Chapter 11
He seemed to come from thin air, coat swirling behind him.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Blackwell roared.
Beatrix, trying to come up with a plausible explanation that did not involve committing felonies, could manage only a stuttered, “I—I’m—”
“Do you have any idea what would happen to me if that report got into the wrong hands? Do you?”
She stumbled backward into the desk chair. He slammed his palms on the desk and added: “A government official who allows a top-secret document to be stolen by securing it improperly gets sent to prison. Who do you think they’ll assume you got this from? Didn’t you spare a single thought for me?”
She hadn’t. Oh, God.
“I didn’t think I needed to secure things from you,” he said, voice gone quiet. “How wrong I was.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, voice catching.
“Sorry you were caught.”
“No, I—”
“Get up.” He hauled her out of the chair. “You read a top-secret document and were effectively trying to steal it by casting a duplicating spell. That’s three separate offenses, Miss Harper—you’ll be in prison for decades.”
Her knees buckled, but his grip on her arm kept her upright.
The contempt in his voice was unmistakable as he added, “I wonder how Lydia Harper’s standing in the Women’s League for the Prohibition of Magic will fare after her sister is arrested for attempting—unsuccessfully, of course—to cast spells.”
“Oh.” Anger flushed out the horrible, weak feeling fueled by fear and guilt. “You set me up to get to Lydia!”
“I did no such thing.”
“You kept leaving me alone with classified books!”
“After expressly warning you not to look at them if you didn’t want to end up behind bars.
Listen carefully, because I’m about to offer you a choice.
” He let go of her. “You can enter into a magical contract that will prevent you from disobeying a direct order from me ever again, or I’m handing you over to the FBI. ”
“What?” she whispered.
“You heard me.”
“I’m not doing that! You could order me to work against the League!”
“You’re going to have to trust me, I suppose,” he said.
She stared at him, adrenaline zinging through her body.
Then she darted around him and out of the room.
No use trying to flee the house—even if by some miracle she escaped, he had ammunition to make life miserably difficult for Lydia. She could see only one way out of his trap.
Blackwell, hot on her heels, caught up with her in the brewing room as she grabbed the bottle of aconite.
“Stay where you are,” she said, “or I’ll drink this.”
He came to a shuddering halt, eyes wide. “Don’t. That’s a terrible way to die.”
“I’m not going to betray my sister.”
“I’m not asking—”
“Get your hands away from your pockets!” she yelled.
He raised them, palms out, to show they were empty. “Suicide would just make it worse for her.”
“Aconite poisoning looks like murder, not suicide.” She could barely hear herself over the thudding of her wildly racing heart.
“It’s your word against mine about the report, and if I’ve just turned up dead, that undercuts your credibility a bit, don’t you think?
Wizards don’t run the police department. ”
“Very clever,” he said, “except I’ve got a camera rolling in the other room that recorded everything you did there. Shall I show you the film?”
The words came as such a physical shock that she swayed. Then she managed a bitter laugh. “And you claim you weren’t setting me up.”
“I didn’t claim that. I said I wasn’t setting you up to get to your sister.”
She took a few ragged breaths, trying to figure out what to do.
“I’ll sign your contract,” she said finally, the words heavy as lead on her tongue, “if you sign an equally binding one that promises you will do nothing to harm my sister, the League or her future with it.”
She could tell by the tight line of his mouth that he wanted to say she was in no position to negotiate. But clearly he could see it would be very inconvenient for him, at best, if she ended up dead.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “Put down the blasted aconite.”
“Not until everything’s official.”
“Then go fetch paper and a pen from the desk in the receiving room—unless you’ll permit me to put my hands in my pockets.”
She edged around him and backed out of the room. He followed her into the hall, no doubt to prevent her from making a run for it.
The contracts didn’t take long to draw up.
His declared: I, Peter William Blackwell, swear to Beatrix Jane Harper that I will take no direct or indirect actions intended to harm Lydia Josephine Harper, to harm her efforts with the Women’s League for the Prohibition of Magic or to harm the League generally.
Hers was much shorter and more ominous. I, Beatrix Jane Harper, swear to obey Peter William Blackwell in all matters.
“What are the spellwords?” she asked in a monotone as she signed her name.
“Ic gehāte. ‘I vow.’”
He pulled black stones the size of half-dollars from an interior pocket and arranged them into two overlapping circles on the floor, each big enough for someone to stand inside.
He balanced the contracts on stones serving as intersection points.
Then he retrieved something from the small refrigerator where they kept perishable ingredients that didn’t interact well with preservation spells.
A thrill of horror shot through her when she saw what it was. The remains of the pomegranate.
“You told me that spell was dark,” she objected, backing away.
He said nothing, merely set the fruit on the worktable and began plucking out pips. The enormity of what she was about to do was sinking in. Obey in all matters. Where exactly would that end? How would she be made to obey? Her legs were shaking but there was nowhere to sit.
Bracing herself against the worktable, she said: “What do you want from me?”
He handed three pips to her, followed by a pair of maple leaves.
“Step into a circle and cast the spell,” he said. “Then eat the pips.”
“Omnimancer—”
“Now,” he barked, striding into the circle closest to the door.
The setup had a terrible intimacy to it, a parody of a marriage rite. She forced herself to stand where he indicated, close enough to breathe in the faint scent of his aftershave, and tried—against impossible odds—to clear her mind.
“Ic gehāte,” she said, more sob than words, aiming the hand clutching the leaves toward the contract she’d signed.
“Again.”
“Ic ge”—her voice caught—“gehāte.”
He scowled at her. “Focus, Miss Harper!”
“Ic gehāte, ic gehāte! Ic gehāte—”
That took. Zip went the magic down her arm. Her contract glowed, and she stared at it. At the word “obey.”
“Ic gehāte,” he murmured at his own piece of paper, which obligingly lit up on the first try. “Into your mouth on three. One, two—”
The pips tasted sickly sweet and bitter-tart, opposing flavors battling it out on her tongue. She retched but managed to get all three down. Both contracts glowed brighter for an instant, then faded, looking for all the world as if nothing remarkable had just happened to them.
“Give me the aconite,” Blackwell said.
Her hand extended the bottle to him before she had time to consciously think about following his order. She tried to pull her arm back and discovered she couldn’t, not until he’d taken the bottle from her.
What had she done?
She staggered out of the circle, staring in horror at the arm once again under her control. Her voice sounded thin, all wrong, as she said, “Is your magic binding me?”
“No. Yours is.”
Oh, that was even worse.
“You’ve turned my own body against myself,” she said, spitting the words at him.
“Yes, I have.”
She stuffed her shaking hands into her pockets, realized they were his pockets, the ones he’d made, and pulled them back out. She wanted to run. Instead, she leaned against the table and forced herself to ask the question she dreaded to hear answered. “What are you going to make me do?”
“Omnimancing,” he said.
She stared at him. Omnimancing?
“I will continue fielding requests that require spellcasting outside the house, but everything that can be done in here, away from witnesses, you will do,” he said, striding to the cabinets and pushing the aconite back into its slot. “You will handle all the brews by yourself.”
“But—”
“You will perform your work to the best of your abilities and cast no spells outside this house. You won’t tell anyone about these contracts or anything whatsoever to do with magic use, yours or mine. You are not to suggest we’re involved in anything illegal. You will not harm me—or yourself.”
He slammed a fist on the table between them. “And you are most certainly not to do anything that will get me into trouble, such as making fucking copies of top-secret documents to give to agitators!”
She pressed her fingernails into her palms to keep tears at bay. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
Besides—he wasn’t done.
“Don’t take anything out of this house without my permission,” he said.
“Don’t duplicate anything in this house without my permission.
Don’t talk, write or otherwise communicate about anything happening in this house without my permission, other than to say you’re helping me prepare ingredients for brews.
Is there anything at all about this that is unclear to you, Miss Harper? ”
She inhaled, felt her breath hitch and exhaled slowly. “One thing,” she said, voice mercifully steady. “If you needed my help, why not just ask for it?”
Somehow this made him even angrier. “Because I wasn’t sure I could trust you! And then you proved to me that I can’t!”
“So did you—Hades,” she said bitterly.
“Get out.”
That was one order she was happy to follow.