Tea with the Evil Overlord
17
Kincaid—Kincaid had grabbed her arm. She jerked away, biting back an appalled, blank-shock scream, and discovered he’d made a perfectly placed hole in Hartgrave’s failing barrier. Hartgrave was gone. She was alone—alone with the most dangerous wizard in the world.
He cut through the remains of Hartgrave’s barrier as if it were spider webs, and she threw out her hands to defend herself. But he walked right past her, extinguishing the fire with another spell.
For a moment, Kincaid stood over the charred wreckage, shoulders stooped, head bowed. Then he turned—she re-braced herself; this was it—and tottered toward the stairwell, sitting heavily on a step .
Her arms wavered. It wasn’t that she wanted violence to be rained down upon her, but his unexpected behavior was really unnerving.
“Emily Daggett, I presume?” He had a beautiful voice, richly British, made for grand speeches and reading books aloud.
As there seemed little point denying she was who he knew she was, she nodded once.
“Forgive an old man for not standing up to introduce himself properly,” he said, “but I fear I’m exhausted.”
“I know who you are,” she said, as coldly as she dared.
“Oh, I doubt it,” he replied, clasping his hands on his knees. “You probably know my name—Malcolm Kincaid, in case you didn’t—but I’m fairly certain you have been misinformed about the sort of person I am. Your source of information is”—he sighed—“suspect.”
He couldn’t have chilled her more if he had cackled maniacally and said her eyes would go well in a potion he was brewing. His mildly spoken words perfectly summed up the fear mounting since she crawled into this house through a window. She had to remind herself that of course he would say that because he was trying to trick her.
Which gave him something in common with Hartgrave.
“I don’t think you’re in a position to cast aspersions,” she said, her fine words ruined by the tremble she’d been trying to suppress.
“Tell me: How long have you known Alexander Hartgrave? ”
She was not going to be drawn into a conversation. No good could come of chats with evil overlords.
“I’d say six months at most,” he added. “Judging by the length of your tenure at Ashburn College—it seems highly unlikely that you would have crossed paths before you became colleagues. Am I correct?”
It took all her willpower to remain silent.
He gave another deep sigh. He did look weary. He looked, in fact, almost exactly like her conception of a wizard, back before “wizard” had any menacing overtones. The only difference was that he’d cropped his silver hair as short as his beard.
“I imagine you would like to hear how I came to be in possession of such information,” he said. “I would, were our positions reversed. But perhaps we could continue this conversation in my office, where I have something to show you and, more importantly, comfortable chairs.”
No, no, no. No chats with evil overlords, no trips to “offices” and absolutely no being lured away from the first place Hartgrave would look.
“I’ve repaired the wards around the house, by the by,” Kincaid said, following her train of thought effortlessly. “Not quickly enough to keep Mr. Hartgrave here, alas, but I was too distracted to think how fully they must have been breached. Your work, I assume. Impressive. Unfortunate, but impressive.”
She gaped at him for just a second before dashing to the nearest wall and pressing her hands against it.
Nothing. No spells.
“They’re on the outside of the house,” Kincaid said in a kindly sort of way. “Now then—shall we? ”
“There’s no reason I should trust you,” she said.
“I haven’t harmed you. Surely that’s one reason.”
She rubbed her forearms, trying to stop shivering. Where was the vicious wizard Hartgrave had led her to expect?
“Come along, Dr. Daggett,” Kincaid said.
And she did. The front door was upstairs, so maybe, just maybe, she’d have a chance there. Hartgrave could be waiting for her even now in the tiny clearing.
Kincaid stood aside to allow her to go up first, but then he sucked in a breath and rushed behind the stairwell. “Jack!”
She’d completely forgotten. Guilt gnawed at her as he unfastened the man’s bonds and gag.
“Mr. Hartgrave’s work, I assume,” Kincaid growled.
The constant undertone of the motion-detector alarm stopped. Someone must have switched it off.
“Sir!” A vaguely familiar voice. “Sir, are you here? Something’s wrong—”
“Gwendolyn—the basement,” he bellowed. “Hurry!”
The woman who appeared was either Crawford or Shaw, the one whose long, fiery hair had made her think of Rose Red. Crawford-or-Shaw saw her and stared, mouth open. “What ... ?”
“This is the young lady we were trying to rescue,” Kincaid said.
“Rescue!” Emily cried.
But he’d already barreled onward in the quickest of introductions: “Emily Daggett, Gwendolyn Crawford. Now help me see to Jack! He’s injured . ”
“Of—of course,” Crawford said. Her face was a picture of confusion and alarm.
Emily gripped the railing as the distressing scene unfolded. The wizard Jack was still unconscious. Kincaid lowered him carefully to the floor, exclaiming over the blood on his face. Reminding herself these were terrible people didn’t much help.
She took a small step forward. “Is there something I could do?”
“Yes.” Kincaid fixed her with a gaze that seemed to take her measure. “Go to the kitchen and fetch a glass of water. Up one flight of stairs, straight down the corridor.”
She almost gasped. Had he ordered her out of his sight—alone?
“Right,” she stuttered, and ran up the steps to where the only thing that stood between her and freedom was a door.
She leapt at it, trying to calculate the time it would take to run across the lawn and into the forest. Not long. She’d be out of sight in this darkness before the motion-detector alarm would bring Kincaid and his deputy outside after her. She could do it. She’d get out, and then Hartgrave—
Your source of information is suspect.
The words sounded even worse in the recollection. She paused, hand on the doorknob, nothing moving but chill sweat down her hairline.
Anyone who had seen only the events of the last half-hour—anyone uninfluenced by emotions about the players involved—would insist Hartgrave was the villain, not Kincaid. Which of them callously left the man down there for dead, and which was trying to save him? Who destroyed tonight, and who mourned?
She tried to pull herself together. Kincaid killed people.
Except—how did she know what she’d been told was true?
She let go of the doorknob. She didn’t have the slightest idea what she’d involved herself in. What was she to do?
Kitchen. Water.
She stumbled down the hall in a daze. When she handed the glass to Kincaid a half-minute later, hand shaking so much that some of the contents sloshed over the rim, he spared her a glance that suggested he knew what she’d gone through. But all he said was, “Thank you, Dr. Daggett.”
“Is he—that is, will he—”
She didn’t get a chance to finish. The injured man went into convulsions on the floor, arms flailing into the wizards trying to help. Blood leaked from his mouth now, not just his nose.
“Good heavens,” Kincaid shouted. “Jack! Jack!”
Crawford looked horror-struck. “He’s turning blue!”
With that, his convulsions stopped. Crawford dove in to try resuscitation, but her increasingly frenzied movements had no effect. Eventually, Kincaid pulled her aside and laid both hands on Jack’s chest.
“Gwendolyn,” he said as she tried to resume her ministrations. “Gwendolyn. It’s over. ”
As the woman wept, Emily sat, legs giving way, everything trembling.
He was dead. Hartgrave had killed him, if unintentionally, and she had helped Hartgrave get in. She’d allowed this man—Jack, his name was Jack—to remain here, injured, while precious minutes ticked away in which he might have been helped.
Kincaid’s voice cut through her shock: “You are not to blame.” Though he had an arm around Crawford, he looked straight at her.
He pulled Crawford to her feet and got her up the stairs, Emily trailing in their wake. Then he transferred the grief-stricken wizard into the care of the house’s other occupant, the woman who’d called out to Jack and had been tricked by Hartgrave’s reply. She looked as terrified as a rabbit surrounded by wolves, and just about as dangerous. When Kincaid broke the news to her, she whimpered.
“Please help Gwendolyn,” he said. “I’ve some pressing matters that must be attended to immediately.”
“Y-yes, sir,” the woman said, tears welling.
He pressed his palms to his eyes after she closed her door. Then he gestured Emily into the next room over.
“Do sit down,” he said.
It was an office—an unremarkable place, full of filing cabinets and framed artwork. On the cherrywood desk dominating the room sat a charming old globe and a bone-china tea set. Precisely as an evil overlord’s office would not look.
Kincaid slipped with a grateful sigh into the chair on the far side of the desk. After wavering near the doorway, she took the seat opposite his. She really was in no condition to stand.
“Tea?” he asked.
The entire situation was so exactly contrary to what it ought to be that she had to close her eyes for a moment to stave off dizziness. Perhaps he wanted to poison her. That, at least, would make some sense.
“I’m in desperate need of a cup,” he added. “The best thing for shock.”
She managed a small shake of her head. “No, thank you.”
“I didn’t think you would,” he murmured, pouring a splash of milk into his own cup before following it with dark liquid from the teapot. “But it was only polite to offer.”
He wrapped his hands around the cup and held it still for a few seconds, giving her the impression he was heating the tea with a quick shot of magic. He took a sip and set the cup down.
“I assume the two magic-users who appeared as if from thin air were colleagues of Mr. Hartgrave’s?”
She might be heartsick and disoriented, but she wasn’t about to fall into the trap of giving up information.
“Ah, but there is still the issue of my trustworthiness to resolve,” he said. “Apologies. It’s only that I feel so appallingly foolish. I believed these people to be in trouble, teleporting randomly without being able to stop—you see such wild magic occasionally—and all along it was a trick. ”
She just managed to hold back a snort. Oh, yes. He wanted to help them.
He pulled a book from a drawer and pushed it across the desk to her. “But first things first, Dr. Daggett. Before this evening went from bad to worse, I promised to explain how it is that I know a bit about you.”
She squinted at the novel, confused. “Northanger Abbey?”
“Open it.”
On the inside cover, in her neat teenage cursive: E. Daggett, English 201, ISU.
Oh.
She hadn’t written her name inside a book for years. It never occurred to her that some of the old college texts she’d stowed in her car’s trunk—in the box with her Christmas presents—had a giveaway of an identification.
“We tracked your progress from Iowa State University to graduate school and onward to Ashburn, though I must say the institutions were agonizingly slow to provide information on you,” he said. “You may have your book back, naturally. I apologize for authorizing my employees to—ah—pinch it.”
Recalling the attack beside the highway cleared her head a bit. She grasped at it like a lifeline, a reminder that Kincaid was indeed a murderous bastard, never mind how he appeared. Somehow, being at the mercy of a murderous bastard seemed more appealing than the idea that Hartgrave—
She didn’t want to think what it would mean if Kincaid wasn’t what Hartgrave said he was .
“Yes, speaking of that evening,” she said, “I didn’t get the idea your employees had rescue in mind when they were shooting fireballs at me. I’m pretty sure they were trying to kill me.”
“They were desperately trying to keep Mr. Hartgrave from slipping away.” He gave her a rueful smile. “Alas, they did not understand then that you were, if not quite an innocent bystander, certainly an innocent participant. Else they would have been far more careful, I assure you.”
She ran through her memories of that night again. Surely Crawford or Shaw said something that would contradict this account. But their side of the tense conversation—all of it she dredged up, anyway—wasn’t inconsistent with righteous anger.
Context was everything.
Finally, unable to keep the questions back, she blurted: “What exactly are you implying about Hartgrave? Why do you say he’s ‘suspect’?”
“Oh, yes, I hadn’t got to that yet.” Kincaid rubbed his neck, staring at the desk. “Again, forgive me—it has been a very ... very difficult evening.”
In her mind’s eye, the wizard Jack was once more convulsing, dying. She blinked back tears.
“Let me first tell you about my operation here,” he said. “You need to understand that, you see. You must have been given a distorted idea of what I do for a living, or you would not be here.”
She hugged the book to her chest, squeezing down the urge to argue. She had done quite enough already. Time to listen .
“You are in my home, but it is also a place of work and, when required, a school,” he said. “I teach magically talented people how to focus their abilities.”
Oh, come on . She kept the words from slipping out, but they must have shown on her face, for he said, “Hear me out, if you would, after which I’d be delighted to answer any questions you may have.”
Would be a nice change, getting all her questions answered.
“Twelve years ago—no, thirteen, I think it was thirteen—I happened across a teenage boy who had quite a lot of potential, and a knack with computers besides,” Kincaid said. “He was desperate to get away from his violent grandfather. I was in need of technical expertise. And I ... I admit I felt sorry for him, this young man still mourning his parents. So I offered him an opportunity for magical training and also a scholarship to the university here, where he could earn a computer science degree.”
She bit her lip. So far, this tale logically filled the gaps in what she knew about Hartgrave’s life.
Kincaid, digging through the contents of another drawer, extracted something and handed it to her. A photo of a young man. Short hair the color of rich earth, dyed haphazardly green and gelled into spikes. Shoulders hunched. Eyes dark and angry. Lips curved into a wicked smirk.
Hartgrave, age seventeen.
He looked like trouble .
“Mr. Hartgrave did well, as I’d expected, and I hired him to assist with my school and also my business concern—I assume you know about the microchips?”
She wasn’t sure whether feigning ignorance in this case would be safest, but her lack of surprise must have been an answer in itself. Kincaid pressed on without explaining.
“He spent some time working at production facilities, but primarily he focused on the problem of finding magically talented people without having to scour every inch of the globe.”
The scoff escaped her before she could even think about stopping it. At his raised eyebrow, she went one step further: “Nearly everyone could do magic if they’re taught.”
“Is that what he told you?” Kincaid shook his head, pity in his eyes. “Does that seem likely?”
The sick feeling in her stomach intensified. She had questioned Hartgrave’s assertion at first. But she’d wanted to believe.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to take someone’s word for it,” he said. “Either his, or mine.”
She glanced down at her hands. She’d already caught Hartgrave in one tremendous lie by omission.
“So he created the tracking program,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Indeed. An ingenious invention. It did just what I’d hoped it would.”
At this, she made herself look him in the eye. “And are you really going to insist it had nothing to do with pinpointing magic-users for the purpose of murdering them?”
“Oh, no. That is , in fact, the purpose for which it was used.”
He paused politely at her startled “aha!” before continuing. “Yes, precisely the purpose for which it was used. By its creator, however—not by me.”