Chapter 25
She watched it happen. The spell going off, Rosemarie barreling into Peter, the screams, the distinctive noise of teleportation as Peter and Rosemarie disappeared.
She saw it and knew it was a dream, because there wasn’t one iota of a chance that it would occur dayside.
Peter would never. And even if he would—which he wouldn’t—he couldn’t cast a thing.
Joan ran to Lydia’s side, gasping at what she saw. Beatrix shut her eyes, clenching her teeth. This was just a nightmare. The nightmare to end all nightmares. She had to wait it out.
“We need your attention!” Joan said into the microphone, her amplified voice barely louder than the confused noise of three hundred thousand people, some shouting, some crying.
“Quiet, please! Are there any doctors here? Please, any doctors? We need immediate assistance! Lydia Harper has been attacked!”
Lydia Harper has been attacked. Beatrix tried to remember going to sleep and couldn’t. She woke up, she went to the march—the real march—and … Lydia Harper has been attacked.
She lurched from her chair in terror and fell at her sister’s crumpled body, gagging at the blood, its stench and horrifying amount. Her sister’s chest was rising and falling—Lydia was still alive, but for how long? She had to do something. She …
She couldn’t breathe. Black spots pulsed around the edges of her vision. No, no, no, she couldn’t have a panic attack now! Her sister’s life depended on what she did in the next few moments! She grasped for her hidden pocket full of leaves. She had to—had to—
Her head hit Lydia’s shoulder as she slumped forward. “Help,” she croaked. Joan’s voice echoed above her, exhorting the crowd to “please stay where you are, please don’t run.” No one was coming to help. The pulsing black spots grew.
“Beatrix!” Someone grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled. “Move! Get out of the way!”
She slid into unconsciousness with a final thought tossed between the crashing panic and despair. Ella. Whoever was yelling at her sounded just like Ella.
Peter gasped as he came out of the jump, muscles still stubbornly nonfunctional.
A cavernously large space rose around them, gray and industrial.
Next to him, the wizard gave a grunt—the first noise he’d heard the man make—and he realized with a start that Rosemarie was there, kicking and punching at what looked like absolutely nothing.
“You rotten, evil—” she choked out, but the rest of it was cut off as they teleported again, no spellwords coming from the wizard’s mouth. Impossible. And yet it worked. They were at the edge of a cliff, scrubby grass under their feet, and—
A croak of a scream shrilled from his throat as Rosemarie tumbled over the edge, shoved by unseen hands.
No! Not her, too! They remained there, horribly, until she hit the far-off ground below, either because the wizard wanted to be sure of his handiwork or enjoyed watching people die.
Then they jumped back to the empty building, Peter staring in glassy shock at the floor.
He rose up perhaps an inch—another spell he couldn’t hear—and the wizard, hand on his back, propelled him forward through the vacant space. A warehouse, Peter’s mind supplied. As if that were the detail that mattered when Beatrix’s entire remaining family had just been murdered.
Her entire remaining family except him, anyway. But it was only a matter of time. They wouldn’t have made him appear to be Lydia’s killer if they intended to keep him alive. They would kill him, too. Now, let it be now.
The wizard opened a door and pushed him inside. A small room, some sort of office. To one side, a desk with a telephone. In the center, a single, empty chair.
With no warning, the man he could not see stripped him with another silent spell, pieces of clothing slithering off one by one.
Peter hung in the air, knowing this should upset him but too numb to register strong feelings about it, as invisible hands pulled all the leaves out of his pockets.
It wasn’t as if leaves would help him. It wasn’t as if a strip search made this horrifying day noticeably worse.
When it was over, his clothes wriggling back onto him, the wizard shoved him into the chair and bound him to it. Unseen ropes cast by an unseen hand on the orders of unseen people who’d decided that Lydia Harper should no longer be alive.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the eerie sight of the telephone handset rising up, seemingly of its own accord. He heard the jig-jig-jig of the rotary dial engaging.
“Here,” the wizard said, and hung up.
Peter readied himself for something imminent. For people to appear. For a staged arrest attempt with cameras rolling that would end with him shot for “resisting,” perhaps.
But minutes dragged by. Nothing happened.
That was worse.
After a while, he remembered that Marbella Draden had warned them this would happen. She’d told Beatrix her sister was in danger. She’d insisted that Garrett’s pretend assassination attempt did not mean a real one wouldn’t come.
He should have believed her, especially given who she was and what she knew. Instead, he’d told himself she was unhinged. He hadn’t given it a second thought.
If he’d simply said they ought to put the strongest possible protection spell on Lydia—and never mind that all the people shaking her hand would feel it—she would still be alive. If he’d recommended it for all four of them, Rosemarie might have survived, too. God Almighty, why hadn’t he listened?
He sat in silence on the hard chair, Lydia and Rosemarie’s murders replaying in his head, the deadening shock giving way to an overpowering tsunami of horror, rage and guilt.
“You fucking coward,” he yelled at the wizard, and the words actually came out, both audible and intelligible.
He received no response. He tried to turn his head, found he could, but barely, and decided to continue moving one of the few muscles he had complete control over.
“How can you live with yourself?”
Silence.
“You killed them! Is this routine for you? How could you follow an order like that?”
Still nothing. For all he knew, the wizard wasn’t even there, had managed to silently slip out. But he was confident the man was still in the room. And he was almost certain that man was Morse.
His neck pulsed, his heart racing with a fury he could do nothing about. “Was it Draden? Did he order you to kill Lydia? That’s my bet, because a man who would cover up the rape of his own daughter would stoop to anything at—”
The blow came without warning, knocking him backward. He stared at the ceiling, dazed, still strapped to the chair but back horizontal and legs up in the air. It took a moment to taste the blood in his mouth. It took a few seconds after that to notice the deep ache that suggested a broken tooth.
The office door opened.
“What’s this?” A smooth male voice. “I thought the instructions were quite clear.”
The answering “yes” sounded livid.
Smooth voice heaved a sigh. “Well? Fix it. And show yourself, please—talking to thin air drives me crazy.”
The chair swooped back into place, the movement so dizzying that Peter retched.
“For God’s sake,” muttered the new man. He was a typic with salt-and-pepper hair, the only detail Peter could fix on as he worked to keep the contents of his stomach in place. “Where’s my handkerchief …”
He was wiping the blood off Peter’s face when Peter found the jagged piece of his ruined molar and spat it out. “Is that a tooth?” the man snapped at the now-visible Morse, and at that point Peter lapsed into laughter that even to his ears sounded crazy.
The man with the salt-and-pepper hair pursed his lips. “Blackwell—”
“He just killed two women.” Peter glared first at Morse, wearing his omnipresent dark glasses, and then at the typic. “And you’re upset about a tooth?”
The man took a step back and considered him, one eyebrow raised. “You do realize”—his lips twisted into a thin smile—“that you killed those women.”
The rage that would have propelled him to answer intemperately three minutes earlier had ebbed.
Stupid to have screamed at Morse. Dangerous to have brought up the vice president and his daughter.
Myopic to think this couldn’t get worse just because he saw no way out alive.
He had to think twice before he said another word.
He looked the man in the eye and, with a knife-edge calm, said, “No.”
The typic shrugged. “Yes. Here’s the position: Three hundred thousand people, give or take, saw you murder your sister-in-law this morning and kidnap the old woman.
In a day or two, everyone will find out that Washington police mishandled a tip about how you posed a danger to Lydia Harper because of your growing obsession with her.
And as you might recall, your former colleagues did try to warn the world that you were disturbed. ”
He paused, either for effect or a response. Peter simply glared at him.
“Now, I don’t think a messy trial and execution would be in the country’s best interests,” the man said, even more smoothly than before, and Peter suppressed an eye roll because there wasn’t a chance in hell they would let him be put on trial and say his piece.
“So that’s why I’m here. To lay out a mutually beneficial plan. ”
“No.” Peter left the fuck you unspoken, but he thought his tone made it abundantly clear.
“I thought I told you never to turn down a proposition until you hear what it is.”
He stared at the man, taken aback. “Whitaker?”
Lt. Gen. Whitaker, head of the Pentagram’s weapons development program, smiled that thin smile again. “You will come back to work on Project 96. You will see it through to completion as quickly as possible.”
Peter shut his eyes, blocking out the smile and the bland face, feeling bile rising up his esophagus. What was this?
Good God, did they kill Lydia because he would then be unable to turn them down?