“During those seven years, I kept finding things,” he said. “The first was almost by accident, a jade figurine in the basement of a house I was clearing of a residual enchantment in Portland. The owner had no idea what it was. I did, because my gift told me. It was a minor piece, a storage vessel designed to hold a single charge of kinetic energy, but it was old and it was real, and the woman who owned it had been using it as a doorstop.”
Despite himself, indignation colored the last word. A doorstop. The figurine had been crafted by a witch in the Song Dynasty, and this woman had been propping open her laundry room door with it.
“I bought it from her for fifty dollars,” he said. “I told her it had sentimental value, which wasn’t entirely untrue. Then I built a containment ward for it, the first one I’d ever designed from scratch. The books I’d read in the Van Horn library had described the theory but not the practice, and no one had ever shown me how to translate one into the other.”
“Self-taught,” Roslyn repeated. There was no real surprise in her tone, as if this was something she already understood, thanks to all the time she’d spent inside his magic.
“Entirely.” He paused, and something in his expression must have shifted, because her gaze sharpened slightly. It was a healer’s reflex, studying him for signs of distress. But he wasn’t in distress. He was only revisiting a memory that, for reasons he couldn’t entirely explain, felt to him like a wound that had healed well but still troubled him when the weather changed. “The ward was terrible. Functional, but inelegant. I rebuilt it four times before I was satisfied, and even then, I knew there were flaws I couldn’t see because I lacked the training to identify them. But it held. The figurine’s energy stayed contained. No one was the worse for it, and I had learned something that the Van Horn library, for all its accumulated wisdom, had never been able to teach me.” He met Roslyn’s gaze. “These objects aren’t inherently evil, and they aren’t inherently good. They’re powerful, and they’re neglected, and that neglect is far more dangerous than the power they contain.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she murmured, “You found your purpose.”
The word startled him. Not because it was inaccurate — it was actually all too accurate — but because no one had ever named it for him before. He’d referred to it as a calling, a responsibility, a vocation, even an obsession. But he had never called it a purpose. Purpose implied meaning, and meaning implied that his life had something to it beyond mere survival.
He hadn’t allowed himself to believe that for a very long time.
“I found a problem no one else was solving,” he said simply.
He realized then that he was talking too much. The story had gained a momentum that was carrying him past the boundaries he’d set for himself, past the careful version of his history he’d curated over the years and into territory that was far more honest than he was comfortable with.
But for some reason, he kept talking.
“After the figurine, I kept finding them,” he said. “Or they kept finding me. I suppose it depends on how you look at it. A set of probability dice in an antique shop here in Astoria, and a weather-working in a sealed jar that had been gathering dust in the attic of an estate outside Cannon Beach. I found an astrolabe that whispered in languages that haven’t been spoken for two thousand years, left in a storage unit in Portland by a warlock who’d died without heirs and whose belongings were about to be auctioned off to the public.” He spread his hands — hands she’d been watching the whole time, although she probably thought he hadn’t noticed — in a gesture that encompassed the study, the house, the life he’d built within its walls. “It wasn’t as if I set out to become a collector. I set out to ensure that these things were safe, and those two intentions converged at some point. By the time I realized what I’d become, it was too late to become anything else.”
“So you found this house,” Roslyn said.
He nodded. “Yes, I found this house ten years ago. It was a foreclosure, structurally sound and large enough to hold the collection as it existed then, and it was located in a town where one more eccentric owner of a ramshackle Victorian house wouldn’t attract any particular attention. I spent two years renovating it — building the reinforced shelving, installing the layered wards, designing the containment protocols for each individual artifact. The work was” — he paused and was a little surprised by what came next, since it wasn’t the word he’d meant to use — “the happiest period of my life.”
The words seemed to hang there for a beat or two. It revealed a vulnerability he’d had no intention of showing to Roslyn Campbell, like a document left open on a desk that should have been locked away in a drawer.
“Ten years,” he continued, since stopping now would only give his previous statement undue weight. “I spent a decade here, maintaining the collection, acquiring new pieces when they surfaced, building a system I knew was imperfect but that was, at least, better than the alternative of leaving these things scattered and unattended across the continent.” He paused there and went on in a much drier tone. “And then the McAllisters acquired two powerful artifacts through sheer accident. I made the mistake of trying to retrieve them, and your cousin sent me to the void.”
Roslyn’s brows had puckered briefly when he mentioned her clan, but she sounded calm enough as she asked, “And the Van Horns?”
“Victoria never stopped looking for me,” he replied. “When I was banished, I had nothing — no collection, no resources, no reason for her to pursue me beyond wounded pride. But over the years, Victoria began to hear rumors. A rogue warlock collecting dangerous artifacts. A man without clan ties who was amassing objects that any primas who’d known of their existence had spent centuries trying to suppress.” His voice remained steady, but he could feel the effort it required to keep his throat from tightening as he spoke. “She decided the collection was hers by right. Not because she wanted the objects — she feared them as much as any Van Horn. Because the objects were mine, and I was hers. In Victoria’s understanding of the world, a banished clan member doesn’t get to build something more impressive than what the clan itself possesses.”
“That’s — ” Roslyn seemed to stop herself, and he watched her choose and then discard several responses before settling on one. “That’s not how these things work.”
A shrug. “It’s how Victoria works.” He looked down at his hands, which were resting on the desk on either side of the untouched soup, and he noticed they were steady enough. That surprised him a little. “She’s spent years trying to locate this house, sending agents, tracking my movements, leaning on contacts in the witch community for information. When her search failed, and I was sent to the void, she would have shifted her efforts to the collection itself.”
Roslyn’s eyes narrowed slightly. “And now you’re back, and the void trail led her here.”
“It is leading her here,” he corrected her. “The trail is fading, but it hasn’t dissipated entirely. The dampening field will slow her progress, but Victoria Van Horn is patient when she chooses to be, and she has resources I can’t match.” He met Roslyn’s gaze across the desk, and then he said what he hadn’t yet said aloud to anyone, the thing that had been sitting at the center of his calculations ever since the day he’d torn his way back to the mortal plane. “She’ll find us. It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when.”
The study was very quiet after he uttered those words. Roslyn hadn’t moved during his account, had quietly sat in the chair across from him as if she understood some stories shouldn’t be interrupted, and now she remained still, her expression thoughtful rather than shocked. He attributed this lack of reaction to the simple fact that she was a McAllister, and had therefore grown up in a family that understood all too well the particular cruelties that witch-kind could inflict on its own.
He waited for the response. It would be, he thought, something practical, a question about how long they might have, or possibly a suggestion regarding their defensive options. Roslyn Campbell was, he knew, a practical woman, and practicality would be her default mode when confronted with this kind of information.
However, what she said was, “You’ve been alone for a very long time.”
The words were spoken quietly, offered without a hint of pity, and they hit him somewhere deep inside that no ward he’d ever constructed could have deflected. She wasn’t observing or even diagnosing. She was simply stating a thing that was true, the way she might state a patient’s temperature or blood pressure…a fact, recorded without judgment, that was still the most important thing in the room.
He knew he should say something. After all, he had several pat responses readily available — the deflection, the dry rejoinder, the retreat into formality that had served him so effectively for the past seventeen years. The words were there already, a dozen variations on the theme of “I prefer solitude” or “loneliness is a luxury I can’t afford” or “you presume a great deal, Ms. Campbell,” each of them perfectly designed to reestablish the distance between them and restore the semblance of control that this conversation had been steadily dismantling.
But he didn’t say any of them.
Instead, he sat in the chair in the study of the house he’d built to hold the only family that would have him, and he looked at the woman who’d spent ten days healing him, and he didn’t speak. The silence wasn’t evasion or deflection. It was the most honest thing he’d offered another person since the day the Van Horns had put him out of their door; it had no performance and no strategy, and definitely no carefully constructed version of himself designed to keep the world at a safe distance.
Roslyn held his gaze for a moment longer, and then she did something he hadn’t expected, which was to nod — once, simply, as though he’d said something she’d been waiting to hear — and picked up her own spoon.
