Peter snorted. “Absolutely none taken.”
“I do want a wizard doc to have a look at you, though. You know, just in case a few of those end-all, be-all spells might actually help. He’ll be in tomorrow.” Alvarez cocked his head. “I have to say, your recovery is nothing short of remarkable. I’ve never had a patient come out of a coma and immediately start talking sensibly, eating and walking. I might have to revise my opinion that wizards bleed red like the rest of us peons.”
“I think I’m just lucky.”
“In more ways than one, I’d say.” Alvarez gave a meaningful jerk of the head toward Beatrix, deeply asleep in her armchair.
Beatrix, the reason he wasn’t dead. Beatrix, who loved him.
“Yes,” Peter murmured, gazing at her. “Very lucky.”
CHAPTER 6
He finally convinced her to go home. She argued, but he was right that she couldn’t take another night of half-sleep on that armchair. “I’ll be fine, truly,” he’d said, so she went—unable to fully quash the anxiety that something might happen to him.
She woke the next morning in a panic. No dreamside. She dialed the hospital with shaking, clumsy fingers, was transferred to his room and listened with mounting dread as the phone rang three times, four, five.
Then he picked up. “Hello?”
“Oh,” she said, visions of disaster evaporating. “Good morning! Are you … all right?”
“Yes.” The tiniest of pauses. “I made the mistake of taking a long nap in the afternoon, though, so I didn’t sleep well last night.”
That explained why they’d never intersected. They made arrangements for her to come down after lunch and she hung up, giddy with relief.
When she arrived at the hospital, she found Peter walking in his room with a cane, his back to her. He turned at the sound of her footsteps and gave her a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
“Is something wrong?” she said, closing the distance between them.
He shook his head, lips twisting. “I’m alive, I’m on my feet, you love me—what could possibly be wrong?” Leaning in, he whispered, “Where is Garrett?”
No wonder he’d looked worried. That worried her, too. “I don’t know,” she admitted.
“Not in Ellicott Mills?”
With no way to know if they were being recorded, it was little wonder he didn’t say anything more specific. She couldn’t say what she otherwise would, either—his body is gone, and I think Ella took it—so she opted for “I don’t think so” instead.
They desperately needed to have a proper conversation, the sort possible only with magic protecting them from eavesdroppers.
“Here,” she said, handing him leaves she’d picked up at his house.
“Thank goodness,” he muttered, stuffing them into the pockets of his gray hospital robe. She wondered if some of his inability to sleep the night before had been the uneasiness of lying unprotected and alone in his room. Whywas the WA so intent on getting him even after he’d come out of the coma?
A knock broke the silence. She looked around to find the wizard doctor in the doorway, his silver dreadlocks a shimmering shade off from his medical whites.
“Well, this is certainly a major improvement,” he said, smiling at them.
She gave him a cautious smile back. She hoped her instincts about him were right. “Peter, this is Wizard Hillier, who looked you over while you were in the coma.”
Hillier gestured out the door. “Feeling up to a short walk?”
The doctor chatted genially about Peter’s incredible recovery as they rode an elevator two floors up. He led them along a busy hallway and opened a door. “After you.”
The room inside had a view of the city that made her heart constrict. There, the Capitol. And just beyond, though she couldn’t see it, was the dingy park where Peter nearly died.
“Your office?” Peter asked.
Hillier gave a soft chuckle. “No, like all itinerants, I don’t get an office. But this one is between occupants, and I like the sunshine. Have a seat, Omnimancer, Miss Harper.”
