Chapter 5 #3
Her feet propelled her across the room before she’d made the conscious decision to move. She reached him just as his upper body tipped sideways, and she caught him with both arms, one around his shoulders, the other braced against his chest, and took his weight as he slumped against her.
He was heavier than she’d expected, mostly because he’d gone completely limp, every muscle surrendering at once. His head fell against her shoulder, his cheek pressing against the fabric of her shirt, and she could feel his breath against her collarbone, rapid and shallow and warm.
Her gift surged through the contact before she could stop it, flooding into his system in urgent, instinctive response to the crisis.
At once, she sensed the extent of the damage…
channels drained, muscles strained, magic guttering again in a way that brought her back to the first night, when she’d found him half-dead in his chair.
Without thinking, she began the emergency stabilization her training demanded, pouring healing energy into the most critical pathways, shoring up the magic around his heart where the void scarring was densest.
But underneath the clinical response, she was aware of something else entirely.
He was warm. That was the first thing she noticed.
It was completely unexpected; he’d been so cold during those early days, his body still filled with the residual chill of the void, that she’d unconsciously categorized him as a cold person, someone whose natural temperature ran low.
But he wasn’t. Under the surface depletion, under the damage and the exhaustion, the body against her was warm.
The heat of him against her shoulder and her chest was so startlingly human that it broke through her clinical detachment like a hand punching through thin ice.
She was holding him. Not as a healer holding a patient, but as a person holding another person. The difference between those two states was something she’d never had to navigate before and sure as hell didn’t know how to navigate now.
His breathing was steadying under her hands, the emergency stabilization doing its work. She could feel the moment when his consciousness began to resurface, signaled by a subtle shift in the tension of his body.
He knew she was holding him. He knew, and he hadn’t pulled away.
Neither had she.
A few seconds passed like that, with her arms around him and his weight against her shoulder.
The dice were silent in their new containment, and through the walls, she could feel the rest of the collection humming its familiar chorus.
His heart beat beneath her palm, steady now, and her magic noted the rhythm the same way it always did.
However, that data meant something different when you could feel it against your own chest.
Then he moved, a slight tensing of his shoulders that signaled he was about to pull away, and she loosened her arms to let him. He sat up slowly, bracing one hand against the floor, and he didn’t look at her.
“The ward will hold,” he said. His voice was hoarse, scraped and rough after the effort of the past two hours. “The new containment is stronger than the original. I built in additional layers to account for the dimensional static.”
“Good.” Her own voice sounded much steadier than she’d expected, and she couldn’t help being relieved by that. “You need to eat something, and then you need to sleep. We’ll do the evening session when you wake up.”
He nodded once, a motion so faint that she might have missed it if she hadn’t been watching for it, and she helped him to his feet in silence. He accepted the assistance without protest, which told her more about his condition than any diagnostic scan could have.
Malachi Van Horn didn’t accept help from anyone unless his body left him no alternative.
They walked back to the study together, her hand under his elbow and his gait unsteady enough that the contact was medically justifiable. At the study door, he stopped, and she felt him straighten, a movement that told her he wouldn’t allow himself to be seen stumbling across his own threshold.
“Ms. Campbell.”
“Yes?”
A pause. He was looking at the doorframe rather than at her, and his hand rested on the wood as though he needed the support but was pretending to be making a casual gesture. “Thank you for not stopping me.”
She could have said several things in response to that comment — that she’d wanted to, that it had been difficult to watch and do nothing, that he’d frightened the hell out of her when he began to collapse.
However, she didn’t say any of them, mainly because she’d learned that Malachi heard what you didn’t say much more clearly than what you did.
“You’re welcome,” she told him. “Now eat and go to sleep, in that order.”
She left him at the study door and went back to the kitchen, where the breakfast dishes were still sitting in the sink.
After she turned on the water, she picked up the sponge and stood there with her hands under the faucet for a long time, feeling the warmth of the water and the ghost of the heat of his body against her shoulder.
Something had changed. She could feel it in the way her magic still resonated with the impression of his heartbeat, in the way the memory of his weight against her shoulder refused to file itself safely under “clinical contact” and instead wedged itself in a place she didn’t have a category for.
She finished the dishes, dried her hands, and began preparing Malachi’s dinner. Broth, rice, the last of the preserved lemon. Small bites.
Three steps back.