“Omnimancer! Please help, it’s an emergency!”
“Mr. … Sederey?” he said, taking his best guess.
“Yes! My daughter burned her arms cooking, it’sbad, and you know an ambulance won’t get here for fifteen minutes at the fastest and then it’s another fifteen minutes to the hospital, and she’s in so much pain and doesn’t want to be moved anyway, and isn’t there a spell orsomething?—”
“Yes,” he said immediately because he knew it well—necessary first aid for lab work. “I’ll be there straightaway.”
A muffled wail came through the line.
“Hurry!” Mr. Sederey said, anguish in that single word.
Peter dashed into the brewing room. “Miss Sederey’s burned herself,” he said, wrenching open the refrigerator. “Damn it, where’s the aloe?”
Beatrix plucked the bottle from its hiding place and handed it to him, fingers brushing his in her haste. Their gazes locked. He turned on his heel, setting his jaw against all the emotions battering him, some of them surely not his, and rushed to the front door. With shaking hands, he removed the shield spell, clattered onto the porch and put it back up—not his fastest performance.
As he jumped into his car, he wondered whether Mr. and Mrs. Sederey were aware he’d told their daughter off. He wished he’d handled the situation better.
On the other hand, it meant this call was definitely not fakery designed to invite him to dinner.
Beatrix choppedthe ingredients for the cold medicine, trying to fall into a soothing rhythm—trying not to think. She cast a spell on the mix.
The horrorstruck exclamation that followed was not hers. But she shared the shocked emotion of the “oh my God” from the doorway where nobody—nobody visible—stood.
Impossible. This was impossible.
“Beatrix!” cried the voice of Wizard Garrett. A hand she could not see grasped her arm. The man who should not have been able to get in said, “What has hedoneto you?”
Bittersweet pomegranate ghosted up her throat, the Vow’s reminder. Don’t tell. Don’t harm. But it was too late. Peter’s warning rang in her ears:No amount of sealed lips will keep the magiocracy from hauling me off if they discover spellcasting women near Ellicott Mills.
Oh God ohGod.
“He—he doesn’t know,” she said, trying anyway. “I just discovered I could do this, and I—I thought if I tried occasionally when he was out?—”
“You’re casting spells for your job!” His objection was so explosive that she almost fell backward in her effort to get away from him. His hand tightening on her arm was all that kept her upright. “He clearly knows, or he would wonder how brews got finished while he was gone!”
The room seemed to flicker as her heart beat faster and faster. What could she do? How on earth could she salvage this? Images of the future flashed before her: Prison for her and Peter, ruin for her sister.
Lydia and Peter had been so worried about Plan B. Instead, the work he paid her to do and her sister didn’t object to—the work funding Lydia’s final semester of college—was their undoing.
Garrett stripped off her coat and tossed it away, separating her from her leaves and the extremely thin chance that she could have bested him in a fight involving spells. But in that instant he was no longer holding on to her, and she ran—grabbing two bottles off the table to throw at him. The first missed, smashing on the floor. He was on her again before she could lob the second, but she twisted fromhis grasp, sped through the brewing-room door and slammed it in his face—right into his forehead, from the sound of it.
He swore. “Beatrix! Get back here!”
Now was the time to teleport,now—if she could do it only at a moment of extreme crisis, surely this qualified? She threw all her weight against the door, closed her eyes and tensed for the jump.
Nothing happened. She could hear Garrett twisting the knob. She felt his weight against the other side of the door.Please, she thought, turning to what had worked when Peter was suffocating in the cellar.Please, please, I must teleport! Please!
Garrett forced himself through, the door flinging her into the wall. He yanked her back and dragged her to the front door as her head spun.
“Undo the spell around the house,” he demanded.
“I don’t know how,” she lied. If he cast the spell—here, inside—Peter’s charms would alert him. That at least would be something.
“Then I’ll show you,” Garrett said with a growl.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to?—”
“I haven’t the slightest idea how you’re able to castanything, but dropping a shielding spell is no harder than what you just did.”
