“No. Not for work.” Peter considered how much to reveal—Martinelli might be under a Vow, but as he himself said, Vows were slippery. “I had to destroy the first one and ended up replacing it with the second.”
Martinelli let out a whooshing breath of obvious relief. “That’s far better. Those other wizards layered one identical Vow on top of the other. Listen, I really think you’ll be OK. How do you feel?”
Peter gave a bitter laugh. “Like I’m losing it. But that might not have anything to do with it. You see, I made those Vows to someone who also made Vows to me.”
Martinelli’s eyes went wide. “At the same time?”
“Yes.”
“Twice?”
“Yes.”
“Oh,boss.”
“So you know. You know what happens with simultaneous Vows.”
“I only know two pairs who did—it’s not a statistically significant sample.” Martinelli paused, then shook his head. “But they had very similar experiences.”
“Dreams?”
“Yes. The first pair each Vowed once, and they started to have these shared Technichroma dreams, dreams pulled from their actual lives. So did the other pair, but then they Vowed a second time?—”
“—and their dreams became like an extension of real life, except it was just the two of them?”
“Yes.”
“Did they Vow a third time? One to the other, or each to each?”
“No! Holy shit—what the hell happens after athirdtime?”
“You can’t undo the Vows. They fuse. They’re permanent.”
For a second or two, Martinelli simply stared at him. “Oh,shit.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Peter muttered.
“No, I mean—it probably hasn’t happened yet, or you’re not willing to admit it to yourself, but the two of you are going to feel as if you’re falling in love with each other.”
Peter gasped. “What?”
“I know, Iknow, it sounds unbelievable,” Martinelli said, misunderstanding Peter’s shock, “but it happened to both the other pairs—these were men who had never wanted other men before. The first ran off with each other—left their wives, left their jobs. A few years later, when one of them died and the other had an instantaneous ‘what was I doing’ awakening, the agency suspected the Vows. They checked their records to see if anyone else had made them simultaneously, discovered another pair who had done so just five months earlier and had them burn their contracts. I tracked them down later. They’d been on the verge of leavingtheirwives for each other. But the instant the contracts were destroyed, bam—back to normal, or some semblance of it.”
“What on earth did they Vow?”
Martinelli shrugged. “They were agency wizards. Standard agency Vow—each pair just happened to make it to each other, which wasn’t standard. Oh, and then the first pair took a Vow about some financial transaction they were cutting on the side.”
The room was spinning. Peter closed his eyes. The one thing he hadn’t questioned was that he’d fallen in love with Beatrix—thathehad, of his own volition.
He waited until he thought he could ask a question without breaking down. Then he said, “Did their Vows haveanythingin them that could explain what happened beyond merely exchanging them with each other? Language about safeguarding their wellbeing, or something of that sort?”
“No.”
He opened his eyes to see Martinelli looking at him with such pity that he immediately closed them again.
“You’re sure,” Martinelli said, “you’re a hundred percentsureyou can’t destroy the contracts?”
“Yes.” Peter sighed. “There will be no back to normal in this case.”
