“Out of surgery. The doctors are hopeful.”
Beatrix closed her eyes, overcome, taking great, shaking breaths. Lydia was alive. Alive, not dead.
“I don’t think she’s in danger of another attack,” Ella added, and that brought Beatrix back to herself.
“It wasn’t Peter?—”
“I know.” Ella’s voice caught. “It was Morse.”
The very wizard Ella had warned them about. A sob rose from Beatrix’s throat and she couldn’t stop it, couldn’t control the tears or hold back the scream of despair and rage.
“It’s—it’s going to be OK.” Ella’s words had an edge of pleading to them, not reassurance. Her voice sounded gravelly, deeper than usual. “Beatrix, I …”
Invisible hands gripped her arms in a supportive gesture, and for a moment it didn’t matter to Beatrix that Ella had almost killed Peter five months earlier, that Ella’s current soundness of mind had not yet been established, or that Ella had made her a fugitive without asking her opinion on the matter. Beatrix leaned in to hug her—and leapt back the next moment, heart kicking up so fast she almost lost her balance and fell.
Too tall. Broad shoulders. Flat chest.
Not Ella.
“Whoareyou?” she shouted.
“Beatrix, I can explain?—”
“Take off the invisibility spell!” she demanded, again grasping for the leaves in her bodice.
“No, listen?—”
“Bemelde,” Beatrix yelled, and the figure snapped into view.
Standing before her, a look of horror on his face that echoed the feeling exploding from the pit of her stomach, was Frederick Draden.
A few seconds passed in silence, Beatrix’s heart juddering in her chest, her hands aimed at Draden. She’d thought Ella might be masquerading as him, yes, but now she was certain this was not her. Ella’s illusions, as convincing as they were, only changed how something looked—not how it felt.
She’d just outed herself as an illegal magic user to the vice president’s horrifying son.
“Beatrix,” Draden said in that voice that sounded almost but not quite like Ella, “I swear it’s me, I used magic?—”
“Undo it, then!”
Draden grimaced. “God, I wish I could.”
“Keep your hands away from your pockets,” she shouted.
He raised them over his head. “Listen—justlisten, OK?”
She set her jaw but said nothing. Draden took a shuddering breath.
Then, rapid fire: “I met you at a League meeting in Baltimore in April 2018. When I lived in your house, I had the first bedroom on the right, second floor. I hated teaching. I especially hated grading. Iloatheladies’ shoes and once bought a pair of boys’ boots, then convinced you to put them on to?—”
“Stop,” Beatrix said, beside herself. “That doesn’t prove anything! The magiocracy could have learned any of those facts!”
“I set off the weapon.” Draden’s voice broke on the words. “I almost killed tens of thousands of people.”
That shocked Beatrix into silence. Draden—Ella—continued in the same quivering, desperate tone. “I pretended to be you. I drugged Omnimancer Blackwell. I caused the explosion, knowing he would die. And then somehow, one or both of you moved the payload stone and saved everybody, thank God.”
Beatrix didn’t see how the magiocracy could have figured that out. And if they had, they would immediately have arrested Peter for absconding with the weapon in the first place.
“Is this room safe?” she murmured.
