Chapter 16
Peter stood, not moving, hardly breathing, as Miss Harper took Garrett to task for jumping out of a tree at her. Either she didn’t know what he did, or the woman had no fear.
The military offered few career options for wizards. Most did R&D. Some specialized in the combat equivalent of omnimancy, casting shields, setting off explosions and keeping soldiers from bleeding to death. Almost all the rest were spies and assassins.
No mystery about the category Garrett fell into.
“You’re right, of course,” the man was saying—to Miss Harper. “One does not as a rule enjoy having wizards rain down on them. By way of apology, let me walk you home. I take it the forest is the shortest way there?”
“No. I mean—yes, it is, but you needn’t walk me home.”
“You don’t like me,” Garrett said, as if it were an interesting discussion point. Or possibly a first.
“It’s more that I don’t like wizards.” She smiled in that sardonic, crooked way of hers, right side of her mouth quirking higher than the left.
Garrett grinned back. “I can’t very well blame you. Though it seems only fair to walk with me until you can decide whether I’m disagreeable on my own account.”
“Some other time, perhaps? I have just enough energy to get home. I don’t think it would stretch so far as to allow a conversation, which would make for a very dull trip.”
“Come with me, then, and you won’t have to walk at all,” Garrett said, holding out a hand.
Peter glared at him, which naturally had no effect at all. Miss Harper looked intrigued.
“Are you offering to take me home magically? How does that work, exactly—is it instantaneous?”
“Nearly.”
“Should I be concerned we’ll appear at our destination with body parts rearranged?”
“Hasn’t happened even once,” Garrett said, putting a hand to his heart. “To me or anyone else.”
“And how long have wizards been traveling this way?” she asked skeptically.
He laughed. “You ought to be a prosecutor. Fine, only for several years. But it’s perfectly safe—researchers have been teleporting for at least a generation. We just couldn’t use it to get farther than a few feet until someone developed fuel with more of a kick.”
Peter suppressed a sigh. That someone was him. He wished he hadn’t, considering what it had led to.
Garrett dipped his fingers into an interior pocket and came out with a “red”—a teleportation leaf the color of cherries. “Shall we?”
“Was that picked after it started to turn? I should have thought that would make it less effective.”
“The color is artificial. It’s to ensure we don’t mix it up with a regular leaf and waste it on another spell.”
She eyed it, clearly intrigued. “How does it work?”
Garrett smirked. “I’m afraid that information is—”
“—classified,” she finished for him, rolling her eyes.
“Annoying, isn’t it? I get told that a lot, too. So—coming?”
As she took a step toward the wizard, her knees buckled. Garrett sprung forward and caught her—so quickly it was alarming.
“Thank you,” she said, voice catching.
“You really are exhausted.” He gazed down at her. This too was alarming. “What on earth did Blackwell have you do today?”
Peter could see by her expression that she wished she could tell the truth, never mind the implications it might have for her. But her Vow stood in the way. She cleared her throat. “Cleaning.”
“The lout.”
“Absolutely and completely.”
She had regained her footing, but Garrett did not let go. Peter had the urge to chuck a stone at him. Seducing your target’s assistant to get information was terrible form.
He glanced back at Miss Harper in time to see her raise a challenging eyebrow. “This spell requires a long stretch of standing still, I take it?”
He nearly gave himself away by laughing. Garrett’s own lips turned up as he said, “Just didn’t want to rush you. Ready? Hang on—gefaran!”
They dematerialized, setting off Peter’s charmed locket. He fumbled for it with fingers he couldn’t see and held it away from his chest for the few seconds it needed to cool down.
Then he took off for Miss Harper’s house at a sprint.
His days of burning through high-grade fuel on a whim ended when he left D.C.
His two remaining reds were tucked in a breast pocket of his coat for emergencies, and catching up with Garrett and Miss Harper did not qualify.
But the thought of her alone with that spy-or-assassin did keep him running far past the point he otherwise would have slowed to a walk.
When he finally pulled into sight of her back yard, he was just in time to see the wizard dematerialize again—this time by himself.
Miss Harper stood in her gazebo, looking at the spot that had been Garrett and now was thin air.
Peter caught his breath, relieved she was fine even though he’d had no reason to expect otherwise, and cleared his throat.
She swung about, looking not so much startled as wary.
“Can I safely reappear?” he said, keeping his voice down.
“Wait here—I’ll be right back.”
Sweat trickled down his hairline as he stood at the edge of her property.
He supposed he should have cast a cooling spell before he dashed through the woods in the encore heat wave that always seemed to come in September, but somehow the weather hadn’t registered.
He wiped his forehead, glad for the temperature-control spell worked into his coat, and glanced around the yard as he waited for Miss Harper to return.
A garden extended across most of it. He remembered flowers there twenty years ago, delicate blooms in yellow and red where lettuce, tomatoes and cabbage now grew, and couldn’t help feeling sorry about the change.
The flowers had been the one thing about this place—Cedarwood?
—that he’d really liked. Everything else had stoked up envy.
The flowers had such a quiet, undemanding beauty that looking at them had always calmed him.
But you couldn’t make a meal of them.
Minutes ticked by. What was she doing? When she finally opened the back door, her expression was apologetic.
“My sister’s in class, but one of our boarders was here,” she said as he canceled the invisibility spell in her kitchen. “I asked her to run an errand for me.”
He had no idea she’d taken on boarders. He supposed she had no choice if she wanted to pay for college.
But his twinge of sympathy was muted by the thought that she had a big house that could be rented out and a large yard that could be gardened, whereas his grandmother’s second-floor apartment had one bedroom and no land at all.
He glanced around, struck by how familiar her kitchen seemed—exactly as he’d remembered it, in fact, except now faded by austerity.
Not as bad as his grandmother’s home had been, but the signs were there.
Walls in need of new paint. Several cracked-and-mended tiles on the kitchen floor.
Appliances twenty years out of date. He followed her into the hall and saw the same furniture in the sitting room that had been there when he was a boy, with nothing done since to spruce it up.
“This is the most likely place for a spell,” she said, gesturing to the sitting room, “but it could have been cast anywhere. He was left alone for a while, unfortunately.”
He forced himself to stop looking at the signs of her fall from affluence. “I’d better check outside, then. My telephone was tapped at the junction box, so yours might be, too.”
She stared at him. Quickly, before she could ask questions, he added, “When did he show up?”
“While most of us were still at church. But why—”
“Did he jump out of here? Teleport, I mean,” he said, thinking the slang word might confuse her.
“Yes—outside, in the front yard. Omnimancer—”
“He cast three spells in Ellicott Mills Sunday morning. Two during church and one about a half-hour after.”
That got her attention. “How do you know?”
“Magic,” he said, trying for deadpan but not quite managing. His lips quirked of their own accord.
She started to laugh. In one second flat she choked it off, expression turned somber. He could catch her train of thought as easily as if she’d handed him a ticket: She didn’t want to let herself enjoy his company for even one unguarded moment.
His voice sounded wrong in his ears as he said “stay here”—and he realized too late what those words would do. She was stuck in place, eyes wide and accusing. “Please,” he snapped, undoing the effect of his order, and stalked out.
Her junction box was unmolested. He retrieved his stones from the ground around it, slipped back into the house and set them in each corner of the sitting room as she watched from the hallway.
“Demarcation,” he explained, sensing her bottled-up question. “The spell needs limits to work.”
The room lit up with his incantation. He took a step backward into the hallway so he could get the full view of the room.
“What are we looking for?” she asked, frowning.
“White areas, breaks in the red—like that,” he said, gesturing to where he’d been standing when he cast. “That was my spell, and I don’t see anything else. But we’d better check under the furniture.”
“Wait, teach me the spell. We could go faster if we split up the house.”
He translated this as I don’t want to be in the same room with you, and in that they were in complete agreement. Her mere presence excoriated him.
“All right.” He fished four more stones from a pocket and dropped them into her hands, along with a handful of leaves. “The incantation is lang rēad lēoht.”
She repeated it three times, fixing her pronunciation before he could correct her. Apt pupil.
Eyes on the stones, she said: “May I have your permission to tell my sister and her vice president in the League that you checked the house and found no sign of magical interference, should that fortuitously prove to be the case?”
He hesitated. He wanted to say no, but he didn’t know how far his Vow would reach—and he was loath to find out, because then she would know exactly how far she could push.