Chapter 31
At first he thought it was his imagination.
No one knocked on his door after five, let alone seven-forty at night.
After his spell fizzled like all the other ones before it, he stuck his head into the hallway just to make sure—and found that someone really was at the door, pounding on it with what sounded like both fists.
Miss Harper.
He pulled her in and shut the door, adrenaline surging. “What’s wrong? Your sister—?”
“She’s fine.”
Miss Harper was out of breath and agitated, face rosy from the cold. She wore nothing over her wine-colored dress, his favorite of the few she owned. Another shot of adrenaline hit as it occurred to him that she might have come simply to see him—could stand it no more than he could.
Then she looked at him, and his stomach twisted. Her eyes were cold. Furious.
“When did you first realize you wanted me?” she asked. Accusation, not come-on.
He resisted the urge to take a step backward. In this situation, in this one situation, he’d done nothing wrong.
“When you walked into the demarcation circle to take the replacement Vow,” he said.
“After you wrote that contract.”
“Yes. What is this about? Why does that matter?”
She glared at him. “I’m trying to figure out whether you meant to distort the way I feel about you, or if it simply happened by accident.”
His mouth fell open. “What?”
“I didn’t want you until just after I Vowed to do you no harm. You must see this is not a coincidence.”
“Beatrix—”
“How has it felt, Omnimancer, as I’ve struggled not to act on my artificial attraction to you? Painful? Agonizing?” She made a wild gesture, tension radiating off her. “The worse you feel, the more the Vow presses on me!”
No. No, damn it! He snapped, “Has it occurred to you that we have a common childhood, a similar worldview and a shared enemy? Or that the other thing I did the night of the replacement Vows is help you prove your sister didn’t hopelessly muck up her conference?
Don’t you think it’s possible you—you, Beatrix—fell in love with me? ”
“You’re the very last person I would ever love,” she cried, grabbing him by the lapels of his coat and shaking.
He grasped her arms, inadvertently jerking her against him.
Her lips quivered inches from his, her breathing suddenly ragged, her eyes dilating.
She looked as if she might kiss him—as if she was caught in a pitched battle between her steel-hard resolve to not want him and the potent reality of how she really felt.
Then she squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth, still gripping his coat. And he realized with a sickening jolt that this looked far less like desire than compulsion.
God, was she right?
“I’ll destroy the contract,” he choked out, pulling back.
She wrapped her arms around herself, trembling and catching her breath. “But if we replace it—”
“No replacements.”
He took the stairs two at a time, lifted the loose floorboard under his bed, brought out the manila envelope with all the contracts and galloped back down with it.
She followed him to the brewing room and watched, silently, as he extracted the accursed document and slapped it onto the preparation table.
“Formeltan!”
Nothing happened. He bit back the expletive that would have felt very satisfying to say.
“So,” she said, voice hard. “I’ll have to destroy the one you signed as well.”
“If, that is, you can trust me not to rush off to harm your sister, her prospects with the League and the League generally after going to some lengths to protect all three,” he said, more bitterly than he’d intended.
Her breath hitched. She looked at the floor. “Yes. I can.”
He rummaged in the envelope and found the contract that bound him. He counted down. They cast the spell.
Both contracts lay on the table, completely unaffected.
“The third one,” she said, grabbing it and adding it to the pile.
Heart in his throat, he said the spellword in tandem with her.
It didn’t work.
“No, no, no!” he snarled, balling up all three contracts and throwing them across the room. They unrolled themselves, perfectly uncreased.
“Why is this happening?” she cried.
“I don’t know!” He kicked the contracts for good measure. “Just to spite us!”
He expected incandescent anger from her. Instead, she leaned against the table, staring dully at nothing.
“Three,” she whispered. “We went to the well one time too many.”
It had been his suggestion for her to make that last Vow to him rather than to Miss Knight. His fault. He slid to his knees, staring at the contracts that now inextricably tied them together.
“It’s as if they’ve all fused.” Her voice broke. “Is there nothing we can do?”
He pressed his hands to his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see her face when he delivered the bad news. “The only way out of a Vow left intact by the contract holder is death. Either party’s.”
“Death,” she repeated.
“You might not have to wait so very long,” he muttered.
Her laugh verged on the hysterical. “What, for my death?”
“No. Mine.”
The heels of her shoes clicked as she walked across the room, her dress rustled against the floor and then—he gasped, it was so unexpected—her fingers wrapped around his. She pulled his hands from his eyes.
“Peter.” He could hear the anxiety in her voice, feel it in her trembling hands and in every atom of his own body. “You must tell me what’s going on.”
The last of his resistance gave way.
“I’ll show you,” he said.
Peter—how jarring to think of him like that while awake—retrieved one of the sleeping drafts they’d made, which explained how he intended to show her.
“Can you spare an hour?” He rummaged in the implement drawer and came out with a half-teaspoon. “This speeds up entry into the stage of sleep with the most vivid dreams, but it’s not immediate.”
She glanced at her watch—seven-thirty. In for a penny, in for a pound. “Yes.”
“I’ll … get sheets on a bed in one of the spare rooms,” he said, looking away. “Assuming you wouldn’t prefer to go home and take the dose there.”
“We might as well both use your bed.” She pressed her palms against her burning eyes. “It’s not as if sleeping fully clothed near each other would be the most outrageous thing we’ve more or less done on it.”
A pulse of white-hot regret hit her the second before he said, “Beatrix, I—I’m so—”
“I know,” she murmured. Clearly he was sorry—she could feel the truth of it through their connection. It didn’t change the fact that he’d done it, but he hadn’t meant it to turn out this way. “Shall we?”
Up the stairs to his bedroom they went. And though it was nothing like the first time they’d gone this way together, the first dreamed time, that other trip came immediately to mind.
He sat on one side of the bed. She took the other, heart rapidly thudding—mostly from the awful certainty that she was about to learn something fearful, though his proximity wasn’t helping. Neither, for that matter, was the prospect of taking the draft.
“I need you to promise you won’t tell anyone what I’m about to show you,” he said. “Anyone. Not even your sister.”
She nodded. “I promise.”
He measured out a dose and was about to swallow it when he caught her eye and hesitated. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
But the next instant a sob escaped from her throat.
He poured the liquid back into its bottle and leaned toward her. “What is it?”
She’d never told anyone. But she wanted to tell him.
“After my mother died, Dad kept taking the sleeping draft until—” She swallowed, catching the dawning realization in his eyes. “The doctors called it an accident, but I ... I don’t know if it was.”
He put out a hand and nearly touched her cheek before jerking back. Recollecting himself. She could well understand the lapse, sitting where they were.
“Go on,” she said, gesturing to the brew.
He looked at her for a moment, then poured the dose again and downed it. He handed her the bottle and the spoon, and she followed suit, trying not to gag. Sweet at first with a sharp sour turn, like rotten vinegar.
“I’m sorry you lost him. Both your parents,” he said. “I truly am.”
She believed it, even the inclusion of her mother. He of all people understood what it was like to have nobody to lean on. She wanted to tell him so, but the draft kicked in with a rush. Her lips felt like rubber. Her head was too heavy to hold up. She slumped onto the pillow, eyes sliding shut.
Then, without warning, she was on her feet next to the bed—they both were. That was the first clue they’d stepped through the looking glass. The second was seeing absolutely no reason she shouldn’t kiss him. So she did. It felt like waking up well after days of being sick.
With great effort, she stepped back. “Right. I’m ready.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, face screwed up in concentration. Nothing happened at first. Then he began to fade away. So did the bedroom, replaced with a claustrophobic space in industrial grays. Long, thin slats cut into the concrete served as windows, revealing nothing but sand and scrub.
She’d seen this place many times before. She knew the wizards and military officers standing about near the slats. Like the dreams of the first contract, she was in Peter’s head, experiencing this as if she were him—but unlike those dreams, she was self-aware enough to realize it.
Disorienting was too mild a word.
The wizard to her right touched something hanging on the wall that she knew, though could not see, was a four-leaf clover charm. “To a better test than the last one,” he muttered, and the part of her that was Peter supplied his name: Martinelli. Peter’s deputy.
“T-minus twenty seconds” echoed over a loudspeaker.
Ten seconds.
Five.
One.
She was dimly aware as the explosion went off—distant, but perfectly visible against the flat nothingness of the desert landscape—that Beatrix would have been appalled at its massive size. But she didn’t feel like Beatrix. She felt like Peter, and Peter was frustrated the blast hadn’t been bigger.