Chapter 7
Two weeks in now, and Roslyn had to admit that she was starting to enjoy her evenings at Malachi’s home.
Well, maybe “enjoy” wasn’t quite the right word.
She wasn’t sure if such a word even existed, because while she’d relaxed into their time together in ways she wouldn’t have thought possible several weeks ago, she also couldn’t ignore the undercurrent of worry that kept thrumming in the background of her mind, just like the wards humming all around her in the big Victorian house.
It wasn’t just her worry about her family, how frantic they must be, how they had to be desperately searching for her even as the very wards Malachi had constructed to keep away the Gibsons and the Van Horns would also be blocking all the McAllisters’ efforts to locate their missing healer.
No, it was also a worry for her patients and how they were managing when the person who’d been responsible for their healthcare had vanished into thin air.
She knew the people in her clan could always go back to the same thing they’d done before she’d become a full-time healer, which was to use ordinary civilian urgent care and the local hospital for as many things as possible, and to reach out to the healers of the local clans — Eleanor Wilcox in Flagstaff and Maria de la Paz in Tucson — for anything that regular medicine couldn’t handle.
But her civilian patients, the ones who relied on her to give them affordable care?
She had no idea. There was a nurse practitioner’s office in the Village of Oak Creek, just south of Sedona proper, but that was a long way to go for people who took Cottonwood’s local free bus for almost all their errands. Family and friends could only pitch in so much, after all.
And while Roslyn knew that some people would call Malachi Van Horn immeasurably selfish for taking her away from those who needed her, she also realized the math in that particular equation wasn’t as simple as it looked from the outside.
Without him to maintain the wards and ensure the magical items in his collection stayed quiescent, even more people right here could face death and disaster.
So she allowed herself to relax into something close to but not quite acceptance, since that was the only real alternative she had.
Although acceptance wasn’t the right word, either, not when she found herself actively looking forward to the time when they sat in his study during the evening and shared a meal and talked.
That she’d begun to anticipate those dinners, not just as another milestone in her patient’s recovery but as an actual part of her day that she actively awaited, was a development she found more than a little worrisome.
But just because it bothered her didn’t mean it had any intention of going away.
Her shift in attitude had started somewhere around the end of the first week, after the bone dice emergency had burned through most of her anger over the amber sphere situation and left something much more complicated in its place.
The healing sessions were still draining even as Malachi continued to improve, and by the time she’d finished his evening treatment and prepared dinner from whatever the pantry could offer, she was tired enough that her usual defenses had begun to run pretty damn thin.
And Malachi, who was recovering steadily enough to sit up at the desk and eat and talk without losing his breath, had turned out to be surprisingly good company.
She hadn’t expected that from him. Arrogance, sure, which was something he tended to deliver reliably.
And she’d anticipated difficulty, which he’d provided in abundance, with every lift of his eyebrow and question as to why she continued to hover over him as if he were a toddler.
What she hadn’t expected, though, was that his arrogance and difficulty would be accompanied by a mind so sharp and wide-ranging that their evening conversations had become the most intellectually stimulating time she’d spent in months.
He talked about magical theory as if it were poetry, finding beauty in the mathematical relationships between dimensional frequencies and the way different planes of existence resonated with each other.
His descriptions of the properties of the artifacts in his collection had a specificity that went far beyond simple knowledge, since his gift gave him a direct, intuitive understanding of those objects that no amount of study could replicate.
When he explained how a particular containment ward worked, he was drawing on lived experience rather than scholarship.
And when he strayed from the collection into other subjects — the architectural history of the Victorian house, the ecology of the Oregon coast, a dry and surprisingly funny critique of the Gibson clan’s various bumblings — she found herself leaning forward in her chair, genuinely engaged in a way she hadn’t been since her last conversation with her brother Cole about the intersection of journalism and magical ethics, which was one of the few subjects that could make them both lose track of time.
Malachi could make her lose track of time more often than not, and that worried her.
It also concerned her how quickly the domestic rhythms of their strange living arrangement had become ordinary, almost humdrum.
She cooked because he couldn’t yet stand long enough to manage it, and because the kitchen had become her own space, the same way the study was his.
He set the desk for dinner each evening, moving his papers and artifacts to the same locations every time, as if making sure they occupied the same space each evening wasn’t simply habit but a matter of actual survival.
As the days passed, they’d developed an unspoken agreement about the bathroom schedule and about the division of the hallway during the hours between sessions…
and also about the small radio she’d found in one of the kitchen drawers and tuned to a classical station that came in weakly from Portland.
He claimed to only tolerate the music, but she had a sneaking suspicion that he actually liked it.
All those small intimacies and negotiations were the kind of thing that happened when two people lived in close quarters, and they were piling up with a speed that frightened her. Each one seemed like another sign that something was growing between them that neither of them wanted to acknowledge.
But it was the laughter that worried her most. She generally didn’t laugh easily, not because she didn’t have a sense of humor, but because it tended to be the kind of quiet, private amusement that rarely made it past a smile.
Malachi’s wit caught her off guard; he slipped remarks in sideways, delivered in the same measured tone he used for everything else, so the humor seemed to hit a beat after the actual words, a delay that made her laugh before she could stop herself.
The night before, he’d described the canned lentil soup she’d served as “an adequate vehicle for sodium delivery,” and she’d laughed hard enough that he had looked startled, as though her amusement was something he hadn’t expected.
The surprise on his face had been so genuine that it had made her laugh again, and then he’d done something she’d never seen him do before.
He’d looked away quickly, as if her laughter and her outright glee were too bright for him to face directly.
That was the moment she’d realized she was in trouble.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of trouble that could be managed by a few deep, bracing breaths and a brisk return to what she always thought of as her clinical mode.
This was something entirely different, something that lived somewhere deep within her and grew roots, and the more she tried to pull it out, the deeper it went.
She recognized it because she’d seen it in her patients a few times over the years, the way proximity and vulnerability combined to create bonds that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with how human beings weren’t designed to be close to someone day after day without eventually feeling something.
Roslyn knew she was feeling something. She didn’t have a name for it yet, and she wasn’t ready to look at it directly.
It was sort of like how you didn’t look directly at the sun, not because you didn’t know it was there, but because acknowledging its full brightness made it impossible to see anything else.
What she did acknowledge to herself was that Malachi Van Horn was brilliant, damaged, and infuriating…
and unexpectedly kind in ways he went to considerable lengths to disguise.
He’d kidnapped her, but he still made sure to be brief in the bathroom every morning so she’d have enough time to deal with her long hair, and when he talked about his collection, his hands moved with a tenderness that made her ache.
Oh, man, she was in trouble.
She also couldn’t stop thinking about the way he’d looked at her last night in the moment after she’d laughed, that quick glance away as if her happiness was something he wasn’t able to deal with.
She’d seen it in patients who’d been isolated so long that ordinary human warmth felt like an assault.
The professional part of her wanted to file it under “trauma response” and leave it there.
That would be the safe thing to do, right?
But that glance hadn’t felt like a trauma response. No, it had felt like a man catching sight of something he wanted and not knowing whether he was allowed to reach for it.
And, Goddess help her, she wanted him to reach.
Malachi had always prided himself on his capacity for self-observation. It was, he believed, one of his more useful qualities — the ability to monitor his own thoughts and responses with a clinical detachment that prevented the kind of emotional errors that tripped up less disciplined minds.
Except that capacity appeared to be failing him.