Chapter 8
Aburning sensation pulled Peter from a sound sleep, and it took a moment before he was awake enough to realize why a coin-sized part of his collarbone hurt.
Then he launched out of bed, disentangling himself from the sheets, and pulled a pair of pants at random from his suitcase while trying to keep the suddenly-hot locket on the chain around his neck from touching skin.
Someone was casting spells in Ellicott Mills.
Someone besides him.
His alarm clock went off the next moment, and he hopped over to it, pulling up his trousers with one hand. With the other, he grabbed a leaf from the pocket of his coat—he’d slept in it to have all his tools of the trade handy in a pinch. He’d expected a visit. Just not quite this soon.
He cast a spell he’d invented on the side and—conveniently, as it happened—hadn’t gotten around to telling anyone about. The burnt ashes of the leaf swirled until they formed a face, almost photographic in its clarity.
He slumped back on the bed in boneless relief. Tim Martinelli, his deputy director. Or, rather, not his deputy anymore. What on earth was the man doing here at six in the morning?
No way to know where exactly Martinelli was within the perimeter he’d set up around the town, but odds were good that his former colleague was en route by car, considering how much the man hated teleportation.
Peter finished dressing at a more sedate pace and managed to shave, brush his hair and set the coffee pot to boil before a tentative knock sounded on the front door.
“In need of some omnimancing?” he said, startling the gangly man into a laugh.
“Do you ever sleep?” Martinelli said. “Seriously—if you’ve developed something that lets you stay up around the clock, I want in.”
“Sorry, no such luck. Though I am interested to know why you’d show up now if you thought I wouldn’t be awake.”
“Because I couldn’t come any later.” Martinelli’s smile was thin on humor. “Some of us still need to be at the Pentagram at eight on Mondays, you know.”
Peter looked pointedly at Martinelli’s DeSoto, parked just shy of the porch. “Some of us could jump directly there.”
“Yeah, yeah. I like to drive.”
He stood aside to let Martinelli in. “Coffee?”
“Please.”
“Sit in the receiving room—there, to your right.”
Back in the kitchen, the kettle was whistling.
He filled two mugs, cast a no-eavesdropping spell on the house and joined his guest, perched awkwardly on a chair.
Martinelli took the coffee and stared at it, neither drinking nor talking.
The dim light emphasized the bags under his eyes, making him look older than his forty-something years.
“Is there anything in particular that brought you all this way at the crack of dawn?” Peter said at last, curiosity and anxiety battling for the upper hand.
“Why did you do it?”
The tone was so accusatory that for a horrible instant he thought he’d been found out. Then Martinelli added, “Why would you leave such an important project for ... this?” He spread his arms, as if to encompass both the less-than-impressive receiving room and the entire town.
“Helping people with their troubles seemed a nice change from designing a weapon of mass destruction.”
Martinelli gave him a look that said what he thought of that. “Did they fire you?”
“No.”
“Was it something I did?”
“Of course not. You’re a perfectly acceptable researcher.”
“Thanks, I’ve always aspired to be acceptable,” his ex-deputy muttered, the expected comeback to an insult as comfortable and threadbare as a pair of old pants. “Whippersnapper.”
Martinelli had meant it to sting the first time he’d said it, had considered Peter everything the word represented: young, inexperienced, overconfident. He had come around later. But now Peter realized Martinelli’s first instinct had been absolutely right.
Martinelli leaned in. “I know you’ve been under a lot of stress lately, but still: Are you honestly telling me you woke up one day and said, ‘I ought to chuck everything I’ve been doing, leave my team in the lurch and go wipe people’s noses in Middle-of-Nowheresville?’”
“Pretty much my exact words.”
“We can’t do this without you, damn it!”
He certainly hoped that would be the case. All his efforts were in vain, otherwise.
“Please,” Martinelli added, voice so plaintive that Peter felt a pang of guilt—a minor echo of the one that hit when he realized which road he was paving with partially good intentions. “Please come back.”
“Let me have my nervous breakdown where it can’t do international harm.”
Martinelli sighed and took a sip of his coffee.
“Think of it this way.” Peter elbowed him. “They’ll ask you to head the project now that a certain whippersnapper is out of the way.”
“Or they might just pull Franck out of retirement.”
God, no. Martinelli was an excellent scientist but not an innovator. Franck was a genius. Franck would get the job done and probably figure out that someone—a pretty obvious someone—had tried to sabotage the effort.
“Don’t let them walk all over you like that.” Urgency turned his words sharp. “Tell them why you ought to be in charge. Assert yourself, damn it, rather than griping about it after the fact.”
Martinelli winced. “Right. I’m truly sorry I was such a jerk to you those first few weeks.”
“You were the best, most loyal deputy I could have asked for, and you owe me no apologies,” Peter muttered, acid churning in his stomach. If only Martinelli would leave. Better yet, if only he could tell the man everything.
Martinelli finished the rest of his coffee in one gulp and stood, clasping Peter’s arm. “Best of luck with the nose-wiping,” he said, too earnestly for it to be a proper dig.
Peter couldn’t honestly wish him good luck in return. “Take care of yourself,” he said instead.
Martinelli was halfway to his car when he turned and called out: “Oh—better expect a visit from Mercer.”
Mercer—Lt. Gen. Robert Mercer—was the Pentagram’s point man overseeing the work. Of course he would be coming.
“Fair warning,” Martinelli added. “He’s pissed.”
Miss Harper arrived fifteen minutes early, ruined dress peeking out of a bag and brewer’s guide clutched to her heart, her unremarkable features transformed by the strength of her enthusiasm.
“This was fascinating,” she said, as if he’d given her a rip-roaring novel instead of a dry primer.
He paused mid-step on the way to the worktable as it hit him that she’d used the past tense. “Have you finished it?”
“Yes.”
“Miss Harper, that book is nearly four hundred pages long.”
She shrugged. “I make no promises that I’ve memorized it.”
“I should hope not, after a single read,” he said, stealing another glance at her and her rapturous smile.
He’d re-read the guide two weeks earlier in preparation—with none of the joy Miss Harper brought to the exercise—and fully intended to check every step of his brewing against it because he didn’t trust himself.
He’d had nine months of basic omnimancer training nearly twenty years ago before he’d been plucked out for the magicist track, which melded spells and science.
He feared he would make a substandard brewer.
He wasn’t accustomed to being inadequate. Even worse to be inadequate in front of Miss Harper, who’d been fiendishly hard to stay ahead of in school and enjoyed rubbing his nose in it anytime he’d come in second to her.
“What shall I do?” she asked.
He took a deep breath. They were not, in fact, thirteen. “We’re going to make a modified tincture useful for migraine sufferers—that will cross two requests off the to-do list. Open the guide to the tincture section, find ‘migraines’ and read out the ingredients for the white willow bark recipe.”
She flipped to the right page and read, “Ten ounces dried white willow bark, ten ounces freshly squeezed pomegranate juice, 80-proof vodka.” She looked up, eyes alight with mischief. “You realize that Pastor Hattington, teetotaler, is one of the migraine sufferers. He will be especially appalled.”
“He’ll be mixing a teaspoon of this into his morning juice and won’t be any the wiser. Don’t you dare tell him.”
Her laughter was there and gone, but he could hear it lingering in her “yes, Omnimancer.” This was without a doubt the best mood he’d seen her in since he’d returned.
“We have the bark and vodka—that’s a common base in tinctures,” he said. “But we’ll need a pomegranate from the general store. Does the mayor open at eight?”
“Eight-thirty, but he’s probably there by now. Should I get anything else?”
He checked the book for the other brews he hoped to tackle that day. “Fresh horseradish, garlic and blueberries. Pick through them to get good specimens. Also, make sure he’s ordered the mature ginger—we’ll need that for the anti-arthritic and anti-nausea concoctions.”
“The horseradish is for the cold medicine, the garlic for the intestinal brew and the blueberries for—let’s see—the kidney-stone medicine?”
“Miss Harper,” he said, deeply impressed, “you’ve progressed faster in a single day than my classmates and I got in a month of brewing.”
She beamed. He felt a twinge at the thought of what he had in store for her.
“I’ll be right back,” she promised, heading for the door.
Too late to listen to twinges. He pulled a slim volume stamped CLASSIFIED from the bookcase, one with a title sure to intrigue his assistant, and left it lying next to the brewing guide.
Beatrix rapped on the shop’s front door and waved through the glass pane when the mayor, looking harassed, leaned out from an aisle. A tremendous crash echoed from somewhere nearby.
“Billy,” Croft bellowed. “Be more careful, for pity’s sake! Just wait here and don’t touch anything until I come back.”
“Our omnimancer requires ingredients,” she said as he let her in.
Croft rubbed his face miserably. “He asked if you were a good employee, and like a complete ninny I told him the truth. I’m sorry.”