Chapter 24
Beatrix sat bolt upright, heart hammering. It took her a second to realize where she was—in the sitting room, on the couch—and then Lydia was at her side, face pinched with worry.
But it was Rosemarie who took her hand, Rosemarie who murmured, “How are you? Are you all right, my girl?”
Beatrix swallowed, mouth dry, stomach in knots. “What—what happened?”
Lydia shook her head. “You’d just set off for work, and then … We don’t know exactly—you took ill and came back. The doctor couldn’t wake you, but he said all your vitals were fine and it was probably just exhaustion.”
She tried to remember. All she could come up with was one memory, disjointed and odd—the feeling of overwhelming fatigue that hit the moment after Ella suggested it. “How long have I been asleep?”
“About an hour and a half,” Rosemarie said.
Beatrix saw Rosemarie’s notepad on her lap and took it up, scrawling, Did you call OB?
Lydia and Rosemarie exchanged looks. We didn’t think of it until ten minutes ago, Lydia admitted. He didn’t answer.
The anxiety in Beatrix’s stomach congealed into dread. What if he’d changed his mind and left? What if something else had happened—the FBI was back, or a wizard came to check on Garrett and discovered him, or—
Stop, stop. She had to get to Peter’s. He might simply have been in the attic when they called, or the bathroom, or …
But the dread was now zipping through her, lighting her nerves on fire.
She stood up cautiously, neither dizziness nor exhaustion setting in. “I’m much better, and I must go to work.”
Lydia and Rosemarie glanced at each other, but Beatrix said, “I’m really better, I promise you,” so they nodded, Lydia mouthing “good luck.”
“Has anyone seen my coat?”
Lydia gave a thoughtful frown. “I think Ella took it off you—maybe she put it in the closet?”
It wasn’t there. It wasn’t in her room, either, and she didn’t have time to look for it anymore, so she flung on her winter coat—three times heavier but no warmer than the wizard’s coat Peter had made her, shot through with spells—and rushed out the front door to her car.
It didn’t matter what soothing possibilities she offered up to herself. Her body was convinced that something terrible was happening to Peter, and she knew from grim experience that she should never, never ignore that. She didn’t have time for a twenty-minute walk or even a ten-minute run.
But when she turned the key in the ignition, the car spluttered and the engine would not catch. She tried half a dozen more times, to no avail. After all its years of hanging on to life, the vehicle seemed to have picked today to die.
She slammed the door and dashed into the forest, the dread now gripping her heart, tendrilling up her throat, curling into her brain.
She ran flat out until she could not go another step without catching her breath, coming to a shuddering halt in the clearing where she used to read, back when she had a normal life.
Where she once danced with Garrett, before he was dead.
Where Peter, in their first simultaneous dream, kissed her as if his life depended on it.
Her ragged breathing was all she could hear for a moment. Then she caught it: a voice, or voices, deeper in the forest. It sounded like an argument—or someone in trouble.
Peter.
She darted off the path that direction. As some of the noise resolved into words—can’t and don’t and oh God—she realized he was in agony and she was running into a disaster with no leaves at hand.
Whoever was torturing him said nothing. An image of the ever-silent Wizard Morse burst to mind—could she possibly catch him by surprise?
They seemed to be just ahead, perhaps down a slope.
She grabbed a fallen branch as solid as a baseball bat, crept to a tree growing along the edge and peeked around it.
In the center of a small clearing about six feet below lay Peter—flat on his back, arms and legs splayed. Demarcation stones circled him, dark against the thin layer of snow on the ground.
She looked for Morse, the torturer, and saw herself instead.
Her shock was so total that for a few seconds she flatly refused to believe her own eyes. The figure wore her face, her hair, her coat. Then her doppelganger’s mouth opened and Ella’s voice came out.
“You’re in no position to lecture me about morality, Omnimancer,” she said.
What was Ella doing?
Beatrix was on the verge of rushing down the hill to intervene when she caught sight of it—the stone device Peter had once showed her in a dream, thin base flaring into a basin etched with terrible runes. And it all became dreadfully clear.
Somehow, Ella had found out about the weapon. She intended to use it with Peter as fuel. He would die. And if his hypothesis about the weapon was right, he would trigger the largest explosion yet with a death toll of unimaginable scope.
She slumped against the tree she was hiding behind as the horror of the situation threatened to overcome her. Why was this happening? Where was the payload stone? What could she do?
The memory of Peter almost dying in his cellar stole the breath from her lungs: This could be the day. This will be the day—
No, no, no. She gulped air, tightened her grip on the branch and crept down the slope toward Ella, now bending over Peter.
“Please,” he said, his body so unnaturally still that something magical had to be keeping it that way, “please don’t do this! Just kill me. Me, not all those people!”
Ella said nothing. As Beatrix reached the bottom of the slope, five yards from them, he added, “I beg of you, think about the consequences!”
“Says the wizard who made the weapon,” Ella muttered. Three yards away.
“I wish to God I hadn’t made it,” he said—and in that moment, seconds before Beatrix was close enough to strike, a twig cracked under her boot and Ella spun around.
“Stay there,” Ella warned, raising a hand.
Beatrix, still clutching the branch, locked eyes with her. “What are you doing?”
“She’s going to blow up D.C.!” Peter’s voice shook. “She put the payload stone near the Capitol building! Beatrix, she’s the—”
“No, you don’t get to tell her,” Ella shouted. “I will tell her,” and when Beatrix tried to use that bit of distraction to close the gap between them, she found herself yanked six feet off the ground.
“Frederick Draden isn’t my ex-fiancé,” Ella said. “He’s my brother.”
Beatrix, dizzy from the sudden levitation, was too astonished for words.
“I wanted to tell you,” Ella said, looking up at her with what appeared to be anguish, “but how could you ever trust me again? You thought I was the spy last year without knowing who my father is.”
“Ella—”
“So it should have been before, but I’m going to tell you everything now. Everything. Will you listen?”
Beatrix nodded. Talking meant Ella wasn’t setting off the weapon, and there was hope she never would.
Ella screwed up her face in concentration, and then it was her face again, not Beatrix’s. The brown hair darkened like someone flicking a switch, the bun disappearing next, Ella’s encircling braid reappearing.
It was so quiet that Beatrix could hear Peter’s breath catching at the sight. Even with leaves and spellwords, wizards couldn’t do what Ella had just accomplished.
“I’ve got a protection spell on now,” she said. “Just for the record. So don’t try to attack me, just—just listen.” Ella began to pace. “My birth name is Marbella Draden, but I will never be that girl again. I’m Ella Knight. I am. I renounce my father. I renounce everything he stands for.”
“But how did you know about the weapon?” Beatrix asked. “If your father didn’t tell you, then how?”
“I overheard you talking about it. In November, that day we went together to his house on a weekend. I told you I would let myself out, and then I cast an invisibility spell on myself so I could see what he did when he thought no one but you was around.”
Beatrix closed her eyes for a long moment. She remembered that day. That was when Peter told her his fear that a wizard would be the most powerful, disastrous fuel of all.
“This morning,” Ella continued, “I drugged your tea.” Beatrix gasped.
Peter’s sigh suggested he was not nearly so surprised.
“I’m sorry,” Ella said to her, “I saw no way around it. Ayayak root—it puts people into a highly suggestible state, but only once, because your body quickly builds up a resistance.”
Beatrix tried to figure out where to begin with this. She settled on, “How did you get this stuff? How did you even know about it?”
“I went through Garrett’s pockets for his reds and found this, too.”
Beatrix shivered. Garrett had the drug in his pocket? How often had he used it, and for what purposes?
“And I think you can guess how I learned about it: I overheard my lovely father talking about it once.” Ella gave a bitter shake of the head.
“I knew your situation was bad, but I thought we could get him to leave”—she gestured at Peter—“and that would help. But then I discover you’re not safe from him anywhere.
He could be rotting in prison, and still he’d invade your dreams.”
“It’s not like that!” Peter remained stock-still, only his eyes turned their direction. “Beatrix, she thinks I’m—that I’m—”
“I swear to you, he’s not raping me,” Beatrix said urgently. “There’s much less self-control in dreams. I want him, and so I sleep with him. It’s as simple as that. I wish I’d told you, but—God forgive me—I didn’t want you to know that my resolve was lacking.”
“Beatrix,” Ella said, “this is what they do. They make you think you’re complicit.”
“He doesn’t—”
“That’s what happened to me,” Ella said. “That’s what my brother did.”
Beatrix stared down at her, horrorstruck.