Plans Unveiled
12
The meal was painfully quiet. Emily wanted to tell Willi how sorry she was, but she couldn’t manage to break the silence. And “so sorry” was woefully insufficient.
In the end, it was Willi himself who spoke first. He shifted his bloodshot gaze to Hartgrave. “Does Dr. Daggett know the plan?”
As Hartgrave hesitated, Bernie jumped in. “No, actually.” He turned to her, his serious expression hitting harder than the others’ because she’d rarely seen him without a grin. “We’re trying to take out their tracking system.”
She’d assumed as much. That would make the problem way more surmountable. But if she’d understood Hartgrave, they weren’t close to accomplishing it. “What’s the set-up? Do you even know where it is? ”
“They have it in the cellar of their headquarters,” said Willi, who either didn’t notice Hartgrave glaring at him or (more likely) didn’t care.
“The building is never empty,” Bernie said. “That’s problem one.”
“And if they’ve protected the system with magic,” she said, thinking this through with a frown, “then none of you could destroy it without first showing up on it.”
She didn’t add “but I could.” Not yet. The idea made her heart beat faster, though. Adventure. Adventure for a noble cause.
Bernie nodded at what she hadn’t left unspoken. “We found a bit of a workaround, but even so, we can’t sneak in and give it a try while the most dangerous wizards are there in the house. Requires a misdirection strategy. Risky, of course.”
Willi waved a hand, as if to suggest that Bernie overstated the hazard. “Two of us charge up to draw away the dangerous ones. We lead them on a—what sort of chase did you say?” He glanced at Bernie. “Bird?”
“Wild goose,” Bernie said. “Teleporting around the world, timing the jumps so we’re always one location ahead of them. Meanwhile, the third man takes out the protections around the tracking system by alternating low-level magic with more powerful bursts too short to set off its alarms.”
“And as I’m the only one of us who can manage that,” Hartgrave said, arms crossed, “it casts them as the bait.”
Bernie rolled his eyes. “It took us ten months just to get him to consider the idea. ”
Hartgrave leaned toward her. “I’m not being unreasonable. The system’s so well fortified, those two would have to keep up the wild-goose chase for more than an hour. Which certain people,” he added, looking pointedly at Bernie, “demonstrably cannot do.”
“And now what?” Willi’s glare, aimed at Hartgrave, seemed like a rebuke. “You believe it will be better now they know you are not dead?”
Before Hartgrave could answer, Willi turned and caught one of her hands in both of his. It stung—calm, she wasn’t—but he gave no sign of noticing.
“Dr. Daggett, you have the power to help. You could go with Alexander—you could get through the protections much faster. Please, please, will you help?”
She took a deep, life-changing breath.
“No ,” Hartgrave snapped, eyes blazing. “She’s not tagging along like it’s an effing field trip! It’s bad enough you two seem determined to put yourselves in deadly peril, but I draw the line at enlisting a girl who has no idea what she’s getting herself into!”
Emily took another deep breath, the last one having run out.
“Hartgrave,” she said, “I’m twenty-six years old, and you can’t order me around.”
The tips of his ears flushed red.
“Willi,” she said, “I give you my word that I will help.”
Willi made a sound suspiciously close to a sob. Hartgrave sprang from his chair and said, “You can’t do this without me, and I refuse to go along with it. ”
“Alexander .” Willi’s voice was sharp. Grim. “I owe you my life. But that does not mean you are not also owing me something.”
All the excess color in Hartgrave’s face drained away.
“We must stop them,” she put in. “You know that.”
He sat down, saying nothing. As good as a yes.
Willi’s expression shifted to something that couldn’t exactly be called happiness, but certainly had a great deal in common with satisfaction.
“It will be fine,” he said to Hartgrave. “You will see.”
“Well,” Bernie said, his upbeat tone sounding a shade forced, “welcome to our federation of freedom fighters, Em. Great to have you. I’d love to stay and chat, but I really ought to be getting home. Unless you still want to practice tonight?”
This last was aimed at Hartgrave. He shook his head.
“Until tomorrow, then,” Willi said, rising. “Sleep well.”
“Wait.” She fumbled in her purse. “I need to pay you.”
Willi put up his hands as if to ward off such an eventuality. “Never .”
“But it’s my turn—”
“He’s extracted a far larger payment from you already,” Hartgrave said, jaw tight. “You’ll see.”
She waited until they were out of the restaurant, heading back to campus, before taking this on. “I seem to recall you thinking I wasn’t entirely helpless two hours ago.”
“You were incredibly lucky. I can’t believe you want to risk yourself like that again—” He stopped, shaking his head. “Actually, I can believe it. It’s just the sort of thing that someone who goes after apparent intruders, barges into mysterious rooms and hangs around a man who gave her a head injury would be likely to do.”
This was said so matter-of-factly—and was so patently true—that her exasperation gave way to a laugh. “Perhaps I’m just a bit adventurous.”
He threw up his hands. “Perhaps you’ve read a few too many adventures.”
Also true. Still: “These wizards are killing people. Doesn’t every fiber of your being cry out against that? Don’t you feel you absolutely must do something?”
They’d come to a stop. He stared into the distance in a way that made her think what he saw wasn’t Main Street, the campus beyond or anything else in town.
“Yes.” The word came out choked. He was slouching more than ever, as if he wanted to curl up into a ball. “Every day.”
Heart twisting, she wrapped her arms around him. He let out a shuddering breath and pressed her closer.
“I don’t want anything bad to happen to you,” he murmured into her hair.
“Maybe this is my grand purpose. Have you thought of that? You can’t stand in the way of someone’s grand purpose—it’s impolite.”
His laugh sounded soggy. She gave him a moment and stepped back, going up on her toes to brush her lips against his. “I’ll be careful. I promise.”
They walked the rest of the way to the Inferno in silence, Emily deciding that now was not the time to make him talk. But oh—the questions. She had so many .
She kept them contained when he suggested she sleep in his room for safety’s sake—in his bed, no less, though not with him in it. She distracted herself for a few minutes more by calling her parents on his old cell phone to let them know she got back OK, not (of course) mentioning what had actually happened on the trip.
The questions began to slip out, however, after he convinced magic to form a second bed a few feet shy of the first.
“Do you know why they’re killing convincers?” she asked.
Her guess: a modern witch hunt. If this group was carrying out a complicated plan for world domination and wanted no magical competition—
“Microchips,” he said.
She blinked. “Uh ...”
“It’s at least partly that, anyway. A microchip is the brain of a computer. They’re in cars, mobile phones—”
“Cameras, watches, microwaves and just about every other household appliance,” she said, recognizing his list as the one he’d recited the day before she left to visit her parents.
The angle of his lips was decidedly ironic. “I’m touched. I’d no idea you paid such close attention to anything I said.”
Her recall ability was excellent, a handy skill for test-taking. And for dealing with this man.
“I remember everything you’ve said.” She gave him a pointed look. “For instance, you also told me there was no conspiracy to keep magic quiet. But what, there is? This Organization has something to do with all these devices?”
“I never explicitly said there was no conspiracy—”
“Honestly! Did you ever once give me a straight answer?”
“See it from my point of view.” He sat on the edge of his magical, semi-transparent bed, looking so earnest it was hard to be angry at him. “My one advantage over them was that they thought me dead, so secrecy was critical. It wasn’t about you. I haven’t told anyone besides Willi and Ballantine, and they were already inextricably caught up in it.”
She walked between the beds, careful not to touch the one made of magic, and perched on the other. They were close enough that she could reach out and run her fingers down his thigh, but she abstained—as tempting as it was.
(What would it feel like to touch more than his hands and face, skin to skin?)
“I think …” Her voice wavered. She cleared it and tried again. “I think it might have been a good idea to recruit more help. Or go to the CIA.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to put more people at risk. And I’ve no hope of persuading the authorities that magic even exists.”
“I found you very convincing on that point,” she said, unable to resist.
He rolled his eyes at the pun, leaning his elbows on the thighs she was very aware she was not touching. “Yes, because that’s what you desperately wanted. Most everyone else—particularly people in official government positions—would see a rip-roaring magician. Law enforcers are not, as a rule, inclined to believe outlandish things. And even if they were,” he muttered, “Kincaid would outmaneuver them.”
Kincaid? Oh, right—both wizards had mentioned that name. “The evil overlord?”
She thought she might get another round of rolled eyes—if not a full-blown snort—but he gave no sign he thought this description was at all overstated.
“Yes,” he said heavily.
Now she had a thousand more questions.
“Wait,” she said, holding up a hand. “Microchips. Explain the part about microchips.”
He sighed. Perhaps he’d spent so much time keeping secrets that he was loath to tell them, even now.
After a moment, he said, “Early microchips had a few thousand transistors apiece, and there was nothing magical about them. Now it’s hundreds of millions, and here’s the rub: Transistors that small won’t work. Not without fifth-force manipulation, I mean. At some point, a magic-user intervened in the process.”
“Kincaid?”
“No. I don’t know who, but it wasn’t Kincaid. He’s not an innovator. Perhaps he learned how to do it from the inventor and then killed them.”
She shuddered.
“Exactly,” he said. “Now he’s got a stable of wizards who handle that critical step for all the microchip producers—for a fee. A substantial one.”
Oh man. “How many people in the companies know? ”
“Very, very few. Kincaid’s people come in under the guise of ‘quality assurance’ prior to testing. It’s fast work. One wizard can handle multiple production facilities.”
“How did you find all this out?”
He hesitated again, staring at his hands. She cast back to his work experience, fleetingly online, and grasped at the answer before he gave it.
“That California company you worked for,” she said. “It’s a microchip manufacturer, isn’t it?”
He looked up, eyes and mouth wide open. No doubt he never expected she would make the connection. “Yes.”
“And you can see auras.”
She couldn’t help but be a bit pleased with herself for working it out on her own, though the expression on his face and the slump of his shoulders persuaded her to move on. Uncovering the truth couldn’t have been pleasant for him.
“All right,” she said. “So ... so this Kincaid runs a profitable business. But I don’t see why he should have to kill anyone outside the Organization who figures out how to do magic. He’s a wizard . He could make billions in fake cash if he wanted.”
Hartgrave leaned a little closer. “Illusions are good enough for some things—I’m sure Crawford and Shaw worked one into the spell they cast around us, to keep anyone outside it from seeing anything—but they aren’t fine-detail enough for counterfeiting. Besides, manipulated magic dissipates eventually, illusions quickest of all. ”
“Still—wait, all spells dissipate? What about this room?”
“An exception.”
She again wondered who had constructed it—who, how, when and why. But this was no time for digressions. “Fine, I’ll accept that Kincaid can’t manufacture his own money. But that couldn’t be the only reason he’s murdering people, could it?”
“Only his psychiatrist could say—if he has one, which I doubt.” Hartgrave rose from the bed, making for the wardrobe. “But he has got a highly lucrative monopoly with a service most anyone could be trained to provide. Some would go to extreme lengths to maintain such a lovely status quo. Would you like the clean sheets?”
She’d had a point she was going to make, but his question derailed her. “Um ... No. No, all yours.”
Good grief, she could feel herself blushing at the thought of sleeping on his sheets and breathing in the echo of his aftershave. He might have come first to the attraction party, but she’d clearly made up for lost time since arriving.
How was she supposed to sleep at all, lying a yard away from him?
Her personal rule was no sex with anybody until she’d dated them at least a month. Not simply known . Actually dated. So far, she’d never had trouble waiting—not that she’d had a tremendous number of lovers, or even enough to count on all the fingers of one hand. It was a blow to her sense of self-restraint that she was sorely tempted to sleep with this man right now, less than three hours after their first real kiss .
She cleared her throat, trying to pick up the threads of the conversation. Lucrative monopoly ... extreme lengths ... Oh yes.
“I don’t see why a limited number of self-made convincers would threaten Kincaid’s business.”
“Ah,” he said, pulling the coverlet into place on his bespelled bed, “but there would be a tipping point. If a handful of people teach themselves, and they teach others, and those others teach others ...”
“Then the truth about magic would become common knowledge,” she said, seeing his point. A few convincers could be written off as stage performers, or kooks, but not thousands.
“Absent intervention, information spreads quickly now.” He sat on his temporary bed. “In large part thanks to microchips.”
She frowned. “But wouldn’t a trail of murders cause its own problems?”
“You’d be surprised how often the authorities think it’s an accident or suicide. A woman is found in her bath with a plugged-in hair dryer, the lone occupant of a house ‘trips’ down the steps and breaks his neck, a man ‘falls,’ puncturing a lung—”
“Stop, stop!” She thought of Willi’s wife and had to swallow the urge to be sick.
Hartgrave winced. “I’m sorry. I’ve lived with this for so long ...”
“When will we go? Tomorrow? The day after? When?”
His expression went from apologetic to horror-struck in record time. “Neither! If I’m having your assistance forced on me, I’m spending several weeks training you first.”
“Forced! You drive me absolutely—wait, what sort of training?”
He blinked. Then he threw back his head and laughed. “That is you to a T, Daggett.”
“‘Daggett,’ eh? Are you going to keep calling me that?”
He reached across the small space separating their beds and ran his fingers down the line of her jaw, leaving a teasing, prickling trail. “I like it. It’s an obstinate sort of name that fits you perfectly.”
How alluring it was that he knew her, knew her shortcomings, and wanted her all the more.
“Now that you mention it,” she said, catching his hand and getting a pleasant little jolt, “I prefer your last name, too. Even though ‘Hartgrave’ sounds like it ought to belong to someone absolutely appalling. And does.”
“Mm.” He leaned in and nipped at her ear. “One wonders why you’re fraternizing with appalling people.”
He began working his way down her neck. Argh, that felt good.
“I’m fond of the one in question,” she said, breathless and lightheaded.
Then he kissed her.
She pressed closer, stomach turning cartwheels as his magic zipped along her skin. The initial shock of contact was so explosive, it blanked out every other sensation. But that receded, leaving Hartgrave.
Really, magic had little to do with why she wanted him. It was him , plain and simple .
She pulled back after a while—possibly a long while—and looked at their twined hands as she caught her breath. A change of subject, that was what she needed. Something that didn’t involve tearing his clothes off.
The mild nipping of his magic suggested a question. “Hartgrave—how is it that you stayed under the Organization’s radar before they found you at Willi’s home?”
He looked completely wrong-footed. Perhaps she should have tried for a segue, or at least started with something that wouldn’t imply her mind had been wandering while her body was otherwise engaged.
“Sorry,” she said. “It occurred to me just now—you couldn’t have known to keep your magic levels down from the get-go, right?”
The sound that came from his throat wasn’t exactly a groan, but it was close. He fell back on his conjured bed, covering his eyes. His skin wasn’t back to a healthy shade, even now, and his hands trembled.
“Please, no more questions tonight. I’m way past my tolerance level.”
“You’re still unwell,” she said, anxious for him and upset at herself. She should have noticed sooner.
“Exhausted. Better tomorrow.”
“Could you use help getting ready for bed?”
He smiled. Faint, ironic, but there. “Are you offering to undress me?”
She hadn’t meant it that way, but now undressing him was once again all she could think about. So much for changing the subject .
He had the good taste not to tease further. “The bathroom’s all yours,” he said, gesturing behind him. “I should be able to manage on my own once you’re done.”
As she brushed her teeth, she ticked off all the reasons to wait. Topping the list: Getting to know him better first—the day’s revelations were a start, but only a start. Surely she could last a month if she focused.
Nothing focused the mind like a need to save the world, or at least part of it.