“Oh crap crap crap!” She tried to sit up; Bernie pressed her back onto her pillows. “I’m supposed to be on campus today for a meeting! The semester starts Monday!”
“Not for you, it doesn’t.”
How she wished she’d made Hartgrave teach her to curse in German. English didn’t seem strong enough.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Bernie protested. “I told the administration what happened—you know: Sightseeing, got into an argument with some other tourists, and then bam, attacked ...”
“... coincidentally a few blocks from St. John’s Hospital, yeah.”
She was struck by the thought that he could have died, they all could have died, and it was amazing good fortune that they hadn’t. Exactly the sort of happyending she’d expected from her books, back when her books were all fantasies.
Then she remembered what they’d just been talking about.
Perhaps notexactlythe sort of happy ending.
She sighed. “You didn’t get me fired, did you?”
“No, no,” he exclaimed. “Your health insurance is still in force and everything. You’ve just got the semester off.”
Her heart sank. It was for all intents and purposes the same thing. How was she supposed to get Ashburn to offer her another contract—or persuade any other college to hire her—with one semester of teaching and a single to-be-published paper to her name? Had she really managed to torpedo her career as an academic after just five months?
“Don’t worry, Em.” Bernie gave her a smile that for once wasn’t the least bit impish. “You’realive. Ashburn is so extremely secondary to that. Now,” he said, producing an e-reader, “how about a book? Whatever you want.”
“Nothing with magic in it,” she said. “Or villains. Or adventure.”
He laughed, then winced—she wasn’t the only one with lingering injuries. “Which leaves what, modernist literature?”
“Well ...”
“That’llmake you run screaming back to adventure novels.”
In any case, the harm was already done.
. . . ..
The following days brought a variety of improvements. Her tests, the ones for diseases you could get by having a knife covered in someone else’s blood thrust into your body, all came back negative. She graduated to solid foods, took some tentative steps with her new cane and spent more time awake than asleep.
But Hartgrave was still absent. So was Willi, except that didn’t bother her quite as much.
Something was wrong. The possibilities were endless, considering that the “few things” Hartgrave needed to take care of had to be Organizational.
But when she pumped Bernie for information—were the remaining wizards a problem? was the microchip industry falling apart?—he insisted that Hartgrave had everything under control.
Then he gave her an uncertain look and added, “Do you mind if I ask ...”
She could fill in the rest with no effort at all.Why isn’t Hartgrave visiting you?
But Bernie left it at that. “Never mind,” he said, waving a hand. “None of my business.”
So he thought it was odd, too. And he didn’t know the reason.
Hartgrave avoiding her in fear of what she might say made sense only for a short period, because a long delay made an angry reaction more likely. So that seemed out as an explanation for his behavior.
Maybe he’d assumed she definitely wouldn’t want to see him anymore? But surely her panicked reactionwhen she thought he was sacrificing himself to Kincaid showed him where he stood.
Perhaps, then, he’d realized he didn’t want her after all. Perhaps he preferred Crawford and went off to grieve her death. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to believe that, either. Almost expiring in someone’s arms provided clear emotional clues.
But the fact remained that he was nowhere to be found. She almost asked Bernie to tell Hartgrave she wanted to see him—was on the brink at least a dozen times—but it seemed so incredibly middle school that finally, the day before she was due to be discharged, she attacked it sideways by asking about the other conspicuously absent convincer.
