As she explained how she really needed to leave so she could do some shopping, he listened in silence and then frowned, a pretty clear indication that he was already looking for reasons to say no.
“The wards are keyed to prevent unauthorized departure,” he told her. “That was a necessary precaution when you first arrived. Modifying them to create a temporary gap will take approximately two hours and will require me to — ”
“I know it’ll cost you energy,” she said, cutting off the lengthy description of the procedure involved. “I’m not thrilled about it, either. But we’re out of ibuprofen and almost out of toothpaste, and the canned food situation is getting grim. Also, another week of beans and rice with no fruit or vegetables or real protein, and your digestive system is going to stage a revolt. I’d rather not have to heal that on top of everything else.”
A pause followed her comment. Malachi’s mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile but wasn’t entirely not one, either. A small, treacherous warmth crept through her at the realization that she could still make him do that, even with everything that had happened between them…and everything that hadn’t.
“I’ll adjust the wards after the morning session,” he said. “You’ll have a window of approximately three hours before the gap begins to degrade. Don’t be late.”
She gazed back at him coolly. “I’m never late.”
“You were late to our second healing session,” he returned.
What a Malachi observation, especially since he knew exactly why she’d been a couple of minutes late that time. “I was making you soup.”
“An inadequate excuse,” he said, but the not-quite-smile was still there, and Roslyn made herself look down at her oatmeal before it could do any more damage.
By eleven, the gap was in place. She felt it when it opened…a brief thinning in the ward’s pressure, like a door cracking in a sealed room…and Malachi, who’d spent two hours on the modification and looked like it, met her at the back door to explain the parameters.
“Walk through the gap at the northeast corner, next to the cedar tree with the broken branch,” he said. “The opening is calibrated to your signature, so it will close behind you and reopen when you return. If you’re not back within three hours, it will seal permanently, and I won’t have the reserves to create another one today.”
Meaning that if she were even a second late, she’d be locked out until at least tomorrow morning. Once upon a time, she would have looked at the situation as an opportunity for escape. Now she only wondered what on earth she would do if she were forced to wander the streets of Astoria for an entire night.
“Got it.” She’d pulled on her cardigan, the only outerwear she had, and tucked the list and a fold of cash into her jeans pocket. The cash had come from a drawer in the study where Malachi kept an envelope of bills for what he described as “operational contingencies” and which apparently meant things like bribing delivery drivers to leave packages at the edge of the property line. The amount was probably far more than she needed for various groceries and toiletries, especially in a place where she wouldn’t have to pay big city prices. She didn’t argue, though, mostly because arguing with him about money would be exactly the kind of personal conversation they’d been trying to avoid all this time.
“Be careful,” he added, and those two words seemed to have enough significance to them that she almost looked back at him. She didn’t, however, because she knew if she turned around and saw whatever expression he was currently wearing, she might say something about the kiss. But they had a system, and the system appeared to be working. Disrupting it now, with Victoria Van Horn closing in and the Gibsons circling like territorial dogs, would be a spectacularly bad idea.
“I always am,” she said, and went outside.
Almost as soon as she’d left the property, she shook her head.
“We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” she murmured.
She’d grown up in the Verde Valley, where the light was golden and the air smelled like sage and juniper, and the landscape stretched out in every direction under a sky so vast it could make you feel small in a way that was somehow comforting rather than frightening. Jerome sat perched on the side of Mingus Mountain, crowded and vertical, the houses stacked above and below Main Street in improbable layers, and Cottonwood was spread out below on the valley floor, flat and practical and warmed by the same sun that had been warming it since long before any McAllister set foot in Arizona.
But Astoria was different from the Verde Valley in almost every way she could imagine. The town clung to the hills above the Columbia River, its streets running steeply down toward a waterfront that disappeared into fog. Victorian houses in various states of repair lined the residential street, some immaculate, with fresh paint and tended gardens, while others sagged under decades of rain and coastal damp. The air was heavy and wet, tasting of salt and something green and growing that she guessed must be moss.
It was beautiful in its own way. Different from the austere beauty of northern Arizona that she was used to, of course, but striking nonetheless. The problem was that everything about it felt foreign, from the perpetually gray sky to the damp that worked its way through her thin cardigan within the first five minutes.
And she could feel the Gibson clan everywhere. Not individual witches or warlocks, but a sort of collective magical presence woven into the fabric of the town the way the McAllisters’ presence was woven into Jerome. It was in the ground beneath the sidewalks and the old brick buildings downtown and the way the wind came off the river, bringing with it traces of magic so old they’d become part of the local weather. Back home, she hadn’t noticed the McAllister presence at all, because it was the water she’d been swimming in her whole life, and only running into a strange witch or warlock she hadn’t met before would have made her sit up and take notice. Here, though, everything was unfamiliar, and the strangeness of it made her skin prickle.
She found a small grocery store on a street that sloped down toward the river, the kind of place with creaky wooden floors and hand-lettered signs over the produce bins. Nothing about it suggested a chain; it was just a local market that probably supplied half the neighborhood, with a deli counter at the back and a bored teenager running the single register up front. Roslyn grabbed a basket and worked through her list methodically, the way she worked through anything. Vegetables first, because those were the priority, then bread, then eggs, and then a block of cheese that wasn’t fancy but wasn’t the pre-sliced kind, either. She added apples and oranges and some lovely-looking Anjou pears, along with a small container of honey, thinking the tea they’d been drinking could use a little extra boost.
The toiletries came from a drugstore two blocks farther down, where she bought toothpaste, a package of plain cotton underwear that wasn’t her usual brand but would do just fine, ibuprofen, and a box of adhesive bandages. She also grabbed a cheap hairbrush because she’d been using Malachi’s comb the whole time, which still felt wrong, and she lingered in front of a display of Astoria-themed T-shirts and sweatshirts before she added a long-sleeved tee and a sweatshirt to the pile in her cart, feeling vaguely guilty about spending his money on something so frivolous.
Only it wasn’t frivolous. If she had a few things of her own, she wouldn’t have to keep borrowing Malachi’s shirts. And although she’d never thought of herself as a clothes horse…unlike her cousin Brianna, whose closets were always stuffed with all sorts of gorgeous and interesting things…Roslyn still had a small wardrobe of shirts in colors she thought were best for her, mostly blues and greens and teals, along with a few pretty things for special occasions. She thought of those items now with a kind of hunger that she tried her best to shove to the back of her mind, even as she couldn’t help wondering what Malachi would think if he saw her in her favorite dress, the dark teal wrap-style one she wore for special occasions, along with a pair of heeled brown boots.
But that ensemble was a thousand miles away, along with the rest of her wardrobe, and she knew it was silly to be thinking about it now when she had other, more important things to worry about.
The whole errand took about an hour. Years of fitting grocery runs into the narrow gaps between classes or clinic appointments had trained her to shop fast, so she didn’t linger anywhere, and she kept her head down. Of course, there was no reason for anyone to pay any particular attention to her now, with no makeup on and her hair pulled back in a ponytail and wearing clothes that had seen better days. All she had to do was avoid the Gibsons, something that shouldn’t be too difficult. She had no idea how many of them lived in Astoria, but a few things Malachi had said seemed to indicate they weren’t a large clan, nothing like the de la Pazes down in the southern part of Arizona or even the Wilcoxes, who covered the breadth of the state above I-40.
To her relief, no one looked at her twice in the grocery store, and the teenager at the register barely glanced up from his phone. In the drugstore, an older woman with a fleece vest and reading glasses smiled at her pleasantly and said something about the weather, and Roslyn smiled back and agreed that yes, it did look like it might clear up later, even though she had a feeling it wouldn’t. Predicting gray skies in the Pacific Northwest didn’t exactly require a weather-worker.
When she was three blocks from the house, though, she stopped abruptly.
Two women and a man stepped out from behind a parked delivery van on the cross street to the left, moving in the kind of coordination that told Roslyn at once that they’d been waiting for her. The taller of the two women — she was dark-haired and in her mid-thirties, wearing a canvas jacket and jeans — positioned herself in the center of the sidewalk, effectively blocking her path. The other woman, who was shorter and stockier, with a silver streak in her brown hair that could have been natural or just a stylistic choice, moved to Roslyn’s right. The man, who also seemed to be in his mid-thirties, slim and brown-haired as well, hung back slightly and positioned himself near the mouth of the alley between two buildings, close enough to intervene but far enough to suggest he was backup rather than the main threat.
All three of them were witches. As soon as they’d gotten close enough, she felt the itch at the back of her neck that told her she was in the presence of witch-kind. This definitely wasn’t a chance encounter, so she knew they must have been tracking her. Maybe since the grocery store, maybe even since she’d left the house. Like all witches, they would have known that if they stayed far enough away, she wouldn’t have been able to tell for sure who they actually were.
