He pressed harder, and the void screamed.
It was a high, sharp sound that tore at his eardrums, the only real sound he’d heard in a year, unless one counted the slow, steady beat of his heart. Early on, he’d realized that he could try to speak, but nothing emerged from his throat or his mouth, as if the void swallowed up those frequencies before they had a chance to develop.
As painful as that dimensional scream was, reverberating in the delicate bones inside his ears and throughout his entire body, Malachi made himself ignore it. If the void was screaming, then that meant the shard was having some effect.
Everything went white, and for one hideous moment, he wondered if he had somehow miscalculated, if he’d only thought he was cutting through to the mortal plane but instead had breached an entirely different universe, one where he would be swallowed in that blazing whiteness and never seen again.
Then he realized he was falling, or at least, what felt like falling. Gravity pulled at him, yanking him out of the nothingness that had been his prison for more than a year.
The whiteness gave way to shapes, shapes he thought he vaguely recognized — a tall ceiling with crown moldings, an elaborate chandelier whose prisms were furred with dust, heavy curtains framing high windows whose proportions felt designed to match the lofty ceiling he’d glimpsed.
And then he fell with a heavy thud onto a Persian carpet whose pattern he also recognized, one worked in shades of red and green and turquoise. It was just enough to protect him from the dusty hardwood floor underneath that he didn’t think he’d broken any bones.
But it still hurt like hell.
He lay there for a moment, staring up at the chandelier, remembering vaguely that it had been there when he bought the house some ten years ago, as had the carpet upon which he now lay. Memory seemed as fuzzy as the dusty prisms on the chandelier, and he breathed in, smelling dust and old wood and something else, something wild and salty, something that seemed at odds with the Victorian fussiness of his surroundings.
Of course.
The house stood on a hill less than a half mile from the sea, and its wild, salt-laden breezes had filled the rooms of the place whenever he saw fit to open a window. Which he remembered hadn’t been too often, partly because he required privacy — even though the lot where the house was located was quite large, more than an acre — and partly because it was simply too damp and chilly to have open windows on this section of the Oregon coast.
Oregon. Yes, that was it.
His hip throbbed. He didn’t think he’d broken it, thought that most likely the rug was the only thing that had saved him from such an injury, but he knew he needed to get up so he could assess the damage from a better vantage point.
Doing so required more effort than he’d expected — he had to put both hands flat on the rug and push his trembling legs to a standing position — but once he was upright, he realized he had much more important things to worry about than a bruised hip.
The house looked the same, with its dark oak wainscoting and the fussy William Morris wallpaper above it that he’d never bothered to replace, but he could feel how wrong it was.
His gaze went at once to the door that led to the basement, with its seven locks arranged in a neat row up one side. They were still bolted, but the wards he’d layered on top of them, which had once been healthy and robust, now felt brittle as lake ice at the end of February. He’d reinforced those wards once every month, carefully strengthening each piece of defensive magic so there was no possible way the things he kept in the cellar could cause any havoc.
But he’d been gone for a long time.
As he stood there, assessing, he understood the damage wasn’t simply the result of neglect. He’d torn through the void and ripped open the wall between that dimension and this one when he returned, and he’d brought some of that energy with him, crackling and sparkling and full of static.
Luckily, the rip in the void had already healed itself — nature abhorred a vacuum, whether in this world or the next — but the damage had been done.
He needed to ascertain how extensive it truly was, whether any of the more volatile items in his collection were ready to break through their wards…and what he would do if it turned out they were. If even one of those items breached its wards while the house’s overall protections were this compromised, the resulting magical discharge would be felt by every witch and warlock within a hundred miles.
The Gibson clan, whose territory this was, would arrive to investigate. They tolerated his presence here, mainly because they knew they could do nothing about it, but they certainly weren’t friends.
Limping and wondering if the ache in his hip actually was more than simply a bruised bone, he made his way to the first collection room, the one he had always thought of as the East Gallery, although it was really just the house’s former parlor, now with reinforced shelving and more layers of wards. The artifacts on the shelves — a silver astrolabe that whispered in dead languages, a set of bone dice that could alter probability within a twelve-foot radius, a glass jar containing what appeared to be smoke but was actually a trapped weather-working that predated the Roman Empire — all appeared to be intact, their individual containment wards still holding.
But he could see the static working on them. Now he detected fine cracks in the magical barriers, hairline fractures that would widen over the coming days as the dimensional energy he’d brought with him continued to corrode everything it touched. He had possibly a week before the first of the weaker containments failed entirely. Some of the objects in this room would merely become active if their wards dropped, an outcome that would be inconvenient but not catastrophic. The bone dice would start influencing probability in their immediate vicinity, which might result in a few oddly lucky or unlucky occurrences in the neighborhood. The astrolabe would whisper more loudly, but its range was limited, and there was no one within earshot to be disturbed by its murmurings.
The items in the basement vaults were another matter entirely.
However, he didn’t go down to check on them. This was partly because now the pain in his hip was screaming loudly enough that he wasn’t sure he could make it down the stairs…let alone back up them…without collapsing, and partly because the wards down there were far stronger than the ones on the main floors of the house. They would hold for a while.
He didn’t want to think about what would happen if those wards failed while he was still in this weakened state.
With a wince, he leaned against the doorframe. It was a moment of weakness that annoyed him. He wasn’t used to being weak. But more than a year in the void had done its work, and he’d already been malnourished and slowly dying of thirst before gravity did its work and slammed him against the Persian rug in the foyer. And his magic was severely depleted, what little reserves he’d still had left channeled into cutting open the hole in the void.
His collection — the items he’d gathered and then locked away, making sure they were safe because no one else seemed to care — was more at risk with every passing moment. If…no, when…the wards failed, the result would spell disaster not just for him but for every living thing in at least a two-mile radius, probably more.
And even though he knew the Gibsons would come to investigate, since this was their territory, they weren’t even the greatest of his possible worries.
No, that would be the Van Horns. He still bore the name of his birth clan, but he had not been a part of it for many years, not since Victoria Van Horn, its prima, had banished him. She’d been hunting him for years, because even though she still believed she’d done the right thing in removing him from her territory, she now coveted the items in his possession, wanted to add them to her considerable wealth even though she had no real idea of what they could do. No, she simply believed that because they had been found by a Van Horn, that meant they were the clan’s possessions, not his.
