Chapter 1 #2
Every morning, Beatrix woke more on edge than before. Every morning, she thought: This could be the day. If she didn’t do something, she would be driven insane by degrees.
The room went silent. Ella had finished.
Joan straightened to her full height. “So you want me to help protect Lydia.”
“It would be excellent to have another person who could,” Ella said, “but that’s not why we’re telling you.”
“We want to teach you magic,” Beatrix said, leaning in, keeping her voice down, “and have you teach other women. Then those women would teach more women ad infinitum. Joan—we want to start an underground movement.”
“Oh,” Joan said, very quietly.
Ella stepped closer, the three of them forming a tight triangle. “Nearly every woman can do magic, or at least that’s the conclusion the wizards reached in tests decades ago. If we make it so tens of thousands of women actually are doing magic—”
“My God, that would change everything,” Joan said, almost to herself. She looked at them, eyes widening. “We could run for Congress.”
Beatrix nodded. “The Twenty-fifth Amendment says magic users, not wizards—‘only magic users may be elected to national office.’ We could kick the wizards out whether it’s repealed or not.”
Joan considered her. “You don’t think Lydia will succeed?”
“She’s put herself in danger. Terrible danger.” Beatrix closed her eyes for a second and got herself under control. “This is Plan B—give the magiocracy a far bigger problem to contend with so they stop focusing on her altogether.”
“Ah,” Joan said, nodding.
“But you must understand, what we’re proposing is highly illegal,” Beatrix murmured.
“Even attempting to cast spells, if you’re not a wizard, is a felony.
So is teaching magic to anyone who isn’t selected for one of the wizardry academies.
I don’t think they’d arrest many thousands of women stepping forward at once, but a handful operating in secret? No question.”
Joan winced.
“We won’t think any less of you if you decide the risk is too high,” Beatrix added.
Joan glanced at Ella, then back at her. “Could you … give me a moment?”
They did. Beatrix sat on the edge of Joan’s couch, waiting, unable to talk to Ella for fear of bugs, trying to ignore the thought jittering in her head: What have you done.
The idea seemed so good in the safety of her house.
Yes, we must, Ella had said, all strategy and enthusiasm.
But they could end up undermining all of Lydia’s hard work.
They might even irrevocably harm her, never mind the Vow they’d both taken.
For all its implacable force when it kicked in, how could it predict the future?
And Peter. Her employer, teacher, unasked-for lover. The only wizard in Ellicott Mills. Whom else would the feds blame if she were found out, but him?
She felt … She grasped about for how, exactly, and came up with the feeling of being him, in one of their disconcerting linked dreams, as his life spiraled out of control in Washington and he made the fateful decision to come home to Ellicott Mills.
“Calm down,” Ella muttered. “You’re going to damage the couch cushions.”
Beatrix hadn’t even noticed she’d grasped them with both hands.
Ella scooted closer. “This isn’t like you. Even the night Lydia was elected and—well, even that night, you were a lot more composed than the rest of us.”
She hadn’t felt like it. But she supposed she normally managed to keep her internal gyrations to herself. Except now she couldn’t.
Now that she was going directly against Peter’s wishes.
She pressed the palms of her hands to her eyes, beginning to see what was happening. Good God, her Vow to Peter was insidious. It couldn’t physically stop her from doing this—not this—but it could certainly make her feel as if she were making a terrible mistake.
“Beatrix?”
“I’m OK,” she said, taking a deep breath, then another. “I’ll be OK.” And she steeled herself, pressing the emotions that weren’t hers, the ones she disavowed, into a tight ball.
If she could resist him in every situation except their dreams, even with his desire for her thrumming through her veins, feeling so much like actual desire for him—if she could do that, then she could put up her chin and barrel through this.
Just recognizing the problem was a relief, in fact.
Now she could shove all the caustic second thoughts she’d been having into the internal box labeled Peter’s.
The bathroom door opened. Joan’s heels clicked against the floor. Beatrix and Ella jumped to their feet.
Even before Joan opened her mouth, Beatrix knew her answer from the angle of her shoulders and the look in her eyes.
“I agree,” Joan said.
“Good,” Beatrix said, and meant it.
Peter knew why his stomach had been variously sinking, flipping and clenching for seemingly no reason all afternoon—Beatrix—but not what had made her so tense. She hadn’t mentioned anything she would be doing over the weekend, no League events that wizards might be sabotaging.
But then, she hadn’t said much to him for two weeks, not even in dreams.
He debated going to her house and seeing what was wrong, assuming she was at Cedarlawn. But the emotion bleeding through to him wasn’t terror. It would really be better to not engage.
He sighed. The gulf that had opened up between them, just as they’d gotten within arm’s reach, seemed impossible to bridge.
His anger had largely burned itself out—hers too, he thought.
But the distance remained. It wasn’t until she proved her internal compass wasn’t infallible that he realized how much he’d relied on her for navigation through the dangerous waters they both treaded.
But she hadn’t actually done anything yet. Perhaps she never would. When push came to shove, surely careful, watchful Beatrix wouldn’t risk her freedom and her sister’s hard-earned reputation with a wild scheme she’d thought of while flush with new power.
Careful, watchful Beatrix, who’d risked those exact things when she took his ill-advised bait to cast spells in the first place.
He gritted his teeth and tried to concentrate on the runes in front of him, not the insidious thoughts of her that curled around his brain like smoke. He managed it for perhaps ten minutes when a familiar shave-and-a-haircut knock on his front door set every nerve alight.
He took the two flights down at a rapid clip. But the person distorted through the peephole was not her.
“Martinelli,” he said, opening the door to the man who’d been his deputy director, back when he was the Army’s chief weapons developer. Four months and a lifetime ago.
He’d been so busy for most of it that he’d barely had time to worry about whether Tim Martinelli would get his job, or whether it would go to a more inventive, more dangerous researcher. Four months was enough time for a decision.
Martinelli held up a bottle of scotch, the golden liquid glimmering in the afternoon light. “Well, Omnimancer—can I persuade you to stop omnimancing for an hour and have a drink with me?”
His lips quirked of their own accord. “It’s a Saturday. Do you think I do nothing else?”
“You live in a town with one traffic light, boss. What else could you do around here?”
Peter laughed—at the gap between Martinelli’s assumption and reality, mostly—and stepped back to let the man in. “That’s particularly insulting, coming from the office stick-in-the-mud.”
“Less talking, more drinking. Where’s your kitchen?”
Martinelli bustled about the space, finding tumblers and ice, and they retreated to the receiving room.
Peter cast a soundproofing spell out of habit, but he didn’t think Martinelli had come to talk shop.
People who worked on highly sensitive projects were not permitted to share their classified information with those who quit.
He sipped at the alcohol. It slid down his throat with just a hint of bite.
“Good?” Martinelli said.
“Very.” He wanted to ask if it meant the promotion had come through, but he didn’t trust himself to say the words calmly. So he went with, “What’s the occasion?”
“Felt bad for you.”
Peter snorted.
“Also,” Martinelli said, swirling the liquid in his glass, “there’s no one worth insulting with you gone.”
“I miss you, too,” he said, surprised by the strength of the ache in his chest.
He had given up a lot in his escape home—an important job, a big salary, a lovely old townhouse in Washington—but the loss he felt most deeply was companionship.
No one here was his friend. Most in Ellicott Mills wanted something from him, granted, but he unnerved them.
The League women distrusted him. And Beatrix—
But that was his own fault.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
Martinelli nodded. “How long do you plan to stay out here, decompressing or whatever it is you’re doing?”
What he was doing, besides ironically helping the Women’s League for the Prohibition of Magic, was attempting to neutralize the incredibly dangerous weapon he’d invented for the Army.
An explosion set off by Project 96 could level the downtown of a large city.
He’d arranged matters so the Army had a replica that would eventually degrade, while the original sat hidden in the forest beyond his house.
So—he’d stay for however long it took to counter this portable cataclysm. Assuming he wasn’t arrested or killed first.
“I worked at the Pentagram for years,” he said, aiming for jocular but falling short. “That requires a lot of decompressing.”
Martinelli ran his hands through his hair, long and silver like every other wizard but thinning on top. He looked tired for just a moment, but then he gave that grin of his that made him look slightly maniacal and not at all middle-aged.
“It’s a woman, isn’t it.”
Peter blinked, thrown. “What?”
“You moved here because of a woman. Getting away from or moving closer to?”
“Neither.” He was relieved that Martinelli assumed the reason was sex rather than something job-related, but still: “What do you take me for?”