Chapter 20
It wasn’t quite five o’clock in the morning, but there was no chance of going back to sleep now.
They dressed in silence and headed downstairs.
She was sitting at the kitchen table, a mug of tea in her hands that she didn’t want to drink, when she heard a soft thunk, followed by three more thunks that sounded like rolled-up newspapers hitting the front door.
She closed her eyes. How she’d hoped, when Hickok showed up yesterday, that a story could help. But now it didn’t matter. And honestly, what had she been thinking? What assistance had she expected to get?
Peter’s chair slid backward against the floor. She listened to the slow thud of his footsteps as he went to collect the papers.
“Hickok’s story is out,” he said when he returned. “Headline: ‘Latest disaster for Romeo & Juliet: Crushing bills.’”
“I don’t want to read it,” she whispered.
He sighed. “Neither do I.”
“Then let’s not. What’s the point.”
She heard the rustle of newspaper pages turning. After a moment, he said, “I have to admit that I’m tempted to read Rydell just for the potential amusement factor.”
“What?” She opened her eyes. He held the column up for her, and she started to laugh. She couldn’t help it. “ROMEO’S NEO-SUFFRAGISM BLAMED ON SELF-HATE? Says who?”
He scanned the piece. “Psychologists. All anonymous, it looks like.”
“Perhaps they suffer from self-hate, too.”
His lips turned up. She grinned at him. But the humor was fleeting, because she considered that tomorrow’s column would be along the lines of STAR-CROSSED JERKS GET JUST DESSERTS. She took a sip of her lukewarm tea and pushed it away. She wished she hadn’t said anything to Hickok.
She wished she’d woken up ten minutes earlier this morning.
She wished the bills had come before they were married.
She wished she hadn’t figured out how to manipulate magic in a way that led to evil and madness, hadn’t taught Ella, hadn’t missed the warning signs that ended with Peter at the brink of death and his best friend vaporized and—
“Look at this,” he said, passing her the Washington Herald.
“Veep’s Son ‘a New Man,’” declared the headline on the local gossip column.
The item described how the carousing Frederick Draden had given up his Baltimore apartment and moved into the vice-presidential mansion, “the better to help his father.” Apparently, he’d woken up one day and decided he was wasting his life.
“Forgive me if I assume that threats of being cut off from the family money might have played a bigger role,” Peter murmured into her ear.
She nodded, still too caught in if-onlys to smile at his dark humor. He stood up and held out a hand. “Why don’t we make some brews?”
They looked through the to-do list of medicinals in the old brewing room and settled on four of the most pressing that required items they still owned. Upstairs, after she’d cast the usual spells, he said, “Now hit gewaerlaecet. The tripwire.”
She stood in one corner of the room, near the door, and cast the spell while focusing intently on where she wanted the tripwire to reach. She thought the magic caught, but there was no way to tell by looking at it. There was nothing to see.
Then Peter reached past her and touched the door. She felt it, as if someone holding the other end of a string in her hand just pulled it taut. The vibration went right down her arm.
“Works?” he asked.
“Wow,” she whispered.
“What about here? And here?” he said, touching other spots on the door.
“Yes,” she said. She put her hand through the invisible, insubstantial tripwire—more of a tripwall, really—and got no response.
An extraordinary spell. How did it recognize the caster, so to speak?
She thought of Garrett sending the tripwire around her house, the physical contact of his lips on her skin enough to turn it topsy-turvy so it would go off only if she crossed it.
She shuddered. But still: extraordinary.
“Have you cast it before?” she asked.
He shook his head. She was about to say how amazing it was but caught herself just in time.
They worked without talking, falling into the rhythm of brew prep, the chunk-chunk-chunk of their knives, the tap of glass containers on wood, the drip-drop of liquid the only sounds. She felt—if not exactly better, at least engrossed.
Then the telephone rang. The spidery horror rose up again, stronger than before. The Pentagram.
Peter looked up at her, eyes wide. “Quick—let me out!”
For a second, just a second, she had the urge to trap him in the room. She turned and unspelled it with shaking hands.
His boot heels sounded like hammers on the steps as he rushed down. She leaned against the doorway, wrapping her arms around herself. She heard his “hello,” out of breath and tense.
A pause. “Yes—good morning,” he said, sounding faintly puzzled.
Another stretch of silence. “Oh! That’s very kind, but I don’t think we could accept”—a short gap, a laugh—“no, no, I’m not suggesting anything of the sort …”
She ran down the stairs, hearing several more bits of his side of the conversation, and got to the kitchen just as he hung up. He gave a bemused shake of the head and leaned in to whisper, “Someone who’s never met us just said she’s contributing $5,000 toward our bills.”
“What?”
“I said no, but the long and short of it is that she mailed it already.” He shrugged. “We’ll have to send it back, of course.”
Impractical hope bloomed in her chest. “Peter, what if …”
His laugh was short. He leaned in closer. “What if several hundred more people spontaneously decide to give us $5,000, you mean?”
She sighed. He was right—a ridiculous thought.
“I should have realized it wasn’t the Pentagram,” he added. “They’re not due to call for another hour and twenty minutes. Shall we?”
They were halfway up the steps when a knock rang out on the front door. Croft stood on their porch.
“For pity’s sake, why didn’t you tell me?” He looked at Beatrix, shaking his head. “I had no idea until I picked up the paper.”
“I didn’t want to bother you—”
“Bother me? You’re the closest thing I have to a daughter, you know!”
For all his kindness, she hadn’t realized he’d seen her that way. He was kind to everyone. Eyes welling, she threw her arms around him.
“Well, now.” Croft cleared his throat and patted her shoulder.
“Well, now—what I came to tell you is that we’ve got $14,000 in the budget that we didn’t have to spend because of all the leak-fixing and other infrastructure work you did, Omnimancer.
I need to call an emergency council meeting to get this authorized, but I can’t imagine they’ll object to giving you money you’ve rightfully earned. ”
Beatrix pulled back, a joyful cry slipping out. Peter looked astonished. Then he shook his head as if trying to fling out the what-if she had planted there. “That’s extremely good of you, Mayor, but I couldn’t—”
“Oh, yes, you could. I’m not taking no for an answer.
” Croft leaned in confidentially. “Also, I didn’t mention this before because I didn’t want to make an offer I was still trying to piece together, but it finally got there last night, so—the counties and towns hereabouts want to hire you as our collective omnimancer. ”
She caught the fleeting look of pain on Peter’s face. That was exactly the job he’d wanted, and now he couldn’t take it.
Croft handed him an envelope. “You’ll find the details in there. I know you could make a lot more somewhere else,” he added apologetically, “but—well, we’d love to have you. Think about it and let me know.”
He shook Peter’s hand, gave Beatrix a smile and left. Back in the new brewing room, she slipped the envelope from his hands, opened it and read the letter aloud.
“‘Dear Wizard Blackwell: We are pleased to offer you the position of omnimancer of Howard and Carroll counties and the municipalities therein. We are prepared to pay a salary of $40,000 a year, not including the cost of brewing ingredients, which we will cover, and’—” She stopped, putting her free hand over her mouth.
“What?” he said, his question sliding out on a sigh.
“… ‘and we will set aside $15,000 annually for the cost of employing a brewing assistant of your choice,’” she murmured. It was more than she’d ever earned. “‘We hope you will accept.’”
“Good God, I wish I could.”
She marshaled her thoughts and took his hand. “Specify that you’ll accept under the condition that your duties are brewing only. That’s all it would take—”
He shook his head. “No.”
“What? Why?”
“This doesn’t change anything. All my arguments still stand.”
She frowned at him. “If you’re thinking that what happened first thing this morning was a sign, I’ve got news for you—this is the sign. We have an attorney who’ll help us, we have jobs, we even have two very generous donations—come on, Peter, what more do you need?”
“You’ve never been as poor as I have,” he snapped. “Don’t blithely shrug off something you haven’t experienced, least of all how bad it would be for the child we might accidentally conceive.”
The urge to throttle him was growing by the second. “You promised to collaborate with me on our finances. You promised.”
“I also promised not to dictate your employment, and I expect you to do me the same courtesy!”
“I will sleep on the floor of our fucking bathroom if I have to so you won’t accidentally fuck me in our fucking bed! How’s that for courtesy?”
His eyes had gone very wide. She’d said that word out loud a grand total of once before in her life—twice, if you counted dreamside.
She let out a shaky breath and pushed on while she had the advantage. “It really comes down to this: Do we have principles, or don’t we? Are we willing to stomach some uncertainty to save people’s lives … or aren’t we?”
He slumped into a chair. “That’s not fair, Beatrix.”
“If you insist on seeing one of your choices in a worst-case light, you have to look at the other that way, too.”
Silence set in. She bit her tongue.