Chapter 1 #3
The smart thing to do, of course, would be to find a way out.
She should test the windows, check the door, and look for any weakness in the magical barriers she could sense surrounding the house.
Her magical healing gift wasn’t anything that could be used in a fight, but she had the same basic abilities as any witch or warlock; she could open a lock with a thought and summon enough flame to start a fire or set a candle alight.
If the warlock downstairs was as wounded as her initial impressions suggested, he might not be in any condition to stop her from escaping.
But she was a healer, and the pull of the warlock’s depleted magic was almost physical, a tug behind her breastbone that her training and her gift both wouldn’t allow her to ignore.
She moved across the room and tried the door. It opened without resistance, which surprised her. If someone had gone to the trouble of snatching her across what felt like several state lines, she would have expected them to at least lock the bedroom door.
The hallway beyond was dim and smelled of dust and old varnish.
More dark wallpaper, with an ornamental plaster ceiling above and a narrow staircase at the far end that descended into deeper gloom.
The static was stronger out here, and beneath it, Roslyn could feel individual impressions of objects she knew instinctively weren’t ordinary — a low hum from behind a closed door to her right, a faint whispering that seemed to come from somewhere below, and an overall sense of things held in careful suspension, restrained by barriers that were slowly losing their strength.
She knew she’d never felt anything quite like it, and, like any witch, she’d seen a lot of strange things in her life. This was different, though. This seemed to be a house full of magical objects, dozens of them, all warded and contained…and the wards were failing.
The warlock seemed to be on the ground floor, somewhere toward the back of the house.
She followed the staircase down, one hand trailing along the banister, her gift reaching ahead of her like a blind person’s cane.
The front entryway was large and dim, with hardwood floors and a massive oak door that felt practically stiff with magic. She didn’t touch it.
Instead, she followed the pull of the wounded warlock down a hallway lined with closed doors, past a room that she thought was also full of warded objects — the source of much of the static — and toward a door at the very end that stood slightly ajar.
A pause to pull in a breath, and then Roslyn pushed it open.
The room was a study, lined with bookshelves and dominated by a massive oak desk. A leather chair sat behind the desk, and in the chair was a man.
He was unconscious, or very close to it.
His head had fallen back against the leather, and his eyes were closed.
White hair hung past his shoulders in lank, unwashed strands, and the clothes he wore — what looked like the remains of what had once been an expensive charcoal suit, complete with a waistcoat he’d apparently buttoned all the way up as if dressing for dinner — were filthy and torn.
His skin had the grayish pallor of someone who hadn’t seen sunlight in a very long time, and was stretched tight over cheekbones and a jaw that might have been handsome if he hadn’t been so drawn and ill.
In his left hand, he held a small, dark shard of something glassy.
In his right was a brass compass that had gone dull and dead.
He looked like someone who should be in an ICU being fed intravenously, not sitting in a leather chair in a dusty study.
Despite the filth and the emaciation and the lank hair, though, she recognized him.
Not personally, of course. She’d never seen this man in the flesh, had only heard him described by her fellow McAllisters who’d confronted him more than a year ago on a promontory above Jerome.
But their descriptions had been detailed enough — white hair, cruelly handsome features, haughty bearing — and even in his current state of ruin, he was still recognizable enough.
The Collector.
The man who’d sent servants to steal from her family and who’d tried to manipulate the extradimensional being Belshegar into betraying the people who trusted him.
The same man who’d personally confronted the McAllister clan, threatening them with the power of artifacts he’d spent years hoarding for reasons no one fully understood.
Her cousin Brianna had nearly died banishing this man to a void between dimensions.
But he was here, somehow alive. And he’d brought her to this place.
He was critically ill, magically damaged, and in need of immediate treatment. But he was also an enemy, the man who’d caused her clan fear and pain and who’d more than earned his exile.
Her healing gift, which didn’t care at all about clan politics, quietly assessed his condition.
His magic was badly degraded, eroded by what she could only assume was prolonged exposure to whatever dimensional space Brianna had sent him to.
In response to that loss, his body was shutting down, organs beginning to fail as the magic that had been sustaining them sputtered.
Without intervention, he would be dead within days, possibly hours.
But she could walk away. She could find a way out of this house, get to a phone, and call her family.
They would come for her. Angela and Connor and Belshegar and the clan elders would descend on this place and deal with the Collector, and whatever happened to him after that wouldn’t be her problem.
She also knew, as she stood in the doorway of that dusty study with the sound of distant waves filtering through the walls, that she wouldn’t walk away.
Not because she felt sympathy for the man in the chair, and not because she was na?ve enough to think that healing him would earn his gratitude or make him less dangerous.
No, she wouldn’t walk away because she was a healer, and this was what healers did. It was what her training demanded, what her gift demanded, and what the name she bore practically demanded of her.
Years ago, her Aunt Roslyn had died alone and in pain because no one had been able to reach her in time.
Roslyn would never let someone die in front of her if she had the power to prevent it. Not even this someone.
So she set her jaw, made herself cross the room, and pressed two fingers against the pulse point beneath his right ear.
His skin was cold and papery, and his pulse was thready and fast, his heart working too hard to compensate for a body that was losing its fight.
Her gift flowed through the contact, instinctively taking note of the damage his body had suffered, and what it showed her was worse than she had initially thought.
“Goddess help me,” she murmured, and got to work.