Rosemarie got in before she could go on. “Surely with practice?—”
“No, I mean … it’s unsafe under any circumstances.” She looked down at the floor. It would be easier this way. “Ella never showed any sign of being unhinged before—you know she didn’t. But then she started using magic this way, and in a matter of weeks, she almost murdered tens of thousands of people.”
“In all fairness, Bee, we don’t know that had anything to do with it,” her sister said. “I mean,youdidn’t try to kill anyone.”
“But I did,” Beatrix said, voice catching. “I came very close on two occasions.”
The silence in the room was suffocating. She swallowed and went on. “The woman who was a failed Plan B recruit—the one who wanted to inform the magiocracy?—”
Lydia broke in. “You thought you would handle it bymurderingher?”
“No, no, we showed up disguised as wizards to make her think she was reporting it. That was the plan. But then we made a mistake and I thought she’d realized that we weren’t wizards at all, I thought she was about to call the tip line again, and I—I only just pulled back from attacking her. I wasn’t thinking, ‘I will kill her,’ but that’s what almost certainly would have happened.”
Peter’s hand twitched in hers. “And the other time?”
“Garrett.” She shuddered. “When Garrett discovered me casting spells and said what he planned to do—Iwantedto kill him. I knew how I could do it. I had my hand to his neckand … and I changed my mind just in time. I didn’t know what had come over me.”
“Stress—that’s what it was, surely,” Rosemarie muttered.
“No. No, you don’t know how itfelt.There was something wrong with me,” Beatrix said, forcing the words out. “It was only after Ella did what she did that I realized what might have come over us both. She used magic that way far more than I did. Imagine the effect that could have had.”
She turned away, pressing her hands to her face. “And I taught her. You warned me it could be dangerous, Peter, you told me there was no way to know its effects, and I didn’tlisten. I showed Ella, and everything that happened afterward is my fault. Her mental breakdown. Your coma. Martinelli. And now this.”
No one said anything for a moment. Then Peter put an arm around her. “Beatrix,” he said gently, “what happened with Project 96 is myfault.”
“But if I’d taken your warning seriously?—”
“No, listen. I developed the procedure necessary to use living fuel, I disregarded the inner voice telling me the whole thing wasn’t a good idea until finally it was too loud to ignore, and then I idioticallybrought the device here under the assumption that nothing bad could happen while I tried to figure out a defense.”
He let out a long breath. “Martinelli is dead because of my bad decisions. It wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. I can’t just push the blame onto Miss Draden—and I certainly don’t blame you.”
She looked at him. He offered a grim smile. “Losing my ability to use magic is the least of what I deserve.”
Rosemarie cleared her throat. “As fascinating as it is to see how you both apportion responsibility for the situation, could wepleasefocus on the key question: What are we to do now?”
Seconds ticked by without suggestions. Her question had no good answer.
“Let’s continue this conversation tomorrow,” Lydia said, her voice subdued. “We can consider our options then.”
Peter dropped them off on his way to Gray’s—what to tell Gray, if anything, was one of the options they would have to consider—and she lingered in the passenger seat beside him as her sister and Rosemarie got out.
“I love you,” she said in a forceful whisper, meaning it every bit as much as she had earlier in the evening. More, in fact.
He pulled her close. Voice choked with emotion, he said, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
CHAPTER 13
The ceiling was so high. That was what Peter remembered thinking at first, as a kid trying to keep his mind off the desperate hope that he could pass the test every thirteen-year-old boy in the county had showed up to take.
He had never been inside the county’s high school before. By that point he’d known he wouldn’t be attending it—Nan didn’t have the money; Mrs. Harper wouldn’t let a bastard child have one of her scholarships. He’d kept staring at the ceiling, overwhelmed by the thought that he would be poor his whole life and Nan would never get the comfortable final years she deserved.
For as long as he could recall, she’d told him things would get better because he was smart. “College! That’s your ticket out, darling boy,” she’d said when they shivered in the cold apartment in the winter or broiled in it all summer. “You’llbe a doctor someday, mark my words,” she’d said when they were down to their last tin of meat or had nothing for dinner but the wild greens she gathered from the edge of the forest. “Study hard—you’ll see.”
But it hadn’t mattered how hard he’d studied.
As he’d stared at the ceiling, afraid if he put his head down that tears might leak out, he’d heard the exam plodding forward: the presiding wizard’s instructions; one group of boys after another marching to the stage to take their turn in reverse alphabetical order; the many repetitions of the awkward spellword. And most significantly, the sighs and groans that followed each group attempt—no cheers, because each boy had revealed himself to be a typic.
That was always the way. Two percent of men were wizards, supposedly, but the last time a county boy had passed this test was a generation before Peter had been born. Ellicott Mills had never produced a wizard.
