he’s still alive,” Stone mused. “What about Ian? Did you find anything else out about him?”
“Near as I can tell he’s living in L.A. somewhere, and doesn’t really want to be found. It took them several months to track him down after his mother died. He’s probably back there by now.”
Stone stood. “All right. Thank you, Jason. I appreciate what you’ve done.”
“No problem. You want me to look in to it any further?”
“Not yet. I’ll let you know. And you’ve got to let me pay you for your time.”
Jason snorted. “Stuff it, Al. So, you want to tell me who these people are, and why you’re so interested in them?”
“Not…just yet.” Stone looked down at the blood-spotted napkin fragment. “I need to do a bit more research. Depending on the results, we’ll see.”
He hung up, this time remembering to switch the phone off so it didn’t ring during
the ritual. So Ian had been telling the truth about his mother, and about Bobby’s disappearance. He wondered what had caused the boy to run away at sixteen—perhaps he’d chafed under Bobby’s strict discipline and decided he’d be better off on his own. If he was Stone’s son, his family always did have problems with authority. It seemed strange to him that Jessamy hadn’t searched for her son, but perhaps Bobby had forbidden it. Or perhaps she’d realized the boy was better off away from his stepfather.
Stone sighed. He couldn’t imagine that kind of life—it was so foreign to his own world full of strong women who’d never submit to that sort of treatment—but he supposed it was possible. Jessamy had been a bit of a wild child when he’d known her, but she’d never been all that assertive. He wondered if Bobby had killed her during a heated argument, then covered up her death as an accident.
Might need to hunt him up, if Ian turns out to be the real thing.
That was for later, though, First things first: before he did anything else, he needed to be sure.
Without further hesitation, he carried the napkin scrap to the center of the circle, carefully lowered himself to sit cross-legged in front of the brazier, and used magic to light the numerous candles he’d placed around the circle’s perimeter. Then he took several deep breaths, placed the scrap in the brazier, and began the ritual incantation.
It didn’t take long. After only a few minutes, he felt the power growing, swirling around him, joining the candles and sending lancing beams into the center to converge on the brazier. The swatch began to glow, its tiny blood spots shimmering with the same silver-and-purple aura that had blazed around Ian himself.
Stone took up a small silver knife. He muttered a few words over it, and it likewise began to glow with a faint white light. Once again his hand shook, and his heartbeat quickened. Based on what he was about to discover, his life could change irrevocably in a mere few seconds.
He raised his other hand and pricked his finger with the sharp tip of the knife. A tiny bead of bright red blood welled up, joining its glow with the knife’s own. With only a brief hesitation, he lowered the knife and pressed his bleeding finger down onto the napkin swatch, all the while still murmuring the words of the incantation.
The test was simple: if the two blood sources came from related individuals, they would merge, their auras blending together into a single entity with a harmonious sense of rightness. If not, the samples would reject each other, resulting in an unpleasant buzzing sensation as the two auras refused to mingle. The closer the relationship between the samples, the more complete the blending would be. A parent-child bond would be the strongest of all, followed by siblings.
Stone focused on the samples with every bit of his concentration, still not sure which way he wanted the results to play out.
The answer came nearly instantaneously. The second the silver-purple aura of Ian’s sample and the purple-gold of Stone’s touched, they shifted and flowed together as if they were two halves of the same whole. The purple bits joined so perfectly there was no way to differentiate them, and the silver and gold blended into a luminous amalgam that blazed even more brightly together than the two had separately. A warm, golden glow suffused the whole thing, creeping outward until it engulfed Stone with an overwhelming feeling of completeness.
“Bloody hell…” he whispered, his shoulders sagging as he stared down at the mixture.
He couldn’t deny it any longer. The ritual didn’t lie, especially not at his power level.
Ian Woodward was indeed his son.
18
Stone didn’t call Ian that night, nor after he got up late the following morning. Part of this was because he had a class, but he had to admit to himself that it was mostly because he needed a bit more time to process the information.
If his students noticed he was a little distracted during his lecture, they didn’t say anything about it. He crossed the campus back to his office, closed the door, and slumped into his chair. As he contemplated the phone on his desk, he thought, as he often did, about how much his life would change once he made the call. It had already changed, of course, but once he shared the results with Ian, he’d be in completely uncharted territory.
The truth was, he had no idea how he was going to interact with the boy. He hadn’t the faintest idea how to be a father.
Before he could hesitate any further, he picked up the phone and punched in the number Ian had given him. His heart thudded, and the back of his neck grew hot. What would he say? How would he break the news? Would he just blurt it out, or—
“If you’re calling, you know why. Leave a message.”
Voicemail again. Bugger. “Er—Ian, this is Stone. Please call me back at your earliest convenience. I’ve…got something I want to discuss with you.”
He broke the connection quickly, before he revealed anything he might regret. He didn’t think telling Ian he was his father was something he should do on a phone message.
He waited a few minutes to see if the boy called back right away, but when he didn’t, he idly straightened papers on his desk, glanced out the window, and leaned back in his chair trying to decide whether he hoped a student or Laura the admin aide would show up with a question, or that they wouldn’t.
He drummed his fingers on the desk, opened and closed a book, and then rose explosively. Damn it, he wasn’t going to sit here all day like a schoolgirl waiting for a date! Ian had his mobile number, and he’d call back eventually. Until then, he had other things to do. Like go down to San Jose and investigate the site of Amy Detmire’s murder. No matter how compelling this whole business with Ian was for him, he’d still promised Myra Lindstrom he’d try to find out who had killed her apprentice.
One nice thing about Stone’s recent change of status after being named to the Adelaide Bonham endowed professorship the previous year was that he had a lot more control over his schedule. They never had gotten around to assigning him his own personal assistant—he hadn’t complained, since Laura did an excellent job of handling everybody’s calendars on her own—but he got first pick of which classes he wanted to teach, as well as input into not only his own schedule, but those of the Occult Studies courses as a whole and the meetings he had to attend.
He didn’t take too much advantage of this—the department still hadn’t managed to find another suitable replacement for Edwina Mortenson, so it was still just him and Mackenzie Hubbard—but he did pull rank enough to make sure his few courses were concentrated into three weekdays and he didn’t have anything too early in the morning. Hubbard didn’t like mornings either, so the Occult Studies curriculum took place largely after noon. Stone had never heard a student complain about it.
At midday, traffic down toward San Jose was light, and it took him less than half an hour to reach the address Flores had given him. It was a small, abandoned strip mall, the kind that was all over the place in the lower-income sections of town. The parking lot was choked with a few weeds, the sides of the buildings sported only a small amount of graffiti, and most of the plate-glass display windows were still intact—not abandoned for too long, then.
Stone studied it for a few moments before approaching, noting the ghosts of signs on three of the four businesses: a nail salon, a check-cashing place, and a tiny Mexican restaurant. The fourth—his destination—was at the end, and it was larger than the other three. It had no sign indicating its purpose, and Captain Flores hadn’t told him.
He pulled up a disregarding spell around the BMW and another one around himself; he might want to talk with anyone he might see around the area, but not until he’d had a look inside the building. He wasn’t entirely sure Flores’s permission to take a look around included actual entry, but the captain hadn’t said he couldn’t go inside. Better to ask forgiveness later, if necessary.
A padlocked chain secured the doors. Stone saw no sign of crime-scene tape or other indications the cops had been here within the last couple of days, which struck him as a bit odd—but he supposed Fl
ores wouldn’t have allowed him inside if the place was still an active crime scene. He glanced around to make sure nobody was watching, then used magic to pop the padlock open. Once he slipped inside, he re-locked it.
It was an overcast day, and not much light shone in from the dusty window and glass doors, but after a few moments Stone’s vision adjusted so he didn’t have to use a light spell yet. He stood near the door and scanned the area.
The room was of medium size, about twice as big as the building’s other three shops. Most of the space had been cleared; the only furniture was a few broken stacking chairs of the type you might see in cheap seminars. Stone couldn’t tell what the place’s purpose had been, but he didn’t see a counter, shelves, or anything else indicating it had been a retail shop. Likewise, he saw no sign of a kitchen, so it probably hadn’t been a restaurant. The air smelled of dust and the faint hint of something sour and unpleasant. He wondered how long Amy Detmire had been there before someone discovered her.
He shifted to magical senses, trying to pick up any traces that might give him a clue about what had transpired here. Instantly, a wall of emotion hit him, staggering him backward.
Fear—terror, in fact. That didn’t surprise him: if Amy was killed here, she’d certainly been scared. But he also picked up something else…something he couldn’t quite identify. Whatever it was, it was strong, though. Emotional resonance that strong usually meant either a lot of people feeling the same thing at the same time, or a long-term pattern. Possibly both.
Had there been a large number of people here when Amy was killed? That seemed unlikely—surely someone outside would have noticed.
Had other people been killed here? Once again, that didn’t make sense, especially if it was the same group. Whatever Portas Justitiæ was, they didn’t seem shy about claiming responsibility for their murders.
With the aid of a light spell, a glance upward quickly showed Stone where Amy’s death had taken place: a heavy duct near the back of the room revealed clear signs of where a rope had been tied around it, and the duct itself sagged as if it had supported more weight than it had been designed for. The unpleasant smell was stronger back here.