Chapter 2 #3
To his relief, the healer let him talk. She didn’t interrupt or ask him to be quiet so she could concentrate, and she didn’t give any indication that his running commentary was either welcome or unwelcome.
No, she simply continued her work with the same methodical thoroughness she’d brought to everything else, and when she was finished, she stepped back and regarded him with an expression that made his stomach clench, as if it understood the bad news before his brain did.
“I think I can stabilize your magic,” she said.
“The degradation can be stopped before it gets any worse, and with daily treatment sessions, we can begin restoring function to the parts of your gift that are still viable.” She paused there, and he could see she was choosing her next words with care.
“But I need you to understand something. Full recovery — whatever ‘full’ turns out to mean in your case — is going to take weeks. Not days, weeks. During that time, you can’t use any magic.
None. Not to reinforce the wards, not to check on the artifacts, not to light a candle or open a lock or do any of the hundred small things that I’m sure you do with magic without even thinking about it. Nothing.”
Impossible. “That is not — ” he began, and she shook her head.
“This isn’t negotiable.” She’d broken into his protest without raising her voice, and somehow her calmness made her words sound more authoritative than if she had shouted.
“Every time you use magic, you’re drawing on a source of power that’s barely holding together.
It’s like trying to run on a broken leg.
You might get where you’re going, but you’ll cause damage that I can’t repair.
The void scarring is bad enough already.
If you keep pulling from a compromised gift, the scarring will spread to parts of your magic that are currently healthy, and what could have been a lengthy recovery will become a permanent disability.
” She let those words settle on him before she added, “So you’ll rest, you’ll eat what I put in front of you, you’ll submit to treatment twice a day, and you’ll leave the wards to do their job on their own until I tell you otherwise. ”
All he could do was stare at her. She stared back at him coolly.
Someone else might have looked compromised by their lack of sleep or the inherent lack of authority that came with rumpled clothes badly in need of changing and hair that needed brushing.
But somehow, she was giving orders to a warlock who had once made the prima of her clan negotiate with him as an equal.
The appropriate response, of course, would be to reassert his authority.
He needed to remind her that this was his house, his collection, and his life’s work, and that he had been managing all of it quite capably for seventeen years without the assistance of a small-town nurse practitioner some ten years his junior.
He had the words ready. He knew they were good words, precise and cutting and perfectly chosen to establish that whatever temporary authority she might have gained from his incapacity, the fundamental power dynamic in this house remained unchanged.
But he didn’t say any of them.
Because the most unsettling thing — more unsettling than the prognosis she’d just given him, more unsettling than the damage to his magic — was that he was going to obey her.
Not because she was right, although she was, and not because he had no choice, although he didn’t.
But because something in the way she’d delivered that ultimatum, without anger and without fear, without any apparent need for him to agree or approve or even respond, had cut through his defenses more effectively than any magic he had ever encountered.
She wasn’t impressed by him. In fact, he didn’t think she was intimidated by him, either.
She didn’t even seem to be particularly interested in him, except as a medical problem she intended to solve.
And that — the sheer professional indifference of it, the way she treated him as a patient rather than a threat or a curiosity or a villain — was so far outside his experience of how people responded to him that he had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
“Very well,” he said. The words cost him more than he would have ever admitted.
She accepted his concession with a small nod and started to turn toward the door, then stopped.
When she looked back at him, her expression had shifted into something he recognized from earlier, a quality of professional thoroughness that didn’t seem to care whether the patient was difficult or compliant or anything in between.
“Before I go,” she said, “I need your name. I’ve been calling you ‘the Collector’ in my head ever since I got here, and I’m not going to spend the next several weeks treating a man I can only address by a title.”
He hadn’t been prepared for that request, although he realized he should have been.
Obviously, she didn’t know his name. Why would she?
The McAllisters had only ever known him as the Collector, the title he’d cultivated for exactly the kind of distance she was now declining to grant him.
He could refuse her, of course. He could fall back on the title and force her to use it for as long as she remained under his roof.
But he was tired, and the part of him that had spent 372 days in the void without anyone speaking his name was not, in this moment, inclined to perpetuate that silence.
“Malachi Van Horn,” he said.
Something flickered in her expression at the surname, telling him she’d recognized it.
Well, the McAllisters and the Wilcoxes were very close, and he supposed she must have heard how the Van Horns had kidnapped a warlock from Wilcox territory, even if that incident had happened a very long time ago.
However, she didn’t comment on the recognition. She only inclined her head and said, “Roslyn Campbell.”
He almost asked her why Campbell and not McAllister, since he’d assumed she was one of the clan’s blood members. But the question would have implied an interest he wasn’t prepared to claim, so he let it pass.
“I’ll be back shortly, Mr. Van Horn,” she said. “I’m going to find the kitchen and put something together for you to eat. Don’t you dare get up while I’m gone. In fact, it would probably be best if you could nap until I get back.”
She left the study without waiting for his response, and Malachi sat in his leather chair and listened to her footsteps recede down the hallway. A single thought passed through his mind.
I am in considerable trouble.