Van Horn magic. He recognized it the way a musician recognized a particular school of playing, not from any single element, but from the combination of approach, pressure, and restraint. The Van Horns trained their warlocks who possessed such gifts to probe wards the way surgeons were trained to probe tissue, with the minimum force necessary to gather information and the maximum control necessary to avoid triggering a response.
Malachi’s eyes opened.
Roslyn’s hands were still on his chest. She was looking at him, her attention now focused and almost sharp, and he knew she’d sensed the shift in his body before he’d consciously processed it — the sudden tension in his muscles, the spike in his pulse, the way his magic had contracted involuntarily.
“What is it?” she asked.
He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he extended his resonance outward, past the walls of the study and through the house and into the ward structure beyond, tracing the outer perimeter until he found the place where the probe had touched. It was on the northern side, near one of the anchors he’d repaired that morning. The probe was already gone, withdrawn as delicately as it had arrived, leaving behind nothing but the faintest impression, the magical equivalent of a fingerprint on polished glass.
That impression was enough, though. He read it the way he read artifacts — through proximity and resonance and the deep, inborn gift Victoria Van Horn had banished him for possessing — and what he found confirmed what his instincts had already told him.
The magical signature in the probe wasn’t Victoria’s personally. It was too precise for her, too surgical. Victoria’s magic had always been broad and forceful, a blunt instrument used by someone who ruled with authority rather than finesse. This probe had been crafted by someone whose gift involved subtlety and control, someone trained in the Van Horn tradition but possessing a lighter touch.
Karl. Victoria’s uncle, whose gift was sleep, the ability to send the conscious mind into darkness with a whisper of magic that slid past one’s defenses. Karl Van Horn, who had once used that gift to abduct a warlock from Wilcox territory, and who served as Victoria’s primary instrument whenever a situation required more precision than force.
If Karl was probing the wards, then Victoria had sent him. And if Victoria had sent Karl, that meant she was no longer searching.
She’d found what she was looking for.
“Malachi.” Roslyn’s voice was steady, but her hands lay quiet on his chest. “Tell me what’s happening.”
He looked at her, and for one unguarded moment, he allowed himself to see her as she was…not as the healer who was keeping him alive, not as the McAllister witch who should have been his enemy, not even as the woman he’d kissed in this room and then spent a week pretending he hadn’t. Just Roslyn, sitting in the lamplight with her hands on his heart, waiting for him to tell her the truth.
“Victoria has found us,” he said.
The study was very quiet. Through the walls, he could hear the distant rhythm of the ocean, and beneath that, the hum of one hundred and two artifacts settling into their evening equilibrium. And beyond that, he felt the steady pulse of his wards…rebuilt, strengthened, and utterly inadequate to stop what was coming.
Roslyn’s hands remained where they were.
“How long do we have?” she asked.
He considered the question. A probe meant reconnaissance, not assault. Victoria would want to confirm the location, assess his defenses, and assemble her resources before she moved. Karl would report back, and Victoria would plan. Victoria always planned; it was easy to have that kind of thoroughness when she had unlimited resources and absolute conviction in her own authority as prima of one of the country’s oldest witch clans.
“Days,” he said. “Perhaps a week. Possibly even two if she decides to be cautious.” He paused there before adding, “But I doubt she’ll be cautious.”
Roslyn’s jaw tightened. A small enough motion, barely visible, but he’d spent the last two weeks learning the language of her face, and he saw it clearly enough. It wasn’t fear, though. What he saw now was calculation, the same look she wore when she’d assessed his condition and begun creating a treatment plan. Now, though, the patient wasn’t him but their entire situation, and the prognosis was probably worse.
“Then we need to talk about what happens next,” she said.
He nodded, but he didn’t say what he was thinking. What happened next would depend entirely on whether he could find a way to protect both the collection and the woman sitting in front of him…and he was increasingly certain it would be impossible to do both.
9
The morning after Malachi told her about Victoria, Roslyn decided to make a list. She sat down at the kitchen table with a stub of pencil she’d found in a drawer and the back of an envelope from a piece of junk mail that had been sitting on the counter since before she arrived and wrote down everything they needed.
Fresh fruit and vegetables first. The pantry’s supply of canned goods was holding out, but Malachi really needed actual nutrients, not just sodium and preservatives. Ibuprofen next, because they’d gone through the last of the house’s supply three days ago, and she couldn’t keep wasting her magic for the kind of minor pain management that a bottle of over-the-counter pills could handle. Bandages, gauze, medical tape. Definitely toothpaste — they were sharing the one tube she’d found in the upstairs bathroom, which was nearly empty. She tried not to think about sharing toothpaste with a man she’d kissed and then spent a week not talking about that kiss.
Therein lay madness…although maybe she was already there.
And she also needed underwear, even a package of cheap cotton panties from the local Target or Walgreens or whatever she could find here in Astoria. Not for the first time, she wished she had her phone with her so she could do some retail research. About all she knew about Astoria, Oregon, was that it had been the location for a bunch of movies back in the day, including The Goonies and Kindergarten Cop. Unfortunately, neither of those movies had really shown what the local shopping situation was like, and besides, they were decades old, so she was pretty much flying blind now.
Anyway, she’d been washing her single pair of panties in the bathroom sink every night for three weeks. At this point, it wasn’t just undignified, it was a hygiene issue, and she knew that the way she’d been far too stubborn to ask Malachi for help with this particular problem said a lot more about both of them than she wanted to think about for too long.
The list wasn’t extensive, but it still seemed to represent something larger than the individual items she’d written down. It was an admission that they couldn’t keep going on the supplies they had, and that one of them was going to have to leave the house to get more.
That person would have to be her, since Malachi could barely make it through four hours of ward work without his hands starting to shake. Sending him into town would be like sending a patient with a stress fracture to run a marathon.
She brought the subject up over breakfast, which was the last of the oatmeal with no raisins this time. Those had been used up two days ago. He was sitting across from her at the kitchen table, his waistcoat buttoned even though it was seven in the morning and she was the only other person in the house. As the days and weeks had passed, she’d wondered if he would ever loosen up enough to leave some of those buttons undone, or even leave the waistcoat off altogether, but that seemed to be a bridge too far for him.
