“Yes. But I’d really rather spend my last seconds kissing you.”
“Don’t move,” she said, jumping to her feet.
As she ran up the stairs, she heard him mutter, “Don’tmove?What a cruel sense of humor my subconscious has.”
Brown’s informed her that the subject, if awake, would be showing signs of “impaired judgment.” (Perhaps that was catching?) She retraced her steps, flipping the cellar light on, and found him lying on his back, murmuring something.
Poetry.
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” he said as she re-read the directions and practiced the pronunciation. “Love is not love which alterswhen it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove: O no! It is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.”
She pulled leaves from her coat pocket to cast the spell the regular way.
“Perdition catch my soul,” he said, gazing up at her, “but I do love thee.”
She swallowed over the lump in her throat and said the spellwords. The white-blue tint receded from his skin in a rush.
He took a deep breath and blinked at her, levering himself up on one elbow. “I’m really alive,” he said, voice shaking.
Tears welled again. It had been soclose. “Really and truly.”
“Apologies for ...” He gestured toward her lips, not looking her in the eye.
“Forgiven.” She cleared her throat. “Who did this to you?”
He laughed, the sound weak and bitter. “Teamwork. Garrett and I.”
This was too minor a shock, comparatively speaking, to make her heart race more than it already was. But her stomach twisted. “What?”
“He saw me casting outside your house. He stuck me to the wall, demanded I stop helping you and left me here. I could have survived that with everything but my dignity intact, but I’d screwed upbeorganin a misbegotten attempt to protect myself.”
She wanted to hit something. “That—thatbastard.”
He sat up and pressed his back against the wall, the one he so recently was trapped on. “I don’t think he knew. If he wanted to kill me, he could have cast any number of spells to do that.”
“I don’t care! If ithadgone the way he’d intended, you’d have been there for hours, maybe even days?—”
“Better than the fate I almost got.”
She shuddered.
“How on earth did you end up here just in time? No, wait—don’t tell me yet.” He pulled out a pair of leaves. “Let’s see if we have any invisible visitors.”
No doubt she would already have been hauled away if so, but you couldn’t be too careful. She let him cast the spell-detector but laid a hand on his shoulder when he tried to get up. “Let me.”
Around the cellar she went, touching all the remnants of magic, even the faint ones, and hitting nothing solid.
“All right,” he said. “How?”
“I felt ... terrible,” she said, struggling to put the sensation into words. She knelt beside him. “I thought it was a panic attack because we’d just discovered that Meg Wallace sold us out to the wizards for the price of her college tuition?—”
“What?Your treasurer? The one who took a Vow?”
“Yes—before she took the Vow. She thought she could pass them information without doing us any harm, the little idiot. Now she can’t tell them anything, of course, and Uncle Sam is done underwriting her education.” She breathed in deeply to tamp down indignation. “It finally occurred to methat this alone couldn’t explain my physical reaction. So I came here.”
That look was back in his eyes—the one that tempted her to kick her principles to the curb. “You saved my life.”
“I put you at risk in the first place.” She glanced at her hands, which held no temptation. “I asked you to cast that spell outside our house. I’m so very sorry, Peter.”
