Chapter 15 #3
“Victoria does not delegate permanently,” he continued.
“She sent the strike team as a probe, the way she sends Karl to probe wards. She wanted to know what the house contained, what defenses were in place, and how much resistance she would face. When the team reports back — when they tell her that four new arrivals, including at least one non-human presence, have entered the house — she will come herself. And when Victoria Van Horn commits to an offensive, she doesn’t come lightly. ”
Angela studied him for a moment, and he could see her parsing the information, separating the useful intelligence from her personal feelings about the man who’d delivered it. It was, he thought, the mark of a good leader, the ability to accept valuable counsel from a source she despised.
“You know her,” Angela said.
“I was a member of her clan,” he replied, and left the rest of it — the banishment, the twenty years of belonging to a family that had decided he was disposable, the mother who hadn’t intervened on his behalf — unspoken.
The silence that followed his comment wasn’t the comfortable kind, but it was functional. Angela and Connor exchanged a look, and then Angela turned to Roslyn.
“How bad is he, really?” she said. “I need the clinical assessment, not the version you give the patient.”
Roslyn stepped aside, and for the first time, Angela had an unobstructed view of Malachi in the leather chair. He didn’t attempt to improve his posture or compose his expression. There was no point in performing strength he did not possess.
“His magic is functioning at roughly fifteen percent of what I estimate his normal capacity to be,” Roslyn said, and her voice had shifted again.
The steel was gone, and now she sounded almost detached, a clinician delivering a report.
“The void damaged his channels extensively, and three weeks of healing brought him to approximately sixty percent before the attack last night. The fireballs and the effort he put into defending the threshold burned through most of what I’d rebuilt.
The scarring around his heart has tightened again, and the burns on his left side are second-degree.
He needs rest, sustained healing, and time.
What he doesn’t need is to be moved, interrogated, or subjected to any additional magical stress. ”
Angela absorbed all this and then looked at Malachi with an expression he couldn’t quite read. It certainly wasn’t sympathy, and it wasn’t forgiveness, either, but he thought it might be the grudging acknowledgment of a fellow survivor.
“You’re going to live, then,” she said.
“Apparently,” Malachi replied. “Roslyn has been quite insistent on the matter.”
A hint of something that wasn’t quite a smile passed across Angela’s face, there and gone so quickly he might have imagined it.
“All right,” she said, and the words were addressed to the room at large, the prima making a decision and expecting it to be followed.
“Levi and Belshegar, I need you to assess the property’s wards and determine what can be reinforced before the Van Horns regroup.
Connor, come with me — we need to secure the perimeter and see what we’re working with.
Roslyn, you continue treating your patient.
” She paused there, and her brilliant green eyes found Malachi’s one more time.
“We’ll discuss the rest of this later. All of it. ”
The promise in that last sentence wasn’t anything close to subtle, and Malachi received it with a slight inclination of his head that was the closest thing to a bow he was physically capable of producing.
“I would expect nothing less,” he said.
Angela turned on her heel and left the study, Connor following, and the air in the room seemed to expand in their wake, the compressed tension releasing by degrees.
Levi pushed off from the bookshelf and followed them, pausing in the doorway long enough to look at Roslyn with an expression that contained something Malachi couldn’t read from this angle, the parental concern of an elder toward a member of the younger generation of his clan, perhaps, or simply the assessment of one extraordinary being recognizing the work of another.
Then he was gone, and it was only Belshegar who remained, still standing a few feet from the chair, still looking at Malachi with that considered, unhurried gaze.
“You aren’t the man you were in Jerome,” Belshegar said quietly.
Malachi met his eyes, which were deep green, old forest moss compared to Connor’s jade and Angela’s emerald.
In those eyes, he saw a depth of perception that went beyond the mortal, an awareness that read not just his damaged aura but the shape of everything he had been and everything he’d become in the three weeks since a healer had knelt beside his chair and chosen to save him despite every reason not to.
“No,” Malachi said. “I am not.”
Belshegar nodded once, as though the answer confirmed something he’d already known. Then he followed the others out of the study, leaving Malachi alone with Roslyn in the room that had been their world for three weeks and which was now, suddenly and irrevocably, part of a larger one.
Roslyn turned to face him, and her eyes were bright with tears being held back by sheer force of will.
She looked wrung out, running on nothing except the stubborn core of a spirit that refused to stop until the job was done.
She had just stood between him and her own family, between him and the prima of what might now be the most powerful witch clan in the Southwest, and she hadn’t moved.
“Well,” she said, and the word probably sounded a bit less steady than she would have preferred. “That went about as well as could be expected.”
He wanted to say that what she had done — not just now, with her family, but all of it, from the first night when she’d chosen to heal him instead of letting him die — was the most extraordinary thing he had witnessed in a life that had included some fairly remarkable events.
Her courage made him ashamed of his own considerable history of self-interest, and her steadiness made the years of solitude he’d endured seem not like the principled choice he’d always claimed it was, but like the waste they had actually been.
All he said, though, was, “Thank you.”
She looked at him for a moment, then moved across the room and sat down on the floor next to his chair in the same spot she’d occupied through the long night. Then she leaned her head back against his knee.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Now shut up and let me rest before your former family tries to kill us again.”
He placed his hand on her hair, and she closed her eyes. Beyond the study walls, he could hear the McAllisters moving through his house — assessing his wards, checking his defenses, occupying his territory with a certain efficient purposefulness that felt like relief rather than intrusion.
His house was no longer his alone, and his wards were no longer sufficient.
Everything he was and owned had been breached more thoroughly than the Van Horns had ever managed, and the force that had accomplished this wasn’t fire or lightning or sleep magic but something far more difficult to defend against.
No, they were people who cared about the woman sitting at his feet, people who had come here because she’d called. They represented everything he’d spent seventeen years convincing himself he didn’t need.
Malachi closed his eyes and let them stay.