Chapter 1 #2
Roslyn’s lips thinned. Her own family history had taught her all too well that things could change in an instant.
She’d never met the woman who was her namesake; her mother’s younger sister Roslyn had been murdered by a trio of dark warlocks long before her niece was born.
Even though she knew her parents had given her that name to honor someone who was torn from her life long before she’d truly gotten to live it, she still thought it felt a little odd, as if some ghost of the first Roslyn hovered around her no matter what she did.
Which was just silly. Not because ghosts weren’t real — plenty of them still hung around Jerome, and Angela, the clan’s prima, talked to them regularly, because that was her gift — but because everyone knew Roslyn McAllister had moved on.
As horrible as her death had been, she’d moved on to the next world and hadn’t lingered.
Frowning a little, Roslyn logged out and shut down the computer, then went back into the exam room and retrieved her purse and sweater from the closet where she kept her personal items. A quick check of her phone to make sure she hadn’t missed any messages — she hadn’t — and then she slid the iPhone back inside her oversized bag, went over to the window, and flipped the sign in the window around to CLOSED.
Most people would expect a small health clinic to be closed at six-thirty at night, but she figured it was better to be safe than sorry.
Not that there was any need for her to be in a hurry, not when what she had waiting for her in her small rented house in Cottonwood’s historic district off Main Street was leftover pizza from Bocce and a half-drunk bottle of wine.
True, the wine was some Chupacabra from Merkin Cellars and therefore excellent, but it lost some of its savor while drunk alone in front of the TV and accompanied by cold pizza.
The parking lot was nearly empty. A few cars sat in front of the nail salon, which stayed open until eight on weeknights, and a man was loading boxes into a van outside the State Farm office.
The light was fading fast, Cottonwood darkening into a premature twilight as the shadows from the Black Hills to the west stretched across town.
A few clouds blazed in bright salmon against a lavender sky, but Roslyn didn’t look up.
Gorgeous sunsets were a given in this part of the world, and right then, she just wanted to get home.
She reached into her purse to click the key fob for her Volkswagen…
…and then the world turned inside out.
There was no pain, at least not in any way she could begin to describe it, but the sensation was so disorienting that pain might have been better.
At least pain was something she understood.
This was more like being pulled through a space that had no dimensions, a feeling of compression and expansion happening simultaneously, as though every cell in her body had been disassembled and reassembled in the time it took to draw a breath.
And when she did pull in a breath, it tasted wrong. It felt almost heavy on her tongue, damp in a way the air never was in the Verde Valley, even during the height of monsoon season. This air tasted of salt and the kind of moisture that never really went away.
Where the hell was she?
Almost reluctantly, not sure she wanted to know the answer to that question, she opened her eyes.
She was lying on a narrow bed with an antique iron frame, and the mattress beneath her was thin enough that she could feel every individual lump.
To her left was a tall window framed in heavy velvet drapes that were open just enough to show her a sky she knew was the wrong color for Arizona.
It was gray and lowering, without any trace of the coppery sunset she’d been looking at moments ago.
Moments? That sounded right, but she had no way of knowing how much time had passed during that…
whatever it was. Her body felt heavy and strange, the way it did when she awoke from an unexpectedly deep sleep, except Roslyn knew she hadn’t been sleeping.
No, she’d been standing in a parking lot in Cottonwood, reaching inside her purse for her car’s key fob, and now she was here.
Wherever “here” was.
She sat up slowly, fighting a wave of dizziness that made the unfamiliar room want to spin around her.
She was still wearing the clothes she’d had on at the clinic — dark jeans, a turquoise cotton blouse she’d bought at a boutique in Old Town Cottonwood because it was so close to the color of her eyes, the comfortable brown flats she always wore when she knew she’d be on her feet all day, the brown cardigan she’d slipped on right before she headed out for the evening — but her purse was gone.
Which meant her phone was gone, too.
Car keys, gone.
Crap.
The room didn’t offer many clues as to her location.
In addition to the bed, it contained a wooden dresser with a cracked mirror, a straight-backed chair, and a braided rug that had faded to a uniform gray-brown.
The wallpaper was dark and old-fashioned, a pattern of climbing vines that might have been attractive once but now just made the walls feel as if they were closing in on her, although she realized the oppressive sensation could have been mostly to do with her current state of mind.
Wherever she was, the room looked like it had been furnished with the bare minimum and then forgotten.
But now she could feel something strange, a low, buzzing static that was like standing too close to a transformer. She didn’t think it was hostile, but it sure as hell wasn’t welcoming, either.
And even though the sensation was entirely novel, she still thought it could be only one thing.
Magic.
Among witch clans, magic was something used cautiously and only in ways that no civilian would ever be able to notice.
Although she knew Jerome was protected by wards set there to prevent any incursions by evil magic, she’d never been able to feel them.
The only time she’d ever really felt magic in action was during the battle between the McAllister clan elders — and her cousin Brianna and her husband Bill — and the strange warlock they knew only as the Collector.
Because that confrontation had involved unleashed magic that resonated across this dimension and the next, she’d been able to sense it even from the clinic, odd ripples and pulses that felt like distant thunder and made the hair on the back of her neck want to stand up.
Whatever surrounded her now, though, seemed entirely different.
She made herself get up from the bed. The dizziness receded enough for her to move, although her legs were unsteadier than she would have liked.
Dimly, she realized the shaking had nothing to do with physical weakness and everything to do with the growing realization that somehow, she’d been taken.
Someone had used magic to pull her out of her life and deposit her in this place, even though she had absolutely no idea how they’d managed to do such a thing.
Yes, she knew there were witch-kind who could teleport, such as Devynn Rowe’s husband, Seth, but this wasn’t teleportation.
This was snatching someone out of their life and sending them someplace completely different.
Despite her shaky legs, Roslyn made herself go to the window anyway so she could try to get some idea of where she’d appeared.
The glass was old and wavy, distorting the view, but she could make out enough to know that she stood on the second floor of a large house.
Below her was a yard that had gone to seed, all overgrown grass and untrimmed hedges, and beyond that was a street lined with other houses, most of them not much more than tall, bulky shapes in the gloom.
At first glance, the place almost felt like Paradise Lane in Jerome, with its rows of Victorian houses and large front yards, the slope of a street that clearly had been built on an incline.
But the sky was a flat, oddly pearlescent gray, and somewhere in the distance, she could hear the sound of waves.
Not Arizona, then. Not anywhere close to her landlocked home state.
That realization made her breath catch. Somehow, she’d known from that first gulped breath that she had to be very far away from the Verde Valley, but for some reason, seeing it right in front of her made the reality so much more awful.
She gripped the window frame and made herself breathe, counting the same way she did when a patient’s condition was worse than expected, and she needed to keep her composure so she could focus.
Four counts in, hold for four, four counts out.
The breathing exercise was one she’d taught herself during her clinicals at Northern Pines, when she was learning to manage the emotional toll of seeing people in pain every day, and it had served her well enough in the years since.
It helped. As she breathed, the panic receded to something almost manageable, and she turned away from the window to face the closed door of the bedroom.
Her healing gift was already reaching out of its own accord, the way it always did when she sensed illness or injury nearby.
There was someone else in this house, someone whose magic had been badly damaged, depleted almost past recognition.
Their signature was faint enough that she nearly couldn’t read it through the odd static that permeated the building.
Her gift had always been persistent, though, and it was telling her now that whoever was down on the first floor seemed to be in serious trouble.
The injured person felt like a warlock.