And Dan felt like the experiment—whatever it was—would be fine. Everything would be fine. He could conquer it all, just as long as Axell held his hand.
35Prospero
The laboratory was awkwardly silent as the magic left the women there. A few sheepishly headed toward the door. Several tried to set their clothes to rights with a modicum of success.
“You were exposed to toxic gas from a leak in the lab,” Ellie said calmly to the group. “Please line up and the mind healer will examine you. Failure to be cleared will result in memory loss and vision loss. It is important that she check you for retinal damage.”
Retinal damage?Prospero usually wasn’t this delicate, but Ellie’s excuse worked well.
Ellie smiled encouragingly as she stood between them and the door. Her authoritative voice and calm manner were undoubtedly a result of her years working in a library, but regardless of the source or the consequences, Prospero currently found it absurdly attractive.
Not the place or the time.
Shoving aside the thoughts of her wife’s assertive streak, Prospero climbed up onto a tall laboratory table and watched Ellie round up thewomen who seemed to be trying to leave. She was managing the chaos well, even as Prospero simply wanted to curl up and ignore this part.
Ellie directed a few of the women around both the bodies and vomit on the floor.
“Oh my god,” one woman said, practically breathing the words. “Is hedead?”
And Ellie’s expression clouded. She went from capable to still in that moment. The horror of the open-eyed corpse was enough to stop her, and the calm in the room started to fade as quickly as it had arrived.
“He… there was… an incident and—”
“Yes. He’s dead. You’re lucky you’re not.” Prospero looked at her unflinchingly and spoke loud enough that the crowd all heard. “He refused his exam, and there he is. It didn’t work out well for him. Line up. Let’s get this resolved so the authorities know it’s safe to come in here and handle the dead.”
Ellie shot her a scowl, but whether or not she approved of Prospero’s blunt tactics, most of the group lined up.
One woman went over to a cabinet and pulled out several long white coats. She draped them over the three dead bodies. “Respect,” the woman murmured. “No one ought to be gawked at when they’re likethat.”
One by one, Prospero looked into the minds of the women, erasing memories of magic exposure, maenad madness, and male idiocy. She left just enough hints that they all knew that they had been compelled to grope Allan, but that no one had been intimately violated. She also impressed an urge to talk to a therapist about it. While she was notactuallya mind healer, she understood—from long talks with Cass and a few other witches—that talking post-violence could help.
And it’s a lot healthier than my coping mechanisms were.
Prospero wouldn’t say that she had stitched all of her own cracks and panics together, but she reached more-or-less stable eventually. Therapyhadn’t been a viable option in her very short nonmagical years, and it was still not popularized fully in Crenshaw.
Once the last of the women left the laboratory, Prospero stood and reached her hand toward Ellie.
“We need to sort out Aggie yet,” Prospero said quietly, “but for today, I simply want to go home. She’ll turn up.”
“The bodies…”
“They are the domain of this world,” Prospero said gently. “We cannot manage everything. They are covered, and they’ll be found by someone here as they assess the damage across campus.”
Ellie frowned. “I wonder what they’ll think.”
“The astounding thing about magic is that—these days—it’s often dismissed with a thin excuse. To believe that it was what it was is to be declared superstitious,” Prospero said. “There are places where people still believe on a large scale, but mostly, the government of advanced nations is the only place where you find unfettered belief. There are pockets, people who handle the realities of witches and missing people, but as a whole…” She shrugged. “The average person will rationalize it away.”
Prospero looked into the now-empty hallway. The throngs of drunken people were gone. All that was left was the destruction. “Let’s go home.”
Ellie wrapped an arm around Prospero’s middle. “Tell me how to teleport us.”
“I can do it.”
“You look like you’re going to topple.” Ellie’s arm tightened, holding Prospero to her side firmly. “Implant the information in my mind.”
“I can’t—”
“Try. If I don’t resist, maybe you can.” Ellie tilted her head. “I won’t resist.”
