Chapter 18
Peter made the mistake of sitting in an empty pew the next morning and spent the service tucked next to Miss Sederey.
Then he made the mistake of staying for after-service pastries, since he’d brought them, and had to disentangle himself from Miss Hennessey.
And on the way out, he received not one but two additional dinner invitations he had to decline.
On the bright side, it made skulking invisibly around empty houses seem a relief by comparison.
And he had a lot of skulking to do. First Bel Air, then Severna Park, then Upper Marlboro.
He returned home hours later, tired out and wondering about the advisability of attempting three more the following Sunday.
He would have to play that by ear, he supposed, but at least everyone he’d visited so far had come up clean.
He glanced at his to-do list for the week and realized that, for the first time, he didn’t have a single item on it. None of the town’s collective requests involved personal visits. All his repeat customers, such as Mr. Freelow and his bursitis, were scheduled for later. He’d finally caught up.
The doorbell rang. He went to answer it, laughing under his breath because surely a new request was waiting for him outside, and reflexively glanced in the peephole.
Miss Sederey. Damn it, something more than mere avoidance was clearly required to nip this in the bud. But what? As he hesitated, someone stepped onto the porch behind her. Miss Hennessey. Oh dear God.
“Hello, Alice,” Miss Sederey said, her voice muffled but distinctly cool.
“Lillian.” Miss Hennessey’s salutation held even less warmth.
They looked expectantly at the door. No, there was no way he was answering it now.
“Did you ring the bell?” Miss Hennessey eventually asked.
Miss Sederey—simperingly sweet Miss Sederey—rolled her eyes and scoffed. “Of course I did, you little ninny.”
It really was instructive what people said when they thought you weren’t listening.
“He’s not in, so you can go home,” Miss Sederey added, making shooing motions.
Miss Hennessey crossed her arms. “I’ll leave when you leave.”
“Why are you even here? Expecting to tempt him with offers of cheap cuts of meat and second-rate produce for dinner?”
“My family puts a respectable meal on the table,” Miss Hennessey said.
Even with the distortion of the peephole glass, he could see from the grim set of her jaw that this was not the first time she’d defended herself from such insults.
He began to think her reaction when he’d declined her invitation hadn’t been an act after all.
Miss Sederey gave an unpleasant laugh. “And yet he ate twice with my family, and not at all with yours.”
“He stopped eating with people! You know that!”
“He never would have eaten with you anyway. You’ll never amount to anything, Alice Hennessey. You certainly won’t marry a wizard.”
Peter undid the spell on the house and threw open the door. He glared at the girls, who drew back with identical expressions of shock.
“Has anyone told you, Miss Sederey, what I was before I was a wizard?” he snapped.
She didn’t answer.
“An impoverished bastard child,” he said. “You might well imagine, then, what I think of people who criticize someone for being poor.”
She opened her mouth as if to say something but quickly closed it.
“Those who would have criticized me then but bat their eyelashes at me now,” he added, “are even worse.”
She squeezed her eyes shut.
“For the record,” he said, “I gladly would have eaten with the Hennesseys if I hadn’t been suddenly inundated with invitations from people who didn’t know me at all but were dying to have me court them.”
Miss Hennessey’s cheeks went a mottled red.
“Listen, both of you,” he said, “I’m thirty-three.
If I marry someone, she will be my age, and her feelings for me will have nothing whatsoever to do with my profession or standing in society.
Find young men you actually care about. Better yet, find interests you care about.
But whatever you do, find something other than me because hunting season is over. ”
He slammed the door and enjoyed his righteous anger for all of thirty seconds before regret lapped away at the edges. He could have communicated the same message without yelling. He could have made Miss Sederey reconsider her behavior without strongly implying he despised her.
A soft knock broke the silence. Miss Hennessey, alone this time, stood forlornly on the porch.
“Yes?” he said, more kindly this time.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I wasn’t thinking about you at all. I was trying to prove something to—to her, and that was idiotic.”
“You don’t need to prove anything to people like her,” he said. “Live your life on your terms.”
She nodded, biting her lip. “Were you actually poor?”
“Very.”
“And … and were you …”
“Yes, and orphaned at childbirth. I thought everyone in town knew that story.”
“I suppose the older folks do, but that’s not what they’re gossiping about.” She blushed again. “Well, you know what they are gossiping about. But the point is, you were poor and you got out. You made something of yourself.”
Something, all right.
“I’m going to apply for a grant to go to nursing school,” she said, lifting her chin. “I’m scared, but I’m doing it. Thank you for yelling at me.”
He smiled, feeling a little better. “Every worthwhile goal in life is at least a bit scary. You’ve got the determination to see this one through, judging by the last few weeks.”
She laughed, looking pleased, and turned to go. “Oh!” she said, swinging back around. “I almost forgot the reason I came to see you. I mean, it was a pretext, and it’s probably not that interesting, but did you know that another wizard was outside town yesterday?”
Her intelligence boiled down to this: She was at the edge of the forest beyond her family’s farm, a couple miles outside Ellicott Mills proper, when she noticed footprints in the snow nearby—footprints being freshly made as she watched.
Before she could think of what to do, a wizard appeared above the newest prints, muttering to himself as he dug into his coat.
Out came a flash of red. Pop went the wizard, teleporting away.
Miss Hennessey had seen only the man’s back, not his face, but she’d known at a glance that it wasn’t her town’s omnimancer—too tall.
“He had long silver hair,” she said eagerly. “Oh, wait—that’s not at all helpful, is it.”
“What about his coat?” He tried to keep the question conversational instead of urgent. “Dark green?” Garrett. “Tan?” Morse. Then, swallowing hard, thinking of his friend who might not be his friend: “Yellow?”
Miss Hennessey bit her lip again, frowning. After a moment, she shook her head. “I’m sorry, Omnimancer, I don’t remember. All the appearing and disappearing was a lot more attention-grabbing.”
Peter could think of just one reason a wizard would trek in the snow outside Ellicott Mills, only to teleport away. The man knew or strongly suspected that any spells he cast in town would not go unnoticed—and this was the workaround.
He saw Miss Hennessey off, ran to his bedroom, snipped bits of the hair in one of his lockets—his silver, Beatrix’s brown, Miss Knight’s black and Miss Dane’s gray—and put them in a cobbled-together makeshift locket that would be the third around his neck.
He rushed to the cellar to collect leaves from his too-small pile.
And then he drove a wide circuit around town, five miles outside it at least, to bury yet another set of demarcation stones.
He came home gripped with the vise-tight feeling of time running out. He had to find a defense against Project 96. He had to. He worked in the attic, fueled by desperation and meeting with as much success as most desperate men do.
At nine o’clock that night, the new locket—and only the new locket—burned hot. Garrett’s face stared back at him in the swirling-leaf pattern of the identification spell. Garrett, who surely knew that Beatrix did not work on Sundays. What, what was this about?
“We’ll have to be even more careful,” Beatrix said, face solemn. She lay next to him in bed, clothes on. Neither of them had any urge to stick it to the magiocracy this time.
“I’m not sure what we can do that we’re not already doing.”
“Other than not breaking the law, of course?”
She was joking. Her eyes crinkled, her lips quirked. But he gripped her hand, feeling the full censure of the message she hadn’t meant to convey. “Should we stop?”
She pulled back. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know, but you’re not wrong. We could go back to making the brews together, all spells cast by me.”
“For a few days?”
“For good.”
“Peter, you need that time for R&D.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, unable to look back at her. “I’m getting nowhere.”
So he told her what he’d held back for weeks—how he’d tried and tried to create a magically infused tool that could sense the payload stone and set off an alarm.
But there seemed to be nothing about the stone to be sensed.
Even if he could do it, a country would need many, many thousands of the sensors, each one with a small enough radius so the authorities could quickly narrow down where the payload stone was.
And even then, it would take several minutes to destroy the stone, ringed with protection spells as it was.
A stone could be smuggled in and set off faster than a city could deal with it.
She sighed. “I shouldn’t have suggested it. I’ve sent you down a pointless rabbit hole.”
“No, I still think it’s the best angle of attack. But I’m coming up short.” It was a moment before he could choke out the whole truth: “I don’t think I can do it. I don’t think I can figure out a defense.”
She took his hand. “You can. I know you, Peter Blackwell.”