“No one knows I have this apartment?—”
“Check anyway.”
Ella cast the magic detector—it didn’t take until the third try, which suggested she was every bit as rattled as Beatrix. It showed nothing, no one invisibly monitoring them. Beatrix cast a soundproofing spell on the room for good measure.
“What fruit did we practice with in Peter’s house?” she asked, wanting to be absolutely, completely sure.
The answer came without hesitation: “Crabapples.”
“What do you call the magic you can do?”
“Knitting.”
“Why did you say I couldn’t really be in love with Peter?”
The face that looked like Frederick Draden’s winced. “Because you’re both under Vows to each other. But I shouldn’t have?—”
“The Vows are broken. Peter’s heart stopped after the explosion and I restarted it with CPR.”
“Oh,” Ella said very quietly. Her lips trembled. “What I did was monstrous. I—I’m not asking you to forgive me, because it’s unforgiveable.”
Why did you do it, then?She wanted to ask that—needed to—but not now. Too many other questions could not afford to wait.
“Tell me truthfully,” she said. “Are you a danger to my life or anyone else’s?”
“No.” Ella hung her head. “No, I swear I’m not.”
Beatrix took a breath and forced out the question that had circled through her head without reprieve for hours: “Is Peter dead?”
“Alive—he’s alive.”
Beatrix collapsed into a chair, legs rubbery from a mix of relief over that answer and dread of the one to come: “Rosemarie?”
“I haven’t been able to find out.”
Beatrix moaned. Ella added: “My father doesn’t keep ‘Frederick’ in the loop. I didn’t know about the plot to kill Lydia at the march, either, or of course I would have warned you. But I managed to overhear a few things tonight. Like ‘Blackwell is demanding a Vow from you’ and ‘fine, only if he takes one, too.’”
Beatrix looked at her in a panic. “What?”
“That’s good news, really—they wouldn’t extract a Vow from him if they were about to kill him.”
But he couldn’t cast it. That was the problem. “Where do they have him?”
“I don’t know.”
“We have to get him out!”
Ella glanced away. “Beatrix …”
“Youowehim,” she snarled. “The weapon you set off with his life force took away his ability to cast”—Ella gasped—“so he can’t take a Vow, he can’t work any spells, he can’t escape.You owe him, Ella Knight!”
Ella nodded, looking painfully earnest. “Yes. I do. I owe him my life, if that’s what it takes. But I don’t know how to find out where they’ve got him. I asked my father outright what was going on so I could ‘help,’ but he brushed me off.” She slumped in her seat. “Morse clearly doesn’t trust me. I’d have been better off if I’d just cast an illusion to make myself a random wizard.”
Bracing herself, Beatrix asked: “Where’s your brother?”
“Dead,” Ella said flatly. “He was dead when I showed up. Facedown in his own vomit.”
Beatrix shuddered. “And when you say you can’t drop this illusion …” She gestured toward Ella’s unnerving façade.
