Chapter 18 #3
To Victoria Van Horn. Fifty meters away, to a space two feet in front of her position. That location would carry the force across her without requiring lethal contact.
And then the inner warding failed.
As he’d known, the release of the compression wasn’t an explosion. Instead, it was a beam, a tight column of directed force that crossed the yard in barely the time it took for him to register that the vessel had discharged. The ceramic shattered in his hand, pieces falling harmlessly to the floor.
And then Victoria’s amplification field collapsed.
He could feel it from the threshold, the sudden failure of the magic that had been holding her fighters in concert, the way a conductor’s baton coming down mid-performance would scatter an orchestra back into eleven separate people playing eleven separate instruments without coordination.
The Van Horn offensive fell into chaos. Attacks interrupted each other, and defensive gaps appeared, the careful coordination dissolving into individual reactions as each fighter was abruptly left to manage their own magic without amplification.
Victoria herself was lying on the ground.
Not dead. He’d been precise enough for that, for whatever his feelings regarding Victoria Van Horn, he didn’t wish her dead.
In fact, she was already moving, pushing herself upright with a kind of dogged determination, as if she instinctively understood that you didn’t show weakness on the battlefield.
But she was moving slowly, and her fighters were looking at her rather than the McAllisters.
The cohesion was gone.
The McAllisters pressed into the gap immediately — Angela and Connor’s bonded energy intensifying, Levi’s disruption field expanding without Victoria’s amplification pushing against it — and the Van Horn fighters began to fall back by ones and twos.
Within ninety seconds, the yard was clear.
Malachi stood at the threshold with a few fragments of the vessel still in his palm, the sharp edges of the clay pressing into his skin, and watched the last of the Van Horn fighters cross back through the outer perimeter boundary and disappear toward the street.
Victoria had regained her feet. Now she was upright and moving, being supported by two of her remaining fighters, her magic still present but contained now. She didn’t look back toward the house.
He turned his hand over and let the final clay fragments fall.
They scattered on the entryway floor with a series of small, sharp clicks against the hardwood, the kind of sound a dropped cup might make.
He looked at them for a moment, the blue-glazed pieces that had been a thing a dead woman had made and spent her life keeping contained, and which had been in his vault for eight years and in his care for every day of those eight years.
Then he heard footsteps, and he turned.
Roslyn was crossing the yard toward the door.
Her face was pale with exhaustion and her hands weren’t entirely steady, but she was forging ahead anyway.
Behind her, Angela and Connor were staring at one another with expressions of disbelief, and Levi stood at the perimeter boundary, looking at something Malachi couldn’t see and probably didn’t want to.
Roslyn came through the door and stopped when she saw the clay fragments on the floor. Then she looked at him, eyes that were weary and bloodshot but still beautiful narrowing slightly.
“What did you just do?” she said.
“What was necessary,” he told her.
She looked at the fragments again and then at the empty space in his hand where the vessel had been.
Whatever she read in his face made her close the remaining distance between them without speaking.
She took his hand — the one that had held the vessel, the one with the slight redness on the palm from the clay edge — and turned it over in both of hers, running her thumb across the skin as though checking for damage.
There wasn’t any damage worth noting. That wasn’t the point.
“It was one of the basement objects,” she said.
“Yes.”
She was quiet for a moment, still holding his hand, her thumb tracing the same path again.
“I’m sorry,” she said at length.
“Don’t be.” He considered how to say the next part and settled on accuracy, mainly because accuracy was all that he had. “It was the correct use. I’ve spent seventeen years ensuring that those objects were never used incorrectly. This wasn’t incorrect.”
Roslyn looked up at him. He could see the weariness in her face. Her hands remained on his, and she was quiet for so long that he began to reconstruct the sentence to determine whether he’d phrased it inadequately.
“Okay,” she said.
That was all. But she didn’t let go of his hand.
Outside, the yard was quiet. The perimeter wards were in ruins, and there were things to be assessed and decisions to be made. Malachi knew all of this with the part of his mind that was always cataloging, always calculating, always determining the next necessary thing.
He left that part to its work and didn’t move. Instead, he let Roslyn hold his hand in the open doorway of a house that had held his collection for twelve years and was holding it still.