Leading and Misleading
19
Kincaid peered at her with what looked to be genuine concern. “You’re white as death. Come sit down.”
Her legs shook and the room gave a funny sort of lurch around her. She grabbed the doorframe to keep herself upright because she was not going to faint—
No, wait. That was the answer, the way to gather more evidence.
She closed her eyes and let her body crumple to the floor in what she hoped was a convincing manner.
“Dr. Daggett?”
She heard the rustling of fabric—Kincaid leaning in—and tried to focus on breathing. Nice and slow. Oh God, surely an unconscious person’s heart wouldn’t be beating this fast.
“Gwendolyn,” he said, raising his voice .
A door opened. Someone sniffled.
“Our guest seems to have fainted,” Kincaid said. “I need your assistance.”
A pause. What were they doing? What? The urge to look was so strong, she could barely keep her eyes shut.
Hands snaked under her arms, and it was only because she’d braced herself for the possibility that she managed not to react. Another pair of hands grabbed her around the ankles, fortunately touching sock and not skin. They lifted her off the floor and carried her down the hall for a few paces until Kincaid said “here,” and they took a left turn into a room.
They set her down on something with give, probably a bed. Two sets of footsteps, the snick of a softly closed door, then silence. She risked opening her eyes and saw that both wizards had indeed exited the room.
And what did she learn? They said nothing incriminating, made no revealing statements about evil intentions. Perhaps they really were what they appeared.
She pressed her face against the pillow, making it damp with her tears. And then it occurred to her: They hadn’t simply said nothing incriminating. They’d said practically nothing at all.
Wasn’t that odd? Wouldn’t people say all sorts of things if somebody fainted? What if Kincaid suspected she was still conscious and put his finger to his mouth to keep Crawford quiet—Crawford, who didn’t know what tale he’d been spinning about Hartgrave?
OK, yes, it was odd, but that still seemed a bit thin for a decision this important. She needed something more. Think .
She breathed in and out at a slow, deliberate pace, pushing down the frenetic adrenaline, clearing her mind of everything but Hartgrave and Kincaid. Which of the two should she—did she—trust? If the men were in a fight right now, which one would she help?
And just like that, she knew the answer. One man was smooth and calm, the other sharp-edged and stormy. Which of the two was more likely to pull off a complex fabrication requiring multiple lies, not simply omissions?
She let anger and fear kick the adrenaline back into high production. Now she needed it.
She tiptoed to the window, pushed it up and pressed her hands against the spell just beyond, the one creating a barrier around the house. The second it fizzled to nothing, she climbed out and dashed across the lawn.
Electric light smothered the darkness, and the whoop-whoop-whoop of the motion-detector alarm went off inside, but she was nearly to the fence. Just beyond stood the forest.
The next moment, she ran headlong into an invisible barrier. She yelped, propelled backward by the force of impact.
“Leaving so soon?”
A cold, familiar voice. She got herself turned around on her hands and knees, finding the woman with the short, dark hair. Shaw.
“Oi! Tell him I’ve got her,” Shaw said, which befuddled Emily for half a second until she saw the wizard’s cell-phone earpiece .
When did they arrange this backup plan in case she made a run for it—while she fetched water for the maybe-or-maybe-not dying wizard?
She scrambled to her feet, hoping this meant she’d made the right choice. Too late for a change of heart, in any case. She thrust her hands back, vaporizing the barrier behind her.
“Not this time,” Shaw hissed. Whipcrack quick, magic caught Emily around her waist and held her fast.
But she was angry. Very angry. With a glancing touch of her fingers, the obstruction vanished and she loped backward toward freedom, hands up, melting Shaw’s attack spells.
Then magic pulled her feet out from under her, like a lasso, and she fell hard on her stomach. Grass poked her in the face as she gasped for air.
“Hah! Nice,” Shaw cackled.
“Not exactly difficult,” said Crawford, a markedly different Crawford than the sobbing, sniffling wreck she’d been shortly before.
Emily flopped onto her side and scrabbled for the magic binding her ankles. “What, no tears? Is the show over?”
Crawford, red hair undulating in the breeze, gave a short laugh. “You seemed to believe it at the time.”
Either the man wasn’t really dead, or these people didn’t even care about their own. Oh, she’d definitely made the right choice.
Shaw, lips twisted in a feral grin, circled her. “Let her go and we’ll catch her again, yeah? ”
Emily kicked as hard as she could with one newly freed leg at Shaw’s Achilles tendon—hoping the woman’s personal shielding wouldn’t completely blunt the impact—and leapt to her feet as Shaw stumbled into Crawford, both wizards temporarily unbalanced.
She hadn’t quite crested the fence when Kincaid materialized in front of her, but she didn’t feel so much as a flicker of alarm. He was powerless against her. She was doing it, really doing it, fending off three yes-actually-evil wizards all by herself. Three.
Then he lifted a hand toward her and she noticed what was in it.
“This is a completely non-magical weapon,” he said, aiming the handgun at her chest. “Put your feet back on the ground, if you please. Otherwise I’ll shoot you, and I’d rather not.”
So much for her extremely brief feeling of having the upper hand.
“Dr. Daggett.” Kincaid cocked the gun. “Now .”
Shaking with frustration and useless adrenaline, she did as he said. Kincaid shimmered out and reappeared on the lawn, close enough to be assured of hitting her.
Shaw stalked over and kicked her shin. “That’s just for starters .”
“See, there was no point talking to her, sir,” Crawford complained to Kincaid. “We don’t have time—”
“It would have made things considerably easier,” he murmured. “Assistance freely given is often more ... complete.”
Emily scowled at them all. “You won’t get any assistance from me. You’re even worse than Hartgrave said you were—you murdered one of your own wizards to set me against him!”
“Don’t be daft,” Crawford snapped. “It was an illusion.”
Not dead. Oh, thank God . Hartgrave wasn’t a killer, and she didn’t have a death on her conscience.
Kincaid fired the gun into the ground six feet from where she stood. She jumped and screamed, surprise exceeding anxiety, but not by much.
“This weapon is not an illusion,” he said. “It’s vital you tell us where Alexander is, and I refuse to be put off any longer.”
She shook her head, trying not to think of the next bullet going through her body.
“Dr. Daggett—”
“You’re going to kill me whether I help or not,” she said, chin up, heart racing. “So ... I choose ‘not.’”
He huffed out an aggravated breath, a less than gratifying response to her courage. “I’d love to have a long discussion with you about the importance of our work and the great danger posed by the man you’re foolishly protecting—”
“The great danger posed by Hartgrave?” she spluttered.
“—but I didn’t have the time to begin with, and now we’re up against it,” he continued, not deterred. “I point this out only under duress: There are worse fates than a quick death. Do keep that in mind.”
Oh, now he reverted to type. A burst of resentment overpowered more rational reactions to such a casually frightening statement—she would have much preferred he save her the anguish and get right to it from the start.
“You’d never torture it out of me,” she declared.
He took a step closer, near enough to intimidate but not to reach. “Only someone who has never been tortured would say that.”
She shrank back, to her deep embarrassment.
“But that won’t be necessary,” Kincaid said. “You will cooperate. Otherwise, I’ll send these two talented assassins to pay a call on John and Helen Daggett of Number 152 Walnut Street, Kniffen, Iowa.”
The world spun. She fell to her knees, dizzy and nauseated.
Kincaid said nothing for a moment, no doubt wanting to let this turn of events sink in, and it did. Oh, it did. On a cold winter’s day, her father would almost certainly be tinkering in the barn. Her mother would be snapping photographs of frost. Easy targets.
“You have three seconds to make up your—”
She didn’t let Kincaid finish that thought, let alone start counting. “I’ll cooperate! I’ll cooperate!”
“Bring her back to my office,” he said to his talented assassins, killing her faint hope that Hartgrave, Willi and Bernie would appear and—
And what? Hartgrave was the ablest of the three, and even he couldn’t take on Kincaid for long. Bernie probably didn’t know any offensive magic at all.
“Why disguise your evil with such convincing goodness when you could just be good?” she howled at Kincaid’s retreating back, a sob catching in her throat .
He looked over his shoulder. “Dr. Daggett, we clearly have very different ideas about good and evil.”
The short return trip offered sufficient time to sum up her situation. Nobody could save her but herself. She, however, was powerless against a gun and unlikely to get it out of Kincaid’s hands, especially while so outnumbered. And , even if she managed that, she couldn’t actually shoot these wizards because they had strong shielding around them—she’d only ensure her parents’ deaths.
This, apparently, was why all the fantasy heroes were orphans.
Why, why hadn’t she thought about the risk to her parents? What kind of daughter was she?
Shaw pushed her into the office chair, wrenched her arms behind it and bound them with rope. Her options were clear: Tell them what they wanted to know, or not.
“Talk,” Kincaid said.
Could such a consummate liar be fooled into thinking Option Two was Option One?
She took a long, shuddering breath to buy herself an extra moment. She couldn’t put Hartgrave’s life or her own ahead of her parents’ lives—her poor parents, who had no idea of the grave danger she’d put them in. But Kincaid murdered people for knowing just a bit too much. He had every reason to think her parents knew a great deal more than a bit, simply because she did.
All she had to her credit was an idea—“plan” was too strong a word—and a lot of recent experience with disingenuous answers.
“Well?” he snapped .
Oh God and her parents forgive her, she was about to take an unbearable risk.
“I do know where Hartgrave is,” she said, manufacturing a snivel but not the misery in her voice. “I’ll show you, just— promise you won’t hurt my mom and dad.”
She said it because he would expect her to. He said “certainly” because—no doubt—he knew that was expected of him. She didn’t believe it.
“What will you do with him?” she whispered.
“You are no longer in a position to ask questions. Where is he? Somewhere near Ashburn College?”
“In the”—she bit her lip, closed her eyes—“in the Ashburn humanities building.”
“And what is his trick for remaining off the tracking system?”
Surprising that Kincaid hadn’t figured it out by now. Perhaps it had never occurred to him that expelling magic was possible—perhaps he thought Hartgrave had done something to the programming all those years ago. Either way, the next part of her performance was critical.
“I don’t know,” she said, reaching for despair. Which wasn’t far from her actual emotional condition. “He hardly ever told me how anything worked. He always said it was complicated and left it at that.”
“Do you know where in the building he would be?”
“Y-yes.” She was crying now. It wasn’t hard to start. “He has a h-hidden room.”
Kincaid rubbed his beard. “I suppose he has barriers in place to prevent anyone from teleporting in? ”
She nodded. She had no idea if this was true—the room itself let magic in—but it suited her purposes.
Crawford snorted. “Not as if we’d take the chance. I ricocheted right into the forest the last time—thanks ever so,” she said, throwing a dark look at Shaw, whose smirk suggested she’d played a barrier prank on her partner. “And I don’t understand why you didn’t just recast the wards around the house to keep Alex from leaving in the first place. Sir,” she added, apparently realizing how petulant she’d sounded.
“Because he’d boxed me in,” Kincaid said. “By the time I’d broken through, it was too late. However—if he tried to jump back to our cellar after he realized he was missing something, he’ll still be feeling less than optimal right now. All the more reason to go soon.”
Emily hoped her alarm looked like general unhappiness and fear. She hadn’t counted on that problem.
“Sub-optimal or not, we can’t catch him if he’ll have advance warning that we’re nearly on top of him,” Crawford said. “We’ll have to—”
But Emily, who didn’t want anyone to suggest clever ideas, interrupted with a sharply indrawn breath.
“Yes?” Kincaid’s full attention was on her—thoroughly disconcerting, but what she wanted.
“Um. N-nothing.”
“You really shouldn’t withhold information, Dr. Daggett.”
“It’s just that—that ...” She stopped, hoping the whopper she was about to tell would be more believable if they had to force it out of her .
Shaw tsked. “Don’t much care about your mum and dad, do you?”
Emily let the words out so fast, they tripped over each other on the way. “He wouldn’t have advance warning!”
Crawford rolled her eyes. “He invented the tracking system. Don’t try to tell us he doesn’t have one of his own.”
But Kincaid considered Emily, tapping a finger to his lips. “That’s not what you meant. Is it?”
She shook her head, bowing it so she wouldn’t have to look him in the eye. “Something happened to his program right before you showed up. It just ... stopped working. He said it was the server—or the network?” She made a helpless noise, the sort to communicate a complete lack of technical knowledge. “He was really upset. He ...”
She stopped, pinching her lips together, hoping she wasn’t overdoing it.
“Go on,” Kincaid murmured, looming over her with the gun still at hand. Quite useful really; no need to pretend to be frightened.
“He said it might take several days to fix,” she whispered, tears dripping onto her shirt.
Kincaid was silent. She sniffled, every muscle in her body rigid with anxiety. Didn’t he believe her?
“Where in the humanities building?” he asked.
Trying to hide her relief with more tears, she blubbered: “The basement.”
He heaved an irritated sigh. “It would be, wouldn’t it. Gwendolyn, find a likely spot to land just outside the building, please. ”
“But sir—if his tracking system is working—”
“I’m not risking my molecules by materializing in an underground location without ever having been there before,” Shaw objected.
Emily was so elated by this turn of events—her idea was working, working even better than she’d hoped—that she made herself take several half-sob breaths for verisimilitude. Perhaps she could persuade them to teleport some distance from the humanities building. Perhaps she could sell them on popping in at the stand of trees beyond the quad.
Kincaid turned his X-ray gaze back on her. “Will we find anyone else in this basement?”
“No,” she said, only half her attention on the question, an easy one.
“I see.” His tone made her stop thinking of teleportation. “No doubt it slipped your mind that I know he has at least two other collaborators. I must say, this calls into question everything you’ve told us thus far.”
For a heart-stopping second, she was too horrified to speak. Then she said: “No! I mean, yes he does, but they—”
“Stop,” he said.
His right hand—the one holding the gun—was moving. She wondered what a bullet felt like tearing through skin and bone, and if he intended to show her how much worse death could be if not quick. Or would he make her watch her parents’ deaths first?
But he didn’t point it at her. He slipped it into a magical approximation of a holster glimmering against his right thigh .
Then he lifted his now-empty hand in her direction and squeezed.
It really was too bad her clothes blunted anti-magic.
His spell wrapped around her torso with suffocating pressure. She tried to yell “wait” but couldn’t pull in the oxygen to yell anything. She struggled against the ropes. Pressed her chin down. Kicked her legs. Wheezed a tiny “please” with the last thimbleful of spent air in her lungs.
The band of magic tightened. Her anti-magic couldn’t possibly prevail in time. Pain, oh God —ribs—lungs—
Dying —
And then Kincaid dropped his hand and she slumped in the seat, sucking in great gasps of air, vision tunneled by pulsating black dots.
Shaw laughed.
“I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to that,” Kincaid said, as if he found torture an unpleasant chore. “Do all of us a favor and tell me the truth.”
It hurt to breathe. Everything, in fact, either ached or shook. She was dangerously close to doing what he’d demanded.
“Now,” he barked.
She thought of her parents and pressed her fingernails into her palms.
“I f-found his hideout on my own, he would never have let me in if I hadn’t, that’s the only reason I know where it is—those other two men, the ones you were following”—she paused for a deep breath, praying it wouldn’t be her last—“they have no idea where he lives. ”
Kincaid said nothing.
In desperation, she added, “He’s the most secretive person I’ve ever met.”
Shaw snorted. “Just so, innit, Gwennie? Even you’d no idea he was about to do a runner, and you were sleeping with him.”
No wonder he knew the way through Crawford’s bedroom in the dark. Emily’s chest constricted, and this time magic had nothing to do with it.
Crawford seemed just as unhappy to have the subject introduced. “Shut it,” she snapped at her partner. To Kincaid, she said, “Sir—if he’s by himself, we don’t all need to go. Leave Verity here with the girl, and we’ll take care of him.”
Emily’s “no!” burst out the same instant Shaw’s did.
Kincaid looked at Emily, one silver eyebrow raised. “No?”
“You need me,” she stuttered, making a point to flinch away from Shaw, to look as if she simply didn’t want to be left alone with the most volatile wizard of the group. “You need me or you’ll never find his room.”
Shaw crossed her arms. “Let’s just go. He could be anywhere, and it’ll be effing hard to get him if he’s not where this one says he is.”
“For your sake,” Kincaid said to Emily, “let us hope he is.”
Her whispered “yes” was heartfelt. Everything depended on Hartgrave being there—and coming to the same conclusion she had about how to handle the situation.