“Children!”
She winced, then shook her head as if to get the thought out of it. “Terrible, but necessary. Staystill, Omnimancer.”
He was overcoming her control of him—muscle by muscle. With a terrific struggle, he inched his right arm toward his pocket full of leaves, thinking of all the people whose lives hung in the balance: Martinelli, if he was at the Pentagram instead of the New Mexico test site. Many other people he’d worked with. The sweet grandmother who lived next to his old townhouse, the twin girls who jumped rope in the alley out back, the boys and young men at the Academy—all within a few miles of Capitol Hill. If a typic could power a mile-and-a-half explosion, wouldn’t a wizard fuel something far worse?
She leapt on him, grabbing his arm, holding the dropper full of liquid paralysis in her other hand. Try as he might, he couldn’t dislodge her or even move his neck. All he could do was press his lips together as tightly as they would go.
“Open your mouth,” she ordered. It took every bit of his willpower to keep his lips from parting.
“Open your mouth,” she shouted. “Open it!”
Blood bloomed on his tongue, bitten in his effort not to obey. If he could move, there was hope. If he couldn’t?—
“I know what you do to Beatrix every night, you goddamned rapist,” she hissed. His mouth opened on instinct as he sucked in a horrified breath, and three drops of the tincture went down his throat.
CHAPTER 24
Beatrix sat bolt upright, heart hammering. It took her a second to realize where she was—in the sitting room, on the couch—and then Lydia was at her side, face pinched with worry.
But it was Rosemarie who took her hand, Rosemarie who murmured, “How are you? Are you all right, my girl?”
Beatrix swallowed, mouth dry, stomach in knots. “What—what happened?”
Lydia shook her head. “You’d just set off for work, and then … We don’t know exactly—you took ill and came back. The doctor couldn’t wake you, but he said all your vitals were fine and it was probably just exhaustion.”
She tried to remember. All she could come up with was one memory, disjointed and odd—the feeling of overwhelming fatigue that hit the moment after Ella suggested it. “How long have I been asleep?”
“About an hour and a half,” Rosemarie said.
Beatrix saw Rosemarie’s notepad on her lap and took it up, scrawling,Did you call OB?
Lydia and Rosemarie exchanged looks.We didn’t think of it until ten minutes ago, Lydia admitted.He didn’t answer.
The anxiety in Beatrix’s stomach congealed into dread. What if he’d changed his mind and left? What if something else had happened—the FBI was back, or a wizard came to check on Garrett and discovered him, or?—
Stop,stop.She had to get to Peter’s. He might simply have been in the attic when they called, or the bathroom, or…
But the dread was now zipping through her, lighting her nerves on fire.
She stood up cautiously, neither dizziness nor exhaustion setting in. “I’m much better, and I must go to work.”
Lydia and Rosemarie glanced at each other, but Beatrix said, “I’m really better, I promise you,” so they nodded, Lydia mouthing “good luck.”
“Has anyone seen my coat?”
Lydia gave a thoughtful frown. “I think Ella took it off you—maybe she put it in the closet?”
It wasn’t there. It wasn’t in her room, either, and she didn’t have time to look for it anymore, so she flung on her winter coat—three times heavier but no warmer than the wizard’s coat Peter had made her, shot through with spells—and rushed out the front door to her car.
It didn’t matter what soothing possibilities she offered up to herself. Her body was convinced that something terrible was happening to Peter, and she knew from grim experience that she should never, never ignore that. She didn’t have time for a twenty-minute walk or even a ten-minute run.
But when she turned the key in the ignition, the car spluttered and the engine would not catch. She tried half a dozen more times, to no avail. After all its years of hanging on to life, the vehicle seemed to have picked today to die.
She slammed the door and dashed into the forest, the dread now gripping her heart, tendrilling up her throat, curling into her brain. She ran flat out until she could not go another step without catching her breath, coming to a shuddering halt in the clearing where she used to read, back when she had a normal life. Where she once danced with Garrett, before he was dead. Where Peter, in their first simultaneous dream, kissed her as if his life depended on it.
Her ragged breathing was all she could hear for a moment. Then she caught it: a voice, or voices, deeper in the forest. It sounded like an argument—or someone in trouble.
Peter.
