Chapter 5 #2
Then a ripple passed through the house’s ambient magical field.
It was subtle, easy to miss if you weren’t attuned to the specific frequencies of the objects behind those closed doors.
But because she had plenty of time on her hands when she wasn’t attending to Malachi, she’d been passively keeping note of the collection in the house since her first night there.
So she recognized the bone dice’s vibe immediately.
The fidgety, restless energy she’d been sensing from the East Gallery since her arrival had changed.
It was no longer contained, no longer held within the careful boundary that she’d felt surrounding each artifact on the shelves.
It had expanded somehow, pushing outward in slow, rhythmic pulses that she could feel through the floor and through the walls, even through the water running over her hands in the sink.
She turned off the faucet and stood very still.
The pulses were affecting the environment.
She could feel it in the small, almost imperceptible ways that probability appeared to be shifting in the immediate vicinity of the East Gallery.
It was a kind of low-grade wrongness in the way things were happening, as though the normal rules that governed cause and effect had developed a slight wobble.
The sensation was hard to describe in concrete terms and was more like an instinct, a healer’s awareness that something in the body of the house had gone seriously out of whack.
Quickly, she dried her hands on the towel by the sink and made her way down the hall toward the study, where Malachi was supposed to be resting between sessions. She hadn’t made it even halfway before she heard the door of the East Gallery open.
He was already there, telling her that he must have felt it even before she did.
It was his collection, after all, warded with his magic, and a breach in one of the containment fields would register on his senses the way a cardiac alarm would register on hers.
When she reached the Gallery’s doorway, he was standing in front of the shelf where the bone dice sat, his expression a mixture of worry and something that looked almost like curiosity.
The dice themselves appeared simple enough, just six small cubes of yellowed bone, each one carved with symbols she didn’t recognize, arranged in a neat row on the shelf.
But she could feel the probability-warping field they were generating, a sphere of influence that extended roughly a dozen feet from the shelf and was growing by the minute.
Within that sphere, the normal distribution of random events had been disrupted.
Those were small things, for now; she sensed it in the way the dust motes in the room were drifting in patterns that defied air currents, and in the faint, rhythmic clicking sound the dice made against the shelf, as though they were vibrating at a frequency just below audibility.
“Go back to the kitchen,” Malachi said without turning around.
She didn’t budge. “You’re supposed to be resting.”
“The containment ward has failed,” he said, now sounding almost testy, as if he’d already known she wouldn’t move an inch.
“If I don’t re-establish it within the next several hours, the probability field will expand beyond the house, and the neighbors will begin experiencing statistically improbable events.
” He paused, and she heard something in his voice that was almost amusement.
“A broken water main here, a car that won’t start there.
Perhaps a particularly unlikely winning lottery ticket.
The effects are unpredictable, which is rather the point. ”
“You can’t do this,” she told him. “You don’t have the reserves.”
He turned to look at her then, and she saw on his face the thing she’d been afraid of ever since the amber sphere incident.
It was an absolute, immovable certainty, the knowledge that he’d destroy himself if necessary before he’d let something in his care come to harm.
It wasn’t bravado, and it wasn’t pride. It was the same expression she saw in the bathroom mirror every morning when she got up and put her hands on a man she should have hated and poured her magic into the wreckage of his gift.
This was duty, plain and simple, the stubborn, instinctual kind that didn’t care about the cost.
“I don’t have a choice,” he said, and then sat down on the floor in front of the shelf.
Since she knew she couldn’t stop him, Roslyn only stood in the doorway and watched him work.
The process took two hours. She knew because she timed it by keeping an eye on her watch. This wasn’t something she did out of clinical obligation but because she needed something concrete to focus on besides what she was seeing.
Malachi, hollow-cheeked and pale, operating on reserves she’d spent ten days rebuilding and which were nowhere close to sufficient for what he was attempting, sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor of the East Gallery and worked to re-establish the containment ward.
She couldn’t look away from his hands. Those long, careful fingers she’d been trying not to notice during their healing sessions moved over the dice with a delicacy that seemed impossible, given his current condition.
He didn’t touch the bones directly — even she knew enough to understand that skin contact with something so powerful could be very dangerous — but his hands traced the air around them, shaping the ward layer by layer the way a potter might shape clay, building up the containment in increments so fine that she could barely detect the individual additions.
Each layer was different. She could feel him adjusting the ward’s frequency with each pass, tuning it to match the specific resonance of the dice the way you’d tune a radio to a station.
Some layers were dense and rigid, designed to block the probability field’s outward expansion.
Others were flexible, woven with a give that would allow the ward to absorb the dice’s restless energy without cracking.
And threaded through all of it was something she hadn’t expected, a kind of accommodation, as though the ward wasn’t just restraining the dice but negotiating with them, establishing terms under which both the containment and the contained could coexist.
The process was much gentler than she’d expected.
The word “gentle” felt wrong applied to a man as controlled and contrary as Malachi Van Horn, but she couldn’t think of a better one.
He handled the dice’s energy the way she handled frightened patients, with firmness and care, acknowledging the thing’s nature without trying to change it.
He wasn’t fighting the artifact. All he was doing was tending to it.
And the cost of rebuilding the ward was written all over him.
Roslyn could see it in the way his shoulders drew in as his magic grew more and more depleted and in the fine tremor in his hands, a tremor that grew worse with each passing quarter hour, even as sweat darkened the collar of his white shirt despite the chill in the room.
Her healing gift, still attuned to his system from that morning’s session, fed her the magical equivalent of a continuous report of what he was spending, and the numbers weren’t good.
He was pulling from channels that hadn’t finished healing, drawing on reserves that existed only because of the careful work she’d been doing twice a day for more than a week.
Each draw left the tissue a little more strained, a little more fragile.
Goddess, how she wanted to stop him. She wanted to cross the room and take his hands and tell him that the dice could wait, that a few broken water mains and unlikely lottery tickets were an acceptable price for not killing himself in front of her.
But she couldn’t. She understood him now in a way she hadn’t before, and she realized that the dice couldn’t wait.
Not because the consequences of their activation were catastrophic — they weren’t, he’d said so himself — but because they were his.
Their containment had failed on his watch, and he would no sooner leave them unattended than she would walk past a patient bleeding on the floor of her clinic.
This wasn’t a man hoarding treasure. This was someone who tended dangerous things because they had no other guardian.
The tenderness with which he re-created the wards — the patience, the careful negotiation between container and contained — told her more about who he was than all the lectures and speeches he’d been delivering since she arrived in this house.
The Van Horns had thrown him away. She knew the broad strokes of the story, gathered from fragments he’d let slip during his daily narrations.
Banished from his clan at twenty, cast out by a prima who saw his interest in artifacts as a threat.
He’d spent the years since then alone, building a life around the only things that couldn’t reject him.
The irony that the objects he devoted himself to were too dangerous for anyone else to want was so perfect that she didn’t think he even saw it.
He had built a family out of things the world was afraid of because the world had been afraid of him, too.
The last layer of the ward settled into place, and the probability field contracted sharply, pulling back into the tight boundary of the containment. The dice gave a final sulky click against the shelf and then went still, their energy held and contained, safely bounded by the new ward.
Malachi’s hands dropped to his lap. His chin followed, his head dipping forward as his body acknowledged what his will had refused to admit for the past two hours, which was that he had nothing left.
The tremor in his hands had spread to his arms, and his breathing had gone shallow and fast in a way that Roslyn recognized with dismay as the precursor to a syncopal episode.
He was going to pass out.