The knob of the front door and the wall just above the entrance to the kitchen lit up starburst bright.
The former was obviously the unlocking spell the wizard used to get in. But what had the man cast on the wall? Peter tried the revealing spell that countered invisibility.
Voilà.
A camera. Not a compact one like his, either. It was twice as wide, with an antenna that strongly suggested it was recording continuously and sending the feed to Washington. Bad, very bad. But also, in a certain light, good. Why would the wizards bother to monitor the house if they’d killed the occupant they were worried about?
Miss Knight, stepping from the study with Beatrix, drew in a sharp breath as she saw what the wizard had hidden there. Beatrix’s eyes widened.Don’t look at it, he wanted to call out, and couldn’t.
On her own, Beatrix angled her head, turned her friend away and marched her toward the front door, saying nothing—handling it. The instant after she opened the door, though, she gave a raw cry. He rushed toward her, heart outpacing his feet. What she’d seen came into view over her shoulder: Her sister, alive, stepping onto the porch just behind an especially grim Miss Dane. Their only tenant who wasn’t in the League trailed them both.
Beatrix threw her arms around her sister. “Oh, Lydia!”
Then she must have recollected that the tenant would be confused because she pulled back and added with admirable calmness, “I was worried something happened to you all when I got home and found the house empty. You might have …”
She stopped, clearly drawing a blank about what, besides wizards with ill intent, could befall someone in Ellicott Mills.
“Twisted an ankle,” he murmured into her ear, thinking of Miss Sederey’s faked injury.
“Twisted an ankle,” she repeated. “I’m—I’m so glad you’re all right.”
“May I go in?” The timid little tenant—Miss Massey—wrung her hands. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but I’m awfully cold.”
He spun around, cast an invisibility spell on the camera and got out of the way just in time for young Miss Harper to press Miss Massey inside.
“You were so kind to backtrack with us,” Miss Harper said. “Thank you for your company.”
“Yes,” Miss Dane said with something like her usual dryness. “Foolish of me to think I’d dropped my gloves.”
He had a mental image of the three women nearing the property, the lockets Miss Dane and Miss Harper wore flaring hot, and Miss Dane coming up with the first excuse she could think of to get Miss Massey to leave with them.
“We’ll have dinner ready in about half an hour,” Miss Harper called as the tenant disappeared up the stairs to her room.
He stepped up to Beatrix again and whispered, “Get everyone else outside.”
A minute later, they huddled together in the near-dark, the air around them enspelled to keep any outdoor recording devices—or invisible wizards besides him—from listening in.
“What kind of camera?” Miss Knight said after he explained what he found.
“Tele-vision,” he repeated. “I’ve seen one at the Pentagram. They won’t have to come back to collect the recordings. Everything will go directly to them via radio waves.”
“You know, I can’t begin to understand these people,” Miss Dane said. “They try to kill Lydia, and when that doesn’t work the first time, their fallback isfilmingus?”
A good point.
“We’ll puzzle over that later,” Miss Harper said, remarkably calm. She gave speeches as fiery as her hair, but he couldn’t remember seeing her outraged by anything in private.
Of course, being targeted for assassination would tend to put anything else that happened to her in perspective.
Then he suddenly remembered.
“Miss Knight,” he said, “tell us about the wizard. What do you know of this man—Morse?”
She sighed. “Nothing good. Former dirty-tricks squad, now the vice president’s right-hand wizard.”
The circle buzzed with the women’s shock. He, at least, was less surprised to hear it.
“What does he do?” Beatrix murmured. “Character assassination or … actual assassination?”
