Chapter 12
Later, after they’d finished feeding each other their cold food, after they’d kissed and talked and kissed some more, after she’d stripped the spells from the room and he’d paid the waiter with effusive thanks, they headed for his car in a bubble of euphoria.
“I love you,” he murmured.
She kissed his ear. “I love you.”
“I love you, I love you, I love you. Just trying to catch up for lost time.”
“I will never tire of hearing that,” she said, leaning into him.
They turned onto Charles Street, its upscale restaurants and elite gathering spots lit up on either side of them. “I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t take you here,” he said apologetically.
She laughed, looking up at the sleek exterior of a private club. “I was so relieved you didn’t.”
Two men tumbled out the door and nearly bowled into them. One was tow-haired, his head turned to his companion behind him. Then the other man straightened up. His hair was silver—a long queue of silver.
Beatrix, tensing, sucked in a breath. Peter recognized him with a nasty start the very next moment.
Not just any wizard. Frederick Draden.
The vice president’s son, the predator who raped his own sister and was never held to account for it, flicked his hair over his shoulder.
“You’re that piece-of-shit Blackwell,” he said with a disgust that perfectly mirrored what Peter felt for him. The man coughed and spat on the sidewalk between them.
Peter pulled Beatrix closer. “You’re Frederick Draden.”
Draden put a hand in his pocket, and in that split second, Peter made up his mind: This was an emergency. Now, here. He went for his own leaves and shouted “beorgan!”
Nothing happened.
No tingle of magic in his stomach. No zip of it through his arm. No puff of leaves turning to smoke. No protective shielding settling on them. Nothing.
As Peter stood there, overcome by blank shock, Draden swayed and fell.
“What have you done to him?” the other man cried out.
“Nothing,” Draden said, his tone at once irritated and breathless. “He cast a protective spell, the coward. Stop faffing around”—he coughed—“and help me up, Ritter.”
That bought Peter a few more seconds to consider what they should do. Run? Stay put and hope the wizard didn’t realize the spell utterly failed?
As Draden struggled to his feet, gasping for air, it finally clicked that the man was seriously ill.
“Bottle,” Draden choked out.
The typic slipped a hand into the pocket Draden had been reaching into, pulled out a flask of the sort an omnimancer would use for medicinals and helped him take a sip.
“Good-bye, Omnimancer,” Draden said contemptuously, walking away with assistance. “Have fun fucking your little revolutionary”—he gave another hacking cough—“and the whole of wizardkind.”
“Oh,” Beatrix said in an undertone once the men were a block away.
“You have no idea how much I wanted to demand how he could have done what he did to—” She caught his shell-shocked expression and must have misunderstood it, because she quickly added, “I know I can’t.
It would make us even more of a target. But I wanted to. ”
“It’s not that.” He leaned in and whispered, as quietly as he could, “My spell didn’t work.”
Her eyes widened. She felt her arm, her shoulder, her head for the hard coating beorgan should have left but did not.
“Well—it’s been almost a month and a half, counting all the time you were in a coma,” she said, murmuring in his ear. “And spells do go awry sometimes. Especially in a stressful situation. I’m sure it’s just—”
“No, it didn’t work at all.” He withdrew his hand from his pocket, still holding the intact leaves. “Even with a screw-up, I should have felt something.”
“Try again.”
He did. He tried the same spell, he tried three different spells, he tried with different leaves. No reaction.
He was too rattled to say anything more. Beatrix, arm around him, led him back to the car.
All the happiness and laughter that had been in her eyes a few minutes earlier had fled. “Peter, do you think …?”
He had no idea. But if the weapon had stripped him of his magical abilities, a world of trouble awaited them.
An hour later, they stood in an empty bedroom in Peter’s house with Lydia and Rosemarie, the latter slowly walking around, scrutinizing every inch for suggestions of invisibility. There was nowhere to sit, but then, that made it easier to ensure there was no one and nothing watching them.
“All right,” Rosemarie said.
Peter turned off the light and they repeated the restaurant procedure, the zip and zing of her magic making her shiver.
What if he could never do this again? She’d missed spellcasting—the wonder and awe of it—in the six weeks she’d abstained, and she’d only been doing it for a few months.
How much worse would it be for a man whose life since the age of thirteen, whose whole identity, was wrapped up with magic?
He turned the light back on, expression tense. She slipped a hand into his and realized his whole arm was trembling.
“What’s happened?” Lydia said.
“I—” He swallowed. “I seem to have lost my ability to spellcast.”
Lydia and Rosemarie stared at him with identical expressions of shock. Lydia was the first to respond, and all she said was, “What?”
It was clear that he couldn’t bear to talk about it. So Beatrix told them how they’d run into the vice president’s son and what happened after that.
“Your two weeks aren’t up until Sunday,” Rosemarie said matter-of-factly. “Don’t you think it’s possible you haven’t recovered enough to have the strength for it?”
“No. That’s not it.” Peter closed his eyes and leaned against the wall.
“The doctor knew full well I should be able to spellcast—that’s why he warned me so thoroughly to wait, for fear it would set my health back.
When I broke my leg at fifteen, when I was laid up with influenza at nineteen, when I had severe food poisoning in my twenties—all of those times, I could cast.”
“Hillier, the doctor—he said he knew of no wizard who’d ever been unable to use magic after an illness or accident.” Beatrix stepped closer to him, shoulder to shoulder. “But there’s no other wizard who had the life force pulled from him by a weapon, let alone survived it.”
Lydia gazed at them. “You mean …”
“I think it took whatever it is I had that allows a wizard to manipulate the world.” Peter sighed. “Permanently, I fear.”
A moment of silence followed. “Not good,” Rosemarie said finally, in a grim understatement.
Now they had no legal way to use magic to protect their conversations, safeguard their events, keep tabs on hostile spellcasting.
If a wizard attacked Peter, he’d have no effective defense.
And this new limitation was utterly life-changing for him—his education and career were built on the assumption that he could cast.
“We’ll make this work,” Lydia said. “We’ve managed without magic for the last six weeks.”
“Not well.” Rosemarie looked at Beatrix. “What we need is a way of using magic that no one will be able to see.”
Her heart couldn’t take much more from this day. “No. No.”
“Beatrix, you told me your method is undetectable. It doesn’t rely on leaves or spellwords.” Rosemarie frowned. “Why don’t you want to do it?”
Peter was looking at her, too, waiting for her answer.
She’d had so much on her mind the last two weeks that she’d given no thought to that powerful, insidious form of magic and its consequences. Now there was no way around it. She had to tell them. She had to tell Peter.
She looked down at his hand clasped in hers. What would he think of her?
“It’s not safe,” she said.
Rosemarie got in before she could go on. “Surely with practice—”
“No, I mean … it’s unsafe under any circumstances.
” She looked down at the floor. It would be easier this way.
“Ella never showed any sign of being unhinged before—you know she didn’t.
But then she started using magic this way, and in a matter of weeks, she almost murdered tens of thousands of people. ”
“In all fairness, Bee, we don’t know that had anything to do with it,” her sister said. “I mean, you didn’t try to kill anyone.”
“But I did,” Beatrix said, voice catching. “I came very close on two occasions.”
The silence in the room was suffocating. She swallowed and went on. “The woman who was a failed Plan B recruit—the one who wanted to inform the magiocracy—”
Lydia broke in. “You thought you would handle it by murdering her?”
“No, no, we showed up disguised as wizards to make her think she was reporting it. That was the plan. But then we made a mistake and I thought she’d realized that we weren’t wizards at all, I thought she was about to call the tip line again, and I—I only just pulled back from attacking her.
I wasn’t thinking, ‘I will kill her,’ but that’s what almost certainly would have happened. ”
Peter’s hand twitched in hers. “And the other time?”
“Garrett.” She shuddered. “When Garrett discovered me casting spells and said what he planned to do—I wanted to kill him. I knew how I could do it. I had my hand to his neck and … and I changed my mind just in time. I didn’t know what had come over me.”
“Stress—that’s what it was, surely,” Rosemarie muttered.
“No. No, you don’t know how it felt. There was something wrong with me,” Beatrix said, forcing the words out. “It was only after Ella did what she did that I realized what might have come over us both. She used magic that way far more than I did. Imagine the effect that could have had.”
She turned away, pressing her hands to her face.
“And I taught her. You warned me it could be dangerous, Peter, you told me there was no way to know its effects, and I didn’t listen.
I showed Ella, and everything that happened afterward is my fault.
Her mental breakdown. Your coma. Martinelli. And now this.”
No one said anything for a moment. Then Peter put an arm around her. “Beatrix,” he said gently, “what happened with Project 96 is my fault.”
“But if I’d taken your warning seriously—”
“No, listen. I developed the procedure necessary to use living fuel, I disregarded the inner voice telling me the whole thing wasn’t a good idea until finally it was too loud to ignore, and then I idiotically brought the device here under the assumption that nothing bad could happen while I tried to figure out a defense. ”
He let out a long breath. “Martinelli is dead because of my bad decisions. It wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. I can’t just push the blame onto Miss Draden—and I certainly don’t blame you.”
She looked at him. He offered a grim smile. “Losing my ability to use magic is the least of what I deserve.”
Rosemarie cleared her throat. “As fascinating as it is to see how you both apportion responsibility for the situation, could we please focus on the key question: What are we to do now?”
Seconds ticked by without suggestions. Her question had no good answer.
“Let’s continue this conversation tomorrow,” Lydia said, her voice subdued. “We can consider our options then.”
Peter dropped them off on his way to Gray’s—what to tell Gray, if anything, was one of the options they would have to consider—and she lingered in the passenger seat beside him as her sister and Rosemarie got out.
“I love you,” she said in a forceful whisper, meaning it every bit as much as she had earlier in the evening. More, in fact.
He pulled her close. Voice choked with emotion, he said, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”