She wasn’t impressed by him. In fact, he didn’t think she was intimidated by him, either. She didn’t even seem to be particularly interested in him, except as a medical problem she intended to solve. And that — the sheer professional indifference of it, the way she treated him as a patient rather than a threat or a curiosity or a villain — was so far outside his experience of how people responded to him that he had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
“Very well,” he said. The words cost him more than he would have ever admitted.
She accepted his concession with a small nod and started to turn toward the door, then stopped. When she looked back at him, her expression had shifted into something he recognized from earlier, a quality of professional thoroughness that didn’t seem to care whether the patient was difficult or compliant or anything in between.
“Before I go,” she said, “I need your name. I’ve been calling you ‘the Collector’ in my head ever since I got here, and I’m not going to spend the next several weeks treating a man I can only address by a title.”
He hadn’t been prepared for that request, although he realized he should have been. Obviously, she didn’t know his name. Why would she? The McAllisters had only ever known him as the Collector, the title he’d cultivated for exactly the kind of distance she was now declining to grant him. He could refuse her, of course. He could fall back on the title and force her to use it for as long as she remained under his roof. But he was tired, and the part of him that had spent 372 days in the void without anyone speaking his name was not, in this moment, inclined to perpetuate that silence.
“Malachi Van Horn,” he said.
Something flickered in her expression at the surname, telling him she’d recognized it. Well, the McAllisters and the Wilcoxes were very close, and he supposed she must have heard how the Van Horns had kidnapped a warlock from Wilcox territory, even if that incident had happened a very long time ago.
However, she didn’t comment on the recognition. She only inclined her head and said, “Roslyn Campbell.”
He almost asked her why Campbell and not McAllister, since he’d assumed she was one of the clan’s blood members. But the question would have implied an interest he wasn’t prepared to claim, so he let it pass.
“I’ll be back shortly, Mr. Van Horn,” she said. “I’m going to find the kitchen and put something together for you to eat. Don’t you dare get up while I’m gone. In fact, it would probably be best if you could nap until I get back.”
She left the study without waiting for his response, and Malachi sat in his leather chair and listened to her footsteps recede down the hallway. A single thought passed through his mind.
I am in considerable trouble.
3
It wasn’t until Roslyn left the study that she realized her hands were shaking. Somehow, she’d managed to hang onto something close to professional calm while she was conducting her examination of Malachi Van Horn, but now that she was alone, her body seemed to have decided it was time for reaction to set in.
She’d been kidnapped by the man her clan knew as the Collector and was trapped in a house with wards powerful enough to prevent her from leaving. Her phone was gone, and she hadn’t seen one in his study.
Not that he would have allowed her to use it even if there had been a phone.
Because he couldn’t see her, she allowed herself a minute to lean against the wall and pull in a few bracing breaths. Losing it wasn’t going to help her — or him — and she needed to get it together.
In a way, it helped to focus on his condition rather than the way he’d trapped her here. That put her squarely in healer mode…or nurse practitioner mode…although she had to admit this was a case that would require her healing ability more than anything she might have studied during her time at Northern Pines.
She’d never seen anything like the dimensional scars his time in the void had caused. Not so surprising; it wasn’t as if the McAllisters or any of the other witch clans she knew made a habit of popping in and out of other dimensions, let alone getting stuck there for more than a year.
So she’d had to work by instinct, creating ways to describe both to herself and to him the damage she’d seen and how to fix it. Luckily, the same magic that allowed her to repair a broken bone without really thinking about the mechanics involved would allow her to do much the same here, although she hadn’t been lying when she’d told him he would never recover fully. If a femur was shattered badly enough, a limp was often the result.
But limping was better than not walking at all.
The shaking in her hands seemed to have calmed down somewhat, so she followed the hallway past several other doors that appeared to open onto another parlor and a formal dining room, and then pushed open a swinging door that had been painted so many times, its hinges were stiff with accumulated layers of enamel.
The kitchen beyond was larger than she’d expected. Sure, the house was large — she guessed it was probably even larger than the big white Victorian where Angela and Connor lived, so bigger than three thousand square feet — but kitchens in old houses were unpredictable. Sometimes, they were much smaller than the footprint would indicate because kitchens back then hadn’t been the center of the house the way they were now, and sometimes they were large because someone had come along and decided to modernize the place.
This house appeared to be one that had been updated at some point. Not truly modern, because she guessed the appliances had to be at least fifteen years old, maybe more, but there was a big six-burner stove and an equally oversized stainless refrigerator, along with a large copper farmhouse sink that added a welcome touch of warmth to the space. As in the rest of the house, everything here seemed to be covered in a layer of dust.
Well, of course it is, she thought as she headed over to the big walk-in pantry on one side of the room. No one’s been here for more than a year.
In a way, that realization made her feel almost sad, that the Collector could have been gone for such a long time and no one had come to check on him. She knew he’d had servants of some kind — what her cousin Bellamy contemptuously referred to as his “minions” — but there didn’t seem to be any indication that they’d stuck around after he’d been trapped in the void.
But maybe they’d all perished in the battle with Brianna and Belshegar and the elders out on the promontory where the McAllister clan held its rituals at the four quarters of the year. Since no one really knew anything about the Collector, they also had no idea how many people he had working for him.
The electricity was on, though, and so was the water and the gas when she checked the tap and the stove. Roslyn guessed he must have all the utilities on autopay, yet another reason why no one had come to see why the house had stood empty for so many months.
And although she had no idea where exactly she was, except that it was somewhere near the coast and probably in the Pacific Northwest, judging by the perpetually gray skies she’d glimpsed through the windows, she could tell this wasn’t the kind of neighborhood that had an HOA that would pounce the second the grass in the yard got too long.
She realized she was thirsty — she hadn’t dared leave the Collector’s side in case his sleep slipped into something worse — so she went to a cupboard, found a glass, and turned the water back on. This time, she let it run for a minute to make sure it was clear and didn’t have any sediment in the pipes after all those months of disuse, and then she drank half of it down before refilling it.
