But she was a problem for a different day. For now, he needed to focus on the immediate, and that meant acknowledging the true problem.
He was dying…had been dying slowly for some time, even if he’d been too stubborn to acknowledge that uncomfortable fact. No matter how strong his magic might be, it wasn’t something that could magically feed him or replenish his dehydrated body. If he’d been a regular mortal, a civilian, as those of witch-kind liked to call them, then he would have called an ambulance, would have been admitted to a local hospital, where they would have given him intravenous fluids and provided the liquids and nutrients he needed that way.
And if he’d still had his servants, those clan-less warlocks who’d come to his employ because they had nowhere else to go, then one of them might have been able to procure some of those healing treatments for him. His four remaining acolytes had perished in the dimensional battle with the McAllisters, however, so there was no one to come to his aid.
Clearly, he needed a healer.
Being trapped in the void had done something to him that went beyond the merely physical, as if the magic spark within had realized the only way to keep him alive was to feed that magic into his failing body. It had worked for a time, he supposed, but now the magic itself was depleted, and the only thing that could possibly restore him was the power of a witch clan’s healer.
If the tiny bit of magic that still survived went out, then all the wards would fail simultaneously, flattening everything for at least a mile in all directions and also alerting the Gibsons — and any other witch clans paying attention — that something catastrophic had just occurred in this particular stretch of the Oregon coast.
So he definitely needed a healer…but not just any particular healer. Like all magical practitioners, a healer’s ability was dependent on the magical strength they possessed. Because he’d made it his particular business to learn as much of the Gibsons as possible, he knew their healer was competent enough, someone adept at healing broken bones and assisting in childbirth, soothing fevers, and even eradicating cancer.
But he knew she wasn’t strong enough to fix what was wrong with him. That would require a healer with an entirely different level of power.
He knew of exactly one such person.
With another wince, he pushed himself away from the doorframe and made his way, slowly and pausing far more often than he liked, down the hallway to the room he had used as a study. The space was just as he’d left it a year ago — the massive oak desk, the leather chair, the bookshelves lined with volumes both magical and mundane. A thick layer of dust covered everything, but the study’s wards had been among the strongest in the house, and they still held.
He opened the bottom drawer of the desk, the one with the false back he’d installed himself using a technique he had learned from a Japanese puzzle box he’d acquired in Kyoto twenty years ago. Behind the false back, in a space barely large enough to hold it, sat a small brass compass on a fine silver chain.
The Siren’s Compass.
A little more than ten years earlier, he’d acquired it from an antiquarian in Prague who hadn’t understood what he was selling. Fortunate for the antiquarian, Malachi supposed, since anyone who truly understood the compass’s function would have demanded considerably more than the eight hundred euros he’d paid for it. The compass was a snatch artifact, a one-use device designed to reach across any distance and pull a specific person to the user’s location. It required only two things to function.
The user’s blood, and a clear mental image of the target.
One use. After that, the compass would be inert, nothing more than a pretty trinket. He’d been saving it for an emergency. If the current situation did not qualify, he couldn’t imagine what would.
He settled himself in the leather chair, mainly because he suspected the compass’s activation would take more energy out of him than he could afford to spend standing up, and then he held the little brass instrument in his palm and studied it.
It was a beautiful thing, with its compass rose etched in silver, its needle made of magnetized iron that pointed not north but toward whatever the user most needed. At this moment, the needle was spinning in slow, lazy circles, as though it couldn’t quite make up its mind where to land.
Which made sense, of course. It hadn’t yet been given its command.
Malachi pricked his thumb on the obsidian shard, which was still sharp enough to draw blood despite 372 days of use, and let a single drop fall onto the compass rose.
Then he closed his eyes and thought of the McAllister healer.
He’d never met the woman, but he knew she existed. Once he’d determined that someone in the McAllister clan had unwittingly gathered an amulet of great power that had been lost in the past, he’d made it his business to learn as much as he could about them, just as he had with his neighbors, the Gibsons. His research had told him that their healer was a young woman, a fully credentialed nurse practitioner who also happened to possess a healing gift of considerable strength. She worked out of a clinic in Cottonwood, Arizona, tending to both the mundane ailments of the civilian population and the magical injuries of her clan. She was, from what he’d been able to tell, very good at what she did.
She was also, because of her clan affiliation, his enemy.
Or possibly “enemy” was too strong a word. The McAllisters had certainly been his adversaries, meddlesome, provincial, and absurdly sentimental about the two artifacts that had fallen into their possession by mere accident, but Malachi had never taken their opposition personally. They’d done what they believed was right, and so had he. That their version of “right” had resulted in his spending a year in a featureless gray void was simply the cost of doing business. He didn’t hold grudges, mainly because they were a waste of energy.
The healer, in any case, hadn’t been present at the confrontation. She was a noncombatant, a medical professional who happened to be born into a family of busybodies. Malachi could work with that. A healer’s training, whether magical or mundane, instilled a certain ethical framework he thought he could leverage, a compulsion to treat the injured regardless of their personal feelings about the patient. It was, he thought, one of the more useful weaknesses of the medical temperament.
He wouldn’t call it a weakness to her face, of course.
And it wasn’t revenge that motivated him, although he knew he would allow the woman to believe that if it made the situation simpler. The McAllisters had put him in the void, and there was a certain symmetry to the idea that a McAllister would be the one to heal him of its aftereffects. If the healer’s pride was wounded by the realization that she’d been summoned like a servant…well, that was her concern, not his.
He would call it symmetry rather than what it actually was, which was the desperate last act of a dying man who had no other options and was now reaching for the one person who might be able to save him.
The compass grew warm in his palm. He focused his thoughts, sharpening the mental image of the healer from a general impression — young, talented, McAllister — into something specific enough for the compass to lock onto. He thought of healing magic and the way it had felt when he’d encountered it in the past, a warmth that went deeper than skin, a rightness that seemed to realign whatever it touched.
The needle stopped spinning. Now it pointed south-southeast, toward Arizona.
Malachi spoke the activation word and felt the compass drain the last of his accessible magic in a single, wrenching pull. The sensation was like having his blood drawn through a very large needle, except it wasn’t blood being taken, but something far more essential.
