Miss Dane cleared her throat. “Good-bye, Omnimancer.”
“Peter.” He let it spill out before he could second-guess himself. “Please—I would like it if we could call each other by our first names.”
She looked surprised but inclined her head. “Very well, then. Peter.”
Off they went, Rosemarie—how odd to think of her in that familiar way—and Lydia. He locked the door and took Beatrix’s hand. “All these months I’ve seen the strategizing and disapproval but completely missed the real emotion behind it. I misjudged her.”
“Oh!” She laughed. “So did I—foryears. It wasn’t until ... until your coma. That was when I realized she was trying in her own prickly way to mother me, and I needed to listen harder to what she meant.”
This image of Rosemarie Dane as a well-meaning porcupine made him grin. Then he recollected what they were supposed to be doing. Sighing, he turned to the receiving room.
It took only a moment to gather up the hate mail—he’d kept it separate, never mind what Beatrix helpfully told Tanner—and he was halfway up the stairs when it hit him. Miss Dradencouldn’tframe him—not anymore, not without fatally damaging Lydia’s movement. Before, his help had been a secret. Now it was extremely public.
That was probably the only reason he wasn’t behind bars.
Under the cover of darkness in the spare room, he pretended to cast spells while Beatrix actually did so. Once the room was safe and light, he watched her copy the threatening letters with lithe fingers, the magic making his gut twist. He lay down on the floor, eyes on the ceiling like the boy he once was, casting his gaze away from what he couldn’t have. Not just magic. For now, at least, also Beatrix.
Eventually she murmured“awritan” for the last time. The sound of papers being stacked together followed, and then the rustle of her skirt as she lay down next to him.
“Did you catch all my conversations with Detective Tanner when you were comatose?” she asked. “Particularly the one where he first revealed that Garrett was their suspect?”
“No—by the time I could hear, you were clearly discussing something you already knew about. Better tell me everything, just in case.”
She tucked her head on his shoulder and unspooled the details, three of which he had in fact missed—the marriage license Garrett had obtained by forging her signature, the unsettling photographs taken while invisibly stalking herand the insistence to a colleague that he had a “plan” to make Beatrix his.
“I don’t know what that would have been,” she said, voice quiet, “but I don’t think anything good would have come from it.”
“God, no.” He shuddered. Perhaps Miss Draden hadn’t been quite so mad—in that one case. It was even the honest truth that Garrett had nearly killed him, just not on the day in question and not quite intentionally.
He took a deep, shaky breath.The mere memory of being affixed to his basement wall where Garrett had left him, unable to move as his own malformed spell slowly suffocated him, always stole the air from his chest. But even before Garrett had gone and he’d realized the true danger he was in, he’d thought he might die. The look in Garrett’s eyes—the rage in his voice?—
Still. Unstable and dangerous though Garrett seemed to have been, the fact remained that Miss Draden had killed him, and he and Beatrix were complicit because they knew and said nothing.
Now they would have to speak publicly about this mess of a case.
“Peter,” she said, “about the press conference…”
“We don’t need to say much.”
She let out a breath. “But what?”
They settled on a few things, pending police approval. Then the subject was covered, and he no longer had an excuse to delay telling her that he could not marry her onMonday—that he had no idea when he would be in a position to marry her.
The silence stretched out. He glared at the ceiling and tried to make himself say the words.
“Forgive an utterly stupid question,” she said, “but how are you feeling?”
He sighed. “Everything it is humanly possible to feel, that’s how I’m feeling. All at once.”
She said nothing for a moment, then laid a hand over his heart. “Peter, tell me truly, now that you’ve had more time to think about it: Has this changed how you feel about me?”
He shifted to look her in the eye. “No—no.” He traced her jaw wistfully. “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”
A tear sparkled in the corner of her eye. “O no,” she murmured, “it is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.”
Three months ago he’d said that to her, lying on another floor in this house, plucked by her shaking hands from death by suffocation. So much had changed since that night, but this much was the same.
“I know you inside and out,” he said, “and I will never stop loving you.”
