Chapter 15
The world seemed as if it was folding itself around him, and Malachi’s eyes snapped open.
What had awoken him wasn’t a sound in the conventional sense, not a crack or a boom or any of the usual auditory manifestations of magical transport.
What he’d heard, or at least felt, was a distortion in the fabric of the room’s ambient energy, a compression and release that made every artifact on the shelves go silent for half a second before they resumed their steady hum.
The study wards noted the intrusion as a change in pressure, and his resonance gift — diminished as it was — still recognized the signature of the event for what it was.
Extradimensional travel. Not teleportation, which displaced air and left a small vacuum in its wake.
This was something else, something that bent the distance between two points rather than crossing it, and the only being he knew of who could do such a thing was the one he’d once ordered to collect those two artifacts from the McAllister clan.
Belshegar.
And that meant Roslyn’s signal had worked.
He’d been drifting in a space between sleep and consciousness when the distortion pulled him to the surface. Roslyn was no longer beside his chair. He could feel her presence elsewhere in the study — near the door, moving — and then he heard people speaking in the hallway beyond.
“Where’s Roslyn?” A woman’s voice, sharp and worried. “Where is she?”
“She’s here, she’s safe, she’s — ” That was Roslyn calling out to the strange woman, her words tumbling faster than he was used to hearing from her, and something in their cadence made him realize that she was crying, or trying very hard not to. “I mean, I’m okay. I’m okay, Angela.”
“You’re definitely not okay.” That was the strange woman again, closer now. Then Malachi heard the study door open quietly, telling him that Roslyn must have released the ward lock from the inside, and then the room was no longer his.
Four people entered. His resonance gift noted each of them even before his eyes fully focused, reading their magical signatures the same way it read the properties of the artifacts on his shelves.
The first signature was bright and complex, green-tinged and layered, a compound power that indicated shared magic and decades of practice.
The second was similar in frequency but darker in tone, jade to the first one’s emerald, a complementary signature that interlocked with its partner so seamlessly, they read almost as a single presence.
Paired magic. Prima and primus, bonded so deeply that their powers had fused at some fundamental level.
Angela McAllister and Connor Wilcox. He’d studied them before the Jerome confrontation, had analyzed their capabilities with the thoroughness he applied to any strategic problem.
Angela was the prima — the McAllister clan leader — and her power lay in the bright, focused energy she and Connor could channel together, a combined force that had been formidable enough to drive back his servants during the battle on the promontory.
Connor Wilcox, her consort, was her match in strength if not in type, his magic possessing the denser, more complex quality that characterized the Wilcox bloodline.
The third signature was something he couldn’t adequately categorize, and this unnerved him.
His gift had always been able to read magical presences the way most people read facial expressions.
But the third presence in the room defied any true classification.
It was human in shape but not in substance, and it had a kind of magic that existed simultaneously on multiple frequencies, as though the person producing it had roots in dimensions that Malachi’s mortal senses could only partially perceive.
Levi McAllister. Brianna’s father, although “father” was a term that required significant asterisks.
He’d been summoned to this plane by a desperate witch named Zoe Sandoval, had arrived as something formless and terrible, and had somehow become the soft-spoken, quiet man who served as a McAllister elder and whose warding skills were, by all accounts, exceptional.
He wasn’t human. He wasn’t precisely anything else, either.
He simply was, in a way that made Malachi’s resonance gift faintly uneasy, the way a compass needle twitched when it encountered a magnetic anomaly.
The fourth signature was the one that sent a cold thread of recognition through his body.
Belshegar, the extradimensional being he’d once manipulated with a fabricated story about a Council and a transgression, the creature whose desire for a human form he’d exploited to ensure his service.
Belshegar, who’d eventually discovered the deception and sided with the McAllisters, and who…
most likely…hadn’t forgotten any of it. His signature was warm and vast and patient, but it still didn’t feel particularly reassuring, not when Malachi had once treated him as a tool.
He opened his eyes fully and took stock of the current situation.
Angela McAllister stood in the center of the study.
She was smaller than he had expected. He’d encountered her only briefly during the Jerome confrontation, and his memories of that night were filtered through the fog of combat and artifact use, so the details had been unreliable.
In person, without the distortion of battle, she was a woman in her mid-fifties who looked a decade younger, with dark hair and emerald eyes that were, at this moment, burning with a fury so tightly controlled that it seemed to raise the temperature of the room by at least ten degrees.
She wore jeans and a gray sweater, with turquoise earrings barely visible through the wavy masses of her dark hair.
Her hands were clenched at her sides, and he could tell she was restraining herself from doing something she very much wanted to do.
Connor stood at her shoulder, tall and dark-haired, his jade-green eyes fixed on Malachi with an expression far less controlled than his wife’s and therefore much less ambiguous.
He looked like someone who was assessing exactly how much force would be required to permanently end their current problem, and who was clearly not opposed to applying that force in the near future.
Levi had positioned himself slightly behind the others, leaning against the bookshelf nearest the door in a posture that seemed oddly casual when contrasted with the obvious tension in the room.
He also appeared to be in his fifties, which was either accurate or wildly misleading, depending on how one counted the years of a being who hadn’t technically existed before his summoning.
His face was thoughtful, his gaze steady, and his magical signature, now that Malachi could study it at closer range, was even more unsettling than it had been from across the room.
It was like trying to read an artifact that had no bottom; the deeper his gift reached, the more there was to find, and none of it followed any pattern he recognized.
Belshegar stood apart from the others, near the windows.
His human form was that of a tall, well-built man, handsome and dark-haired, and anyone who didn’t possess a resonance gift would have seen nothing unusual about him other than his good looks.
Malachi, however, could see…or rather, sense…
the vast power that existed beneath the human surface, the extradimensional essence wearing a mortal shape the way one might wear a particularly well-tailored suit.
He was looking at Malachi, and his expression didn’t seem to be hostile. No, it was something worse.
It was thoughtful.
Between all of them and Malachi stood Roslyn.
She’d placed herself directly in front of the leather chair, positioned so that anyone who wanted to reach him would have to go through her first. He could see her exhaustion in the shadows under her eyes and the slight tremor in her hands and the pallor of her usually luminous skin, but she was also standing straight, her shoulders squared, her chin lifted.
She had her back to him, which meant he couldn’t see her face.
But he could see theirs, however, their expressions ranging from Angela’s barely contained fury to Connor’s outright hostility to Levi’s quiet assessment.
“Move aside, Roslyn,” Angela said. Her voice was soft now, which was somehow worse than the sharpness had been. Soft meant she was running out of patience but was still willing to be careful with the woman she was speaking to. “Let me see him.”
“He’s my patient,” Roslyn said.
Angela crossed her arms, emerald eyes still blazing. “He’s the man who kidnapped you.”
“All right, both of those things are true, but it still doesn’t change anything.
” Roslyn’s voice was steady and professional, stripped of everything except the calm authority Malachi had heard her use during their most difficult exchanges.
It was a voice that said, I’m the healer, and my word is final.
“He’s critically injured. His magic has been depleted to the point of systemic failure, he has second-degree burns across his left side, and the scarring around his heart is severe enough that any significant stress could trigger a complete collapse.
I’ve spent the last three weeks keeping him alive, and I will not have that work undone just because you’re upset. ”
Angela shot the younger woman a look of utter disbelief. “Are you serious? You’ve been here for three weeks, healing the man who stole you from your family, and you want me to — ”
“I want you to trust my judgment.” Roslyn still hadn’t raised her voice, but something in her tone had shifted and hardened. “I’m a healer, and he’s my patient. I don’t walk away from my patients, Angela. Not ever. You know that about me.”