Chapter 4
By the fourth day of his treatment, Malachi was forced to admit that the McAllister healer was very good at her job.
He would never have said so aloud, of course.
Conceding competence to a woman who was, in effect, his prisoner would have undermined a power dynamic he was already struggling to maintain.
But the evidence was difficult to argue with.
His magic, which had been nearly snuffed out when she first laid hands on him, had stabilized enough that he could feel its presence again.
It wasn’t the deep, reliable well it had once been, perhaps, but it was still there, a pulse rather than a current.
His vision no longer doubled without warning.
The cracked hip, while still painful, had shifted from excruciating to merely miserable, which was enough improvement that he could now walk from the study to the kitchen and back without the hallway tilting sideways beneath him.
Progress. He loathed it, not because he objected to the improvement in his physical condition, but because each small step forward was evidence that he needed Roslyn Campbell, and needing anyone had always been the one indulgence Malachi refused to permit himself.
The routine she’d imposed for his healing was ruthlessly efficient, and he found he couldn’t reasonably object to any part of it without sounding petulant, a quality he associated with lesser intellects.
She arrived at the study each morning at seven with a tray — rice or oatmeal, a mug of broth, water — and conducted the first healing session while he ate, her hands on his temples or his wrists or the pulse points at his ankles, her magic flowing through him with the warm, steady pressure that he’d stopped pretending he didn’t find comforting.
At least, he’d stopped pretending to himself. The performance he maintained for her benefit was another matter entirely.
During the morning sessions, he held forth.
He told her about the artifacts, about their histories and their properties, as well as the specific dangers each one posed if its containment failed, and he described the glass jar of weather-working, which predated the Roman Empire and contained enough stored atmospheric energy to flatten a city block.
Then he went on to explain the astrolabe’s whispers, which were fragments of a dead language that corresponded to no known historical civilization and that, if transcribed and spoken aloud, would theoretically open a doorway to a plane that had been sealed since before recorded human history.
He lectured her on the bone dice, the probability warpers, the items in the basement vaults he did not describe in detail because he didn’t think she needed the burden of knowing what he kept down there.
His reason for doing all this was that silence during her sessions felt intolerable.
When he stopped talking, the only thing left was the sensation of her magic inside his body, and that sensation was intimate.
Not sexual, although that particular distinction grew less reliable each day, with every time he noticed the blue of her eyes or the curve of her mouth.
No, it was intimate in the way that being truly open to another being was intimate.
Her gift didn’t merely repair damage; it read the channels and patterns of his magic with a thoroughness that left nowhere to hide.
By now, she knew the exact dimensions of his damage.
She knew which channels he had overworked and which he had neglected.
She probably knew things about the structure of his power that he himself had never had to learn, mainly because one did not typically examine one’s own magical architecture from the outside.
The narration helped to keep her at a distance. Or rather, it kept the entire experience at a distance, allowing him to pretend that her hands on his skin were merely a medical procedure and not the first human contact he had experienced in more years than he wanted to count.
The evening sessions were worse. By evening, his reserves of conversation had been exhausted, and she’d learned to let the silences stand as she sent her healing energy inside him.
She would place her palms flat against his chest — the void scarring was densest there, concentrated around his heart — and work quietly for twenty or thirty minutes, and he would sit in his chair and stare at the bookshelves and try not to think about the way her magic felt moving through the scarred tissue of his abilities.
Thinking about it would have forced him to acknowledge that it felt something like mercy, and he simply didn’t possess the framework for processing that particular quality.
Meals were equally problematic. She cooked with a kind of quiet competence, not making a production of it.
It was all practical food, simply prepared, seasoned with the supplies from his pantry and served at the desk in the study because he hadn’t graduated…
in her clinical estimation, at any rate…
to the dignity of eating at the dining room table.
The food was good, but he wouldn’t tell her it was good. He ate what she put in front of him with the minimum acknowledgment basic courtesy required, and when she asked how his stomach was tolerating the increased portions, he always responded with clinical data rather than opinion.
“No nausea,” he told her. “Mild discomfort after the beans yesterday, which resolved within the hour.”
A nod. “Good. We’ll add bread tomorrow.”
He’d frowned. “I don’t require a running commentary on the menu.”
The faintest quirk at the corner of one mouth. “And yet you’ll get one.”
She had a talent for the last word that he found both admirable and deeply irritating, mainly because he recognized it as the same talent he possessed.
They were, in certain respects, more alike than either of them would have been comfortable admitting out loud; both guarded, both careful, both inclined to use professional detachment as a substitute for the messier business of actually engaging with another person.
The difference was that her armor was warmth, a composed friendliness that kept people at exactly the distance she wanted them, while his was formality, a kind of cultivated inapproachability he employed because he’d decided long ago that distance was safer than connection.
They were very effective at not connecting, and he suspected she found this as exhausting as he did.
On the morning of Roslyn Campbell’s fifth day at the house, he sensed the Gibsons.
It happened during the first healing session, which was perhaps the worst possible timing, since his defenses were at their lowest when her magic was active inside him.
He was sitting in the study with her hands at his temples, his eyes closed as he delivered a description of the astrolabe’s containment protocol he was fairly certain she had stopped listening to three minutes ago, when something at the edge of his perception shifted.
Something was different about the wards — specifically, the outermost layer of the perimeter wards, which he’d designed to function as an early warning system rather than a true barrier.
Something was pressing against them, not with force, but with a careful, probing intelligence that told him the source wasn’t an animal or a mundane intruder, but a witch or warlock with enough skill to test a ward boundary without triggering it.
He went rigid, and immediately, Roslyn’s hands paused on his temples.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Be quiet.”
The sharpness of his tone was probably uncalled for, but right then, he didn’t have the bandwidth for courtesy.
He extended what remained of his perceptual range toward the ward boundary and identified the signature, one he recognized from years of living in Gibson territory without their explicit permission.
There were two signatures, actually, a paired team, which he supposed was the Gibsons’ form of playing it safe.
They’d stopped at the property’s eastern edge, where the yard met the neighbor’s fence, and they were doing exactly what he would have done in their position, which was testing the wards’ density, looking for degradation, trying to determine whether the home’s occupant was present and, if so, how powerful they were.
His return through the void would have left some trace behind.
The dimensional static he’d been shedding for days would have registered on at least their prima’s radar and possibly that of other witches and warlocks in the clan, depending on their level of sensitivity.
The Gibsons, whatever their other failings, were competent enough, and they would have felt his arrival.
The only reason it had taken them five days to investigate was probably that the static itself had been so disorienting, so unusual, that pinpointing the source had required time.
Time that had just run out.
“The Gibsons,” he said. “There are two scouts at the perimeter. Don’t move.”
He closed his eyes and focused on the study’s interior wards, which were the strongest in the house, layered over a span of years to mask the energy of whatever — or whoever — was inside.
They would hold. His own magic, already weakened, would read as faint and ambiguous through those layers, and the scouts would have difficulty distinguishing it from the background noise of the collection contained within these walls.
But there was a variable he hadn’t accounted for, and it was currently standing behind his chair with her hands on his temples.