“Can’t,” she whispered.
A coughing fit overtook him. “You can,” he said after that. “Youmust. Please—”
More coughs. His arms shook. If they stayed, they would die. If they left, they might be eternally stranded in the aether—assuming his fate-worse-than-death theory was right. Shehadto calm down.
The valiant never taste of death but once. The valiant never taste of death but once. The valiant—
“Are you ready?” he said, the question strained.
“Yes,” she gasped. Perhaps it would even be true.
On the other side of the barrier, Kincaid bellowed, “NO!”
But Hartgrave looked only at her. He tore one hand from the barrier, making a jerky movement that had to be an effort to pull in enough magic for the jump.
He’d half-dematerialized—past the point of no return, perhaps a tenth of a second from taking her with him—when she was wrenched from his grasp.
17
Tea with the Evil Overlord
Kincaid—Kincaid had grabbed her arm. She jerked away, biting back an appalled, blank-shock scream, and discovered he’d made a perfectly placed hole in Hartgrave’s failing barrier. Hartgrave was gone. She was alone—alone with the most dangerous wizard in the world.
He cut through the remains of Hartgrave’s barrier as if it were spider webs, and she threw out her hands to defend herself. But he walked right past her, extinguishing the fire with another spell.
For a moment, Kincaid stood over the charred wreckage, shoulders stooped, head bowed. Then he turned—she re-braced herself; this was it—and tottered toward the stairwell, sitting heavily on a step.
Her arms wavered. It wasn’t that she wanted violence to be rained down upon her, but his unexpected behavior was really unnerving.
“Emily Daggett, I presume?” He had a beautiful voice, richly British, made for grand speeches and reading books aloud.
As there seemed little point denying she was who he knew she was, she nodded once.
“Forgive an old man for not standing up to introduce himself properly,” he said, “but I fear I’m exhausted.”
“I know who you are,” she said, as coldly as she dared.
“Oh, I doubt it,” he replied, clasping his hands on his knees. “You probably know my name—Malcolm Kincaid, in case you didn’t—but I’m fairly certain you have been misinformed about the sort of person I am. Your source of information is”—he sighed—“suspect.”
He couldn’t have chilled her more if he had cackled maniacally and said her eyes would go well in a potion he was brewing. His mildly spoken words perfectly summed up the fear mounting since she crawled into this house through a window. She had to remind herself that of course he would say that because he was trying to trick her.
Which gave him something in common with Hartgrave.
“I don’t think you’re in a position to cast aspersions,” she said, her fine words ruined by the tremble she’d been trying to suppress.
“Tell me: How long have you known Alexander Hartgrave?”
She was not going to be drawn into a conversation. No good could come of chats with evil overlords.
“I’d say six months at most,” he added. “Judging by the length of your tenure at Ashburn College—it seems highly unlikely that you would have crossed paths before you became colleagues. Am I correct?”
It took all her willpower to remain silent.
He gave another deep sigh. He did look weary. He looked, in fact, almost exactly like her conception of a wizard, back before “wizard” had any menacing overtones. The only difference was that he’d cropped his silver hair as short as his beard.
“I imagine you would like to hear how I came to be in possession of such information,” he said. “I would, were our positions reversed. But perhaps we could continue this conversation in my office, where I have something to show you and, more importantly, comfortable chairs.”
No, no, no. No chats with evil overlords, no trips to “offices” and absolutelynobeing lured away from the first place Hartgrave would look.
