All four of the suits were black. There were also seven waistcoats in varying somber shades, along with a dozen stiff white shirts. As far as she could tell, there wasn’t a single item of casual clothing, no T-shirts or jeans or even a short-sleeved button-up.
Then again, that shouldn’t be so surprising. She really couldn’t picture the Collector in a pair of cargo shorts or something.
Roslyn stood in front of the closet for a moment and studied the row of identical suits and coordinating waistcoats, and she thought she might be starting to understand a little more about the man dozing downstairs. This wasn’t simple eccentricity, seemed instead almost like a kind of armor. Everything she’d seen and sensed in the house so far seemed to indicate that the Collector was someone who’d organized his entire existence around control…because control was the only thing standing between him and whatever he was afraid of.
For the Collector, those suits weren’t vanity, even though she could tell they’d been expensive. Instead, they were a fortress.
None of these insights made Roslyn feel particularly sympathetic toward him, not after what he’d done to her clan, not when he’d kidnapped her without a second thought. However, it did make her feel more confident in her ability to manage him as a patient, because she thought she understood the coping mechanism, even if she didn’t yet know anything about what had caused it in the first place.
The closet did, however, solve one immediate problem. She’d been snatched out of her life wearing the clothes she’d had on at the clinic — a cotton blouse, jeans, a light cardigan, her favorite flats — and she didn’t have anything else. No change of underwear, no pajamas, nothing to wear while she washed what she had. She wasn’t about to ask the Collector for help with this, assuming he was even in a condition to provide it, so she took stock of what was available and told herself she’d make do. All she really needed was two of his white shirts, which were far too large but would serve well enough as nightwear and as something to wear around the house while her own clothes dried. She also found a terrycloth robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door, oversized but functional, so she figured she could wash her things in the tub each evening and let them dry overnight on the radiator. It was a system that was less than glamorous but at least workable, and one she had a feeling she’d have to maintain for the foreseeable future.
She took the shirts and the robe to the small bedroom and set them on the bed, trying not to think too hard about the fact that she would be sleeping in his clothes. It was a practical solution to a practical problem, nothing more.
The other bedrooms were empty or used for storage, and contained odds and ends like boxes of books, a folded card table, and a set of bookshelves that hadn’t been assembled and were leaning against one wall, the boards and shelves still waiting to be put together. The second floor had its own collection of artifacts, their energy fainter than the ones below. She counted two rooms with warded doors, and behind one of them, she felt something that made her stop in the hallway and press her hand flat against the wall.
It was whispering.
Not in any language she recognized, or even in any discernible words. It was more like the vibration of a voice heard through several walls, reduced to nothing more than tone and rhythm. And somehow she could tell it was old…very old…and had something that felt almost like awareness. The artifact behind that door knew she was there. It couldn’t reach her through the ward, but it could feel her healing magic moving through the house the same way she could feel its energy pulsing past the static.
But because it seemed contained — and also because she knew she couldn’t do anything about it — Roslyn pulled her hand away from the wall and kept walking.
By the time she’d finished her survey of the house, the gray light outside the windows had faded to full dark, and she thought she had a better idea of what she was working with. There was heat — she’d checked the boiler, and to her relief, it seemed to be functioning just fine — and electricity and water, along with enough food to last the two of them several weeks if she was careful. She had clothes she could change into, and a linen closet with clean bedding. And although she wished she could somehow get the Collector upstairs and into his own bed, he seemed to be doing all right in the study for now.
While she was upstairs, she’d also found a notebook in the master bedroom’s nightstand drawer. It was leather-bound and filled with cramped handwriting, the pages covered in what appeared to be detailed notes on the house’s warding system. There were diagrams of the rooms, each one annotated with dates and measurements she didn’t completely understand but which she guessed were probably some kind of maintenance log. He’d apparently tracked the condition of every ward in the house on what looked like a weekly schedule for years.
Roslyn logged the notebook as potentially useful and left it where she’d found it. She wasn’t about to start going through his personal papers.
Not yet, anyway.
A quick peek into the study on the way back to the kitchen told her that he appeared to be dozing, eyes closed and head tilted to one side, so she wouldn’t allow herself to feel too guilty about the time she’d spend familiarizing herself with the house. If nothing else, she’d needed to know what she was dealing with, and now that she did, it was time to get to work.
She paused long enough to thoroughly wash her hands at the sink and then went on to assemble a meal from ingredients she’d found in the pantry. The rice was ready, so she turned off the heat on that burner and began warming up some broth. To round things out, she prepared a small portion of the canned white beans and mashed them roughly with the back of a fork, then seasoned them with a little olive oil and salt. Protein was essential to start building his body back up, and the beans were the gentlest form she had available. She found a whole preserved lemon in a jar in the back of the pantry that she thought would be nice if she squeezed a few drops over the beans, and even though it wasn’t the same as fresh, it was still much better than the mummified specimen that still sat in the refrigerator.
While the broth was heating up, she sat down at the kitchen table and wrote out a treatment schedule on the back of a dry-cleaning receipt she found in a drawer. He would need a healing session in the morning and evening, with each one lasting around thirty to forty-five minutes, depending on how much his system could tolerate. And she’d need to feed him three times a day in small portions, gradually increasing the amount of food as his stomach adjusted. The whole time, she’d have to monitor his fluid intake and make sure he didn’t use any magic and rested between sessions.
She stared at the schedule and tapped her pen against her chin. The schedule looked exactly like what it was, a standard recovery plan, the kind she might develop for any seriously debilitated patient. That her current patient was a warlock who’d kidnapped her, and the debilitation was caused by a year spent in a dimensional void, and the “clinic” was a Victorian house somewhere on the Pacific Northwest coast, didn’t change any of the basics. Biology was biology, after all. A body needed food, water, rest, and time, regardless of the circumstances that had injured it in the first place.
Now that she was at rest, though, her brain started churning again. By this point, it was nearly six, and she’d been gone for almost twenty-four hours. Her first client, Vicky Forbes, had been scheduled for nine-thirty that morning. She would have arrived for her appointment — just a routine check to make sure her new blood pressure meds weren’t causing any problems — and realized that Roslyn Campbell was nowhere to be found.
Roslyn used an answering service for the hours the clinic wasn’t open, so she assumed Vicky would have called there first. The answering service had her parents’ contact information and had been instructed to reach out to them in case of emergency, so they must know by now that their daughter was missing.
Was her Volkswagen still sitting in the parking lot? Technically, no one was supposed to park there after hours, but everyone in the Cottonwood P.D. knew what her car looked like, and if anyone had noticed it the night before, they probably would have thought she was either working late or had car problems of some kind. Either way, she doubted they would have towed her little SUV.
Not yet, anyway.
So by now her parents…and by extension, Connor and Angela and the elders…would have realized she’d vanished into thin air. They’d be making calls, doing everything they could to figure out what had happened to her.
Would they be successful?
That was something Roslyn didn’t know. She had no idea whether the spell or the artifact or whatever it was the Collector had used to bring her to his home would have left any kind of magical residue behind. If it had, she supposed there was a chance that maybe Belshegar — or Levi McAllister, one of the elders and also someone with otherworldly origins — might have picked up on it.
But if that was the case, wouldn’t they have been able to trace her here already?
Again, she didn’t know.
Steam was rising from the saucepan, signaling that the broth was ready. Roslyn was almost glad that she had to get up to deal with it, because at least that meant she wouldn’t have to keep sitting there while her thoughts continued to circle around and around.
She rose from her chair and arranged the meal on a tray she found leaning against the side of the refrigerator. It was a wooden tray with a lipped edge, the kind used for breakfast in bed. Roslyn couldn’t help wondering why he had it, because the Collector didn’t seem like a breakfast-in-bed kind of person to her. The rice went into a bowl, the broth into a mug, and the beans onto a small plate. She added a glass of water and a cloth napkin from a drawer, mostly because there didn’t seem to be any paper napkins, and she had a feeling he’d be irritated if she gave him a paper towel.
