Chapter 34 #3
“He saw me casting outside your house. He stuck me to the wall, demanded I stop helping you and left me here. I could have survived that with everything but my dignity intact, but I’d screwed up beorgan in a misbegotten attempt to protect myself.”
She wanted to hit something. “That—that bastard.”
He sat up and pressed his back against the wall, the one he so recently was trapped on. “I don’t think he knew. If he wanted to kill me, he could have cast any number of spells to do that.”
“I don’t care! If it had gone the way he’d intended, you’d have been there for hours, maybe even days—”
“Better than the fate I almost got.”
She shuddered.
“How on earth did you end up here just in time? No, wait—don’t tell me yet.” He pulled out a pair of leaves. “Let’s see if we have any invisible visitors.”
No doubt she would already have been hauled away if so, but you couldn’t be too careful. She let him cast the spell-detector but laid a hand on his shoulder when he tried to get up. “Let me.”
Around the cellar she went, touching all the remnants of magic, even the faint ones, and hitting nothing solid.
“All right,” he said. “How?”
“I felt ... terrible,” she said, struggling to put the sensation into words. She knelt beside him. “I thought it was a panic attack because we’d just discovered that Meg Wallace sold us out to the wizards for the price of her college tuition—”
“What? Your treasurer? The one who took a Vow?”
“Yes—before she took the Vow. She thought she could pass them information without doing us any harm, the little idiot. Now she can’t tell them anything, of course, and Uncle Sam is done underwriting her education.
” She breathed in deeply to tamp down indignation.
“It finally occurred to me that this alone couldn’t explain my physical reaction. So I came here.”
That look was back in his eyes—the one that tempted her to kick her principles to the curb. “You saved my life.”
“I put you at risk in the first place.” She glanced at her hands, which held no temptation. “I asked you to cast that spell outside our house. I’m so very sorry, Peter.”
“I would have anyway. It needed to be done.” He hesitated. “Has it occurred to you that if you hadn’t intervened on my behalf, you’d be free?”
She looked up with a jerk, unable to believe how calmly he’d asked that. “No! What a horrible thought!”
“Why?”
“Why? Because you have important work to do? Because you shouldn’t die in your early thirties? Because—” She faltered. Because I need you.
“If I’d never made you take a Vow,” he said, words quiet, “you might have eventually fallen in love with me on your own. It’s not outside the realm of possibility, is it?”
“I don’t know.” She swallowed. “I can’t think rationally about you.”
She braced herself for arguments, persuasion, seduction. But he simply nodded, which was most effective of all. He understood her, knew intimately how her mind worked, and there was nothing—nothing—more seductive than that. Perhaps he thought patience would win out.
Perhaps he would be right.
“I was so certain I’d run out of time,” he said, glancing at the wall behind him. Changing the subject. “Even when you burst in, I thought it was too late.”
A jolt of adrenaline hit—in a good way—at this reminder. She’d been so massively relieved by the results that she hadn’t had the opportunity to feel excited. Now the import of what she’d done set in.
“Peter ... I thought so, too. So I gave up on fordēst. I needed something faster.”
“You don’t mean—” His eyes widened as she nodded. “The wild magic that saved your sister—you did it again?”
She could feel her happy grin stretching wider and wider. “Yes.”
“How?” He leaned forward in his urgency.
“It’s not like spellcasting at all. It’s an appeal.”
He digested this. “Show me?”
She stood, wondering if it would work when she wasn’t desperate.
Nothing could top a plea to save someone you loved—felt like you loved, whether you actually did or not.
But she threw her arms wide, tipped her head back, closed her eyes.
Please. She thought about what she wanted.
Please. She remembered in a flash the feel of the fabric on her skin, the fine stitch work, the autumn colors.
Please. She exhaled and felt something click, like a record-player needle slipping into the groove.
Then she looked. Between them lay the quilt from his bed two floors up.
“Oh my God,” Peter whispered. “Oh my God.”
His hands shook as he reached out to touch it. She couldn’t tell if he was amazed or spooked. He looked up at her and said, “Do you have any idea what you’ve just done?”
“Magic without a spell. Without fuel.”
“Not just that. Impossible magic.”
“I saw Wizard Garrett call his canteen to him once,” she said, but then the rest of that memory came back to her—why it had worked.
“You need the object you’re calling to be in a magically prepared room,” Peter said. “My quilt wasn’t. No one has ever been able to do what you just managed.”
He scrambled to his feet, swaying for a second before getting his balance, and retrieved something from the far corner of the cellar. The five-pound weight.
Impossible not to think of her first magic lesson. Same place, object, company. Still, neither of them was really the same now, were they?
Arms out. Head back. Eyes closed. Please. Please.
The results were slower this time. But she did it. The weight hit the ceiling with a resounding thwack, flakes of plaster floating down from the point of impact like snow.
“Oh,” she gasped. She wanted to dance about.
Peter steadied himself on the stairwell railing. “That’s ten feet. If not for the ceiling, I’m sure it would have gone far higher.”
“It’s amazing.” She took him by the hand and pulled him into the center of the room. “You have to try it. We’ve been doing magic all wrong, demanding and forcing and—and limiting. But this is the way. This.”
She positioned his arms, tipped up his chin. “Close your eyes. Think of what you want to accomplish and ask for it. Say please.”
His lips quirked. “Please?”
“Yes! Go on.”
She backed up and waited.
A minute ticked by. Two. He sighed and opened his eyes, rubbing his neck. “I’m not getting anywhere.”
“You’re exhausted,” she said. “Try again tomorrow.”
He slumped onto the quilt. “I don’t think that’s it. I think I can’t cast this way.”
“Don’t give up so quickly—”
“Beatrix, wizards have been experimenting with magic for a hundred years. Far longer if you count underground efforts. Don’t you think someone would have tried it your way?”
She hadn’t considered that. But now that he mentioned it—yes.
“I’ll give it another shot tomorrow. I’m confident, though, that I’m not going to be able to, that wizards simply can’t.
” He leaned back on his hands and looked up at her, brows drawn low, the muscles in his neck taut.
“But witches might. Those experiments with women in the nineteen-thirties only lasted a year and a half. No one tried anything but teaching the subjects how to cast the conventional way.”
“You’re saying ...” She crouched beside him, head spinning. “You’re saying the most powerful magic users could be women.”
“Yes.”
She’d thought women using magic in a minor way could revolutionize society, but this ...
“Peter, this changes everything.”
He nodded, and she realized with a start that he wasn’t excited or intrigued or absorbed.
He was upset.
“You don’t like it,” she said, barely able to force the words out.
“It’s extraordinarily dangerous.”
She had to breathe in and out several times before she could manage a response. “I see.”
He grasped her hand as she tried to get up. “No, you don’t see. Think, Beatrix! This isn’t about women’s rights. It’s about power. Power is always dangerous.”
“That hasn’t stopped men from using magic!”
“I’m not telling you not to use it,” he said, almost in a whisper. “I’m saying we need to keep this a secret. Please don’t tell anyone—not even your sister.”
She stared at him, aghast. “What?”
“No one can know.” He held her hand so tightly it hurt. “What do you think the administration would do if they discovered half the country had magical potential outstripping anyone practicing today, but no training to protect themselves? What do they need for the weapon I idiotically made them?”
“Powerful fuel,” she murmured.
“You see?”
“Yes—but you must see this is yet another reason to keep the status quo. Another ‘leave well enough alone’ argument, one that works out for the ruling class as always.”
“Beatrix—”
“Don’t you think the possibility that women could make every wizard redundant is influencing your opinion on the matter?”
He scowled at her. “What exactly do you propose? Announce to the Star, complete with demonstration, that women have the potential to be great witches? Your sister will be through. We’ll both be thrown in prison. And none of the people you want to convince will believe you.”
“Not a public announcement.” She leaned toward him. “An underground movement.”
If she could get word out to enough people, it would spread.
Inexorably. And Lydia could stop what she was doing, stop endangering her life, because nothing would dissolve wizards’ stranglehold on political power faster than the revelation that thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of “ladies” were far better than they at their one claim to superiority.
But Peter shook his head. “What, ‘Psst, you can do magic, pass it on’? You’ll be caught.”
She jerked from his grasp. Why couldn’t he understand? “Not if I’m careful. And besides—it’s spellcasting that’s illegal, and that’s not what this magic is.”
“I doubt the FBI would see the distinction.”
“Well, there is one. That’s why your earlier order that I do no spells outside this house didn’t prevent me from saving Lydia. This is an entirely different sort of magic.” She sat back on her heels, willing him to see, to be on her side. “This is tapping directly into the source.”
“Which we know nothing about! Doesn’t that concern you?”
All that kept her from shaking him was the thought of how close he’d come to dying just a few minutes earlier. “Are you really about to tell me this is the devil’s work?”
“No!” he snapped. “No, I’m not. Damn it, Beatrix, you need to stop seeing everything as either black or white—it’s going to be your undoing.”
She leapt to her feet. “If you viewed the world a bit more like I do, you’d never have entrapped me, you’d never, never have built that weapon, because you would have realized where the line between good and evil is!”
He reared back as if she’d struck him. She wished she could rewind time like the film in his camera and say what she really meant.
I need your support. I need you.
“I came here to stop the weapon I made,” he said, voice cold as death, “and I ended up creating another one.”
For a terrible moment, she simply stood there, blood rushing in her ears. Then she spun on her heel and went for the door.
“You can’t do it, you know,” he called out. “You Vowed to cause me no harm. You Vowed to cause your sister no harm.”
“I Vowed to protect her,” she said, once more finding it hard to breathe. “And I will. I will.” She swung about to glare at him. “But perhaps you’d like to call on my Vows and see if they’d prevent me?”
He was on his feet, arms as rigid as if he were about to cast a spell. Then he deflated, shoulders slumping.
“No,” he said. And though she was too far away to properly see his expression, there was no mistaking the stricken tone.
The urge to close the distance between them, to put her arms around him, was overwhelming. But it wasn’t her urge. It was his. She turned, every atom in her body protesting, and walked out the door.
Her priority—before all else—was to keep her sister safe. If she’d just transformed herself into a weapon, well ... so much the better.
He’d thought he couldn’t possibly fall asleep, but he did. And there she was, sparking with fury in exactly the spot where she’d stood a few hours earlier—an arm’s length from the cellar door.
“I hate you,” she said. The sentiment was bitter enough to taste.
He looked away, but she wasn’t done.
“I love you,” she choked out. “My God, this is hell.”
“Yes,” he said, and turned back just in time to catch her as she flung herself at him. Teeth and nails and lips and tongue. They toppled onto his quilt, a silent reminder of her troubling power, and made short work of each other.
He caught his breath, heart hammering in time with hers. He didn’t know what to do. Every day his life went just a bit more off the rails, and every night …
“I’ll never escape you, will I,” he said to her, this almost-Beatrix who tormented him.
Warm air skimmed across his chest as she snorted. “Hoist with your own petard, eh, Hades?”
He cast an eye over his dark domain, this place that trapped them both. Then he angled his head to gaze at her, her eyes defiant, her mouth inviting. Without meaning to, he closed the few inches separating them and brushed his lips against hers.
She kissed him back.
“Perdition catch my soul,” she murmured, slipping a hand into his.
The story continues in Radical, book two in the Clandestine Magic trilogy.