Healer’s Heart (The Witches of Mingus Mountain #8)

Prologue

The void had no shape, no form. It was neither light nor dark, hot nor cold. It merely was, somewhere far outside the space where normal matter existed, where people lived their lives and time rolled on inexorably.

Time was not supposed to be a factor in the void.

And yet…unfortunately…it was.

Malachi Van Horn, known to the witches and warlocks of the McAllister clan in Jerome, Arizona, as the Collector, knew all too well that time had slid its insidious fingers into the void that Brianna McAllister had created.

He didn’t believe that had been her intention, guessed she had meant for the void to be a timeless, ageless bubble that would keep him trapped forever, but although she was very powerful and possessed a dimensional talent that hadn’t shown itself for generations, she was still new to wielding her gift.

She had done the best she could…but that best hadn’t been quite good enough.

His watch, an antique wind-up piece he’d bought in a shop in New Orleans, had continued to tick away the entirety of his captivity, and he made sure to wind it every other time it told him the hour was twelve.

Neither noon nor midnight had any real meaning here, except that keeping track of the watch hands’ circuit of the hand-painted dial allowed him to maintain a count of all the nearly countless hours he’d spent trapped in this nothingness.

Nearly countless, but not uncounted. It had taken him a while to understand what was happening, to realize that while time seemed almost suspended, it still made its inexorable march forward into the future.

And what he’d understood at last was that every hour here correlated to a day in the real world, wherever that was.

He had been here approximately 372 hours, so more than a year had passed in the world outside the void.

Brianna McAllister had banished him at the very beginning of October, when the Northern Arizona skies had still been bright blue and the days were still warm enough, although a bite had begun to touch the evening air, a warning of winter to come.

Now it would be the middle of October, a year from the moment he’d disappeared.

And he knew he was dying.

That hadn’t been Brianna’s intention, or at least, he didn’t think it was. She had only meant to send away a man she viewed as a threat to everyone and everything she cared about, and she’d used her gift to put him somewhere that would render him powerless.

If he’d been in her position, he quite probably would have done the same thing.

Now, though…time continued to tick away, slowly, very slowly, but not so slowly that his body wasn’t desperate for water, for food. He was a strong man, or at least, he had been when he was first sent here.

But if he didn’t escape soon, then he never would. He would expire in the void, with no one to know of his death or to mourn his passing.

Although, he realized with a flash of grim humor that pulled at his chapped lips, quite probably no one would have mourned him even if they’d been informed of his death.

Certainly not his former clan members.

He hadn’t been idle all 372 days of his captivity, however.

The ring he’d worn during his confrontation with the McAllisters, the one that had allowed him to tap into dimensional frequencies and wield them as weapons, had been shattered during the battle, or he could have used it to escape this place, its energy sufficient to part the void the same way he might have parted the curtains in his study at home.

Instead, he had something that wasn’t quite magical — at least, not in the way that the ring and all the other one hundred and two artifacts stored in his house were.

Tucked into his waistcoat along with his pocket watch was a slender shard of obsidian. To most observers, it wouldn’t have looked out of the ordinary, perhaps a specimen that a collector of rocks and minerals might have placed on their shelf.

But while the piece of obsidian wasn’t precisely enchanted, it was volcanic glass, an item that had been born of fire.

And fire existed in every dimension, which meant that Malachi could tune it to resonate with the exact frequency of the void where he was trapped, allowing him to eventually cut his way free.

The key word being “eventually.”

He’d gotten close once or twice, summoning what remained of the magic inside him to thrum within the shard, pitches slowly matching so it would be able to cut through the fabric of this cursed place.

But each time it had slipped away, the frequencies separating and becoming dissonant before he could get the dimensional bubble where he was trapped to separate long enough for him to slip free.

Now, though…now he thought he might have it.

He had to, because if he stayed here for even a few hours longer, he knew he would die. And as drained and as weary as he currently was, he still couldn’t allow himself to slip quietly into oblivion.

Not quite holding his breath, he pressed the obsidian shard against a place somewhere a foot or so in front of him, a place he’d noted before.

It wasn’t quite what he could call warm, since neither warmth nor cold existed in this place beyond all worlds, but it still had a ghost of what he thought might be warmth, somewhere beyond the place where he’d been existing for more than a mortal year.

And that warmth seemed to be a signal that the barrier between the void and the real world was thinnest at that spot.

An educated guess only, but that was all he currently had.

For all the artifacts he’d collected, for all the study he’d made of magic and the history of the witch world so he might have a context for the magical items he’d gathered over the past two decades, he still was no expert on this void Brianna had used as his prison.

Dimensional magic was so rare that it was only mentioned here and there, in journals and chronicles he’d collected for his library, so he had no true idea of what was and wasn’t possible.

The only possibility that mattered now was the very real probability that he would die soon if he didn’t escape his prison.

He pressed harder, and the void screamed.

It was a high, sharp sound that tore at his eardrums, the only real sound he’d heard in a year, unless one counted the slow, steady beat of his heart.

Early on, he’d realized that he could try to speak, but nothing emerged from his throat or his mouth, as if the void swallowed up those frequencies before they had a chance to develop.

As painful as that dimensional scream was, reverberating in the delicate bones inside his ears and throughout his entire body, Malachi made himself ignore it. If the void was screaming, then that meant the shard was having some effect.

Everything went white, and for one hideous moment, he wondered if he had somehow miscalculated, if he’d only thought he was cutting through to the mortal plane but instead had breached an entirely different universe, one where he would be swallowed in that blazing whiteness and never seen again.

Then he realized he was falling, or at least, what felt like falling. Gravity pulled at him, yanking him out of the nothingness that had been his prison for more than a year.

The whiteness gave way to shapes, shapes he thought he vaguely recognized — a tall ceiling with crown moldings, an elaborate chandelier whose prisms were furred with dust, heavy curtains framing high windows whose proportions felt designed to match the lofty ceiling he’d glimpsed.

And then he fell with a heavy thud onto a Persian carpet whose pattern he also recognized, one worked in shades of red and green and turquoise. It was just enough to protect him from the dusty hardwood floor underneath that he didn’t think he’d broken any bones.

But it still hurt like hell.

He lay there for a moment, staring up at the chandelier, remembering vaguely that it had been there when he bought the house some ten years ago, as had the carpet upon which he now lay.

Memory seemed as fuzzy as the dusty prisms on the chandelier, and he breathed in, smelling dust and old wood and something else, something wild and salty, something that seemed at odds with the Victorian fussiness of his surroundings.

Of course.

The house stood on a hill less than a half mile from the sea, and its wild, salt-laden breezes had filled the rooms of the place whenever he saw fit to open a window.

Which he remembered hadn’t been too often, partly because he required privacy — even though the lot where the house was located was quite large, more than an acre — and partly because it was simply too damp and chilly to have open windows on this section of the Oregon coast.

Oregon. Yes, that was it.

His hip throbbed. He didn’t think he’d broken it, thought that most likely the rug was the only thing that had saved him from such an injury, but he knew he needed to get up so he could assess the damage from a better vantage point.

Doing so required more effort than he’d expected — he had to put both hands flat on the rug and push his trembling legs to a standing position — but once he was upright, he realized he had much more important things to worry about than a bruised hip.

The house looked the same, with its dark oak wainscoting and the fussy William Morris wallpaper above it that he’d never bothered to replace, but he could feel how wrong it was.

His gaze went at once to the door that led to the basement, with its seven locks arranged in a neat row up one side.

They were still bolted, but the wards he’d layered on top of them, which had once been healthy and robust, now felt brittle as lake ice at the end of February.

He’d reinforced those wards once every month, carefully strengthening each piece of defensive magic so there was no possible way the things he kept in the cellar could cause any havoc.

But he’d been gone for a long time.