The amber sphere was reliable, stable, and demanded very little maintenance once activated. It also required an initial charge from its user’s magical reserves, a substantial one, roughly equivalent to what Roslyn’s sessions had rebuilt in the past five days.
He would lose everything she had given him, every careful, painstaking repair she’d made to the channels around his heart and through the center of his magic. If he used the sphere, he would be back to where he’d been on the day she arrived, or close to it, at any rate, and the recovery timeline she’d laid out would extend by a week at minimum.
He didn’t tell her about the amber sphere during the remainder of the morning session. Instead, he sat quietly while she worked, and when she was finished, he ate the breakfast she brought without commentary and said nothing when she removed the tray and went to the kitchen to clean up.
He waited until that afternoon to activate the sphere. Roslyn was safely upstairs, and that meant he had sufficient time to work.
The procedure required him to enter the locked room, which meant dismissing the ward, a process that took several minutes and left his hands shaking with effort. The room beyond was small and dim, lined with shelves, each one holding objects he’d acquired over the years and judged too sensitive for the more accessible collection rooms. The amber sphere sat on the middle shelf, nestled in a velvet-lined box. He took it in both hands, felt its dormant energy pulse once against his palms, and pushed.
At once, his magical reserves, painstakingly accumulated over five days of healing, emptied in a single sustained pour that lasted for around forty seconds and felt far longer. The sphere drank from him the way the void had drunk from him, except that the void had been indiscriminate and the sphere was targeted, pulling specifically from the channels Roslyn had been rebuilding, the ones that ran deepest and closest to the center of his magic.
When it was done, the dampening field bloomed outward from the sphere in a silent wave, expanding through the walls of the house and into the yard and past the fence line. He could feel it settle, a thick, even suppression that would render every kind of magic signature inside its radius to a murmur. To anyone scanning from outside, the house would feel like nothing more than a concentration of old ambient energy, the kind of residual magic that accumulated naturally in structures that had stood for more than a century and had once had witch-kind living in them, even though they were no longer there. The outer perimeter wards would still register at the property line — they had to, by design — but anyone scanning the interior would find only the soft, ambient pulse of an old house.
The Gibsons would lose interest, and the cloaking stone could be retired. Roslyn would be able to heal him freely while continuing to broadcast their location.
All it had cost him was everything she’d given him so far.
He replaced the sphere in its box, closed it, re-established the ward on the room’s door, and then walked back to the study on legs that felt as if they’d been filled with sand. The hallway swam around him — the faded William and Morris wallpaper, the dark walnut wainscoting, the row of closed doors — and he had to stop twice and brace himself against the wall until his vision steadied.
Somehow, he made it to the chair, where he sat down. He was aware that his breathing was too fast and his hands were trembling against the armrests, and that the hollow, gutted sensation in his chest was the absence of the magic she’d spent a week rebuilding.
He had time to button the cuff of his shirt, which had come unfastened during the activation, before he heard her footsteps on the stairs.
She entered the study and stopped in the doorway. He watched her eyes widen as she felt it — the dampening field, the change in the house’s magical atmosphere, and then those turquoise eyes glittered as she seemed to register the change in him.
The anger that crossed her face in that moment wasn’t the cool, composed displeasure he had seen before when he was being difficult about eating a bowl of beans or having her check his pulse for what felt like the hundredth time. A flush of fury touched her cheeks, and for the first time since her arrival, she looked at him not as a medical professional dealing with a difficult patient but as a woman confronting someone who’d just done something unforgivably stupid.
“What the hell did you do?” she demanded.
“I solved the problem,” he said calmly.
“What did you do?” She strode across the room and took his wrist. Immediately, he sensed her gift reaching through the contact to find what was left, which was very nearly nothing. Her grip on his wrist tightened. “Your magic is almost gone. I spent five days rebuilding your energy, and you’ve — ” She stopped herself there, neck and jaw taut, and the visible effort that restraint cost her told him more about the severity of the situation than any clinical description of the damage he’d caused could have.
“There is a dampening field around the house,” he said. He was aware that his voice sounded faint, which definitely wasn’t the effect he’d been aiming for. “It will suppress all magical signatures within a radius of five hundred feet. The Gibsons won’t be able to detect us, and you’ll be free to continue healing me without tactical constraints.”
“‘Free to continue healing you.’” She repeated those words with a sort of flat affect that he recognized as the precursor to something considerably more forceful, like the tide running out before the tsunami arrived. “You just emptied your reserves to power an artifact after I explicitly told you that using magic would set back your recovery, and you’re talking about it as if you’ve done me a favor.”
He gazed at her coolly. “I have done us both a favor. The detection risk — ”
“The detection risk was manageable,” she snapped. “What you’ve done definitely isn’t.” She released his wrist and stepped back, and for one disorienting moment, the absence of her touch felt worse than the drain on his magic. “I’m going to examine you properly after dinner,” she continued. “Don’t use any more magic. Don’t touch any artifacts. Don’t do anything except sit in that chair and contemplate the possibility that you aren’t the only person in this house capable of making decisions.”
And after delivering that remark, she stalked out of the study, long, golden-brown ponytail swinging.
Malachi sat in his leather chair and contemplated, as instructed, the possibility that he wasn’t the only person in this house who could make decisions. The exercise wasn’t productive. What he found himself contemplating instead was the expression on her face as her gift had traced the extent of what he had spent — not the anger, which he had expected, but the emotion he thought he’d glimpsed underneath it.
For just a moment, it had looked like grief.
She was grieving that something she’d been building with care had been taken from her. The loss didn’t appear to be merely professional but personal, the pain someone might experience if they’d invested themselves in a thing and then watched it be carelessly destroyed.
He hadn’t meant to upset her. No, he’d intended to protect her, which wasn’t a thought he wanted to examine too closely. Examining it would require him to acknowledge that protecting Roslyn Campbell had become a priority that ranked alongside protecting the collection, and he wasn’t prepared to reckon with what that meant.
The dampening field hummed around the house, silent and effective. In the study, Malachi sat alone in the quiet and felt, for the first time in five days, entirely cold.
5
She’d been brief and cold with Malachi the rest of that day, had performed the necessary healing that evening in an almost perfunctory way, although she hadn’t stinted on the amount of therapeutic energy she poured into him. Still, she wanted him to know she was still furious. Not because he’d basically thrown away five days of hard work, but because she wanted him to get better. If his healing process turned out to be three steps forward and two and a half back, then this was going to take forever.
She refused to acknowledge that being trapped in his gloomy mansion for longer than expected might not be the worst thing in the world.
