Chapter 6
She asked the question he’d been waiting for on the eleventh evening, while he was eating the soup she’d made from the last of the canned tomatoes.
It was very good, and he supposed he shouldn’t be too surprised.
The meals she’d prepared so far had shown some remarkable ingenuity, considering the limited ingredients she had on hand.
“Why do the Van Horns want your collection?”
Malachi set down his spoon. He’d known this was coming.
Roslyn had held off for quite some time, waiting until she knew he was well along on his healing journey before she began to truly pry.
She already knew about the artifacts, of course, and she knew about the Gibsons and the reasons why they were less than pleased about him occupying even this small slice of their territory.
Because of fragments he’d let slip during his daily narrations and from the amber sphere incident, she also understood that his relationship with magic was self-taught, solitary.
But what she didn’t know — what he’d been deliberately withholding — was the reason behind all of it, the history that connected a banished warlock with a house full of dangerous objects to a prima in Manhattan who would cross the country to reclaim what she considered hers.
For a moment, he considered deflecting. After all, he possessed a considerable repertoire of conversational maneuvers he could employ — the redirected question, the partial answer that satisfied the form of a response without providing its substance, the sudden interest in a tangential topic that steered the discussion into safer waters.
He’d been deploying these techniques since he was twenty years old, and so far, they’d served him reliably enough.
But Roslyn was sitting across from him at the desk, with the lamplight catching the lighter streaks in her honey-brown hair and her steady blue gaze on his face.
She wore one of his white dress shirts because her own clothes were drying on the radiator upstairs.
Over the past ten days, she’d rebuilt his magic with her hands and her gift and her relentless, infuriating patience, and something about the plain directness of her question made his usual evasions feel pointless and small.
Because having something in his hands would make this easier, he picked up the spoon again, but he didn’t begin eating. He simply held it, the way he might hold a pen or an artifact, something to help anchor him while he ventured into territory he’d spent seventeen years avoiding.
“Because Victoria Van Horn believes the collection belongs to her,” he said coolly.
“Not to her personally — she has no interest in the objects themselves, no understanding of what they are or what they require. She believes they belong to her because I belong to her. Or at least, I did, and in the Van Horn worldview, the possessions of a clan member are the possessions of the clan.”
“Because you were a Van Horn.”
It wasn’t a question. He’d let slip a few things over the past ten days, so he realized there was no reason for concealment now.
“Yes, I was born a Van Horn,” he said. “My mother was Elise Van Horn, a cousin from a minor branch of the family. She was powerful enough to be useful but not prominent enough to matter. My father was a warlock named David Hale, from a small clan in Connecticut that the Van Horns considered beneath them. He died when I was three. I have no real memories of him.”
Malachi paused and noted that his grip on the spoon had tightened. He relaxed his fingers before continuing.
“After my father’s death, my mother returned to Manhattan with me.
We lived there at Victoria’s mother’s sufferance — Greta Van Horn was the prima then, and she made it clear that our place in the clan was conditional on our usefulness.
My mother’s gift was minor, something in the realm of enhanced perception, and Greta considered her barely worth supporting, although she was entitled to the same stipend that all members of the Van Horn family were given.
I, however, showed early signs of significant power, and the Van Horns have always been interested in powerful children. ”
Roslyn frowned. “Interested how?”
“The way one is interested in an investment,” he said simply.
“I was given a private school education, trained in the fundamentals of magic, given access to the family’s resources.
” He was narrating now, falling into the measured cadence he used when discussing the artifacts.
It was a defense mechanism, the same retreat into the objective voice that kept the emotional content of what he was relating at arm’s length.
“I was a dutiful student. I was also a curious one, which is where the trouble began.”
He set down the spoon. There didn’t seem to be any point in pretending that he was eating, and maintaining the pretense would have been an insult to the intelligence of the woman who sat across from him.
“The Van Horns have an extensive library,” he went on.
“Many old clans do. The library contained generations of accumulated knowledge, grimoires, theoretical texts, historical records. I spent a good deal of time there as an adolescent, which the family encouraged, because a well-read warlock was an asset.” He paused there, giving himself a moment to decide how he wanted to continue.
“But the library wasn’t where the trouble started.
The trouble started when I was ten years old and my gift manifested. ”
“Your gift,” Roslyn repeated, and her eyes narrowed slightly.
“Yes. Yours is healing, of course, while your cousin Bellamy’s is controlling the wind.
Mine is — ” Another pause as he considered how best to explain the power that had been born within him.
“Resonance, I suppose. I can sense magical objects, read their properties, understand their function and their history through direct proximity. It isn’t a common gift, and it wasn’t one the Van Horns knew how to categorize, which made them uncomfortable from the start. ”
He picked up the spoon again, then put it down. An idle movement, one he knew betrayed his discomfort at having to relate the tale.
“I was twelve when I found my first artifact. It was a brass letter opener at a yard sale in the Village, sold by a civilian who had no idea what she had. I knew what it was the moment I touched it — it was a minor amplifier, designed to boost the user’s natural magical output.
I brought it home, and within an hour, it had discharged in my bedroom and blown out every window on the second floor of the house.
” The corner of his mouth moved, and he was surprised to find that the expression he wore now was something adjacent to a smile, although a bleak one.
“The Van Horns were not amused by such a public display of magic.”
Roslyn’s mouth quirked as well, and he wondered if she was thinking of similar magical mishaps that might have occurred in her own clan. “I suppose not.”
“I was told to leave such things alone,” he continued.
“The problem was that my gift didn’t come with an off switch.
I could no more stop sensing artifacts than you can stop sensing an injured or unwell patient.
The artifacts called to me — or rather, I was attuned to them in a way that made ignoring them a kind of sustained discomfort, the equivalent of a physician walking past an open wound and pretending not to see it.
” He looked at her and saw in her expression the recognition he’d expected.
She understood. Of course she did. “The Van Horns’ policy on magical objects, which is shared by most major clans, is simple — if you find one, destroy it.
If you can’t destroy it, then contain it.
If you can’t contain it, bury it somewhere deep and pretend it doesn’t exist.”
“And you couldn’t pretend.” Her voice was almost soft now, sympathetic.
He wasn’t sure what to do about that, so he only nodded.
“I couldn’t pretend, and I wouldn’t destroy.
Pretending a thing doesn’t exist isn’t a containment strategy.
It’s willful ignorance, and willful ignorance, when applied to objects that can level buildings or warp probability or open doors to sealed dimensions, isn’t merely foolish.
It’s irresponsible.” The word came out with more force than he’d intended.
He noted that and made himself continue in a quieter tone.
“As I grew older, I began arguing — publicly, at clan meetings, which was my first mistake — that the artifacts should be studied, cataloged, and properly maintained by someone who understood their properties. I proposed a system. I had detailed plans for how the collection and care of these objects could be formalized.”
Roslyn leaned forward a little, turquoise eyes shining with interest. “And that happened when you were twenty?”
It was hard to believe he’d once been that young.
The intervening years had stretched on longer than he wanted to acknowledge.
“I was twenty, and I was certain that being right would be sufficient protection. Unfortunately, it was not.” He paused and allowed himself a small breath, one he was sure Roslyn noticed.
“Victoria Van Horn had recently inherited the prima title from Greta, and she was in the process of consolidating her authority. A young warlock whose inborn gift made him an expert on the very objects the clan wanted buried, challenging established policy in public — that wasn’t merely inconvenient. It was a threat to her position.”