Chapter 25
The next second seemed to go by in slow motion. The crane arm—yards, feet, inches from colliding with Lydia’s head. Blackwell’s horrified intake of breath. Her legs lurching her forward even though there was nothing she could do, nothing, because she was hundreds of feet away.
And then—impossibly—she wasn’t.
She barreled into her sister, knocking her onto a wooden pier as deadly steel whistled past, her own body jerked backward when the crane arm clanged on the pavement.
It took her a breathless, ear-ringing moment to realize the fallen equipment had caught the edge of her coat.
How she’d traveled the distance of a football field in under a second without so much as casting a spell, she had no idea. But now was not the time to ponder.
They needed to run.
Lydia lay on the pier, looking shell-shocked. Beatrix, yanking her coat free, dragged her sister to her feet and got them turned around. The ruined equipment cut them off from the lot, a barrier nearly six feet tall.
“Help!” she shouted.
Rosemarie, somewhere in the distance, bellowed back. “I’m coming!”
But it was Ella who got there first, Ella who scrambled over the downed arm. Beatrix couldn’t believe, looking at her face, that she’d had anything to do with this—this assassination attempt.
Blackwell’s words about Theo echoed in her ears: Army wizards are either researchers or agents specializing in spying, assassinations and sabotage. Which do you think he is?
“Quickly,” Ella said, grasping Lydia’s other arm and hoisting her over the remains of the crane. “To the car, come on, move.”
The lot they’d parked in seemed miles away. But Ella didn’t run directly for it. She zigzagged, taking them all with her.
“What are you—” Beatrix began.
“Never run away from a wizard in a straight line. Easy target.”
Of course. Why hadn’t she thought of that? But twenty seconds later, Beatrix felt the telltale tingle of magic on her skin. The world jittered around her as her heart accelerated from rapid to breakneck.
Ella yelled, “I think we’ve been hit!”
“Protection,” Blackwell whispered, so close she could feel his breath on her ear. He grabbed her free arm and ran alongside her toward the lot.
“It’s OK,” Beatrix gasped out to Ella and Lydia. “It’s OK. Keep going. Almost there.”
Blackwell let go as they reached the car. She wrenched the back door open and Ella scrambled in, pulling Lydia with her.
“What if the car’s been sabotaged?” she whispered in what she hoped was Blackwell’s direction as Rosemarie and Meg caught up with them.
Rosemarie’s outraged shout overwhelmed whatever he said in response. “Why is she here? Get her out!”
No mystery who “she” was. Ella’s eyes widened.
“No.” Beatrix glared at Rosemarie. “It’s my car, and she’s staying. Get in.”
It couldn’t balance out her lack of faith in Ella before, but it was something. Rosemarie made a disgusted noise and flung open the front passenger door.
“I’ll cast the detection spell on the car, but they’re going to be beside themselves when they see it,” Blackwell whispered.
“Rosemarie, wait—you drive,” Beatrix called out, praying that no one would stop them and discover Rosemarie was past the legal driving age for ladies.
Assuming they made it out at all.
“Meg, get in the front,” she said. “Pop the hood and don’t put the key in the ignition—I need to make sure it’s not going to blow up on us. Everyone, put your heads down, cover them with your arms, come on, come on!”
“Clever,” Blackwell murmured, a soft clack in the vicinity suggesting a demarcation stone laid on the pavement beside the car.
“Wait!” Her stomach clenched as she remembered his one request that day—avoid revealing he was helping them. “The wizard will see the spell.”
“I’m casting a chameleon spell first. All he’ll see is what the car looks like right now.”
The air shimmered around them as he whispered the magic words. Then he cast again, and the eerie red light flared up as if he’d turned it on with a switch.
No wizardry under the hood. No problems with the tires. No splotches of white inside the car, except the protective magic around Lydia and Ella—which thankfully they couldn’t see with their heads down. Blackwell undid both spells, cutting off the red light and the shimmery sheen.
“Start the car!” she hollered. To Blackwell, she murmured: “Thank you, thank you. Please be careful.”
“I’m coming with you,” he whispered as she opened the back door, when it was too late to argue, and he squeezed in with her—four adults in a space meant for three.
Rosemarie hit the accelerator and they took off.
Meg, white as death, remained hunched over, arms around her stomach now instead of her head, moaning.
Ella turned around to stare out the rear window.
Lydia leaned against Beatrix, shivering, just like the little girl who once ran to her after bad dreams—but this time with a nightmare all too real.
And kneeling at her feet, Blackwell.
His thigh was pressed against her leg. His arm, braced against the door, was so close she could feel it every time she breathed in. She put out a hand to determine where his face was, not wanting to bang into it by accident, and brushed against his mouth.
The memory of what those lips felt like on hers was a sham. But her traitorous body reacted to it as if it really had happened.
She pulled her hand back and worked on sliding out the pins holding her hat in place. It gave her something to concentrate on that wasn’t horrible.
“I don’t think any wizards are following us,” Ella said.
“We’re in traffic now, it would be the height of idiocy to tail us in an invisible vehicle—my God, that was close.
I saw the crane and thought—but there you were, as if you appeared out of nowhere,” she added, turning to look at Beatrix.
“Incredibly lucky that you happened to be so close by.”
“Yes,” Beatrix said, stomach churning. Lucky, very lucky—and unsettling.
How had it happened? Not Blackwell, of that she was almost certain.
She would have felt the tingle of spellwork if he’d cast something on her.
She would have heard the Old English on his lips.
Besides, the crane arm fell so fast there hadn’t been time to get a spell out.
She removed the last pin and set her hat in her lap.
Ella gasped. “Your—your hair.”
Her heart gave a jerk. “What is it?” she asked as if she didn’t know. Could she possibly pass off strands of wizard’s silver as regular old aging gray?
Ella, digging into her purse, held up a hand mirror.
Not a few strands. Every single one of them.
“Oh no,” she said, the words disappearing into a burst of noise as Rosemarie, Lydia and Meg simultaneously saw what Ella meant.
“Quiet!” Ella turned to Beatrix with a rapturous expression on her face. “What you did—that was magic. You really did come out of nowhere. You teleported.”
“I—I—” She choked on pomegranate.
Ella leaned in. “How? We’re all supposed to be completely incapable—and that, that wasn’t just any old magic. A lot of wizards can’t teleport.”
Beatrix tried to think of something she could say and ended up coughing.
“Horrible flavor, pomegranate,” Ella said, and pounced as Beatrix gave a violent start. “Our omnimancer has been teaching you, hasn’t he. He’s put you under a Vow, and you haven’t been able to say a word—hasn’t he?”
Beatrix could feel her throat closing in on her.
“Yes,” Blackwell shouted, snapping into view. “Breathe, Miss Harper!”
The reaction this caused made the to-do over Miss Harper’s hair seem sedate by comparison.
“Are you mad?” Miss Dane, in the driver’s seat, out-volumed the others. She jerked the car into a dark alley as Miss Harper gasped for air. “He’ll kill us all!”
“I couldn’t if I wanted to,” Peter said, panic over his sudden outing giving his words a brittle tone. “Miss Harper has me under a Vow.”
The young woman with a braid coiled around her head like a dark crown—and an alarming amount of knowledge about wizardry—glared at him from the other end of the back seat. “What Vow, specifically?”
“To take no action intended to harm Lydia Harper, her efforts with the League or the League in general,” he said. “She needs all of you, so you have no reason to fear me.”
Miss Harper looked him in the eye. “Let me tell them what you’ve done for us.”
She was so close. Her hands, her legs, her face. Dread faded for a few seconds as a lunatic urge gripped him: to kiss her in front of these women who hated him.
“Please,” she added, misinterpreting his rattled silence as disagreement. “What they know already is worse.”
A vast understatement. The number of people with knowledge that could send him to prison for years if not decades—unable to fix the damage he’d caused—had just ballooned from one to five. He had to get the other women under Vows, too. Somehow.
He sighed. “All right. Tell them.”
Miss Harper sketched out the last twenty-four hours, tucking the alarming evidence of her magic use back under her hat as she did so. Miss Dane muttered “I knew it” when he was revealed as the wizard in the film, but otherwise the assembled let Miss Harper explain without interruption.
She said her sister would be dead if not for his warning. She said they all owed him their gratitude. She said that when it came to their safety, she trusted him implicitly.
He couldn’t help noticing that her confidence in him was conditional. But even that was an improvement.
Miss Dane, meanwhile, wore a look he recalled from his grade-school days. It sent a residual shiver down his spine.
“Keep in mind you couldn’t see anything he did,” she said to Miss Harper. “He could have cast the spell on the crane himself.”
Before he could jump to his own defense, the woman with the dark hair spoke up. “Not if he’s under a Vow. I suppose you can back that up with the documentation?” she added, shooting a pointed look his direction.