It's here!
You can find the free bonus story about Beatrix and Peter lower in this email. It's set about two years after the main events of Revolutionary, partway into the epilogue period (before the scene in the diner, specifically).
So our heroes are getting some well-deserved happily ever after ... but they're both a bit frustrated at the start. This is me, after all: I had to throw in some complications.
Half the story is below, with a link to the other half on my site. That heads up I gave last time about some steam? It's in the second part. If you prefer to skip over steamy scenes, here's an easy way to do it: When you get to the point where Peter says, “Distract me,” hit control-F on a PC (or command-F on a Mac), put in “He pushed to his feet” and jump there by hitting the enter/return key. Magic!
Oh, and this story — not surprisingly — contains spoilers for the Clandestine Magic trilogy. You'll want to have read Revolutionary already.
Hit reply when you're done, if you're so inclined, and let me know if I left out any characters you wanted to see, tell me your guess for the name of the next book (it's in the story somewhere) or share anything else on your mind.
OK: Quick pause for some other books you might like to read, and then on to "Interlude."
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A few more cool & bookish things
The family business comes calling for a woman with relatives in Heaven and Hell. The Frosted Ball offers a lady and a notorious pirate a second chance. Find those books and a bunch more on Kindle Unlimited in this promotion.
A woman whose search for scrap metal turns up a rare and dangerous key, an elf on the run, and a weredodo (yes, weredodo) intent on solving a crime. Find these free-for-everyone stories right here.
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And now: Interlude
October 31, 2023
The man leaning against the stone wall at the edge of the women’s college drew curious glances from passing students. His coat, long and midnight blue, gave him the air of a wizard. His hair, short and brown, suggested he was a typic.
His smile as he saw Beatrix Blackwell left no doubt he was hers.
“I thought you wouldn’t be back until tomorrow,” she exclaimed, throwing her arms around her husband.
“Mm,” Peter said. “I wanted to see you today.”
She pressed closer with a sigh. “And the funder said no?”
The vibrations from his soft laugh went right through her own chest. “So much for my grand distraction.”
“You’re quite distracting, my good sir.” She stepped back and took his arm, leading him off campus. “Far too distracting to go on standing here, in fact.”
The way his eyes crinkled told her he was amused. But the turn of his lips showed his disappointment about the failed trip. He’d thought this time would be the charm, the proposal that would finally fund the lab they hoped to run.
“As I recall,” she said, “a wise man once told me I would need a graduate degree at the very least before attempting medical research. There’s still time.”
“As I recall, that man was a bit of an idiot.”
She stole a kiss in lieu of a response.
They walked a short distance in silence, the crisp breeze ruffling his coat and her long brown skirt. Hazelhurst College was not so avant-garde as to allow its students to wear pants—even bloomers. Not yet, she thought. So much she still wanted from the world that it refused to provide … yet.
She caught Peter looking at her and stole another kiss, heart accelerating as he trailed a hand down her back. His lips were cold. His mouth was warm.
At the sound of an approaching car, they pulled away with huffs of not-quite laughter. “Necking in public,” he said with mock scorn. “Those scandalous Blackwells.”
“A splendid word. Scandalous,” she said, drawing out the sibilants.
“A bit less splendid when you hear it from the man you’re trying to convince to fund your lab.”
“What?”
“I think he neglected to fully read our proposal before inviting me to Boston,” he said, jaw tightening, “or else he wouldn’t have been so surprised about your area of research.”
Ah.
“Do you think he would have funded just you?” she asked, aiming for mildly curious but sounding a bit wistful.
“It doesn’t matter. That’s not the lab I want.”
Still an idealist at heart—which, depending on the situation, either charmed or exasperated her. Sometimes both at once. “This is not the outfit I want,” she pointed out, gesturing at her skirt, “but needs must.”
“We’ll get the money,” he said, the cadence of the words communicating how stubborn he was prepared to be.
She was so tempted to kiss him again. Their bed had been cold and lonely without him in it. But another car came around the bend, so she set a brisk pace instead, eager to get him home.
“How was your exam?” he asked, snatching a brilliantly orange leaf blowing through the air with the hand that wasn’t twined with hers.
“Not quite as brutal as I expected.” She grinned. “Thank you for the supplementary lecture, Dr. Blackwell.”
“My inorganic chemistry professor would be astonished that I grasped any of it well enough to explain it to someone else. By far my worst class.”
“I thought the class where they locked you in a room with booby traps was the worst one.”
“That was interesting, though.”
She bumped her shoulder against his. “Makes me feel bad to ever complain about the final exams Hazelhurst gives.”
He chuckled. But his expression turned pensive as they walked on. “Do you wish you could have gone? To the wizardry academy, I mean.”
She’d given that some thought, of course. How could she not, after discovering that women were capable of magic and the government had kept it a highly classified secret for ninety years?
The answer she’d settled on was no.
“When you went to the academy, they decided what you would study, where you would work, what you would do.” She shook her head. “Not a chance.”
“When you put it that way,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to go, either.” He glanced down at the leaf in his hand, too far gone for casting with. “Not, of course, that I could anymore.”
For months after he’d woken from the coma and discovered he could no longer work magic, she’d thought his abilities might—might—return. She had a well-developed sense of pessimism, born of experience, but it didn’t seem unreasonable to hope. Perhaps what the weapon took from him was only temporary. A cut could heal and shorn hair could regrow. Why not the essence, whatever it was, that had once permitted him to spellcast?
He’d hoped, too. He didn’t talk about it, but she could tell by the press of his lips and the angle of his shoulders when his spell attempts—first daily, then weekly, then monthly—came to naught.
At some point after the two-year mark, he all but stopped trying. His magic was not coming back.
“What about the witches’ academy?” he asked, clearly wanting to drag the conversation back on track before she said something stupidly well-meaning like you know your magic is the least important thing about you. (“I rather liked it, though,” he’d retorted. Then he’d apologized for snapping, which just made her feel worse.)
She shook her head, focusing on his question. “The witches’ academy that does not exist and, quote, never will, so help me God?”
“The Senate majority leader can say whatever he likes. It’s up to the president. Eventually, Joan’s going to prevail.”
She hoped so. The founder and president of the fast-growing National Organization for Witches had made an academy her top priority, and Joan Hamilton was very good at getting under President Abbott’s skin. Every day from sunrise to sunset, women recruited by Joan stood outside the White House with a pointed banner: Mr. President, how long must witches wait for equality? Every weekend, speakers drafted by Joan attracted a crowd and annoyed Abbott further. (Beatrix, who’d held the banner on multiple occasions and spoken here and there, once got a flash of his grim expression as he rode in his presidential car through the gates.)
There was no good reason for the magiocracy to deny women a magical education.
Of course, bad reasons often won out.
“So,” he persisted, “if I’m right, will you go?”
She looked at Peter, surprised. She’d thought he was merely asking her opinion about whether a witches’ academy would dictate the lives of its students as much as the wizards’ academies did.
“You know I won’t go,” she said. “We talked about it, remember?”
“Beatrix,” he murmured, “please tell me you’re not letting thoughts of how I might take it influence your decision.”
She stopped, mouth open. Into the silence, he added, “My lack of magic should have no bearing on what you do with yours. If I’ve given you even a hint of worry that I couldn’t be completely happy for you, then shame on me.”
“Husband mine,” she said, stepping closer and taking both his hands in hers, “that didn’t once cross my mind.”
His smile was there and gone. “You’ve been careful with me. You can’t deny it.”
“Well …”
“You can’t honestly deny it, I mean.”
She bit her lip. She lifted his left hand, the one that held the striking orange leaf like a talisman. “I don’t want to make you feel worse. But,” she said more loudly over his attempt to cut in, “that has absolutely nothing to do with my admittedly premature decision to not go to an academy the magiocracy doesn’t want to open.”
He tickled her chin with the leaf. She hadn’t realized she’d jutted it at him. (“I can always tell how you’re feeling by the angle of your chin,” he'd said one evening, lying in her arms after a simmering argument abruptly turned into a much more pleasurable activity.)
“All right,” he said now, the soft challenge in his voice sending shivers down her spine. That was exactly how he sounded when he whispered things like I have a depraved idea you might like in her ear. “Go on.”
“I …” she said a bit breathlessly. She had to get this man to a bed. “I’ll tell you as we walk.”
She dragged him across Frederick Road to the avenue that cut past her old house, heading for the forest and the quickest route back home.
“Is it the lack of agency?” he asked. “I think witches might get more freedom than wizards after graduation, actually. The magiocracy can’t very well dictate what work women will do and for how long if leaders are also insisting that your real place is in the home.”
“That’s … quite an interesting thought,” she said, “but no. Hazelhurst is just far more likely to give me the tools I need to develop an effective contraceptive.”
“But the options with magical innovation—” He stopped, though only verbally, because she was still pressing them forward at a rapid clip. “No, you’re right. The academies’ idea of sex education is telling boys to ‘get to work producing more wizards for your country.’ Your chance of finding an academy professor willing to act as an adviser for your research is probably nil.”
“That was exactly my—wait, they told you to go off and get as many women pregnant as possible?”
“It was more ‘get married early and have lots of sons.’ Some of my classmates clearly took it the other way, though.”
An unpleasant thought struck her. “Do you think your father—could he have possibly been—”
“One of those types of wizards?” His grin was short-lived. “No. Just a thoroughly rotten typic. I did meet him once, you know,” he said, correctly interpreting her expression of shock. She’d come to a dead halt. “After I graduated, he looked me up. So delighted to have a son who turned out to be a wizard. I got him to admit he’d known my mother was pregnant when he left her, then told him he’d see some wizardry he wouldn’t like if he ever contacted me again.”
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, cupping his face. She’d never asked before—she’d thought he truly didn’t know who the man was.
“It’s all right,” he said, forehead to hers. They stood there for a moment before he shifted, pressing his lips to her neck, restarting the fire his story had temporarily quenched. The satisfied sound he made as her breath caught seemed to reverberate through her. “Would you like to go home to bed, wife mine?”
“God, yes.”
“Bee! Peter!” a voice called out—and she turned in mingled frustration and consternation to find her sister darting toward them. “Joan—Joan—”
For one heart-stopping, vertiginous second, Beatrix’s mind was thrown back to that moment in Washington when Lydia crumpled, dress stained with her own blood. No, no—not Joan, please not Joan—
Then Lydia drew close enough for Beatrix to see, with incalculable relief, that what she’d taken for alarm was a wild grin. “She just called! Abbott’s doing it! We won!”
Beatrix swayed, catching Peter’s arm to steady herself, hardly able to believe what her sister was saying.
Peter managed words first. “You mean—the academy?”
“Yes!”
Lydia was completely out of breath. Slowly, they walked back with her to the house that was now hers and Rosemarie’s, Lydia explaining that she hadn’t stayed for the whole story. Rosemarie was getting it from Joan, but Lydia had wanted to try to catch Beatrix on the way back from class.
“I thought you were coming home tomorrow,” she added to Peter.
“We had a difference of opinion, the funder and I.”
Lydia gave them both a sympathetic look. For the better part of a year, she’d been raising funds for scholarships to women’s colleges. Differences of opinion with wealthy would-be patrons was a regular occurrence for her.
“Better luck next time,” she said, stepping onto the porch and opening the door.
Rosemarie, indomitable, stood in the kitchen with one hand on the wall and the other on her cane, her wheelchair nowhere in sight. The telephone handset was back in its cradle. She turned toward them—lips pinched, eyes furious.
At some point after Lydia rushed out, Joan must have delivered a serious however.
See you next time! (And oh hey, here are my latest books. In an America run by wizards and 100 years behind on women's rights, she resists. He's the wizard who just hired her.)
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