Chapter 19
Dawn arrived gray and damp, like every other Astoria dawn Roslyn had experienced during her time there.
She’d been awake for the last two hours, sitting on the floor of the study with her back against the leg of Malachi’s chair and her hand on his ankle.
He was still cold in a way that worried her, and she wanted to be able to feel any change in his temperature or his energy.
The other McAllisters were in the kitchen.
She could hear Angela’s voice in low conversation with someone who might have been Connor or might have been Belshegar, and she could smell coffee, which someone…
probably Angela…had made at some point. Levi had been walking the perimeter of the property since the Van Horns retreated, making a slow circuit to ensure that all remained calm.
Roslyn hadn’t slept, not really. Malachi had drifted in and out, and she’d drifted with him, which she supposed was some form of rest, if not the kind she really needed.
His hand moved — just his fingers, curling once against the arm of the chair.
“Catherine’s here,” he said.
Roslyn lifted her head. She hadn’t felt anything. But she’d also been trying not to feel anything at all for the last two hours, and she trusted his read better than her own right now.
“Now?” She got to her feet, moving slowly because everything ached.
“In about a minute. Angela has been waiting for her.” He opened his eyes. They still shimmered like seawater, but there was something in them that Roslyn thought she recognized as resolve. “I need to be in the East Gallery before they come in. I won’t have her walk into my collection without me.”
At once, Roslyn shook her head. “Malachi — ”
“Help me up.”
No point in arguing when he had that tone in his voice and that glint in his eyes.
She got an arm under his shoulders and helped him to his feet, and he leaned on her more than he would have wanted her to know if he’d been at full strength.
They made it down the hall together, and she felt the moment he started carrying his own weight again, two steps before they reached the gallery door.
He didn’t let go of her arm, but he straightened.
In that moment, she understood that he was about to walk into a room and lose something, and he wanted to lose it standing up.
Catherine came through the front door less than a minute later.
Angela was beside her. Two Gibson witches stayed in the entry hall — a woman Roslyn didn’t recognize and the dark-eyed man she’d seen on her ill-fated shopping trip, the one who hadn’t spoken much that day and didn’t seem inclined to speak now.
After all, the deal was specifically between Catherine and Malachi. Everyone seemed to understand that.
Catherine stopped just inside the door. She didn’t look at the artifacts on the shelves. Instead, she looked straight at Malachi.
“Hope’s heart,” she said, as if that was enough for him to understand, even though those words felt utterly cryptic to Roslyn.
Malachi nodded once. He let go of Roslyn’s arm and crossed the gallery to a small alcove between two of the warded cabinets, a place she’d walked past dozens of times without noticing what was in it. He opened a velvet-lined drawer and took out a pendant on a darkened silver chain.
The stone was a little bigger than her thumbnail. Moss agate, she thought, smoky green and almost black at the edges, with whorls in it that moved when the light changed. It was subtly beautiful, the kind of beautiful you’d miss if you weren’t paying attention.
“This was made by Hope Gibson for her husband in 1871,” Malachi said.
His voice was quiet and even, which was how she knew this was costing him.
“By that time, most witches and warlocks had abandoned the creation of magical items, but she was driven by a need to keep her husband safe. But the amulet wasn’t strong enough, and she reworked it to strengthen the thing after he was lost on the bar in 1881. ”
“I know what it is,” Catherine said. Her voice wasn’t unkind, but it wasn’t particularly warm, either. “I’ve been hearing about it since I was four years old, but it’s been missing for decades.”
“Missing for a time,” Malachi allowed. “And then found and kept safe.”
The Gibson woman didn’t reply to that comment. Instead, she held out her hand.
Malachi went to her and put the pendant in her open palm.
Roslyn watched the silver chain fall through his fingers and pool in Catherine’s palm, and she watched his hand close into a fist for a second after he let go and then open again, deliberately, as though he hadn’t wanted anyone to see him close it.
But she saw it anyway…and she was fairly certain the Gibson prima-in-waiting had seen it, too.
Catherine lifted the pendant by its chain, looked at it for a moment in the gray morning light, and then put it on.
She fastened the clasp at the back of her neck without looking, and she settled the stone against the hollow of her throat.
Roslyn, who’d been standing six feet away with her arm still half-raised in case Malachi needed to lean again, felt something that didn’t seem quite like magic.
This was something quieter than magic. The pendant settled against Catherine’s skin, and the whorls in the stone slowed and then went still.
It had come home.
Malachi sensed it, too. Roslyn could see him feel it, the smallest tightening at the corner of his mouth, gone again before anyone but her would have caught it.
“Thank you,” Catherine said. Then she added, “I’m sorry it took us this long to find her.”
“But at last you did,” Malachi said.
“Yes.”
He inclined his head. Catherine turned and walked back out through the entry hall with the two Gibson witnesses falling in behind her. The front door closed, and the house seemed quiet again.
Roslyn went to Malachi before he had to ask. She got under his arm again and felt him take the help this time without disguising it.
“Coffee?” she asked. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say that would be equal to what had just happened, so she’d said the smallest thing instead.
“Please,” he replied.
The yard smelled like scorched grass and spent lightning and the salt wind coming in off the water, a scent that was still foreign to her even after three weeks here in Oregon.
Roslyn stood in the middle of it with her arms crossed and tried to make herself feel something other than so exhausted that she was ready to fall over in a heap.
Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t quite manage it.
She could tell her magic was running on fumes, and that was putting it kindly.
The healing she’d done during the battle — Connor’s burns, Angela’s sprained shoulder, the sleep fog Roslyn herself had barely been able to overcome — had taken the little that was left of her reserves.
She was upright and functional, and the coffee she’d shared with Malachi just a little while earlier had only been enough to keep her going through the next hour or so.
The yard was a total mess. Sections of the outer ward perimeter were simply gone, burned away or blasted through, and she could feel the absence where they’d been, like the hollow feeling you got when a wisdom tooth was pulled.
The remaining wards had the fragile, makeshift quality of a bandage holding together a wound that really needed stitches.
Angela appeared at her elbow. “Now that this thing with the Gibsons is handled, we need to talk about next steps.”
“I know,” Roslyn replied. There were always next steps, even after what was supposed to be a victory.
“The Gibsons got something they wanted,” the prima continued. “But that doesn’t mean they don’t want us to get the hell out of their territory.”
Rather than reply immediately, Roslyn glanced over at the house.
In the early morning light, it looked pretty much like what it was — a big old house that had been under magical assault for the better part of twelve hours, its outer defenses wrecked, its entryway scorched.
She was also certain that it was now indefensible.
Victoria might have retreated, but she would regroup at some point.
She had resources, and she had pride, and Roslyn knew enough about the Van Horn prima by now to understand that the word “defeat” wasn’t in her vocabulary.
“We need to move the collection,” Roslyn said.
Angela didn’t argue with that statement, which told her the prima had already reached the same conclusion and had been waiting to see if Roslyn would get there herself.
“Yes, to Jerome. Tricia and Allegra have already found a place for it — there’s a house on Juarez Street that’s been empty for almost two years.
A couple of civilians bought it a while back and started to fix it up, but they ran out of funds.
” She paused there and then grinned, a sort of fierce smile at odds with the smudges of soot on her face and her wildly messy hair.
“I authorized Tricia to make them an offer they couldn’t really refuse.
Anyway, the house is in pretty decent shape, since the plumbing and electrical have already been updated, and I think the wards should integrate well with the existing protections we already have in place in town. ”
Roslyn shifted her weight. “What about Victoria? Moving to Jerome won’t make her stop wanting the collection. She’s spent seventeen years convinced it belongs to her. Why wouldn’t she just come after us in Arizona?”
Angela’s smile faded a little…but only because she was now shifting from satisfaction at the outcome of the battle into more practical concerns.
“She might. But there’s a difference between attacking a banished warlock living alone in another clan’s territory and attacking us in the Verde Valley.
Astoria was a strike-team operation. Arizona would be a war. ”
Roslyn waited, because she could tell the prima had more to say.