Sacrifice In Stone (2 page)

Mara’s voice was so delicate. A treat for
the only sense left to him. “This’ll sound crazy.”

“Why not. We’re doin’ crazy today,” Lucy
said.

“Anyway, I had a dream about the journal,
and somehow I knew it was in the study.”

“There are thousands of books in there.
How did you find it?”

“I don’t know. It just drew me,” Mara
said.

A connection had been forged between them
that day. He didn’t know how. For the first time in centuries he had hope. Hope
that someone would be able to release him from this prison. He’d heard them
talking over the years and so he’d known her name, but it wasn’t until that day
that he’d felt her. She had the book. Freedom was suddenly possible. Then her
uncle had discovered her.

“I want that book,” Hobart Rushworth had
demanded.

“What book,” Mara had asked. Garrick
admired the bravery of her tone even as he heard the slight quiver beneath it.

The scuffling sounds that followed had frustrated
Garrick. He strained against the stone, striving to break free. What was Hobart
doing to Mara? Then a cracking sound. A sound like a tree breaking under the
weight of a winter ice storm. As he heard Hobart stride out, Mara stumbled
against his marble prison and rested there for a moment.

Miraculously, Garrick's forehead, his
brow, his eye, his cheek seemed to loosen and live again. He’d struggled so
long to open his eyes and now one lid shot upward. For a few seconds, perhaps
minutes, he’d seen Mara.

She’d gaped at him. Barely six inches
away. Her blue eyes wide. Long, blonde hair flowing in waves over her
shoulders. She was tall, as tall as he. Her wide lips had been open in a
shocked moue, pinkened with the same blush that was on her cheeks. No, that was
wrong. One cheek was red; a dark, blotchy handprint still stained it. A trickle
of blood leaked from a cut in her bottom lip and smeared on her chin as if
she’d swiped at it.

The tips of her fingers still pressed
against his forehead. He couldn’t speak. His lips were fixed and remained
unmoving. He could only blink. In reaction, Mara had gasped and stumbled back.
Her hands outstretched as if warding him off. Garrick saw blood—her
blood—on her hand. It must have been her blood that had allowed that
small part of him to live again.

He’d longed to tell her he’d never hurt
her.

Mara stuttered, “W-w-wait!”

Then the miracle had faded, his eye fixed
in place, his vision obscured by what seemed like a marble cataract.

“I’ll come back for you,” she’d whispered.

The next day he’d been spirited away from
the Rushworth estate to languish as a prisoner not only within his stone
enclosure but in this obscure place. Waiting. Forever waiting for Mara.

“I still don’t understand how you know
his name?” Lucy said.

“It’s there, toward the end of the book.”

“There are six names here and the rest of
the text is written in some other language.”

“Most of the book is written in Latin,”
Mara said. “Five years ago I found my uncle’s hiding place for the book and I
translated it. The
Transfero Vita
lists three names in the first column and three names in the second column.
According to the text, the lives, the fortunes, and the destinies of the three
in the first column are transferred to the names in the second column. Garrick
Lawson is listed in the first column with a line connecting his name to my
ancestor Henry Hobart Rushworth.”

“That’s ridiculous. You can’t transfer
someone’s life away in a book. I don’t get it,” Lucy said.

Unfortunately, Garrick got it. He
understood all too well how his life had been transferred away that day. He
still felt the dagger piercing his side and the dipping of the pen into the
wound to use his blood as ink in the book.

“Put aside logic and listen.” Mara began
to read aloud. “
Transfero Vita
—An
excerpt from the Gospels of St. Francis of Wycombe—”

“Just a minute,” Lucy interrupted. “There
was no St. Francis of Wycombe. I’m a Catholic. I know these things.”

“You’re so impatient,” Mara said in a
stern tone.

Garrick heard footsteps move away and a
rustling of paper.

“Where was I? Ah yes. An excerpt from the
Gospels of St. Francis of Wycombe faithfully transcribed by Brother Thomas, to
the glory of the goddess Ariadne this twenty-first day of June in the year of
our god Dionysus, 1758 in Buckinghamshire, England.”

“I don’t want to interrupt again,” Lucy
said, “but I have to say, WTF?”

“I had just that reaction when I first
read this. Then I did some research and I think I know where this came from.
Back in the mid-eighteenth century there was a group who fancied themselves
pagans. Some said they were Satanists. Anyway, it was started by this guy, Sir
Francis Dashwood who had an estate in England. They called themselves the Order
of the Knights of West Wycombe or the Brotherhood of St. Francis of Wycombe.
Today they’re known as the Hellfire Club.”

“I’ve heard of that. Weren’t they just a
group of spoiled aristocrats looking to get wasted on wine and have orgies, so
they pretended to have black masses and conduct rituals?”

“That’s what some of the histories say,
but this gospel—and
Sacrifice in
Stone
—would seem to indicate they were deadly serious. Let me read
you the rest of this.”

Garrick imagined Mara concentrating on
the yellowed pages of the journal. “To begin the ritual, the brothers chanted
the sacred maxim three times.
Fais ce que
tu voudras
.”

“That’s French,” Lucy crowed. “It means,
‘do what you will’.”

“That’s right,” Mara said. “Then it says
that the priestess was ushered into the temple’s inner sanctum while the
brothers began the chant of the ritual.”

More pages rustled. “There’s a bit here
that seems to be in some other language and I haven’t been able to translate
it.” He heard footsteps pace and then stop. “Here’s where it picks up in Latin
again,” she said. “The priestess was brought to a halt before the three marble
blocks, the three sacrifices and the three receivers. The priestess pronounced
them all suitable to the purpose.”

Priestess? Witch was more what Garrick
recalled. With her wiry black hair, cold black eyes and red gown. She’d been
beautiful but repellent at the same time.

“What does that mean?” Lucy asked.

“From what I can tell from this
translation the three sacrifices are British soldiers who had been socializing
at the local tavern where a couple of the brothers plied them with drink and
lured them to a network of caves Sir Francis had excavated beneath West Wycombe
hill.”

“I just worry about finding a designated
driver when I go out drinking,” Lucy said. “These poor guys had to worry about
getting trapped into some kind of black mass.”

Garrick remembered the scene well. He and
the other lads had stopped at the village on their way to join a new regiment.
A drink or two had seemed an innocent diversion. One he sorely needed after his
time in the war against the French in the colonies. What harm could there be in
one night of leisure?

He’d discovered the cost when he awoke
stretched upon a slab. Through a groggy haze he’d seen his fellows in a similar
quandary. A group of at least a dozen figures garbed in white robes, hoods
obscuring their faces, encircled them. Garrick had sought to fight against the
ties that bound him to the marble, but his limbs had a strange lethargy.
Weakness in his normally strong body and fog in his brain? He realized he’d
been drugged.

“Black mass is right,” Mara said. “The
journal says that Garrick was blooded, which seems to mean that he was stabbed
and his blood was allowed to run onto the stone. Then he was raised from the
slab and given a dagger to do battle with my ancestor.”

Yes, the battle. At first, he’d managed
to do more than hold his own in the fight against a man unencumbered by blood
loss and drugs. He’d sliced Rushworth’s forearm with a lunging jab.

“Damn. Can you not hold the blighter?
He’s taken a chunk of me,” Rushworth said as he stepped away from the
staggering Garrick.

“You must finish him for the transfer to
complete,” the priestess said. “However, do not allow your blood to touch the
stone.”

Rushworth took a step forward and swung
his dagger in a tentative arc that missed by a foot. Shaking his head,
Garrick’s vision cleared and he lunged forward. Grabbing the bigger man around
the middle, he’d hung on.

“Gads. Do something.” Rushworth struggled
to escape. “He’s still has the strength of an ox.”

One of the others encircling them jabbed
Garrick in the back with a torch. He gasped at the pain. The smell of burning
flesh overpowered the space. The blow was enough to allow Rushworth to
extricate himself and he’d jerked back, narrowly avoiding Garrick’s desperate
lunge with a dagger to his midsection.

“Damnation, he almost cut me,” Rushworth
said.

“Continue to mewl and you will not be
blessed by the goddess.” The tone of the leader, who Garrick assumed now was
Sir Francis Dashwood, was disgusted. “Consider yourself fortunate to be given
this opportunity to bring glory and fortune to yourself and your family.”

Garrick’s vision blurred. He blinked at
the sweat burning his eyes, a gritty mixture of perspiration and the ash from
the torches lining the walls of the cave.

“Hurry,” the priestess said as the
struggle continued. “If he loses too much blood to the ground in this contest
there may not be enough for the stone.”

Fighting to remain conscious, Garrick
circled Rushworth. Even in his weakened state he would have been more than a
match for the blighter, but he was undone when he felt the flat of a palm
strike him between the shoulder blades and propel him toward his opponent in an
ungainly stumble into Rushworth’s blade. It was buried to the hilt and Garrick
knew he was dying. Dead already as the robed monks dragged him back to his
marble slab.

“That’s it. Lay him on it.”

Memory wasn’t clear, more as a puddle of
spring rain on a dirt road. As he lay bleeding, the stone beneath him had
softened and began to settle around him with the consistency of quicksand.
Garrick had strained then against the sinking of his body into the stone. The
more he struggled to free himself, the weaker he became. The more he thrashed,
the more his body hardened. Until he himself was the stone.

“This won’t work,” Lucy said. “Even if
I’m not suffering some sympathetic insanity and this statue moved, it would
take too much blood to bring him back. More blood than you can spare.”

“I had some of my blood stored. It’s in
the car.” Mara shot a glare at her friend. “Don’t argue with me. Just help me.
I have to save him.”

“Save him,” Lucy said almost to herself.
“I see…this is about your parents.” She reached out a hand to Mara. “You
couldn’t save your parents, so now you have to save him. Even if you do, what
will he be like? Two and a half centuries encased in stone would make me
insane. What if he wants to kill you for being a Rushworth?”

A horror movie scream broke the silence
of the museum—the ringtone setting Mara had assigned to her uncle.
Tugging away from her friend’s well-meaning but unwelcome concern, she pulled
out the device and examined the face. She couldn’t help a full-toothed grimace.
“I knew it! Uncle Hobart.”

“Don’t answer it,” Lucy said. “He doesn’t
have any control over you now that you’re in grad school. Okay, maybe he
controls your trust fund.”

The screaming phone continued
relentlessly. It would go to voicemail with one more ring.

“Yes, but he’ll suspect something if I
don’t answer. I don’t want him to go looking for the
Transfero Vita
until after I’ve freed Garrick.” Mara flipped the
phone open. “Hello, Uncle.” Hopefully, he would attribute the slightly choked
tone of her voice to cell phone static.

“What are you doing?” Uncle Hobart
demanded from across the miles.

“Do you really expect me to answer that
question with something other than, none of your business?”

Lucy made a triumphant face and gave a
thumbs-up.

“An important business transaction tanked
a few minutes ago. Inexplicably, the seller refused to sign the paperwork, got
up and walked away from the table without even trying to bargain for more
money.”

“Thanks for the news flash. What does
your deal have to do with me?

“You did something. What was it?”

“Your failed deal can hardly be my fault.
I’m hundreds of miles away.” Crap. She hadn’t intended to tell him anything
about where she was.

Silence pulsed at her over the phone
line. Finally, he spoke again. “Where are you?”

“I’m in—”

Lucy mouthed something and Mara latched
on.

“I’m in Miami with Lucy. At her parents’
condo.”

“Hmm. Are you now?”