Chapter 4 #4
The Gibsons would lose interest, and the cloaking stone could be retired. Roslyn would be able to heal him freely while continuing to broadcast their location.
All it had cost him was everything she’d given him so far.
He replaced the sphere in its box, closed it, re-established the ward on the room’s door, and then walked back to the study on legs that felt as if they’d been filled with sand.
The hallway swam around him — the faded William and Morris wallpaper, the dark walnut wainscoting, the row of closed doors — and he had to stop twice and brace himself against the wall until his vision steadied.
Somehow, he made it to the chair, where he sat down. He was aware that his breathing was too fast and his hands were trembling against the armrests, and that the hollow, gutted sensation in his chest was the absence of the magic she’d spent a week rebuilding.
He had time to button the cuff of his shirt, which had come unfastened during the activation, before he heard her footsteps on the stairs.
She entered the study and stopped in the doorway. He watched her eyes widen as she felt it — the dampening field, the change in the house’s magical atmosphere, and then those turquoise eyes glittered as she seemed to register the change in him.
The anger that crossed her face in that moment wasn’t the cool, composed displeasure he had seen before when he was being difficult about eating a bowl of beans or having her check his pulse for what felt like the hundredth time.
A flush of fury touched her cheeks, and for the first time since her arrival, she looked at him not as a medical professional dealing with a difficult patient but as a woman confronting someone who’d just done something unforgivably stupid.
“What the hell did you do?” she demanded.
“I solved the problem,” he said calmly.
“What did you do?” She strode across the room and took his wrist. Immediately, he sensed her gift reaching through the contact to find what was left, which was very nearly nothing.
Her grip on his wrist tightened. “Your magic is almost gone. I spent five days rebuilding your energy, and you’ve — ” She stopped herself there, neck and jaw taut, and the visible effort that restraint cost her told him more about the severity of the situation than any clinical description of the damage he’d caused could have.
“There is a dampening field around the house,” he said.
He was aware that his voice sounded faint, which definitely wasn’t the effect he’d been aiming for.
“It will suppress all magical signatures within a radius of five hundred feet. The Gibsons won’t be able to detect us, and you’ll be free to continue healing me without tactical constraints. ”
“‘Free to continue healing you.’” She repeated those words with a sort of flat affect that he recognized as the precursor to something considerably more forceful, like the tide running out before the tsunami arrived.
“You just emptied your reserves to power an artifact after I explicitly told you that using magic would set back your recovery, and you’re talking about it as if you’ve done me a favor. ”
He gazed at her coolly. “I have done us both a favor. The detection risk — ”
“The detection risk was manageable,” she snapped.
“What you’ve done definitely isn’t.” She released his wrist and stepped back, and for one disorienting moment, the absence of her touch felt worse than the drain on his magic.
“I’m going to examine you properly after dinner,” she continued.
“Don’t use any more magic. Don’t touch any artifacts.
Don’t do anything except sit in that chair and contemplate the possibility that you aren’t the only person in this house capable of making decisions. ”
And after delivering that remark, she stalked out of the study, long, golden-brown ponytail swinging.
Malachi sat in his leather chair and contemplated, as instructed, the possibility that he wasn’t the only person in this house who could make decisions.
The exercise wasn’t productive. What he found himself contemplating instead was the expression on her face as her gift had traced the extent of what he had spent — not the anger, which he had expected, but the emotion he thought he’d glimpsed underneath it.
For just a moment, it had looked like grief.
She was grieving that something she’d been building with care had been taken from her. The loss didn’t appear to be merely professional but personal, the pain someone might experience if they’d invested themselves in a thing and then watched it be carelessly destroyed.
He hadn’t meant to upset her. No, he’d intended to protect her, which wasn’t a thought he wanted to examine too closely.
Examining it would require him to acknowledge that protecting Roslyn Campbell had become a priority that ranked alongside protecting the collection, and he wasn’t prepared to reckon with what that meant.
The dampening field hummed around the house, silent and effective. In the study, Malachi sat alone in the quiet and felt, for the first time in five days, entirely cold.