Chapter 3 #3
She paused long enough to thoroughly wash her hands at the sink and then went on to assemble a meal from ingredients she’d found in the pantry.
The rice was ready, so she turned off the heat on that burner and began warming up some broth.
To round things out, she prepared a small portion of the canned white beans and mashed them roughly with the back of a fork, then seasoned them with a little olive oil and salt.
Protein was essential to start building his body back up, and the beans were the gentlest form she had available.
She found a whole preserved lemon in a jar in the back of the pantry that she thought would be nice if she squeezed a few drops over the beans, and even though it wasn’t the same as fresh, it was still much better than the mummified specimen that still sat in the refrigerator.
While the broth was heating up, she sat down at the kitchen table and wrote out a treatment schedule on the back of a dry-cleaning receipt she found in a drawer.
He would need a healing session in the morning and evening, with each one lasting around thirty to forty-five minutes, depending on how much his system could tolerate.
And she’d need to feed him three times a day in small portions, gradually increasing the amount of food as his stomach adjusted.
The whole time, she’d have to monitor his fluid intake and make sure he didn’t use any magic and rested between sessions.
She stared at the schedule and tapped her pen against her chin.
The schedule looked exactly like what it was, a standard recovery plan, the kind she might develop for any seriously debilitated patient.
That her current patient was a warlock who’d kidnapped her, and the debilitation was caused by a year spent in a dimensional void, and the “clinic” was a Victorian house somewhere on the Pacific Northwest coast, didn’t change any of the basics.
Biology was biology, after all. A body needed food, water, rest, and time, regardless of the circumstances that had injured it in the first place.
Now that she was at rest, though, her brain started churning again.
By this point, it was nearly six, and she’d been gone for almost twenty-four hours.
Her first client, Vicky Forbes, had been scheduled for nine-thirty that morning.
She would have arrived for her appointment — just a routine check to make sure her new blood pressure meds weren’t causing any problems — and realized that Roslyn Campbell was nowhere to be found.
Roslyn used an answering service for the hours the clinic wasn’t open, so she assumed Vicky would have called there first. The answering service had her parents’ contact information and had been instructed to reach out to them in case of emergency, so they must know by now that their daughter was missing.
Was her Volkswagen still sitting in the parking lot?
Technically, no one was supposed to park there after hours, but everyone in the Cottonwood P.D.
knew what her car looked like, and if anyone had noticed it the night before, they probably would have thought she was either working late or had car problems of some kind.
Either way, she doubted they would have towed her little SUV.
Not yet, anyway.
So by now her parents…and by extension, Connor and Angela and the elders…would have realized she’d vanished into thin air. They’d be making calls, doing everything they could to figure out what had happened to her.
Would they be successful?
That was something Roslyn didn’t know. She had no idea whether the spell or the artifact or whatever it was the Collector had used to bring her to his home would have left any kind of magical residue behind.
If it had, she supposed there was a chance that maybe Belshegar — or Levi McAllister, one of the elders and also someone with otherworldly origins — might have picked up on it.
But if that was the case, wouldn’t they have been able to trace her here already?
Again, she didn’t know.
Steam was rising from the saucepan, signaling that the broth was ready. Roslyn was almost glad that she had to get up to deal with it, because at least that meant she wouldn’t have to keep sitting there while her thoughts continued to circle around and around.
She rose from her chair and arranged the meal on a tray she found leaning against the side of the refrigerator.
It was a wooden tray with a lipped edge, the kind used for breakfast in bed.
Roslyn couldn’t help wondering why he had it, because the Collector didn’t seem like a breakfast-in-bed kind of person to her.
The rice went into a bowl, the broth into a mug, and the beans onto a small plate.
She added a glass of water and a cloth napkin from a drawer, mostly because there didn’t seem to be any paper napkins, and she had a feeling he’d be irritated if she gave him a paper towel.
Tray in both hands, she went down the hall to the study.
His eyes were still closed, but she could tell from the set of his jaw that he wasn’t asleep anymore.
“I need you to eat,” she said from the doorway.
His eyes opened. In the soft illumination — she’d turned on the desk lamp earlier — his face looked less gaunt and more angular, a natural configuration rather than thinness due to starvation. His white hair, lank and unwashed as it was, caught the light and turned from dull to almost luminous.
He would be handsome when he recovered, Roslyn realized then, although she filed the thought away almost immediately, telling herself it was something she’d noticed the same way she might take note of his weight or his pallor or anything else that could affect his physical condition.
“I’m not hungry,” he told her.
“That doesn’t matter,” she replied briskly, then came over and moved aside a stack of papers so she could set the tray on the desk.
“Your body has been in starvation mode for months and months, so your hunger signals are being suppressed. You won’t feel hungry for days or possibly weeks, but if you don’t eat, the refeeding process will be a lot more dangerous.
You need small meals at frequent intervals, starting now. ”
He looked down at the tray. She watched his gaze move from the bowl of rice to the mug of broth to the mashed beans with their gloss of olive oil, and something in his expression changed.
It wasn’t anything she could call a softening, but at least it had shifted from its default position of watchful control to something a little more open.
“You used the preserved lemon,” he said.
“It was in the pantry,” she replied simply, and hoped he could hear the context beneath those words.
I’m going to use whatever I find in this house to make you better.
A pause, followed by, “Yes, it would have been.”
Another hesitation, and then he reached for the mug of broth, which told her he had better instincts about his own body than she’d given him credit for — liquid before solids when you were dealing with a starved stomach.
He drank slowly, both hands wrapped around the mug in a way that made him look strangely younger.
“The rice should be eaten in small bites,” she told him, using the no-nonsense but still warm voice she always employed when working with patients.
“If you feel nauseous, stop and wait ten minutes before trying again. The beans are a source of protein. You need them, but they can wait until you’ve kept the broth and rice down for at least half an hour. ”
One eyebrow lifted. It was dark, a stark contrast to his pale hair, and she wondered if his hair had been dark when he was younger, if somehow the strange artifacts that surrounded him had made it turn white prematurely.
He remarked, “You have a gift for making dinner feel like a medical procedure.”
“In your case, it is a medical procedure,” she replied smoothly.
The corner of his mouth moved. It wasn’t anything close to a smile, but she guessed that it was an acknowledgment of their exchange, a concession that something she’d said had registered as worth responding to.
And, thank the Goddess, he ate. He did so slowly and carefully, but he was eating.
She watched him from the chair she’d pulled up to the corner of the desk, monitoring for signs of distress — nausea, cramping, the blood sugar spikes that could accompany refeeding after prolonged starvation.
Her healer’s gift, still in contact with his damaged system from the examination earlier, fed her a steady stream of information that her conscious mind translated into clinical shorthand.
Heart rate elevated but stable, blood pressure low but improving, no signs of acute gastrointestinal distress.
He finished the broth and most of the rice before he set down the spoon and leaned back in his chair, moving with deliberate care.
“The beans can wait,” she said.
Those dark brows pulled together. “I believe I just said that.”
“You said you weren’t hungry,” she returned. “I’m saying the beans can wait because you’ve had enough for a first meal, and pushing further could cause problems. There’s a difference.”
He regarded her for a moment. His expression wasn’t hostile but attentive, as if he was reexamining first impressions and adjusting them slightly.
“Your first treatment session will be at seven tomorrow morning,” she said as she rose from the chair. “I’ll bring breakfast before we start. Tonight, you need to sleep — actual sleep, not whatever you’ve been doing in that chair. It might be hard to get you up there, but the bedroom upstairs — ”
“I don’t sleep upstairs,” he broke in.
For a moment, she paused. That had sure looked like a master bedroom to her, but she decided it was probably better to leave the questions for later.