Chapter 32 #3
“Beatrix took the same Vow I did. She felt the same compulsion. And she managed not to kill anyone. There’s something seriously wrong with me that I went along with what the Vow wanted.”
“Maybe,” he said, “or maybe it’s just that your life experiences allowed the Vow to work on you in a way it couldn’t with her.”
She snorted. “I’m just a poor, traumatized victim, is that it?”
“No,” he said. “I mean you knew down to your marrow that what Garrett was doing was wrong. You knew what I’d done to Beatrix was wrong. The need to do something would have felt overwhelming without the Vow, but with that added on top …”
She made no reply for a moment. Then, sounding as if it cost her something to say it, she muttered, “I really misjudged you.”
That should have felt like a victory. Instead, he felt tired and sad. He might have won her over long before, had he talked to her frankly like this. Instead, he’d bristled at her jabs and reasonable distrust of him. He’d given her few opportunities to change her mind.
“Look,” she said, eyes welling, “even if I wasn’t fully to blame, even if the Vow played a big role, I have to pay for my crimes.”
“I can’t tell you what to do,” he said. “I’m not even close to impartial. But as far as punishment goes, it seems to me that you’re already serving a type of life sentence.”
A tear spilled over and raced down her cheek. Her lips quirked—a brief, ironic smile. “This is no good at all, Omnimancer. Who am I going to find to be my implacable voice of conscience now?”
“Try Rosemarie. She didn’t let me get away with anything in grade school.”
Miss Knight looked nearly as surprised to find herself laughing as he felt for prompting it. A moment later they were both chortling—helplessly—at the flabbergasted look on Beatrix’s face as she walked back into the room.
“Well,” Miss Knight said, getting to her feet, “on that note, I think I’ll say good night.”
Beatrix turned to him as soon as her friend dematerialized. He expected questions, but instead she kissed him.
“You’re not going to ask me …?” he said a moment later, gesturing to where Miss Knight had been.
“I don’t need to know the contents of your private conversation.”
“Well—talk to her later. She needs … She really needs a friend.”
She kissed him again, pulling them both onto the couch this time.
“If I’d known six months ago that I would have gotten this response just for saying one half-decent thing about her …”
“No,” she said, laughing breathlessly, cheeks flushed, “it’s mostly that I couldn’t wait a moment longer to do that. We’re free. We’re alive.”
“All thanks to a woman who charges into lion’s dens to save her husband.”
“And a man who pulls rabbits out of hats when all seems lost.”
“Well, to be fair, it was your magic I was borrowing.”
She caressed his cheek. “It took great presence of mind to do what you did.”
He smiled down at her. Then she added, “Borrow my magic anytime,” and he had to suppress a sigh. Tempting—very tempting. But no. If Project 96 almost killed him when it drained the magic out of him, how could he be sure that tapping hers wouldn’t shorten her life?
He would never stop missing spellcasting—he knew that. He would hope, until it happened or the day he died, that his abilities would somehow regenerate.
But what he had, here and now, felt like more than enough.
“Beatrix Jane Blackwell,” he murmured, “I will love you until the end of time.”
“Peter William Blackwell,” she said, smiling her wonderful crooked smile, shifting in a way that made his nerve endings sing, “I look forward to it.”
As soon as Beatrix stepped onto the platform, gripping Peter’s hand, the hum of the crowd gave way to shouted questions and the poof-poof-poof of camera flash bulbs.
“Omnimancer, can you tell us what happened—”
“—the vice president—”
“Omnimancer!”
“—Detroit—”
“Omnimancer!”
Joan cleared her throat into the microphone and the din subsided. “Thank you for joining us. May I introduce Beatrix Blackwell—please hold your questions until she is done speaking.”
Beatrix could see the furrowed brows of the newsmen. She was not the Blackwell they wanted. More than one story that morning had referred to Peter rescuing her “like a prince with his sleeping beauty,” and no one, not even Hickok, knew what role she’d played.
The size of the assembled press corps seemed big enough to encompass someone from every news organization in the country.
Right in front, wearing his yellow fedora and acid smirk, stood Roger Rydell.
She felt the old panic rising like bile until she shifted her gaze to the crowd of women behind them, all looking back at her.
Women who’d taken risks for months. Who’d said “yes, I will.” Who’d come here knowing they could be thrown in jail.
She pressed her hands together, feeling the reassuring metal texture of the protection spell on her skin. Then she spoke directly to them.
She told them about the experiments nine decades earlier that proved women could spellcast. About the plan she set in motion, hoping it would save her sister’s life. About the way it took on a life of its own.
“You didn’t know any of that when a friend asked if they could trust you with a dangerous secret,” Beatrix said. “You’d thought the government was telling the truth when it said that only a relative few are capable of magic—all of them men. But that was a bald-faced lie. And we can prove it.”
She took off her hat and held it out with one hand. With her other, she gripped leaves.
“āhebban!”
The word rippled through the crowd in a hundred thousand echoes. An instant later, a hundred thousand hats floated in midair. A sight to take the breath away.
The opening shot of a revolution.
She turned and held out her hand to Peter. He stepped forward and took it, pressing his shoulder to hers.