Chapter 11 #2
Edgar Hadwin came through it at a run, with Sean at his heel and Roam a stride behind and Honey behind Roam.
Behind Honey, in a tight half-circle moving as one creature, came the unbonded strays.
They came up through the front hall without speaking.
Edgar made the parlor doorway first. He stopped and saw the three cats on Duchess on the rug and the page floating across the room.
He saw the page slip through the slit of the desk.
"Sweet merciful," Edgar breathed. His big hand was already at his throat, his amulet already in his fist. He was already moving, past the parlor doorway, down the front hall, and into the corridor that ran along the back of the house. "Sean. Roam. Get my Honey out of here."
Honey did not move. She was standing at the parlor threshold watching the pages form at Duchess's mouth and drift across the room with her hand at her own throat, and she was not going anywhere.
Sean was already running. Roam was at his shoulder. They cleared the corridor, cleared the back hall, and reached the door just beyond Rhoda's study. Edgar already had his amulet in his fist. He was already chanting.
In the vault, the first page dropped at Rhoda Hadwin's feet. It dropped the way a leaf drops in still air. It landed open, face-up, on the cold stone floor of the vault, two inches from her left boot.
Rhoda looked at it.
Lazlo's back was still against the door. His hand was still at his side, curled around the thing he had taken from his pocket. The face he was wearing had not changed.
Rhoda bent and picked the page up. It said, in handwriting that was not anyone's handwriting and was at the same time recognizably Duchess's: Every secret. Every witch in his pocket.
The second page dropped at her right boot. She picked it up. The vault. He has been waiting for it a very long time.
The third dropped between the first two. Nadia walked in on a deal in the field office. He took the papers out of her coat. He left her on the stairs.
The fourth. Soot knew. Phineas tried to save Soot. He killed them both.
The fifth. The foot in his pocket. He kisses it like a god. He believes it is the most powerful thing in the magical world.
Rhoda Hadwin straightened. She had four folded pages in her left hand. She had one folded page in her right. She held them up so that the lamp above the door caught their faces, and she looked at the man with his back to the door of her own vault, and she did not say a word.
Lazlo smiled. It was not the warm mild smile he had been smiling for three days. It was the smile under the smile. It was a small private smile of a man who had been waiting a long time to stop pretending.
"Are you surprised?" He said.
Rhoda did not answer.
"My dear, Rhoda. You are not. Look at your face. You knew. Some part of you has known since I stepped onto your porch just a few nights ago."
A faint dark hum began to rise off his shoulders. Not visible at first. A thing the eye almost did not catch. Then it caught. The air around Lazlo had begun to darken at the edges, a slow black smoke that did not move like smoke.
"It's a great pity," Lazlo said. His voice had gone quieter and was not warm anymore.
"I should have liked to come down here as your friend.
I had hoped you would let it be enough to be your friend and to walk out of this room with my own dignity.
But the books would not let me. Your books, Rhoda. You have kept them too well."
The black at his shoulders thickened.
"I will not be stopped, Rhoda. Not now." He moved closer to her.
His hands came up. He flicked his wrists once, almost gently, the way a man flicks water off his hands at a sink, and the black at his shoulders unmade itself from his body in two long fast streams and came across the vault at Rhoda Hadwin.
It did not get there.
The wall behind the gold-coin wall opened.
Edgar Hadwin stepped through it with his amulet in one fist and his free hand already lifted, and the lavender of him was not the lavender it had been in the dining room three days before.
It was the lavender of a man who had been waiting his whole working life to stand between his wife and a thing like this, and it came up his forearms and out through his fingers and across the vault in one enormous gust that took the black streams of Lazlo Varga's magic and folded them inside itself and kept going.
The vault filled with purple glitter. Rhoda did not move. She stood with five folded pages in her hands and the lavender washing past her like weather, and she did not move, because Edgar's magic had never once touched her with anything but care.
The glitter cleared.
Lazlo was on his knees on the floor of the vault, his hands behind his back, his head bent.
Around his wrists, the soft slow gold of Spectral Enforcement cuffs had locked.
Sean had come down the inside stair behind Edgar's chant and had Lazlo's elbow.
Roam had come down behind Sean and had Lazlo's other elbow.
"Sir," Sean said quietly. "You'll be coming with us now."
Lazlo did not answer.