Hartgrave looked as if he were swallowing laughter. He really was the most provoking man she’d ever met.
“Were you bolstering that spell?” she asked, managing to sound only a touch grumpy.
“No, but you’ve never cut through magic that fast before,” Hartgrave said. “So just remember: Scared is okay, but mad is better.”
After that, they practiced with illusory fireballs, with prison domes like the one that had trapped them in Clear Lake, with magic that dragged her to and fro. She focused on what the Organization did to people, what they did to Willi’s wife, and got progressively better.
In between, Hartgrave put her through an exercise requiring the other extreme of the emotional spectrum, necessary for getting to Organization headquarters—the stomach-churning, head-spinning jump of teleportation.
“I don’t know what would happen if we attempted this while you were producing any significant amount of anti-magic,” Hartgrave said by way of introduction, “but it seems to me that our molecules might never re-form. And as you’ve noticed, we do have a bit of consciousness in that state, so it would be one of those worse-than-death fates. Do be careful.”
She halfheartedly thwacked him on the arm. “Why on earth would you tell me that if you wanted me to becalm?”
“You managed it while being attacked,” he said, eyebrows raised.
Well—true. With effort she managed it again, and he popped around the room with her until she could go through the unnerving experience without her legs feeling like jelly when those body parts came back together.
But they wouldn’t be able to jump directly into the house, protected as it likely was by shielding to prevent intrusion. Instead, they would have to land nearby and break in—while avoiding the motion detectors all over the lawn.
That produced yet another exercise in the pauses between self-defense: Walking well above the ground on magically hardened air. No sweat—certainly much easier for her to do than for Hartgrave to create.
Making an airborne sidewalk while staying under the radar required him to charge up and cast as much as he could in under five seconds, all while ensuring he usedup enough magic in the process, and he’d only recently gotten the knack of it.
She skipped along the altered air, having great fun with it. Hartgrave watched, saying nothing. It struck her when she jumped down that he looked rather grim.
That was her only warning. As she stretched, he cast something at her—and she couldn’t put her arms back down.
“This is not a game, Daggett,” he said. “You could be attacked at any moment.”
“Oh,comeon,” she said.
His spell had caught her at the elbows, and those were covered by her shirt, a bad start. She struggled to get her hands in a position where she could reach the conjured binds. Then she craned her neck to try to put her forehead to some use. In the end, she could do nothing but get as angry as possible and wait for that to work.
It took more than five minutes.
She glared at him as she rubbed her abused elbows. “Are you still trying to persuade me not to go?”
His eyes had a guarded look to them. “Is it working?”
“No. Name a date. It’s already—wait, whatistoday? I’m losing track of time down here.”
“Tuesday. January twenty-first.”
Anxiety twinged in her stomach, but not for any Organizational reason. She’d burned through almost all her break, the break she’d intended after Professor Fletcher’s warning to spend madly writing a paper good enough for a journal to publish. She needed to get it done before her contract was up in May, and managingthat during the spring semester—while teaching five classes—would be difficult at best.
Well. She would just have to do it somehow. Getting an offer from Ashburn beyond her one-year contract was likely her only chance for a career in academia, considering her lack of options last year and the new crop of history PhDs set to be disgorged in the spring.
She took a deep breath. Time enough to worry about that later. The career she’d spent eight years preparing for was important, but in no way could it outrank saving innocent people from mass murderers. And anyway, she had every intention of managing both.
Hartgrave was nominally watching Willi and Bernie practice at the other end of the room. Perhaps he thought he’d successfully dodged her effort to get him to pick the day they would set their plan in motion. But probably not, considering all the prior examples she’d given him of single-minded pigheadedness.
“Spring semester starts next week,” she said. “I have a meeting about it Friday. If you think I’m ready, we ought to go.”
He looked at her, expression impenetrable. “You’re never going to be ready, Daggett, in the same way the rest of us are never going to be ready. They’re more powerful than we are. You do understand that?”
Yes. That was part of the appeal. It was childish and silly, and she would never admit it to him, but there it was. She’d wanted an adventure, wanted to battle great evil, and now she was about to get her wish, fifteen years after the fact. She couldn’t endure the strain of sitting around while he went adventuring by himself, but sheconsidered with significantly more excitement than fear the prospect of going together.
She cleared her throat and came up with a more rational response. “If we can stick with the plan, none of us will have to go head to head with them.”
