Chapter 19 #4
“A fragment of the outer perimeter degraded,” Levi replied. “The ambient magical disruption reached the corridor briefly, but I compensated.”
She stared at him for a moment. As usual, he appeared completely undisturbed. “You ‘compensated,’” she repeated. “While maintaining a stable dimensional corridor between two states.”
“It was manageable,” he said simply.
“Right.” She picked up the sixteenth object. “Good to know.”
The last object in the basement was a small carved box that hummed below the threshold of hearing, something Malachi had told her very little about and which she’d learned, from experience, meant that the less she knew the better, and set it down next to the others.
Then she stood in the empty dining room in the house on Juarez Street and looked down at the trio of folding tables, now covered in a bunch of objects that looked like they’d come from the world’s weirdest garage sale, and she exhaled very slowly.
Done.
She went back through the corridor one final time and found Belshegar and Levi closing the corridor behind her. The shimmer in the air contracted and then was simply gone, the wall where it had been just a wall again.
Malachi was standing in the study.
The room was almost entirely empty. The shelves along the walls were bare, and the glass cases stood open.
The dedicated spaces where she’d learned to recognize individual artifacts by their various energies were just spaces now, with no sign of what had previously occupied them.
And the constant, low-level hum of collected magic that had been as much a part of this room’s atmosphere as the smell of old paper and woodsmoke was now gone entirely.
Without it, the room just felt like a room.
Malachi stood in the middle of the space, keen gray eyes focused on the empty shelves. But now there was nothing on the shelves to see.
She walked across the room so she could stand next to him. For a while, she didn’t say anything, because she’d learned that silence was often the most useful thing she could offer him.
This felt like one of those moments.
“The house in Jerome,” he said at last.
“Yes,” Roslyn replied, again trying to pick up on what he hadn’t said as much as what he had. “It needs some work, but I know the clan will pitch in to make it livable.”
Something flickered in his eyes. Was he thinking about how different the McAllisters were from the Van Horns, how they were planning to welcome a man who’d been their enemy only a short time ago?
If he was, he didn’t seem inclined to talk about it right now.
“I assume it will be a smaller property than this one. The collection will need to be reconfigured for a different spatial arrangement. Several of the containment wards are calibrated to specific distances between objects, and that calibration will need to be adjusted.”
“Probably,” she agreed, and guessed he was focusing on something concrete because he wasn’t quite ready to recognize how much his life was about to change.
He was silent again. She looked at his face, at the profile she’d spent three weeks learning — the strong lines of his brow and nose and chin, the fall of white hair, the slight furrow between his brows that seemed to be always there, whether he was running calculations or feeling something he hadn’t named yet — and she thought about the seventeen years he’d spent in this house with those one hundred and two objects.
His collection had been the thing that kept him company through all of it, and now they were in a house in Jerome, Arizona.
Nothing about that was something she could make easier by saying so.
Still quiet, he turned to look at her. What she saw in his face wasn’t grief, which surprised her. She’d expected some form of sorrow, the kind of controlled, minimized sadness he’d have for anything he’d spent that long protecting. But this seemed to be both more and less than that.
“I thought I would mind this more,” he said.
“And you don’t?”
He considered the question for a moment before he replied, “No. I find that I don’t.
” He glanced over at the bare shelves again, and she could see him examining this new fact about himself the same way he’d examined every other fact about himself over the past few weeks — with genuine curiosity, as though he was still occasionally surprised by his own interior landscape.
“The objects are safe. That was always the objective. Exactly where they’re safe matters considerably less than I had assumed. ”
The strange thing was that she understood. He’d spent his entire adult life making himself indispensable to dangerous things because he’d had nothing else to be indispensable to. Those same things were now in a house where people would come and go, and the rooms wouldn’t be silent all the time.
“Ready?” she asked.
He looked at the empty room for one more moment, at the bare walls and the open cases and the chair that sat behind a desk he no longer needed, and then he turned away from it.
“Yes,” he said.
They walked out of the study together. She didn’t look back…and neither did he.