“Monday, then. Marry me on Monday.”
“Yes,” she said, looking as radiantly happy as he felt.
CHAPTER 12
Later, after they’d finished feeding each other their cold food, after they’d kissed and talked and kissed some more, after she’d stripped the spells from the room and he’d paid the waiter with effusive thanks, they headed for his car in a bubble of euphoria.
“I love you,” he murmured.
She kissed his ear. “I loveyou.”
“I love you, I love you, I love you. Just trying to catch up for lost time.”
“I will never tire of hearing that,” she said, leaning into him.
They turned onto Charles Street, its upscale restaurants and elite gathering spots lit up on either side of them. “I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t take you here,” he said apologetically.
She laughed, looking up at the sleek exterior of a private club. “I was so relieved you didn’t.”
Two men tumbled out the door and nearly bowled into them. One was tow-haired, his head turned to his companion behind him. Then the other man straightened up. His hair was silver—a long queue of silver.
Beatrix, tensing, sucked in a breath. Peter recognized him with a nasty start the very next moment.
Not just any wizard. Frederick Draden.
The vice president’s son, the predator who raped his own sister and was never held to account for it, flicked his hair over his shoulder.
“You’re that piece-of-shit Blackwell,” he said with a disgust that perfectly mirrored what Peter felt for him. The man coughed and spat on the sidewalk between them.
Peter pulled Beatrix closer. “You’re Frederick Draden.”
Draden put a hand in his pocket, and in that split second, Peter made up his mind: This was an emergency. Now, here. He went for his own leaves and shouted“beorgan!”
Nothing happened.
No tingle of magic in his stomach. Nozipof it through his arm. No puff of leaves turning to smoke. No protective shielding settling on them. Nothing.
As Peter stood there, overcome by blank shock, Draden swayed and fell.
“What have you done to him?” the other man cried out.
“Nothing,” Draden said, his tone at once irritated and breathless. “He cast a protective spell, the coward. Stop faffing around”—he coughed—“and help me up, Ritter.”
That bought Peter a few more seconds to consider what they should do. Run? Stay put and hope the wizard didn’t realize the spell utterly failed?
As Draden struggled to his feet, gasping for air, it finally clicked that the man was seriously ill.
“Bottle,” Draden choked out.
The typic slipped a hand into the pocket Draden had been reaching into, pulled out a flask of the sort an omnimancer would use for medicinals and helped him take a sip.
“Good-bye, Omnimancer,” Draden said contemptuously, walking away with assistance. “Have fun fucking your little revolutionary”—he gave another hacking cough—“and the whole of wizardkind.”
“Oh,” Beatrix said in an undertone once the men were a block away. “You have no idea how much I wanted to demand how he could have done what he did to—” She caught his shell-shocked expression and must have misunderstood it, because she quickly added, “I know I can’t. It would make us even more of a target. But Iwantedto.”
“It’s not that.” He leaned in and whispered, as quietly as he could, “My spell didn’t work.”
Her eyes widened. She felt her arm, her shoulder, her head for the hard coatingbeorganshould have left but did not.
