“This will mask us while we’re in this room,” he said. “But it won’t help when you move through the house. The moment you leave the field’s radius, your signature becomes visible again.”
A single nod. “So I’ll stay in the study during your sessions and be careful the rest of the time.”
His lips pressed together. “Your version of careful and mine may differ.”
Blue eyes the color of desert turquoise met his. “My version of ‘careful’ has kept you alive for five days.”
He sat back down in the chair, and the effort of the last few minutes revealed itself in a tremor in his hands that he couldn’t hide. The cloaking stone’s activation had pulled from reserves he couldn’t spare, and his body, which had been cautiously rebuilding under Roslyn’s care, didn’t bother to conceal what he’d just done.
She noticed it at once. Her gaze dropped to his hands and then returned to his face, and now the expression she wore wasn’t composed patience but something much closer to anger.
“You just used magic,” she said, brows drawing together in annoyance. “After I explicitly told you — ”
Calmly, he cut in, “The situation required it.”
“It made you burn through reserves we’ve been rebuilding for almost a week.”
She went to the front of the chair and took his wrist without asking permission, her fingers finding the pulse point automatically. Her healing gift reached out through that contact, and he could feel it assess what he’d just spent. The assessment, he could tell from the tightening of her mouth, was far from favorable.
“You’ve set yourself back at least a full day,” she told him, still frowning. “Possibly two.”
He shrugged. “A day’s setback is preferable to a Gibson incursion.”
Her mouth tightened. “And what happens tomorrow when they come back? Or the day after?”
She released his wrist but didn’t step back, and from this distance, he could see smudges of fatigue around her eyes that hadn’t been there five days ago. She was tired, he realized then. Healing him twice a day was draining her. Perhaps he’d been aware of this in the abstract but hadn’t, until this moment, considered what it looked like from the outside.
“Will you use another artifact?” she went on. “Are you going to spend another day’s worth of reserves? At what point does the cost of hiding become worse than the thing you’re hiding from?”
He didn’t have an answer for any of those questions. Or rather, he had several, none of which would satisfy her, since they all amounted to the same thing. He would spend whatever it took, burn through whatever reserves he had, use whatever artifacts were required, because the alternative — being found and confronted, being forced to defend a house full of volatile artifacts while operating at a fraction of his capacity and with a healer from a different clan in the crossfire — was unacceptable.
But he couldn’t say with a McAllister healer in the crossfire without revealing that her safety had become a factor in his calculations, and that would raise questions he knew he wasn’t prepared to answer.
“The Gibsons are methodical,” he replied instead. “They’ll scout for three to five days before escalating to a direct approach. The cloaking stone will cover that interval if I limit its use to our sessions. In the meantime, the dimensional static continues to dissipate. Another week, and the background noise will be low enough that your signature will blend naturally with it.”
Roslyn crossed her arms, looking singularly unconvinced. “Another week of twice-daily sessions during which you’re also powering a cloaking artifact. That sounds like a siege.”
“I’ve managed sieges before,” he replied, his tone milder than he’d intended.
Her head tilted to one side. “And you ended up in a void for a year, so maybe your track record isn’t exactly the reassurance you think it is.”
She held his gaze for a moment longer, and he watched her decide not to push further, not because she’d conceded the point, but because she had already learned something about him that most people never did, which was that direct confrontation only made him dig in harder. Roslyn Campbell fought her battles sideways, with patience and persistence and the knowledge that she was right and was willing to wait for him to arrive at the same conclusion on his own terms.
It was, he reflected, an extremely effective strategy.
She returned to her position behind the chair and placed her hands on his temples again. “Don’t move. I need to reassess the scarring after that little stunt, and it’s going to take longer than usual.”
He sat still. Her magic entered his system, and he felt it trace the cost of the cloaking stone’s activation…the depleted channels, the setback in the tissue she’d been carefully rebuilding, the additional strain on magic that was still, despite five days of treatment, operating well below safe thresholds. Her hands were warm against his temples, and her power moved through him with the same steady, thorough attention it always did.
He sat in his chair and stared at the bookshelves and forced himself not to think about what he was feeling.
What he was feeling, if he’d allowed himself to name it, was that the cloaking stone could mask their signatures inside the study, but it couldn’t cover the entire house. During the hours between sessions — when Roslyn was in the kitchen, or moving through the hallways, or sleeping in the small bedroom upstairs — her magic would be partially detectable to anyone looking for it. The scouts would eventually notice a pattern of suppression during certain hours, visibility during others, and they’d would draw their own conclusions.
He needed a better solution, one that covered the whole house all the time, regardless of where she was or what she was doing.
And he knew exactly where to find one. In the locked room on the ground floor, the one whose wards Roslyn had felt and wisely decided not to test, there was an artifact he’d acquired seven years ago from a collector in Vancouver who hadn’t understood what he was selling. It was a sphere of dark amber, roughly the size of a billiard ball, and its function was to generate a dampening field that could suppress magical signatures within a radius of approximately five hundred feet, far more than enough to cover the house and the yard.
The Vancouver collector had been using it as a paperweight. Malachi had recognized the object for what it was and had spent three months negotiating its purchase, during which time he’d had to maintain an expression of mild academic interest that had cost him far more effort than most of his actual warding work.
