Chapter 4 #3
Roslyn crossed her arms, looking singularly unconvinced. “Another week of twice-daily sessions during which you’re also powering a cloaking artifact. That sounds like a siege.”
“I’ve managed sieges before,” he replied, his tone milder than he’d intended.
Her head tilted to one side. “And you ended up in a void for a year, so maybe your track record isn’t exactly the reassurance you think it is.”
She held his gaze for a moment longer, and he watched her decide not to push further, not because she’d conceded the point, but because she had already learned something about him that most people never did, which was that direct confrontation only made him dig in harder.
Roslyn Campbell fought her battles sideways, with patience and persistence and the knowledge that she was right and was willing to wait for him to arrive at the same conclusion on his own terms.
It was, he reflected, an extremely effective strategy.
She returned to her position behind the chair and placed her hands on his temples again. “Don’t move. I need to reassess the scarring after that little stunt, and it’s going to take longer than usual.”
He sat still. Her magic entered his system, and he felt it trace the cost of the cloaking stone’s activation…
the depleted channels, the setback in the tissue she’d been carefully rebuilding, the additional strain on magic that was still, despite five days of treatment, operating well below safe thresholds.
Her hands were warm against his temples, and her power moved through him with the same steady, thorough attention it always did.
He sat in his chair and stared at the bookshelves and forced himself not to think about what he was feeling.
What he was feeling, if he’d allowed himself to name it, was that the cloaking stone could mask their signatures inside the study, but it couldn’t cover the entire house.
During the hours between sessions — when Roslyn was in the kitchen, or moving through the hallways, or sleeping in the small bedroom upstairs — her magic would be partially detectable to anyone looking for it.
The scouts would eventually notice a pattern of suppression during certain hours, visibility during others, and they’d would draw their own conclusions.
He needed a better solution, one that covered the whole house all the time, regardless of where she was or what she was doing.
And he knew exactly where to find one. In the locked room on the ground floor, the one whose wards Roslyn had felt and wisely decided not to test, there was an artifact he’d acquired seven years ago from a collector in Vancouver who hadn’t understood what he was selling.
It was a sphere of dark amber, roughly the size of a billiard ball, and its function was to generate a dampening field that could suppress magical signatures within a radius of approximately five hundred feet, far more than enough to cover the house and the yard.
The Vancouver collector had been using it as a paperweight.
Malachi had recognized the object for what it was and had spent three months negotiating its purchase, during which time he’d had to maintain an expression of mild academic interest that had cost him far more effort than most of his actual warding work.
The amber sphere was reliable, stable, and demanded very little maintenance once activated. It also required an initial charge from its user’s magical reserves, a substantial one, roughly equivalent to what Roslyn’s sessions had rebuilt in the past five days.
He would lose everything she had given him, every careful, painstaking repair she’d made to the channels around his heart and through the center of his magic.
If he used the sphere, he would be back to where he’d been on the day she arrived, or close to it, at any rate, and the recovery timeline she’d laid out would extend by a week at minimum.
He didn’t tell her about the amber sphere during the remainder of the morning session. Instead, he sat quietly while she worked, and when she was finished, he ate the breakfast she brought without commentary and said nothing when she removed the tray and went to the kitchen to clean up.
He waited until that afternoon to activate the sphere. Roslyn was safely upstairs, and that meant he had sufficient time to work.
The procedure required him to enter the locked room, which meant dismissing the ward, a process that took several minutes and left his hands shaking with effort.
The room beyond was small and dim, lined with shelves, each one holding objects he’d acquired over the years and judged too sensitive for the more accessible collection rooms. The amber sphere sat on the middle shelf, nestled in a velvet-lined box.
He took it in both hands, felt its dormant energy pulse once against his palms, and pushed.
At once, his magical reserves, painstakingly accumulated over five days of healing, emptied in a single sustained pour that lasted for around forty seconds and felt far longer.
The sphere drank from him the way the void had drunk from him, except that the void had been indiscriminate and the sphere was targeted, pulling specifically from the channels Roslyn had been rebuilding, the ones that ran deepest and closest to the center of his magic.
When it was done, the dampening field bloomed outward from the sphere in a silent wave, expanding through the walls of the house and into the yard and past the fence line.
He could feel it settle, a thick, even suppression that would render every kind of magic signature inside its radius to a murmur.
To anyone scanning from outside, the house would feel like nothing more than a concentration of old ambient energy, the kind of residual magic that accumulated naturally in structures that had stood for more than a century and had once had witch-kind living in them, even though they were no longer there.
The outer perimeter wards would still register at the property line — they had to, by design — but anyone scanning the interior would find only the soft, ambient pulse of an old house.