Chapter 34 #2
“I slipped away to a payphone just up the street,” Meg whispered. “I called the number Wizard Smith had given me. I gave our location.”
In the silence that followed, she wailed, “I waited until the votes were all counted! I thought they couldn’t possibly do any harm!”
“The only thing worse than enemies,” Rosemarie said in disgust, “are friends.”
Beatrix clutched the table, forcing herself to breathe deeply, trying to stave off hyperventilation. What was wrong with her?
Perhaps it wasn’t her at all. Perhaps something was wrong with Peter.
“Be right back,” she said, her voice sounding thin and strangled as she barreled through the door to the kitchen.
The telephone rang and rang. She set it back in the cradle, knowing full well that it was irrational to take his lack of answer as a reason to worry. Where else would he be after dinner but in his attic lab, where he couldn’t hear a thing?
She was shaken, that was all. She’d hit the limit on nasty shocks. Gulping more air, she crossed back into the enspelled dining room, indistinct buzzing turning to angry yelling in a single step.
“—justify this to yourself!” Lydia—pacing. “There are ways to get the money for college besides selling out all your friends and everything you believe in. You could have asked us for help. You could have worked.”
“Easy for you to say,” Meg muttered, “when you have someone to do all the working for you.”
“Yes,” Lydia said bitterly. “Easy for me to say.”
Beatrix wanted this turncoat out of her house. “Are we done?”
“Wait—ask her what contact she’s had with wizards since the conference,” Ella said.
Beatrix repeated the question. Meg answered in a monotone. “The original Wizard Smith visited afterward to tell me off for not calling sooner. I took him to task for trying to kill Lydia. I said I hadn’t signed on for that. He said no one had tried to kill her.”
Ella snorted. “Oh yes, it was all in our heads. Our empty, feminine heads.”
“He came back several times to get information. I wouldn’t give him any—”
“Couldn’t,” Rosemarie said.
Meg managed a passable glare. “Well, I wouldn’t have. He tried one more time today. Then he said they were done with me, and my tuition would not be covered next semester.”
Ella shook her head and turned to Rosemarie. “Well, I salute you—it turns out you were right about why we got a visit. Just not about the source of the leak.”
“Apologies for that,” Rosemarie said. “I am glad it wasn’t you. You’d be far more formidable.”
Meg crossed her arms, the very picture of a petulant child. “May I go?”
“Please,” said Beatrix, whose panic attack had progressed to nausea.
She opened the front door, not looking forward to the drive back. Neither, it appeared, was the traitor.
“I’ll walk,” Meg said, and left without another word.
Beatrix stumbled back into the kitchen. She would try Peter again—he would answer, and then she would know he was fine and, by process of elimination, that she wasn’t.
On the tenth ring, she dropped the telephone and ran for the car.
Everything hurt. Head. Gut. Lungs. He tried to take shallow breaths, but the more oxygen-starved he got, the harder it became not to gasp.
So many ways he could have avoided this death.
Not casting the protection spell. Casting it while still at the Harpers’ house, before he’d degenerated to freshman-level boneheadedness.
Saying absolutely not when Beatrix asked for his help, that evening before the League conference.
Asking for her help at that moment of truth in the receiving room, rather than subverting her will to his.
Not experimenting with animals.
Not working on the weapon.
Not focusing on fuel innovation for his dissertation.
Not agreeing to be trained as a wizard.
Now he would never be able to undo the disaster he’d set in motion. But his death would at least serve one useful purpose. Beatrix would be free. Would she mourn him at all?
Then came a sound so astonishing he thought at first he’d imagined it: banging on the front door.
“Help!” he bellowed, wasting huge gulps of oxygen. “Cellar! HELP!”
He managed a few more yells, each weaker than the last. Too much carbon dioxide. Out of time. Darkness crept around the edges of his vision.
The cellar door opened. Beatrix, framed in the moonlight.
So he’d progressed to hallucinations.
“Peter!” Her voice quavered convincingly enough as she rushed to him. “What happened?”
“Stuck,” he rasped. “Running ... out of ...”
“Air,” she said, sounding breathless herself. She reached for him and hit the barrier. “OK—OK, I can fix this,” she said, producing leaves with shaking hands.
He wanted to explain to her—assuming she really was there—that she couldn’t fix this, no one could. He wanted her to understand that when he died, it would not be her fault. But he was past the point of words.
Beatrix angled herself just so and shouted, “Fordēst!” But then she remembered: It took a lot of time to cut through beorgan when Peter had demonstrated in the hotel. Three minutes.
He was gasping, twitching, turning a washed-out shade of blue.
Dying.
He didn’t have three minutes.
She dropped her hands, cutting off her spellwork, and pressed them back against the implacable barrier, thinking—demanding—open!
Open! She’d teleported in a split-second simply because she’d absolutely needed to.
Well, she needed this. Him. She felt a hundred conflicting things about this man, but none of that mattered, because he couldn’t die and leave her on her own with his weapon of mass destruction catastrophe and her wizard assassin crisis.
His body convulsed.
Open, open, OPEN!
Then she realized what it was, that thing skittering on the edges of her memory, why spellcasting the proper way felt off.
Not a demand. A plea. Not a tightly held position. Arms thrown wide.
Please. Please oh please oh please.
She could picture the imprisoning spell disappearing. She needed it to happen as badly as he needed oxygen.
Please—I can’t lose him.
The barrier separated with a tremendous crack—real, not imagined—and disintegrated. She sprang forward, sending more pleases into the universe, and he detached from the wall and slumped into her arms, pulling in wheezing gasps of air.
“Peter?” His name came out an octave too high. She sat on the floor, taking him with her. “Are you—OK? Peter, don’t leave me.”
He said nothing, simply breathed, head heavy against her shoulder.
It surely did her heart no good to be beating this fast. But she was petrified that he’d been irreparably harmed because she hadn’t arrived fast enough.
Had let precious minutes tick away after it first occurred to her that he might be in trouble.
She clutched at his back, her tears dripping onto his face.
He groaned. Then he shifted, sitting up under his own power, and stared at her with an intensity that offered entirely different fuel for a rapid pulse.
“Definitely hallucinating,” he croaked.
And he kissed her.
Familiar and foreign at the same time—the brush of his lips, the warmth of his hands, the swoop of her stomach. God help her, she kissed him back. He was alive, he was all right, he was so close his heart seemed to be beating directly against hers.
She breathed in the faint, intoxicating scent of his bay rum aftershave, grasping his arms, every nerve ending at attention.
Only when he pressed her toward the floor did she find the strength to pull away.
“Peter,” she murmured, putting her fingers to his lips, “this is real.”
He kissed her fingers one by one. “You’re a figment of my imagination. Of course you would say that.”
She sighed. Which of her feelings for him were hers, and which were twisted by his desire for her? Impossible to tell.
“This is really and honestly happening,” she said, the words coming out more apologetically than she’d intended, “so I cannot kiss you. You wouldn’t imagine me saying that, would you?”
His smile was rueful. “Yes. Adds authenticity.”
Lord give her strength. She bit her lip to keep from laughing, or crying.
“You’re alive, I promise you,” she said, extricating herself. “And I’m taking you to a hospital.”
“It’s not going to do any good.”
“Why? Because you’re hallucinating me?”
“That, and they don’t have wizards on staff around here. There’s a spell.”
She grasped his arms. “Where—in the Brown’s Lexicon?”
“Yes. But I’d really rather spend my last seconds kissing you.”
“Don’t move,” she said, jumping to her feet.
As she ran up the stairs, she heard him mutter, “Don’t move? What a cruel sense of humor my subconscious has.”
Brown’s informed her that the subject, if awake, would be showing signs of “impaired judgment.” (Perhaps that was catching?) She retraced her steps, flipping the cellar light on, and found him lying on his back, murmuring something.
Poetry.
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” he said as she re-read the directions and practiced the pronunciation.
“Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove: O no! It is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.”
She pulled leaves from her coat pocket to cast the spell the regular way.
“Perdition catch my soul,” he said, gazing up at her, “but I do love thee.”
She swallowed over the lump in her throat and said the spellwords. The white-blue tint receded from his skin in a rush.
He took a deep breath and blinked at her, levering himself up on one elbow. “I’m really alive,” he said, voice shaking.
Tears welled again. It had been so close. “Really and truly.”
“Apologies for ...” He gestured toward her lips, not looking her in the eye.
“Forgiven.” She cleared her throat. “Who did this to you?”
He laughed, the sound weak and bitter. “Teamwork. Garrett and I.”
This was too minor a shock, comparatively speaking, to make her heart race more than it already was. But her stomach twisted. “What?”