Chapter 3
By now, he had a good sense of what time it was.
A nearby church bell tolled the hour, and Peter could distinguish between day and night based on when Beatrix was by his side.
But the evening before, he couldn’t get dreamside—or at least, it was all wrong and he couldn’t find Beatrix in it.
And today, she’d never arrived. Had something happened?
Was she in trouble? He listened to the bell announcing seven o’clock and had to fight back panic.
Minutes passed with nothing but the sounds of nearby medical equipment and farther-off medical staff to distract him.
Then someone clattered into the room. “I’m—I’m here,” Beatrix gasped. “What a day.”
She said nothing for a moment, catching her breath, sliding her hand into his—he thought; it was always so hard to tell if the pressure he could barely feel was on his hand or somewhere else.
He concentrated and thought he caught the whisper of a chill, of cold fingers on hospital-warmed skin. Maybe.
“I have a job,” she whispered. “I finally found something. That’s why I’m so late.”
Oh. What a relief. He didn’t know how many days—weeks?
—this ordeal had been going on, but she couldn’t afford to be unemployed for long.
He waited for details, but she immediately launched into news from town (Sue Clark and her baby were still doing all right, Mayor and Mrs. Croft just celebrated their fortieth anniversary), which he appreciated but didn’t want to hear as much as her own news.
She didn’t want the wizards to know, if they were listening in. Something about her job was better kept secret. What could it be?
He worried over that while she read stories to him from that day’s newspaper (“Congress deadlocked over Canadian Aggression Act,” “White House unveils security plans amid fears of foreign spies”).
A job related to the League? But there was nothing in the League’s sphere of influence that came with a paycheck.
It hit him as she read a dry piece about the Maryland legislature. Senator Gray. It might be Senator Gray she was working for.
This didn’t make him feel much better. He didn’t think Gray was a spy, but Peter had no great amount of confidence in the man, either. Still, if Gray hired Beatrix, he had more sense than Peter had given him credit for.
She fell silent. He made himself stop thinking about Gray so his attention wouldn’t be divided, and that was when he realized he could feel her hand in his—really feel it, her winter-chapped fingers rubbing his palm absently.
Then she pulled away. “I have to go or I’ll miss the train,” she said heavily. He felt something else—her lips on his forehead? That wasn’t as clear, but he felt it, he absolutely did. Could he be improving? Surely that was a good sign?
He should try to move again. He hated the exercise in pain and futility, but there was always a chance that this time it would work.
And really, it was striking how much he was now able to sense his hand.
He paused, noticing that the feeling had receded, not quite to what it had been before, but certainly no longer at the level of sensation when Beatrix had been holding it.
That was curious—a side effect of the Vow, no doubt.
Before his coma, the slightest physical contact with her would zip through him with relentless force.
The click of the door closing told him Beatrix was gone. He geared himself up for the attempt and tried to move the hand he could more or less feel.
He was incapable of screaming, or else he would have. The pain wiped away all rational thought, leaving only the awareness that he’d managed little to no movement. Then he mercifully blacked out.
When he came to, it was all he could do not to attempt a soundless yell that would set the cycle off again.
This was impossible. It was like being electrocuted—as if he were a penned-in cow trying to break free.
Or back in that fiendish final exam in his sophomore-year undergraduate magical innovation class, this time for all eternity.
(If you figured out how to get out of the sealed-off and booby-trapped room the professor put you in, you passed.
Otherwise, you flunked out of the entire magicist track, which Peter now fervently wished he had done.)
The church bell tolled ten o’clock. He made himself relax, drift, because getting into dreamside was the only hope he had left.
Nothing changed for what felt like hours.
Then he snapped to attention at the sudden realization that he was standing—in pitch-black darkness no different from what passed for consciousness in his coma, but standing nonetheless.
He had to be dreaming. This was just what had happened the night before.
“Beatrix?” he called. “Beatrix!”
But just like the night before, he got no answer. Surely she was here somewhere? He’d never had these sorts of self-aware dreams before they made their Vows to each other. Something had happened to dreamside, but this had to be it.
He put his limbs to good use and jogged forward, bellowing her name, hands outstretched to warn him if anything was in his path. He called and called until his voice was hoarse, coming across nothing whatsoever in this dark wasteland.
“Stop!”
His breath caught. Beatrix’s voice. He ran in the direction she seemed to be.
“Where are you?” he cried. “Can you see me?”
She sobbed, now very close indeed, though he still couldn’t make her out. “I can’t stand this,” she said, voice trembling. “Please let me wake up!”
What? “No, I need to talk to you!” he said—and then grasped why she might react in such a way. “This isn’t a dream, it’s dreamside.”
“It’s not.”
“Beatrix, I swear it is—”
“Dreamside is gone, ‘Peter.’ The Vows were broken.”
The shock of this was so profound that he couldn’t come up with a reply.
“I’d rather go back to having you berate me while bleeding to death,” she said bitterly, her breath hitching as she inhaled. “At least then I’m happy to wake up.”
His heart twisted at this picture of what her recent dreams had been like. But he had to focus on one thing at a time—on this one tremendous thing. “How do you know the Vows are broken?”
“The contracts,” she said simply.
“They’re—they’re not gone?” Fear clutched him. “What if the magiocracy—”
“No, they were still hidden under the floorboards. They were just in hundreds of tiny pieces.”
“Oh my God,” he whispered. “Oh my God.”
“So you see, figment of my imagination, you cannot be here. It’s impossible.”
He would have assumed the same thing. And yet here he was.
“Listen,” he said urgently, “I don’t know how much longer we have or if I’ll be able to come back tomorrow night or whether we could find each other if I did. I’m going to tell you something that will prove you’re not imagining the entire conversation. Will you hear me out?”
She was silent for a second. Then: “You have to tell me something I don’t already know, something I can verify dayside—”
“My will is in the top drawer of my desk in the receiving room. It’ll allow you to tap my savings to pay for my care. You’re my sole beneficiary, and I also gave you power of attorney if I should ever be incapacitated. Call Tim Martinelli at the Pentagram if you run into problems—he witnessed it.”
“Peter,” she whispered. “It’s—it’s really you?”
“Yes. Honest to God.”
“Oh,” she said, the syllable packed with emotion. A swish of fabric, a soft thunk—she must have abruptly sat down.
He inched forward, not wanting to trip over her. “How long have I been in a coma?”
“You know you’re in a coma? Are you aware of things happening around you?”
“Yes. I can hear, but no one’s ever mentioned the date around me.”
“It’s February 24. You’ve been in the hospital nearly four weeks.”
Four weeks. He sighed. “Well, Martinelli has probably left his Pentagram job by now—he said he would. Hopefully a secretary can explain how to reach him, if it’s necessary.”
“Right. OK.” She hesitated. “Are you … in pain? During the day, I mean?”
“No, I can barely feel anything,” he said. “Though I can make out my hand pretty well while you’re holding it, so contact must help.”
He thought of what happened whenever he tried to move and was about to amend his point about feeling no pain when Beatrix said, “I can’t see you. Can you see me?”
“No.”
“You just see the forest and hear my disembodied voice, then?”
He paused, surprised and unsettled. “I don’t seem to be in a forest. It’s just pitch-black nothingness.”
He heard another swish of her skirt. She took a few steps, dry leaves crunching under her feet, and stopped with a soft “oh!”
“There’s a wall between us,” she explained.
“What?”
“It feels like … it almost feels like it’s made of magic.”
He frowned, stretching out a hand to try to touch the unseen edge of the darkness around him.
The starburst of agony would have been blinding, if there were anything to look at in the first place. The world jostled around him. The sensation of limbs disappeared.
He was dayside again, trapped in his own head. No, no, no!
He tried desperately to get back to sleep. But eventually the church bell tolled six, and he knew it was too late.
He could do nothing then but lie awake, thinking—to little effect. Was there some malevolent magic at work in his inability to come out of the coma? If so, how could such a thing be fought?
When he finally stopped turning that around in his head for fear of driving himself crazy, he thought instead about the broken Vows.
She hadn’t said how she felt about him now.
What if that was an answer in itself? What if all her visits to his bedside were nothing more than misplaced guilt over what her friend had done?
He poked at his own feelings, hoping they had similarly altered. He thought of her Plan B—a betrayal he’d hardly had time to process. She’d lied to him, endangered him, made a mockery of the partnership they’d built—
But then, he’d done the very same to her. He’d set out to entrap her in a job that required her to break federal law. How could he in good conscience tell himself that what she did was worse?
Perhaps because it came later, after they’d been through so much together. Or perhaps it was only because this time, he was the victim.
One thing was clear: What Beatrix had done stung so much because he loved her. The Vows were gone, and now he knew without a doubt.
By taking it at a near-run, Beatrix reached Peter’s house with twenty minutes to spare before her train was due. She opened the top drawer of his desk with shaking hands and a rapidly beating heart.
Empty.
She looked in every other drawer in the desk.
She clattered up the stairs to his bedroom and looked in all the drawers he had there.
Finally running out of time, she dashed for the train and rode it to Annapolis with burning eyes squeezed shut.
Maybe the magiocracy had taken it. But what good would that do them?
She would have to call Martinelli and see if he had indeed witnessed Peter’s will, and if he hadn’t—well, that would be that.
How easily she had believed. How desperately she’d wanted that would-be Peter—his voice suddenly there and just as abruptly gone—to be what he’d said he was.
Gray was not in the cafeteria, so she schlepped to the first of the hearings on her list for the day. After three hours of mind-numbing testimony about accrual accounting, she ran to a payphone.
The operator rang the Pentagram for her. The Pentagram’s operator transferred her to another office. The secretary who answered the line said nothing for a long moment when she asked for Wizard Martinelli.
“Ma’am?” Beatrix said, wondering if she’d lost the connection.
“I’m sorry, he’s—he’s no longer with us.”
She sighed. Right. “Do you happen to know where I might find him? It involves a will.”
“No, I mean—he’s dead,” the woman said, voice catching.
Beatrix sagged against the telephone booth, horror clutching at her heart, stomach, lungs. “But I saw him just a few weeks ago” fell from her lips, as if that mattered. She added, “What happened? Was he ill?”
“No, he—” The woman cleared her throat. “That’s all I can say. Is there anyone else you need to speak with?”
“No, thank you,” Beatrix whispered and hung up, standing shell-shocked in the booth until a man rapped on the door, scowling at her.
She made way for him and sank onto a nearby bench. What happened? Could it simply have been a heart attack or another unfortunate natural event that took him?
Horrible possibilities occurred to her. He told the Pentagram exactly why he was leaving, and they killed him.
(But surely he wouldn’t have told them?) He didn’t tell the Pentagram why he was leaving and they killed him anyway.
(But why would they kill him and not Peter?) He was at the New Mexico test site the morning she dropped the payload stone, and—
She stopped, not wanting to think the rest of it. But it came anyway, overwhelming her.
Had she unwittingly killed him?
When Ella set off the weapon, Beatrix had had only seconds to get the payload stone out of downtown Washington, drop it in the desert and teleport out.
She hadn’t seen the test-site complex Peter and Martinelli often worked at—or any other sign of civilization—but she’d hardly had time to carefully look.
And she had no idea how wide the blast area might be when powered by a wizard—by Peter’s life force.
How many died in her effort to save the people living and working in D.C. ?
She knew of no way to answer that question. She’d looked for news accounts of death and destruction in New Mexico and found none. The Pentagram, no doubt, would want to keep it quiet.
She went about the rest of the day somehow, taking notes she knew Gray would never read, and walked to the cafeteria, feet leaden. Her employer didn’t show. Twenty minutes past five, she gave up and left, riding the train out of Annapolis feeling even worse than on the train coming in.