She sat next to him on the floor, warming his chilly hands with hers. “What did they do to you?”
He caught his breath, or close to it. “I’ve overextended myself. Couldn’t pull in magic at the rate I needed. Had to tap reserves.”
“What, you were drawing it out of yourbody?”She shuddered as he made an affirmative noise. “Wouldn’t—wouldn’t that be like sucking oxygen out of your bloodstream before your body’s done with it?”
“Yes. Very like.”
She held his hands tighter. “What can we do?”
“Time, the great healer.”
“I don’t suppose you can draw magic into your body from the atmosphere to replace what you’ve lost ...”
“No. Magic goes out, not in.” He paused; he was still breathing heavily. “Besides, I have to produce magic to draw more around me. Right now”—he shifted in a vain attempt to find a comfortable position on the stone floor—“I can’t do magic any more than you can.”
“Here,” she murmured, slipping an arm around him. They sat like that for a while, Hartgrave’s breathing and skin tone slowly returning to normal as he leaned against her, his body warm against hers.
Her spirits improved as he did. They’d successfully escaped. He would be all right. And she’d had an honest-to-goodness adventure, by gosh.
“Well—go ahead.”
She looked up at him in confusion.
“Ask your questions,” he clarified with the air of someone about to face an ordeal, as if he hadn’t just come through something far worse. “No doubt you have enough queued up to keep us here for the next month.”
Her heart zipped at the implications. Did that mean … No, no, one thing at a time. “Just to be absolutely clear: You, Hartgrave, are telling me, Daggett, to ask you questions?”
His laugh warmed her right through, despite its raspy edge. “I can’t pretend I don’t owe you some answers after that near-death experience. Besides, the harm I was trying to avoid has already been done.”
She considered this, lining up the clues she’d gleaned over the weeks. “Are those women from Cornwall?”
He nodded.
“Do they target certain magic-users?”
“Yes,” he said, his tone suggesting he hadn’t expected that mental leap.
Hah! So her first instinct had been right after all—hewashiding.
“How’s this,” she said. “You went to Cornwall University, figured out how to use magic—or possibly the other way around, but whichever, they found out about you and decided to take you out. You faked your own death, fled here because the American Midwest is the last place they’d look for a snobby European, and everything was fine until tonight, when they somehow discovered you again.”
Now he looked truly taken aback, so she tapped her free hand against her knee, trying to unravel the rest and impress him further. “Can they track the use of magic? Wait—that’s not right, you’ve been using magic all along ...”
“You’re close.” He glanced down at the hand he didn’t have around her shoulder, splaying it out, palm up. “Every aura is unique, like a fingerprint. But auras of people who use magic are also strong enough that satellites can pick them up as they would any other signal. The group those killers belong to combines global positioning systems with fifth-force manipulation, andvoilà: They can see where all the magic-users are, all the time.”
“But not you?”
He pulled her a little closer. She could hear thethud-thud-thudof his heart beating too fast, the conversationprobably resurrecting bad memories. “I was fortunate enough to work out a way of remaining under the radar.”
This abruptly brought to mind his declaration that he’d taught himself how to push magic away for “health reasons.”
“If you keep the magic in your aura below a certain amount, they can’t see you,” she said. “That’s it, isn’t it. ‘Health reasons’!” She shot him a look. “You continually misled me.”
“I was being careful.” He paused. “I’ve never lied to you.”
She used up the remainder of the look and moved on, wanting to get more answers while the getting was good. “So how could you do any magic?”
“Small manipulations, like fixing your cup or your computer—they don’t require much fuel. It’s only with bigger feats that I’d have to pull so much magic to me, I’d go over the top.”
