Chapter 23 #2
Usually, she was early. She’d never once been this late.
He had his hand on the telephone to dial her house, bugs be damned, because surely an employer could check up on the whereabouts of his employee, when he heard footsteps on the porch.
The knock at the door wasn’t her shave-and-a-haircut.
But when he squinted through the peephole, there she stood.
She looked on edge but not as if some new terrible incident had happened, so he left her in the hall while he checked the house.
When he came back downstairs, she was in the kitchen, sipping a cup of coffee.
“Is everything all right?” he asked.
“Felt rotten, but I think I’ve recovered.” She sounded off—her voice had a rasp to it, and she winced. “Coffee?”
She slid his cup into his hands. It was warm—she’d refilled it for him—so he drank some this time. “What happened?” he asked.
“Stress. Exhaustion.”
No wonder. “Can I get you anything? A brew?”
She shook her head.
He took another sip, trying to work out how best to tell her this information that would pain her. “Beatrix—I heard something troubling from Martinelli.”
Deciding in that moment to show her the picture, not tell her the story, he fetched the book, put it on the table and pointed to the girl in the photo.
She gasped.
He sat, expecting a rush of strong emotion to hit him as it washed over from her, but all he had to contend with were his own conflicted feelings. Which brought on another uncomfortable question.
“Did Miss Knight tell you?” he asked. “Did you already know?”
But as he looked more closely at her—shock and horror all over her face—it didn’t seem possible. She shook her head, still staring at the photograph.
“I don’t know what this is about,” he said, his hangover headache deepening, “but Martinelli says the Secret Service is under orders to keep their distance. That’s bad.
It wouldn’t happen without Draden’s OK, and I can’t think of a reason he would agree to it except to give her anonymity.
If she isn’t the vice president’s daughter, she can join the League.
She can move in with you. She can gain everyone’s trust.”
Beatrix was shaking her head. “She’s under a Vow.”
“Using an assumed name, and who knows if that even works.” He scowled. “Besides—I don’t trust the Vows. They don’t do what you expect, and—” He almost said they didn’t stop Plan B, but it was too raw still to discuss. Instead, he said, “and they won’t protect us against a determined foe.”
Beatrix said nothing, simply stared into her coffee.
“I know she’s your best friend,” he said in a more measured tone. “I know the two of us don’t get along, Miss Knight—Draden—and I, and that’s coloring my perception of this. But she could have told you who she was, and she didn’t.”
“What will you do?” she said, voice more hoarse than before. She drank from her cup, and he did, too, to buy himself more time, but there was no wordsmithing that would make her like the answer.
“We have to tell Lydia,” he said. “I think we’d better do it right now.”
She laid her hand on his. He gave an involuntary jerk of surprise because it was so unusual for her to touch him dayside. Yesterday had been his fault. The time before in the brewing room—his fault. (The whole thing, his fault, his fault.)
“One emergency at a time,” she said. “We can’t delay my call to the police any longer.”
He opened his mouth to argue, then saw the logic in her recommendation.
“Let’s finish our coffee and go over what I’m to say,” she murmured.
They’d talked about that already, dreamside. But he saw the logic in running through it again. He saw the logic in finishing his coffee. So he drank it as he reminded her of what they’d agreed to.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “You look pale.”
He nodded, feeling marginally closer to all right than not, but she didn’t seem satisfied.
“Stand up for a moment,” she said.
He did, and the room spun. She leapt to her feet and helped him back into the chair.
“Rest here for a while,” she said. “We’ll call the police later.”
Yes, that seemed wise. It was the opposite of what she’d said before, but after all, he’d just had a dizzy spell.
She pulled up her chair to his and sat, distractingly close. It therefore took him a few seconds to process what she said next: “While we wait, we should talk about the weapon.”
He blinked at her. “The weapon?”
“Yes,” she said, gazing at him. “We need to.”
An excellent point. He nodded. Then he noticed that her eyes were not the shade of brown they’d always been.
“You look different,” he said.
Calmly, patiently, she said, “No, I’m the same.”
Of course. Yes.
“Where in the forest did you put the weapon? It would be good if you told me.”
Yes, that would be good. Really, he should have told her already. He tried to describe it—take the path to the little clearing, follow the multiflora rose about two hundred feet, look for it deep under the vines—but she thought it would be better if he showed her, and he agreed because it would.
“But first,” she said, “walk me through exactly how it works. The spells, the runes, whatever you must do to use it. You can see why I should know this.”
Yes, he could. He told her, then wrote it down at her request, with a diagram of the complex parts.
“Give me the payload stone,” she murmured, holding out her hand. “It would be better if I have it, just for now.”
Yes. Just for now. He took it from an interior pocket and put it on her outstretched palm, the deathly Ear rune stretching from one end to the other, thin and horrible. He didn’t want it. How could he have kept it in his pocket for months and months?
“Come now,” she said, standing and holding out her other hand. “Let me help you gather what we need.”
She led him to the brewing room, her shoes not making their usual click-click. He looked down. Something about the way her feet moved looked unreal. Almost as if they weren’t making contact with the floor.
“Beatrix,” he said as they crossed the threshold, “your feet—”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said.
He nodded and retrieved his extra demarcation stones and a stick of charcoal.
She asked him for curare and he found it for her, a tincture in a bottle marked with a red DANGER sticker.
She slipped the bottle into one of her coat pockets.
Then they set out for the transmitter, and every time the thought crossed his mind that something was wrong—a small thought, but insistent—it was soothed away by her words.
“This is good,” she said.
Yes.
“This is the right thing to do,” she said.
Of course.
She held his hand and murmured to him in a voice that sounded less and less like hers, but what she said washed his anxieties away like the lapping of ocean waves, over and over, before his disquiet could amount to anything.
He found the transmitter for her and wrestled it from the multiflora rose brambles.
She smiled at him and held out her hand again. “Come with me for a moment. We’ll be right back.”
He thought they would walk somewhere. Then he saw the red leaf in her hand.
They were out the other end of the teleportation stream—standing in some sort of park, Peter blinking in the sunlight—before he could get a word out.
“How—where did you—” he stuttered.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” she whispered into his ear. “It’s perfectly understandable.”
Yes. That was right. They needed reds, she’d managed to get one and that was good. There was nothing to worry about.
Was there?
The uneasy voice in his head was getting louder and more insistent. Something is wrong.
“Everything is all right,” Beatrix said, looking around.
Yes.
No.
He turned and realized where they were: a block away from the Capitol complex, in a decrepit park atop a garage he’d once parked in. He turned back to find her slipping the stone under a metal trashcan.
The full implications struck like lightning, clearing some of the fog from his brain.
He leapt for the stone, hand outstretched.
Then this Beatrix-who-was-not-Beatrix threw an arm around him and the next instant they were back in the Ellicott Mills forest, his hands empty, the payload stone sitting in a spot where it could take out the Capitol, the White House, the Pentagram—and worst of all, the many people living and working in that wide radius.
He had his hand in his pocket, fingers brushing leaves, when the imposter snapped, “Stop that! And don’t say a thing.”
It was Miss Knight—Miss Draden. She still looked like Beatrix (how, how?) but she no longer was trying to imitate Beatrix’s voice. That shock gave way to a worse one: His muscles obeyed her. He could not grip the leaves or form a spellword.
“Lie down,” she said. “Hands out of your pockets.”
He fought the order but only delayed its execution. She pulled out the bottle of curare, paralysis agent in anesthesia brews, and removed the dropper. In his struggle against the compulsion he was under, he managed to stutter, “No, don’t! All—all those people—”
“All those wizards,” she said, eyes dark, face grim.
“You’ll kill hundreds of thousands of people. People,” he shouted, the words getting out more easily now, but the rest of his body barely responding to his desperate mental commands. “More typics than wizards!”
“They chose this life.”
“Children!”
She winced, then shook her head as if to get the thought out of it. “Terrible, but necessary. Stay still, Omnimancer.”
He was overcoming her control of him—muscle by muscle.
With a terrific struggle, he inched his right arm toward his pocket full of leaves, thinking of all the people whose lives hung in the balance: Martinelli, if he was at the Pentagram instead of the New Mexico test site.
Many other people he’d worked with. The sweet grandmother who lived next to his old townhouse, the twin girls who jumped rope in the alley out back, the boys and young men at the Academy—all within a few miles of Capitol Hill.
If a typic could power a mile-and-a-half explosion, wouldn’t a wizard fuel something far worse?
She leapt on him, grabbing his arm, holding the dropper full of liquid paralysis in her other hand. Try as he might, he couldn’t dislodge her or even move his neck. All he could do was press his lips together as tightly as they would go.
“Open your mouth,” she ordered. It took every bit of his willpower to keep his lips from parting.
“Open your mouth,” she shouted. “Open it!”
Blood bloomed on his tongue, bitten in his effort not to obey. If he could move, there was hope. If he couldn’t—
“I know what you do to Beatrix every night, you goddamned rapist,” she hissed. His mouth opened on instinct as he sucked in a horrified breath, and three drops of the tincture went down his throat.