Chapter 11
“Miss Harper!”
Beatrix and Lydia, walking out of church with Rosemarie and Ella, turned in unison. State Sen. Mitchell Gray strode toward them, an unexpected sight given that his own church was five miles away. He wore a trilby hat and coat the color of his name, his expression grave.
“I’m glad I caught you,” he said. “Can we talk?”
“Yes,” Lydia said. “Here?”
He shook his head. “Somewhere private.”
Lydia glanced at Beatrix, her dilemma obvious. Where?
“The omnimancer’s mansion,” Beatrix said.
“What?” Gray fell back a step. “No.”
This was a man who’d enthusiastically welcomed Peter to town. A chill went down Beatrix’s spine. She stepped closer to Gray and murmured, “Do you have a problem with Wizard Blackwell, Senator?”
“Well …”
“Or is it with wizards in general?”
He hesitated, then nodded.
“It would be the best place to go,” Lydia whispered. “I promise.”
He looked as if he wanted to argue the point, but he stuffed his hands in his coat pockets and said, “Fine.”
Soon after, they were sitting in Peter’s receiving room. He leaned against his desk. “What’s going on?”
Gray turned to Lydia. “Why exactly should I trust him?”
“Hey,” Peter said, voice sharp, “why should we trust you? You told me Miss Harper would undermine me at every opportunity because she’s in the League.”
“I was just trying to—”
“Gentlemen,” Lydia said, the fire and brimstone she usually reserved for speeches seeping in.
Peter had heard one of those speeches before. Gray, apparently, had not. He looked like a man thrown off his train of thought headfirst. Beatrix, who was not especially fond of the man, bit her lip to hold back a grin.
“You should trust Senator Gray because he’s leading the charge to repeal the Twenty-fifth Amendment,” Lydia said to Peter, who raised his eyebrows. Turning to Gray, she added, “And you should trust Omnimancer Blackwell. If not for him, I’d be dead.”
Gray’s mouth fell open. “What? What happened?”
“Wait a minute,” Peter said, and Beatrix could see from his expression that he wasn’t convinced. “What happened to you that you suddenly don’t like wizards?”
Gray leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “My office’s been bugged.”
“Join the club,” Ella muttered, quietly enough that Gray didn’t catch it.
“Bugged how?” Rosemarie said.
“The phone’s tapped. I haven’t seen the tap, but it has to be, because they know things I’ve only said on that phone.
” Gray glared at the floor. “I’ll talk to a legislator who seems supportive of the bill, and the next time I run into them—complete one-eighty.
The third time that happened, I said, ‘What the—the heck,’” he said, in such a way that Beatrix knew “heck” was not the word he used, “and eventually the guy admitted he’d gotten a visit. From a Wizard Smith.”
Beatrix looked at Peter, heart kicking up. “Wizard Smith” was the name two different wizards gave to the League’s treasurer when she was taking money from the magiocracy to inform on them.
Peter cleared his throat. “High forehead, dark glasses, square jaw?”
Gray made a disgusted sound. “No idea. I couldn’t get much out of him.”
“‘Smith’ threatened him?”
“I think it was more subtle than that. And I’m sure the fact that a wizard was onto him immediately didn’t help.”
“OK,” Peter said. “This is what we’ll do. Drive me to your office while I’m under an invisibility spell, and I’ll see what’s there. We should check your home, too. And your car.”
“Thank you,” Gray said, the words clipped. “But Miss Harper, first tell me why you needed your life saved.”
Lydia explained—with more detail than Beatrix would have given, including the run-up to the conference and all the sabotage attempts, but without any hint of female magic use. She implied that Beatrix had been standing close enough to push her out of the way when Peter called out his warning.
“And now our house is bugged,” she said.
Gray, who’d looked increasingly horrified through this recitation, let out a long breath. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Would you have believed it before last week?”
He pressed his lips together, deflating. “Well—I don’t know.”
“Exactly.”
“But you’ve let me go blithely along without telling me the true risks involved,” he said. He sounded angry, not afraid, which was something.
“Their specialty is sabotage,” Lydia said. “Their most recent action targeting us was to bug the house, and that speaks volumes about their intentions.”
Beatrix almost objected, but she caught herself in time. Of course Lydia sounded nonchalant. She was trying to calm Gray.
Gray, for his part, gave a bitter huff of a laugh. “Oh, so it’s just my career and reputation I have to worry about.”
“High risk, high reward,” Rosemarie said. “If nothing changes, your career will never include a seat in Congress.”
“We just need to keep pace with them, Senator,” Lydia said. “That’s all—not even a step ahead. We have numbers on our side. How many wizards sit on state legislatures?”
“Not many,” he admitted.
“And how many state legislators would rather sit in Congress?”
“Miss Harper—”
“If they’re trying to sabotage you, they’re worried you’ll succeed.”
That silenced him.
Lydia stood, looking him in the eye. “You can do this. I wouldn’t have asked you to take the lead if I had any doubts.”
He held her gaze, jaw tight. Beatrix gripped her chair. If he gave up, would anyone in the legislature be willing to take up the cause? What if he switched sides and told the wizards the League knew about the bugging?
“All right,” Gray said. “But from now on, don’t keep me in the dark. I’m serious.”
“I won’t,” Lydia said, offering him her hand. “Anything you need to know, I will tell you.”
He hesitated. But he shook on it. “Omnimancer?”
Peter nodded, pushing away from his desk. He glanced at Beatrix, and her heart—that co-opted organ—sped up. “Are you coming back later, Miss Harper?”
“Yes. If that’s all right.”
His half-smile spoke volumes. But all he said was, “This might take a few hours.”
So much of his life was now caught up in their problems. Even Garrett would likely no longer be an issue for him if not for her.
“Thank you,” she murmured, and felt how very insufficient that was.
Gray’s office phone was indeed tapped. So was his home phone. He had an audio recorder hanging over each of his desks for good measure—one in Annapolis, the other on the outskirts of Ellicott Mills.
“On the bright side, it could be worse,” Peter said on the drive back to his house in Gray’s unmolested pickup truck. “You could have recording devices all through your house.”
Gray glowered at the road. “I am positively gleeful.”
“You can go to the press about this, you know.”
“You’d cast the revealing spell for the reporters?” Gray sounded highly skeptical. “You’d out yourself as a League supporter?”
He was right—there would be no way around it. Peter hesitated.
“Never mind.” Gray shook his head. “I don’t think it would help at this stage. How could I prove it was officially sanctioned? I mean, they could say you did it.”
That was true. But it was also a convenient excuse for doing nothing.
“Did you?” Gray added, and it took Peter a second to realize what he meant.
“No, Senator, I did not install those bugs,” he snapped. “My phone is tapped, too.”
Gray made a hrm sound that was not a satisfying stand-in for an apology.
“For now, talk to your colleagues in hallways and meeting rooms,” Peter said. “That’s where most of the work gets done anyway, isn’t it?”
Gray glanced at him, frowning. “So you’re really, honest-to-God helping those ladies.”
“Yes.”
“Why?” The way Gray asked, it sounded as if he couldn’t conceive of a reason anyone would.
This was the man they were counting on to get the Constitution changed and stop more attempts on Lydia Harper’s life? He stared at Gray. “You have doubts about whether the Twenty-fifth Amendment is a bad idea, do you?”
“Not even a shred of a doubt, but I’d have thought you’d have plenty.”
“Wrong is wrong.”
Gray was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You’re interested in Lydia Harper, aren’t you.”
“No.” He wasn’t sure whether to laugh at this close-but-no-cigar guess or chew Gray out for implying that the only reason to work alongside the League was to get under a woman’s skirt. “Why would you think so?”
Gray was glaring again. “Why shouldn’t I? Everyone makes such a fuss about what a beauty she is.”
Lydia Harper looked like her mother. That would never be a recommendation. More importantly, she wasn’t Beatrix.
“I heard her speak in Baltimore, and I was impressed,” Peter said. “Then I saw firsthand how much she frightens the magiocracy. This movement she’s organizing, it’s our best chance to get change.”
Next to him, Gray was nodding. “All right. Just as long as you’re on board because you believe in this.”
Well—that was the right thing to say. Peter kept his voice light as he replied, “And you? Any other interests you’d like to declare?”
Gray, making the tricky turn up Peter’s driveway at just that moment, bit his lip. Then he gave a self-deprecating smile. “Isn’t Congress reason enough?”
Later—when Beatrix returned with Lydia, Ella and Rosemarie in tow—they sat in the receiving room again as Peter explained what he’d found.
And importantly, what he hadn’t found: nothing in the truck, in the hearing rooms or in the hallways the senator normally traveled. Good news. If you trusted Gray.
“I don’t trust Gray,” Beatrix said after Peter went back to his attic and R&D.
Ella nodded. “He strikes me as the sort to switch sides if the going gets tough.”
“I don’t like that the man’s one demand was for us to tell him everything,” said Rosemarie, who wasn’t frequently in agreement with them. “The whole thing could be a ruse. He might already be working with the magiocracy.”