Entrance and Exit
24
She woke in the dark with a cry, heart racing, skin covered in the clammy sweat of nightmares. Gunshots, knives, suffocation—Kincaid towering over her—
The third consecutive night of this. Her stepped-down pain medication let in dreams, violent and disturbing. Crawford and Shaw dying repeatedly. Kincaid gathering everyone she loved into the Inferno to kill them one by one.
This time, he’d come for her in the hospital. Now that she was awake, her lungs, heart and stomach were all of the opinion that someone really was in the room with her, and they refused to return to normal working order.
She remembered only too well the sight of Hartgrave’s cell-phone screen covered with red dots, each representing an Organization wizard. Easily dozens. What if even one of them wanted an eye for an eye? What if that one tracked her down and was here now, waiting for her to drop off again?
She hadn’t worried about reprisals because the Organization’s most dangerous members were dead. Now it occurred to her that “somewhat less dangerous” was somewhat less than reassuring.
One long moment passed. Try as she might, she couldn’t make out anything but her own loud heartbeat and respiration as she stared at the various shapes in the dark room. The television. The empty chair. The potted ficus, looking surprisingly sinister.
The chair sneezed.
With speed borne of fear and fury, she slammed her good arm into the invisible body sitting six inches to her right.
A yelp. Unseen hands caught her elbow before she could connect a second time, and the air shifted, resolving itself into a wholly unexpected person. Hartgrave.
Fear gave way to a zip of adrenaline fueled by another emotion, not quite happiness but more the anticipation of it. He’d come, he’d finally come!
And then anger set in.
He’d finally, finally come, and it was the middle of the night.
She glared at him. “What are you doing?”
He crossed his arms, eyes on the ficus instead of her. “Keeping watch.”
“Against the Organization?” More adrenaline, so much that she felt ill. “But my parents—what about my parents? ”
“No, no, they’re perfectly safe,” Hartgrave put in quickly. “What’s left of the Organization are the technicians. They didn’t have anything to do with the witch hunting and weren’t even aware it was happening.”
“Oh,” she said, greatly relieved, and waited for the actual reason he was standing guard over her.
He said nothing.
It was like reversing time three months, when the only information she got out of him was via guessing. “So ... ?”
“I’m ensuring you’re all right.”
“Now?” But she saw in his expression an embarrassment that seemed to reach beyond simple shame for bad behavior, and she took a stab at the cause: “Have you been here every night?”
He sighed. “Yes.”
“I’m amazed I have to explain this,” she said, “but I’d rather you spend time with me while I’m conscious.”
“Would you?” He had never sounded so cutting, which was saying something. “Spending time with me is the reason you’re hospitalized.”
She’d had this argument with Willi, and she was sick of it. “If you’re warming up to a grand declaration along the lines of, ‘My darling, our love cannot be, I’m simply too dangerous for such a fragile and delicate flower,’ I may be forced to hit you again.”
“That isn’t precisely how I would have put it,” he muttered, “but it is true. You must see it.”
“In the five months you’ve known me, have I struck you as a complete idiot? About anything other than adventures,” she hastened to add .
“No.”
“And have I ever seemed unable to make up my own mind and communicate the results?”
A smile flickered on his face, then died. “No.”
“Then why,” she said, poking him in the chest, “are you treating me as if I am?”
“I’m not—”
“You are . Would we be having this conversation, any conversation, if I hadn’t discovered you here? You simply decided I’d be better off without you, and that was that! Didn’t it occur to you I should have some say about my own effing life?”
“Which you almost lost, thanks to me.” He leaned in, the room’s deep shadows giving a menacing cast to his face. “I’ve been nothing but ill fortune for you. And before you claim none of it was my fault,” he added, anticipating her, “please recall who’s to blame for giving you a concussion. You blacked out for nearly a minute. You could have died then —don’t you remember accusing me? It’s a wonder you escaped without serious injury.”
She didn’t have an immediate comeback to that.
“Listen to me, Daggett,” he said, the command sharp and urgent. “Kincaid was my magic instructor. Kincaid .”
“I figured as much, but—”
“You think it hasn’t warped me? Perhaps you assume I’ve done nothing under his tutelage that would sicken you?”
She had indeed assumed that, so his words struck a nerve. But she rallied .
“Come on, you’ll have to do better than that. I’ve read a thousand books with a self-torturing hero, and you have all the symptoms.”
“I’m not a hero, God damn it ,” he shouted, standing so abruptly that his chair thunked against the wall.
She stared at him in silenced shock. He glanced at the door. When no one appeared in response to his outburst, he sat down.
“This is your fatal flaw, Daggett.” He said this quietly but no less angrily. “You take a few spare facts and embroider them into a lovely story. ‘He must be good, he’s fighting a dark wizard’—as if life had anything to do with books. As if evil people never occasionally do the right thing.”
“You’re not evil,” she protested. The words wobbled, more plea than statement.
He laughed bitterly under his breath. “I was an Organization wizard for eight years. Eight .”
Goosebumps rippled down her arms. She’d been aware of this timeline, but there was a great deal of difference between being aware of it and having him say it like that.
“What are you trying to tell me? That you invented the tracking system? I did eventually figure that out,” she murmured.
“I’m telling you that you ought to ask what I did in those eight years.”
The panic that had gripped her during the Inferno battle was white-hot. This, now, was arctic. For a moment, she couldn’t think of anything except no . No, he couldn’t mean what he’d just implied. No no no no .
But this was the Organization. What else could he mean?
It took all her self-command to force the words out, faint as they were: “You’ve killed people? Innocent people?”
He hesitated, eyes miserable, mouth a tight line. Then: “Yes.”
She felt numb. Like the moment she fell on Kincaid’s knife, before the worst of the pain.
Hartgrave, never one to volunteer a lot of information if a little might do, left it at that. But he didn’t need to say anything else. He’d won the argument. With that single word, he’d won.
“I’m leaving Ashburn,” he said, addressing this to the foot of her bed. “Ballantine should be able to counteract your effect on microchips, but you’ll need my replacement to straighten out the purely technical problems that sometimes follow.”
She stared at the covers, her arm, back and foot throbbing painfully with each rapid heartbeat. She’d been so certain in these hospitalized days that she finally had a grip on his slippery past.
“I should never—” He stopped, and she looked at him in time to see him put his face in his hands. “Of the great many things in my life I should never have done, getting involved with you was the one I knew was wrong before I even started.”
Numbness was wearing off. The urge to throttle him took over. “Then why did you do it?”
“Because I fell in love with you,” he said, just above a whisper. “Not a defense, I know. Rather the reverse. ”
He stood. He seemed about to go. Then he reached out and tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear.
The brief contact between his fingers and her skin felt as bad as a murderer’s touch should.
“Sorry,” he gasped, pulling away.
Lifting a hand to press it to her stinging face, she noticed the watch—his watch—on her wrist. For the second time, she undid the clasp with fingers made clumsy by her zeal to get it off. “Take it. It’s yours.”
He winced. “Keep it. I want you to have a watch that works.”
“You want me to think of you every time I see it!”
“Daggett ...”
“Go . Please go.”
He nodded. For a heart-stopping moment he simply looked at her. Then he teleported away, and she fell back on her pillow, drained and wretched.
So this, then, was the end of her misbegotten adventure. Nothing happy about it.