Prologue #3
He’d never met the woman, but he knew she existed.
Once he’d determined that someone in the McAllister clan had unwittingly gathered an amulet of great power that had been lost in the past, he’d made it his business to learn as much as he could about them, just as he had with his neighbors, the Gibsons.
His research had told him that their healer was a young woman, a fully credentialed nurse practitioner who also happened to possess a healing gift of considerable strength.
She worked out of a clinic in Cottonwood, Arizona, tending to both the mundane ailments of the civilian population and the magical injuries of her clan.
She was, from what he’d been able to tell, very good at what she did.
She was also, because of her clan affiliation, his enemy.
Or possibly “enemy” was too strong a word.
The McAllisters had certainly been his adversaries, meddlesome, provincial, and absurdly sentimental about the two artifacts that had fallen into their possession by mere accident, but Malachi had never taken their opposition personally.
They’d done what they believed was right, and so had he.
That their version of “right” had resulted in his spending a year in a featureless gray void was simply the cost of doing business.
He didn’t hold grudges, mainly because they were a waste of energy.
The healer, in any case, hadn’t been present at the confrontation.
She was a noncombatant, a medical professional who happened to be born into a family of busybodies.
Malachi could work with that. A healer’s training, whether magical or mundane, instilled a certain ethical framework he thought he could leverage, a compulsion to treat the injured regardless of their personal feelings about the patient.
It was, he thought, one of the more useful weaknesses of the medical temperament.
He wouldn’t call it a weakness to her face, of course.
And it wasn’t revenge that motivated him, although he knew he would allow the woman to believe that if it made the situation simpler.
The McAllisters had put him in the void, and there was a certain symmetry to the idea that a McAllister would be the one to heal him of its aftereffects.
If the healer’s pride was wounded by the realization that she’d been summoned like a servant… well, that was her concern, not his.
He would call it symmetry rather than what it actually was, which was the desperate last act of a dying man who had no other options and was now reaching for the one person who might be able to save him.
The compass grew warm in his palm. He focused his thoughts, sharpening the mental image of the healer from a general impression — young, talented, McAllister — into something specific enough for the compass to lock onto.
He thought of healing magic and the way it had felt when he’d encountered it in the past, a warmth that went deeper than skin, a rightness that seemed to realign whatever it touched.
The needle stopped spinning. Now it pointed south-southeast, toward Arizona.
Malachi spoke the activation word and felt the compass drain the last of his accessible magic in a single, wrenching pull. The sensation was like having his blood drawn through a very large needle, except it wasn’t blood being taken, but something far more essential.
The compass pulsed, and then the silver chain crumbled to powder in his hand. The compass itself went dull, its needle freezing in place, a dead instrument that would never point toward anything again.
But in the space between one heartbeat and the next, Malachi felt a displacement of air, and he knew without opening his eyes that it had worked.
There was someone in his house who hadn’t been there a moment ago.
He could feel her, a warm, steady pulse of magical energy on the second floor, disoriented and frightened but unmistakably alive.
The compass had deposited her somewhere above him, probably in one of the spare bedrooms upstairs, which was a small mercy.
It would have been considerably more awkward if she had materialized in the middle of the East Gallery, surrounded by artifacts that would have reacted very badly to the sudden presence of unfamiliar magic.
Summoning the remnants of his strength, Malachi tried to assess what he could sense of her signature.
It was clean and bright, natural and strong.
Good. He’d chosen well — or rather, the compass had chosen well.
Its function was to deliver whatever the user most needed, and what Malachi most needed at this moment was someone who could keep him alive long enough to repair his wards and save his collection.
He knew he should go to her. Now that she was here, he needed to go upstairs and explain as calmly and rationally as possible why she was here and what was required of her.
It was important to establish the terms of their arrangement before she had time to panic, because a panicked witch in a house full of barely contained artifacts was a recipe for the kind of disaster he’d spent most of his adult life trying to prevent.
But his legs didn’t seem interested in obeying the commands from his brain.
The activation of the compass had taken nearly every ounce of energy he had left, and his body had decided it was done taking orders for the time being.
His hands lay open on the arms of the chair, palms up, and in the left one, the obsidian shard still rested, its edge rusty with his dried blood.
In his right, the dead compass sat like a stone.
Get up, he told himself again, but again, his body showed no signs of moving.
He would rest for a moment. The house’s external wards, degraded as they were, would still deliver a very unpleasant shock to anyone trying to leave without his authorization, so the healer wasn’t going anywhere.
And the internal wards on the study would mask his presence well enough that she wouldn’t immediately be able to find him, thus buying him some time to gather himself before their first meeting.
First impressions mattered, and he certainly didn’t intend to make his while lying in a heap on the floor.
So he let his head fall back against the leather chair and allowed his eyes to close.
The study was quiet around him, the only sounds the distant crash of the waves against the beach and the faint, almost subliminal hum of dozens of artifacts settling into their new equilibrium.
The chair held him the way it always had, leather creaking softly as it took his diminished weight.
He was home, and he was alive.
That he was also dying, and the only person who could save him was a woman with every reason in the world to let him die?
Well, that was a complication he’d address when he could stand.