Prologue #2
As he stood there, assessing, he understood the damage wasn’t simply the result of neglect. He’d torn through the void and ripped open the wall between that dimension and this one when he returned, and he’d brought some of that energy with him, crackling and sparkling and full of static.
Luckily, the rip in the void had already healed itself — nature abhorred a vacuum, whether in this world or the next — but the damage had been done.
He needed to ascertain how extensive it truly was, whether any of the more volatile items in his collection were ready to break through their wards…
and what he would do if it turned out they were.
If even one of those items breached its wards while the house’s overall protections were this compromised, the resulting magical discharge would be felt by every witch and warlock within a hundred miles.
The Gibson clan, whose territory this was, would arrive to investigate. They tolerated his presence here, mainly because they knew they could do nothing about it, but they certainly weren’t friends.
Limping and wondering if the ache in his hip actually was more than simply a bruised bone, he made his way to the first collection room, the one he had always thought of as the East Gallery, although it was really just the house’s former parlor, now with reinforced shelving and more layers of wards.
The artifacts on the shelves — a silver astrolabe that whispered in dead languages, a set of bone dice that could alter probability within a twelve-foot radius, a glass jar containing what appeared to be smoke but was actually a trapped weather-working that predated the Roman Empire — all appeared to be intact, their individual containment wards still holding.
But he could see the static working on them.
Now he detected fine cracks in the magical barriers, hairline fractures that would widen over the coming days as the dimensional energy he’d brought with him continued to corrode everything it touched.
He had possibly a week before the first of the weaker containments failed entirely.
Some of the objects in this room would merely become active if their wards dropped, an outcome that would be inconvenient but not catastrophic.
The bone dice would start influencing probability in their immediate vicinity, which might result in a few oddly lucky or unlucky occurrences in the neighborhood.
The astrolabe would whisper more loudly, but its range was limited, and there was no one within earshot to be disturbed by its murmurings.
The items in the basement vaults were another matter entirely.
However, he didn’t go down to check on them.
This was partly because now the pain in his hip was screaming loudly enough that he wasn’t sure he could make it down the stairs…
let alone back up them…without collapsing, and partly because the wards down there were far stronger than the ones on the main floors of the house. They would hold for a while.
He didn’t want to think about what would happen if those wards failed while he was still in this weakened state.
With a wince, he leaned against the doorframe.
It was a moment of weakness that annoyed him.
He wasn’t used to being weak. But more than a year in the void had done its work, and he’d already been malnourished and slowly dying of thirst before gravity did its work and slammed him against the Persian rug in the foyer.
And his magic was severely depleted, what little reserves he’d still had left channeled into cutting open the hole in the void.
His collection — the items he’d gathered and then locked away, making sure they were safe because no one else seemed to care — was more at risk with every passing moment.
If…no, when…the wards failed, the result would spell disaster not just for him but for every living thing in at least a two-mile radius, probably more.
And even though he knew the Gibsons would come to investigate, since this was their territory, they weren’t even the greatest of his possible worries.
No, that would be the Van Horns. He still bore the name of his birth clan, but he had not been a part of it for many years, not since Victoria Van Horn, its prima, had banished him.
She’d been hunting him for years, because even though she still believed she’d done the right thing in removing him from her territory, she now coveted the items in his possession, wanted to add them to her considerable wealth even though she had no real idea of what they could do.
No, she simply believed that because they had been found by a Van Horn, that meant they were the clan’s possessions, not his.
But she was a problem for a different day. For now, he needed to focus on the immediate, and that meant acknowledging the true problem.
He was dying…had been dying slowly for some time, even if he’d been too stubborn to acknowledge that uncomfortable fact.
No matter how strong his magic might be, it wasn’t something that could magically feed him or replenish his dehydrated body.
If he’d been a regular mortal, a civilian, as those of witch-kind liked to call them, then he would have called an ambulance, would have been admitted to a local hospital, where they would have given him intravenous fluids and provided the liquids and nutrients he needed that way.
And if he’d still had his servants, those clan-less warlocks who’d come to his employ because they had nowhere else to go, then one of them might have been able to procure some of those healing treatments for him.
His four remaining acolytes had perished in the dimensional battle with the McAllisters, however, so there was no one to come to his aid.
Clearly, he needed a healer.
Being trapped in the void had done something to him that went beyond the merely physical, as if the magic spark within had realized the only way to keep him alive was to feed that magic into his failing body.
It had worked for a time, he supposed, but now the magic itself was depleted, and the only thing that could possibly restore him was the power of a witch clan’s healer.
If the tiny bit of magic that still survived went out, then all the wards would fail simultaneously, flattening everything for at least a mile in all directions and also alerting the Gibsons — and any other witch clans paying attention — that something catastrophic had just occurred in this particular stretch of the Oregon coast.
So he definitely needed a healer…but not just any particular healer.
Like all magical practitioners, a healer’s ability was dependent on the magical strength they possessed.
Because he’d made it his particular business to learn as much of the Gibsons as possible, he knew their healer was competent enough, someone adept at healing broken bones and assisting in childbirth, soothing fevers, and even eradicating cancer.
But he knew she wasn’t strong enough to fix what was wrong with him. That would require a healer with an entirely different level of power.
He knew of exactly one such person.
With another wince, he pushed himself away from the doorframe and made his way, slowly and pausing far more often than he liked, down the hallway to the room he had used as a study.
The space was just as he’d left it a year ago — the massive oak desk, the leather chair, the bookshelves lined with volumes both magical and mundane.
A thick layer of dust covered everything, but the study’s wards had been among the strongest in the house, and they still held.
He opened the bottom drawer of the desk, the one with the false back he’d installed himself using a technique he had learned from a Japanese puzzle box he’d acquired in Kyoto twenty years ago.
Behind the false back, in a space barely large enough to hold it, sat a small brass compass on a fine silver chain.
The Siren’s Compass.
A little more than ten years earlier, he’d acquired it from an antiquarian in Prague who hadn’t understood what he was selling.
Fortunate for the antiquarian, Malachi supposed, since anyone who truly understood the compass’s function would have demanded considerably more than the eight hundred euros he’d paid for it.
The compass was a snatch artifact, a one-use device designed to reach across any distance and pull a specific person to the user’s location.
It required only two things to function.
The user’s blood, and a clear mental image of the target.
One use. After that, the compass would be inert, nothing more than a pretty trinket. He’d been saving it for an emergency. If the current situation did not qualify, he couldn’t imagine what would.
He settled himself in the leather chair, mainly because he suspected the compass’s activation would take more energy out of him than he could afford to spend standing up, and then he held the little brass instrument in his palm and studied it.
It was a beautiful thing, with its compass rose etched in silver, its needle made of magnetized iron that pointed not north but toward whatever the user most needed. At this moment, the needle was spinning in slow, lazy circles, as though it couldn’t quite make up its mind where to land.
Which made sense, of course. It hadn’t yet been given its command.
Malachi pricked his thumb on the obsidian shard, which was still sharp enough to draw blood despite 372 days of use, and let a single drop fall onto the compass rose.
Then he closed his eyes and thought of the McAllister healer.