“No.”
“You just see the forest and hear my disembodied voice, then?”
He paused, surprised and unsettled. “I don’t seem tobein a forest. It’s just pitch-black nothingness.”
He heard another swish of her skirt. She took a few steps, dry leaves crunching under her feet, and stopped with a soft“oh!”
“There’s a wall between us,” she explained.
“What?”
“It feels like … it almost feels like it’s made of magic.”
He frowned, stretching out a hand to try to touch the unseen edge of the darkness around him.
The starburst of agony would have been blinding, if there were anything to look at in the first place. The world jostled around him. The sensation of limbs disappeared.
He was dayside again, trapped in his own head. No, no,no!
He tried desperately to get back to sleep. But eventually the church bell tolled six, and he knew it was too late.
He could do nothing then but lie awake, thinking—to little effect. Was there some malevolent magic at work in his inability to come out of the coma? If so, how could such a thing be fought?
When he finally stopped turning that around in his head for fear of driving himself crazy, he thought instead about the broken Vows. She hadn’t said how she felt about him now. What if that was an answer in itself? What if all her visits to his bedside were nothing more than misplaced guilt over what her friend had done?
He poked at his own feelings, hoping they had similarly altered. He thought of her Plan B—a betrayal he’d hardly had time to process. She’d lied to him, endangered him, made a mockery of the partnership they’d built?—
But then, he’d done the very same to her. He’d set out to entrap her in a job that required her to break federal law. How could he in good conscience tell himself that what she did was worse?
Perhaps because it came later, after they’d been through so much together. Or perhaps it was only because this time, he was the victim.
One thing was clear: What Beatrix had done stung so much because he loved her. The Vows were gone, and now he knew without a doubt.
By taking it at a near-run,Beatrix reached Peter’s house with twenty minutes to spare before her train was due. Sheopened the top drawer of his desk with shaking hands and a rapidly beating heart.
Empty.
She looked in every other drawer in the desk. She clattered up the stairs to his bedroom and looked in all the drawers he had there. Finally running out of time, she dashed for the train and rode it to Annapolis with burning eyes squeezed shut. Maybe the magiocracy had taken it. But what good would that do them? She would have to call Martinelli and see if he had indeed witnessed Peter’s will, and if he hadn’t—well, that would be that.
How easily she had believed. How desperately she’d wanted that would-be Peter—his voice suddenly there and just as abruptly gone—to be what he’d said he was.
Gray was not in the cafeteria, so she schlepped to the first of the hearings on her list for the day. After three hours of mind-numbing testimony about accrual accounting, she ran to a payphone.
The operator rang the Pentagram for her. The Pentagram’s operator transferred her to another office. The secretary who answered the line said nothing for a long moment when she asked for Wizard Martinelli.
“Ma’am?” Beatrix said, wondering if she’d lost the connection.
“I’m sorry, he’s—he’s no longer with us.”
She sighed. Right. “Do you happen to know where I might find him? It involves a will.”
“No, I mean—he’s dead,” the woman said, voice catching.
Beatrix sagged against the telephone booth, horror clutching at her heart, stomach, lungs. “But I saw him just a few weeks ago” fell from her lips, as if that mattered. She added, “What happened? Was he ill?”
“No, he—” The woman cleared her throat. “That’s all I can say. Is there anyone else you need to speak with?”
“No, thank you,” Beatrix whispered and hung up, standing shell-shocked in the booth until a man rapped on the door, scowling at her.
