Chapter 12
She managed to hold off her breakdown until half a mile into the forest, and it was there that Ella—going for a solo tromp in her boy’s boots—found her.
“Are you all right?” Her friend covered the distance between them at a run. “What’s happened?”
As she opened her mouth with no clear idea of what she would say, she tasted the too-sweet aftertaste of pomegranate blooming in the back of her throat—reminder and warning. She couldn’t answer the question.
“Beatrix?”
She coughed. “Our omnimancer,” she finally choked out, and could get no further.
Ella’s expression hardened. “What did he do?”
“He—he—” She faltered, trying to think of something true that she would be physically capable of saying.
Ella’s next words were quiet. Dangerous. “Did he rape you?”
Beatrix burst into laughter. A completely inappropriate response, but she couldn’t help herself. Ella looked alarmed, which only made her laugh harder. Blackwell could do literally whatever he pleased to her, as long as it didn’t harm Lydia, and she had no defense—what could possibly be worse?
“No,” she finally managed, “not that.” She shifted on the log where she’d slumped. “It’s just that you were right about him after all.”
Amazing she could say as much as that. But Ella’s face showed just how cryptic and confusing it was. “What, that he’s awful? Does this have something to do with the League? Beatrix, don’t make me guess!”
“Sorry—I’m sorry.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “It’s not about the League. It’s not something I can really explain.” The hysterical giggles tried to push their way out again, but she swallowed them down. “Please don’t worry. It was a thoroughly rotten day, but it’s over.”
Ella stared at her, as if to puzzle her out, then grasped both her hands tightly. “All right. But if at any point you do need my help, you need only say the word.”
Beatrix tried to force her expression into something appropriately appreciative despite the crushing certainty that saying the word would be impossible. “Thank you.”
“Come on—let’s go home.”
They picked their way through the undergrowth, Ella stealing glances at her. Beatrix wished her friend hadn’t discovered her in her moment of weakness. It meant anxiety to no purpose. She tried to think of a distracting subject to talk about, but Ella got there first.
“Any progress on finding a new caterer?”
Beatrix sighed. This too would require less than full honesty, but for a different reason. “Not as such, no,” she hedged.
In truth, she’d put together a list of tiny operations—ones that normally catered garden parties—and Rosemarie was lining up half a dozen to share the load. They had told no one. Even the caterers knew only that the food was for a “ladies’ event.”
She hated that loyalty to her sister meant treating her best friend as if she were a spy and imposter. She hated even more the knowledge that it could be true.
“Makes me want to kick something,” Ella said, responding to the catering problem but capturing Beatrix’s feelings about the entire situation.
Then Ella hoisted her skirt and carried through on a half-decomposed log.
Beatrix backed up a step. “Um ... Not speaking metaphorically, then.”
“Literally is so much more”—thwap!—“satisfying. You give it a try.”
Beatrix lifted her own skirt an inch to more clearly show her bare feet. As much as she disliked the heels stuffed in her bag, she didn’t want to ruin them and waste money on another set.
“Oh—right.” Ella got in a particularly vicious kick. “You can borrow my boots, then.”
She pulled them off and sat in the moss while Beatrix squeezed them onto her two-sizes-larger feet.
Boots finally on, more or less, she gave the remainder of the log a half-hearted whap.
“You can do better than that,” Ella said, wiggling her toes. “Think of all the trouble wizards have been causing you. Think of Blackwell.”
A minute later, there was nothing left to kick. Beatrix stood amid the mulch and splinters, panting.
Ella gave her an appraising look. “Feels a bit better, doesn’t it?”
It did. But the effect was fleeting. The moment Beatrix stepped into the house and caught sight of Lydia, hunched over a textbook, she realized that being forced to do exactly what Blackwell wanted was not the only outcome of the contract she’d signed.
Half her life was now hidden from everyone she cared about. Bad enough that this pushed Ella to arm’s length—Ella, the one she’d never had any difficulty talking to. How could she keep her awkward, tenuous connection with her sister from collapsing under the weight of things unsaid?
“Hello,” Lydia murmured, flashing a weary half-smile that quickly faded. “Bee—everything all right?”
“Yes,” Beatrix said. “Fine.”
She let the flow of dinner talk wash over her.
The rest of the evening she spent on every chore she could find to keep her hands busy, and if they weren’t sufficient distractions, they were at least exhausting.
Just after midnight, she crept into her room without waking Lydia and felt her way blindly to bed.
She would get through this.
It wasn’t, after all, the very worst day of her life.
Peter sat down next to a hospital bed that contained Mrs. Harper. Nothing about this struck him as odd.
Naturally she was alive. That was the way the world was supposed to be. And of course he was by her side. Where else would he be, if she wasn’t well?
He took her hand. Weak pressure, there and then gone, might have been an answering squeeze, but it could just as easily have been his imagination.
Her eyes remained closed. Her skin, he realized with the first fluttering of panic, had gone practically gray.
Yesterday it had simply been too pale. Yesterday he had thought she would recover.
“Mom?” He said the word as if it were second nature, his voice trembling, young, feminine.
“I love you,” he whispered, throat closing in on him.
“We all need you. Terribly. Lydia is bawling without you, I can’t believe the noise she can make with her tiny lungs, but I don’t blame her, I want to scream, too—please, Mommy,” he said, gasping for air.
“Please, don’t leave us. Don’t leave me. ”
He woke with a start in bed, heart galloping, wondering why in the hell he’d dreamt he was Miss Harper as she watched her mother fade away. Possibly his conscience trying to tell him something?
“Where were you when I needed you,” he croaked.
Beatrix was reading the Star after breakfast, half-listening to the newsreader on the radio, when she got to her feet without any idea what she was doing. She tried to sit and couldn’t, the ghost of pomegranate coating her throat, making her cough.
Lydia ran over with a cup of water, pressing it into her hands. “OK?”
“Yes, thank you.” Beatrix downed it, trying to wash away the taste. “I just remembered that our omnimancer wants me back today.”
“On the weekend? Again?” Outrage pinched Lydia’s face. “How can you like this job?”
“Temporary insanity.”
Beatrix darted to her room for her wizard’s coat and marched to the Victorian on the hill, a marionette with her strings pulled. When Blackwell opened the door, she said nothing for fear of what might come out of her mouth.
He blinked at her. Then, a guarded edge to his voice, he said, “Good morning.”
“It was,” she said, “until you summoned me here.”
Shock twisted his features for an instant before he got control of himself. “Come in.”
She lurched forward.
“Please,” he said in a hurry, turning the order into a request.
She steadied herself against the doorframe and stepped inside, heart pounding in her ears. He hadn’t meant for her to show up. That seemed perfectly clear. How did this ghastly contract work? Did he even know?
Blackwell closed the door behind them. “I should have given you your pay yesterday. If you’ll wait here, I’ll fetch it.”
So that was how it would be. The sick feeling in her stomach intensified. She didn’t want to imagine what she might be forced to do by a stray muttering of his—or worse, an errant thought.
He returned with an envelope and handed it over. “I thought you might have bills in need of settling immediately.”
Oh, really.
“I see,” she said. “So you made me walk a mile on a day off—with no idea why—to rectify your oversight.”
He winced. “I ...”
“You could have telephoned, you know. Or come yourself.”
But the man was too quick to be caught flat-footed again. “The telephone company isn’t due to reconnect the house until Monday. And I doubted your sister would appreciate a wizard appearing uninvited on her doorstep.”
“How thoughtful. Am I free to go?”
“Yes,” he said, sounding as if he would like nothing better. But as her hand closed on the doorknob, he added: “Unless, that is, you’re able to work today.”
She stared at the light filtering through the window above the door. Freedom—so close, so far. “I am at your command.”
“Are you willing to work today? For overtime pay, of course.”
She wanted to say no, both to get away and because “no” was an answer she would rarely be allowed to give him.
But she couldn’t afford to turn down a day’s pay, let alone time-and-a-half.
The sooner she got to the end of Lydia’s crushing tuition bills, the better.
Their roof, long overdue for replacing, might start leaking at any moment.
“Yes,” she said, sighing. Feet leaden, she followed him further into the house she’d left the day before at a run.
He led her to the cellar. She thought of Persephone, forever wintering in hell.
“Is there an expiration date to this?” she asked as they descended. “How long do you intend to force me to work for you?”
“A few years should be sufficient,” he muttered.
Years. She’d clung to the hope that this arrangement would last no more than a few months, for surely he didn’t want to remain here long while receiving no income and draining his savings. Years—with no guarantee that he would actually let her go after that.