“It will cover exactly what I need you to do, nothing more,” he said. “If we put that into effect and destroy the original, our dreams and feelings might go back to being ours alone.”
“Right now?” Her words tumbled out, clipped, taut. “You’ll do this right now?”
If their positions were reversed, he wouldn’t let her sleep on it, either. “Yes. Immediately.”
Once in the house, Peter retrieved the contract from its hiding place in his bedroom—pausing to steady himself against the bed, so intense were the feelings radiating from his chest. Joy, relief, anticipation. The best he’d felt in months, and it was entirely secondhand.
He was tempted to linger so he could savor it for just a bit longer. But he made himself turn around and walk down the stairs.
Miss Harper was already in the brewing room, setting up the demarcation circles. She removed pips from a pomegranate as he wrote up the replacement:
I, Beatrix Jane Harper, swear to assist Peter William Blackwell to the best of my abilities and to do him no harm. Unless he gives permission, I swear to cast no spells in anyone else’s presence or outside this house; to in no way communicate about any of his activities or anything occurring inside this house, beyond saying I am helping him with the non-magical aspects of brewing; to take nothing from this house, either the original or a duplicate; and to communicate nothing that would suggest anything unusual or untoward is happening here.
She looked at it for a long while. Then she signed her name.
When they stepped into the demarcation circles, he was struck by how very close they were to each other. He couldsee the hollow of her throat as it disappeared under her collar. Could hear her coat rustle and smell the orange scent in her hair.
He had the sudden, overpowering urge to close the gap between them and?—
He backed out of the circle, mortified beyond description. “Inappropriate” didn’t evenbeginto cover it.
“Omnimancer?” she said, a tremor in her voice.
“I—I think I should destroy the other Vow first,” he said, offering up the first excuse he could think of to put air between them until he could get his heart to stop battering his rib cage.
“Oh,” she said, voice catching, andoh, the image that conjured up. Miss Harper on his bed, hair splayed across his pillow, saying that word in exactly that way over and over. God Almighty, why was he having these thoughts about her of all people?
He grabbed a maple leaf from his coat and aimed at the original contract lying on the table—the one that ensured she would never, ever,everwant him.
“Formeltan,” he said.
The leaf was consumed in a puff of smoke. The contract, to his surprise, was not.
“Formeltan!”he snapped, wondering if he’d been thrown so far off kilter that he couldn’t cast a simple burning spell properly.
The second attempt was similarly disappointing. No—this was a problem with the contract, not his spellcasting.
“Cast with me,” he said, moving to put the table between them.
She arranged herself in the just-so position. “On three? One, two?—”
Spells coming to naught, they stared at the piece of paper with its single, ugly sentence. He grabbed it, trying to rip it down the middle, and it was as if the very molecules had changed. It looked like paper. It felt like paper. There the resemblance ended.
She gripped the table, staring at him. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know!” He tossed the contract aside. “It’s supposed to keep other people from destroying it, not me!”
She darted to the bookcase and pulled out an encyclopedia. While she read, he tried several more spells, each as fruitless as the one before.
“There’s no mention of the holder of a contract being unable to extinguish it when desired.” The tension in her voice equaled what he felt in his entire body. “But there’s also no mention of a pair of wizards Vowing to each other essentially simultaneously.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “Because no one casts this spell if they can possibly avoid it. The government frowns upon it, and there are less binding ways to enter into a joint agreement.”
“Perhaps the only way to destroy this contract is to also destroy the one you signed,” she said.
He saw no reason why that should be, but he ran to retrieve it anyway. He needed to sever the link between them without delay. What if he gave himself away by dreaming ofthat moment in the demarcation circles? What if she experienced, through whatever connection the Vows had given them, these particular, problematic feelings?
He laid the other contract on the table, next to his, and handed her a leaf. She stared at it, then at him, her expression showing how much this worried her.
