Chapter 25 #2
But in fact, he could turn them down. Because he refused to go along with this. He absolutely refused.
“No,” he spat. “I’d much prefer the trial and execution.”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t clear,” Whitaker said pleasantly. “This isn’t a choice.”
“Actually, it is.” Peter swallowed to try to clear the metallic taste of blood from his mouth.
“You can tell me to work on the weapon all you want, but there’s nothing you can do to make me.
I’ve already been dosed with ayayak root, as you probably heard from the police, so that won’t work again.
Torture can leave people utterly unable to function, so you can’t risk that.
And I’d rather die, so threatening to kill me is useless. ”
“Oh, we’re not doing any of that,” Whitaker said, waving an insouciant hand. He turned to Morse. “If you would?”
The wizard strode past them, Peter tensing for something awful. A different drug? A more subtle sort of torture?
He heard a drawer open. The click of a button. A whirring sound.
A picture snapped into view on the blank wall in front of him, blurry at first, then clearer. He and Beatrix sat at their kitchen table, the remains of a meal between them, his hand on hers, her face visible but not his—a view from a hidden camera attached to the ceiling.
“I do want her. I do. God, I do. But I swear I don’t love your sister. I love you, wife mine,” he heard himself say. Tinny, distant, but his voice. Words that probably came out of his mouth at some point, in completely different sentences, stitched together.
“Prove it to me,” Beatrix replied, her lips moving in concert with the words, a snippet of something she must actually have said.
“Anything,” he said.
“Oh? What?”
“Anything. I’ll—I’ll kill her if you want me to.” A pause. “Should I? Should I … kill Lydia?”
Beatrix smiled her crooked smile, made horrible in this fabricated context. “Yes. Oh, yes.”
The captured-on-film version of himself leaned in and kissed her, and he abruptly remembered the real scene.
The morning after their wedding. A conversation about how much he loved her, how he intended to kiss her right there—the possibility of hidden cameras be damned—because no one could make hay of it anymore.
The picture shuddered, flipped, vanished, the buzzing machine clicking off.
A more subtle sort of torture indeed.
“Just for the record,” Peter said, voice shaking, “that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. As you well know!”
“Of course it happened,” Whitaker said. “You just saw it happen with your own eyes. No jury in the world would acquit your wife. An open-and-shut death penalty case.”
“You … you evil—”
“So let me reiterate: You will come and work on the project until we say we are satisfied. You do that, and this evidence will never get out. Do we see eye to eye now?”
“Do you think I’m a fool? I’m supposed to take you at your word? You’re a liar!” He was yelling. Losing it. Oh God, Beatrix!
“Blackwell—”
“I need a Vow. A binding Vow with”—sudden inspiration—“with the vice president.” He took a breath, the rest of the plan coming to him. “Draden will take no actions to harm my wife and he will proactively stop anyone else from doing so.”
“Blackwell—”
“Make that happen and I’ll do what you want. Otherwise, go to fucking hell.”
“Are you quite done?”
He scowled at Whitaker, clenching his teeth to stop the fearful trembling.
At all costs he had to protect Beatrix. He’d utterly failed to keep her sister safe, he hadn’t been able to do a thing to prevent Rosemarie’s murder, but he would be damned if he let the magiocracy ruin her life any more than it already had.
Whitaker crossed his arms. “I’ll see what we can arrange.”
“The vice president,” Peter said, voice raised. “No one else. No one.”
Whitaker gave him a fleeting look of annoyance—yes, how irritating this all was, the way he was reacting to the complete devastation of everything he cared about—and swept from the room.
Leaving him alone with Morse.
“Mrs. Blackwell?”
She opened her eyes and stared in confusion at Senator Gray. Had she fallen asleep on the job? Then she remembered that he’d fired her weeks ago, and—
She sat up, gasping for air. She was on a cot at the end of a hallway in what looked like a hospital. “Lydia!”
“In surgery,” Gray said quickly, putting a hand on her shoulder as if he feared she might run off.
She grasped his other hand with both of hers. “She’s … alive?”
“Yes. They think—well, they haven’t lost hope that she could pull through.”
“Oh,” Beatrix sobbed, relief and anxiety buffeting her from all directions. Then she considered how very simple it would be for wizards to intervene at this stage—for someone to make sure her sister did not beat the odds. She leapt to her feet. “Where is she?”
He pointed. “In there.”
Four feet away stood a door with a small, square window. She stepped up to it, fear gripping her, and looked through.
Nearly everything inside was an antiseptic white—the doctors’ scrubs, the nurses’ dresses and caps, the operating table, the painted bricks on the wall. Lydia’s auburn hair looked far too colorful to be allowed. Her face, however, was almost pale enough to match the room.
She was turned in such a way that her wound was not visible, but the memory of how it looked was seared in Beatrix’s mind.
She pressed her hands against the door, feeling as helpless as she had on the platform.
How could she keep wizards out? All that occurred to her was a surreptitiously cast shielding spell on the room.
But that required demarcation stones, and Peter had them in his—
The rest of the attack on Lydia came back to her. She stumbled to the cot, dizzy and sick.
“Rosemarie?” she asked.
“I don’t think she’s turned up. I’m … I’m sorry.”
“Peter?” Her voice cracked.
Gray winced and shook his head.
She wrapped her arms around herself, considering the possibility that Peter did exactly what it appeared he had.
That he’d been faking his inability to spellcast. Pretending he loved her.
Biding his time just so he could—no, no, that was utterly ridiculous.
If he’d wanted to kill Lydia, he’d had hundreds of opportunities to do it before now. In front of crowds, even.
He didn’t do it. Of that, she was certain. It had to be the magiocracy—but how could she prove it? Who would believe her?
“I don’t think it was him,” Gray said abruptly.
She stared at him, startled.
“I mean,” he added, more quietly, “I think that was him on the stage, but …” He sat on the folding chair next to her cot, leaning toward her so she could hear him whisper.
“I was behind the platform. I saw Miss Dane shove the omnimancer out of the way and grab—well, it looked like thin air. I think there was another wizard standing behind Blackwell—pulling his strings or something. I think that’s what happened. ”
“And now they have him,” she said, her whisper harsh in its urgency. “What am I to do?”
He swallowed. “I don’t know.”
She stood up, needing to do something, and stared through the window again, wishing she had Rosemarie’s talent for spotting invisibility spells. Wishing far more intensely that Rosemarie were here with her arm around her.
She heard the creak of the chair and the click of dress shoes as Gray came up behind her. She expected him to tell her to sit down. But he said nothing at all.
“Why were you at the march?” she asked. When he didn’t immediately answer, she added, “You said you were done. I thought you meant it.”
“I did.” The words sounded heavy. Resigned.
She looked at him. His slicked-back hair was mussed. His tie was askew. He had blood on his dress shirt and an air of desperation that hung around him like static electricity. She almost asked the question on her lips: Are you in love with Lydia?
He pressed a hand to his eyes. “I promised my constituents good, old-fashioned values, and you’re—you’re revolutionaries. You want to overturn everything! What about motherhood? What about the children? How is our society supposed to function if women can—if women—”
He was looking at her as if he expected an interruption. She simply held his gaze, and he wilted.
“Whenever I hear her speak,” he murmured after a short silence, “I get the sickening feeling that she might be right.”
She swallowed a retort along the lines of how would you like it if I said it made me queasy to think of you exercising your rights. She was too wrung out. And anyway, for Gray, that counted as progress.
“She’s never said anything to you about women’s rights,” she pointed out.
“She didn’t have to. If you listen to her, you can’t help but think about it—about everything she’s rejecting. She’ll never be a proper wife and mother. Never.”
He said this as if he took it personally. She was absolutely convinced now that he did—that he lusted after her sister as so many men had before him but was repelled by everything that made Lydia Lydia.
“And the worst of it is …” He looked through the window, shoulders slumping.
“The worst of it is that I can’t convince myself she ought to be normal.
It would be like … like putting a gown on a statue.
Everyone might agree that the dress is the height of fashion and respectability, but it’s still ruining a work of art. ”
She gazed at Gray, reconsidering him—just a bit. After a moment, she slipped her arm through his.
His groan seemed pulled from his very depths. “Oh, God, she can’t die. Not that. Please.”
She pressed her free hand against the door, trying to draw strength from its cool solidity. Not Lydia. Not Rosemarie. Not—she shut her eyes—Peter. Please, God, please—not any of that.
“Mrs. Blackwell?”