Chapter 12
Roslyn was just finishing the dinner dishes when the wards started screaming.
That wasn’t the right word for it — wards didn’t have voices, didn’t have lungs or throats or anything else you needed to create sound — but her healer’s senses translated the sensation into something her mind could process.
That was why it felt like a high, thin shriek of magical distress, like metal being torn apart under enormous pressure.
The sound wasn’t in the air, though. It was in her bones, vibrating through her magic with an urgency that made her drop the dish she was rinsing on the floor.
Luckily, it landed on the rug and not the hardwood, but still.
She bent down to pick it up with shaking fingers and realized that Malachi was already moving, heading into the hallway from the chair where he’d been resting in the study.
In situations like this, she always went into triage mode. Assess, prioritize, act. It was the same series of steps she used when a patient coded, except in this case, the patient was the house itself, and the code was coming from every direction at once.
“How many?” she asked as she followed Malachi into the downstairs corridor.
The house was dark, the hallway lit only by the faint ambient glow that seeped through the windows, and every step sent vibrations through the floor that she could feel resonating with the distress in the wards.
The artifacts were agitated; she could sense them humming in their containment, responding to the assault on the property’s defenses, uneasy and restless, like animals scenting fire on the wind.
“At least five,” he said briefly. “Possibly more.” He was ahead of her, moving fast but carefully, one hand trailing along the wall as though he was reading the house through his fingertips.
“The outer perimeter is already gone. They came through the weakest section on the eastern side. The anchors I repaired last are the newest, and the newest are the most vulnerable to a coordinated strike.”
They stopped in the center of the hallway.
Through the windows that flanked the front door, Roslyn couldn’t see anything unusual, just the dark street and the overgrown yard, and beyond the wall, the shapes of neighboring houses sleeping under the perpetually gray sky.
But the normality of the view was a lie, because she could feel what was happening beyond it, a pressure building against the remaining wards the way water built against a dam.
Something massive and hostile was pressing inward from multiple points, and the house’s defenses were buckling under the strain.
A flash of light bloomed in the yard, bright enough to throw sharp shadows through the front windows and across the entryway floor.
It wasn’t lightning — at least, not the natural kind.
It was concentrated and directed, a bolt of white-blue energy that struck the middle ward layer and detonated against it with a crack that Roslyn could somehow feel in her spine, the kind of involuntary reflex that made her clench for a moment before she could tell herself neither of them had been hit.
The ward held, but barely. She could sense how fracture lines had begun to spread from the point of impact like cracks in ice.
“That was a lightning talent,” Malachi said.
An outside observer might have commented that his voice sounded far too clinical for the situation, except she knew that was how it got when a situation was at its worst, flat and careful, stripped of everything except information.
“The magic workers who can use fireballs will follow.”
They did. There were two of them, working in tandem, sending spheres of orange-red flame arcing over the yard toward the house.
The flames hit the ward layer and splashed against it like waves hitting a seawall, sending cascades of sparks and heat rippling across the invisible barrier.
Through the front windows, the light was hellish, flickering orange and red, painting the entryway walls in colors that belonged in a furnace, not a residential neighborhood.
“Won’t the neighbors — ?” she began, but Malachi immediately shook his head.
“Either the Gibsons or the Van Horns will have set a perimeter to keep civilians from noticing. It’s standard territorial protocol during a magical engagement.
The Van Horns are operating on Gibson ground, so the Gibsons are either cooperating or standing back to watch.
” His jaw tightened. “Either way, no one is coming to help.”
Then something hit her.
This wasn’t fireballs or lightning, though.
No, this was something else entirely, a creeping, insidious heaviness that rolled through the damaged wards like fog coming in off the ocean, seeping past the fractures and the gaps and the places where the middle layer had cracked under the lightning strike.
It was subtle at first, a drowsiness that Roslyn might have mistaken for ordinary exhaustion if she hadn’t been running on pure adrenaline only seconds before.
But it deepened fast, pulling at her consciousness with soft, irresistible fingers, and she recognized it with a surge of fear that cut right through the growing haze.
Sleep magic. Karl Van Horn’s gift, the same power he’d used to abduct a warlock from Wilcox territory, sliding past their defenses like a needle slipping into a vein.
Her knees buckled. She caught herself against the wall of the entryway, one hand flat against the walnut wainscoting, and fought.
Healers had a natural resistance to magic that targeted the body, thank the Goddess.
Her gift gave her an intimate understanding of her own physical systems, and that understanding allowed her to recognize and resist external attempts to manipulate them.
She could feel Karl’s sleep spell working on her, could trace its progression through her nervous system the way she’d trace an infection, and she pushed back against it with everything she had, using her knowledge of her own neural pathways to keep the signals firing, to keep her eyes open and her legs under her.
It was the hardest thing she’d ever done.
The spell was exquisitely crafted, designed to feel natural rather than imposed so the body’s own desire for rest became the weapon.
Fighting it was like fighting the urge to breathe; it was technically possible, but only for so long, and only at an enormous cost.
Her vision blurred. The entryway swam around her, the wainscoting and the William Morris wallpaper dissolving into indistinct shapes. She could hear Malachi’s voice from somewhere ahead of her, sharp and commanding, but the words were muffled, as though she was hearing them from underwater.
Stay awake. Stay awake. You are not going to sleep.
She bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste blood, and the pain cut through her drowsiness like a blade. Not enough to dispel it — Karl’s magic was too strong for that — but enough to buy her a few more seconds of consciousness, a narrow window in which she could think.
Malachi was at the front door. She could see him through the haze, a tall, lean figure in his white shirt with his hands raised and his magic pouring into the door’s wards, all seven locks and fourteen layers of protection he’d built over a decade.
They were the heaviest defenses in the house and were now the last barrier between them and whatever was in the yard.
His back was to her, and the set of his shoulders told her everything she needed to know about how much this was costing him.
The magical reserves she’d spent three weeks rebuilding were burning away, and she could feel, even through the fog of Karl’s spell, even with her own consciousness slipping, the way Malachi’s magic was flickering, struggling to sustain the output he was demanding of it.
Another fireball struck the wards. This one was different, bigger and hotter, thrown with the kind of force that meant the Van Horn fireball witches had stopped probing and were now actively trying to breach their defenses.
It hit the front door’s ward layer dead center, and the impact blew the door inward off its hinges.
Not all the way, though. The wards caught it and somehow held it, but the force of the blow drove the heavy oak door back on its frame. A tongue of flame licked through the gap between the door and the jamb, reaching into the entryway with a heat she could feel from fifteen feet away.
And Malachi was directly in its path.
The flame caught him across his left side — shoulder, arm, the ribs beneath.
She heard the sound he made, a sharp, involuntary exhalation that was worse than a scream, and she saw him stagger sideways, his hand still raised, his magic still pouring into the wards even as his body registered the damage it had just suffered.
The door lurched inward another inch, and through the widening gap, she could see the yard lit up in orange and white, with dark figures moving at the edge of the property and the shapes of fireballs forming in hands that were about to throw them again.
The sleep spell was still pulling at her, dragging her down into a darkness that promised rest and peace and the absence of all the terrible things that were happening in the entryway.
Her legs wanted to fold, and her eyes wanted to close.
Every part of her body was screaming at her to stop fighting and let the spell take her.
The spell was gentle and soothing, after all, and the alternative was fire and noise and the smell of burning wood and the sight of the man she’d just made love to being torn apart by people who wanted what he had.
No.