Chapter 17
A fireball caught Connor on the right side, slipping past his green-white magic at an angle that suggested the Van Horn fireball witch who threw it had been aiming for the narrow gap that opened when Connor shifted his weight to deflect a lightning bolt from the south.
It was a coordinated strike, the lightning caster forcing the movement, the fireball witch exploiting the opening, the first clear evidence that Victoria’s coordination was adapting to the McAllisters’ defensive maneuvering.
The flame caught Connor across his hip and thigh.
Roslyn saw him stagger, his leg buckling for half a second before he caught himself against Angela’s shoulder.
The green-shot energy between them flickered and dimmed, and during that flicker, two more fireballs made it through the gap, striking the ground between her feet and sending up a spray of dirt and sparks that forced her back several steps.
Her hand found Connor’s arm, steadying him, and their magical barrier re-formed, but it was thinner now.
Connor was favoring his right leg, his weight shifted to compensate for a burn that Roslyn could feel even from where she stood inside the study.
It was second-degree at minimum, the kind that went deep enough to compromise the muscle beneath the skin and would limit his mobility for hours if left untreated.
Roslyn was at the front door before she’d even made the conscious decision to move.
She hadn’t been thinking about Angela’s orders, hadn’t weighed the tactical reasoning behind her movements or calculated the risk.
Her body had simply responded to the injury the way it always did, with the irresistible pull that had been a part of her since she was twelve years old and had mended a bird’s wing without really understanding what she was doing.
A person was hurt, and she could help. Everything else was just background noise.
The night air hit her as soon as she crossed the threshold, cold and damp, filled with the salty smell of the Pacific and the acrid tang of magical fire.
The yard was a mess of scorched grass and cracked flagstone, the air thick with residual energy from two hours of sustained magical combat.
Orange light from the continuing fireballs flickered across the scene, throwing shifting shadows against the house and the property wall.
Somewhere to the east, Levi’s disruption field hummed at a frequency that seemed to live deep in her ears.
She ran to Connor and Angela’s position in a low crouch, staying below the trajectory of the fireballs that were still arcing overhead. The grass was wet and uneven, and her foot caught on a raised flagstone edge, nearly sending her sprawling, but she recovered and kept moving.
Connor saw her coming. “Get back inside,” he said through gritted teeth, but his voice was tight with pain, and the hand he had braced against his right thigh was trembling.
“Shut up,” she said, and knelt beside him.
She put both hands on his leg, one above the burn and one below, and let her healing magic do what it was meant to do.
The burn was bad, worse than she’d estimated from inside the study.
The flame had penetrated the fabric of his jeans and seared through the skin and into the fascia beneath, and the tissue was already beginning to swell.
She couldn’t heal it completely. Right now, she simply didn’t have the reserves for a full healing, and anyway, the chaos in the yard wouldn’t allow for the kind of sustained session that would close the wound properly.
What she could do, though, was seal the worst of the damage, reduce the swelling, and numb the pain enough that Connor could put weight on the leg without his body betraying him.
It took about ninety seconds. Each one of those seconds was a measurable drain on her magic, a draw from a well that was already dangerously shallow.
“Done,” she said. “It’s not fully healed. Don’t push it harder than you have to.”
Connor tested the leg, carefully putting weight on it, and the relief on his face told her the patch was holding. “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me,” she replied briskly. “Just stop getting hit.”
She moved before he could respond because Angela had turned to check on them.
In that moment of distraction, a lightning bolt had gotten through, striking the ground close enough that Roslyn could feel the charge run through the wet grass and tingle up through the soles of her shoes.
Angela deflected the follow-up strike, but the effort cost her, and when Roslyn reached the prima’s side, she could see the strain in Angela’s face, the tightness around her eyes and the grim set of her mouth.
Her left arm still hung lower than her right.
“Your arm,” Roslyn said.
A brief head shake. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. Give me ten seconds.”
Angela’s expression was fierce, but she still went ahead and extended her left arm, and Roslyn quickly pressed her hands to the shoulder and felt the damage.
It wasn’t a burn this time, but a deep bruise where a deflected fireball had struck the muscle, the impact dispersing beneath the skin in a pattern that told Roslyn the magical fire had been partly absorbed rather than fully deflected.
The tissue was inflamed, and the joint was beginning to stiffen.
She pushed healing magic into the shoulder, and felt the bruise respond and the swelling begin to subside.
Ten seconds became fifteen, then twenty, because the damage went deeper than the surface suggested, and she had to chase the inflammation down through layers of muscle before it reached the joint.
A fireball sailed over her head, close enough that the heat dried the moisture on the back of her neck in an instant. She flinched but didn’t pull her hands away.
“Done,” she said, and Angela rotated the shoulder once, testing it, and turned back to the fight without a word.
After that, Roslyn kept moving between the fighters, reading the battle as much with her healer’s perception as with her eyes.
She couldn’t see the Van Horns clearly in the dark, couldn’t track the trajectory of fireballs and lightning bolts with enough precision to predict where they’d land.
But she could feel the McAllisters — their magical energy, their vital signs, the distress a body radiated when it had been damaged by magical fire or struck by a charge of magical lightning.
Her gift turned the battlefield into a kind of triage map, each fighter a node of information that told her where they were, how badly they were hurt, and how long they could keep fighting before the damage they were absorbing began to compound.
Connor took two more hits over the next hour.
The first was minor, a glancing strike along his forearm, which she patched in less than a minute.
The second was worse, a lightning bolt that grounded out through his left hand and sent a surge of electrical energy through his nervous system, leaving him disoriented and numb from the elbow down.
She had to work on that injury for nearly three minutes, tracing the path of the charge through his peripheral nerves and coaxing the damaged signals back into alignment.
During those three minutes, Angela fought alone, her defensive barrier thinned to a single layer of greenish-white energy that caught the incoming fireballs but let enough heat through that the air around her shimmered.
Levi needed her once. He came to her rather than the other way around, appearing at her side during a brief lull in the Van Horn assault as Victoria pulled her fighters back to regroup, giving the McAllisters maybe sixty seconds of breathing room.
His disruption field had faltered, and when Roslyn put her hands on his temples, she found the reason at once.
The sustained output had drained a portion of his reserves that was directly tied to whatever extradimensional source powered his abilities.
Her healing magic could reach the mortal elements of his system, the physical body he’d been given when summoned to this plane, but the deeper structures were beyond her.
She replenished what she could, knowing it was a temporary fix.
“That will hold for possibly another hour,” Levi said. His voice had lost some of its usual calm and now sounded exhausted more than anything else.
“Then we’d better finish this in under an hour,” she said.
She couldn’t heal Belshegar at all. His body wasn’t a body in any way that she understood, so her magic, which worked by understanding the systems it repaired, had nothing to latch onto. He was also the only fighter who hadn’t been injured, which at least eliminated the immediate problem.
The work was draining her fast, though. Each healing effort pulled from the same diminished well, and there was no opportunity to rest, no pause in the battle long enough for her reserves to stabilize.
She could feel herself descending through thresholds she’d never reached before, first to a place where her hands began to shake between sessions, next to a stage where her vision started to gray at the edges when she stood up too quickly, and at last, where the healing itself became less efficient, her magic becoming more and more stretched until each repair took longer and accomplished less.
From working with Malachi, she knew she couldn’t go on like this for much longer. If she kept pushing, she’d experience the kind of damage that even another healer would struggle to repair, because her body’s magic, starved of energy, would begin to cannibalize its own tissue.
All she could do was hope this would be over soon.