“Sure. With what?”
“Keeping Omnimancer Blackwell away from me.”
Ella’s lips quirked. “About time.”
Beatrix sketched out her plan, piggybacking on efforts in town that were already in motion, twisting them to her purposes. It might do the trick, it just might.
But only if she could get through the night without letting the truth out in a rushing flood.
Peter openedthe door to his townhouse in Washington and stood on the stoop for a full minute, letting the oddness of it sink in. He hadn’t been here in four months.
It was ridiculous—he should have been back immediately to pack the rest of his portable things. He should have rentedthe place out right away. He felt even more foolish when he finished emptying his drawers and closets and ended up with a grand total of six boxes—few enough that he could fit all of them into his car.
The leasing agent showed up ten minutes later, assured him that a furnished place like his would rent on the spot—“such alovelyneighborhood”—and took the keys. Then there was nothing for him to do but drive … home. For lack of a better word.
He gazed at his packed car and decided not to leave just yet.
It was a mild afternoon, the biting cold temporarily receded, and he walked through the neighborhood with the finality of a goodbye tour. No one looked twice at him in this place crawling with wizards. When he gave in to the temptation to buy something at the confectioner’s, he stood in a line in which two of the four people in front of him were wizards, and so was the man who came in immediately afterward. It was—not comfortable, exactly, because Washington now had too many bad associations, but familiar. He missed being invisible.
Back outside, he walked to the park across the street, intent on dawdling a bit longer. He sat on a bench and bit into a fudge square, watching Washington going about its Sunday. A woman pushed a baby carriage past. The wizard who’d been behind him in line came out of the shop. A father trailed by six children caught the door and let his brood in.
The wizard who’d been behind him in line crossed into the park and walked past, gray coat flapping in the breeze.Peter glanced that way, trying not to appear as if he were looking, the paranoia he now lived with spiking. Hadn’t he seen a wizard in a gray coat on his old street? Was this a tail?
The man sat two benches over and took a bite of his own candy.
Peter got to his feet, unsettled, and walked on the path that circled the park, keeping his eyes frontward for a slow count to thirty. Then he stopped, bent down to tug on his pant leg, and looked behind him for a fraction of a second. Gray Coat was still sitting on the bench. He really was paranoid. Or maybe the issue was that he hadn’t pulled out of sight yet?
No, this was silly. If he were being tailed, why wouldn’t they have sent Theo Garrett or some other wizard from the dirty-tricks squad, someone with the clearance to go invisibly? He turned around and crossed back to O Street, intent on returning to his car and leaving this city he could no longer visit without jumping out of his skin.
A black limousine, two sedans flanking it, pulled up at the five-star restaurant a few yards ahead of him. Men in dark suits and darker glasses piled from the sedans, one of them opening the limousine’s back door. Out came Vice President Draden. The man who knew about and approved of the weapon that ran on human fuel and could reduce a major downtown to ashes.
He watched Draden stride into the restaurant, giving a wave to the star-struck mothers on the sidewalk, and as a result almost missed the wizard following him out of the car.High forehead. Square jaw. Grim mouth. The wizard who tapped Beatrix’s phone a few weeks earlier.
Was the man Secret Service? What did this mean?
“All right, move it along, folks,” one of the remaining wizards in dark glasses called as the door closed behind the vice president and the phone-tapper in the tan coat. “Keep walking.”
Peter moved on, mind so abuzz he didn’t think to look one more time for his gray-coated possible tail. When it occurred to him later as he sped north in his car, he looked reflexively in his rearview mirror—and laughed at himself for it. As if the wizards didn’t know exactly where he lived now. As if any of them could show up, visibly, without drawing the entire town’s attention.
He got home without incident. He ate a spare dinner and spent the next three hours in his R&D lab, flailing, failing. Then it was time for sleep and the netherworld existence of dreamside.
Once, there was a clear distinction between these two halves of his life. But one bled into the other now. His memories of what they did dreamside kept catching at him during the day, making his heart race and his hands shake. And the problems of real life tagged along with him to the other side—now he would have to ask Beatrix if she’d started her dangerous campaign. He ought to tell her about what he’d seen in Washington, too.
He lay in his bed for some time without falling asleep, eyes shut, everything dark around him, drowsiness creeping up by degrees. The leap into dreamside happened, as always,as if someone had pushed a button on a projector and changed the slide that was the world around him. His room snapped into focus, lights on, and he was standing by the bed rather than lying on it, looking at Beatrix sitting on his quilt. He was so used to it by now that he didn’t so much as twitch.
Then she disappeared.Thatwas a shock.
Did she wake up? Was something wrong? Whathappened?
He stood there, heart rattling, imagining the worst and trying to force himself out of the dream and into consciousness. Rational thought caught up a second later: The only way into this neither-here-nor-there state was if he and Beatrix both were asleep. The spell was broken—so to speak—the moment one of them woke.
He ran his hand over the quilt, feeling for an invisible body. He walked carefully around the room, looking, listening. Then, after what felt like ages, he caught the barest hint of motion on the ceiling.
He leapt onto the bed and reached up, catching at something warm, grasping her invisible arms. Hair he couldn’t see tickled the hollow of his throat. Lips pressed against his.
“You win this round,” Beatrix murmured.
He laughed. “What are you?—”
