“Yes,” Beatrix said, stomach churning. Lucky, very lucky—and unsettling. How had it happened? Not Blackwell, of that she was almost certain. She would have felt the tingle of spellwork if he’d cast something on her. She would have heard the Old English on his lips. Besides, the crane arm fell so fast there hadn’t been time to get a spell out.
She removed the last pin and set her hat in her lap.
Ella gasped. “Your—yourhair.”
Her heart gave a jerk. “What is it?” she asked as if she didn’t know. Could she possibly pass off strands of wizard’s silver as regular old aging gray?
Ella, digging into her purse, held up a hand mirror.
Not a few strands. Every single one of them.
“Oh no,” she said, the words disappearing into a burst of noise as Rosemarie, Lydia and Meg simultaneously saw what Ella meant.
“Quiet!” Ella turned to Beatrix with a rapturous expression on her face. “What you did—that wasmagic. You really did come out of nowhere. Youteleported.”
“I—I—” She choked on pomegranate.
Ella leaned in. “How? We’re all supposed to be completely incapable—andthat, that wasn’t just any old magic. A lot ofwizardscan’t teleport.”
Beatrix tried to think of something she could say and ended up coughing.
“Horrible flavor, pomegranate,” Ella said, and pounced as Beatrix gave a violent start. “Our omnimancer has been teaching you, hasn’t he. He’s put you under a Vow, and you haven’t been able to say a word—hasn’t he?”
Beatrix could feel her throat closing in on her.
“Yes,” Blackwell shouted, snapping into view. “Breathe, Miss Harper!”
The reactionthis caused made the to-do over Miss Harper’s hair seem sedate by comparison.
“Are youmad?”Miss Dane, in the driver’s seat, out-volumed the others. She jerked the car into a dark alley as Miss Harper gasped for air. “He’ll kill us all!”
“I couldn’t if I wanted to,” Peter said, panic over his sudden outing giving his words a brittle tone. “Miss Harper hasmeunder a Vow.”
The young woman with a braid coiled around her head like a dark crown—and an alarming amount of knowledge about wizardry—glared at him from the other end of the back seat. “What Vow, specifically?”
“To take no action intended to harm Lydia Harper, her efforts with the League or the League in general,” he said. “She needs all of you, so you have no reason to fear me.”
Miss Harper looked him in the eye. “Let me tell them what you’ve done for us.”
She was so close. Her hands, her legs, her face. Dread faded for a few seconds as a lunatic urge gripped him: to kiss her in front of these women who hated him.
“Please,” she added, misinterpreting his rattled silence as disagreement. “What they know already is worse.”
A vast understatement. The number of people with knowledge that could send him to prison for years if not decades—unable to fix the damage he’d caused—had just ballooned from one to five. He had to get the other women under Vows, too. Somehow.
He sighed. “All right. Tell them.”
Miss Harper sketched out the last twenty-four hours, tucking the alarming evidence of her magic use back under her hat as she did so. Miss Dane muttered “I knew it” whenhe was revealed as the wizard in the film, but otherwise the assembled let Miss Harper explain without interruption.
She said her sister would be dead if not for his warning. She said they all owed him their gratitude. She said that when it came to their safety, she trusted him implicitly.
He couldn’t help noticing that her confidence in him was conditional. But even that was an improvement.
Miss Dane, meanwhile, wore a look he recalled from his grade-school days. It sent a residual shiver down his spine.
“Keep in mind you couldn’t see anything he did,” she said to Miss Harper. “He could have cast the spell on the crane himself.”
Before he could jump to his own defense, the woman with the dark hair spoke up. “Not if he’s under a Vow. I suppose you can back that up with the documentation?” she added, shooting a pointed look his direction.
