She made way for him and sank onto a nearby bench. What happened? Could it simply have been a heart attack or another unfortunate natural event that took him?
Horrible possibilities occurred to her. He told the Pentagram exactly why he was leaving, and they killed him. (But surely he wouldn’t have told them?) He didn’t tell the Pentagram why he was leaving and they killed him anyway. (But why would they kill him and not Peter?) He was at the New Mexico test site the morning she dropped the payload stone, and?—
She stopped, not wanting to think the rest of it. But it came anyway, overwhelming her.
Had she unwittingly killed him?
When Ella set off the weapon, Beatrix had had only seconds to get the payload stone out of downtown Washington, drop it in the desert and teleport out. She hadn’t seen the test-site complex Peter and Martinelli often worked at—or any other sign of civilization—but she’d hardly had time to carefully look. And she had no idea how wide the blast area might be when powered by a wizard—byPeter’s life force. How many died in her effort to save the people living and working in D.C.?
She knew of no way to answer that question. She’d looked for news accounts of death and destruction in New Mexico and found none. The Pentagram, no doubt, would want to keep it quiet.
She went about the rest of the day somehow, taking notes she knew Gray would never read, and walked to the cafeteria, feet leaden. Her employer didn’t show. Twenty minutes past five, she gave up and left, riding the train out of Annapolis feeling even worse than on the train coming in.
CHAPTER 4
She was alone in the forest, standing beside the weapon she’d dismantled in real life—Peter’s terrible Project 96. She sank to the ground, the cold seeping through her dress. Nothing accosted her but her own thoughts for a long while.
Then she heard it: “Beatrix!Beatrix!”
Pointless to tell herself she shouldn’t answer. As long as there was at least an infinitesimal chance this was Peter, she would. Perhaps she would answer even if it were proved beyond a molecule of a doubt that her sleeping brain was playing tricks on her.
“Here,” she called.
The thud of his footsteps announced him, but like before, there was nothing to see. She didn’t wait for him to speak. “There’s no will in the desk. I checked every drawer. I looked in the drawers of the bedroom furniture, too.”
“What?” Peter—or, rather, the voice that sounded like him—seemed suitably shocked. “I put it in the desk drawer the very morning Miss Draden attacked. Ithasto be there.”
“Wizards ransacked your house soon after. They could have taken it, though I don’t know what they would gain by it.”
He sighed. “Keeping you from my money if I die? Though my care would have exhausted it by then, I’m sure. Listen, did you try Martinelli? He could confirm you’re my sole beneficiary and the person I want making medical decisions for me. Maybe that would do some good.”
“Peter …” She wrapped her arms around her knees and lay her head on them. “He’s dead.”
She could feel the horror in the silence that followed. “What happened?” he said finally, the word choked with emotion.
“I don’t know. But …” She swallowed a sob. “You know I took the payload stone to the desert. I don’t have any idea how close I was to the test site—for all I know, it was inside the blast radius. What if it’s my fault? What if I killed everyone in the complex?”
“If that happened, and it’s a hugeifwe should not assume is the case, it would be entirely Miss Draden’s fault,” he snapped.
She thought of telling him her grim theory of why Ella had done what she did. However she looked at it, she could not escape blame. But he might disappear at any moment—she had to use the time more productively.
“Tell me something else I can use to verify you’re you,” she said.
“Right. Yes,” he murmured, the anger gone, a bleakness to the words that mirrored how she felt. “Well, I bank at Provident, but I doubt they’d confirm that to you without the will. My house is in Georgetown, 3336 O Street. It’ll be in the land records, but you can’t exactly take a day off work to go look.”
“Do you have friends I could call, someone who’s been there?”
He made a sound that was halfway between a snort and a sigh. “I never had anyone over.”
How lonely must his years in Washington have been? Of course, he probably spent most of his time at work. With Martinelli.
She fought back another sob.
“Do you know the gift I gave Mrs. Clark for the baby?” he asked.
It was hard to concentrate enough to remember such a small detail. “Um—no.”
“Good. It’s a solar-system mobile. Ask her, and that’s your confirmation I’m not a figment of your imagination.”
