He ran a hand over his eyes. “All right. Tomorrow, 7 p.m.”
Her heart accelerated so fast, she had to put out a hand to steady herself on him.Tomorrow.
“Okay,” she said. “Good.”
. . . . .
By the time they took a well-deserved break for dinner at Mexican Foo, everyone but Hartgrave was caught up in pre-mission euphoria.
“To thirty minutes!” Bernie raised his glass of beer, Willi’s one culinary nod to his country of origin. “To thirty minutes, six seconds—my personal record!”
“As you’ve reminded us at least thirty times so far today,” Hartgrave said, though he was the first to drink to the toast. Thirty minutes in the room translated to fifteen minutes outside it, and that was good news indeed.
“To Dr. Daggett,” Willi said, topping off everyone’s glasses. “Full of courage!”
She grinned at Hartgrave. “Or foolishness, depending on whom you ask.”
“No comment,” he said, clinking her glass.
Keeping hers raised, she added, “To all of us. May the forces of good overcome evil.”
“How about, ‘Mayweovercomethem,’” Hartgrave said dryly. “Just in case the gods of toasts have any doubt which is which.”
She managed to not spit out her mouthful of beer, but it was close. “That’s by far the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard all month.”
Bernie slung an arm around her shoulders. “You know he has to find the objection to everything. It’s a compulsion. Go ahead, Hartgrave—it’s your turn.”
Hartgrave contemplated his glass for a moment. “To Daggett,” he said finally, lifting it. “May she forgive my many sins.”
“Likewise,” she said, touched.
“I will drink to that,” Willi said.
“You’ll drink toanything,” Bernie said, and the serious mood lifted.
But her sense that Hartgrave was rattled only increased on the walk home. He kept stealing glances at the map filling his cell-phone screen.
She slipped her gloved hand into his free one. “Where are they? Crawford, Shaw and Kincaid, I mean.”
“Cornwall.”
She got a better look at the map, zoomed in on that region. Definitely fewer wizards than on the night she and Hartgrave escaped from Clear Lake, which seemed to confirm a pattern he had noticed—the weekend swarmed with Organizationists while the middle of the week was much sparser.
Fortunate, since they had to creep through the Organization’s house-and-headquarters without being seen. They ought to be all right once in the basement,location of the server running the tracking system, but—love of adventure notwithstanding—she was glad the intervening distance would be covered on a day with fewer potential guards. And at 2 a.m. Cornwall time, when anyone left in headquarters would either be sleeping or sleepy.
She’d suggested an invisibility spell, but apparently those rapidly ran out if you didn’t keep feeding them magic. (“And the air shimmers around you if you move,” Hartgrave had noted. “Not exactly the effect you want when you’re trying to be inconspicuous.”)
He took one last look at the dotted map as they descended into the Inferno, then slipped his phone back into his pocket.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” she said. “How did you manage to get a tracking system, too? Did you hack into theirs?”
He stopped dead, a half-dozen feet from the door to his room. His laugh, when it came a beat later, was short and bitter. “Good God—if I could hack into it, I would have destroyed the unspeakable thing years ago.”
Of course. She winced, feeling foolish.
“The reason I have my own tracking system,” he said, “is that I made it.” He paused, then gave a sharp sigh. “Because mine runs off my own server, we’ll still have it after we eliminate theirs. Which is critical, because it will never be safe to not keep an eye on them.”
He let her into his room ahead of him and leaned against the wall near the door once in, staring at nothing. His obvious anxiety about the next day was starting to rub off on her.
