Chapter 7
Bare tree branches rose darkly above her, a more comforting sight than the house with its warmly lit windows behind. Beatrix stepped into the gazebo and collapsed on the bench, looking at the forest instead of the home the magiocracy had turned against her.
Peter, still invisible, cleared his throat. “Will you be all right?”
She nodded.
“You stripped the bespelled sheets off the beds?”
“Yes. I wore rubber gloves,” she added, anticipating his question.
“Good. Get rid of them—sheets and gloves. There’s no way to know what those spells were about.”
She nodded again, exhaustion gaining on her. She was very, very tired of all this.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, almost as if he were apologizing for something he’d done, and her throat closed up as she tried to tell him what his help meant.
More than anything now, it meant added guilt.
“Thank you,” she choked out at last, and he left. Necessary, she reminded herself. For Lydia. Any day could be the day, as this afternoon had so clearly shown.
She ought to go to bed. But now it had a tele-vision camera pointed at it. Free conversations in the house, let alone any female spellcasting, would be impossible. Even the bathrooms had audio recorders, for God’s sake. Magic experiments with Ella were over.
The back door creaked open and clicked shut. She turned to see Ella walking toward her, braid no longer coiled around her head but instead hanging down her back.
“Can we talk here?” Ella whispered.
Beatrix nodded. No bugs, and Peter had cast a sound-dampening spell on the gazebo before he’d left.
Ella looked at her. “Are you all right?”
She stopped trying to hold her head up and let it droop into her hands. “Ella, this is … this is just …”
“I know. I know.” In exactly the same tone, she added: “On the upside, all this recording equipment will be great for our future biographers.”
The laughter caught Beatrix sideways, forcing its way out.
“Or perhaps we’ll just confuse them.” Ella pitched her voice lower and mimed taking notes. “‘Subjects said nothing of substance. Unclear how they had wherewithal to run major organization.’”
Beatrix tried to get control of what threatened to become hysterical giggles.
“I propose a contest,” Ella said. “The person who manages to say the blandest thing each day wins.”
“Not”—Beatrix bent over, chest twitching with the effort to stop laughing like a crazy person—“not including Miss Massey, of course.”
“Of course.”
She sat up to find Ella wearing that grin, the one suggesting that life was a series of jokes, if you simply looked hard enough.
“Because that wouldn’t be a fair competition for the rest of us,” Ella said, and they both lost it.
It felt so good to laugh like this, helplessly and completely. How long had it been? Before the attempt on Lydia’s life? Before the Vows?
Beatrix sighed, the seriousness of the situation dampening the humor. “We’ll have to say some supposedly substantive things, you know, or they’ll realize something’s up.” Much like she was on the hook to sleep in her camera-monitored bed.
But Ella grinned, and her grin made the situation more bearable. “I fully intend to have fun making those things up.”
Ella was right—they would manage this. They knew where all the recording devices were, thanks to Peter. And nothing had happened to Lydia.
Yet.
“Thank you for everything,” she said quickly, trying to get her mind off that ominous yet. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Ella.”
Ella hugged her. “That’s what friends are for—to make jokes about being surveilled by wizards.”
Eventually, though, they could put off going to bed no longer.
Beatrix trudged back to the house with Ella, feet heavier with each step.
She passed through the kitchen, with its camera and audio recorders, walked under the device in the hallway and changed into nightclothes in the bathroom, where at least the magiocracy would not be able to see.
Their bedroom was dark and silent. Lydia faced the wall, taking the deep, even breaths of the sound asleep. Beatrix crept to her own bed and lay there, unable to get her mind off the invisible cameras pointing at them both. At her.
Then it struck her—the essential irony of the situation. When she did fall asleep, however long it took, she would have sex with a man to whom she was not married. Exactly what the wizards wanted to record—and would never get.
Hah.
“Hah!” Peter grinned down at her, running his fingers along her warm skin. “Now I’ve another good reason to have you in every conceivable way we can think of: Sticking it to the magiocracy.”
She stretched, pressing against him, making his pulse leap. “Do you ever miss it? Being part of the magiocracy you’re now sticking it to?”
That didn’t require a second’s thought. “No.”
“What do you miss? You had a life in D.C., and you gave it all up.”
He lay down beside her, slipping a hand in hers. “I miss my home. A few of the people—Tim Martinelli, my deputy. The café around the corner and the candy shop a few blocks away.”
It wasn’t a lot, now that he thought of it. He didn’t miss the work or the social scene or the entertainment.
She shifted, cupping his face with her free hand. “You weren’t happy.”
He wouldn’t have said that at the time. But he hadn’t been, not really.
“And now you’re stuck in the town you were glad to see the back of twenty years ago,” she said, “trying to find a defense to Project 96 and running interference for us against the most powerful people in the country. Hardly an improvement.”
He snorted. “Don’t forget ‘possibly under investigation for stealing military secrets.’”
“But I thought Garrett hasn’t—”
“No,” he said, pulling her closer. “He hasn’t been back. Not since that night.”
The one good thing about the evening a few weeks earlier when Garrett nearly killed him by accident—besides not dying, anyway—was the certainty that the man had nothing on him. Not even something circumstantial. Otherwise, he would surely have made a threat of it.
Instead, Garrett treated him like a rival. Which was both true and utterly false.
“One other item for your list,” he said, moving their entwined hands to lay them on his chest. “In love with a woman who will never love me back.”
She said nothing at first, and he thought he’d gone too far. But then she murmured, “It feels as if I do, and I won’t know for certain unless you stop loving me, or …”
He waited before supplying the words himself, the possibility that loomed before him like the outstretched finger of the Ghost of Christmas Future. “Or I die.”
She laid her head on his shoulder. “In here, it’s enough, that feeling. Outside—in the harsh light of reality—”
“—you remember your principles.”
“Awkward things, principles.”
They lay silently for a while, Beatrix pressed so close that his senses were full of her—the hint of orange from her hair, the swell of her hip against his hand, her flushed cheeks, her deep sigh.
“You’ll hate me eventually,” she said, so quietly he almost missed it.
“No,” he said. “Never.”
She kissed him. He slid his hand from her hip to her bottom, lust jolting through him as she moaned, and—
He sat up in his dark bedroom, the real bedroom, breathing hard. What?
A split second later, his senses followed him out of the dream and he felt his charmed locket burning against his chest.
Well, fuck.
He grabbed a leaf from his coat, adrenaline making his movements jerky, and cast the identification spell.
High cheekbones, slightly aquiline nose.
Garrett.
Beatrix—he dove for his car keys on the nightstand as he zipped up his pants. The wizard might already be in her house, and she would be asleep, everyone there was asleep. He cast an invisibility spell on himself as an afterthought.
Five seconds later, his bedroom door opened.
Garrett. In his room. Just as invisible as he was.
Peter stood next to his nightstand, heart in his throat, trying not to move or breathe too loudly or think about the purpose for which Garrett had shown up in the middle of the night. Garrett, who was almost certainly assigned to the Army’s spies-and-assassins wizard unit.
He couldn’t tell where in the room the man was. Garrett moved with magically silenced feet. Peter had no idea how to replicate the effect, though even if he did, casting it now would give himself away.
He scanned the room, a bead of sweat trickling down his neck. With his back against the wall and the need to take shallow breaths, it was like their last encounter all over again.
Where was Garrett, where?
Something brushed against his shin. Fabric. A wizard’s coat.
The urge to run was overwhelming. He had never pegged himself as a coward before, but until he came back to Ellicott Mills, there had never been a wizard looking to do him physical harm, let alone one trained for combat.
He had two red leaves, the fuel powerful enough for teleportation spells, in a breast pocket of his coat. He could cast the spell and be gone.
But then he’d be down to a single red, with no way to acquire more. Two was already too few, given the types of emergencies Beatrix and her sister were likely to face. He’d promised her he would protect Lydia. He made himself stay where he was.
Then a voice—Garrett’s, angry—called out, “Gefaran!” Peter’s locket flared hot once again as Garrett teleported out.
He pushed off the wall, shaky, wary, and went through the entire house, demarcating each room and hallway to reassure himself that Garrett hadn’t simply teleported somewhere else in the building.
Then he went outside, buried spare demarcation stones in a generous circle around the house and rigged up a second warning system with his grandmother’s locket, tucked away for years in a keepsake box.
The locket already around his neck picked up on spells anywhere in town, other than those cast by him, Beatrix, Miss Knight and Miss Dane.
The new one would flare hot only if the spellcasting happened in the house or immediately outside it.