Chapter 15
Peter, one step from the top of the staircase, heard the front door open and shut, followed by the soft sound of Miss Harper’s bare feet on the hardwood floor. He could practically feel her anger from two flights up. With a sigh, he slipped into the attic.
Over the weekend, he’d transformed it into an approximation of an experimental-spells lab.
Gone were all the odds and ends. Enchantments on the walls, ceiling and floor shielded the old wood from the magic he was about to start throwing around.
Most of it would do nothing at all—that was the nature of R abolish; kill,” the dictionary declared. “Powerful explosive spell. Restricted use only.”
Oh God.
She tried to start on the next brew, but her hands trembled. Finally she retreated to the kitchen and ate the lunch she’d packed, trying—failing—to think of a harmless reason her employer would cast a restricted spell known for ruination and destruction.
It sounded like he was practicing, or seeing how well the spell worked against various defenses—the better to use it at some later date.
Food helped stem the shakiness. She refocused on brewing, with great effort, and worked her way through two more assignments before she had to stop to rest. Blackwell’s boots on the stairs gave her a nasty turn—she didn’t want to see him, she really, really didn’t want to see him—but to her relief he headed out, the front door opening and closing with a soft click.
Four o’clock. One more brew should round out the day, and perhaps she could leave before he returned.
Assuming she had enough energy left to see it through. She’d cast fifteen spells already and was feeling close to drained. Hints of a headache played around her eyes and the base of her neck, the promise of pain to come.
The next assignment was a vitamin-heavy concoction that the manual noted was designed to stave off health ailments on ships and in other situations where food was scarce.
“Expensive ingredients,” Blackwell had written in the margins of the book, and any question she might have had about whether he’d penned that today or twenty years earlier was erased by the next sentence: “Please get it right the first time.”