Chapter 20
It was done with remarkable efficiency. All four women were at home.
In each case, Lydia said she had not known about Plan B, would not have authorized it, appreciated very much their concern for her safety but needed them to do all they could to end the campaign.
Then Beatrix numbly called on their Vows with the words Lydia and Peter—the latter standing invisibly by—had demanded.
Dot looked at her with sympathy, Marilyn with surprise, Clara with irritation.
But it was Joan’s expression, the tight press of her lips and the weariness in her eyes, that truly haunted her.
When it was finally over, she endured an awful, silent dinner alone with her sister, everyone else having eaten already. Then she escaped upstairs to the one place in her house that might offer a bit of solace.
Her parents’ room looked just as it had when they were both still alive. She lay on their bed, inhaling the slightly musty scent of an unused space, and tried to remember the feeling of cuddling up between them here. One more hug, then off to bed with you.
What would her mother and father have thought of everything she’d done the last few months? What would they have thought of Lydia’s work and the risks she didn’t want to acknowledge?
The door creaked, and she jerked up, expecting Lydia. But it was Ella who tiptoed in. She held out a pen and a piece of paper with a single question: What’s happened?
Beatrix took them, heart twisting, knowing she should have informed Ella immediately. Lydia and OB discovered Plan B. It’s been undone.
“No!” Ella put a hand over her mouth, glancing at the ceiling where they knew an invisible audio recorder listened to their every word. “Oh, I—I have a rip in my dress,” she said, voice trembling. “How did this happen?”
Beatrix violently scrawled a single word. Vow.
“I tried not to name you,” she whispered in Ella’s ear, “but I had no control. I’m sorry.”
Ella just shook her head, the twist of her lips communicating not your fault just as well as words could have, and put up a finger to indicate that she would be back. She returned with matches. They watched the note burn to ash, Beatrix wishing the troubles named in it would disappear as easily.
Ella sat next to her on the edge of the bed, shoulder to shoulder, offering silent support.
Beatrix had never felt so close to her, and so very, very far from her sister.
It wasn’t just Lydia’s total disregard for her own safety.
It was what she’d said about the importance of toeing the line: Have you forgotten what I’ve gone through to win this position and how easily I could lose it.
She’d thought Lydia wanted change. Now she wondered if her sister’s true aim was power.
And she didn’t want to think of Peter at all.
But eventually, Ella squeezed her hand and went down to her own bedroom, and Beatrix lay back on her parents’ bed, knowing what awaited her.
For all that she didn’t have to sleep in her bedroom with Lydia, there was no way to avoid sleeping—so to speak—with Peter.
What would their dreamed selves do? Would they apologize to each other for the betrayals? Would they even care?
When she sat up abruptly in Peter’s room, flipped dreamside, he gave her a grave, assessing look from his side of the bed. Then he stood up and walked out.
She stared at the closed door, hyperaware of her heart thudding in her chest. They had never been apart in dreams. Even when they’d argued bitterly about her idea in the first place, weeks ago—even then, they’d thrown themselves at each other the moment they got dreamside.
She told herself this way was better. No yelling. No crying. No confrontation.
She lay on his bed in the silent room, alone, utterly bereft.
Peter let Beatrix in the next morning for her shift, wishing he knew what to say to her. An entire dreamside spent searching for the words was too short.
He still felt angry and wronged. But also deeply sorry, because her fear for her sister was perfectly justified. Guilt had set in, too. She’d gone to some lengths to shield him from her bad idea, and he’d ripped it apart without offering a sufficient alternative.
Still, he kept circling back to this: He couldn’t trust her anymore.
Not because she was untrustworthy—simply because she would do literally anything she thought would protect her sister.
There would be a Plan C, a Plan D, a Plan E, and at some point she would slip past his defenses.
Would she care so very much then about not throwing him under the bus?
He went off to the attic, chest tight.
Hours later, as he finished a late lunch on his own in the kitchen, the telephone rang. “Blackwell,” he said, around his last bite of sandwich.
“Omnimancer! Please help, it’s an emergency!”
“Mr. … Sederey?” he said, taking his best guess.
“Yes! My daughter burned her arms cooking, it’s bad, and you know an ambulance won’t get here for fifteen minutes at the fastest and then it’s another fifteen minutes to the hospital, and she’s in so much pain and doesn’t want to be moved anyway, and isn’t there a spell or something—”
“Yes,” he said immediately because he knew it well—necessary first aid for lab work. “I’ll be there straightaway.”
A muffled wail came through the line.
“Hurry!” Mr. Sederey said, anguish in that single word.
Peter dashed into the brewing room. “Miss Sederey’s burned herself,” he said, wrenching open the refrigerator. “Damn it, where’s the aloe?”
Beatrix plucked the bottle from its hiding place and handed it to him, fingers brushing his in her haste.
Their gazes locked. He turned on his heel, setting his jaw against all the emotions battering him, some of them surely not his, and rushed to the front door.
With shaking hands, he removed the shield spell, clattered onto the porch and put it back up—not his fastest performance.
As he jumped into his car, he wondered whether Mr. and Mrs. Sederey were aware he’d told their daughter off. He wished he’d handled the situation better.
On the other hand, it meant this call was definitely not fakery designed to invite him to dinner.
Beatrix chopped the ingredients for the cold medicine, trying to fall into a soothing rhythm—trying not to think. She cast a spell on the mix.
The horrorstruck exclamation that followed was not hers. But she shared the shocked emotion of the “oh my God” from the doorway where nobody—nobody visible—stood.
Impossible. This was impossible.
“Beatrix!” cried the voice of Wizard Garrett. A hand she could not see grasped her arm. The man who should not have been able to get in said, “What has he done to you?”
Bittersweet pomegranate ghosted up her throat, the Vow’s reminder. Don’t tell. Don’t harm. But it was too late. Peter’s warning rang in her ears: No amount of sealed lips will keep the magiocracy from hauling me off if they discover spellcasting women near Ellicott Mills.
Oh God oh God.
“He—he doesn’t know,” she said, trying anyway. “I just discovered I could do this, and I—I thought if I tried occasionally when he was out—”
“You’re casting spells for your job!” His objection was so explosive that she almost fell backward in her effort to get away from him. His hand tightening on her arm was all that kept her upright. “He clearly knows, or he would wonder how brews got finished while he was gone!”
The room seemed to flicker as her heart beat faster and faster. What could she do? How on earth could she salvage this? Images of the future flashed before her: Prison for her and Peter, ruin for her sister.
Lydia and Peter had been so worried about Plan B. Instead, the work he paid her to do and her sister didn’t object to—the work funding Lydia’s final semester of college—was their undoing.
Garrett stripped off her coat and tossed it away, separating her from her leaves and the extremely thin chance that she could have bested him in a fight involving spells.
But in that instant he was no longer holding on to her, and she ran—grabbing two bottles off the table to throw at him.
The first missed, smashing on the floor.
He was on her again before she could lob the second, but she twisted from his grasp, sped through the brewing-room door and slammed it in his face—right into his forehead, from the sound of it.
He swore. “Beatrix! Get back here!”
Now was the time to teleport, now—if she could do it only at a moment of extreme crisis, surely this qualified? She threw all her weight against the door, closed her eyes and tensed for the jump.
Nothing happened. She could hear Garrett twisting the knob. She felt his weight against the other side of the door. Please, she thought, turning to what had worked when Peter was suffocating in the cellar. Please, please, I must teleport! Please!
Garrett forced himself through, the door flinging her into the wall. He yanked her back and dragged her to the front door as her head spun.
“Undo the spell around the house,” he demanded.
“I don’t know how,” she lied. If he cast the spell—here, inside—Peter’s charms would alert him. That at least would be something.
“Then I’ll show you,” Garrett said with a growl.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to—”
“I haven’t the slightest idea how you’re able to cast anything, but dropping a shielding spell is no harder than what you just did.”
“But why do you need me to—”
“I can’t cast here, or Blackwell will know.”
She felt an instant of utter despair. As he told her the spellword and handed her a leaf, she tried to think of something, anything she could cast on him. Or say to change his mind. Or use to warn Peter.
She had nothing—except the uncorked bottle full of a dark, viscous liquid that was a key ingredient in sore-throat brews. She was still clutching it. He hadn’t taken it from her.