Chapter 9
The morning after Malachi told her about Victoria, Roslyn decided to make a list. She sat down at the kitchen table with a stub of pencil she’d found in a drawer and the back of an envelope from a piece of junk mail that had been sitting on the counter since before she arrived and wrote down everything they needed.
Fresh fruit and vegetables first. The pantry’s supply of canned goods was holding out, but Malachi really needed actual nutrients, not just sodium and preservatives.
Ibuprofen next, because they’d gone through the last of the house’s supply three days ago, and she couldn’t keep wasting her magic for the kind of minor pain management that a bottle of over-the-counter pills could handle.
Bandages, gauze, medical tape. Definitely toothpaste — they were sharing the one tube she’d found in the upstairs bathroom, which was nearly empty.
She tried not to think about sharing toothpaste with a man she’d kissed and then spent a week not talking about that kiss.
Therein lay madness…although maybe she was already there.
And she also needed underwear, even a package of cheap cotton panties from the local Target or Walgreens or whatever she could find here in Astoria.
Not for the first time, she wished she had her phone with her so she could do some retail research.
About all she knew about Astoria, Oregon, was that it had been the location for a bunch of movies back in the day, including The Goonies and Kindergarten Cop.
Unfortunately, neither of those movies had really shown what the local shopping situation was like, and besides, they were decades old, so she was pretty much flying blind now.
Anyway, she’d been washing her single pair of panties in the bathroom sink every night for three weeks.
At this point, it wasn’t just undignified, it was a hygiene issue, and she knew that the way she’d been far too stubborn to ask Malachi for help with this particular problem said a lot more about both of them than she wanted to think about for too long.
The list wasn’t extensive, but it still seemed to represent something larger than the individual items she’d written down. It was an admission that they couldn’t keep going on the supplies they had, and that one of them was going to have to leave the house to get more.
That person would have to be her, since Malachi could barely make it through four hours of ward work without his hands starting to shake. Sending him into town would be like sending a patient with a stress fracture to run a marathon.
She brought the subject up over breakfast, which was the last of the oatmeal with no raisins this time.
Those had been used up two days ago. He was sitting across from her at the kitchen table, his waistcoat buttoned even though it was seven in the morning and she was the only other person in the house.
As the days and weeks had passed, she’d wondered if he would ever loosen up enough to leave some of those buttons undone, or even leave the waistcoat off altogether, but that seemed to be a bridge too far for him.
As she explained how she really needed to leave so she could do some shopping, he listened in silence and then frowned, a pretty clear indication that he was already looking for reasons to say no.
“The wards are keyed to prevent unauthorized departure,” he told her. “That was a necessary precaution when you first arrived. Modifying them to create a temporary gap will take approximately two hours and will require me to — ”
“I know it’ll cost you energy,” she said, cutting off the lengthy description of the procedure involved.
“I’m not thrilled about it, either. But we’re out of ibuprofen and almost out of toothpaste, and the canned food situation is getting grim.
Also, another week of beans and rice with no fruit or vegetables or real protein, and your digestive system is going to stage a revolt.
I’d rather not have to heal that on top of everything else. ”
A pause followed her comment. Malachi’s mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile but wasn’t entirely not one, either.
A small, treacherous warmth crept through her at the realization that she could still make him do that, even with everything that had happened between them… and everything that hadn’t.
“I’ll adjust the wards after the morning session,” he said. “You’ll have a window of approximately three hours before the gap begins to degrade. Don’t be late.”
She gazed back at him coolly. “I’m never late.”
“You were late to our second healing session,” he returned.
What a Malachi observation, especially since he knew exactly why she’d been a couple of minutes late that time. “I was making you soup.”
“An inadequate excuse,” he said, but the not-quite-smile was still there, and Roslyn made herself look down at her oatmeal before it could do any more damage.
By eleven, the gap was in place. She felt it when it opened…a brief thinning in the ward’s pressure, like a door cracking in a sealed room…and Malachi, who’d spent two hours on the modification and looked like it, met her at the back door to explain the parameters.
“Walk through the gap at the northeast corner, next to the cedar tree with the broken branch,” he said.
“The opening is calibrated to your signature, so it will close behind you and reopen when you return. If you’re not back within three hours, it will seal permanently, and I won’t have the reserves to create another one today. ”
Meaning that if she were even a second late, she’d be locked out until at least tomorrow morning.
Once upon a time, she would have looked at the situation as an opportunity for escape.
Now she only wondered what on earth she would do if she were forced to wander the streets of Astoria for an entire night.
“Got it.” She’d pulled on her cardigan, the only outerwear she had, and tucked the list and a fold of cash into her jeans pocket.
The cash had come from a drawer in the study where Malachi kept an envelope of bills for what he described as “operational contingencies” and which apparently meant things like bribing delivery drivers to leave packages at the edge of the property line.
The amount was probably far more than she needed for various groceries and toiletries, especially in a place where she wouldn’t have to pay big city prices.
She didn’t argue, though, mostly because arguing with him about money would be exactly the kind of personal conversation they’d been trying to avoid all this time.
“Be careful,” he added, and those two words seemed to have enough significance to them that she almost looked back at him.
She didn’t, however, because she knew if she turned around and saw whatever expression he was currently wearing, she might say something about the kiss.
But they had a system, and the system appeared to be working.
Disrupting it now, with Victoria Van Horn closing in and the Gibsons circling like territorial dogs, would be a spectacularly bad idea.
“I always am,” she said, and went outside.
Almost as soon as she’d left the property, she shook her head.
“We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” she murmured.
She’d grown up in the Verde Valley, where the light was golden and the air smelled like sage and juniper, and the landscape stretched out in every direction under a sky so vast it could make you feel small in a way that was somehow comforting rather than frightening.
Jerome sat perched on the side of Mingus Mountain, crowded and vertical, the houses stacked above and below Main Street in improbable layers, and Cottonwood was spread out below on the valley floor, flat and practical and warmed by the same sun that had been warming it since long before any McAllister set foot in Arizona.
But Astoria was different from the Verde Valley in almost every way she could imagine.
The town clung to the hills above the Columbia River, its streets running steeply down toward a waterfront that disappeared into fog.
Victorian houses in various states of repair lined the residential street, some immaculate, with fresh paint and tended gardens, while others sagged under decades of rain and coastal damp.
The air was heavy and wet, tasting of salt and something green and growing that she guessed must be moss.
It was beautiful in its own way. Different from the austere beauty of northern Arizona that she was used to, of course, but striking nonetheless.
The problem was that everything about it felt foreign, from the perpetually gray sky to the damp that worked its way through her thin cardigan within the first five minutes.
And she could feel the Gibson clan everywhere.
Not individual witches or warlocks, but a sort of collective magical presence woven into the fabric of the town the way the McAllisters’ presence was woven into Jerome.
It was in the ground beneath the sidewalks and the old brick buildings downtown and the way the wind came off the river, bringing with it traces of magic so old they’d become part of the local weather.
Back home, she hadn’t noticed the McAllister presence at all, because it was the water she’d been swimming in her whole life, and only running into a strange witch or warlock she hadn’t met before would have made her sit up and take notice.
Here, though, everything was unfamiliar, and the strangeness of it made her skin prickle.