She looked at him, startled.
“No,” he said, quietly but even more firmly. “You hadnothingto do with this. He visited me the day before. He was as clear-headed as always.”
“Oh,” she murmured. “You saw him?”
“Yes. He told me he loved you. He hadn’t given up hope.”
Her face twisted. Tears slid down her cheeks. He shouldn’t have said it.
He cleared his throat awkwardly. “Please forgive me for?—”
“I wasted the time we had,” she said. “I will always regret that. But I can’t tell you what a comfort it is that his last thoughts of me were … were kind.” She rose. “Thank you, Wizard Blackwell. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
He struggled to his feet and took her outstretched hand, unable to speak. Her gratitude—that was worst of all.
Are you all right?
There were many other questions she wanted to ask, but that was simplest. She passed the paper to Peter, sitting next to her on the couch after dinner, Rosemarie chaperoning from the nearby chair—as if there were anything to keep an eye on. They were a perfectly respectable foot apart. He wasn’t so much as holding her hand.
He hesitated before taking the pen and writing a one-word answer:Tired.
That was not the way she would have described how he looked. Beaten down, more like. Miserable, even. She tookthe paper back, contemplated what to say, and settled on a question that hinted at their newest problem:Did you sleep OK?
He seemed to rouse himself at that.Yes. No dreams. I’m concerned.
She swallowed.Gone, you think?
He gave a helpless shrug before putting pen to paper.If the coma kept the link in place when it otherwise would have snapped…
He didn’t finish the thought, but he didn’t have to. If the coma was the key to why dreamside inexplicably outlived the Vows, it ceased to exist the instant he recovered.
For something so irrational as tandem dreaming they could control, that explanation made a certain amount of unfortunate sense.
She stared at their spare conversation on the page. No way to talk to him in person. No way, it now seemed, to talk to him in dreams. And they shouldn’t even be writing to each other like this—a wizard could have slipped into the house, using no spells in town, and they would never know. A wizard could be standing next to the couch and looking over Peter’s shoulder this very instant.
She jumped to her feet, ran to the bathroom and burned the paper, stomach clenching at the thought of the dangerously revealing things she’d written in this house before his coma. They couldn’t afford any more mistakes.
She returned to sit in complete silence with Peter, the words she wanted to say pressing at her like a thousand pinpricks from the inside. Thirteen days before they couldhave a safe conversation. Thirteen days before she could ask him how he really felt about her.
He took her hand. She looked at him, her imprudent heart giving a hopeful lurch.
“I’d better go,” he said.
“Yes,” she murmured, the unsaid words nearly choking her.
She wokethe next morning with more evidence that Peter was right. Dreamside had not returned. She could think of nothing else until she bent down to pick up the newspaper on the stoop and saw their faces on the front page.
The story was out.
“THE LEAGUE’S WIZARD,” theStar’s headline declared—stripped above a photo that looked like something out of the cinema. Peter’s anguished face pressed to hers. Her hands clutching his coat, his ring visible on her finger.
She averted her eyes and hastily read the story.
It was good. Very good. Washington officials denied any connection to the image and anonymous note, but Hickok called eight League leaders who all told the same story of how they’d received them. Two, in fact, reported hearing apopoutside the door, the significance of which Hickok had made sure to explain.
“All this,” Hickok wrote, “while Blackwell had yet to be released from the hospital in which he’d nearly died.”
There was a quote from Gray: “Americans owe Omnimancer Blackwell a debt of gratitude, and the Abbott administration should be ashamed of itself.”
