“How?” Laurent asked, gulping down coffee and wishing his brain would finish waking up.
“Because the families choose the sacrifice. Each House makes one, once a generation. Traditionally, it’s the firstborn.” The uninflected blankness of a teacher reading from a textbook.
“The firstborn what?” Laurent asked, setting down his coffee.
“Child,” Sydney said. “The firstborn child.”
“No.” Laurent stood up. “No. What is that? Sacrifice the firstborn child? Like some fucking Greek myth? No. This is the twenty-first century. That does not happen.”
“I assure you that it does.” Sydney met his eyes. “Quite easily, and without a lot of fuss. It has for four generations now. All it took was for one person to realize that magic hurt. That you could do a spell, but afterward you might be weak, or run a fever, or cough blood, or whatever it was that was your readjustment to what you had just done. Impossibility is supposed to be just that, and there are consequences when it isn’t.
“So some people stopped doing magic at all, because it hurt after. And then someone thought—what if we could get rid of the pain? What if we could make someone else pay, instead? And then, better still, what if we took the magic from those kids and put it in the thaumaturgical equivalent of a pool, something everyone could draw from. Easy, convenient access.”
“Okay. Let’s say you’re right. I mean, I get wanting things to be easy and not painful, but kids, Sydney? Kids?”
“Easier to give someone up when you haven’t gotten to know them.”
“That is some fucked up shit.”
“Yes,” Sydney said.
“But wait. Not everyone has kids. I mean, assuming you’re right—which is a big assumption, because seriously, if someone is going to show up and ask me for a child, they are out of luck. Or are they going to make me buy some orphan off the street? ‘Congratulations on surviving the Turning, Mr. Beauchamps. Now, where’s the baby?’?” His hands went to his head as if by pressing on it he could press himself into the ground, into sanity.
“That is precisely what they’ll do,” Sydney said. “It won’t be immediate, but it is a requirement to establish a House.”
“You’re actually serious.” He sat down hard.
“I am. The only circumstances in which the requirement is waived is if a member of the House has perished in a Turning—the spell is set up to recognize that as a sacrifice as well, the idea being that their magic returns to that waiting pool.”
“That’s why no one treats any of this like a big deal,” he said. “Because losing a challenge is some fucked up get out of jail free card.”
She nodded. “Exactly. Otherwise, buying a child is not only an option for those who can’t or don’t wish to have biological offspring, of course. It’s also an option for those who want to guarantee both their bloodline and their access to comfortable magic. With enough money, you can buy anything.”
“But you said ‘sacrifice.’?” Horror in every word.
“I did.” Quiet, even. The voice in which the doctor tells you that she’s very sorry but the tumor is malignant and surgery is no longer an option.
“You don’t mean they actually kill the kids, do you? You can’t mean that.”
“The sacrifices aren’t killed immediately or directly. It’s a process. An extraction, or distillation, to choose the most clinical terms. Clinical terms make it easier to talk about, and ease is needed, at least in polite company, as most sacrifices don’t survive the process.
“The place those sacrifices are sent, it pulls magic out of them. Through pain, through suffering. Through everything the magicians of the Unseen World should have to endure themselves to access power.
“Does it hurt, Laurent, when you cast spells?” Gentle, the words so gentle, as if he might break when she spoke them.
“It used to,” he said. “When I first started. Before I met Grey and started going to school here. I’d get headaches. Migraines. Nausea, auras, the whole thing. I figured they stopped because I’d learned the right way to do things.”
“No,” Sydney said. “That’s not why they stopped. They stopped because someone else started paying your price.”
“Oh God.” Laurent clutched his hand over his mouth and stumbled from the room.
Sydney sat, unmoving, on the barstool, looking out over the city as she listened to the sounds of retching, of the flush of the toilet, the running water. Laurent was red-eyed and ashen when he returned.
“Not all of the children die of it,” Sydney continued as if there had been no interruption. “Most do, yes. But some very few of us come out of it quite well. For a certain definition of quite well, anyway. We learn to use our own power, and to wield it in ways most of the Unseen World can’t imagine.”
“What’s a—wait. You said ‘us.’ Sydney, you said ‘us.’ You weren’t—” He looked sick again.
“I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors by now, the things people are saying about me.”
He nodded. “Something about you being a Shadow. I figured it was another thing like being an outsider.”
“It’s called the House of Shadows, the place we’re sent. And yes, I came from there. I was the sacrifice of a House.” She almost, almost told him which one then, but bit the words back. Too soon to ask him to process that as well. Too much was still uncertain. And he was still asking questions. “I earned my way out. Only one other has in living memory—Verenice Tenebrae.”
Laurent nodded slowly. “I knew she was a big deal, that people talked about her. I didn’t really pay attention to why. Wait—only you two? Out of . . . ?”
“A lot,” Sydney said. “More than either of us want to count. Shadows has been around for more than one hundred years. Long enough for people to be used to the idea, for this to be the way it’s always been done. For people to feel sad, a little, if they actually think about it, but goodness, the way things were before must have been so much worse.”
He shuddered. “But if it’s so rare, how did you get out? Are you okay? If you’re not a sacrifice anymore, what are you now?”
So she told him. Told him about Shadows, about learning magic, about learning to conceal every part of herself. About the contract that kept her in bond. Showed him the ragged edges of her shadow, where she had cut bits away to make payments. Took a cloth and scrubbed off the makeup that covered the scars on her hands and arms that magic didn’t hide.
Laurent winced, then said, “Okay. How much?”
“How much what?” Puzzled.
“To pay off your contract.”
“What does it matter?” The reason for his curiosity wasn’t any clearer to her.
“Because I’ll buy them out. This hold they have on you is bullshit. You’re a person—you shouldn’t be fucking owned.”
Sydney looked at him, long and steady. “You mean that, don’t you?”