Chapter 6 #3
He nodded. “Yes, I found this house ten years ago. It was a foreclosure, structurally sound and large enough to hold the collection as it existed then, and it was located in a town where one more eccentric owner of a ramshackle Victorian house wouldn’t attract any particular attention.
I spent two years renovating it — building the reinforced shelving, installing the layered wards, designing the containment protocols for each individual artifact.
The work was” — he paused and was a little surprised by what came next, since it wasn’t the word he’d meant to use — “the happiest period of my life.”
The words seemed to hang there for a beat or two. It revealed a vulnerability he’d had no intention of showing to Roslyn Campbell, like a document left open on a desk that should have been locked away in a drawer.
“Ten years,” he continued, since stopping now would only give his previous statement undue weight.
“I spent a decade here, maintaining the collection, acquiring new pieces when they surfaced, building a system I knew was imperfect but that was, at least, better than the alternative of leaving these things scattered and unattended across the continent.” He paused there and went on in a much drier tone.
“And then the McAllisters acquired two powerful artifacts through sheer accident. I made the mistake of trying to retrieve them, and your cousin sent me to the void.”
Roslyn’s brows had puckered briefly when he mentioned her clan, but she sounded calm enough as she asked, “And the Van Horns?”
“Victoria never stopped looking for me,” he replied.
“When I was banished, I had nothing — no collection, no resources, no reason for her to pursue me beyond wounded pride. But over the years, Victoria began to hear rumors. A rogue warlock collecting dangerous artifacts. A man without clan ties who was amassing objects that any primas who’d known of their existence had spent centuries trying to suppress.
” His voice remained steady, but he could feel the effort it required to keep his throat from tightening as he spoke.
“She decided the collection was hers by right. Not because she wanted the objects — she feared them as much as any Van Horn. Because the objects were mine, and I was hers. In Victoria’s understanding of the world, a banished clan member doesn’t get to build something more impressive than what the clan itself possesses. ”
“That’s — ” Roslyn seemed to stop herself, and he watched her choose and then discard several responses before settling on one. “That’s not how these things work.”
A shrug. “It’s how Victoria works.” He looked down at his hands, which were resting on the desk on either side of the untouched soup, and he noticed they were steady enough.
That surprised him a little. “She’s spent years trying to locate this house, sending agents, tracking my movements, leaning on contacts in the witch community for information.
When her search failed, and I was sent to the void, she would have shifted her efforts to the collection itself. ”
Roslyn’s eyes narrowed slightly. “And now you’re back, and the void trail led her here.”
“It is leading her here,” he corrected her.
“The trail is fading, but it hasn’t dissipated entirely.
The dampening field will slow her progress, but Victoria Van Horn is patient when she chooses to be, and she has resources I can’t match.
” He met Roslyn’s gaze across the desk, and then he said what he hadn’t yet said aloud to anyone, the thing that had been sitting at the center of his calculations ever since the day he’d torn his way back to the mortal plane.
“She’ll find us. It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when.”
The study was very quiet after he uttered those words.
Roslyn hadn’t moved during his account, had quietly sat in the chair across from him as if she understood some stories shouldn’t be interrupted, and now she remained still, her expression thoughtful rather than shocked.
He attributed this lack of reaction to the simple fact that she was a McAllister, and had therefore grown up in a family that understood all too well the particular cruelties that witch-kind could inflict on its own.
He waited for the response. It would be, he thought, something practical, a question about how long they might have, or possibly a suggestion regarding their defensive options.
Roslyn Campbell was, he knew, a practical woman, and practicality would be her default mode when confronted with this kind of information.
However, what she said was, “You’ve been alone for a very long time.”
The words were spoken quietly, offered without a hint of pity, and they hit him somewhere deep inside that no ward he’d ever constructed could have deflected.
She wasn’t observing or even diagnosing.
She was simply stating a thing that was true, the way she might state a patient’s temperature or blood pressure…
a fact, recorded without judgment, that was still the most important thing in the room.
He knew he should say something. After all, he had several pat responses readily available — the deflection, the dry rejoinder, the retreat into formality that had served him so effectively for the past seventeen years.
The words were there already, a dozen variations on the theme of “I prefer solitude” or “loneliness is a luxury I can’t afford” or “you presume a great deal, Ms. Campbell,” each of them perfectly designed to reestablish the distance between them and restore the semblance of control that this conversation had been steadily dismantling.
But he didn’t say any of them.
Instead, he sat in the chair in the study of the house he’d built to hold the only family that would have him, and he looked at the woman who’d spent ten days healing him, and he didn’t speak.
The silence wasn’t evasion or deflection.
It was the most honest thing he’d offered another person since the day the Van Horns had put him out of their door; it had no performance and no strategy, and definitely no carefully constructed version of himself designed to keep the world at a safe distance.
Roslyn held his gaze for a moment longer, and then she did something he hadn’t expected, which was to nod — once, simply, as though he’d said something she’d been waiting to hear — and picked up her own spoon.
“Your soup is getting cold,” she said.
He looked at the bowl for a second or two before he picked up his spoon. They ate in a silence that was, for the first time since she’d arrived, not uncomfortable but companionable, a quiet that understood they’d said enough and knew it.
Malachi ate the soup that Roslyn Campbell had made from canned tomatoes and dried herbs and thought it was possibly the best thing he’d tasted in seventeen years.
He didn’t tell her that, of course. But he suspected, from the way she glanced at him when he reached for a second helping, that she already knew.