Chapter 29
Breakfast was a bust. Lunch, too. But at dinner, they finally managed to get Red Coat to come to a halt in one of the few surveillance blind spots where they’d calculated none of the cameras could see.
“Out of my way,” the wizard hissed as they clustered around him.
Peter fell to his knees, grasping the man’s coat right at the pocket where he kept his fuel. “Please—please, I’m begging you, give us more time!”
“How the heck do you think we can completely overhaul this weapon in three days?” Martinelli put in, waving his arms.
“We need more time—”
“The whole thing is insane, that’s what it is—”
“Get off me,” Red Coat spat, yanking his coat back—several leaves lighter. He stalked off, and for ten minutes, Peter and Martinelli ate in charged silence as they waited to see if they’d been found out. Was someone going to come bursting in?
No one did.
They’d done it. He couldn’t believe it.
Now they just had to get into the laundry or garbage chute without being caught, climb up it somehow, find a way to escape whatever place this was and get to Beatrix—before Morse saw they were missing.
He tried not to think about the odds of this plan going disastrously wrong.
Beatrix hoped Peter had been exaggerating when he’d told her that the complex was mostly underground, but alas, it was true. Below the main level were two other levels, equally large if not larger.
The first clearly housed soldiers, with rows of rooms full of bunk beds.
It was too late to safely search here—full of people—so she left it for the morning and went down one more flight.
This level had the same rows of rooms, perhaps once used for housing as well but now either empty or storing piles of items. Bags of potatoes.
Laboratory gear. Crisp uniforms. Dirty uniforms. All the doors had little windows, and she looked into every one of them—easily dozens.
In none of them did she see a kidnapped wizard, though Morse would really be slipping if he put Peter in a room like this.
Still: Should she have been opening all these doors to look into corners?
What if she did and gave herself away to an invisible guard?
What if she ought to forget about the rooms and search for a false wall, hidden trapdoor or equally obscure item?
What if Peter wasn’t here at all, the four days and no-longer-twenty hours ticked away, and …
Five miles. God Almighty, not that.
Finally, exhausted and famished, she paused her search and backtracked to a room full of canned rations.
She grabbed a box, realized that of course it did not turn invisible simply because she’d touched it, and had to cast a spell on it because she was too spent for more knitting.
She could hardly lug it out, she was so shaky, but she managed to get up the steps and back to Peter’s old office.
It seemed the safest place: No one would have a reason to walk in the next morning.
But more than that, being there felt … better, somehow.
After she’d secured the room, she fell on the rations. Corned beef had never tasted so good.
Then she curled up under Peter’s desk, feeling him in the very air around her. Like an echo from the past, insubstantial and beyond her grasp. Like a dream.
The lights were off. The fan was on. They had five leaves to their name, a veritable fortune.
Showtime.
Martinelli had to get up first—he had a chance of pulling Peter into the chute but not vice versa, given their respective sizes.
Peter gave Martinelli a boost this time and stood bent-backed as his friend hissed a spell at the barrier, fortunately not near a camera.
When Martinelli scrambled into the chute, it was both a literal and figurative weight off his shoulders.
His relief lasted all of ten seconds. “I can’t turn around!” Martinelli hissed. “It’s too tight!”
Damn it. Why hadn’t they thought of that?
He looked around, trying to come up with something. His eyes fell on the table.
“Come back down,” he whispered.
After they’d quietly moved the table in place, Peter stood on it and worked his way into the chute first. It was made of slippery metal, but the sides—amazingly—had built-in handholds. That rang a vague bell, as if it should remind him of something, but he came up empty.
Martinelli gave a soft grunt as he worked his way in. “Go, go.”
Neither of them liked leaving the table there. But they had no idea what awaited them up the chute. Better to have three leaves than just one and a table moved back to its original spot.
They went up perhaps fifteen feet, Peter nearly falling onto Martinelli at one point, Martinelli breathing so heavily that the sound echoed around the tight space.
Was the climb too much for him? Peter, staring ahead in the dark, suddenly realized they were perhaps two feet from the end of the chute.
He covered the remaining distance and still couldn’t make out much, but it looked like an empty room lay beyond—perhaps an office.
All that separated them from it was a metal grate.
He laid his hand on it and thought there might be no spellwork there.
God, he hoped that was right.
“Cast onde,” he whispered. “One leaf’ll do. We just need to loosen these screws.”
He pressed himself to one side. Martinelli, voice reedy, performed the spell. Peter pocketed the obliging screws, pulled off the grate and—
“Shit!”
“What?” Martinelli’s whisper was hoarse. “What is it?”
“Barrier. Could be a low-grade shield.”
For a moment, the only sound was Martinelli’s breathing. The dilemma was obvious: If it was that type of shield, their two remaining leaves could take it down. If it wasn’t …
Martinelli started to wheeze. Peter looked around, worried. “Are you OK?”
“Cla—” Martinelli gasped out. “Claustr—”
Claustrophobic. Peter grabbed Martinelli’s arm, struck with fear that his friend might faint—fall—die. “Go back down.”
Martinelli, eyes squeezed shut, shook his head. “Can’t.”
“Cast the spell,” Peter said, louder than he’d intended. “Quick.”
With heroic effort, Martinelli forced air into his lungs and performed the spell on his first try, his magic sparking against the barrier.
The enchantment did not give way.
Martinelli started to shake.
“No!” Peter shouted at the spell trapping them, not thinking about the cameras below, considering nothing but the horror of getting within inches of escape and finding calamity instead. “No, God damn it!”
A sound brought him to his senses. He froze, hanging on to Martinelli. For a few beats of his frantically pounding heart, nothing happened.
Then came a voice that sounded almost as stunned as he was to hear it: “Peter! Hold on, I’ll drop the spell!”
A minute later—both men safely out of the chute—Peter wrapped his shaking arms around his invisible, astounding wife.
Every emotion seemed to be lodged in her throat, holding words back.
Perhaps it was the same for him, because he said nothing for a while, holding her so tightly she could feel his heart racing just above hers.
Then he whispered: “We must get out. I don’t know how much time we have before they’ll follow us here. ”
“Oh,” she murmured, a spurt of fear breaking the logjam. “Just a moment …”
She dug into a pocket for leaves and cast an invisibility spell on the man whose life she’d been mortally afraid for and the man whose death she thought she’d caused. It felt miraculous, standing here with them both. She had to get them to safety—somehow.
“Where are we?” Peter whispered.
“Your old office.”
“What? How in the—never mind, let’s figure out somewhere to hide. Martinelli?”
“They must have had us in the lower basement,” Martinelli said, catching his breath, “so—not there.”
“I don’t think the upper basement is a good idea, either,” Beatrix whispered.
“Wait—what about the old lab?” Peter said.
Ten minutes later, they reached it without incident.
The abandoned laboratory looked as if the last time it had been used was during the World War, a recommendation in itself.
As a bonus, it had a bathroom—ancient but operational—and was located at the end of a hallway next to unoccupied offices.
Martinelli cast a tripwire in the corridor as an early-warning system, Beatrix checked the lab for spellwork—clean—and soundproofed it, and Peter swiped a gallon of water from the mess hall to pair with the rest of the tinned meat.
As Martinelli sealed the room, Peter said, “I can’t believe I didn’t realize that was the chute to my office. I mean, I knew it had one for disposing animals back in the 1920s, I even saw the handholds once …”
“I can’t believe your wife got through the checkpoint,” Martinelli said. “It’s even more secure now than it was when you left, boss.”
Peter’s hand found her elbow and slid down her arm, his fingers twining with hers. “How did you do it? When I heard your voice, I thought for a second that I was dreaming.”
“It’s—it’s a very long story. Peter,” she added in an urgent undertone, the question she feared to ask pressing at her like a knife, “what happened to—”
“Wait! Sorry, just in the interest of caution: Tell me what name you sometimes call me. What you called me when you said I’d hoisted myself with my own petard.”
“Hades,” she said without hesitation. Of course he needed to ask. She could be Ella, for all he knew.
“Ask me a question,” Peter said to her, but she had no doubt, none, so she picked one with an answer she didn’t know.
“When did you first realize you loved me? Not just thought—knew.”
He drew her to him, murmuring in her ear. “In the coma. After you told me the Vows were broken.” He pressed his forehead to hers, voice catching. “My God, I’m so sorry, Beatrix. It was Morse—I couldn’t stop him, he had me under a spell, and he killed your sister and—”
“Lydia’s alive,” she said. “She’s alive.”
Peter gasped. “You’re—you’re sure?”
“Yes,” she said, “but I haven’t been able to actually see her, because they arrested me when she was in surgery—”
“What?”
“Wait, first I must ask you …” She swallowed. She had the sickening feeling she knew the answer already. All she could manage was a tremulous, “Rosemarie?”
“Dead,” he choked out. “Morse.”
“Oh,” she said, legs buckling, chest constricting, her body folding in on itself. Peter helped her to the floor, arranging her in his lap, wrapping his arms around her as she shivered convulsively.
The image of Rosemarie running headlong at the wizard—and her own death—circled through her head in a loop until she forced it out with other memories.
Rosemarie holding her back after class at age six (six!) to tell her that she could go to college if she applied herself, and was she going to do that or not?
Rosemarie carrying her into the classroom at age seven with a badly skinned knee, surprising her by saying not a word about “unladylike behavior” and plucking out the gravel with exceeding gentleness.
Rosemarie rapping her knuckles at age eight because she was whispering to another girl—whispering, she remembered, something ugly about Peter.
“No,” Rosemarie had said, fire in her eyes.
“I expect better from my students, Miss Harper. I expect better from you.”
Rosemarie, her lifelong guide. Rosemarie, whom she loved so much that grief buffeted her from all sides, making it hard to breathe, to think, to go forward.
Rosemarie, embracing her at her mother’s funeral, saying, “Work will help. Take it from me, Miss Harper: For a while, work is the only thing that will interrupt this pain.”
Get to work.
“We have to stop them,” she said, voice raw.
He held her tighter. “Yes.”
“They’re going to use your weapon.”
“What have you heard? They haven’t told us anything except to hurry up and finish.”
“I overheard Morse talking to Whitaker,” she said, a fresh wave of misery crashing over her.
“When I destroyed the weapon, I left tiny pieces of it in the forest, and Morse found them—he figured it out—he knows what that explosion in January was powered by. He knows what he needs to produce another five-mile radius is a wizard.”
“Oh, fuck,” he whispered.
“They’re going to set it off on Friday.” She grasped his arms. “I don’t know where or why, but Friday—Friday around noon.”
“Hey,” Martinelli said, voice sharp. “Call me crazy, boss, but I’m thinking there are a few things you need to tell me. Right now.”