There. That was a little better.
Of course, now that her thirst had been somewhat sated, she realized how hungry she was. At the clinic, she’d taken a break at lunch to run over to Safeway and grab a salad, which she’d eaten at her desk before her one o’clock client showed up, but that little bowl of lettuce and vinaigrette and dried cranberries had been consumed more than twenty-four hours ago.
A quick peek inside the refrigerator revealed a bottle of Perrier and a withered lemon, and the freezer was similarly empty. So much for grabbing a Lean Cuisine or a frozen pizza.
Not that the Collector seemed like the kind of man who would lower himself to eat anything so plebeian.
For some reason, that thought awakened a hint of amusement. Could she really be standing in the kitchen of the man who’d attacked her clan and thinking about what kind of frozen food he might eat?
It sure looked that way.
She set down the glass on the butcher-block countertop and gazed out the window over the sink. It showed a landscape just as neglected as the front yard, the grass overgrown and turning yellow, the trees with suckers coming up around the roots and several branches that looked as if they’d been broken during one storm or another. To one side was a tangle of roses, with a few of the bushes still flaunting a few blood-red blooms.
Without thinking, she reached out to touch the window. At once, a sharp tingle went up her arm, accompanied by a faint spark that spiraled out from the glass before disappearing.
Clearly, the wards were still in place despite her captor’s weakened condition.
Well, she’d already decided to stay and heal him, because that was what healers did. In school, she’d taken the Nightingale Pledge, an oath that emphasized compassion.
She wasn’t sure if she could be completely compassionate toward her patient after everything he’d done, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to give him the best damn care she possibly could.
And that meant getting some liquids and some food inside him.
Since her search of the refrigerator hadn’t revealed anything useful, she went on to the pantry, which was much larger than she’d expected, probably converted from the butler’s pantry it had been when the house was originally built.
Unlike the refrigerator, the pantry appeared to be extremely well-stocked. She saw cans of tomatoes and beans, cartons of cashew milk, and even more cans, these of chicken broth and beef bouillon. There were also a rough dozen soups in various flavors, artichoke hearts and several varieties of olives, as well as sundried tomatoes and pesto and spaghetti sauce. In addition, she found dried pasta in glass jars, rice in sealed containers, and a collection of spices that included things like smoked paprika and sumac alongside the usual salt and pepper and garlic powder. And there was olive oil, one bottle opened and one sealed. All kinds of vinegar — red wine, white wine, and balsamic. On the top shelf, she located several tins of loose-leaf tea, oolong and Darjeeling.
Well, at least they wouldn’t starve, although she would have liked to have found some fresh fruit and vegetables. Still, the contents of the pantry would provide enough sustenance to get some nutrients into her patient, and that was the important thing, even though some people — all right, most people — would have probably argued that the most important thing was for her to find a way out of there, wards or no.
But Roslyn knew she wasn’t most people. All of the Arizona witch clans had healers, but she was the only one who’d decided that she wanted to be schooled in regular medicine rather than simply relying on the gift that had been her birthright. The combination had served her well so far, although she had a feeling her current patient was going to test her abilities to the utmost.
For now, though, she knew she needed to focus on putting a meal together for him. Nothing heavy…it was going to be a while before she felt comfortable feeding him pesto and linguine…but a nice, clear broth and some rice, along with something soft, maybe some beans, should work for starters. Then she could assess how he did with that and decide what he could eat next.
Her mother had some fairly strong opinions about canned broth, but Roslyn hadn’t seen a chicken coop in the backyard, and even if those hypothetical chickens hadn’t flown the proverbial coop, it wasn’t as if she knew how to butcher a chicken.
Not that she would have had the intestinal fortitude to do such a thing unless she was completely starving.
So, they had food and running water and electricity, and she’d noticed baseboard radiators in the study, so they would have heat as well, although she might have to check on the condition of the boiler.
There was a joke. She’d grown up in a nice, semi-custom home in a hilly area of Cottonwood with central gas heat. It wasn’t as if she knew the first thing about how boilers worked.
But if the alternative was shivering through another damp, gray night, she’d figure it out.
After getting a batch of rice going on the stovetop, she headed out of the kitchen and stuck her head inside the first door to the left, which turned out to be a bathroom. It had black and white hexagonal tile on the floors, a clawfoot tub with a slightly yellowed white shower curtain, and a pedestal sink. Above the sink was a medicine cabinet.
A quick inspection told her that it had some basic supplies — a box of Band-Aids, aspirin, rubbing alcohol, a thermometer, a tube of antibiotic ointment that was still within its expiration date. No prescription medications, which told her that the Collector either hadn’t needed them or had relied on magical remedies for whatever ailed him. Given what she now knew about his almost obsessive self-reliance, she suspected he’d used magic anytime he was dealing with something worse than a simple headache.
It wasn’t much, but it was still more than she’d expected. She set everything on the edge of the tub, already sorting the supplies into categories in her head — wound care, fever management, general comfort. The absence of anything truly useful…IV fluids, electrolyte supplements, the kind of equipment she kept stocked at the clinic…was something she’d just have to deal with. His treatment was going to be almost entirely magical, anyway. However, the mundane supplies would be helpful for the secondary effects of his time in the void. He was dehydrated, malnourished, and in pain, and while her magic could address the damage to his gift, it couldn’t put calories in his stomach or water in his cells. She’d have to do that part the old-fashioned way.
The next door on the left was protected by a ward. She could feel it before her hand touched the knob, a dense, layered barrier that seemed somehow different from the home’s perimeter wards. This one was older and more deliberate, and appeared designed not to keep people in but to keep them out, which she supposed made sense. Behind the ward, she sensed three or maybe four objects, each one with a distinct frequency that she could only partially read through the dimensional static the Collector had brought with him. One felt cold, while another pulsed with a rhythm that was almost biological, steady and slow. The others were harder to characterize, but none of them felt exactly friendly.
Obviously, she didn’t try the door.
The next two rooms were also collection rooms — she could tell by the density of warded magic behind their closed doors — but the door after that opened on a linen closet stocked with sheets, towels, and wool blankets that smelled of cedar. She took a set of sheets and two towels, adding them to her mental inventory.
The second floor, which she explored next, was laid out around a central landing with the staircase descending at one end. It had four bedrooms and another bathroom, this one larger than the one downstairs, with a clawfoot tub deep enough to submerge in and a shower attachment that looked like it had been added sometime in the 1970s. The bedroom where she’d woken the day before was the smallest, with a single bed and a nightstand and nothing else.
The master bedroom was across the hall; Roslyn could tell almost at once that it was his, not just because it was bigger than any of the other bedrooms, but because the bed had been made with perfect hospital corners, and because the closet, when she opened it, held a row of suits in dark fabrics, each one hanging on a wooden hanger at exactly the same distance from the next.
