Chapter 6
The knock on the door wasn’t Beatrix’s. Rap, rap, rap. Miss Knight stood on the porch, dark hair twined around her head in her usual braid.
“Omnimancer,” she said, her steady gaze suggesting deep stores of animosity.
“Miss Knight. I’m afraid Miss Harper isn’t here—”
She ducked under his outstretched arm to get into the house. “Good. I’ve been looking for an opportunity to talk to you. Alone.”
Not today. He couldn’t handle it today.
“Well?” she said.
Short of tossing her out, there really was no way around it. He walked into the receiving room, putting the massive desk between them.
“Do you understand,” she said, carefully enunciating each word, “what you are doing to Beatrix?”
He opened his mouth, trying to formulate an answer.
“You’re making her ill,” Miss Knight said, and that was not one of the half-dozen choices he’d considered.
“What?” he said, the question harsh with urgency. Were the panic attacks his fault somehow?
She shot him an impatient look. “I know what you’ve done, Omnimancer. She’s trapped in a nightmare relationship with a man who’s twisting her feelings and driving her out of her mind.”
He sighed. It was too much to hope that Beatrix hadn’t told her best friend about that. He desperately wanted to tell someone, and Miss Knight at least was under a Vow.
“It’s a nightmare for me, too,” he murmured.
Miss Knight put her hands on the desk between them. “Then what are you going to do about it?”
“The Vows have fused, and we can’t—”
“You can leave,” she said. “Go somewhere else, somewhere out of state. Distance will make a difference, Omnimancer—or don’t you want to fix the problem?”
He stared at her. Apparently Beatrix hadn’t told her everything.
“Miss Knight,” he said, trying to decide how to explain dreamside.
“Don’t you dare tell me you’re doing her more good than harm by helping the League,” she said, not bothering to wait. “You know what I think? I think you planned this.”
The accusation was outrageous and patently unfair. But it contained a kernel of truth. None of this would have happened had he not set out to rope Beatrix into omnimancing, and he’d given zero thought to what his plan would entail for her.
“Get out,” he said.
“No.”
“You made her take that last Vow!” He slammed his fist on the desk. “This is as much your fault as mine!”
She stepped forward, glaring at him. “That’s an awfully thin claim, considering that I told her she could make it to me but you insisted she make it to you. And now you’re tailing her to ensure her activities conform to your idea of a proper wizard’s assistant!”
He sucked in a breath. Beatrix had told her. It was harder to take, somehow, than Beatrix telling her about the Vows’ awful side effect—perhaps because that was accidental, whereas he had spied on her quite intentionally.
“Is the thought that Beatrix might occasionally be beyond your control so terrible for you to bear?” Miss Knight asked.
“I’m not trying to control her,” he said, hating that he’d done just that with the first Vow, had controlled her so fully that she couldn’t have even blinked if he’d told her not to move. “Of the two of us, who has more influence with her—you or me? Have you thought about that?”
“Just what are you—”
He yelped, his charmed locket burning hot against his chest. A wizard had just cast a spell within the town limits. He looked up to see Miss Knight pulling her own charmed locket from under the collar of her dress, eyes wide.
Oh God. “Did yours—”
“Yes,” she said, the tension in that spare word echoing what he felt. The wizard was at the Harpers’. “Lydia—”
Someone hammered on the front door with both fists. Beatrix, back from the Clarks’, no shave-and-a-haircut this time.
“Quick,” he said, running for the car, both women hot on his heels, and shouted “you drive” to Beatrix, hoping that wasn’t asking too much.
He leapt into the passenger seat and started the car from there. Beatrix threw the Pierce-Arrow into reverse, executed a rapid three-point turn and careened down the steep driveway, Miss Knight holding on in the back.
He got his internal organs under control and cast the spell that would show who tripped the lockets’ charm. The oak leaf turned to ashes in his hand and lifted into the air, swirling around. Then it resolved itself. High forehead. Dark glasses. Square jaw. Grim mouth.
He’d completely forgotten to tell Beatrix about seeing this man with Draden. Had that really happened only two days ago?
Beatrix zoomed down Main Street, face pale. “Garrett?”
“No,” he said, wishing it was, despite the nearly fatal run-in he’d had with the wizard. Garrett loved Beatrix, or thought he did. He at least might have some qualms about killing her sister. “It’s—”
“Morse!” Miss Knight sounded appalled.
He turned in his seat, staring at her. “You know him?”
Miss Knight put a hand to her mouth—and then their lockets went hot again. Beatrix cried out, a heartrending sound. He cast the spell a second time; same result.
“It’s the wizard who tapped your phone last month,” he said, trying to remain calm. “Miss Knight, who is he?”
But before she could answer, their lockets flared a third time, immediately followed by a fourth and fifth, and they were in an uproar: curses spilling from his lips, Miss Knight urging Beatrix to go faster, Beatrix making the hairpin turn onto narrow College Avenue at forty miles an hour.
Spells kept coming. She was whispering something he thought was a prayer until he caught the words as she neared her house: This could be the day.
The day she lost her sister.
He closed his eyes, overwhelmed by the horror of it, hardly able to think, and so it wasn’t until Beatrix brought them to a shuddering halt four feet from her front door that he realized their mistake.
This was his car—his flashy, instantly identifiable car.
Coincidence could explain why Miss Knight and Beatrix showed up at this moment, but his sudden appearance would make any intelligent operative wonder.
Shit. He spelled himself invisible, hoping it would make a difference, and caught up with the women as they barged inside.
“Lydia?” Beatrix’s voice shook. “Rosemarie? Miss Massey?”
No one answered. But their lockets flared yet again—a response of a different sort. For a second he thought she would faint. But as he jumped toward her, she clattered into the kitchen.
It was empty. The dining room, too. No one was in the basement or any of the rooms on the second floor, and as they ran up the stairs to the top level, he had visions of all three women laid out on the floor of the master bedroom he once swept, their eyes glassy, their hearts stopped.
Except no one was there, either. It made sense, of course, because if the wizards did kill Lydia, they would make damn sure it looked like an accident. But it was hard to keep hold of that thought with Beatrix’s fear coursing through him, adding to his own.
She wrapped her arms around herself. “Where are they?”
“Let’s check outside,” Miss Knight said, looking out the window to the fallow garden.
As they closed the front door behind them, the charms embedded in their lockets burned again—a few times in quick succession, a brief pause, then more spells.
They looked around the expansive lawn in the fading light, braced for bodies, but finding none.
Finally, perhaps ten minutes after the last time their charms went off, Peter leaned against the gazebo, trying to reason through the shared panic.
The wizard had probably left. Whatever he’d been doing appeared to be done.
And if this Morse wasn’t covering up a triple murder, mightn’t he have been hiding recording equipment in whatever area of the house he thought the League met?
Best to go back in and figure out what they were dealing with.
“I’m heading inside,” he whispered to Beatrix. “Stay out until we know what he’s stuck you with.”
Beatrix reached out a hand and managed to grab his still-invisible arm. “You think he’s gone?”
“Seems likely.”
“Then I need to make a call,” she said, and dashed for the house.
He caught up with her just as she reached the porch. “It’s tapped—”
“I know,” she said.
Then she was through the door and in the study, telephone in hand. Miss Knight followed, bumping into him as she crossed into the room.
“Mayor Croft, I’m so glad you’re still there,” Beatrix said into the receiver, the words tumbling out in a rush. “Have you seen Lydia this afternoon?”
Her face cleared at his answer. She let out a great whooshing breath and he sagged against the doorway, weak with their combined relief.
“Oh—oh, good,” she said, and Peter knew she was holding back so the people who might listen to the conversation later wouldn’t realize how worried she had been.
She sat in the chair by the phone. “When were they there?”
Then she said “oh,” but it was a markedly different “oh.” She said, “I see,” and, “Thank you very much, Mayor,” and put the phone in its cradle, tensed up all over again.
“What is it?” Miss Knight said.
“They were all at his store—Lydia, Rosemarie and Miss Massey—but they left an hour ago,” she said, keeping her voice down.
“They might be running other errands,” Miss Knight said.
She shook her head, taking sharp, shallow breaths, her panic bleeding over to him again. “They told him they were going home. Even if you don’t cut through the woods, the walk from the store takes no more than thirty-five minutes. They should have been here before us.”
He forced his own breathing back to a normal pace.
This was not the way the wizards would eliminate a threat—surely not?
He wanted to tell Beatrix so, but he couldn’t tip his hand that he was here.
And he wanted to hold her, but he couldn’t do that, either.
After what had happened today, he couldn’t trust himself to get within a yard of her.
Instead, it was Miss Knight who put her arms around Beatrix, Miss Knight who said, “It’s OK.”