Two words again. Not I forgive you, which would have been generous and which he hadn’t earned. Not it’s all right, which would have been a lie. Just I know — an acknowledgment that she’d heard him, that she understood what the words had cost, and that she wasn’t going anywhere.
It was, he reflected, the most terrifying thing anyone had ever said to him.
He closed his eyes. Her hands stayed where they were, warm and steady against his chest, while her magic continued its patient work in his ruined body, rebuilding what the void and the Van Horns and seventeen years of solitude had torn down.
Outside the study, the night was quiet, those hostile witches and warlocks holding back for now. He knew it wouldn’t stay quiet for long.
But for now — for these fragile, borrowed hours — someone was keeping watch, and for the first time in seventeen years, that someone was not him.
So Malachi slept.
14
Had she ever been this tired? Roslyn didn’t think so, but she had to admit that the months of her residency were a haze, those sleepless nights and long days disappearing into a fog that was probably not too dissimilar from what women experienced after going through childbirth, pain receding so the prospect of going through it again in the future wasn’t an utter nightmare. But now the first gray light of dawn had begun to slip past the curtains, thin and colorless, and she allowed herself a breath of relief.
Malachi was alive. That was the most important thing, what she clung to as the rest of their nightmare situation threatened to overwhelm the part of her brain that was still functioning. He was asleep in the leather chair, his breathing shallow but steady, the blanket she’d draped over him rising and falling in a rhythm that sounded almost normal. His magic was stabilized. Not recovered, not even close, but the channels she’d spent the night painstakingly holding together had stopped actively degrading, and the scarring around his heart had loosened.
She’d bought him time. How much time was another question, one she was too tired to contemplate right then.
Her own magic was almost as wiped out. The drain was different from ordinary exhaustion, though. It wasn’t just that her body was tired, although it felt wrung out as a damp dishcloth, one that had been wadded up and tossed onto a countertop to be dealt with later. The well she drew all her healing from, the deep internal source that had sustained her through three weeks of twice-daily sessions and the crisis at the threshold and the long hours of the night before, had been depleted to a level she honestly hadn’t thought possible. Now she had maybe one significant healing effort left in her, and then she would be running on nothing, and a healer with no magic was just a woman with an N.P. degree and no backup plan.
Beyond the study walls, the house was quiet. The Van Horns hadn’t resumed their assault, which meant they were probably resting and strategizing. They could also be waiting for full daylight to press their advantage, although that didn’t make as much sense, considering the way they’d waited until dark last night to attack. Either of those options would end the same way, though. Karl Van Horn would probe the study wards until he found a weakness, and then the witches with the fireball powers would exploit it. And Malachi, even if he woke, didn’t have enough magic left to reinforce so much as a single anchoring point.
They couldn’t fight, and they couldn’t run. The fixed-point portal stone could take only one of them to safety, and neither of them was willing to be the person who used it.
So that left exactly one option, the same one she’d been turning over in her mind since somewhere around three in the morning, when Malachi had finally stopped talking, and the resulting silence had given her room to think.
She needed help…and the only help that mattered was a thousand miles away in Jerome, Arizona, behind wards of their own, with no idea where she was or whether she was even still alive.
Roslyn eased herself up from the spot where she’d been sitting on the floor next to the chair. Her knees groaned, her back ached, and the room tilted slightly before it righted itself. She stood for a moment, letting her body adjust to being vertical, and then she looked around the study.
She’d spent countless hours in this room. She knew it as well as she knew the layout of her clinic — the desk with its stacks of papers and the lamp that had burned through too many late nights, the bookshelves lining the walls with their mix of academic texts and grimoires, the artifacts on their dedicated shelves and in their warded cases, each one humming with its own particular frequency. During the healing sessions, she’d become attuned to the room’s ambient energy, the way the collection produced a constant low-level output that Malachi had channeled into the walls and ceiling to power the independent ward layer. And she’d begun to recognize individual artifacts by their signatures — the silver astrolabe’s murmuring whisper, the bone dice’s faint, clattery hum, the glass jar of trapped weather-working that sometimes made the air pressure in the room shift when a storm was coming in off the ocean.
In all that time, though, she’d never inventoried the collection. She’d never gone through the shelves the way Malachi did, reading each object with his resonance gift, understanding its properties and its history and its potential. She was a healer, not a collector, and the artifacts had been his domain.
But now his domain was the leather chair, and possibly a few last dregs of magic that were currently being held together by spit and baling wire. If there was something in this room that could help them, she’d have to find it herself.
She started with the shelves nearest the desk because they were the ones she’d seen Malachi tend most carefully, suggesting that they held the objects he considered the most important or the most volatile. The artifacts were arranged with a care that told its own story, with each one in its designated spot, separated from its neighbors by exactly the right distance to prevent interaction, contained within individual wards she could feel as faint pressure changes when she passed her hand near them. Some of them she recognized from his descriptions during their long evenings of conversation — a carved ivory box that hummed with a note just below the threshold of hearing, a set of tarnished silver rings that had been separated onto different shelves because their resonance frequencies were close enough to create interference.
So many of them. But she had to go about this methodically, even though her brain was screaming at her that she needed to hurry up. The upper shelves held mostly small objects, including a compass that wasn’t the Siren’s Compass but something older and less specialized, a collection of polished stones that pulsed faintly when she drew near, a miniature hourglass whose sand appeared to fall upward.
On the third shelf down, behind a carved wooden box, she had to move carefully aside, her fingers found something cool and curved. She drew it out and held it up to the thin dawn light that slipped past the heavy velvet curtains.
It was a bell, small enough to fit in her palm and made of bronze that had gone dark with age, its surface marked with symbols she didn’t recognize. The clapper inside was intact, a small bead of what looked like silver, and when she turned the bell in her hand, she felt the faintest vibration, as though the object was responding to her proximity the way a tuning fork responded to sound. She couldn’t explain how she knew it might help, only that she did.
“Roslyn.”
Malachi’s voice, roughened by exhaustion. She turned to find him watching her with eyes that were alert despite the gray pallor of his face and the deep shadows beneath them. He’d woken without her noticing, which either meant she was more out of it than she’d thought or that he’d been conscious for longer than he was letting on.
“What is this?” she asked, holding up the bell.
He blinked and focused on the object, and something seemed to change in his expression. Now she saw a sharpening of attention that she recognized from the times she’d watched him tend to the bone dice or re-ward a case in the East Gallery. Even half-dead, his gift was still working, still reading the properties of the object in her hand.
“A resonance amplifier,” he said. “Eighteenth century, possibly earlier. It was designed to boost a witch’s natural magical signature across great distances.” His gaze moved from the bell to her face, and she watched understanding come alive in his tired eyes. “You’re thinking of using it to signal your family.”
It wasn’t a question, but she answered it anyway. “Can it reach Arizona?”
“Potentially,” he replied. “It depends on the strength of the signal being amplified and the clarity of the signature. Your healing magic is — ” He paused there, and she could almost see him doing the calculation, running through variables and distances and the properties of the bell with the same careful attention he applied to everything. “Clean, distinctive. Your clan would recognize it…if they’re listening for it.”
