Chapter 3 #2
There was a joke. She’d grown up in a nice, semi-custom home in a hilly area of Cottonwood with central gas heat. It wasn’t as if she knew the first thing about how boilers worked.
But if the alternative was shivering through another damp, gray night, she’d figure it out.
After getting a batch of rice going on the stovetop, she headed out of the kitchen and stuck her head inside the first door to the left, which turned out to be a bathroom.
It had black and white hexagonal tile on the floors, a clawfoot tub with a slightly yellowed white shower curtain, and a pedestal sink. Above the sink was a medicine cabinet.
A quick inspection told her that it had some basic supplies — a box of Band-Aids, aspirin, rubbing alcohol, a thermometer, a tube of antibiotic ointment that was still within its expiration date.
No prescription medications, which told her that the Collector either hadn’t needed them or had relied on magical remedies for whatever ailed him.
Given what she now knew about his almost obsessive self-reliance, she suspected he’d used magic anytime he was dealing with something worse than a simple headache.
It wasn’t much, but it was still more than she’d expected.
She set everything on the edge of the tub, already sorting the supplies into categories in her head — wound care, fever management, general comfort.
The absence of anything truly useful…IV fluids, electrolyte supplements, the kind of equipment she kept stocked at the clinic…
was something she’d just have to deal with.
His treatment was going to be almost entirely magical, anyway.
However, the mundane supplies would be helpful for the secondary effects of his time in the void.
He was dehydrated, malnourished, and in pain, and while her magic could address the damage to his gift, it couldn’t put calories in his stomach or water in his cells.
She’d have to do that part the old-fashioned way.
The next door on the left was protected by a ward.
She could feel it before her hand touched the knob, a dense, layered barrier that seemed somehow different from the home’s perimeter wards.
This one was older and more deliberate, and appeared designed not to keep people in but to keep them out, which she supposed made sense.
Behind the ward, she sensed three or maybe four objects, each one with a distinct frequency that she could only partially read through the dimensional static the Collector had brought with him.
One felt cold, while another pulsed with a rhythm that was almost biological, steady and slow.
The others were harder to characterize, but none of them felt exactly friendly.
Obviously, she didn’t try the door.
The next two rooms were also collection rooms — she could tell by the density of warded magic behind their closed doors — but the door after that opened on a linen closet stocked with sheets, towels, and wool blankets that smelled of cedar.
She took a set of sheets and two towels, adding them to her mental inventory.
The second floor, which she explored next, was laid out around a central landing with the staircase descending at one end.
It had four bedrooms and another bathroom, this one larger than the one downstairs, with a clawfoot tub deep enough to submerge in and a shower attachment that looked like it had been added sometime in the 1970s.
The bedroom where she’d woken the day before was the smallest, with a single bed and a nightstand and nothing else.
The master bedroom was across the hall; Roslyn could tell almost at once that it was his, not just because it was bigger than any of the other bedrooms, but because the bed had been made with perfect hospital corners, and because the closet, when she opened it, held a row of suits in dark fabrics, each one hanging on a wooden hanger at exactly the same distance from the next.
All four of the suits were black. There were also seven waistcoats in varying somber shades, along with a dozen stiff white shirts. As far as she could tell, there wasn’t a single item of casual clothing, no T-shirts or jeans or even a short-sleeved button-up.
Then again, that shouldn’t be so surprising. She really couldn’t picture the Collector in a pair of cargo shorts or something.
Roslyn stood in front of the closet for a moment and studied the row of identical suits and coordinating waistcoats, and she thought she might be starting to understand a little more about the man dozing downstairs.
This wasn’t simple eccentricity, seemed instead almost like a kind of armor.
Everything she’d seen and sensed in the house so far seemed to indicate that the Collector was someone who’d organized his entire existence around control…
because control was the only thing standing between him and whatever he was afraid of.
For the Collector, those suits weren’t vanity, even though she could tell they’d been expensive. Instead, they were a fortress.
None of these insights made Roslyn feel particularly sympathetic toward him, not after what he’d done to her clan, not when he’d kidnapped her without a second thought.
However, it did make her feel more confident in her ability to manage him as a patient, because she thought she understood the coping mechanism, even if she didn’t yet know anything about what had caused it in the first place.
The closet did, however, solve one immediate problem.
She’d been snatched out of her life wearing the clothes she’d had on at the clinic — a cotton blouse, jeans, a light cardigan, her favorite flats — and she didn’t have anything else.
No change of underwear, no pajamas, nothing to wear while she washed what she had.
She wasn’t about to ask the Collector for help with this, assuming he was even in a condition to provide it, so she took stock of what was available and told herself she’d make do.
All she really needed was two of his white shirts, which were far too large but would serve well enough as nightwear and as something to wear around the house while her own clothes dried.
She also found a terrycloth robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door, oversized but functional, so she figured she could wash her things in the tub each evening and let them dry overnight on the radiator.
It was a system that was less than glamorous but at least workable, and one she had a feeling she’d have to maintain for the foreseeable future.
She took the shirts and the robe to the small bedroom and set them on the bed, trying not to think too hard about the fact that she would be sleeping in his clothes. It was a practical solution to a practical problem, nothing more.
The other bedrooms were empty or used for storage, and contained odds and ends like boxes of books, a folded card table, and a set of bookshelves that hadn’t been assembled and were leaning against one wall, the boards and shelves still waiting to be put together.
The second floor had its own collection of artifacts, their energy fainter than the ones below.
She counted two rooms with warded doors, and behind one of them, she felt something that made her stop in the hallway and press her hand flat against the wall.
It was whispering.
Not in any language she recognized, or even in any discernible words.
It was more like the vibration of a voice heard through several walls, reduced to nothing more than tone and rhythm.
And somehow she could tell it was old…very old…
and had something that felt almost like awareness.
The artifact behind that door knew she was there.
It couldn’t reach her through the ward, but it could feel her healing magic moving through the house the same way she could feel its energy pulsing past the static.
But because it seemed contained — and also because she knew she couldn’t do anything about it — Roslyn pulled her hand away from the wall and kept walking.
By the time she’d finished her survey of the house, the gray light outside the windows had faded to full dark, and she thought she had a better idea of what she was working with.
There was heat — she’d checked the boiler, and to her relief, it seemed to be functioning just fine — and electricity and water, along with enough food to last the two of them several weeks if she was careful.
She had clothes she could change into, and a linen closet with clean bedding.
And although she wished she could somehow get the Collector upstairs and into his own bed, he seemed to be doing all right in the study for now.
While she was upstairs, she’d also found a notebook in the master bedroom’s nightstand drawer.
It was leather-bound and filled with cramped handwriting, the pages covered in what appeared to be detailed notes on the house’s warding system.
There were diagrams of the rooms, each one annotated with dates and measurements she didn’t completely understand but which she guessed were probably some kind of maintenance log.
He’d apparently tracked the condition of every ward in the house on what looked like a weekly schedule for years.
Roslyn logged the notebook as potentially useful and left it where she’d found it. She wasn’t about to start going through his personal papers.
Not yet, anyway.
A quick peek into the study on the way back to the kitchen told her that he appeared to be dozing, eyes closed and head tilted to one side, so she wouldn’t allow herself to feel too guilty about the time she’d spend familiarizing herself with the house.
If nothing else, she’d needed to know what she was dealing with, and now that she did, it was time to get to work.