Chapter 20 #2
With her right hand, she cast the spell to take down the shielding.
With her left, she poured out perhaps a third of the bottle behind her back.
As he pulled her from the house, she let the rest flow out on the porch, stairs, sidewalk.
Even as she did it, she knew it was probably hopeless.
Would Peter really see it as a warning? If he was puzzling about her absence in the house when Garrett returned from wherever he was about to take her …
Garrett pulled her into the forest with an iron grip on her arm. It was all she could do to put one foot in front of the other.
A practically incoherent Mr. Sederey met him in the driveway. “Here—Omnimancer—here!”
Miss Sederey was in the kitchen, arms in water in the sink, moaning as her mother supported her. Her legs buckled as they moved her to the living room sofa. “Oh, it hurts, it hurts,” she cried.
No wonder. Her arms were bright red from her wrists to her elbows. Fixable, but terrible until that point. He cast cooling, healing and numbing spells in quick succession.
“Better?” he said, kneeling beside the couch.
She slumped over, eyes fluttering shut.
“Lillian!” Mrs. Sederey clutched at her husband. “My God, she’s dead!”
His stomach gave a horrible swoop even though he was sure that wasn’t the case. He grabbed her wrist and found a steady pulse. “No, no, just fainted.”
Mrs. Sederey looked faint herself. Mr. Sederey led her to a chair.
“As soon as she comes to, she should feel much better.” Peter swallowed hard to combat an unexpected, rising queasiness.
He’d seen worse burns and hadn’t reacted like this before.
“The spellwork needs to be repeated once per minute for five minutes to really set in. The healing won’t be immediate—the skin will still be raw—but it will take a good deal of the edge off the pain. ”
The house was dead silent as the minutes ticked by. Once he cast the final round, he pulled the aloe from his coat and squeezed a generous dollop on one of her arms.
Miss Sederey sat bolt upright with the surprised laughter of someone unexpectedly tickled. Quick as a wink, her expression shifted to a grimace. She moaned. She cried.
He stared at her. Then he grabbed a leaf and cast the diagnostic spell.
Green. Both arms glowed green, perfectly healthy, which they couldn’t be at this point if she’d truly burned herself. In fact, the skin was still an angry red below the glowing spell. What had she done to make herself look as if she’d been burned? What on earth had she been thinking?
“Miss Sederey,” he said, “have you forgotten our discussion?”
She continued to groan, but it sounded thin. Her cheeks were now as red as her fake burn.
“The spell I just cast shows nothing at all wrong with your arms,” he said, glaring at her. “Can you think why that would be?”
Her eyes widened. Her groaning stopped.
“Shall I share my theory with your parents?” he said, turning toward her father and mother, who looked thoroughly befuddled.
“No!” She didn’t sound nearly as upset as he’d expected. She sounded angry. “That’s not why, Omnimancer. Honestly—you’re not the only wizard in the world!”
His heart lurched. “What?”
“You’re—you’re not the only man, I mean,” she stuttered.
“Did another wizard ask you to do this?” His voice shook.
“No!” she said. “I burned myself, and you’ve healed me! That’s what happened! I haven’t talked to any wizards!”
He cast one more spell on her arms—an illusion countercharm—and the awful burn vanished.
He didn’t stay to find out who had wanted to lure him from the house. He grabbed the red leaf from his coat—the last one—and teleported.
After they’d gone a short way into the woods, Garrett clicked something into place around her right wrist—it was invisible, but it felt like a shackle. She heard the jingle of metal against metal.
“What are you doing?” she asked, voice trembling. She tried to take a step backward and realized he’d chained her to a tree.
“When Blackwell returns, I’m taking him into custody,” Garrett said. “Then I’ll come back for you.”
She looked the way they’d come in mute horror. She could see the house from here, just barely, but they were far enough away that Peter would be unlikely to notice her—certainly too far to hear her yell. Garrett could swoop in and teleport Peter away before he had any idea what had happened.
The warning she’d left on the porch was useless. What could she do? She thought of knitting, but no—she’d managed so little with it, and nothing that would help her now.
Better to talk. Distract.
“You haven’t asked me what happened,” she said.
“I know what happened.” His voice was grim, and it sounded as if he was faced away from her—looking toward the house, watching for Peter.
“Really?” Anger began to give her strength. “Do tell me what you know about my life, Wizard Garrett.”
“Theo!” His name echoed off the trees. “My name,” he said, the sound suggesting he’d turned around to look at her, “is Theo. Why didn’t you trust me? The minute he asked you to do this, you could have come to me and I would have helped you! But you chose him over me!”
“No, you chose the magiocracy over me!” She glared at him, or at least where she thought he was. “They tried to murder my sister, and you chose them. Can you blame me for seeing the hand of Providence in my ability to cast spells? I have to protect her!”
He sighed. A few seconds of silence passed between them. Then he said: “It was never intended to kill her. I was trying to scare you into stopping before the tactics got ugly.”
She gaped at him. All she could manage was a weak, “What?”
“Believe me when I say that I know what character assassination looks like, and I refuse to let that happen to you,” he said.
“You’re just as much a target as your sister, Beatrix.
More, because you’re locked up every day in that house with an unmarried man.
So when we got the call that your sister had won the election, I made the crane fall.
I aimed it so it would be close, but it wouldn’t hit her. I did it for you.”
Beatrix leaned against the tree behind her for support. The whole world felt like it was shifting around her.
Lydia had been right.
“You almost got yourself killed by coming out of nowhere to save her,” he said, sounding angry—at her.
“And after all that, you were even more determined to keep marching on. My God, you’ve broken the law!
Why didn’t you listen to me, Beatrix? Tell me, why must you insist on tilting at windmills instead of living a normal life that makes us happy? ”
All the fear, all the heartache, all the lies over Plan B—none of it had been necessary.
“You made me believe my sister was in mortal danger,” she said, very slowly, “because you were concerned about my reputation. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I couldn’t think of any other way to convince you.”
“And you’re wondering why it is that I don’t trust you?” she shouted.
“Keep your voice down,” he hissed. “I was only thinking of you. Who else in your life prioritizes you over everyone, Beatrix? Who?”
Peter. Tears welled up; she blinked to try to stop them from falling. She had not done the same for him.
“Say my name,” Garrett bit out with sudden, frenzied urgency.
This was unnerving in a way that had nothing to do with the shackle around her wrist or the looming felony charges. She could feel the warmth from his too-close face.
“Say it!”
“Theo,” she said, her voice cracking.
“What is Blackwell to you? Tell me!” He grabbed her with hands she could not see, the fierceness of it stealing the air from her lungs. “Tell me! Tell me, God damn it!”
The possibility that her life might be in danger—not Lydia’s, hers—shot through her like a canon blast.
“He’s my employer.” Her voice quavered. She took a shaky breath. “When you said I chose him over you—I never chose him in the way that you meant. That’s the truth.”
It was, in the letter-of-the-law sense.
Then—as ghostly hands cupped her face, as Garrett said in a very different tone, “I love you, you must believe me”—she saw Peter materialize near the house.
He ran flat out for the door, pulling a leaf from his pocket and turning himself invisible before he reached it.
Looking straight through the equally invisible Garrett, she saw the door open and close as if by itself.
Peter was inside—and he knew something was wrong.
Garrett, still holding her, had missed the whole thing.
“Beatrix, say something!” he demanded.
“You’ve chained me to a tree,” she whispered. “You’re going to turn me over to them. I don’t think love enters into it.”
“I’m not going to turn you over,” he said. “I’m going to marry you.”
Peter stood in the brewing room, heartbeat roaring in his ears.
The dark liquid in the hallway behind him and the amber brew dripping down a counter in front of him, broken glass glinting on the floor, eloquently confirmed his worst fears.
How had the wizard, whoever it was—Garrett, it had to be Garrett—slipped into the house without them knowing? Where had he taken her?
Beatrix—arrested. Her sister’s efforts—ruined. And all because he’d wrongly thought there was no way for a wizard to get into the house without setting off their charms.
Wait. His heart jangled. If his charms never went off, shouldn’t that also mean the wizard hadn’t teleported away with her?
Couldn’t they still be in town?
He rushed to the cellar, thinking the back way out would be safest—and there he found an answer to one of his questions.
The glass pane for the lone window lay in pieces on the floor.
The window was in reach of the door handle, which unlocked if you turned it from the inside.
The whole procedure could have been done in less than the six seconds the house had gone unprotected when he left for the Sederey farm.