Chapter 28 #2
Peter, hovering a dozen feet from the action in tortuous suspense, sagged in relief after Garrett snatched a red from his coat and teleported away.
Every muscle had been tensed with the effort of watching the man for signs of imminent spellcasting—and with the horrible thought, until the final moments of the conversation, that Miss Harper might actually accept the proposal.
Miss Knight came running from the car, her unbuttoned coat flying out behind her. “Is he definitely gone?”
Miss Harper put a trembling hand over her eyes. “I think so. Teleportation makes a distinctive sound.”
“I know, but I want to check.”
“Hang on—I’ve got it,” Peter said and loped off.
He demarcated the entire property, burying the stones so Miss Harper could draw on them later without anyone coming across them. When he jogged back, she was leaning against her friend, eyes red. He cast the magic-detection spell, turning everything a matching shade.
Almost everything. The exceptions he’d expected glowed bright white: the teleportation spot, his own invisible body, Miss Harper’s hair and the link between him and her.
He glanced at the women as they pulled away from each other, wondering if Miss Knight’s one-way Vow to Miss Harper had produced a smaller thread of magic between them, but found nothing.
Then he glanced at the house and saw another tell-tale white glow at the same instant that Miss Harper did, judging from the breath catching in her throat.
The front door.
“Oh no,” she said, taking off for it at a sprint.
He caught up with her, grabbing her hand before she could touch the illuminated doorknob. “Stop! It could be booby-trapped.”
“Don’t you think it far more likely to have been an unlocking spell so they could do more casting inside?”
Miss Knight clattered to a halt on the porch. “That’s almost certainly it.”
“We can’t just assume—” he began.
Miss Knight jumped forward and turned the handle.
Nothing happened—magical or otherwise. The door was locked.
“You could have killed us,” he said, only just managing not to yell.
Miss Knight, putting her key in the lock and opening the door, waved this off. “They won’t set off an explosion or anything else that would look like a hit. ‘Accidents’—that’s what we have to worry about.”
She was right, which made him even angrier in the split-second before reason took over. He breathed in, calming down.
“H-hello?”
A woman he didn’t recognize, a waif of a thing with large eyes, peeked out from the sitting room. One of the boarders?
“Miss Massey—sorry to startle you,” Miss Harper said. “It’s just me and Ella.”
The woman tiptoed closer and looked out, as if to reassure herself of that. In a voice little louder than a whisper, she said, “I thought I heard a man’s voice.”
“Wizard Garrett.” Miss Harper’s shoulders stiffened. “He won’t be back.”
“Oh,” Miss Massey said. It was probably just his imagination that she seemed disappointed. What was she doing in a house full of League members if she liked wizards?
Miss Harper shot Miss Knight a look. Miss Knight stepped into the house and took the waif’s arm.
“I hate to impose upon you,” she said, “but I find myself in desperate need of your assistance.”
Miss Massey blinked several times in evident confusion. “My assistance?”
“Yes. I need you to teach me how to play a passable game of checkers.” Miss Knight looked up at the woman, expression so extremely serious that it crossed the line into comical. “It is of the utmost importance.”
Miss Massey must have had no idea how to respond to this, for she simply said “oh” again.
Miss Knight was already maneuvering her up the stairs. “I promised my pupils I would play with them during lunch on Monday, you see, and I’ve no idea how. And you’re ever so good at the game ...”
She gave Miss Harper a lunatic grin over her shoulder before disappearing around the corner. How could she joke at a time like this? But Miss Harper, stepping into the house, made a choked sound that could only be a laugh.
“Miss Massey’s not in the League, I take it,” he murmured, following her in and closing the door.
“No.” Miss Harper’s smile faded, and he thought for a second that the mere reminder of his invisible presence had wiped away her mirth.
But then she added, “Someone’s passing information to the magiocracy, and there’s an outside chance it’s her, so we absolutely cannot let her see or hear anything we don’t want them to know. ”
That explained the checkers game. He couldn’t imagine a more unlikely spy, though.
“I’ll cast the detector spells,” he said, whisper-quiet, stepping nearer so she could hear him. “It’s always possible there’s a wizard in the house right now, and until we know there isn’t ...”
She took a step closer still, skirt brushing against his boots. “How many spells were cast here while we were gone?”
He could smell the faint citrus scent in her hair again. He inhaled, thinking of that moment in the interlocking circles—and then the dream, pressed against her—oh God he couldn’t keep standing here. Rapid fire, he said: “No idea. I have to be in town for the charm to work. Hang on.”
He placed stones in each corner of the living room, cast the detection spell and leaned against the wall, relieved, when no white marred the red besides the faint remains of the detection spell he’d cast here weeks earlier.
He’d taken care to do it in a corner of the room so he would recognize his own handiwork.
From there, it was a slightly altered repeat of that September afternoon.
This time, only he cast the spells and Miss Harper limited herself to searching in drawers and looking under furniture.
And this time, when she stepped into her parents’ room as he finished up there, he realized three twined threads linked them rather than two.
Surely it wasn’t his imagination that each was thicker than the ones binding them together before.
She stared at the bright-white connection with what looked—felt—like despair. “I didn’t find anything. You?”
“Nothing except my own old spells.”
“I don’t understand it.”
“The spell on the door may not have been cast today,” he said. “Maybe someone unlocked it in order to switch the contracts—maybe that happened just a few days ago, close enough that it’s still bright.”
“But there was no spell on the safe.”
He shrugged. “The safe might be easier to pick than the door. Or they found the key—is it in the house?”
“Yes,” she admitted. She squeezed her eyes shut, and he was reminded that she had just sent away a man she’d cared about, a man who had offered her exceedingly tempting marriage terms. A man who—she had to be thinking—might have switched the contracts himself.
He wanted to say ... something. He fumbled for words.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, taking the most obvious ones from him. “I just remembered you never got dinner—you must be starving.”
He was, come to think of it.
“Please, come downstairs and have something to eat,” she added.
“While invisible?”
She cracked a very small smile. “As amusing as it would be to watch, no. Ella has Miss Massey well in hand. They’re deep into a game of checkers in her room.”
He followed her to the kitchen, reversing the spell on himself as she slid a casserole into the toaster oven. The tension radiating from her reminded him where she ought to be instead.
“I’m keeping you from your sister,” he said, voice down so Miss Massey wouldn’t hear.
She shook her head. “We’ve decided not to go tonight after all. We might lead them right to her. She’s safer if we stay here and work on some protections for the house so it’s less vulnerable when she comes back.”
He could see the logic in that. And he could think of several spells they should cast to counter the most likely “accidents.” Fire resistance would be chief among them.
“Have you called her already to tell her you’re not coming?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’ll call from the payphone on Main Street. Just in case.”
“Good.” He hesitated. “I should stay here tonight.”
Her eyebrows rose.
“I don’t mean it as commentary on your ability to take care of yourself,” he said, the words rushing out.
He sounded like a blasted schoolboy. “Three is a magically significant number. Three wizards—magic-users—casting protective spells together have a greater effect than one casting just as many spells. If they do it at the darkest point of the night, so much the better. And while we’re at it, I want to set up the charm that alerts you if anyone casts a spell on the property. ”
“Then I would be grateful—very grateful—for the help.”
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” he said, gesturing toward the sitting room.
She gave a wan smile. “I’m not inflicting that horrible thing on you, Omnimancer. I’ll make up the bed in the master suite.”
“Your parents’ room?” Her mother would roll over in her grave. And he didn’t particularly care to sleep there.
Miss Harper winced. “Sorry. Bad memories, I know.”
Right—she had seen that memory through his eyes. She’d cleaned the floor of the room as if she had done it with her own hands and heard her mother’s unkind words with the exact horror he had felt.
She knew things about him that he’d never told anyone, that he could never fully explain simply by telling. Terrible—and intoxicating.
“I’ll put you in Rosemarie’s room,” she said. “Would that be all right?”
He nodded. “Thank you.”
“How does the property charm work?”
He pulled his necklace out from under his shirt. “This heats up whenever a spell is cast in town. Well—whenever a spell is cast by anyone other than you or me.”
“Oh! How does it know to differentiate?”
“Hair. I’ve got a strand of mine and yours in here. We’ll both want to have Miss Knight’s and Miss Dane’s as well, so we’re not jumping a foot each time they cast something.”
She mmm’ed in an abstracted way, and he realized for the first time how very odd it must look that he had her hair in a locket. With his.