“Really, he’ll be fine,” Ella said, sitting in the chair Peter had brought in because he’d believed her story about grading.
Just as he’d believed her, Beatrix, when she lied about the status of her whisper-campaign plans. She leaned against the wall, feeling ill.
“Beatrix,” Ella said gently, “you know it’s the Vow making you worry?—”
“He’s helping us and at leastpossiblyputting himself at risk, and what am I doing? Exactly what he begged me not to do.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “And I’m stealing from him.”
“Borrowing.” Ella’s voice was firm. “We’ll replace those leaves as soon as spring rolls around.”
Beatrix shook her head, gazing at the floor. “That doesn’t make up for it.”
“Listen: Did you want him to strong-arm the mayor into laying you off?”
“No, of course not. You know that.”
“Right. So he stoleyou. And after that, he hid his true purpose from you, tricked you into casting spells and forced you into the Vow.” Ella gave a wintery smile, all bitter angles. “What a nice fellow.”
All the usual counterarguments came to mind. He didn’t do it because he was mean-spirited or power-hungry or warped. He was desperate. He’d thought the stakes were too high to?—
Beatrix put a hand to her mouth. He’d thought the stakes were too high to trust that she’d see things his way if he toldher the truth and let her decide how to proceed. Well, now the situation was reversed.
“I’m not doing anything to him that he hasn’t already done to me,” she murmured.
“Exactly,” Ella said.
The second-guessing voice in her head, the one she’d come to think of as the Vow, hissed that it wasn’t really the same and you couldn’t justify one wrong by comparing it to another.
Shut up. She would not submit. She wouldn’t.
“All right,” she said to Ella. “Let’s get to work.”
When his housewas once again empty, Peter retrieved Lydia Harper’s list from where he’d hidden it. Several of the targets were often out on Sunday afternoons, so he decided to start with the closest one.
That woman had a helpfully deserted alley across the street from her home, so he parked there, cast the invisibility spell on himself and spent a minute trying to determine whether she was in. He saw nothing to suggest so—no vehicle in the carport, no lights on in the rooms inside. He risked ringing the doorbell to be safe. Then, after no one appeared, he went to the back door, cast an unlocking spell and skulked in, hands shaking as he closed it behind him. Was this how it felt to be on the dirty tricks squad? Did Morse or Garrett ever have second thoughts while on an assignment?
He took a calming breath and reminded himself that he was here to make sure no recording equipment had been installed under the occupant’s nose. That was the opposite of a dirty trick, surely? He tiptoed through the mercifully small rancher, found it indeed empty, and went around a second time, closing curtains and casting revealing spells.
The house was entirely red, other than the white around his body. No other wizard had cast a spell here, at least not in the last few months. He put the curtains back to the position they’d been in before, turned the lock on the knob and slipped out. Nine minutes from start to finish.
His heart slowing to a more normal rate, he retraced his steps to the front yard—just in time to see a sedan turning into the carport.
He drove back to Ellicott Mills, shuddering at the close call. Ten minutes from home he remembered he’d promised to eat dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Beatty, and only by going straight there did he make it on time.
“Omnimancer, sogoodof you to come,” Mrs. Beatty said, beaming at him. “Mr. Beatty is on the telephone and I have one more thing to do in the kitchen, but please have some appetizers—just through there in the sitting room.”
Next to the table with the appetizers sat a woman who looked very much like the thirtysomething Mrs. Beatty, only younger.
Oh dear.
“My sister, Grace Shirley from Annapolis,” his host said, her beam now at blinding levels.“MissGrace Shirley.”
Miss Shirley stood, cheeks rosy with either embarrassment or rouge. “Omnimancer—I’ve heard so much about you.”
Peter spent the dinner wishing Martinelli were there to act as a buffer and laugh about it afterward. Once he’d escaped into his car, he entertained himself by thinking about how to tell the story to Beatrix to wring maximum humor out of it.
He was turning up his dark driveway when the blindingly obvious finally struck him: Hecouldn’ttell her. Few subjects were more calculated to feed the civil war between her hijacked emotions and her own inclinations than a tale about how he’d wriggled out of two matchmaking attempts. There was no way to make it funny. He just needed to make it stop.
CHAPTER 12
