Chapter 4 #2
He couldn’t help himself. He opened it. Inside was a diaphanous angel tree-topper and another note. You deserve a proper Christmas.
He sank back against the foot of his bed, head in his hands. Then he pushed himself to his feet and walked out of the house.
Beatrix was on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor, trying to make the old tiles look less dingy, when the doorbell rang.
“Omnimancer!” Rosemarie’s voice carried over with ease, but whatever she said after that was lost to the roar in Beatrix’s ears.
She thought he would wait until that night’s dream to ask. There was only one reason to come in person.
If he called on her Vow, she would have to tell him. The horror he would feel—and she would feel it too, like a flood. It wasn’t simply that he might order her to stop. What if she lost her nerve and ran back to all four women with a plea that they not even start?
“Beatrix!” Rosemarie called.
No. No. Lydia’s life was at stake. She simply wouldn’t do it. She put her forehead to the cool floor, trying to calm herself, and got to her feet.
“Omnimancer,” she said as she walked into the foyer. Her voice quavered. She left it at that.
“I’m sorry to bother you after hours, but I find I need to ask you about one of the ingredients you ordered for the headache brew,” he said.
She led him to the dining room, knowing the conversation would have nothing to do with brews or ingredients.
The moment they crossed over the invisible demarcation line—inside which anything they said would be obscured—he immediately cast a revealing spell.
The room glowed red. The only traces of magic beyond the air around his hands were the twined threads from her chest to his, the insubstantial proof of the Vows that would bind them as long as they both lived.
He dropped the spell and turned, wearing an expression that could only be anguish. “Beatrix … I have to—”
“Do you distrust Rosemarie?” she said in a rush. Anything to delay this moment. “Do you know something I don’t?”
He blinked. “No. No, I just wanted to have a plausible reason for being here in case the magiocracy has managed to sneak in any recording devices under our noses.”
She stared at him, her veneer of calm further thinning. “Do you think they would do it without using magic?”
“Not really.” He sighed. “I’m just being paranoid.”
Which meant he surely had not missed how suspicious his day had been.
“Beatrix—”
“Wait, Mrs. Clark!” The words burst from her, heartfelt—if also a distraction. “What happened? Is she all right?”
“Oh—yes, she’ll be OK. Anemia. Easily treated with a supplement brew. The mayor said he’d put in a rush order for the key ingredient we don’t have.”
Beatrix let out a breath. Impossible to think of Mrs. Clark’s pregnancy difficulties without also thinking of her own mother dying after giving birth to Lydia.
“Listen, I … I need to tell you something,” Peter said.
Tell? Not ask? He wasn’t looking at her. He put his hands on the dining room table and stared down at it.
“I followed you to your meeting tonight,” he murmured. “I spied on you.”
Her heart gave an almighty jerk. She swayed on her feet.
“I was so sure you were going to start your whisper campaign,” he said. “I had to know. I felt that I had to do something.”
Into the widening silence, all she could manage was a brief, shaky question. “Invisibility spell?”
“Yes. Beatrix—I’m so sorry. I could see right away that I’d been wrong.”
She stared at him, hardly able to believe it. Wrong?
“I was stuck in the room at that point and couldn’t leave until you went to the lavatory,” he said. “And then I got back home to find …”
He pressed his hands to his eyes and said, “That was the most wonderful present I’ve ever had. And it couldn’t have been better timed to drive home what a terrible mistake I’d made.”
“You …” Beatrix swallowed. “You were in the room as we discussed the march.”
“Yes.”
“And then you slipped out.”
“Like a thief.”
He’d missed it. He’d been there, could have overheard all their plans, but simply hadn’t followed them to the restroom. They’d avoided discovery by the barest of margins.
“I know full well that I shouldn’t have done it. It was a breach of trust. Again,” he said, and his voice cracked.
Oh, God, she couldn’t take it. She stumbled to a chair and sat.
He took the seat next to her. “I don’t want to spy on you, or badger you dreamside when you have no ability to hold back, or force you to talk by calling on your Vow. I won’t. Just—please, tell me what you’ve decided to do. Tell me of your own volition.”
Could she be sure that anything she did was of her own volition? Anything, at least, besides Plan B?
She wanted to tell him, if “want” wasn’t such a woefully inadequate word for it. Her stomach churned at the thought of continuing to hide this from him. Her hands trembled. Her chest ached.
Oh, her chest ached, all right—precisely where the twined threads that connected them dove, unseen and unasked-for, into the body he’d unwittingly taken over.
And yet if he could undo it, he would. Of all the things she doubted, that was not one of them. Could she really sit here and lie to his face to protect her sister?
This could be the day.
“I …” she gasped out, blinking back tears. “I …” She grasped for the only true thing she was willing to say: “I don’t know what to do.”
There were two ways to take that, and she watched him latch on to the one she hadn’t meant.
He let out a breath, shoulders relaxing.
His jolt of relief washed over to her, zipping to her belly in a strange counterpoint to the tension there.
He said, “I’m not going to repeat the arguments I’ve made too many times already.
But could you make me one promise? Will you tell me when you come to a decision? ”
There was no way to slide around this question. Truth or falsehood. The time had come.
She thought of Lydia, swallowed hard and lifted her chin. “I promise.”
And though she put her head in her hands and cried after he left, she walked out of the dining room knowing she’d done what was morally required of her.
Lydia was her only living relative. She had to take the actions that offered her sister the best chance of surviving this nightmare.
If the situation were reversed and Lydia were Peter’s sister, he would do the exact same thing.