Chapter 23
“Where have you been?”
Beatrix, lugging Blackwell’s projector into the house, didn’t have a chance to answer Rosemarie and Lydia’s simultaneous question.
The two of them dragged her into the study and shut the door, both hissing additional questions at a quarter of their usual volume.
She supposed they didn’t want to wake Miss Massey—it was already past ten.
“Just watch this,” she said, turning the machine on.
Lydia gasped as she recognized Dockett. Rosemarie whispered, “Turn it off!”
“What?” Beatrix said, befuddled.
“Root cellar.” Rosemarie gestured at them to follow her. “Quietly.”
Beatrix tiptoed down the stone stairs, wondering if more was afoot than courtesy to sleeping tenants, but decided to hold her questions until after the show.
The effect on Lydia was electric. She watched, rapt, as the drama unfolded, unable even to pace.
“Bee,” she said, grasping Beatrix’s hands as the projector shut off, “how did you get this?”
“An insider,” Beatrix said, wishing she could tell her the truth—wishing she could talk to someone about how conflicted she now felt about Blackwell.
She didn’t realize she was missing the flow of conversation until the sound of his name brought her to attention.
“What?” she said.
“Listen, for heaven’s sake!” Rosemarie managed to convey more irritation in a whisper than Beatrix would have thought possible. “The bus Meg and I took went past the Key on the way out of Baltimore tonight, and whom did we see waiting to cross the highway? Our omnimancer.”
Her stomach clenched. Of all the bad luck ...
“I knew he was in on it,” Lydia said, crossing her arms.
“He’s not,” Beatrix said.
Rosemarie poked a finger toward her. “That was him talking to Dockett.”
Pomegranate ghosted up her throat as she tried to come up with a reply. He’d told her not to tell anyone what he’d done. The new Vow held her to it, the film falling into the categories of an activity of his and something untoward.
“It doesn’t sound like his voice,” she finally managed, feeling desperate.
“Why are you defending him after what he did to you?” Lydia said, which wasn’t after all so far off the point.
But he’d helped her. Whatever his reasons, he’d helped her.
“I know when this was filmed,” she said. “And I know exactly where Blackwell was at the time, because we were in the same room.”
Lydia hmmm’d. Rosemarie rolled her eyes. “So there are two wizards working on the anti-League project,” she said.
“Don’t forget he checked our house for spells last month,” Beatrix said, thankful he had allowed her to reveal that.
“Or cast some, having been given convenient access by persons who will remain nameless.”
“Think whatever you want,” Beatrix snapped, “but we’re not going to tell anyone our guesses about which wizards are behind this. It won’t matter to the League. It won’t matter to the newspapers.”
“I think it would matter to the newspapers,” Rosemarie said.
“Unless you promise me you won’t mention Blackwell’s name, I’m not going to let you show this film,” Beatrix said, only just managing not to yell.
“Beatrix Harper—”
“Oh.” Lydia stared at her. “Oh, I see.”
“You do?” Beatrix said, hoping her sister had put two and two together.
“You’re falling for him.”
She stamped her foot in frustration. “No I’m not. Listen—I don’t like the man, but he’s not trying to undermine us. Please trust me on this.”
Rosemarie looked as if she wanted to continue arguing, but Lydia held up a hand.
“All right—we’ll leave Blackwell out of it,” she said.
“It might make a big difference to us whether he’s working against the League, but for purposes of showing the world that we didn’t reserve the wrong weekend, it’s neither here nor there. ”
Thank goodness. Beatrix leaned against the wall, relief and exhaustion turning her legs rubbery. “I showed the film to Helen Hickok. She expects to have a story in Sunday’s paper.”
Lydia’s brow furrowed. “How did you get to Baltimore? You didn’t take the car.”
“Train,” Beatrix lied. “Were you able to find a venue?”
Rosemarie heaved an aggravated sigh. “For Sunday, yes. But Meg and I were only able to get meeting space on Saturday through four o’clock.”
“But the vote’s at six!”
“I know,” Rosemarie said. “We tried all the other hotels again, each of the universities, the high schools—no one has space on Saturday. Our only option is a church that’s having bingo at 4:30.
Oh, and I did manage to book rooms for all the out-of-towners, but only by spreading them across the other hotels and not mentioning we’re with the League. ”
“Well, that’s ...” Beatrix groped for the words.
“Still a catastrophe,” Rosemarie supplied.
“Inconvenient to all involved and—now that we can prove the government really is out to get us—unnerving. I suspect the majority of the League, if pushed, would choose convenience and comfort over the possibility of effecting change by putting up a real fight.”
“If we can find a halfway decent place to stage the election, I might still have a chance at winning,” Lydia said. “If we can’t, I’m sunk.”
Beatrix bit her lip, trying to think of a solution. “We could rearrange the schedule, move the election earlier in the afternoon—”
Rosemarie snorted. “Our esteemed president absolutely refuses to allow it.”
“I called her after dinner,” Lydia said. “She was as sympathetic as a vulture.”
“Never let it be said that Patricia Gossard doesn’t know a gift when it drops in her lap,” Rosemarie said, heading for the stairs.
“Wait,” Beatrix said, recollecting the oddness of their location. “Why did we have to watch the film down here? What’s wrong with the study?”
Rosemarie and Lydia glanced at each other.
“What?” she said, unable to take the suspense.
“Ella’s room is directly above it.” Lydia slipped a hand into hers. “Whoever switched the contracts needed access to the safe and the key. Someone living in this house had both.”
Beatrix pulled back, heart racing. No. No. “But Miss Massey—”
“You don’t really believe it was Miss Massey,” Rosemarie said, almost gently.
Beatrix sank onto the stairs for lack of anywhere else to sit, pressing her palms against burning eyes. Rosemarie was right, of course. And if it wasn’t Miss Massey, all clues pointed to the woman she’d thought was her friend.
Beatrix stared at the report stamped CLASSIFIED and TOP SECRET. Something at the back of her mind balked at the idea of copying it. Don’t do it. Stop! But she needed the report to prove women could do magic. She threw her shoulders back and chanted the spell.
In burst Blackwell, and she remembered with a thrill of horror what came next. She couldn’t go through this. Not again, not even in a dream, which surely this was.
With a tremendous wrench that felt like extracting herself from drying cement, she forced her body to move, to do something other than reenact the worst moment of her adult life. She caught a glimpse of his shocked face as she dashed past him—out of the receiving room, straight out of the house.
The surprise value bought her a few seconds.
But she could hear his footsteps pounding closer and closer behind her, feel the tips of his fingers as he tried to grab her by the almost-wizard’s coat she had no choice but to wear at work.
She tore it off and hurled it behind her, hoping to catch him in the face.
As she crossed into the woods, she pulled off her high-heeled boots, delicate and feminine and detested, and chucked those at him as well, not slowing to see if they connected.
Still he was almost upon her. So she shrugged out of her dress, its heavy brocade and useless ruffles weighing her down, and kicked it back. Feeling as if she would explode from the inability to take in enough air, she shed her corset, too.
They were deep in the forest when he finally overtook her, catching her by her thin shift—the only bit of clothing she still had on—and pulling her around.
Then he kissed her.
Beatrix sat up in her dark room, heart pumping so fast it was as if it alone had propelled her.
Her lips and spine tingled. For one muzzy, not-quite-awake moment, she felt bitterly disappointed that she was in her bed while Blackwell was a full mile away in his.
Then her higher brain functions engaged.
What was wrong with her?
She lay down, shivering, and tried to reassure herself that her dream was not a reflection of secret desires.
Of course she didn’t want him. She didn’t want anything to do with him.
She was grudgingly indebted to him for his help and relieved—very, very relieved—that he’d replaced the heavy bonds with lighter ones, but there her positive feelings for him ended.
Theo was the one she wanted. Theo, funny and sweet, who had never forced her to do anything. Who was far more handsome to boot.
And if nothing in her life had been as erotic as that phantom kiss, Blackwell’s hands in her hair and body flush against hers?
Well—reality never compared with dreams. And thank goodness this one hadn’t been shared.
Naturally it hadn’t, because unlike all their unsettling twined dreaming under the influence of the original Vows, this wasn’t a memory of something that had happened.
Naturally.
She squeezed her eyes shut, clasped her hands and prayed: Please let me be the only one who saw it. She experienced the dream as herself. If it had been shared, it was hers—not his.
And she had kissed him back.
Peter woke Saturday morning feeling unexpectedly happy and spent a while puzzling over why. When he suddenly remembered, he lost his grip on his coffee cup and it smashed on the kitchen floor.
Was it possible to have a more Freudian dream than that? Running her down as she stripped and then kissing her as if his life depended on it—his subconscious must have wanted to make her hate and distrust him even more than she already did. How could he look her in the eye on Monday?
But—but perhaps she hadn’t been along for the ride. Perhaps the new Vows didn’t allow such linked dreaming.
He sent out a fervent prayer: Please.
He proceeded to spend hours trying, or more specifically failing, to come up with a brilliant solution to his Project 96 problem.
It wasn’t until he stopped for a break around three o’clock that he spared a thought for how Miss Harper’s conference was going.
Had she found replacement meeting space?
He attempted to sense her emotions through the connection they potentially still had, but to no avail—unless her stress was indistinguishable from his.
It was remarkable, really, that Washington would sic a dirty tricks specialist on the League, which had managed to get minor restrictions placed on magic use decades ago but hadn’t accomplished anything since.
He didn’t see what the League could accomplish.
Every nation used magic—none, therefore, could stop.
But someone powerful had obviously decided that Lydia Harper was a threat.
How far might they go to neutralize her?
Or the people she relied on?
Sixty seconds later, he was in his car, speeding toward Baltimore.