Roslyn listened with her arms crossed and her expression as unreadable as he hoped his was, and when he’d finished, she said only, “I need to check your channels now.”
“Agreed,” he said. Disagreeing with her would only mean an extended negotiation that would require them to remain in the same room for that much longer, a room that already felt too small. She was too close, and the oatmeal with its raisins and brown sugar was too much like something a person made for someone she cared about.
So he let her touch him and assess the condition of his magic, and he tried to pretend he didn’t feel anything from that touch. Then he went outside.
The outer wards ran along the property line, roughly forty feet from the house on all sides, invisible to civilian eyes but perceptible to any witch or warlock who knew what to look for — a shimmer at the edge of vision, a sense that the air had thickened slightly at an invisible boundary. Malachi had built them in layers during his first year in the house, each one keyed to a different type of intrusion. The outermost layer repelled casual magical detection, the middle layer disrupted active scrying, and the innermost layer served as an alarm system that would alert him to any breach.
All three layers were degrading. He could see it with his resonance gift the way a structural engineer might see cracks in a foundation, not with his physical eyes, but with a deeper perception that translated magical architecture into something his mind could interpret. The outermost layer had gone patchy, thinning to near-transparency in several places along the eastern perimeter. Stress fractures had appeared in the middle layer at the junction points where individual ward sections overlapped, and those fractures were spreading. The innermost layer was still intact, but it was compensating for the weakness above it by drawing more power than it was designed to sustain.
He began with the eastern perimeter, where the damage was worst. The work required him to kneel on the damp grass in the chilly air, place his hands flat against the earth, and extend his magic downward into the ward anchors buried beneath the soil. Each anchor was a focal point, a place where the ward’s energy was rooted to the physical location. Repairing them meant feeding his own power into the structure, filling the gaps the way a mason filled cracks with mortar.
Within the first hour, he could feel the drain on his magic, a steady pull running through his channels, drawing from the reservoir of power Roslyn had spent two weeks rebuilding. The pull was manageable at first, no worse than the sensation of warding the bone dice, but it didn’t diminish as the work progressed. Each anchor required a little more than the last, each repair revealing new damage underneath, fractures beneath fractures in a framework that had been built by a man working alone, without the resources or the knowledge that a clan would have provided.
By midday, when Roslyn came out to the back porch and told him he needed to stop, he’d repaired nine of the thirty-six anchors on the eastern perimeter. His hands were trembling, and the scarring around his heart — the void damage she’d so carefully reduced — had begun to ache with a deep, persistent throb he recognized as a warning.
She checked his magic on the back porch while a cool autumn wind came off the ocean, bringing with it the smell of salt and wet stone. Her hands were warm on his wrists, and her gift moved through him with the efficiency of long practice. He watched her face, which was all he could do to keep himself from watching her hands, so he saw the exact moment when her professional composure dropped slightly, showing in the tightening of her jaw.
“You’ve lost ground,” she said.
“I repaired nine anchors.”
“And your magical output dropped four percent in the process.” She released his wrists and stepped back, putting distance between them with a calculation he recognized because it was the same thing he’d been doing all morning. “You’re spending more than you’re generating. If you keep this up, by the end of the week, you’ll be back where you were ten days ago.”
He considered arguing with her. The numbers she was telling him were, he suspected, accurate. After all, she knew his magic better than he did, a fact he’d acknowledged the previous evening in the moments before everything went wrong. Arguing with accurate data was a waste of energy he couldn’t spare at the moment.
“I need to repair the wards,” he said instead.
“I know you do.” She crossed her arms, and the wind caught a strand of light-streaked dark honey hair that had escaped her braid and blew it across her face. With impatient fingers, she tucked it behind one ear. “But not like this. Not by pouring yourself into the ground faster than I can fill you back up.”
“What do you suggest?” he asked. In his own voice, he thought he heard the same quiet that had appeared the night she’d told him he’d been alone too long.
“I don’t know yet.” She met his eyes, and what he saw in her expression wasn’t frustration or reproach. Instead, it seemed like something closer to persistence, along with a refusal to accept that the situation was hopeless simply because the obvious solutions had failed. “But burning yourself down to save the wards isn’t the answer if it ends up killing you in the process. Come inside and eat something. Let me work on you this afternoon, and we’ll try to figure out a schedule that doesn’t require you to choose between the house and your heart.”
The word heart seemed to have more weight than she’d probably intended. She appeared to notice it, because the faintest color touched her cheeks before she turned and went back inside.
He stood on the porch for a moment longer, watching the wind move through the overgrown grass and rustle the leaves on the trees, before he followed.
Malachi went back out the next morning, and the morning after that. The schedule they negotiated was Roslyn’s design — four hours of ward work in the morning, a healing session after lunch, and then rest until evening. It was sensible and disciplined, but also entirely insufficient, because the math of the situation hadn’t changed. Each morning, he repaired more anchors, and each afternoon she repaired more of him, and the net result was a slow, grinding equilibrium that tipped a little further into deficit with every passing day.
By the fourth day, the tremor in his hands had become persistent enough that he could no longer conceal it during meals. By the fifth day, he could feel it — he was spending faster than she could replenish. Each session restored a measurable fraction of what he’d burned through the day before, and each day’s warding work consumed that fraction and a little more. The math was inescapable. He was running a deficit, and he wasn’t going to be able to close the gap as long as the wards needed repair, and the wards always, always needed repair. Roslyn tracked the deterioration with the meticulous precision he’d come to expect from her, noting the numbers each afternoon without comment, although her full mouth grew a fraction tighter with each session.
At least the wards were improving. He’d completed the eastern perimeter and moved to the northern, and the repaired sections held firm, their energy clean and steady in a way that the damaged sections were not. The dampening field was stabilizing as the underlying structure strengthened, which was the only calculation that mattered — or rather, it was the only calculation he was willing to prioritize.
They didn’t speak of the kiss. Not once in those five days did either of them reference what had happened in the study, even though it lived in the spaces between their conversations like a piece of furniture someone had moved into the room and then agreed to ignore. They discussed the wards, his recovery, the food supply, the weather. Their interactions were courteous and professional, conducted with careful formality, like a couple of diplomats negotiating across a border neither of them was willing to acknowledge.
Malachi told himself this was the correct approach. He had kissed her, and it had been a mistake — not because of the kiss itself, which his treacherous memory insisted on replaying with vivid accuracy at inconvenient moments, but because of what it represented. Attachment. Need. The possibility that he might build something more than a house full of dangerous objects and a life organized around their containment, and the certainty — absolute, unshakable, born of seventeen years of evidence — that anything he built beyond these walls would be taken from him.
Victoria had taken his family. The void had taken a year. To allow himself to want Roslyn Campbell, to name the feeling that surfaced every time she walked into a room and changed it simply by being in it, would be to hand the universe one more thing it could use against him.
No, he wouldn’t do it. He hadn’t survived the void, survived banishment, survived seven years of homelessness and ten years of solitary guardianship, only to undo himself over a woman with turquoise eyes and honey-colored hair and a laugh that made the study feel like a place where someone actually lived.
So he worked on the wards, and she healed him. They were very polite to each other, and neither of them mentioned the way their very politeness had become a form of cowardice.
Malachi felt the probe at dusk on the seventh day. He was in the study, sitting in his leather chair while Roslyn worked on the scarring around his heart. Her hands rested on his chest, and her magic moved through him with the careful, deliberate touch that characterized their evening sessions, which were slower than the morning work and more focused, designed to repair rather than simply stabilize. His eyes were closed, and he was concentrating on keeping his breathing steady. Her proximity during these sessions had become considerably more difficult to endure since the kiss that neither of them mentioned, and the effort of maintaining his composure while her hands were on him required a level of discipline that left him little attention for anything else.
Which was why he almost missed it.
The probe was delicate. It brushed against the outer wards with the lightness of a fingertip tracing the edge of a glass, testing for resonance without applying enough pressure to trigger the alarm layer. Most witches wouldn’t have detected it at all, because most witches didn’t have a resonance gift attuned to the specific frequencies of their own warding. Also, the probe had been designed to be undetectable, precise and controlled and yet achingly familiar in its technique.
