Chapter 2
Someone else’s magic was inside his body.
Was he being attacked? Had the wards broken down somehow?
But then he realized that an attack wouldn’t feel like this.
An attack was sharp, intrusive, a violation of the body’s natural defenses, while what he was feeling now seemed to be almost the opposite.
This was a warmth that moved through him with deliberate care, seeking out the damaged places at the center of his magic and doing something to them he couldn’t quite identify but which his body seemed to welcome in a way he found alarming.
Someone was healing him.
He opened his eyes.
The study looked much as it had when he’d lost consciousness, except the curtains had been pulled back from the windows, letting in a flat gray light that told him it was either very early morning or very late afternoon.
The dust motes drifting through the light gave the room a quality of suspended animation, as if even the air had been holding its breath while he slept.
The healer was sitting in the straight-backed chair she had pulled up beside his leather one, and she had two fingers pressed to the inside of his left wrist. Her eyes were closed, her expression one of focused concentration, and she didn’t immediately seem to notice that he was awake.
She was younger than he’d expected, in her late twenties at the very most, with light brown hair pulled back from a face with arched dark brows, a straight nose, and a mouth fuller than it probably should have been.
She was wearing what appeared to be the clothes she’d arrived in, a turquoise blue cotton blouse and dark jeans and a brown cardigan, all of them somewhat rumpled from what he assumed had been an uncomfortable night spent in a chair rather than a bed.
She had stayed with him. That was either very dedicated or very foolish.
He suspected it was a little of both.
“You can stop that,” he said.
Her eyes opened. They were a vivid blue almost the same color as her shirt, almost the same hue as the prized Sleeping Beauty turquoise of her home state.
Those eyes regarded him calmly, and something about her gaze felt almost impersonal, as if she’d decided the best way to handle her current situation was to act as if he was no different from any of her other patients.
“You’re awake,” she said. She spoke softly, but there was a strength to her tone despite that, the kind of strength that told him she fully intended to do whatever needed to be done.
“An astute observation.” His voice wasn’t much more than a rasp, effectively undermining the cutting effect he’d been aiming for.
His throat felt as though it had been scoured with sandpaper, and when he tried to sit up straighter in the chair, the muscles in his back and neck vociferously protested.
“Don’t move yet.” She released his wrist and stood, and he noted with some irritation that she moved with a kind of unhurried efficiency, something he hadn’t expected from someone in her current situation.
“You’ve been unconscious for roughly twenty hours.
Your blood pressure is low, you’re severely dehydrated, and your magic is — ”
Irritation stirred despite his weariness. “I am aware of the state of my magic.”
“ — dangerously depleted.” She’d continued as if he hadn’t interrupted her, which was a conversational tactic very few people had ever successfully employed against him.
“You have what I can only describe as dimensional scarring throughout your entire energy system. It’s as if someone took a wire brush to the inside of your — ”
“I know what it is,” he cut in. He didn’t need this woman — this girl, because she couldn’t be much more than twenty-seven at the most — to explain to him the damage the void had done during his imprisonment there.
He’d been living with that reality for 372 days.
He had felt it happening in real time, the slow erosion of everything that made him what he was, and he certainly did not require a clinical summary.
She stopped speaking and looked at him. He didn’t think she was angry, but her current state felt adjacent to that emotion, a sort of controlled displeasure at being dismissed by a person who was in no position to be dismissing anything.
He’d seen that expression on exactly one other face in his life, on that of a surgeon in Portland who’d once treated a knife wound Malachi had acquired during a particularly unpleasant negotiation with a collector in Chinatown, and who had responded to Malachi’s attempts to direct his own treatment with pointed silence.
This girl had the same quality, he realized. She radiated competence the way some people radiated warmth, and it was, he was forced to admit, impressive for someone her age…and profoundly inconvenient.
“I understand that you know what it is,” she said after a weighty pause.
“But what you probably don’t know is what it looks like from the outside.
That’s my area of expertise, not yours. So I’m going to tell you, and you’re going to listen, and then we can have whatever conversation you’d like about why I’m here and what you want from me. But the medical briefing comes first.”
He could have objected, could have reminded her that she was in his house, surrounded by his wards, and that she was alive only because he had chosen to bring her here and could, theoretically, choose to send her away.
But the theoretical nature of that threat was precisely the problem.
In his current state, he couldn’t send anyone anywhere.
Although he hated to admit it to himself, he could barely sit upright.
And the healing energy she’d been threading through his body while he slept had already done more to stabilize his magic than anything he’d been able to accomplish on his own in the void.
So he said nothing. Apparently, she chose to interpret his silence as consent, because she resumed her assessment with brisk, unsparing directness, as though she’d learned long ago that this was the best way to deliver bad news.
The damage was extensive. That much he already knew. What he hadn’t fully grasped…because it was difficult to evaluate one’s own magic with any objectivity, rather like trying to read a label from inside a bottle…was how close to complete systemic failure he actually was.
His magic wasn’t merely depleted. No, it was structurally compromised, the channels through which his powers flowed riddled with what the healer called “void scarring,” areas of dead tissue, magically speaking, where the dimensional energy of his prison had burned away the capacity to conduct power.
The scarring was concentrated most heavily around his primary channels, the large conduits that carried magic to his extremities, but it had also spread into the smaller tributary channels that governed fine motor control over his gift.
That was why his wards had been deteriorating unevenly, she explained; the damage wasn’t uniform, which meant some of his containment work was holding better than others, depending on which channels he’d relied on to create them.
It was, she said, analogous to nerve damage in the mundane medical sense; some of it might heal, given time and proper treatment, and some of it might be permanent.
Permanent.
It was not a word he’d wanted to hear. He’d known his condition was dire, but some inner part of him had been hoping it wasn’t quite that dire.
“How much?” he asked.
She didn’t pretend to misunderstand the question.
Those striking turquoise-hued eyes unblinking, she replied, “I won’t know until the acute damage has healed and I can see what’s underneath.
Right now, the scarring from your time in the void is so extensive that I can’t distinguish between tissue that’s dead and tissue that’s merely inflamed.
But the treatment will be the same either way.
First, I need to get you stabilized, and then I can focus on gradually restoring your core magical functions.
After that, I’ll be able to assess what’s been permanently lost.” She paused, and something in her seemed to almost soften, as if she understood all too well the weight of what she was about to say.
“Best case, you’ll recover eighty to ninety percent of your previous magical strength over a period of several weeks.
Worst case, you’re looking at fifty percent, and even that would require sustained treatment. ”
Fifty percent. Half of what he’d been. Half the power to maintain the wards, half the strength to contain the collection.
Half the magic that had kept him alive and free and one step ahead of Victoria Van Horn for the past seventeen years.
However, he wouldn’t allow the healer to see the inner distress her words had caused. “And without treatment?” he inquired.
“Without treatment, your magic will continue to degrade,” she said calmly.
“Your body is already diverting resources to compensate. That’s why your blood pressure is low, and your muscle mass has deteriorated beyond what simple malnutrition would explain.
In simple terms, your body is cannibalizing itself to keep your magic functioning.
If that process continues unchecked, you’ll experience organ failure within days. ”
Days. Not weeks, not months.
Days.
“Well,” he said. “That would be inconvenient.”
Something flickered in those clear blue eyes.
A sort of surprise, he thought, or possibly simple disbelief that a man who had just been told he was dying would respond with understatement.
He found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he was curious about what she would do with that response.
Most people, in his experience, reacted to his affect with either intimidation or irritation. She appeared to be doing neither.
“I have a feeling it would also be inconvenient for quite a few people,” she said calmly. “Which brings me to my next question. What exactly do you have in this house?”