And Peter. Her employer, teacher, unasked-for lover. The only wizard in Ellicott Mills. Whom else would the feds blame if she were found out, but him?
She felt … She grasped about for how, exactly, and came up with the feeling ofbeinghim, in one of their disconcerting linked dreams, as his life spiraled out of control in Washington and he made the fateful decision to come home to Ellicott Mills.
“Calm down,” Ella muttered. “You’re going to damage the couch cushions.”
Beatrix hadn’t even noticed she’d grasped them with both hands.
Ella scooted closer. “This isn’t like you. Even the night Lydia was elected and—well, even that night, you were a lot more composed than the rest of us.”
She hadn’t felt like it. But she supposed she normally managed to keep her internal gyrations to herself. Except now she couldn’t.
Now that she was going directly against Peter’s wishes.
She pressed the palms of her hands to her eyes, beginning to see what was happening. Good God, her Vow to Peter was insidious. It couldn’t physically stop her from doing this—not this—but it could certainly make her feel as if she were making a terrible mistake.
“Beatrix?”
“I’m OK,” she said, taking a deep breath, then another. “I’ll be OK.” And she steeled herself, pressing the emotions that weren’t hers, the ones she disavowed, into a tight ball.
If she could resist him in every situation except their dreams, even with his desire for her thrumming through her veins, feeling so much like actual desire for him—if she could dothat, then she could put up her chin and barrel through this. Just recognizing the problem was a relief, in fact. Now she could shove all the caustic second thoughts she’d been having into the internal box labeledPeter’s.
The bathroom door opened. Joan’s heels clicked against the floor. Beatrix and Ella jumped to their feet.
Even before Joan opened her mouth, Beatrix knew her answer from the angle of her shoulders and the look in her eyes.
“I agree,” Joan said.
“Good,” Beatrix said, and meant it.
Peter knewwhy his stomach had been variously sinking, flipping and clenching for seemingly no reason all afternoon—Beatrix—but not what had made her so tense.She hadn’t mentioned anything she would be doing over the weekend, no League events that wizards might be sabotaging.
But then, she hadn’t said much to him for two weeks, not even in dreams.
He debated going to her house and seeing what was wrong, assuming she was at Cedarlawn. But the emotion bleeding through to him wasn’t terror. It would really be better to not engage.
He sighed. The gulf that had opened up between them, just as they’d gotten within arm’s reach, seemed impossible to bridge. His anger had largely burned itself out—hers too, he thought. But the distance remained. It wasn’t until she proved her internal compass wasn’t infallible that he realized how much he’d relied on her for navigation through the dangerous waters they both treaded.
But she hadn’t actually done anything yet. Perhaps she never would. When push came to shove, surely careful, watchful Beatrix wouldn’t risk her freedom and her sister’s hard-earned reputation with a wild scheme she’d thought of while flush with new power.
Careful, watchful Beatrix, who’d risked those exact things when she took his ill-advised bait to cast spells in the first place.
He gritted his teeth and tried to concentrate on the runes in front of him, not the insidious thoughts of her that curled around his brain like smoke. He managed it for perhaps ten minutes when a familiar shave-and-a-haircut knock on his front door set every nerve alight.
He took the two flights down at a rapid clip. But the person distorted through the peephole was not her.
“Martinelli,” he said, opening the door to the man who’d been his deputy director, back when he was the Army’s chief weapons developer. Four months and a lifetime ago.
He’d been so busy for most of it that he’d barely had time to worry about whether Tim Martinelli would get his job, or whether it would go to a more inventive, more dangerous researcher. Four months was enough time for a decision.
Martinelli held up a bottle of scotch, the golden liquid glimmering in the afternoon light. “Well, Omnimancer—can I persuade you to stop omnimancing for an hour and have a drink with me?”
His lips quirked of their own accord. “It’s a Saturday. Do you think I do nothing else?”
“You live in a town with one traffic light, boss. What elsecouldyou do around here?”
Peter laughed—at the gap between Martinelli’s assumption and reality, mostly—and stepped back to let the man in. “That’s particularly insulting, coming from the office stick-in-the-mud.”
“Less talking, more drinking. Where’s your kitchen?”
