As the man set a stone in one of the far corners of the hallway, then the other, Peter inched to the cattycorner kitchen—doorway, no door—and slipped through. The wizard’s spell could show where magic had been cast. Presumably it also picked up on spells cast elsewhere on objects that were then moved into the area in question, as long as the spells were still operative. Peter’s escape was good only if this bit of sorcery didn’t reveal spells that had simply passed through, so it was with a feeling of slow suffocation that he watched the man set stones in the other two corners and extract a leaf.
Close enough to touch. To hear. Peter held his breath.
“Lang read leoht,” the wizard murmured.
The red spell lit up the hallway with two interruptions: the window pane and chandelier at the other end.
Peter tried to push back a dizzying rush of relief. This ordeal wasn’t over yet.
The intruder retrieved the stones with a spell, swiveling to catch each one speeding at him, and paused as if to consider his next move. Kitchen. Cellar. Brewing room.
The fight-or-flight urge todosomething, not simply stand there with the odds against him, ratcheted up to an unbearable degree. But he forced himself to stay put, and the wizard—perhaps swayed by the brewing room’s many possibilities for hiding contraband—chose the one option that gave Peter a chance.
Shaking from adrenaline, he tiptoed back to the door that almost had been his undoing, waited for the wizard to step out of his line of sight and eased it farther ajar until he could slip through. Securely on the other side but hardly safe, he padded down the stairs and felt his way half-blindly in the much deeper darkness of the cellar until he came up against his false wall—the one he’d thought would be impossible to tell from the real thing.
He undid it with a whisper. Hefted the dangerous contraband hiding there. Took careful steps toward the back door, legs burning with the stymied desire to run.
Finally—outside. He gulped air and picked up the pace, an invisible man with an invisible load that needed to be hidden with no spells whatsoever. Somehow, he managed to get down the sloping lawn without taking a tumble. Once the trees closed in around him, he set down his burden: Project 96, a weapon capable of leveling Ellicott Mills and everything around it.
He lifted the invisibility spell cloaking his ill-begotten creation and stared at the thing, wondering where on earth he could put it.
The device, made entirely from stone, stood two feet high, with a thin base topped by a shallow basin—a bit like a planter, except he would never try to hide it in plain sight in the greenhouse, even with a plant for verisimilitude. Both sides of the basin were inscribed with runes. Even a slow-witted wizard would immediately grasp that these runes were not for encouraging life.
No, he had to stow this transmitter as far out of sight as possible. He hoisted it again, arms already protesting, and headed farther into the darkness of the forest.
He trudged for what must have been a quarter-mile, stumbling over exposed tree roots and the uneven terrain, before finding a spot that seemed good enough to risk. Just past a small clearing crouched a dense thicket of multiflora rose, peppered with vicious thorns—as thuggish and uninviting as a plant could get. He followed it away from the path for at least five hundred feet. Grateful for the spell shielding his body, he shouldered his way into the mess and wrestled the weapon into its midst. Then he rearranged the shrub’s arching stems to conceal what he’d done, a comb-over writ large, and fought his way out. He couldn’t see the thing at all. Hooray for invasive plants.
He looked around the clearing until he felt confident he would have no trouble finding it again, and then retraced his steps, well into trembling exhaustion. Collapse was imminent by the time he reached the forest’s edge, so he layon his stomach in view of the house and waited for a sign that it was still occupied.
Time ticked by. He drifted off at least once, despite rocks digging into his hip and the burning pain of overtaxed muscles. He had just convinced himself to get up and go in when the wizard exited, dark coat blending into the night.
The man strode toward the tree line, giving Peter another jolt of unwanted adrenaline. Move? Stay put? But this time he didn’t have to choose: As soon as the sloping hill shielded the wizard from Main Street, he disappeared with a dramatic swirl of his duster-length coat. The tell-tale sound of teleportation, like a cork pulled from a wine bottle, meant he was likely gone and not just invisible.
Peter rolled onto his back and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to ward off a nauseating dizziness. He’d been a hair’s breadth from arrest. What he’d done to avoid that fate might have merely delayed the inevitable. Whoever this wizard was, he knew what he was doing.
Peter dug demarcation stones from a pocket and set one on the moss beside his head. Then, struggling to his feet, he marked the other three angles of a large square—one that encompassed the spot where the mystery wizard teleported from—and cast the new, impressive spell. Only the exit point shone white against the red, forming a vaguely body-like shape. He walked to it and put his hand straight through to make absolutely certain the man wasn’t still there. Waiting for him.
Heart decelerating, he nullified the spell, collected the stones and staggered back to the house. He cast it again, thistime around the structure itself. The telephone junction box glowed bright white—he’d been tapped, then. As he had no intention of saying anything the least bit incriminating via phone, they were welcome to listen in.
He was too drained to check for more booby-traps, and far too exhausted to shimmy up the side of the staircase to avoid tripping the prowler’s silent-alarm spell, if it was still in place. He dragged himself into the receiving room. There he spent the remainder of the night, just shy of fully asleep.
CHAPTER 14
Beatrix waited for church to end with what could not properly be called impatience, because she didn’t want to talk to Mrs. Price. It wasn’t a question of wanting. She had to know.
She left her sister, Ella and Rosemarie with a murmured excuse as the closing hymn faded, working her way to the front of the sanctuary as everyone else tried to get to the coffee. She caught a glimpse of Blackwell in the outward crush, looking haggard. Then she saw her target, in black as always.
“Mrs. Price—could I have a word? There’s something I must ask you.”
“Oh?” the widow said.
There was a great deal of meaning in thatoh.It suggested, at minimum, that Mrs. Price couldn’t imagine the conversation would be satisfying. She’d said hardly anythingto the surviving members of the Harper line since Lydia extricated the county chapter of the League from her grasp. After years of beingtsk’d by the woman for offenses to polite society, Beatrix had counted this as an unexpected bonus.
Now it merely made a bad situation worse.
“Please,” she said. “It’s about my mother.”
Mrs. Price pursed her lips. “Well—we’d better sit, then.”
