“After my father’s death, my mother returned to Manhattan with me. We lived there at Victoria’s mother’s sufferance — Greta Van Horn was the prima then, and she made it clear that our place in the clan was conditional on our usefulness. My mother’s gift was minor, something in the realm of enhanced perception, and Greta considered her barely worth supporting, although she was entitled to the same stipend that all members of the Van Horn family were given. I, however, showed early signs of significant power, and the Van Horns have always been interested in powerful children.”
Roslyn frowned. “Interested how?”
“The way one is interested in an investment,” he said simply. “I was given a private school education, trained in the fundamentals of magic, given access to the family’s resources.” He was narrating now, falling into the measured cadence he used when discussing the artifacts. It was a defense mechanism, the same retreat into the objective voice that kept the emotional content of what he was relating at arm’s length. “I was a dutiful student. I was also a curious one, which is where the trouble began.”
He set down the spoon. There didn’t seem to be any point in pretending that he was eating, and maintaining the pretense would have been an insult to the intelligence of the woman who sat across from him.
“The Van Horns have an extensive library,” he went on. “Many old clans do. The library contained generations of accumulated knowledge, grimoires, theoretical texts, historical records. I spent a good deal of time there as an adolescent, which the family encouraged, because a well-read warlock was an asset.” He paused there, giving himself a moment to decide how he wanted to continue. “But the library wasn’t where the trouble started. The trouble started when I was ten years old and my gift manifested.”
“Your gift,” Roslyn repeated, and her eyes narrowed slightly.
“Yes. Yours is healing, of course, while your cousin Bellamy’s is controlling the wind. Mine is — ” Another pause as he considered how best to explain the power that had been born within him. “Resonance, I suppose. I can sense magical objects, read their properties, understand their function and their history through direct proximity. It isn’t a common gift, and it wasn’t one the Van Horns knew how to categorize, which made them uncomfortable from the start.”
He picked up the spoon again, then put it down. An idle movement, one he knew betrayed his discomfort at having to relate the tale.
“I was twelve when I found my first artifact. It was a brass letter opener at a yard sale in the Village, sold by a civilian who had no idea what she had. I knew what it was the moment I touched it — it was a minor amplifier, designed to boost the user’s natural magical output. I brought it home, and within an hour, it had discharged in my bedroom and blown out every window on the second floor of the house.” The corner of his mouth moved, and he was surprised to find that the expression he wore now was something adjacent to a smile, although a bleak one. “The Van Horns were not amused by such a public display of magic.”
Roslyn’s mouth quirked as well, and he wondered if she was thinking of similar magical mishaps that might have occurred in her own clan. “I suppose not.”
“I was told to leave such things alone,” he continued. “The problem was that my gift didn’t come with an off switch. I could no more stop sensing artifacts than you can stop sensing an injured or unwell patient. The artifacts called to me — or rather, I was attuned to them in a way that made ignoring them a kind of sustained discomfort, the equivalent of a physician walking past an open wound and pretending not to see it.” He looked at her and saw in her expression the recognition he’d expected. She understood. Of course she did. “The Van Horns’ policy on magical objects, which is shared by most major clans, is simple — if you find one, destroy it. If you can’t destroy it, then contain it. If you can’t contain it, bury it somewhere deep and pretend it doesn’t exist.”
“And you couldn’t pretend.” Her voice was almost soft now, sympathetic.
He wasn’t sure what to do about that, so he only nodded. “I couldn’t pretend, and I wouldn’t destroy. Pretending a thing doesn’t exist isn’t a containment strategy. It’s willful ignorance, and willful ignorance, when applied to objects that can level buildings or warp probability or open doors to sealed dimensions, isn’t merely foolish. It’s irresponsible.” The word came out with more force than he’d intended. He noted that and made himself continue in a quieter tone. “As I grew older, I began arguing — publicly, at clan meetings, which was my first mistake — that the artifacts should be studied, cataloged, and properly maintained by someone who understood their properties. I proposed a system. I had detailed plans for how the collection and care of these objects could be formalized.”
Roslyn leaned forward a little, turquoise eyes shining with interest. “And that happened when you were twenty?”
It was hard to believe he’d once been that young. The intervening years had stretched on longer than he wanted to acknowledge. “I was twenty, and I was certain that being right would be sufficient protection. Unfortunately, it was not.” He paused and allowed himself a small breath, one he was sure Roslyn noticed. “Victoria Van Horn had recently inherited the prima title from Greta, and she was in the process of consolidating her authority. A young warlock whose inborn gift made him an expert on the very objects the clan wanted buried, challenging established policy in public — that wasn’t merely inconvenient. It was a threat to her position.”
He stopped there. The study was quiet around them, and he could hear the ocean waves through the walls, distant and rhythmic, along with the faint hum of the collection settling into its evening equilibrium. Roslyn was watching him with the same steady attention he recognized from his healing sessions, and he had the uncomfortable sense that she was reading him the way she read his magic, noting the places where the structure was sound and the places where it was held together by sheer force of will.
“She banished me,” he said. “Formally and publicly, in front of the assembled clan. The ceremony, if one could call it that, took place in the main hall of the Van Horn estate on 77th Street, a room designed to impress visitors with the family’s wealth and consequence. Victoria stood on the dais where her mother had stood before her, and she read the decree in a voice that carried to every corner of that hall, and every Van Horn in attendance — aunts, uncles, cousins, people I’d grown up with, people who’d sat at my mother’s dinner table — they all sat in their chairs and watched it happen.” Again, he stopped, and wondered now if he’d said too much. But by this point, it seemed better to keep going. “I was twenty years old. I had no resources of my own, and I was informed that if I set foot in Van Horn territory again, I’d be dealt with as an intruder.”
He considered his next words carefully. What came out was less careful than he’d intended.
“My mother was sitting in the third row. She didn’t speak on my behalf, and she didn’t look at me. I never saw her again.”
The silence that followed that statement was the kind he’d trained himself to fill. Silence was vulnerability, and vulnerability was a gap in one’s defenses through which the world could reach in and take whatever it wanted. He should be talking now, steering the conversation back toward more neutral topics and explaining the theoretical basis for his disagreement with Van Horn policy and the logical progression that had led from banishment to the collection.
Instead, he sat in there in silence.
“What happened after that?” Roslyn asked. Her voice was both careful and gentle, as though she understood the ground on which they both stood was more fragile than it seemed.
“I survived,” he said simply. “Which is a less dramatic story than it sounds, I suppose. I had very little money, no clan affiliation, no territory, and no allies. What I had was a considerable amount of raw magical talent and a disposition that made it difficult for me to ask for help, which, in retrospect, was probably a greater obstacle than my lack of resources.”
Once again, he picked up the spoon, then put it back down.
“I drifted,” he went on. “That’s an accurate enough word, although I preferred to think of it as traveling with purpose. I came to the West Coast because it seemed a good idea to put a continent between the Van Horns and me. I was in Portland for a while, and then in San Francisco and Seattle. I spent a good deal of time in small towns where no one asked questions, or cities where a warlock without clan ties could find work if he was willing to operate in the margins.” It felt better to summarize those seven years of his life in a few sentences, compressing them so they didn’t hold quite so much pain. “I warded buildings for witches who needed extra security and didn’t have anyone in their own clans who could do the work for them. I did magical pest control — minor hauntings, residual enchantments left behind in old houses, the kind of work that no respectable clan warlock would lower himself to do. I was quite good at it, which I suppose made it marginally less humiliating.”
Roslyn was still watching him, her gaze steady even though the sympathy in those clear eyes was now more obvious than ever. “For how long?”
“Seven years.”
It was a long time to be without a home. Not street-homeless, of course, not in the way that term was usually understood. He had always earned enough to rent a place to sleep, had always maintained his appearance, had always kept his waistcoat buttoned and his shoes polished, because it was always better if you couldn’t let the world see what it had done to you. But he’d been homeless in the more fundamental sense of having no place where he belonged, no door he could open and know that what was on the other side would still be there when he returned.
“The worst of it wasn’t the instability,” he said. He was mildly alarmed to hear himself make that admission, as it wasn’t part of the curated narrative he’d intended to give. “The worst of it was the invisibility. A warlock without a clan is someone who shouldn’t exist. I found items that would shield my witch nature, so at least I didn’t have to worry about being attacked and driven out of another clan’s territory. But I also had nothing of my own.”
He stopped there, realizing he hadn’t intended to say any of that. The fact that he’d actually spoken of such things to Roslyn Campbell told him his control was eroding badly.
