Practice, Practice
13
The next morning, they’d just finished breakfasting on food from Hartgrave’s mini-fridge (unplugged, powered by magic) when Willi showed up, a bleary-eyed Bernie in his wake. It was the first time she’d ever seen the latter on campus before nine o’clock.
Willi shucked off his coat and pushed up his sleeves. “Ready?”
Hartgrave shook his head. “First, we’ve got to do something about Dr. Daggett’s car. If we don’t handle this properly, we’ll lead them right to us.”
That gave her a start—not because she thought he was right, but because she’d forgotten all about her poor wreck of a vehicle.
“Why should they think it has anything to do with us? You’re a convincer. They’ll assume you popped into Clear Lake for some reason,” she said. “Which you did, actually.”
Bernie, finishing a tremendous yawn, nodded his agreement. “A broken-down car on the side of the road in a snowstorm—that’s hardly suspicious.”
“They’re not going to overlook the possibility of a connection,” Hartgrave said. “They have no other clues to go on. Here, take a look at this.”
He held up his cell phone so they could see what was on the screen. A map of Clear Lake. Dead center: two red dots.
“Crawford and Shaw—the ones from last night,” he added, no doubt for her benefit. “They’ve been back for the last two hours.”
She must have slept right through the SOS. She stared, aghast.
“It’ll be fine,” Bernie said. “Really. We’ll call the nearest mechanic at eight sharp, have them tow it in and then we’ll just let it sit in the shop until after our fait is accompli . No appearance by any of us. No connection. Give them a story about how you were on the way to the airport and won’t be back for a month, at which point you’ll bring the key so they can repair it. We can wire the payment using an assumed name.”
That eased her mind. But Hartgrave, pacing about, did not look appeased. “What if they’ve already looked inside the car?”
She patted him on the arm as he passed by. “Don’t worry ...”
“Don’t worry! Look, you don’t want them to know who you are. You were so bundled up yesterday, I doubt they could identify you by sight, but if they work out your name —”
“They won’t,” she said. “They can’t get it by calling in my license plate number and asking, because it’s against state law to give out any particulars. And there’s nothing in the car but unwrapped Christmas presents. I keep my registration and insurance card in my wallet.”
He considered this for a moment. “Well. All right, then.”
Bernie grinned at her. “His idea of high praise.”
After they’d settled things with a mechanic, she insisted on more details of the plan she’d agreed to help see through. “Tell me about the time problem.”
“It’s me,” Bernie said. “I can keep my end of the wild-goose chase going for thirteen minutes, and then I run out of steam and can’t manage any more teleportation jumps.”
She glanced at Hartgrave. “How much time do you need to get to the tracking program?”
He looked none too happy about the conversation, but he answered the question. “About three minutes. It’s in their cellar, and we can’t jump directly into the building.”
She bit her lip. “So I have ten minutes to take out the magical safeguards. Is that possible?”
Hartgrave shrugged. “It would take me an hour.”
“You know what sort of magical security system we’ll be facing?”
He nodded.
Well—that was fortunate. “Can you set up a simulation for me? ”
“Yes. Better sit,” he added, gesturing to the chair by the beds. “This will take a while.”
He and the other men spent at least ten minutes casting magic indistinguishable from the air around them. Finally, Bernie—voice muffled—said: “Okay, Em! Have at it.”
She stood and inched forward, expecting booby traps.
“It’s the same sort of defense you got through last night, only more so,” Hartgrave said. “Barriers upon barriers upon barriers. Stop when it gets to be too much.”
She stepped toward the men, palms out, until she met resistance—a faint flash of something rippling away from her fingertips like water disturbed by a stone.
At first she made excellent progress, even though every obstacle that fell had another right behind it, sometimes as close as an inch. After a while, however, she felt as if she’d been out in the sun too long. Drained. Parched. Worse than farm work on the most uncomfortable day of summer—even concentrating was a struggle.
She thought of the people whose lives would suddenly be at risk when they discovered magic. And of Hartgrave claiming her help had been forced on him. She pushed onward.
He caught her as she stumbled through the last barrier, her legs shaking, ears ringing. Bernie and Willi were both jumping about, whooping like madmen. The sight made her giggle. The giggle sounded so ridiculous, she laughed.
“Ten minutes, three seconds!” Willi pulled her in for a hug, catching Hartgrave as well since he was holding her upright, which struck her as even funnier. “We can do this—we can actually do this!”
She couldn’t seem to catch her breath, which might have had something to do with her inability to stop laughing, and that was also funny, though slightly less so if she blacked out from lack of oxygen ...
Oh God, what was happening?
“Water!” Hartgrave scooped her into his arms and rushed back the direction she’d come. “Hurry!”
Into the chair she went. A bottle was pressed to her lips; she drank until it was empty. Then she slumped back, like a marionette with its strings cut, and couldn’t manage even so much as an I feel terrible .
Someone—Hartgrave?—put a cold compress over her eyes. It helped. A little.
“Are—are you all right?” Definitely Hartgrave.
Her answer was more groan than assent.
“Damn it, why didn’t you listen to me?” (Still Hartgrave. Of course.)
His face came into view, pinched, as he switched the damp cloth with a freshly cooled one. “Where does it hurt? What are your symptoms?”
“Hot, tired, achy.” She considered adding “intoxicated,” but that sensation had passed. “Is that how it was for you yesterday?”
“Not exactly, but the result seems to be every bit as incapacitating.” He made an aggravated sound that was almost a growl. “I hope you’ve learned your lesson. Don’t overdo it . Perhaps you’ll eventually manage ten minutes without hurting yourself, if you practice, but don’t even think about pulling a stunt like that again. ”
She had enough energy to remove the second facecloth and grin at him. “What was that you said about more practice?”
His glare communicated one emotion. His tense shoulders relaxing betrayed another. “I think you’ve had quite enough for one morning.”
Bernie, hovering nearby, said, “Do you need anything? More water?”
She shook her head. “Why don’t you let me watch you practice.”
“Okay, but it gets dull fast. And it takes a while.”
“Just thirteen minutes, right?”
“Actually,” he said, “I can do the wild-goose routine for twice as long in here, give or take. But that’s not a fair measure. It’s easier to use magic in this room because there’s so much of it.”
“Pulling magic to you, this takes energy,” Willi said. “It is tiring.”
“Wait,” she said, squinting at them. “How could you possibly know you can wild-goose for only half as long outside this room?”
“I’ve done in-versus-out tests, ones that stayed under the radar,” Hartgrave said.
“And I got my baseball cap only half as far off the ground when I walked out of here the first time and tried to levitate it again,” Bernie said. “To prove I hadn’t just had the hallucination to end all hallucinations, of course ...”
He grinned. Emily reciprocated. Then it occurred to her that this would have been the death of him, had Hartgrave not intervened, and she was no longer amused.
“All right,” Bernie said, nodding to Hartgrave and pushing up his sleeves. “Shall we?”
He disappeared with a sound like a soft hiss, reappearing halfway across the room.
“Five,” Hartgrave called out. Like a warning. “Four. Three ...”
Bernie screwed up his face in concentration, palms outstretched. Hartgrave finished the countdown—with “now” in place of “zero”—and Bernie disappeared.
The moment after, Hartgrave materialized almost exactly where Bernie had been. And started a new countdown.
So he was playing the role of an Organization wizard, trying to overtake Bernie but forced to wait for the man’s aura to register on the tracking system between jumps. Five seconds, he had said. It took five seconds.
Equally unsettled and engrossed, she craned her neck to look for Bernie. He was just behind her chair, and he winked at her.
But after he teleported several hundred more times, he wasn’t in any shape for fooling around. His face glistened; the hair under his pork pie hat was damp. He gasped for air like an out-of-shape man in the last stretches of a marathon.
“Uncle, uncle,” he wheezed as Hartgrave finally overtook him.
Hartgrave crossed his arms. “If they catch you, don’t say that. ”
“Well, obviously.” Bernie weaved unsteadily toward her and leaned against the high-backed chair. “I’ll ask for directions to London Bridge.”
Aha, so Hartgrave used his icy stare of death on other people, too. He cracked his knuckles and said, “If you can’t take this seriously—”
“You’ll find someone else?” Bernie rolled his eyes. “How’d I do, Willi?”
“Twenty-five minutes, fifty-nine seconds.”
Bernie gave a whoop. “More-or-less good enough!” He jabbed a finger at Hartgrave. “Hah, hah and another hah!”
His entire arm wobbled.
“Like to sit?” she whispered.
“Yes, would you mind?” he said under his breath, a bit desperately.
No wonder Hartgrave was so worried about this part of the plan. She gave up her seat and walked over to him, glad her legs could once again hold her weight.
“Is the chase really necessary?” she asked in an undertone, not wanting to hurt Bernie’s feelings. “Why not lie in wait until they’re all out running errands or kicking puppies?”
He shook his head. “Kincaid almost always stays in headquarters. Crawford and Shaw are frequently there, too. I’ve never, not once, seen all three gone at the same time”—he tapped his phone, with its tracking program—“and they’re far and away the most dangerous of the bunch. Distraction is vital. ”
“But if they’ve never left headquarters together before, why are you sure they’ll all come out for Bernie and Willi?”
“Given sufficient reason ...” He shrugged. “They don’t want magic to become common knowledge, so two autodidacts popping wildly about the world should draw them out, and fast.”
“Auto ... ?”
“Sorry—autodidact. Self-taught person. Magically self-taught, in this case.” He lapsed into silence for a few seconds, then shook his head. “Crawford and Shaw always stick together, probably in case an autodidact proves unusually tough, so I expect they’ll go after one of our guys and Kincaid will take the other.”
She thought about this. “How dangerous is he? Kincaid, I mean—how good is he at magic?”
Hartgrave gave a small but unmistakable shudder. “Very.”
That set her off, too. She hoped Bernie wouldn’t draw him.
“Well?” Willi—tapping his foot. “Are we talking or are we working?”
No question he took it seriously.
Hartgrave fetched two more bottles of water from beneath the bed, tossed one to Bernie and drank the other. Then he gestured to Willi. “All right. Go ahead.”
She sat on the non-magical bed and leaned toward Bernie as the inexorable countdown once again echoed around the room. “How does Hartgrave have the energy to do it again with hardly a break? ”
Bernie’s soft huff of laughter sounded rueful. “He’s a lot better at this than either of us, that’s how.”
But not better than the Organization hitwomen. And they, apparently, weren’t as powerful as Kincaid. Avoiding a direct confrontation would be critical—especially one involving Bernie.
She eyed him, biting her lip. He was in good shape for his age—she would have guessed fifty instead of sixty if he hadn’t mentioned when he went to college—but now it was all she could do not to see him as fragile.
Bernie caught her staring. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Are you sure you should be doing this? You know,” she said, nodding toward Willi and Hartgrave across the room, “this?”
“Well,” he said, “my doctor did recommend I get more exercise ...”
She wanted to shake the man. “Bernie! This could kill you.”
“You too.” He raised his eyebrows at her. “Have you thought about that?”
She knew it, of course, but she hadn’t spent more than a passing moment thinking about it. Her assignment was far less dangerous than his. But even so—people risked their lives every day, and for pointless reasons. To drive somewhere a few minutes faster. To get an adrenaline rush. To fit in. If she wanted to be a bit heroic, if she wanted to help stop the villains and save innocent people, why shouldn’t she ?
Bernie, though, had never struck her as the rush-into-danger type. He struck her as the do-it-for-a-laugh type.
“Just tell me the reason you’re involved in this,” she said. “For real, no joking.”
He squirmed, cheeks going pink. Finally, he muttered, “‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.’”
Vaguely familiar. When in doubt: “Shakespeare?”
“Julius Caesar ,” he said, the only part of this strange morning that reminded her he was, in fact, an English professor. “Of course, Caesar said that right before doing something stupid, but never mind that. The point is, what have I done with my life? Nothing. Nothing lasting, anyway. No grand love affairs. No children. No students inspired to take up medieval lit as a career. I’d like to do something that might outlive me.”
A good reason. Not that different from hers, actually.
“So—if you’re asking whether I’m taking this seriously, yes, I am.” He frowned at his hands. “I’m just fairly lousy at it.”
She cleared her throat. “Look at it this way: You’re way better at magic than I am.”
He snorted and glanced over his shoulder at thin air shimmering and reshaping itself into Willi. “Too bad the ‘powerful old wizard’ archetype doesn’t hold true if you’re already pretty old when you start.”
They watched Willi and Hartgrave for a while—easy to get mesmerized by the sheer repetition of it—before she tried a question to which she figured she already knew the answer. “Are you sure this plan is the only way?”
“Seems to be. Apparently those three always have the magical equivalent of Kevlar around them, so sneak attacks are a no-go.”
She wrinkled her nose at him. “Not very heroic, anyway.”
“More heroic than what they’re doing.”
Indisputable. She went back to watching Willi disappear and reappear, his mouth set in an unwavering line, his eyes hard.
. . . . .
“No, not yet,” Hartgrave said the next morning. He put a hand on her shoulder to restrain her from getting back to work on the wall of magic she’d taken a pause from pummeling. “You’re going to learn to pace yourself, Daggett.”
She sighed, trying not to fidget. More seconds ticked by.
“All right, continue,” he said.
When she finally broke through, she suffered none of the symptoms that had made the previous attempt so uncomfortable. But Willi’s stopwatch app recorded a disappointing twenty minutes, thirty-one seconds.
“Oh, come on,” she said, scowling at Hartgrave.
He glowered back. “Safety first, then speed.”
“Don’t fret,” Bernie muttered, patting her on the back. “You still beat Safety Boy here by a considerable margin. ”
“Safety Boy” had all sorts of rules for her. Each practice could at most be thirty seconds faster than the last, and only if she showed no sign of overheating or fatigue. If she looked the tiniest bit tired, he added thirty seconds. And she was permitted just four rounds of practice a day.
After a week and a half of this, she burst through to Willi and Bernie at ten minutes, one second. They pulled her into a jig and capped it by kissing her on opposite cheeks.
Hartgrave limited himself to a “well done,” though his smile promised more later. Bernie, snorting, gave her a little push toward Hartgrave and said, “Go on.”
“Ja , you two are not fooling anyone,” Willi said.
Oh. She looked at Hartgrave, seeing in his flushed face the same pleased embarrassment she felt. He put his arms around her, leaned in and brushed his lips against hers.
His cell-phone alarm interrupted. SOS. SOS. SOS.
They leapt apart, Hartgrave cursing and grappling in his pocket for the phone. Everyone crowded around, trying to see the screen as he zoomed in on the problem. Had they been found? Were they about to be attacked? Heart pounding, she looked at the street names and saw none she recognized. Hoffman, Preston, Biddle ...
“Not the Organization,” Hartgrave said, tapping the pulsating dot, which she belatedly noticed was green, not red. Coordinates appeared above it.
She shivered. “An autodidact?”
He nodded. This brought no real relief. An autodidact about to draw the Organization’s attention was nearly as bad, because she knew what he was going to do.
Hartgrave zoomed out on the map, revealing highways and a harbor and the city’s name. Baltimore. “Ballantine, pick me up afterward at the airport. Willi, stay with Daggett.”
And he was off, running to the wardrobe, flinging on his black duster like a superhero donning a cape. She dashed after him, catching up just as he reached the door.
“Don’t leave this room,” he said, a fierceness to the order that raised her hackles.
She stifled her inclination to spit out something equally snappish. What she said instead was, “Come back.”
He nodded, opened the door a crack and with a flicker was gone—answering the question of how to teleport from a room that wouldn’t let magic out, though at the moment she didn’t care.
Bernie jogged over and pulled the door shut, shooting her an anxious look he’d probably meant to go unnoticed. Willi sat on the bed, the real one, staring at the wall with unfocused eyes.
She might never see Hartgrave again.
“Oh God,” she said, all her muscles trembling at once.
Bernie took her arm and led her to the chair. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay, Em, it’ll be okay.”
She leaned back and squeezed her eyes shut. “Saying it over and over doesn’t make it true.”
“He’s done this a lot. Dozens of times. ”
“Yeah, that’s why the families of firefighters never worry.”
Bernie put a hand over hers, yelped and retreated.
“Not a good idea to touch my bare skin when I’m upset,” she said, rubbing her hand. “Guess Hartgrave didn’t mention that.”
“Probably saw no reason for anyone to touch you but him,” Bernie said, which would have been enough to get a laugh out of her if she didn’t immediately wonder whether that sweet kiss would be their last.
She swallowed with effort. “How much time does he have? Ten minutes? Five?”
“What? No! All day.”
He looked too surprised to be lying. She felt instantly calmer. “So when they showed up in two minutes flat after Hartgrave blipped onto their radar, that was—”
“—extremely unusual,” he said, emphasizing both words. “For the run-of-the-mill autodidact, they give it a day to see if the aura persists. Sometimes people do minor, unconscious magic and won’t ever manage it again. It’s not at all like what we’re planning—when Willi and I leap into the great wide yonder, we’re counting on a much speedier response. Anyway, the Organization doesn’t know Hartgrave is warning off autodidacts, so they have no reason to show up in Baltimore until tomorrow.”
This seemed so reasonable, so likely, that she managed a shaky smile. Then she glanced past him and saw how shattered Willi looked.
“Bernie ... ”
“He’s not thinking about Hartgrave,” Bernie whispered.
Oh. Of course.
She got to her feet, walked with care around Hartgrave’s conjured bed and sat next to Willi, ignoring Bernie’s hissed warnings to leave well enough alone. “Could you explain to me what should happen now? I’m worried.”
Willi turned and blinked, focusing with evident effort. She’d just decided that Bernie was right, trying to distract him was a bad idea, when he pulled his cell phone from a voluminous coat pocket.
“Here is the autodidact.” He pointed at the green dot. “At home, or inside someone’s home,” he added, zooming in until they got an aerial photograph of the street, a patchwork of old rowhouses and vacant lots. “Alexander jumps usually to a back yard.”
She frowned at the map. “Why not just teleport into the house? Would be a good way to prove he’s not making it all up.”
“No, that would be a good way to get shot,” Bernie put in. “Infinitely better to knock on the door.”
“And what, ask to be invited in for tea?”
Bernie shrugged. “He’s persuasive. And he manages to bring most of them around—keep in mind they’re usually aware something odd just happened, even if they don’t suspect they did magic. So they’re automatically more receptive than the average person. All he had to do in my case was pop off a minor spell that stayed under the radar and show me this program—with me on the map in living green color, and the ominous mass of red in Cornwall.”
She hugged her knees to her chest. “But the ones who don’t come around ...”
“They die,” Willi said, voice flat.
They sat around his cell phone for a long while, saying nothing. The dot kept blinking with infuriating regularity. She glared at it until she could stand it no longer.
“If I don’t do something, I’ll scream.”
Willi eyed her. “We could practice.” A grim smile flickered for an instant on his face. “No one is now around who would stop you from practicing as much as you want.”
She gave a choked laugh. “Good idea.”
The two men cast barriers for her to disintegrate until she was exhausted, and then they made her take a nap. When she woke at 11 p.m., the autodidact was still on the radar. And no one had heard a thing from Hartgrave.
It was already the next day in England. How early would Crawford and Shaw set out?
So much for sort-of calm.
“No, no, this is a good sign,” Bernie insisted—too brightly. “If the autodidact were going to toss him out, they would’ve done it already. I’m sure he’s teaching whomever it is how to push magic away.”
She wrapped her shaking arms around herself, staring at the accursed green dot. “But it’s been six hours! How long does it usually take? ”
Bernie glanced at Willi, then back at the screen. At that moment, the dot blinked out of existence.
“There we go,” Bernie said, the words twining with a sigh of obvious relief. “Give him another fifteen minutes or so, and he’ll be out of there—he always calls when he’s on his way to the airport.”
She spent the time pacing, expecting every second that one of the men’s cell phones would ring, but she still nearly jumped out of her skin when the call finally came.
Willi answered. “Hallo? Right. Gut. Ja, Wiedersehen .”
He handed her the cell. She hit the speaker-phone button and dropped it on the bed, afraid that even a short conversation without gloves might fry it.
Hartgrave’s voice on the other end of the line sounded as tense as she’d ever heard it, save for that disastrous evening in Clear Lake. “Daggett? There are no direct flights from here to Des Moines. It’s going to be hours. Better go to bed.”
“I don’t think I can,” she said. “I’ll wait up and come with Bernie to bring you back.”
“No ,” he snapped. “Stay there. Stay. ”
Okay, that was over the line. What was she, a dog? “I won’t,” she snapped back, her well of restraint tapped out.
“Daggett, so help me God, if you’re in Ballantine’s car when I walk out of the airport, I’m turning around and going back in.”
“I’ll bundle up—I’m not going to damage it.”
“That’s not the objection,” he said, raising his voice. “I don’t want you to leave the safety of the room. ”
“Oh? Well, I don’t want to be your effing Rapunzel!”
“My—what?”
“Rapunzel,” she hissed. “You know: Trapped in a tower? Completely useless character? One of those German fairy tales you claim make your ears bleed?”
Behind her came the sound of someone, either Bernie or Willi, desperately trying not to laugh. Hartgrave coughed, which seemed a wise move, as it gave him plausible deniability that he was doing the exact same thing.
“Am I the prince or the wicked witch in this scenario?” he inquired.
She wasn’t ready for the argument to be over, even if the turn it had taken was absurd. She frowned at the phone. “I’m serious . I’m not a damsel in distress, and I won’t let you make me into one. Anyway, what will you do when the semester starts? Bar me from teaching my classes?”
Six seconds went by before he responded, enough time for Willi to mutter “what is a ‘damsel’?” to Bernie and get a whispered answer back.
“Please,” Hartgrave murmured. “I’m very worried about what could happen to you. Please stay there until it’s time to take the system out—it won’t be long now.”
Oh. “When?” The word quivered with tension and excitement.
“A few more days—just enough for some self-defense lessons.”
Her mind was full of what the next few days would be like.
“Daggett?” he said, breaking into her reverie.
“Sorry. Yes—okay. I’ll stay. ”
He let out a long breath. “Thank you.”
She thought of and discarded one response after another. I’ve been beside myself all evening. I’ve never felt this way about anyone. I won’t be right until you’re back here, safe. She glanced over her shoulder at Bernie and Willi, both studiously pretending they weren’t listening.
Her hesitation gave Hartgrave the final word.
“By the way, I promise I’ve never thought of you as Rapunzel,” he said. “Your hair’s far too short for that.”
Willi went home to get some sleep, promising to return in four hours when Bernie would leave for the trek to Des Moines International Airport. Forget Rapunzel—she felt like a child. Or a lightly guarded prisoner.
Bernie settled in the chair. “You really think you won’t be able to sleep?”
“Yes.”
He grinned. “So ... you and Hartgrave.”
When she didn’t take this bait, he said, “Well?”
“What, you want the whole story?” She sat cross-legged on the bed, feeling like a participant in the weirdest sleepover ever. “It’s the usual: Girl and boy dislike each other, girl discovers boy is a magic-user and pesters him, boy decides he actually likes girl for some odd reason, boy kisses girl—”
“When?”
“The first time? Right before I left for Christmas. I was so shocked, it ended badly.”
“Hah! Willi owes me ten bucks.”
She stared at him. “Did you two reprobates have some sort of pool going? ”
“No, no, I bet him that Hartgrave’s foul mood while you were gone was the result of rejected attentions. Willi thought he was just grumpy because you were gone. But a pool would have been a good idea, too.”
“That’s—that’s ...” She tried to glare at him but couldn’t quite manage it. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, trying to make money off his hurt feelings.”
“Oh, I am. Thoroughly.”
That felt like the first of a two-shoe routine. She raised her eyebrows, waiting for him to drop the other one.
“You know,” he said, as if this were just occurring to him, “you ought to yell at Willi when he gets back. Be sure to tell him how terrible it was that we were making light of Hartgrave right after his attentions had been rejected.”
She blew a raspberry at him.
They waited quietly for a while, Bernie dipping into and out of sleep. As the time neared for him to leave, she asked the question nipping at her since Hartgrave insisted—ordered—that she stay.
“Am I making a mistake, getting involved with him?”
Bernie squinted at her, yawning. “You’re asking for relationship advice from the guy who’s never been serious enough with anyone to have an anniversary?”
“You know him. You know him a lot better than I do.”
“Longer than you, but probably not better,” he said. “He’s had such bad experiences with people, he’s loath to trust anyone—I’ve had the darndest time persuading him to tell me things I obviously need to know.”
“Sounds familiar,” she muttered .
“Right? That’s my point—the faults I know about, you know about, too. He’s not easygoing. He always insists on his way, and sure, he’s often right, but it’s aggravating. And he’s got a biting sense of humor.”
She nodded, though she’d stopped seeing those things as faults and started thinking of them as essential parts of him, bitter ingredients that made for a flavorful stew.
Bernie stretched, rubbing his back. “But he’s very honorable. He’s spent years trying to right a wrong when it would have been better for him personally to do nothing. And he saved my life,” he added, wagging a finger at her, “so in conclusion: He’s perfection itself, and don’t you dare break his heart.”
Always back to jokes. She pondered how to get a serious answer out of him and settled on, “What if I were your daughter? Would you give your blessing then?”
He considered this for so long, she was sure the answer would be no, and it filled her with anxiety. She didn’t want it to be no. She wanted it to be—
“Yes,” he said. “I would. But c’mon—it doesn’t matter, does it? You can’t tell me this is some passing fling. He’s on a perfectly safe plane ride home, and you’re so worried about him, you’re up at three in the morning.”
The world rearranged itself around her as she acknowledged the truth of this. She didn’t simply like him. At some point she’d sprinted far beyond that emotion.
“You’re right,” she said. “But it makes me feel better to have your approval anyway. ”
The next four hours, Willi sat with her, earning major brownie points by plying her with actual brownies. Then—finally—the door opened and Hartgrave stumbled in.
She threw her arms around him, careful to avoid skin. He pressed her closer.
Willi cleared his throat. “When will we practice?”
“Come by after lunch,” Hartgrave said, voice froggy with exhaustion.
“Okay. Good night—ah, morning.”
When the door closed behind Willi, Hartgrave took her hand—without ill effect—and walked with her to the side-by-side beds.
“Why did it take so long?” she asked. “Did your autodidact refuse to believe in magic?”
He sighed. “She believed, all right. She could see she’d hit on a sure way to protect herself from the neighborhood bad guys, and she didn’t want to hear anything to the contrary.”
“What did you do?”
“I eventually convinced her.”
He raised his free hand in the direction of the chandelier, which obligingly powered down, throwing the room into darkness.
Without letting go of his other hand, she settled against the pillows. “It’s a very good thing, what you’re doing.”
He sighed again, saying nothing. It must be hard for him not to think of the autodidacts who couldn’t be persuaded. The situations where he had to go home without success, then watch from Ashburn as the green dot blinked out because the person it represented was dead.
Which reminded her: How had he avoided becoming a dot (or whatever its equivalent was) on the Organization’s tracking system?
He didn’t seem to be near sleep. He was rubbing circles on her palm in an absentminded fashion. She turned over to look at him, a dark shape in the shadows to her still-adjusting eyes.
“Hartgrave?”
“Mm?”
“You never told me how you steered clear of the Organization before you found Bernie and this room.”
The circles on her palm stopped.
“Their tracking system is relatively recent,” he said. “Before, their only options were fanning out randomly to look for tell-tale auras and finding the occasional online boaster.”
“Oh . They would miss a lot of people that way, wouldn’t they?”
“Yes,” he said. Bitterly.
“Was Willi’s wife—that is, did the system come online before ... ?”
This time, his “yes” was barely a whisper.
She swallowed. “I’m sorry.”
“Not as much as”—he shifted in the bed, turning toward her—“as Willi is, I assure you.”
Easy to recall the way the man had looked that evening, reliving his wife’s death while Hartgrave tried to save another self-taught convincer. She’d never lost a loved one to anything but old age and could only imagine the heartache. What if it had been her parents instead of his wife? What if it had been Hartgrave?
She shivered and laced her fingers with his. “How did you discover they were using this system to kill people?”
The answer didn’t come immediately, and when it arrived, it was unsatisfying. “By accident.”
She waited for more, but more was not forthcoming. Bernie’s complaint— I’ve had the darndest time persuading him to tell me things I need to know —replayed in her head.
“And? You’re the world’s worst storyteller, Hartgrave.”
“I’m glad you find this so entertaining,” he snapped, pulling his hand from hers, “but my darling Pandora, how badly do you want to know?”
She sucked in a breath, anger and shame battling for the upper hand. Shame won. He couldn’t have picked a better cautionary image than Pandora—who, contrary to popular opinion, made the world a worse place by opening a jar, not a box. Curiosity was a flaw they shared, she and Pandora. She’d been so focused on what had happened, she hadn’t given a thought to how it might make him feel to tell it.
Her grandfather didn’t want to talk about the war. Her Great-Aunt Dot didn’t want to talk about the day Great-Uncle Mike fell in the backyard, heart gone still. Grasping for details was cruel, especially when she could picture well enough what Hartgrave’s case entailed: the horror of stumbling onto a great injustice, feeling you had to do something, but at best being able merely to keep it at bay .
“Well?” Apparently his question had not been rhetorical.
“I don’t want to know that badly.” She swallowed over a lump in her throat. “I’m sorry.”
He clambered off the bed, and for a second, she thought he would storm off. To sleep in her office, maybe. But he knelt on the floor between the beds, looking penitent instead of angry.
“I realize it must seem fascinating to you—almost like an adventure novel,” he said. “And I know, I definitely know, that I ought to make my life an open book to you. But Daggett—there’s nothing I hate to talk about more than the Organization.”
She hugged him, feeling even guiltier. When they pulled apart, he sat back on his heels and said, “I’ll answer non-magical questions about my life. Assuming you’re interested.”
Did he think she was more attracted to the aura around him, literal as well as figurative, than to him alone? How wrong he was.
“I’m extremely interested,” she said. “Tell me about your family.”
“Mm. My grandfather raised me. If, that is, you’d call shouting interspersed with ignoring ‘raising.’ Half the appeal of an English university was getting far away from him.”
“What about your parents?”
“Dead.”
No wonder he disliked talking about his past. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Me too. ”
“How? Wait, you don’t have to tell me.”
He brushed his hand against hers, a there-and-gone bit of contact that nipped against her skin. “It’s all right. Auto accident, that’s how.”
A sudden, awful possibility occurred to her. “You don’t think ...”
“What?”
“They might have been convincers—”
To her surprise, he snorted. “And Kincaid came to get them? No, nothing so melodramatic. He doesn’t work that way. As far as I know, all the murders he’s committed—or ordered, more like—have been at the victim’s home, away from potential witnesses.”
She pressed back the inevitable questions. She wasn’t going to pry, darn it.
“Besides,” he added, “I was there.”
“What?” she gasped, the question popping out before she could stop it.
“I was seven, but I remember it well enough. My father was driving in a snowstorm, lost control of the car and crashed into a guardrail. Killed instantly—my mother, too. Had I been sitting anywhere but the left side of the back seat, I’d have been dead as well.”
“Oh,” she said in a horrified whisper. To have that happen at age seven—to be in the car, a helpless witness to his parents’ deaths ... She shuddered. “How could you bear it?”
“Well—you eventually come to terms with dreadful things. Only assuming they weren’t your own fault.”
She put her arms around him, pressing her lips to the top of his head. He remained there for a while, leaning against her, and it felt charged, like a held breath. He would hardly need to move at all to be in bed with her.
But she had just enough self-control not to suggest it, and he didn’t test her willpower.
“I suppose we ought to try to get some sleep,” he murmured, pulling back. “Willi will be here immediately after lunch whether we’re up or not, and I want to start self-defense practice with you today.”
Self-defense. A few days until adventure.
He slipped back into his bed, and she lay in hers, unable to turn her mind off. She had a useful power, a dark sorcerer to overcome and an orphaned hero to fight alongside. He was right: It did seem like an adventure novel. It was all the fantasy-book dreams of her childhood come to life.