Chapter 4
Then she heard it: “Beatrix! Beatrix!”
Pointless to tell herself she shouldn’t answer. As long as there was at least an infinitesimal chance this was Peter, she would. Perhaps she would answer even if it were proved beyond a molecule of a doubt that her sleeping brain was playing tricks on her.
“Here,” she called.
The thud of his footsteps announced him, but like before, there was nothing to see. She didn’t wait for him to speak. “There’s no will in the desk. I checked every drawer. I looked in the drawers of the bedroom furniture, too.”
“What?” Peter—or, rather, the voice that sounded like him—seemed suitably shocked. “I put it in the desk drawer the very morning Miss Draden attacked. It has to be there.”
“Wizards ransacked your house soon after. They could have taken it, though I don’t know what they would gain by it.”
He sighed. “Keeping you from my money if I die? Though my care would have exhausted it by then, I’m sure. Listen, did you try Martinelli? He could confirm you’re my sole beneficiary and the person I want making medical decisions for me. Maybe that would do some good.”
“Peter …” She wrapped her arms around her knees and lay her head on them. “He’s dead.”
She could feel the horror in the silence that followed. “What happened?” he said finally, the word choked with emotion.
“I don’t know. But …” She swallowed a sob. “You know I took the payload stone to the desert. I don’t have any idea how close I was to the test site—for all I know, it was inside the blast radius. What if it’s my fault? What if I killed everyone in the complex?”
“If that happened, and it’s a huge if we should not assume is the case, it would be entirely Miss Draden’s fault,” he snapped.
She thought of telling him her grim theory of why Ella had done what she did. However she looked at it, she could not escape blame. But he might disappear at any moment—she had to use the time more productively.
“Tell me something else I can use to verify you’re you,” she said.
“Right. Yes,” he murmured, the anger gone, a bleakness to the words that mirrored how she felt.
“Well, I bank at Provident, but I doubt they’d confirm that to you without the will.
My house is in Georgetown, 3336 O Street.
It’ll be in the land records, but you can’t exactly take a day off work to go look. ”
“Do you have friends I could call, someone who’s been there?”
He made a sound that was halfway between a snort and a sigh. “I never had anyone over.”
How lonely must his years in Washington have been? Of course, he probably spent most of his time at work. With Martinelli.
She fought back another sob.
“Do you know the gift I gave Mrs. Clark for the baby?” he asked.
It was hard to concentrate enough to remember such a small detail. “Um—no.”
“Good. It’s a solar-system mobile. Ask her, and that’s your confirmation I’m not a figment of your imagination.”
“OK,” she said, trying not to think of Martinelli or death or anything but the subject at hand.
Neither of them said anything for a moment. He cleared his throat. “Have any wizards examined me? That is, doctors who are wizards?”
“Yes, one—a Wizard Hillier. I liked him, but I watched him like a hawk just in case.”
“Did he notice anything odd? Any sign of magical interference?”
“No,” she said. “Should he have?”
“I think there’s something keeping me in the coma.
Something tangled up with motor control, maybe.
I get a hint of it every time I try to move—I can’t do it, and it’s very painful, like crossing a line and getting an electric shock.
And here, dreamside, if I reach out to try to feel the edges of whatever I’m in that separates us, the same thing happens.
That’s what pulled me out last night. I touched it and woke up. ”
She stared aghast at the empty space where he presumably stood. “Do you think Wizard Hillier cast something on you to keep you from waking up?”
“Let’s hope so, because that sort of spell should be reversible.”
“If it’s not that …”
He groaned. “Then it’s probably the aftereffects of the weapon. And that, I’m afraid …” He trailed off. She didn’t need the rest of the sentence to know he thought there would be no reversing that.
Breathe. No panicking. She pushed to her feet and put her hands on the invisible wall between them. Just as before, touching it on this side had no obvious consequences. “Can you see anything in there? Anything at all?”
“No.”
She took another deep breath and focused on what she wanted: the wall disintegrating—small pieces cracking off, bigger ones, a complete collapse.
Nothing happened. It was hard to picture in fine detail the destruction of something you couldn’t see. In fact, it was hard to see anything now, so dark had the forest become.
She gritted her teeth and visualized the noonday sun streaming down on them, unhindered by the leafless trees, hitting every part of this sinister barrier. Let there be light …
“Oh,” she gasped, temporarily blinded as the dreamscape abruptly accommodated her. To Peter, she added, “Look again—if there are any cracks in your prison, you’ll see sunlight peeking through.”
He hummed something tuneless under his breath while he looked.
As her sight returned, she found shimmering before her an amorphous shape roughly Peter’s height.
She could see the forest through it, but it wasn’t quite transparent.
An odd pattern seemed to be spread across it, repeated thousands of times over, lines and strokes glinting darkly in the sun. She leaned in to see them better.
Then she stumbled backward, adrenaline-spiked dread in her veins. Runes—the same rune etched into the payload stone, the one that wizards called “the grave.”
Peter was trapped in a shroud of death, and there seemed no question what had done it.
“Oh! Good morning—come in.” Sue Clark’s welcoming smile flickered. “Are you all right?”
Beatrix tried to smile back. “Tired. I finally got a job—started it a few days ago, in fact, and I haven’t had a moment until now to come and tell you.”
“Beatrix! That’s wonderful news.”
“Just in time, too. But I’ve been neglecting you. How are you feeling? How’s little Will and everyone else?”
“Good, all of us.” Sue hesitated. “And Omnimancer Blackwell? Any change?”
Beatrix shook her head, an answer at once true and false.
“We want him back, too,” Sue murmured. “Everybody in town does.”
A few seconds passed as Beatrix struggled for control of herself. She didn’t want to ask. She didn’t want the answer. But she forced the words out: “Did he—did he give you anything? For the baby, I mean?”
Sue’s face lit up. “Oh, that’s right—I never showed you! You must see this.”
Beatrix followed her to the bedroom, heart quivering. Inside, over the bassinet in which Will lay sleeping, miniature planets turned lazily around a bright yellow sun.
Sue touched the tiny Earth, all blues and greens. “He’ll happily stay in his bassinet for hours, staring up at it. All the children love it. I can’t properly express how kind it was of Omnimancer Blackwell to give Will something so beautiful.”
Beatrix nodded, unable to speak. The conversation with Peter had been real. He was aware inside his coma-stilled body. It was all she could do not to break down, because that meant the deathly runic magic entombing him was real, too, and he would probably never awaken.
Eventually, she managed to say, “I’d better go. My train …”
Sue walked her to the door. “I know it’s impertinent to ask, but … has Omnimancer Blackwell’s coma affected you beyond the loss of a job?”
The hospital knew about their “engagement,” the lie Beatrix had told to ensure access to him and his doctors. With no next of kin to consult, they’d allowed her to make decisions about his care—not that there had been any to make, beyond continuing it.
But no one in Ellicott Mills worked at the hospital. No one in town—save for Lydia and Rosemarie—knew how she felt about him.
Sue was her friend. Her only friend, now. She murmured, “I love him,” a rogue tear slipping down her cheek at the thought of how much she had lost the day Ella attacked Peter.
Sue nodded, clearly unsurprised. She reached out and squeezed Beatrix’s hand.
“Whatever I can do to help you—both of you—I will do. I owe you my life, you know.” Sue’s lips twisted, wry with a hint of bitter, as she added, “Heaven knows it would be more useful to have someone rich and powerful in your debt, but one takes what one can get.”
“Your friendship,” Beatrix said, a lump in her throat, “means more to me than you could know.”
She gave Sue a swift, tight hug. As she ran for the train, an angry wind whipped tears off her face.
Once in Annapolis, she went to the cafeteria without any expectation of seeing her employer—but Gray was there.
“I need you to organize that press conference,” he said, barely above a whisper. “The one you suggested in your report.”
She was gaping at him, she knew it. She cleared her throat, buying a second to decide how to respond, and went with a simple, “When?”
“As soon as possible.”
“Why? What’s happened?”
“I don’t have the votes. Those wizards can lobby like nobody’s business.” He shook his head. “Maybe the Sugarworkers can change a few minds.”
She tapped the table. “Lydia’s lining up support from other groups. If you wait a bit, you could have a press conference with a lot more people standing behind you.”
“My bill just got scheduled for a committee vote next Friday. Seven days—that’s all the time we’ve got.”
“OK,” she murmured, mind racing. “OK, I’ll aim for Wednesday or Thursday and get as many supporters as I can.”
He nodded and turned to go.
“Wait,” she hissed. “Should I organize it as your employee or as a League representative? What should I say to people?”
He hesitated. But he gave the answer she expected: “Tell them you’re with the League.”