Chapter 13 #2
She was tired, he realized. He could feel it in the way her energy moved through him, the faint tremor in it that wasn’t quite visible in her hands but was present in the magic itself.
She was draining herself to keep him alive, and the knowledge of that reality settled into him with a weight that was worse than the cold.
“I used to dream about this house when I was homeless,” he said.
He wasn’t entirely certain whether he was speaking aloud or simply thinking in a direction that happened to produce sound.
“Before I found it, I mean — years before. I used to dream about a house where I could put things. Where the walls were thick enough and the wards were strong enough that the objects I’d collected would be safe and where I would be safe.
It would be a place where no one could come in and take any of it away. ”
His voice had lost its usual cadence, the measured precision that usually characterized his speech. What emerged instead was unguarded, the words falling in the order they occurred to him rather than the order he would normally have chosen.
“I slept in cars mostly. And shelters, when the weather was bad enough that sleeping in a car seemed foolish even by my standards. Libraries during the day, because libraries don’t require an explanation for your presence there, and because they had books, which were the one form of companionship I could tolerate.
” He paused, and something shifted in his chest that wasn’t the scarring and wasn’t the burns but was located in the same general vicinity.
“I had two artifacts with me during that period. The obsidian shard in my waistcoat lining, and a brass letter opener that had been my first acquisition. It was a small thing, minor in power, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave it behind.
I told myself I was protecting it. In reality, I think it was the closest thing to a pet that I was willing to acknowledge. ”
Roslyn made a sound then. It wasn’t a word, just a small, soft exhalation he felt as much as heard, because her hands were on his chest and her magic was threaded through the damaged tissue of his core. Every breath she took resonated through the connection between them.
“The house found me,” he continued. “Or perhaps I found it. I came to Astoria because it was small and coastal, and the Gibson clan’s territory was weak enough at the edges that a solitary warlock could live here without attracting too much attention.
I had money by then — seven years of ward work and pest control had produced a modest but functional savings account — and I was looking for a place to anchor.
To stop drifting.” His lips thinned. “A Victorian home seemed appropriate. It would be large enough for the collection, old enough to handle heavy wards, and aesthetically suited to the kind of man I intended to become, which was a man whose house reflected the life he’d chosen rather than the life that had been chosen for him. ”
As if the thought had originated somewhere else, he realized he was talking too much.
He knew this with the same certainty that he knew his magic was failing, could feel the words leaving him with a momentum that his weakened defenses couldn’t hold back.
In his normal state, he would have recognized the danger of this unburdening and would have redirected the conversation toward something safer — the ward structure, the artifacts, the tactical situation with the Van Horns.
Anything that kept the focus on problems to be solved rather than histories to be endured.
But his normal state was somewhere on the other side of the burns and the slow, systemic failure that Roslyn’s hands were fighting to reverse, and what remained of him was too tired to construct the barriers that kept these things where they belonged.
The third time he drifted, the memory was older, and it had an edge very unlike the others.
He was twelve and was in his mother’s apartment in Manhattan, the small one they’d been given after his father’s death, the one that smelled of the lavender sachets she kept in every drawer because she said they helped her think.
She was standing in the kitchen doorway, a slight woman, pretty in a careful way, her pale hair always pinned precisely and her clothes always pressed, because appearance mattered in the Van Horn clan.
Appearance was the currency that bought you the right to stay.
“You are a disgrace to this family,” she said, her voice calm, and that was the worst part.
If she’d shouted, he could have dismissed her words as simple anger.
If she’d cried, he could have interpreted her emotion as grief.
But Elise Van Horn did neither. She simply stated the fact with the same measured certainty she used when commenting on the weather or the price of tea, as though his basic inadequacy was an observable phenomenon rather than a judgment.
That was the day he’d brought home the brass letter opener.
He’d found it at a yard sale, and the magic in it had called to him in a language he didn’t have words for yet, a resonance that thrummed through his gift and made the object feel less like a thing and more like a voice.
He’d spent his allowance on it — three dollars — and he’d carried it home in his coat pocket, thrilled that he’d found something precious, even if he didn’t yet know that the world didn’t share his assessment of its value.
His mother had recognized what the letter opener was. Her enhanced perception, minor as it was, had been enough to identify the object’s magical properties, and her response had been immediate and unequivocal.
Van Horns did not collect artifacts. Van Horns did not seek out magical objects for personal study.
The family’s position on such matters was clear, and Malachi’s interest in them wasn’t a gift to be nurtured but a tendency to be corrected, firmly and early, before it became something that could embarrass the family in front of those whose opinions mattered.
But he’d kept the letter opener. He’d hidden it, first in his sock drawer and then in a hollow book on his shelf, and eventually in a warded box he’d built at the age of fifteen, teaching himself the containment principles from texts he’d smuggled out of the Van Horn library.
His mother never found it, or if she did, she never mentioned it again.
But the words stayed. They stayed the way burns stayed long after the initial injury had healed, a tightness in the tissue that altered the way everything around it moved.
“Disgrace,” he murmured, and the word emerged half in the study and half in the memory, even as Roslyn’s hands pressed a little more firmly against his chest.
“You’re not,” she said. Just those two words, quiet, direct, and delivered with the same steady certainty that characterized her magic.
He didn’t argue with her, which was perhaps the most telling indication of how far his defenses had fallen.
Time became unreliable after that. He surfaced and sank in intervals that bore no relationship to clock time, each emergence bringing with it a slightly different configuration of the study.
The lamplight shifted, Roslyn’s position adjusted, and the quality of the silence outside the walls changed in ways he couldn’t quite catalog.
At some point, she left his side long enough to bring water from the small supply they kept in the study, and he drank because she held the glass to his mouth and declining would have required more energy than complying.
At another point, she pulled a blanket from the back of the sofa and laid it over him, and he felt the weight of it settle across his body with a significance that was disproportionate to the act.
That someone would think to cover him, that someone would notice he was cold and would take steps to address it, was a form of attention he hadn’t received in so long that his response to it was closer to confusion than gratitude.
Between the surfacings, he talked, mostly because he couldn’t stop himself.
He spoke about the void, about the way the gray had a texture to it, thick and granular, as though the absence of matter had a consistency of its own.
He spoke about the counting, how the numbers had become a lifeline and then a compulsion and then a kind of madness, because at some point around day two hundred, he’d begun counting not just the days but the hours and the minutes and the seconds.
The counting had consumed so much of his attention that he’d wondered whether the shard in his hand was keeping him sane or whether the counting was… and whether there was a difference.
He spoke about the cold again. The cold was the thing that came back most often, the sense memory that overlaid the present with a transparency that made the study’s warmth feel temporary and conditional, as if at any moment the fire could go out and the gray could return.
Then he would be back in that place where warmth was a concept rather than a sensation.