Chapter 25 #2
“Yes,” Beatrix admitted. “He seemed so nice at first.”
“Oh, your judgment …” Rosemarie threw up her hands.
She almost defended herself. None of the red flags about his behavior appeared until she’d sent him packing, for heaven’s sake. But she looked at Rosemarie, and then at Peter, lying comatose but alive, still alive, and she said, “Thank you.”
“What?”
“When I need help, I can always count on you,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve said ‘thank you’ for years because I’ve been so focused on what you say rather than what you do.”
Rosemarie’s eyes widened.
“If you hadn’t made us practice CPR every day for a month in seventh grade, Peter would be dead.
” Beatrix blinked back tears. “If you hadn’t moved in with us, we would have lost the house.
If you hadn’t been there, advising us and prodding us, I could never have sent Lydia to college, and she would never have accomplished so much.
You drive me crazy sometimes, and I’m sure I do the same to you, but you’ve been mothering me for longer than my own mother and I love you.
I don’t know what would have become of Lydia and me without you. ”
Rosemarie simply looked at her for a few fraught seconds. Then she came around the bed, gave Beatrix an awkward hug and fled the room.
Beatrix spent half a minute trying not to cry.
Then the thought occurred to her that this was a surprisingly good way to stop a lecture, and she was hard-pressed not to laugh.
She so wanted to share it with someone who would appreciate both the real emotion and the subversive humor of it, but of the two people who fit the bill, one was comatose in the bed beside her, and the other had put him there.
She pressed her forehead to his hand, limp in hers. “Oh God, Peter,” she whispered, “I can’t take this. I can’t. I can’t.”
“Miss Harper?”
She turned in her chair. The physician who’d checked on her the day before stood in the doorway, a nurse in tow. “I thought I’d find you here,” Dr. Rivera said. “Let’s see how you’re doing.”
She dutifully submitted to having her temperature taken, her blood pressure checked, her reflexes tested.
“Well,” Rivera said, “I’m still not thrilled by your blood pressure, but everything else seems to have settled down. Promise me you’ll get plenty of rest and liquids, and I’ll sign your discharge papers.”
She looked at Peter, torn.
“You have special dispensation to come visit him at any time,” Rivera said, patting her on the back. “Night or day. We promise.”
“Thank you,” she said, trembling, her eyes burning.
“You saved his life, you know.”
She peered up at the doctor. “But will it be enough?”
“It’s early days yet. Most people in comas wake up—don’t lose hope.”
She nodded. But she knew what had happened to Peter, and she feared she had “saved” him for this—lying in a hospital bed, forever out of reach.
As soon as she got home, she went into the forest, Rosemarie with her to keep a watch out for invisible wizards.
Beatrix spent the walk with her heart in her throat.
If Ella took the transmitter … She couldn’t complete the thought.
She didn’t know if Ella had extracted from Peter how to make a payload stone, but it seemed entirely possible.
As complicated as the stone was to produce, there seemed no limit to what Ella could do, given time and motivation.
It was hard to think of this Ella of the last few days as the same person she knew and loved.
Surely that woman wasn’t her Ella, who had joked with her, consoled her, strategized with her.
Surely trauma alone could not have induced Ella to try to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
Something must have happened. And she feared she knew what it was.
Their new magic, the knitting that Ella did so remarkably well—wasn’t that the likely culprit? Beatrix was painfully aware that she herself had teetered on the brink of murder—twice now—since beginning to cast this way. What might she have done if she’d been as enthusiastic a practitioner as Ella?
Beatrix had discovered this way of tapping magic. If knitting explained Ella’s insanity, there was no question where the fault lay.
She shuddered, hoping it wasn’t true. And yet she also didn’t want to believe that Ella—who once dreamed of building towering skyscrapers—had all along been biding her time for an opportunity to destroy.
“Down here,” she murmured to Rosemarie as they reached the slope to the small clearing where the nightmare had started.
She looked around and saw … nothing. The transmitter wasn’t there. Lydia had not gone to the wrong spot.
“Oh, no,” she said under her breath. “Oh, God. Oh, no.”
Rosemarie walked into the clearing, stopped and put her hand on what looked like thin air. Good heavens, was it there? Rosemarie turned, nodded once, held up a finger—wait—and glanced around.
“All clear,” she said. “I think this is it.”
Beatrix rushed after her and felt stone, the lip of the top section, the Ear rune. She palmed leaves she’d taken from Peter’s ruined coat and cast the revealing spell, just to be sure. The relief she felt as the transmitter flickered into view shot through her like an electric shock.
“It looks like a birdbath,” Rosemarie said, shaking her head.
It did, in fact. What it most certainly did not look like was a weapon of mass death.
“Better go back up the slope,” she whispered. “Get to a safe distance.”
As Rosemarie retraced her steps, Beatrix moved as far from Project 96 as the clearing allowed and took aim. “Fordēst,” she said—meaning it with all her heart.
It hit, sizzled for a while as it ate through the protection spell there, and then—with a tremendous crack and a low boom—the transmitter shattered into hundreds of pieces.
She cast one more spell at the shards to make them small enough to be unrecognizable before kicking the rubble into the undergrowth.
She’d fulfilled her promise to Peter. She wished with the bitter wisdom of hindsight that she’d destroyed the weapon long before.
Rosemarie took one look at her as she crested the slope and enveloped her in a hug as unexpected as it was needed.
“I’m so proud of you, my girl,” Rosemarie said, voice gruff. “I know I’ve been hard on you of late, but I’ve always been very proud of you.”
“Oh,” Beatrix murmured, shocked.
“Heaven knows I’m no good at this sort of thing.” Rosemarie grimaced. “Well—I was trying to get you to spend more time with your sister, that’s what.”
Beatrix sighed. That made sense, looking back. So many of the critical things Rosemarie had said to her recently were designed to keep her in the house—with Lydia—rather than going off with Ella.
She should have listened.
“Lydia’s doing this for you, you know,” Rosemarie said.
“Doing what?”
“The League. All of it. Once she was old enough to understand the sacrifices you were making for her, she asked me how she could repay you. She realized that if she got a job after graduation, saved up and sent you to college, it would take a very long while. And even then, you’d have few options when you graduated.
She was … oh, thirteen or thereabouts, and she declared, ‘This is all wrong.’ So she decided to try to change it—for you. ”
Beatrix found herself at a complete loss for words.
She’d thought Lydia had started off on this path to get more rights for women in general.
She’d seen the League as something that separated them: Lydia enjoyed this work and she did not, Lydia was inspiring and she was not, Lydia sought power in the organization and she would not.
How she’d resented Lydia for assuming she’d do League grunt work year after year—and how confused and hurt her sister must have been as they grew ever farther apart.
“Why didn’t she tell me?” Beatrix asked.
“She knew you would say she didn’t need to pay you back. But she intends to see this through.”
She leaned into Rosemarie. Thank God she hadn’t known this while she’d thought Lydia’s life was in danger.
She remembered something Ella had said to her—what she’d said in their first real conversation: Here, sis, have my life savings so I can attend college vicariously through you—no pressure.
Ella had meant it as a joke. But she’d been closer to the truth than either of them realized, if Lydia had felt the weight of that decision long before she went to Hazelhurst.
“Well, then,” Rosemarie said, voice once again brisk, but eyes moist. “Shall we see what’s come of the omnimancer’s house? I’d be shocked if it hasn’t had some uninvited guests.”
She was right. The front door was ajar, the lock broken, as if to suggest a garden variety break-in.
Drawers stood open and papers lay on the floor in the receiving room.
The vials in the brewing room had been pulled out and put back none too carefully, broken glass glinting all over the floor.
Someone or multiple someones had been here.
The magiocracy, Beatrix assumed, wanted to know if Peter had anything to do with the explosion they had not set off themselves.
There was nothing connected with that to find here. What set Beatrix running for his bedroom in panic was the realization that the wizards might have discovered the contracts instead.
He’d used no magic to hide them—they’d both thought that safest. Neither of them had counted on an intruder willing to pull the place apart.
She opened the door and clapped a hand over her mouth.
The wallpaper had been torn almost entirely off, remnants of it hanging ragged and in pieces.
His beautiful scrap quilt, made by his grandmother, lay forlornly on the floor, sliced open.
A hole gaped in his mattress. And both of his loose floorboards had been wrenched up—the one that hid nothing, and the one under which he’d put the contracts.
Beatrix watched, wretched, as Rosemarie looked around the room for any sign that they were not alone, or that recording equipment had been installed under invisibility spells.
As soon as the all-clear came, Beatrix dropped to her knees beside the right floorboard, feeling underneath it.
Her grasping fingers brushed against nothing but the underflooring.
She reached farther and farther, unwilling to accept what this meant, until her whole arm was under the floor—and oh, there it was, the envelope!
The magiocracy had missed it.
She pulled it out, opened it on the second try with trembling fingers and looked inside.
The contract for Ella’s Vow stared back at her.
Beatrix swallowed hard and pressed it out of the way.
Behind it was Rosemarie’s contract, then their turncoat treasurer’s, and—she gaped.
That was all there was. The contracts underlying her Vows to Peter and his Vow to her were gone.
For a terrible moment she thought the wizards had found the envelope after all. But logic kicked in. They wouldn’t take three contracts and leave three more. They’d steal all of them. And when she looked more closely, she realized there was something else in there, a layer at the bottom.
She tipped the envelope, and into her hand poured a shower of tiny pieces of paper. Most were too small to have anything identifiable on them. But three were slightly larger. One said I, Peter Wil, ripped off mid-word. Another said brew. The last said no harm.
“Oh,” she gasped, unable to catch her breath, hardly able to think. No, no, no!
Their contracts—destroyed. Their Vows, broken. The only way that could have happened was if Peter—
She scrambled to her feet and darted into the bathroom just as Rosemarie came out of it.
“All clear?”
“Yes,” Rosemarie said, peering at her.
“I’ll be back,” she said, shutting the door. She turned off the light—just in case—and visualized where she needed to be: another bathroom thirty miles south, with a peach toilet, white tile floor, green soap smelling of lye, the sound of nurses’ clicking shoes ...
The magic caught. The picture in her mind snapped into focus around her. But now that she was standing in the bathroom in Peter’s hospital room, the horror of having her fears confirmed stayed her hand on the doorknob.
She heard people passing by in the hallway, snatches of muffled conversation between doctors.
“Such a pity he didn’t pull through,” one said.
“So young, too,” another agreed.
She pressed her forehead to the door, an icy feeling spreading from her chest. So now she knew. She loved him. The Vows were broken, her feelings had not changed—she, Beatrix Harper, loved Peter Blackwell, and he was dead.
The door opened. She stumbled out, straight into a nurse.
“Oh!” The woman steadied her. “Are you Miss Harper? I didn’t realize you were here!”
“Yes,” she said, somehow managing to choke the word out.
“You poor dear,” the nurse murmured, taking her arm. “We’re going to have to move him in a few minutes, I’m afraid, but you can sit with him until then.”
Beatrix walked to the bed and sat, too shattered to do anything else—to speak or take his hand or look at him. She couldn’t even cry.
“I know this is hard,” the nurse said. “It’s a terrible thing that happened, and no mistaking it.”
Shoes clicked as the nurse walked to the door. The sound paused. “But he’ll be with the best doctors in the long-term care wing, and they’ll do all they can for him, I assure you!”
The words took a few seconds to penetrate. Then Beatrix grabbed for his hand. It was warm. She felt for his heartbeat. It was there, weak but steady. She slumped against him, and now the tears flowed because she’d been in hell and had just been released.
“Peter,” she whispered into his ear, “the Vows are broken. Your heart stopped for a moment—that must be how it happened. And I love you. I love you! Come back to me!”
She half-expected this to work. But the seconds stretched to minutes, and nothing changed. She would have to wait, hope, pray—and send him magic, assuming she even could.
People were coming. She turned to see a contingent of nurses and orderlies.
“All right, Miss Harper,” said the sympathetic nurse from before. “It’s time.”
Beatrix squeezed Peter’s hand.
Faintly—so faint she almost doubted her own senses—he squeezed back.
The story concludes in Revolutionary, the final book in the Clandestine Magic trilogy.
In the black void, he heard his name.
Read REVOLUTIONARY now