Chapter 33 #2
The wait was every bit as uncomfortable as he’d anticipated.
Beatrix excused herself to start dinner, and he was prevented from following by Miss Knight and Miss Dane, who practically frog-marched him to the sitting room.
For tea, as if he were a social caller. The missing tenant returned and joined the crowd, staring at him in wide-eyed silence as the others questioned him.
Did he have any family in town? No, none anywhere since his grandmother died, six months after he’d been whisked off to Arlington to train as a wizard. (It had not been a good first year.)
How did Ellicott Mills compare with his memories? Smaller. Poorer.
What was his opinion of Washington? Not fit for mixed company.
Not asked was the question he knew at least some of them were dying to put into words: What exactly is going on between you and Beatrix?
Dinner was quiet, perhaps because everyone had exhausted their store of polite and semi-polite small talk. Afterward, the tenant—whatever her name was—worked up the courage to whisper “it was very nice to meet you” and tiptoed upstairs.
The time had come. He slipped out into the darkness.
He worked quickly, the hairs on the back of his neck standing at attention. Invisibility would do him no good at this point—either way, it would be immediately obvious who was casting the spell if anyone from D.C. was watching.
Nothing in the garage. Nothing in the garden. He did a brisk circuit around the house: nothing, nothing, nothing ... something. The telephone junction box lit up just like his had.
He dropped his spell and went back to the dining room, where four sets of eyes bore into him. “You’ve been tapped,” he said.
Beatrix shook her head, looking less upset than perplexed. “Why now? I mean, why not months ago?”
He shrugged. “New man on the job?”
“Perhaps the leak’s been shut off and they need a new source of information,” Miss Dane said. Looking directly at Miss Knight.
Miss Knight threw up her hands. “Oh, for—”
“Thank you, Omnimancer,” Beatrix cut in, standing up. “I know you must want to get home.”
He hastened out after her before someone could insist he stay. She walked him down the darkened driveway, the silence between them like a physical weight he didn’t know how to cast off.
She turned to him as they reached his car. “It feels so inadequate, but all I can think to say is that I’m grateful.” She hesitated, then took his hand in both of hers, sending a jolt up his spine. “Thank you very much, Peter.”
She hurried back to the house before he could respond.
He drove home, thoughts in turmoil, and went to his greenhouse to see to the plants.
Strictly speaking, he never should have involved himself in the Harpers’ problems. Doing so increased his chances of arrest, made him fall in love with Beatrix and led to the final Vow that bound them so inextricably.
But he wanted her sister to succeed—and to stay alive. Hadn’t Beatrix lost enough already?
He looked down to find he’d thoroughly overwatered the last plant.
He couldn’t afford to lose track of his surroundings—for all he knew, the nameless wizard was still in town.
Brushing the dirt off his hands, he cast a careful eye over the greenhouse.
It seemed fine. So did the lawn beyond. He strode to the side of the house, dropped the protection spell around it and opened the basement door.
The next instant he was on his hands and knees in the dark cellar. An assailant he couldn’t see had barreled into him so violently that it felt more like being hit by a truck than a man. The door shut with a bang.
Adrenaline surging, he struggled to his feet.
Grabbed for leaves. Tried to cast a protection spell.
The intruder slammed him into a wall and affixed him there with a whipcrack-quick incantation that left his locket burning, his fuel out of reach and his feet an inch off the floor.
He couldn’t move anything but his head, which ached from the impact.
Clearly his stuttered beorgan didn’t take.
The wizard spit out the spell that reversed invisibility and growled, “What do you think you’re doing?” His face was deeply shadowed, but his voice was unfortunately familiar.
Garrett.
The man didn’t wait for an answer. “You’re casting on the side for the Harpers. You’re the reason they keep pushing on as if they have an ice cube’s chance.”
“I’m not—”
“I saw you.”
It registered, vaguely, that this wizard had to be at least six-foot-two—Garrett towered over him. He tested the magic holding his arms to the wall and couldn’t move them a bit. He’d never felt so outmatched in his life.
“Could we please have a normal conversation upstairs with less skull-splitting?” he said, hardly able to hear his own voice over the roar of his pulse.
“Don’t be absurd. Talk. You cast the spell-scanner outside their house.”
No point denying it. Better to make it appear he’d done it coincidentally.
“Of course,” he said, stoking up anger to tamp down panic. Reminding himself that Garrett still had nothing on him to warrant arrest. “Every so often I check their property for spells because fucking wizards are trying to kill them.”
Garrett’s face, coming into clearer view as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, twisted with some strong feeling. Loathing. Contempt. “The newspapers would be very interested to hear they’re requesting magic, don’t you think?”
“If you leak it to the press,” he said, carefully enunciating every word, “I’ll tell them why I’m doing it.”
“You sicken me.”
Peter couldn’t manage to hold back an aggrieved, “What?”
Garrett crossed his arms, a gesture of supreme confidence in his spellwork—confidence that was not misplaced.
“You want Beatrix Harper, so you press her into working for you. You make yourself invaluable to her. ‘Oh, keep doing what you’re doing, I’ll take care of you.
’ Well, you can’t. You can’t even take care of yourself. ”
Peter wasn’t certain whom this insulted more—him or Beatrix. “You think I hired her in some sort of grand plan to seduce her?”
Garrett slammed a fist into the wall an inch shy of his head. Shit. The collision sounded like metal on stone—like Garrett had a powerful protection spell on himself. As the man pulled back, Peter could see he’d damaged the wall.
“I know that’s what you did,” Garrett hissed. “I saw the way you looked at her when she thanked you.”
Fear zinged through him with the speed of a spell. This wasn’t Garrett the Army wizard, here on orders to scare him straight. It was Garrett the jealous ex-lover.
He took a moment to gather his wits because his life could depend on his answer.
“I hired her because she’s the brightest person in town. In fact, by giving her no choice about whether to work for me, I guaranteed I’d be”—he thought of her words and suppressed a sigh—“the very last person she’d ever love.”
Garrett didn’t seem entirely persuaded by this line of reasoning. But this time the man aimed nothing worse at him than a skeptical look.
“Listen,” Peter said, forcing himself to go on, to make the suggestion that was in Beatrix’s best interest but left him physically ill.
“I know who you are, Wizard Garrett. I know how you feel about my assistant. It doesn’t have to be this way—help her.
You could do it far more effectively than I could. ”
Garrett was evidently too taken aback to have an immediate response. Peter pressed his advantage. “You don’t want to quit the Army? Fine. Tell Miss Harper whatever they’re planning. Keep her and her sister safe.”
Worm your way back into Beatrix’s heart.
“That’s a court-martial offense,” Garrett said, the words barely above a whisper.
“I guarantee what your unit is doing is illegal. Pick your crime.”
Garrett looked away. He needed more. One more reason.
“They’re doing important work,” Peter said—and realized an instant too late, as Garrett whipped about, that he’d made a mistake. That Garrett had fallen for Beatrix in spite of her League activities.
“You’ve got to be joking.” Garrett gestured aggressively. “I don’t think Lydia fucking Harper will get anywhere, but if she did, she’d destabilize the entire country. It’s madness.”
“‘Throw the bums out’ has a rather long and storied place in American history—”
“Throwing all the wizards out is a short-sighted and na?ve suggestion!” Garrett stepped in, too close. “Stop aiding the Harpers. She needs to quit—no good will come of this.”
Peter wanted to throttle the man. Garrett looked as if he felt the same way about him. Only one of them could follow through.
“She’s not going to quit.” He looked the wizard in the eye, willing him to be reasonable. “It doesn’t matter what either of us do or don’t do—you must see that.”
The sound that came from Garrett’s throat was pure disgust. “Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone has a breaking point, especially a twenty-year-old girl. What you’re doing, omnimancer, is giving her a false sense of security. You’re helping cause her death.”
“I’m helping—”
“Stick around,” Garrett snapped, pulling out a leaf, “and think about it.”
It was a red. By the time Peter got out a “no,” Garrett was already gone, teleported with a pop—leaving him alone and utterly unable to get down from the wall.
He struggled for a minute before giving up the slim hope that he could free himself without magic.
It could, of course, be worse. Garrett could have killed him.
But hanging here for a day and a half until Beatrix came to work Monday morning—no food, no water, no toilet—might land him in the hospital.
Even if she stopped in after church, he was looking at a fifteen-hour wait at minimum.
There seemed no way he could drop off into a sufficiently deep sleep to get a message to her subconsciously.
When she did find him, he would be an embarrassing mess. No doubt that was what his assailant had counted on—that, and the odds that he’d get down from the wall a quivering wreck. Garrett really didn’t know anything about him. He hoped.
He let his head loll forward, expelling a long and bitter breath. The air just beyond him fogged up. Not like air normally would, there and gone, but rather like a car window on a cold day.
Oh fuck.
His heart raced. He huffed out hot air in more spots, testing his horrible theory, hoping to God it was wrong.
But no: All around him, against the wall behind him and a couple inches out in front, the air reacted in exactly the same way.
He had managed to cast the protection spell. And it had gone terribly wrong.
It wasn’t safely on his body like a second skin, allowing him to breathe. It had bubbled out around him, keeping everything—including air—from getting in.
Each breath brought him closer to suffocation. He didn’t have a day and a half. He didn’t have fifteen hours. He had perhaps a single hour, and then he’d be dead.