Chapter 24 #3
“If you’re outside it and not in—” she began, rubbing the awful Ear runes off his body.
“It doesn’t make a difference,” he said, and she dredged up another detail from his memories—of animals that moved out of the circle. As long as they’d been inside it when the sequence started, they were inextricably linked to the transmitter and it drew their life force wherever they were.
“No!” She grabbed the lapels of his coat. “I refuse to give up! I won’t! There must be something I can do!”
“Yes, but you’d be risking your life,” he whispered.
“Tell me!”
“Get the stone. Jump it to the desert.”
That would save the city, but not him. And only if she could teleport, which she couldn’t. She’d never been able to replicate whatever it was she’d done to help Lydia, not counting her dreamside cheat method of rearranging the world instead of herself, and—
I’m not sure that’s so very different from magic.
Peter’s dreamside words ringing in her ears, she hissed, “Where’s the stone? Describe the place—sights, sounds, smells!”
“Spirit of Justice park,” he said quickly. “Close by the Capitol, on top of a garage, lousy spot, mostly grass, no one goes there, smells like exhaust, a sidewalk bisects it and the stone is under a metal trashcan just beside the sidewalk …”
She closed her eyes and concentrated, clutching Peter’s motionless hand.
And she could see it, she could see exactly what he meant.
Just as Ella’s chanting recitation ended and she had ninety seconds left before all was lost, she felt the magic catch.
She opened her eyes, heart thundering in her ears.
She and Peter were in a park.
“Is this it?” she cried, jumping to her feet, seeing the grass and the pavement and—oh, the Capitol! The Capitol building!
“Yes!” Peter said. “Quick, do you see a trashcan?”
She saw two, one at each end of the street. She didn’t have time for a bad guess.
“There’s a bare patch of dirt near the can,” Peter shouted.
She saw it. She dashed for it. And there under the can lay the stone, looking like a harmless rock with its rune side out of sight. She grabbed it and ran headlong back to Peter. Even before she got there, he was yelling out details about the test site she’d seen in their dreams:
“Desolate, sand, bits of brown scrub, one two-lane road leading up to the building, nothing from there to the detonation site, the complex is mostly underground and the exterior is an ugly gray, the sun is so hot you can’t bear it at midday, even in the winter—go at least thirty miles out from the building, there’s nothing there, it’s like the moon … ”
She’d been there in a sense already. The magic caught faster this time.
She opened her eyes to a barren landscape, spun around, saw nothing and no one, and flung the stone away from her.
Without knowing exactly how much time she had left but sure it was down to seconds, she fell to her knees and put her entire being to the task of conjuring up the Spirit of Justice park.
Exhaust, grass, two trashcans, Capitol building—
Crackling energy broke her concentration. Sparks like lightning rushed horizontally toward her, the sound escalating to the screech of a hurtling train. Her last thought as Ella’s spellwork overtook her was of Peter, lying on the distant sidewalk. About to die—just like her.
Everything went black.
Then the world snapped back to life around her. Not the desert. The park.
She’d teleported herself, still on her knees, directly beside Peter.
“You did it,” he croaked, gazing up at her. His fingertips brushed hers, a spare bit of movement.
She was alive. He was alive. Somehow they must have short-circuited the bomb—what she saw and heard must have been her fevered imagination. He was alive.
She slipped an arm behind his neck, sitting him up, babbling in dumbfounded relief, “You’re all right, you’re all right.”
“No,” he rasped.
With his face close to hers, she saw what she’d missed. His skin was a chalky white the color of the payload stone. He convulsed suddenly in her arms, blood leaking from his mouth.
She screamed. She had to teleport him—no, she couldn’t, the lexicon said a person with internal injuries wouldn’t survive that—oh God, oh God! “Help! Help us! Help!”
No one came. No one heard.
“What can I do?” she pleaded as he coughed up more blood.
“Nothing,” he said, the word barely above a whisper. “Nothing … you can do.” More coughing, more blood, the faint pressure of his hand on her back as he tried to hold on to her. “Serves me right.”
“No!” she cried, because it didn’t serve him right, he didn’t deserve to die, and no one had tried to save the animals after weapon tests so who was to say she couldn’t save him now?
She pressed her cheek to his and shut her eyes to block out everything but what she wanted.
What knitting required, she now knew, wasn’t panic so much as a monomaniac focus on the details.
She pictured the color rushing back to Peter’s skin, the sharp stench of blood disappearing, his heartbeat steadying, his laughter filling her ears.
She imagined it with gritted teeth as he convulsed against her, moaning between coughs. She redoubled her efforts, but it only got worse.
“Destroy the transmitter,” he gasped, taking a breath that rattled in his chest. “Please—d-don’t let this happen again—promise—”
“I promise,” she said, choking over the words. She couldn’t help herself: She looked at him, and what she saw made more attempts at knitting impossible.
Blood vessels burst like fireworks on his cheek. His eyes rolled back in his head. His cough stopped, everything stopped, the trembling, the convulsions—he wasn’t breathing, his heart wasn’t beating—
Beatrix screamed in incoherent despair.
Then the lessons Rosemarie taught them in middle school rushed back at her with crystal clarity.
She pressed him to the ground and pushed on his chest with both palms, fast fast fast fast, singing a verse of that hoary old jig Rosemarie insisted they practice to: “I’ll see you in my dreams, m’dear, I’ll see you in my dreams; reality is no friend to me, but I’ll see you in my dreams.”
Each word was a dagger to the chest, but it helped her keep the rhythm.
When the verse ended she put her lips to his and breathed oxygen into his lungs, then sang it again, pressing his chest, keeping the blood flowing through his body.
All the while, she tried to think. What did the weapon steal?
Life force, he’d said, but what if his suspicion was right, what if it was magic the weapon took—what if life force and magic were one and the same, and she could provide him some of hers?
“I’ll see you in my dreams,” she said, finishing the verse, and as she bent down to give him oxygen, she kept one hand on his heart and gave a mental push. Take my magic take it take it.
She didn’t know if anything was happening, if it were even possible to share it, but she kept going in a fevered loop: chest compressions and song, oxygen and magic.
Adrenaline was all she had left, powering her past the exhaustion, the horror, the misery, and she was running out of it.
Her compressions slowed. The song came out as a croak.
His body twitched. He was coughing. He was coughing, that meant he was alive—there was still hope—
“What’s going on here?”
She looked up, trying to keep the compressions going. A police officer was striding their way.
“Help!” she cried. “He needs an ambulance! Hurry!”
The officer, a typic, scrambled for his radio.
Beatrix could feel the faint flutter of Peter’s heart and see his chest rising with weak but independent breaths, so she concentrated all her efforts on infusing him with magic.
She pressed out all second thoughts about whether it mattered and imagined it seeping through his skin, rushing to his organs, his blood, every part of his body that was balanced on the knife’s edge between life and death.
The ambulance arrived. Medics intervened, one of them moving her aside and asking what had happened.
“I—I don’t know,” she stuttered, at a loss for what to say, half her attention on Peter. She didn’t want to be standing this far from him. She needed to keep giving him magic. “He coughed up blood and his heart stopped—it’s restarted now, but it’s weak—”
“We’ve got it,” the medic assured her. “But do you have any idea what caused this?”
“Magic,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself. Peter’s blood was spattered down her shirtwaist, and her legs were shaking. “I think it was magic.”
They loaded him into the ambulance, an oxygen mask over his face. She leaned against the vehicle to keep herself upright, waiting to get in after him.
“Miss, come with me,” the officer said. “I’ll get your statement and someone will take you home.”
“No,” she said, trying to clamp down on the sobs that would brand her an unstable woman in his eyes. “I must stay with him.”
The officer’s face softened. “Are you his wife?”
“No.”
“Then you really do need to—”
“I’m his fiancé,” she lied. “Don’t take me away from him!”
The red-haired medic who’d asked her what had happened leaned out of the vehicle and whispered, “I’ve got this.” Louder, he said, “She’s not looking so good, Mac. I want a doc to give her a once-over. Let her come with us.”
She scrambled into the back of the ambulance before the officer or anyone else could object. She clutched Peter’s hand with both of hers.
“Miss?”
She opened her eyes with a start. The medic with the red hair was looking at her with some concern. “We’re here,” he said.
She tried to stand and couldn’t. It was like being in the thrall of Ella’s drug, except this time the exhaustion was real. “Help,” she whispered.
“It’ll be OK,” the medic said, half-carrying her to a wheelchair. “You’re in shock—we’ll get you checked in.”
The hospital was a blur. She tried to explain that she needed to stay next to Peter, but talking was a struggle and no one listened to her. They put her in a room with four beds, the other three of which were occupied by women.
“No,” she said, the word coming out thick and odd. “Peter …”
“We’ll take good care of him,” a nurse said, patting her. “Don’t worry, dearie.”
And for the second time that ghastly morning, she fell asleep against her will.