“The only contract with the Lares I’m aware of is the one that requires—” she swallowed—“you know what? I don’t want to know.”
Her father drew a deep breath as he unlocked the front door. “That’s right, you don’t want to know,” he admitted sadly. “It’ll make sense afterwards. Not to your detriment,” he added hastily. “I wouldn’t lay that on you.”
“Fucksake, Dad,” she said, not unkindly. She hadn’t asked to be born under the family curse, any more than one might ask to be born with a genetic disease or a high risk of hereditary breast cancer. But at least the curse came with side benefits—unlike the ailments, if you could call an ability to harness the power of dreams a benefit when it could so easily slide sideways into nightmare.
“Just remember not to call me Abraham,” he snarked. Then the gloom cloud dropped again. “I’d never do that to one of my kids. Although Jeremy has tempted me a time or two.”
The nature of the family’s relationship with their Lares was contractual: in every second generation the family would provide the Lares with a sacrifice, and in return the Lares would provide the family with the power to walk through dreams and warp dreams into reality.
When Great-great-great-to-the-nth-gramps had signed in blood on the dotted line, it had probably seemed like a superb bargain to a sociopathic pre-Victorian paterfamilias. Life was cheap in those days and the family had grown rich and powerful trading in powerful artifacts, visiting other realms. As recently as 1900, one in five infants died before the age of five: a century earlier, it had been closer to two in five. What was another child’s life cut short in sorrow and pain, if it was the price of safety and prosperity for their siblings and nieces and nephews? Great-great-grandma had birthed twelve babes, of which eight survived to adulthood. Great-grandpa was one of the survivors. Group selection was the term for it in evolutionary biology: sacrificing a life to enhance the survival prospects of one’s kin.
But the drought of magic had coincided with the onset of the demographic transition, the birthrate plummeting even as the survival rate among infants rocketed, and the sacrificial pact grew onerous. One infant among many was few: one among few amounted to many. Grandpa’s sacrificed sibling, his name struck through in the family spell book, had been the last, for Grandpa had only the one brother, and had been guilt-stricken thereafter. Dad was an only child. Evie and Imp were two, and Dad had declined to ritually slit either of their throats, although Mum’s melancholia—
“Dad, did Mum ever try to—” Her mouth dried up as he led her into the bedroom and pushed the bed to one side, revealing a pre-scribed containment circle.
“Yes,” he said, after staring at his feet in silence for almost a minute. “We’d hoped that the contract might be fulfilled if, if—”
“—An early termination?”
“—Was not acceptable to the Lares.” He nodded slowly, caught up in decades-old grief. “The contract specified it had to be a natural born child. She tried, Evie, she did it to protect you both. It didn’t work.”
“There must be another way around it, surely?”
“Not that we could find.” He sighed. “Magic’s easier now, though. It may not be necessary any more. Or there might be new possibilities. Cloning, maybe. Something with stem cells. Who knows?” He draped a cloth across the bedside table and then laid the skull upon it, an improvised altar for a scratch-built ritual exorcism. “It’ll only become an issue if you or Jeremy want to have children.”
“I’d dissolve the contract with the Lares first,” she warned him. “Walk away from the power.”
“Yes, well, you wouldn’t be the first to try to do that. Unfortunately life has a way of making liars of us, for all our good intentions.” He carefully scribed a trail of sea salt around the circle. “Our ancestor didn’t have the foresight to add a termination clause, so it runs in perpetuity. There’s a write-up in volume four and a commentary in volume nine of the annals. The price of forfeiture tends to be the life of the contracted party. In fact, the whole goddamn binding is a trade of power for death. The whole point of the sacrifice is to deflect the death onto someone else, rather than the adept’s own head.”
Life sucked but it sucked less than the alternative, Evie would freely admit. Also, the way magic was becoming easier these days gave her a prickly premonition. It wasn’t just that she was gaining experience, becoming more proficient. Something fundamental was shifting in the world, and in the long term it would be to their benefit. Maybe they wouldn’t need the grotesque pact with the Lares for much longer. Maybe she and Imp would acquire sufficient power in their own right that they’d be able to break free of it. The future beckoned, offering hope for the kind of prosperity their family hadn’t known since Great-granddad’s days.
Presently all was in position. Dad checked his watch. “Your mother should be home in an hour or so. We should cook tea, Evie. You can say you did it as a treat? She’ll like it if she thinks you’re learning to look after yourself.”
“Huh.” Evie sniffed, mildly offended: “Just because you don’t want to, Dad!” But she headed for the kitchen all the same, calling, “Why don’t you make yourself useful and lay the table?” over her shoulder.
“I’ll do that.” Her father shuffled through into the dining room and began assembling place mats and cutlery. “Your mother will feel sleepy after supper and want to go and have a lie-down,” he called.
“Do I want to know?” Evie asked. “Where do you even get roofies, anyway?”
“I’d never do that to Jenny!” His offense was tangible. “As long as she sits in her usual place she’ll find it hard to keep her eyes open.”
“Ah, volume six, section three?” She mentally patted herself on the back
