Behind them, another fireball hit the front door, and this time, she heard wood splinter. The wards on the entryway were failing, the seven locks and fourteen layers peeling away under sustained assault. It wouldn’t hold much longer.
“The study,” Malachi said. His voice was hoarse and strained, and she could hear the pain in those words, even though he was clearly trying to suppress it. “The study has its own wards separate from the house’s perimeter. I built them to protect the collection — ”
“I know,” she said, because she did. She’d felt those wards every day for the past three weeks, the dense, layered protections that surrounded the study and the East Gallery, defenses that were independent of the outer perimeter and powered by the ambient energy of the artifacts themselves. “Can you walk faster?”
“I’m walking as fast as I can.”
“Then walk faster than that.”
He made a sound that might have been a laugh if his lungs had been working properly, and then they were at the study door. She could feel the wards here — thick and solid, thrumming with stored energy that was very different from the battered perimeter wards. These protections hadn’t been breached. These protections were fed by the collection itself, more than a hundred artifacts generating a constant ambient output that Malachi had channeled into the walls and the floor and the ceiling of this room over more than a decade of careful, obsessive work.
He pressed his palm to the door. Something inside the ward structure recognized him, and the door opened. She pulled him inside and closed the door behind them.
The study sealed. The wards snapped into place with a pressure she felt in her ears, and the noise from outside — the crackle of fire, the crack of lightning, the dull concussive impacts of fireballs against the failing perimeter wards — dropped to a muffled rumble, as though someone had closed a heavy window against a storm.
Roslyn lowered Malachi into his leather chair. He went into it gracelessly, his burned left arm braced against his body, his face the color of old paper. The lamplight caught the sheen of sweat on his forehead and the tight set of his jaw, and she could see his right hand trembling against the arm of the chair. It wasn’t the void tremor she’d grown accustomed to, but the deep, shaking exhaustion that came from burning through most of his magical reserves in less than ten minutes.
She knelt beside the chair and placed her hands on him, right wrist first, reading his pulse the way she always did, followed by the inside of his elbow and then his chest, directly over his heart. The assessment took seconds, and what it told her turned the spent-adrenaline clarity in her head to something colder and much more brittle.
His magic was failing. The analogy she’d used weeks ago — a candle in a draft — was all too accurate now, except this time, the candle had been halfway rebuilt, carefully tended, slowly coaxed back to strength over days and weeks of patient work, but the draft had come back even worse than before. The channels she’d repaired were stressed and fraying. The scarring around his heart, which she’d reduced from critical to manageable over dozens of sessions, had tightened again under the strain, compressing the tissue in a way that would take days to undo…if she could undo it at all. The burns on his left side were severe, second-degree at minimum, probably worse beneath the fused shirt, and his body was diverting what little magical energy it had toward basic damage control. That meant there was nothing left for the wards, nothing left for the collection, nothing left for anything except keeping his heart beating.
“How bad?” he asked, and his voice was quiet enough that she knew he already had the answer.
She wouldn’t lie to him. All this time, she’d never lied to him, and she wasn’t about to start now, not with the Van Horns outside and the wards failing and the man she loved bleeding in his chair.
The man she loved. The thought arrived without any fanfare, slipping into place as though it had always been there, waiting for her to stop being too busy or too scared or too stubborn to notice it.
“Bad,” she said. “Your magic’s barely holding. The burns need immediate attention, but healing them is going to drain me, and if I drain myself now, I won’t have anything left if they breach the study.” She kept her hands on his chest, and her own magic, despite everything, was steady. It was always steady, to be honest. That was the one thing she could count on; her gift didn’t panic even when the rest of her wanted to. “The scarring around your heart has tightened again. It’s not as bad as when I first got here, but it’s close.”
Through the study walls, she could hear the assault continuing — muffled thumps and cracks, the occasional flare of light visible through the curtained windows. The Van Horns were working on the entryway, testing the interior walls, looking for weaknesses. They hadn’t reached the study yet, but they would. It was only a matter of time and force.
“The study wards will hold,” Malachi said. His voice shook a little, but overall, he sounded remarkably steady, considering his current condition. “For now, at any rate. The artifacts’ ambient energy will sustain them longer than the outer defenses, but not indefinitely. If the Van Horns maintain this level of assault — ” He paused there, and she saw him calculate, the careful internal arithmetic he applied to every problem. “Hours. Perhaps until dawn.”
Until dawn. A reprieve, not a rescue.
Roslyn looked at him, burned and drained, sitting in the chair where she’d first found him three weeks ago, barely alive and still buttoning his waistcoat, and she made the same choice she’d made then.
The only choice she knew how to make.
She would heal what she could, would hold what she could hold. And she would figure out the rest when dawn came, if dawn came, because she wasn’t about to let this man die in front of her.
Not this man. Not tonight.
Not ever.
“Hold still,” she said. Then she put her hands on his burned shoulder and got to work.
13
The cold seeped into his awareness first. It wasn’t the ambient chill of the study, since the house was warm enough, heated by the residual energy of one hundred and two artifacts humming behind their containment wards. No, this was a cold that came from inside, radiating outward from a place deep in his body where his magic had been. He’d felt this before. In the void, there had been days when the cold had become so absolute that his body seemed to forget it had ever known warmth, when the distinction between himself and the gray nothingness around him had narrowed to a margin so thin that he’d had to recite the periodic table to confirm he was still capable of actual thought.
This was that kind of cold, the kind that meant something deep inside him was failing.
Somehow, he was sitting in his leather chair, although he wasn’t sure how he’d gotten there. He knew where he was because the shape of it was familiar even without opening his eyes — the worn arms beneath his hands, the angle of the back, the way the cushion had long since molded itself to the contours of his body.
Roslyn’s hands were on his chest, and their position — left hand over his sternum, right hand lower against the scarred tissue where his magical channels converged — was the placement she used when the damage was serious enough to require her to work on his magic directly.
Her healing power moved through him with a steadiness that he thought was remarkable, given the circumstances. The Van Horns had breached the outer wards, broken down the front door, set fire to the entryway, and driven them into this room like animals into a corner. His own magic was nearly spent, and the study wards, while stronger than the perimeter defenses, weren’t anything close to infinite. Outside these walls, five of Victoria’s best offensive talents were regrouping for a second assault.
