Coming to an Understanding
11
A full minute passed before she could open her eyes and lift her head. They’d landed in Hartgrave’s hidden room. He was pushing the door shut, an effort that seemed to be the final straw, because he then swayed and fell.
She staggered over to him. His eyes were screwed shut, his teeth clenched, face a subtle shade of gray. A horrible thought gripping her, she reached for his hand—and felt nothing but ice-cold skin, not even a low hum, despite how worked up she was.
“Hartgrave ...” Her voice trembled. “Are you all right?”
He cracked open one eye. “Do I”—he coughed— “look all right? ”
“No,” she snapped, anxiety making her testy. “You looked like you could be dead, and I was trying to rule that out.”
“Death,” he said, pausing to breathe with effort, “might be preferable.”
Probably a good sign that he had energy for sarcasm.
“Are we safe here?” She looked at the door. “They can’t follow us?”
“They’ve no way”—he wheezed—“of knowing where we went.”
He tugged his still-beeping phone out of his pocket and silenced it with shaking fingers. It took three attempts.
She bit her lip. “Any point going to the emergency room?”
He shook his head.
“At least let me get you to bed, then,” she said, taking his hands. But despite both their efforts, he couldn’t get up.
She sat next to him on the floor, warming his chilly hands with hers. “What did they do to you?”
He caught his breath, or close to it. “I’ve overextended myself. Couldn’t pull in magic at the rate I needed. Had to tap reserves.”
“What, you were drawing it out of your body?” She shuddered as he made an affirmative noise. “Wouldn’t—wouldn’t that be like sucking oxygen out of your bloodstream before your body’s done with it?”
“Yes. Very like.”
She held his hands tighter. “What can we do?”
“Time, the great healer. ”
“I don’t suppose you can draw magic into your body from the atmosphere to replace what you’ve lost ...”
“No. Magic goes out, not in.” He paused; he was still breathing heavily. “Besides, I have to produce magic to draw more around me. Right now”—he shifted in a vain attempt to find a comfortable position on the stone floor—“I can’t do magic any more than you can.”
“Here,” she murmured, slipping an arm around him. They sat like that for a while, Hartgrave’s breathing and skin tone slowly returning to normal as he leaned against her, his body warm against hers.
Her spirits improved as he did. They’d successfully escaped. He would be all right. And she’d had an honest-to-goodness adventure, by gosh.
“Well—go ahead.”
She looked up at him in confusion.
“Ask your questions,” he clarified with the air of someone about to face an ordeal, as if he hadn’t just come through something far worse. “No doubt you have enough queued up to keep us here for the next month.”
Her heart zipped at the implications. Did that mean … No, no, one thing at a time. “Just to be absolutely clear: You, Hartgrave, are telling me, Daggett, to ask you questions?”
His laugh warmed her right through, despite its raspy edge. “I can’t pretend I don’t owe you some answers after that near-death experience. Besides, the harm I was trying to avoid has already been done.”
She considered this, lining up the clues she’d gleaned over the weeks. “Are those women from Cornwall?”
He nodded .
“Do they target certain magic-users?”
“Yes,” he said, his tone suggesting he hadn’t expected that mental leap.
Hah! So her first instinct had been right after all—he was hiding.
“How’s this,” she said. “You went to Cornwall University, figured out how to use magic—or possibly the other way around, but whichever, they found out about you and decided to take you out. You faked your own death, fled here because the American Midwest is the last place they’d look for a snobby European, and everything was fine until tonight, when they somehow discovered you again.”
Now he looked truly taken aback, so she tapped her free hand against her knee, trying to unravel the rest and impress him further. “Can they track the use of magic? Wait—that’s not right, you’ve been using magic all along ...”
“You’re close.” He glanced down at the hand he didn’t have around her shoulder, splaying it out, palm up. “Every aura is unique, like a fingerprint. But auras of people who use magic are also strong enough that satellites can pick them up as they would any other signal. The group those killers belong to combines global positioning systems with fifth-force manipulation, and voilà : They can see where all the magic-users are, all the time.”
“But not you?”
He pulled her a little closer. She could hear the thud-thud-thud of his heart beating too fast, the conversation probably resurrecting bad memories. “I was fortunate enough to work out a way of remaining under the radar.”
This abruptly brought to mind his declaration that he’d taught himself how to push magic away for “health reasons.”
“If you keep the magic in your aura below a certain amount, they can’t see you,” she said. “That’s it, isn’t it. ‘Health reasons’!” She shot him a look. “You continually misled me.”
“I was being careful.” He paused. “I’ve never lied to you.”
She used up the remainder of the look and moved on, wanting to get more answers while the getting was good. “So how could you do any magic?”
“Small manipulations, like fixing your cup or your computer—they don’t require much fuel. It’s only with bigger feats that I’d have to pull so much magic to me, I’d go over the top.”
“Like ... flying,” she whispered, feeling sick. This had been her fault. None of it would have happened if she’d walked across the highway slowly, or for that matter had taken her car in for a pre-Christmas checkup.
How terribly heroic.
“Hartgrave ... I’m sorry—I’m so sorry.”
He frowned. “What are you suggesting? That I should have let you die?”
“No, but—”
“It was an accident. I don’t blame you.”
It shouldn’t have mattered, not when she was blaming herself, but his absolution helped. She pressed closer, reassured by the steady rise and fall of his chest, and was diverted for a moment by the realization that they were breathing perfectly in sync.
Then logic reasserted itself. “Wait—why are you able to fly in here?”
She could feel rather than hear his chuckle. “Because, as implausible as it might seem at a little college in the middle of nowhere, this room is the neatest bit of magic I’ve ever seen.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Magic-tight, one way. It can drift in, but it can’t get out. I’ve no idea how; it’s clearly old magic,” he added, anticipating the question about to fall from her lips. “But the point is, I can safely do anything in this room as long as the door’s closed. Their system can’t pick me up. And that, to more fully answer one of your earlier questions, is the reason I live here.”
Who could have built such a relic? How she would love to know. Her mind drifted down the path of fanciful speculation for about ten yards before pulling up short. “Oh no! When I barged in on you that first time—”
“A tiny burst of aura isn’t enough for the tracking system. It requires five uninterrupted seconds to recognize the signal.”
Ah. She grimaced. “That’s why you fell. You had no choice.”
“Well—and because I was startled into it. But it’s entirely why I didn’t use any magic afterward to hide myself. The consequences of you seeing me weren’t quite as dire as the consequences of you not seeing me. Also”—he angled his head to catch her eye, his smile sharp- edged—“I did foolishly assume you’d run straight off to get help, not dawdle about.”
She shifted away from him, wincing. “No wonder you detested me.”
“I just wished you were working elsewhere—I was sure you’d undo the enchantment on this room if you got too close to it.” Before she could manage more than a sharp intake of breath at that, he added: “But to my great surprise, you don’t.”
He took her free hand in his, rubbing his thumb down her palm. It tickled. His magic was reviving.
“And then I changed my mind about you,” he said, “and thought it a fool’s errand to get you to change yours about me.”
Her laugh was breathless. “You certainly made a rotten first impression. Horrible man, blaming me for my computer troubles when you knew it wasn’t anything I could help.”
“A perfectly accurate first impression. I am horrible.”
His delivery was as deadpan as usual. She gave him credit for insulting himself as thoroughly as he’d ever insulted her.
“Daggett,” he murmured, looking up from their intertwined hands. He stopped, as if searching for the words.
She wanted him. He wanted her. And now, it seemed, there was nothing standing in the way. Forget words. She pressed in.
This time when their lips touched, the tingling charge rushed all the way down her spine. He groaned, a sound nearly as arousing as the physical contact. She snaked a hand around the back of his smooth head to pull him closer, to feel more of him, and wondered as the buzz sizzled along her arm if people could actually pass out from sensory overload.
This was magic in a way that made even teleportation seem second-hand. And alongside that, equally powerful, all the things that were simply him : the wiry strength in his arms as they wound around her, the sandpaper-scratch of his jaw, the faint forest scent that did things to her with every inhale.
He pulled her onto his lap, and when she had the wherewithal to think anything but guh , she realized her heart was pumping just as fast as when she’d been fighting for dear life.
Kissing him was utterly intoxicating. What would it be like to do more?
He broke away first, breathing the air of the room like a man surfacing from deep water.
“I don’t want to stop,” he said in answer to her inarticulate noise of protest, his hands rubbing circles on her back. “But I’ve got the rather pressing matter of what to do now that the wizards know I’m not as deceased as advertised.”
She had no reason to question why those particular wizards didn’t call themselves witches (perhaps they too had looked into the etymology of the words and knew the gender-neutral history). Anyway, that wasn’t the most noteworthy part of his declaration.
She scrambled off his lap, alarm making her clumsy. “You said they wouldn’t be able to track you here! ”
“Not with magic. If they make inquiries, however, they could stumble upon the fact that a college less than thirty miles from their encounter with me employs an Alexander Hartgrave, and that would be that.”
She groaned, and not in the pleasant way of the past few minutes. “For Pete’s sake, why didn’t you make up a fake name? Isn’t that the first order of business for a person on the run?”
“Oh yes,” he muttered, retrieving his cell phone from a pocket and glancing at it. “You try getting a white-collar job with no green card or Social Security number. I happen to have a tech-worker visa, and I was damn well going to use it.”
She hadn’t thought of it that way. She supposed persons on the run didn’t typically use academia as their bolt-hole. Besides, he must have thought he’d be safe if he kept himself invisible online.
Wait ...
“The Ashburn profile,” she said, gripping his arms.
“Gone,” he said.
“No, I mean the search-engine caches! The wizards will find you the minute they search for your name—”
“Also gone.” He looked pleased with himself.
Handy thing, computer skills. So: His future seemed to hinge on there being no reason for the Sisters Grimm to think of calling the university and asking for him. Not dreadful odds, but not great, considering its proximity to Clear Lake.
“Well,” she said, slipping a hand into his, “what are we going to do?”
“We? ”
She frowned at him. “Of course ‘we.’ Even if you refuse to blame me for causing this crisis, you saved my life.”
“So? You saved mine afterward.”
“By that measure, you saved mine twice! I repay my debts.”
His smile was faint, but it was a smile. “Except for dinner.”
“Oh yeah? I’ll rectify that right now.” She paused long enough to notice he still looked a bit off. “Um ... maybe I should get takeout while you rest.”
“No.” He got to his feet with care. “Let’s go to Willi’s.”
. . . . .
“You’re late,” someone called out as they entered Mexican Foo.
It sounded like Bernie. It was Bernie. He was sitting at a table with Willi, his back to the door, broad-brimmed fedora at a jaunty angle on his head.
“Let’s hurry up and eat so we can—oh,” he said, catching sight of her as he turned in his chair. “Uh—hello, Em.”
The whole exchange was odd. As odd as Hartgrave having Bernie’s phone number. Wait ...
“She knows,” Hartgrave said to the men.
“No,” she gasped, unable to believe what this signified even though she’d already been most of the way there. “Bernie and Willi? ”
“She knows some of it,” Hartgrave amended, collapsing in a chair.
She turned on Bernie. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Then she gestured to Hartgrave and added, “Never mind—I know why.”
The English professor rolled his eyes. “Exactly. Speaking of which”—he poked Hartgrave—“what brings on this change of heart?”
Hartgrave sighed. “The Organization’s found me.”
The effect was immediate. Bernie choked and coughed. Willi pushed out of his chair with surprising speed for one so portly and shouted, “Wo sind sie?”
“Long gone, both of them,” Hartgrave said, apparently answering the question. He laid his cell phone on the table. A map of the country—colorless, with the exception of several blood-red dots on the West Coast—filled the screen.
“Wizards,” he said to her, pointing to the dots. “As for the ones we’re particularly interested in ...”
He selected “Crawford, Gwendolyn” from a list of names on a pull-down menu. The map spun, stopped at England and zoomed in on an area at the southwest tip—the dots so numerous there, they formed a red blob, like a wound. She sucked in a breath, startled and disturbed. Cornwall.
Hartgrave moved his cursor into the mass. Names popped up and disappeared, too quickly for her to read, until he got to the one labeled “Crawford, Gwendolyn.”
“And where there’s Crawford”—he inched to the dot next to hers—“aha. ”
“Shaw, Verity,” read the screen. Emily wondered which was Snow White and which was Rose Red. Also, how Hartgrave got his hands on the same sort of tracking system they had. He might have worked out how to make one, once he’d learned it was possible, but she preferred to imagine a more interesting origin. Pushed into his hands by a reformed-but-doomed member of the group— take it, they’re about to come after you ...
“And Kincaid makes three,” Hartgrave said, bringing her back to reality, which was plenty interesting enough. “That ought to be quite a conversation they’re having.”
“Alexander!” Willi banged his fist on the table, staring daggers at Hartgrave. “Enough! Will you explain please what has happened!”
“Yes, damn it,” Bernie said, clutching the cheery yellow table. “Do they know about the plan? Do they know about us?”
Hartgrave put his phone away. “No. It’s not as bad as that.”
He then summarized the events of the evening—leaving Willi even more agitated. The man was all but tearing his hair out. “They will be on guard now! It will never work!”
She jumped in. “What won’t work? What plan?”
That silenced everyone. Willi and Bernie looked at Hartgrave, who scowled in a manner that telegraphed a complete unwillingness to explain.
“Oh, go ahead,” Bernie said. He leaned toward her and added, “I thought he ought to tell you the whole story as soon as you found out about his extracurricular activities, but I was overruled.”
“And you know what I thought,” Willi snapped at Hartgrave, gesturing aggressively.
“I remember quite well, thank you,” Hartgrave said, an unmistakable warning there.
She crossed her arms. “So we’re back to ‘stop asking questions,’ are we?”
It hit the mark. He looked away, rubbing his neck. “We’re trying to prevent—”
“No, no, start at the beginning,” Bernie said.
“She knows the gist of my situation,” Hartgrave said. Through clenched teeth.
“Yes,” Bernie said, “but what about our situations?”
Hartgrave glanced at Willi.
“I get us something to eat,” the restaurateur murmured, disappearing stoop-shouldered behind the kitchen doors. From enraged to subdued in thirty seconds.
“As you have already guessed,” Hartgrave said, his voice even softer than Willi’s, “this group of wizards—the ‘Organization,’ as they call themselves—eliminates other magic-users as they crop up. Their victims are, you understand, perfectly innocent people who stumbled upon magic in one way or another.”
“Wait,” she said, suddenly cold. “Do you mean they—they eliminate all other magic-users? How many people have they killed?”
He made a helpless gesture. “Only they know. Possibly hundreds. ”
Oh God. Hundreds. She couldn’t get her mind around hundreds. She’d assumed they were targeting a select few, the people with potential to become threats.
“One of them,” Hartgrave added, “was Willi’s wife.”
Her heart sank.
Bernie gave Hartgrave a pat on the arm. “I would’ve been another, if it weren’t for him. He found me before they came calling.”
She leaned in, feeling ill. “But Willi’s wife ... ?”
“I tried.” Hartgrave fixed his gaze on a wall, not looking at her or Bernie. “It isn’t a simple matter, getting strangers to believe they’re in danger from something so fantastical. Five years ago, I told Anna Durr she had to stop doing magic. We got into an argument, and I was still trying to persuade her when the Organization’s leader appeared. Popped right into the living room ...”
He stopped, swallowing with effort. “She was two feet away. She didn’t have a chance against him. Willi walked into the flat the moment after it happened, only to see her—see her—”
Bernie, perhaps sensing his assistance was required, stepped in. “He got Willi out. Saved his life. But after that, Hartgrave was as good as dead.”
“So he made it appear as if he was,” she mumbled. To think she’d been excited when she’d pieced together the bare details of his history a half-hour ago.
“Yes,” Hartgrave said, finding his tongue, “and then I ran here and have been hiding underground, like a rat, ever since.”
Bernie gave him a few more pats. “I was the one who found the hidden room, by the by,” he added in an aside to her. “It’s the reason I got caught up in all this. The air’s more parts magic than oxygen in that place—anyone wandering in would start spontaneously casting spells. Er—sorry, Em. No offense.”
“He knows about the anti-magic,” Hartgrave said, waving a weary hand at her.
She rubbed her temples. This seemed a bit off the key subject of murderous wizards.
“We have to stop them,” she said. “How do we stop them?”
“We’ve been working on that,” Bernie said, “but it’s been more—ah—theoretical than practical so far.”
Hartgrave sighed. “He means we’ve accomplished sod all.”
“And he means we’ve managed nothing—speak English, man! But we certainly have done something. Or rather, he has. He’s getting to nearly all the newly minted convincers before they are.”
“Oh .” The word came out of her mouth in nearly a whisper. “Oh, Hartgrave —”
“Don’t look at me like I’ve done something noble. It’s my bloody responsibility,” he snapped.
The man was a hero, was precisely what she’d aspired to be her entire childhood, and he’d just waved it off as if it were embarrassing.
“I’ll admire you if I want to,” she shot back. “Because it is admirable, not to mention potentially fatal.”
He raised his eyebrows. “And you think going after the Organization directly wouldn’t be?”
“Well—if we can dismantle their operations, that’s a one-time strike instead of a never-ending defensive war,” she said. “If you keep pushing your luck, it’ll eventually run out.”
“It may already have,” he reminded her.
On that cheerful note, Willi returned with dinner.