She sighed. “No,” she said, and that was the absolute truth. “No, I don’t.”
“Well, we’ll keep you informed,” Tanner said, and left.
Rosemarie raised her eyebrows. “You seem to have had quite a close call with that wizard.”
Beatrix nodded.
“I take it you were encouraging the man before having a change of heart?”
“Yes,” Beatrix admitted. “He seemed so nice at first.”
“Oh, yourjudgment…” Rosemarie threw up her hands.
She almost defended herself. None of the red flags about his behavior appeared until she’d sent him packing, for heaven’s sake. But she looked at Rosemarie, and then at Peter, lying comatose but alive, still alive, and she said, “Thank you.”
“What?”
“When I need help, I can always count on you,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve said ‘thank you’ for years because I’ve been so focused on what you say rather than what you do.”
Rosemarie’s eyes widened.
“If you hadn’t made us practice CPR every day for a month in seventh grade, Peter would be dead.” Beatrix blinked back tears. “If you hadn’t moved in with us, we would have lost the house. If you hadn’t been there, advising us and prodding us, I could never have sent Lydia to college, and she would never have accomplished so much. You drive me crazy sometimes, and I’m sure I do the same to you, but you’ve been mothering me for longer than my own mother and Iloveyou. I don’t know what would have become of Lydia and me without you.”
Rosemarie simply looked at her for a few fraught seconds. Then she came around the bed, gave Beatrix an awkward hug and fled the room.
Beatrix spent half a minute trying not to cry. Then the thought occurred to her that this was a surprisingly good way to stop a lecture, and she was hard-pressed not to laugh. She so wanted to share it with someone who would appreciate both the real emotion and the subversive humor of it, but of the two people who fit the bill, one was comatose in the bed beside her, and the other had put him there.
She pressed her forehead to his hand, limp in hers. “Oh God, Peter,” she whispered, “I can’t take this. I can’t. I can’t.”
“Miss Harper?”
She turned in her chair. The physician who’d checked on her the day before stood in the doorway, a nurse in tow. “I thought I’d find you here,” Dr. Rivera said. “Let’s see how you’re doing.”
She dutifully submitted to having her temperature taken, her blood pressure checked, her reflexes tested.
“Well,” Rivera said, “I’m still not thrilled by your blood pressure, but everything else seems to have settled down. Promise me you’ll get plenty of rest and liquids, and I’ll sign your discharge papers.”
She looked at Peter, torn.
“You have special dispensation to come visit him at any time,” Rivera said, patting her on the back. “Night or day. We promise.”
“Thank you,” she said, trembling, her eyes burning.
“You saved his life, you know.”
She peered up at the doctor. “But will it be enough?”
“It’s early days yet. Most people in comas wake up—don’t lose hope.”
She nodded. But she knew what had happened to Peter, and she feared she had “saved” him for this—lying in a hospital bed, forever out of reach.
As soon asshe got home, she went into the forest, Rosemarie with her to keep a watch out for invisible wizards. Beatrix spent the walk with her heart in her throat. If Ella took the transmitter … She couldn’t complete the thought. She didn’t know if Ella had extracted from Peter how to make a payload stone, but it seemed entirely possible. As complicated as the stone was to produce, there seemed no limit to what Ella could do, given time and motivation.
It was hard to think of this Ella of the last few days as the same person she knew and loved. Surely that woman wasn’t her Ella, who had joked with her, consoled her, strategized with her. Surely trauma alone could not have induced Ella to try to kill hundreds of thousands of people. Somethingmusthave happened. And she feared she knew what it was.
Their new magic, the knitting that Ella did so remarkably well—wasn’t that the likely culprit? Beatrix was painfully aware that she herself had teetered on the brink of murder—twice now—since beginning to cast this way. What might she have done if she’d been as enthusiastic a practitioner as Ella?
Beatrix had discovered this way of tapping magic. If knitting explained Ella’s insanity, there was no question where the fault lay.
