“Wait,” Peter said as she turned to go.
He reached into his nightstand drawer and pulled out a package wrapped in silver paper. A present. Her heart twisted.
“Merry Christmas, Beatrix.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, hardly able to get the words out.
She opened it downstairs, self-reproach making her fingers clumsy. Inside was a red-and-brown scarf—warm, soft to the touch, beautiful. Something she needed but would not have bought. A perfect gift.
She blinked back tears, thought of her sister—this could be the day—and got to work.
CHAPTER 8
The rest of December, what little was left of it, went by without further visits from Garrett or other unexpected tension—simply being constantly watched. Except there was nothing simple about that. It upended Beatrix’s life.
Conversations in the house, ones not staged for the minders, were all but limited to the weather and housekeeping. They ate meals in near silence, Christmas dinner included.
No more black-humor chats with Ella on the walk to work, either. They couldn’t rule out the possibility that a wizard might be following them: Garrett, Morse, anyone.
Even the omnimancer’s mansion wasn’t immune. Peter pounced the moment she set foot in the place, casting the revealing spell on every inch of the house before he let her get to work. Any time they opened the door, he repeated theprocedure all over again. He began scheduling his outside omnimancy work so it didn’t coincide with her shifts. On the occasions he couldn’t avoid it, he dropped the spell on the house, squeezed out the door in a way that made it impossible for anyone else to squeeze in, then recast it from the outside.
Inside his house, though, she could go about her day without fear that someone was watching or listening. Amazing that this place she dreaded to enter just a few months ago was now her sole oasis in a desert created by the magiocracy. And though she couldn’t see Peter without a jolt of guilt, it was dulling with repetition. She owed him the truth, but not at the expense of her sister’s life.
By the first weekend in January, her feelings of guilt had diminished to the point that she was tempted to go to his house that morning, without any work requiring it. She ate breakfast, trying half-heartedly to talk herself out of it. But the pull was undeniable. She wanted to see him, and now that Vow-created emotion was joined by an equally strong but real desire to get the hell out of her house.
Halfway through washing the dishes, she made up her mind to go.
“What? What is it?” Lydia, a towel in one hand and a plate in the other, stared at her.
Beatrix blinked. “Sorry?”
“You looked so happy all of a sudden, I …” Lydia’s eyes flicked up to where they knew the audio recorder above the sink was, then down to the dish in her hands. “I just wondered what you were thinking of, that’s all.”
Did she smile so infrequently? More to the point: When was the last timeLydiasmiled?
She ought to bring her sister along. She ought to have thought of that in the first place.
“I’m just happy that it’s not quite so cold today,” she said, trying to sound casual. “Come on a walk with me.”
“Oh …” Her sister’s voice was heavy with regret. “I’d like to, Bee, I’dreallylike to, but I have so much to do.”
Beatrix didn’t know exactly what work her sister had planned that day because they couldn’t effectively talk about it. But nothing was stopping her from writing a note to Lydia in a room without a camera and asking how she could help. She hadn’t thought until that moment about what it cost her sister to be stuck in the house during winter break while she and Ella escaped to the relative freedom of their jobs.
Lydia put the last plate away and walked to the sitting room, where she now wrote her speeches, letters and other materials because there were no unblinking tele-vision cameras there. Beatrix dried her hands in the kitchen, glancing at the door that led to the sitting room, then at the one that opened onto the back yard—the first step to Peter’s house. Ought vs. want.
Ella bustled in, coat on, holding her stuffed-full school bag in one hand and Beatrix’s own work coat—the one Peter bespelled to be like the sort worn by wizards—in the other. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”
What Ella had in mind other than getting out, she didn’t know. Of course, that was reason enough. She shot another look toward the sitting room, torn.
“Well, come on,” Ella said, grinning.
Rosemarie walked into the kitchen at just that moment. “Going somewhere?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Ella said. “If you’ll be here?”
One of them had to stay with Lydia at all times to protect her. She’d never learned to spellcast—Rosemarie had put her foot down; Lydiawaspresident of the Women’s League for the Prohibition of Magic, after all.
Rosemarie looked as if she wanted to put her foot down now, too. She shot Beatrix, and only Beatrix, her patented look. (Where was the fairness in that?) But then she merely crossed her arms and said, “Naturally I’ll be here.”
