“Do they suspect?”
He shrugged. “The spells shouldn’t have begun degrading yet. I think Garrett was assigned to poke his nose around here simply because quitting an important job for one with no salary or prospects looked odd.”
“Yes, so why did you?”
“I could at least justify coming home. And I knew the town would throw a fit if the Pentagram took their omnimancer away. I needed to make it harder to conveniently disappear me.”
She nodded, biting her lip in that way she had while thinking. “Are you sure a protection spell could work? Do the transmitter spells travelto the payload like a lit fuse, or are they just ... there?”
“Once that initial ninety-second delay ends, you mean? They travel—at close distances it’s nearly too fast to tell, but it does mean a strong enough wall of protection should stop them from getting to the payload. The problem is, the force of the spellwork is so overwhelming that it destroys abeorganshield instantly and keeps going.”
She shuddered.
“We did try to find a way to capitalize on quantum entanglement theory so it would simply be ‘there,’ but we had no luck—there’s a mercy,” he added.
“I’ve never heard of quantum entanglement. What is it?”
“Subatomic sorcery—figuratively speaking.” He held up both pointer fingers at arm’s length. “Two entangled particles have a bizarre connection: However far apart they are, what happens to one”—he jerked his left hand up, then his right—“affects the other.”
She made a rueful sound. Even without asking, he knew what she was thinking.
Like us.
Their couplingin dreamside that night was fast and just short of violent. He grasped her hips so hard she could feelhis fingers imprinting on her skin. She bruised his lips and scratched his back.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she gasped, falling back onto the pillows, her body twitching with aftershocks. “Don’t leave me.”
He traced the line of her jaw. “I thought you’d be relieved.”
“I am contractually obligated to feel otherwise.”
“Beatrix,” he said, eyes downcast, “I am so wretchedly sorry. I swear to God I never meant this to happen.”
“I know.” She cupped his face, breathing in his scent. “It’s not an accusation. It’s a reminder that I’m the addict and you’re the drug.”
He rested his forehead on hers.
“To me,” he said, “it feels like the other way around.”
“Maybe a protection spellis going about it from the wrong angle.”
Peter, crossing out yet another failed variant, looked up at her. “Oh?”
“What about a spell that would set off an alarm if someone arrives with a payload stone? A bit like your early-warning system,” she said, lifting the charmed necklace from under her blouse.
He stared at her.
“I’m sure you thought of that already,” she added, embarrassed she brought it up.
“No, damn it—Ididn’t,and I feel like an idiot.”
She stepped closer, clasping her hands to keep them from shaking. “Do you think it’s possible?”
He paced around the room for a while, clearly puzzling it through. Finally he said, “Our charms pick up spells at the moment of casting because there’s something to pick upon—that temporary pop of energy you’d be able to measure with an incantometer if you happened to be there. I’ve no idea if there’s anything about the stones we could use as handholds. If runes have a magical signature, it’s not one the incantometer recognizes.”
He stopped in front of her and added, “But that’s what experimentation is for. Brilliant idea, Beatrix—truly.”
She knew intellectually that what she felt for this man was a fabrication, and for her own sanity she had to fight against it while awake and in possession of all her faculties. But unlike the payloads, she wasn’t made of stone.
