The compass pulsed, and then the silver chain crumbled to powder in his hand. The compass itself went dull, its needle freezing in place, a dead instrument that would never point toward anything again.
But in the space between one heartbeat and the next, Malachi felt a displacement of air, and he knew without opening his eyes that it had worked.
There was someone in his house who hadn’t been there a moment ago.
He could feel her, a warm, steady pulse of magical energy on the second floor, disoriented and frightened but unmistakably alive. The compass had deposited her somewhere above him, probably in one of the spare bedrooms upstairs, which was a small mercy. It would have been considerably more awkward if she had materialized in the middle of the East Gallery, surrounded by artifacts that would have reacted very badly to the sudden presence of unfamiliar magic.
Summoning the remnants of his strength, Malachi tried to assess what he could sense of her signature. It was clean and bright, natural and strong. Good. He’d chosen well — or rather, the compass had chosen well. Its function was to deliver whatever the user most needed, and what Malachi most needed at this moment was someone who could keep him alive long enough to repair his wards and save his collection.
He knew he should go to her. Now that she was here, he needed to go upstairs and explain as calmly and rationally as possible why she was here and what was required of her. It was important to establish the terms of their arrangement before she had time to panic, because a panicked witch in a house full of barely contained artifacts was a recipe for the kind of disaster he’d spent most of his adult life trying to prevent.
But his legs didn’t seem interested in obeying the commands from his brain. The activation of the compass had taken nearly every ounce of energy he had left, and his body had decided it was done taking orders for the time being. His hands lay open on the arms of the chair, palms up, and in the left one, the obsidian shard still rested, its edge rusty with his dried blood. In his right, the dead compass sat like a stone.
Get up, he told himself again, but again, his body showed no signs of moving.
He would rest for a moment. The house’s external wards, degraded as they were, would still deliver a very unpleasant shock to anyone trying to leave without his authorization, so the healer wasn’t going anywhere. And the internal wards on the study would mask his presence well enough that she wouldn’t immediately be able to find him, thus buying him some time to gather himself before their first meeting.
First impressions mattered, and he certainly didn’t intend to make his while lying in a heap on the floor.
So he let his head fall back against the leather chair and allowed his eyes to close. The study was quiet around him, the only sounds the distant crash of the waves against the beach and the faint, almost subliminal hum of dozens of artifacts settling into their new equilibrium. The chair held him the way it always had, leather creaking softly as it took his diminished weight.
He was home, and he was alive.
That he was also dying, and the only person who could save him was a woman with every reason in the world to let him die?
Well, that was a complication he’d address when he could stand.
1
Roslyn’s last patient of the day was a Wilcox warlock she’d met during her last year at Northern Pines University, when she was just finishing up her Doctor of Nursing program there. Liam had just started his freshman year, so it wasn’t as if their coursework had overlapped at all, but witches and warlocks always made sure they were known to each other even when they had nothing else in common.
In Liam’s case, he’d graduated last May and had fallen for a McAllister witch and relocated to the Verde Valley. This sort of thing happened all the time now, so under most circumstances, Roslyn wouldn’t have given the situation a second thought. Sure, it probably hadn’t been the smartest thing in the world for Liam to take his dirtbike on some of Mingus Mountain’s more challenging trails, but with a clan healer as a built-in insurance policy, he’d probably thought it would be no big deal if he ended up injured.
Which he had, taking a nasty spill that dislocated one shoulder and fractured his collarbone. Those injuries would have usually landed him in the emergency room, but his fiancée, Roslyn’s cousin Lainey, had brought him straight to Roslyn’s clinic in Cottonwood.
Their timing was impeccable, since she’d just wrapped up a consultation with her last client of the day about ten minutes earlier and was in the process of closing up shop when they appeared. Of course, Lainey had apologized for showing up so late, but Roslyn had only brushed her off, saying this was what being the clan’s healer was all about.
And it was. There was no such thing as being “off duty” when you were a healer, no matter what the hours on the clinic’s door might say.
She thought she’d gotten used to it. After all, it had been more than fifteen years since her gifts had surfaced a little before her twelfth birthday. On that day, a little white-crowned sparrow had smashed into the big picture window that overlooked the backyard of the house where she’d grown up, and she’d reached out almost without thinking and touched a finger to the bird’s broken wing.
At once, it had let out a surprised little cheep, given an experimental flutter of its wings, and then flown off into one of the big Mexican honeysuckle bushes that grew along the back wall. Roslyn had stood there for a moment, startled, and then it dawned on her what had happened and she’d run off to tell her mother. Her father had still been editor of the Verde Valley News back then, so he was at work, but her mom had been home, and the news had spread quickly around the clan.
After more than a generation of having to rely on civilian healthcare practitioners or the healers of other clans when a particular issue couldn’t be solved by ordinary methods, the McAllisters finally had a healer of their own.
At first, Roslyn had been thrilled. Her twelve-year-old self had been more than happy to take on a role that had been empty for so long. Back then, there had been boundaries — no one expected an underage girl to deliver a baby or get up at three in the morning to quell a fever that could wait until a more reasonable hour — but as she grew older and decided that she wanted actual medical training to back up her considerable magical gifts, those boundaries seemed to get less and less solid.
And now it seemed as if, between the clinic and the demands of her clan, she didn’t have a life at all, just an endless stream of medical emergencies.
Like Liam’s fractured collarbone and dislocated shoulder.
Both injuries were simple enough to fix, though, and she had him and Lainey out the door in less than half an hour. No question of billing…healers didn’t charge their clan patients…and yet Roslyn knew she’d be compensated anyway. Everyone in the McAllister clan earned a stipend that kept them from having to work unless they really wanted to, but because of the extra hours she put in, her stipend was considerably larger than most others.
In fact, she really didn’t need to have the clinic at all, except that it provided a handy place to see her witch clients. Besides, Cottonwood’s civilian residents really needed a place where they could see a primary care provider at an affordable cost.
Roslyn saw Lainey and Liam to the door and said goodbye with a smile, although she admonished Liam to stay on easier trails for at least the next week or so until the magical healing she’d begun had fully taken root. He’d nodded, and Lainey had said, “That’s for damn sure,” and they’d both gotten into Lainey’s little electric truck and headed back up the hill into Jerome.
The smile Roslyn had been wearing faded as soon as they were gone. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate being there for members of the clan when they needed her, but seeing Liam had struck a nerve, had pulled up memories she thought she’d safely buried.
