Page 34 of Magic for Nothing

“She’s more than related. She’s close family. Her father’s father was the son of Alexander and Enid Healy, who deserted the Covenant after being led astray by heathen teachings.” Leo said this like it was perfectly reasonable, and not bizarro revisionist history. “They left their children behind when they went, they were in such a hurry to put an ocean between them and people who thought rightly about humanity’s place in the world. Margaret should have been like my sister. She should have been born a princess within the Covenant. Good bloodline, centuries of service, grand knights in her family tree. Instead, she’s been watched like a hawk her entire life, because some people think deceit runs in the blood. She’s angry, and she has every right to be. Those people destroyed her life before she was even born, and there was never anything she could have done.”

“That’s . . . wow.” I tried to look shocked, instead of furious. I wasn’t sure it was working. “Why did they leave their kids behind? My parents would have never done that to me.”

“They were traitors. Who knows how a traitor thinks?”

There was a flicker of motion near his foot. I glanced down and saw Mork running at Leo’s ankle, whiskers flat, looking for all the world like he was about to attack the man for the sake of his gods.

Great-Great-Grandpa Alexander and Great-Great-Grandma Enid have been dead for a long time, and I didn’t think they were going to be particularly upset by one Covenant member badmouthing them. Mork, on the other hand, wasn’t dead, and had become my responsibility the moment he announced his intention to come back to America with me. Quick as I could, I stepped forward, grabbed Leo’s hands in what I hoped would seem like an impulsive gesture, and pulled him toward me, away from the enraged Aeslin mouse.

“I don’t know how a traitor thinks, but I know I want to thank you, truly, for being so kind to me,” I said, staring into his eyes and praying my own hands wouldn’t choose this moment to heat up. “I knew I was taking a risk when I came to England. This could have ended so incredibly badly. It didn’t, and a lot of that is down to you being such a good friend. We’re friends, right?”

Leo blinked, a flicker of surprise rolling across his face before he smiled. “Sure,” he said. “Friends. You’ll be back here soon enough, mission done, and then you can swear properly, and be a true member of the Covenant. We’ll have to go out to celebrate. Just the two of us. Do you dance?”

The question came far enough out of left field that I answered honestly: “Does a mosh pit count?”

His smile could have lit up the room. “Oh, we are going to have a lot of fun when you get back, Annie. Keep yourself in one piece, all right? You have training to do, and we need to go dancing.”

Mindy had grabbed Mork by the tail and was dragging him under the nearest dresser. Given the utter lack of self-preservation he was currently exhibiting, I had no idea how the Aeslin mice had been able to survive in this building for as long as they had.

Leo was still beaming at me. I smiled back, somewhat weakly. This wasn’t part of my playbook. It never had been.

Is he going to kiss me? I thought. If he kisses me, I’m going to have to let him. For the mice.

He did not kiss me. Thank God. Instead, he let go of my hands and took a decorous step back before saying, “I think it’s going to be lovely having you here. I’ll even see about getting you moved to a different room, without Chloe to snore in your ear all night.”

“That’s okay, I don’t—you know what, no. No one is that good of a liar. Please move me. She could wake the dead.”

“She did, once. We’d been trying to track down this nasty little spirit that kept haunting its childhood home. Finally popped Chloe into the girl’s room. The thing materialized to ask us to get my sister out of there.”

“What did you do with her?”

“Woke her up and told her to sleep in her own bed.”

“I meant the ghost.”

“Oh, that. We stuffed the thing into a spirit jar. It’s not going to bother anyone else.” Leo’s smile had a different edge on it this time. “Just think. Soon, that sort of story is going to be yours. Car leaves for London in an hour. See you then.”

He turned and left the room, leaving me to stare after him. These people . . .

I had to get out of here. Luckily for me, that was exactly what I was doing.

Ten

“The trick is not learning to disappear. The trick is learning to hide in plain sight, until everyone around you swears you belong exactly where you are.”

—Jane Harrington-Price

The baggage claim area at the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport, getting real sick of time zones

FOR REASONS OF “they can’t catch us both if we’re never in the same place at the same time,” Margaret and I flew in on different planes, under the auspices of different airlines. I didn’t know what they arranged for her, but I’d been on a London to Chicago American Airlines flight, followed by a Southwest Air short-range hopper to Minneapolis. My next trick was going to involve a five-hour bus ride to Madison. By the time I got there, I expected to be just this side of homicidal, possibly with a side order of setting every damn thing in the world on fire.

Margaret was going to beat me by at least six hours, courtesy of not having been routed through Minnesota for no good reason. Madison was only three hours from Chicago, by bus. This was the Covenant’s idea of misdirection, and I hated it.

(On the plus side, there weren’t many people taking the middle-of-the-week flight from London to Chicago. I’d been able to claim a row at the back of the plane as my very own, allowing Mork and Mindy to crawl out of my bag and spend most of the flight playing with the seatback entertainment system while I dozed. It was the most normal thing I’d done in weeks.)

Other things I hated: the fact that I’d just bounced through Chicago, where my Uncle Mike and Aunt Lea lived, and where the Carmichael Hotel with its staff of friendly gorgons was located, and I hadn’t been able to tell them I was there. Margaret was going to be watching me like a hawk—for all I knew, she already was. I was pretty sure there’d been no Covenant spies on the plane, because there’s devotion to the mission and then there’s doing that to yourself voluntarily, and besides, I’d been at the back of the plane, where I could see people coming, but as soon as my feet hit American soil, all bets were off. She could be following me, having lied about her travel plans. They could have sent someone else to make sure I went where I was supposed to go. There were too many variables. It wasn’t safe to reach out. Not yet, anyway.

As if triggered by my meandering thoughts, I caught a glimpse of a man who was either Robert Bullard or his long-lost twin. I stretched and yawned, using the motion to cover a slight turn of my head, but the man was gone. The cold feeling he’d awakened in my chest remained.