Chapter 19
They hustled inside to talk about it—all of them except Mrs. Clark, whose kind dinner invitation they had to turn down—but really, what could they do?
Nothing. His savings plus what he might reasonably expect from the sale of his townhouse in Washington wouldn’t cover a quarter of their combined bills.
Beatrix’s savings amounted to a few hundred dollars.
Then Lydia, eyes wide, read a line from the bill out loud: “If you wish to negotiate a payment plan, you must disclose all financial accounts and owned property.” She whispered, “Bee—what if they come after our house?”
“No, no,” he assured her, “we’ve got the money to pay Beatrix’s bill—your home is safe.”
“Peter,” Lydia bit out, “Beatrix’s name is the only one on the deed. And now that you’re married—”
“—everything she owns is technically yours,” Rosemarie said heavily.
Beatrix stared at him, eyes wide.
“We weren’t married when I incurred the bill,” he said.
“I doubt very much that will matter,” Rosemarie said.
“The contract will protect it,” he said, fear rising like bile. It would protect the house—wouldn’t it?
Lydia was pacing now, always a bad sign. “You can restrict your right to do whatever you like with Beatrix’s property, but you can’t restrict the hospital’s right to take it!”
“I—I’m sure …” he said, not sure of anything now. This was a day designed to underscore how little he knew.
Rosemarie gave him her most Miss Disdain of looks. “Did an attorney help you write it? Did you ask anyone with expertise what they thought of it?”
“No,” he said, anger beginning to overcome his other feelings, “because I was trying to keep the document confidential.”
“Oh, how well that worked out!” Rosemarie crossed her arms. “I grant you the contract was extremely effective when it came to killing the legislation and ruining all our hopes, but in this case, I’d be shocked if it’s anything but absolutely and completely useless.
Excellent work, Omnimancer. Truly A-plus. ”
Beatrix hissed “Rosemarie,” obviously trying to contain the situation, but it was too late.
“The contract isn’t the problem here, it’s that we got married,” he barked at Rosemarie. “And did you warn us against it? No, you demanded it!”
Beatrix put a warning hand on his arm. “I think—”
He leapt for the door, knowing he was a hair’s breadth from exploding, and found he was blocked by the spell she’d put around the room. A spell he could no longer undo. “Let me out!”
Her voice shook as she said the negating spellwords. He slammed the door behind him, irrationally angry at her—and rationally, massively, incandescently furious at himself.
If he’d listened to the voice of reason in his head, they wouldn’t have married yet. This mess would have been his alone. But now, they would all pay the price.
He closed the front door behind him, without a slam this time, and leaned against the house with his eyes squeezed shut.
If he had a job with a salary as good as his last one—even then, the bill would take years to pay off.
As it was, he had no idea what he was qualified for now.
He was a man rapidly approaching middle age with an education and work history wholly focused on a skill he no longer had.
He couldn’t pretend anymore: It wasn’t sadness or loss that bit at him whenever Beatrix cast spells. It was jealousy.
They were lucky she could spellcast and he knew it. Her magical abilities had nothing to do with his predicament and everything to do with the fact that he was still alive. But how much luck would he have trying to argue away irrational feelings with logic?
He needed to calm himself before he went back inside and apologized. The greenhouse—he still hadn’t been to the greenhouse to tend the plants.
The air was as warm and redolent as always, but it was woefully overmatched by his black mood. He was at the far end, watering the valerian, mind going in useless circles, when the click of the door opening announced he was no longer alone.
He sighed.
“Beatrix,” he said, turning around, “I—”
It wasn’t Beatrix.
“Blackwell!” A wizard with a bulbous red nose glared at him, arm outstretched with a fistful of leaves in his hand. “You’ll—you’ll pay, you fucking traitor!”
Nowhere to run—the man, whoever he was, blocked the only way out. No way to turn it into a physical fight—they were a good fifteen feet apart, and the intruder could spit out a spellword faster than any mad dash in his direction.
“Wait! I’ve already lost,” he said, trying for reason, as long of a shot as it seemed. “It’s all over. The legislature—”
“You need to be stopped,” the man said, slurring, “and I’m gon—gonna stop you.”
No reasoning with a drunk.
Could he run faster than a sloshed wizard could cast?
He sprang forward a split-second before the man spat the word he himself had uttered over and over in his attic as he pummeled shielding spells with explosive force—the word that meant he was going to die.
“Fordēst!”
The spell burst from the wizard’s palm—and inexplicably, miraculously rebounded, sending the man flying backward out of the greenhouse with a terrible boom and a shower of shattered glass.
Peter slammed into an invisible barrier the next instant and sprawled to the floor, head spinning more from the situation than the impact. A magical shield stood between him and his attacker. That was why the spell had ricocheted. How had it come to be there?
No sign of Beatrix. No sign of anyone except the wizard, lying still on the grass, a tangled and bloody mess. Peter winced—partly with reflexive pity, partly because it almost had been him.
Then came a sound, soft but unmistakable. The pop of teleportation.
Before his eyes, the mangled body disappeared.
Peter scrambled to his feet, staring at the empty lawn in bewildered shock. He put out a hand to steady himself on the barrier. But it, too, was now gone.
The local police took photos, swabbed samples of the blood and had Peter recite the details of what had happened over and over, each retelling making Beatrix more upset. He’d almost died. He’d been watering plants in his greenhouse, and he’d almost died.
Then Detective Tanner rushed in and went over all the same ground, literally and figuratively. Finally, sitting in the kitchen with hot chocolate, Tanner asked a question that had not yet come up.
“This other wizard you think was there under an invisibility spell, Omnimancer—could it have been Garrett?”
Beatrix closed her eyes. She didn’t want to think about Garrett. She was far past her limit already.
“I sincerely doubt it,” Rosemarie said tartly, answering the detective.
“I can’t think of a single reason Garrett would protect me,” Peter said.
“If he wanted to kill you himself—” Tanner stopped. “No, you’re right. He’d have done it immediately afterward, in that case. And I suppose he’d have no reason to teleport away with that other wizard.”
That was when it hit her like a physical jolt: There was someone who would have a reason to protect Peter. Someone who’d disposed of a dead body once already.
Ella.
If she’d been caught in the throes of temporary madness when she’d attacked him before—if she wanted nothing more than to atone—then wasn’t it possible that Ella might shadow them under an invisibility spell?
Wasn’t it likely, even, that she would have seen the stories about the death threats and wanted to do something?
“Mrs. Blackwell?”
She blinked and refocused on Tanner. “Yes?”
“Have you received any threats?”
“Well,” she began, thinking of the letters, but not entirely sure what sort of threats they’d all contained.
“Yes,” Rosemarie said heavily. “Fourteen in all.”
Beatrix sighed—the number had gone up. Peter looked thunderstruck. “What?”
“Wizards or typics?” the detective asked.
“They didn’t specify. I’ve assumed typics, because they’re all focused on the false idea that Beatrix was playing Peter and Wizard Garrett off each other.”
Tanner stood. “Copy them and mail them to me, please.”
Beatrix nodded.
“And be careful, both of you,” Tanner said.
They drove Lydia and Rosemarie home and waited in the yard, away from the house and its ever-watching cameras, as Rosemarie went inside to gather up the letters.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Peter asked her.
“The same reason you didn’t tell me about the threats you got, I expect,” she said wearily. “I didn’t think they really meant it, and I didn’t want to worry you.”
Her sister slipped a hand into hers. “We must take every precaution.”
Easy to say. Difficult to do.
Rosemarie, walking briskly toward them, handed over the virulent pack of notes. Then she threw her arms around Peter, to his evident shock.
“I’m sorry,” she said in an urgent undertone.
“I’m so sorry for what I said. You could have died, and—and I want you to know that the Senate vote wasn’t your fault.
If it hadn’t been the contract, it would have been something else.
And this hospital-bill disaster—we all should have seen this coming. ”
He let out a ragged breath. “I’m sorry for what I said, too. Truly. None of this is your fault, either. And I deserved to get chewed out for presuming to tell you how to fight an uphill battle I just joined.”
Rosemarie shot him one of her rare, wry smiles and hugged her next. “Be careful, my girl.”
Ten minutes later, back in their bedroom, Beatrix cast the usual spells and emerged from checking the bathroom to find Peter sitting on the bed, reading the threatening letters addressed to her.
“Stop,” she said, stomach twisting.
“I have to know.”
“Peter—”
“This is deadly serious,” he snapped. “These are three times as vile as the ones I got. You should have told me.”
“And then what? What on earth do you think you can do about it?”
She realized what it sounded like the instant she said it—half a second before he winced as if she’d struck him. “I—I didn’t mean—”