Chapter 33
He held the attic door open for her, heart accelerating as the edges of her skirt brushed against his boots. Her skirt, for God’s sake. He got hold of himself and said, “I need a break from my disaster. Let’s see if we can figure out how you teleported the night of your sister’s conference.”
She shook her head. “I still have no idea what happened. And short of recreating the conditions, which for obvious reasons I’d rather not do …”
“I propose something less drastic.” He tapped his watch. “I’ll count down from thirty seconds, and you see if you can relocate yourself across the room before I get to zero.”
“Without leaves?”
“Precisely.”
He could see she didn’t think this likely to succeed, but she arranged herself in the spellcasting position and looked at him expectantly.
“Thirty,” he said, “twenty-nine, twenty-eight ...”
At twenty, her eyes slipped closed. At fourteen, she gritted her teeth. By seven, she’d leaned her entire upper body forward.
“Two, one, zero.”
She sighed. “It just feels ...”
“... wrong,” he finished for her, thinking of an earlier conversation. A dreamt one. “Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know.” She frowned. “It’s exactly like a word on the tip of your tongue or a memory just beyond your grasp. Maddening.”
She extracted a leaf and levitated the apple he’d left in the room overnight. “Perhaps it was a one-off,” she said, staring at the fruit. “Nothing else I’ve managed is very impressive.”
“Most of the population would disagree.”
She shot him her don’t-patronize-me look. She’d been extremely competitive in school, always vying for the top grades—a part of her must hate that he was so much more gifted at magic for no reason except luck. Luck that he was born male, and providential good fortune that he could cast spells.
She reversed her own spell, bringing the apple back down. “Try again?”
His locket flared. She sucked in a breath at exactly the same moment.
“Magic,” she said, pulling her own locket out. “A wizard just—at my home—”
He was already casting the identification spell. Not Garrett. A nondescript wizard with a high forehead, dark glasses and a grim expression.
“I need to call my sister,” she said, dashing down the stairs to the kitchen.
He rushed after her, almost tripping on the way. “Remember, the phone is tapped!”
“Yes—right.”
She dialed her number with shaking hands, getting a finger into the wrong hole, having to start all over again. His locket was still hot. Several spells back-to-back? He heard the telephone ring faintly against her ear, once, twice, three times, four.
“Hello?” said a tinny and clearly upset voice.
“Lydia!” Beatrix sagged with relief against the wall. “Is—is now a good time for me to come back?”
Her sister’s “yes, please do” sounded emphatic but, he thought, not frightened.
“I’ll be home shortly.” Beatrix swallowed and added in nearly a whisper, “I love you.”
He winced at the unexpected pain of hearing those words from her dayside, knowing she would never say them to him. Then he felt guilty for thinking of that when her sister could be in danger.
“I’ll drive,” he said as she hung up. “Come on.”
She said nothing on the short trip there, hands clenched in her lap. He parked away from the house, cast a layer of protection on them both and spelled himself invisible.
Nothing looked amiss with the land or the house. They slipped in and found nothing obviously wrong on the inside, either, other than Miss Dane standing beside Beatrix’s sister with the forbidding air of a bouncer.
“What happened?” Beatrix whispered.
“No idea,” Miss Harper said in similarly hushed tones. “I was in the sitting room with homework and Rosemarie was in the kitchen, so we’re fairly confident no one got in either door.”
“Where’s Ella?”
“With you, we assumed.” Miss Dane raised an eyebrow at her. “Though considering that you called here just a few minutes ago, you didn’t come from the woods.”
“I stopped in at our omnimancer’s.”
Miss Dane took two steps forward and grabbed his arm—as if she could see him. “Obviously,” she said, voice dry as dust.
“How—” he said, rattled.
“There’s something a shade off about the air around you.”
He’d never noticed such an effect. He wasn’t aware of anyone else noticing it, either. Extremely observant woman, Miss Dane.
“Well, Omnimancer?” She crossed her arms. “What do you suggest?”
Lang rēad lēoht would help. But the fact that his former employer had no idea he knew it was a huge advantage, and casting the magic-detection spell now increased the odds of them finding out.
So he said, “Go around the house and see if you can find any other air that looks off.”
Miss Dane worked her way through the place, the rest of them standing strategically near doorways to keep an invisible wizard from slipping past. Fortunate that Beatrix’s odd-woman-out tenant—the one not in the League—had happened to walk to town, because he was certain what they were doing would look strange.
“Nothing,” Miss Dane said finally. “Now what?”
Loud knocking saved him from replying. Miss Knight, at the back door, out of breath. “Is everyone all right?” she said as she closed the door behind her.
“Yes, and we have no idea what it was all about, so we’d better watch what we say,” Beatrix’s sister murmured. “Omnimancer Blackwell is here, by the way.”
“Miss Knight,” he said from thin air, making her jump. She apparently didn’t have his former teacher’s unusual knack.
That formidable woman turned to Miss Knight, eyes narrowed. “Where were you? Since you weren’t doing what you said you were doing.”
Miss Knight flushed. “I most certainly was. I just did more walking than Beatrix.”
“While she visited our omnimancer,” Miss Dane said, giving an ugly connotation to the verb.
“Hey!” he said. At the same time, Beatrix snapped, “You should be glad I did!”
“Please, let’s not fight,” said Miss Harper, holding up her hands. “Omnimancer, I am glad you’re here. Would you be willing to check for signs of spellcasting?”
He supposed there really was no way around it. None of them, least of all him, could afford to have a camera hiding in this house.
“I will,” he said, “if you turn the place upside down for recording equipment that’s simply been hidden. And pull down all the window shades in case he’s outside looking in.”
He went room by room, expecting he’d have to wade through dozens of spells cast by the women.
But other than the exterior walls—bright white with what were almost certainly protection spells—there were surprisingly few remnants of magic.
Then he got to the master suite and discovered the ghostly outlines of a crowd of invisible people in the bathroom.
His breath caught in his throat.
“It’s OK,” Beatrix said, rushing in and putting her hand through them all. Nothing there.
Oh. He realized, now that his heart wasn’t trying to jump up his throat, that the outlines were about the size of her sister.
Brilliant in its simplicity: They’d obviously decided to cast all their protection spells on Miss Harper in one spot so they could more easily distinguish between theirs and an intruder’s.
“Excellent idea,” he said.
She smiled. “I was pleased with it.”
“House seems OK—I can’t absolutely vouch for the exterior walls, but I’ve got a workaround in mind. Find anything?”
“Not yet. We’re still, ah, ‘cleaning.’” She brandished a duster in a distinctly ironic way. “What’s your workaround?”
He reversed the spell on himself and snapped back into view.
“I’ll cast a sound-dampening spell in a few places.
It doesn’t completely deaden sound like the anti-eavesdropper, just turns everything said in the area into indistinct mumbling outside of it.
I’m thinking it would be useful in this bathroom and wherever you have League meetings. The dining room?”
“Yes. Thank you—that should do very well.”
After he cast the spells and every inch of the house had been scrubbed, they gathered in the dining room, young Miss Harper choosing to pace as the rest of them sat.
“What could those spells have been about?” she said. “A wizard just popping in for a jaunt around town?”
“Do we know who it was?” Miss Knight added.
Beatrix shrugged. “Not Wizard Garrett. The man’s in his late thirties, perhaps, with a slightly receding hairline and a square jaw.”
He thought Miss Knight’s eyes widened at that description. “Anyone you know? From Bethesda, perhaps?” he said dryly.
“I … I’m not sure.”
“How many spells did he cast?” Miss Dane said.
“One or several in quick succession,” Peter said.
“Entirely possible that he did come for a jaunt around town, in the getting-his-bearings sense, and the spell we all felt was when he teleported out. Bea—” He caught himself before saying the second syllable of Beatrix’s name and hoped he hadn’t turned red at the slip.
“Be careful. Miss Harper thought she was followed in the woods today.”
The younger Miss Harper—the only person he thought of as “Miss Harper” anymore—grabbed the back of a chair to steady herself.
Miss Dane eyed Beatrix. “Please tell me you weren’t doing something incriminating at the time.”
“No, Rosemarie.”
Miss Knight tapped on the table, drawing everyone’s attention. “We haven’t checked outside the house, correct? The wizard must have cast something there if he didn’t do it in here.”
He couldn’t deny that.
“We should look,” Beatrix said apologetically.
He couldn’t deny that, either. He sighed. “Let me handle that after dark. If he’s still around, I want to give him a chance to get out.”
“Please stay for dinner, then,” Miss Harper said.
He didn’t want to. He wanted to be out of this house, away from these women who—variously—distrusted him, disliked him, tolerated him and unwillingly loved him.
But the thought of leaving Beatrix while a wizard potentially lurked nearby, waiting to do who-knew-what harm, twisted his internal organs into knots.
“Thank you,” he said. “I will.”