“My mother has been listening for it since the day I disappeared.”
The certainty in her own voice surprised her. But it was true. Jenny Campbell, whose minor gift of mind-reading had always been most sensitive to the people she loved, would have spent the past three weeks straining against the silence, searching for even a whisper of her daughter’s presence. And Angela, the prima, would have every resource at her disposal pointed toward finding a missing clan member. They were looking. They’d been looking since the beginning.
They just hadn’t been able to find her.
Malachi was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “There’s a cost.”
Of course there was. With artifacts, there was always a cost.
“The amplification doesn’t discriminate,” he continued, his voice careful, as if he knew the information he was about to provide wouldn’t be entirely welcome. “It will boost your signature across all perceptual ranges, not just the one your family is attuned to. The Van Horns will feel it. The Gibsons will feel it. Every witch and warlock within several hundred miles will know that a healer of considerable power is in this house, and your anonymity — which has been one of the few tactical advantages we possessed — will be gone.”
She understood what he was saying. For three weeks, the house’s wards had masked her magic, had kept the world from knowing that the quiet nurse practitioner from Cottonwood, Arizona, was anything more than a witch with ordinary healing abilities. The Gibson scouts who’d confronted her in town had been suspicious, but they hadn’t known the full extent of her power. The Van Horns, focused on Malachi and the collection, hadn’t realized what they were dealing with.
That ignorance had been a shield…and the bell would shatter it.
“You’ll be announcing yourself,” Malachi said, and his voice had dropped lower, the words coming with a difficulty she guessed wasn’t entirely physical. “To everyone. Not just your family. Every hostile force within range will know exactly who you are and exactly where you are, and that knowledge can’t be taken back.”
She looked down at the bell in her hand. The bronze was warm where her skin touched it, and the faint vibration had strengthened, as though the artifact sensed the magic in her and was responding to it the way his resonance gift responded to magical objects. It was a small thing, this bell, small enough to fit in her palm, small enough to overlook on a crowded shelf between a carved box and a row of polished stones.
But it was also big enough to change everything.
“If I don’t use it,” she said, “we’ll die in this room.”
The words were blunt. Roslyn supposed she’d inherited that bluntness from her mother, who’d learned early on that there was no point in dressing up the truth when the truth was standing right in front of you. Malachi didn’t flinch, but she saw the way his jaw tightened, a small, involuntary contraction that was his version of one.
“Yes,” he said.
Should she be glad that he hadn’t attempted to sugarcoat the situation? “Then the cost is worth it,” she told him.
She knelt on the floor next to the chair. Standing felt like too much distance for what she was about to do, and besides, her legs were shaking from exhaustion and she didn’t want Malachi to notice. The bell sat in her palm, warm and waiting, and she could feel its resonance now, a clear, pure note that existed just below the threshold of hearing, like a sound waiting to be born.
“How does it work?” she asked.
“You channel your magic through it,” Malachi told her. “Your natural magic, not a constructed spell. The amplifier will do the rest. It was built to boost what already exists, not to generate something new.” He shifted in the chair, and she could see the effort the movement cost him. “One pulse. Make it count.”
She closed her eyes. Beneath the exhaustion and the fear, there was the place where her gift lived, the warm, steady center of the healing power that had defined her since she was twelve years old and had accidentally mended a bird’s broken wing in the backyard of her parents’ house in Cottonwood. That power was diminished now, drained by the night’s work, but it was still there, still hers.
It was still the thing that made her who she was.
An image of her mother rose in her mind. She had no idea if it was at all accurate, but she saw her sitting at the kitchen table with her hands wrapped around a cup of tea that had long since gone cold, her blue eyes fixed on something only she could see. Then she thought about Angela, the prima who had led the clan through crises that would have broken lesser women, and Connor, and Levi and Belshegar, whose power was something beyond what any of them fully understood.
And at last her thoughts went to the aunt whose name she bore, the woman who had died because no one had been able to save her in time.
Roslyn opened her hand, held the bell between her thumb and forefinger, and poured everything she had into it.
The sound the bell produced wasn’t loud. In fact, it was barely audible, a single clear tone that seemed to bypass the ears entirely and register in the part of her mind that recognized magical frequencies the way her inner ear recognized balance. The note hung in the air of the study for a moment, vibrating with a purity that made the artifacts on their shelves go quiet, their constant humming falling silent in response to a signal that was older and cleaner than any of them.
Then the amplifier engaged.
The bell’s resonance caught her healing signature, the warm, bright, unmistakable frequency that Malachi had described as clean and which she’d spent her whole life learning to use, and it expanded it. Now it wasn’t exactly louder, but wider, as though a single candle flame had suddenly been reflected in a thousand mirrors, each reflection sending the same light outward in every direction simultaneously. She felt an expansion in her midsection, a pulling sensation that wasn’t painful but was extremely strange at the same time, as if a part of her that had always been contained within the boundaries of her body was suddenly being stretched across a distance her mind could barely comprehend.
The study walls were no barrier. The wards — even Malachi’s independent ward layer, powered by the ambient energy of the collection — let the signal pass, because the bell wasn’t an attack or an intrusion but simply an amplification of something that was already there. Her signature flowed through the wards and out into the gray, foggy dawn and kept going, spreading outward in a wave that she could track only because the bell maintained its connection to her, a tether between the source and the signal.
She felt it when the Van Horns noticed, a sharpening of attention from somewhere outside the house, a collective intake of breath across multiple magical presences, as five trained witches and warlocks registered the sudden appearance of a healing signature powerful enough to cut through every ward and barrier between here and the horizon. She felt the Gibsons, too — a more distant awareness but still unmistakable, as if they’d suddenly realized that the situation in the big Victorian house on the bluff was considerably more complicated than they’d assumed.
And then, farther away — much farther, across mountains and desert and the long, dry stretch of land between the Pacific Northwest and the red rocks of northern Arizona — she felt the signal reach home.
She couldn’t know exactly what happened in Jerome when her magic arrived. But she could feel the moment of contact, a faint resonance that echoed back through the bell like a voice answering across a canyon. Someone had heard her. Someone had recognized the signature that Jenny Campbell’s daughter had inherited, the bright, clean power that ran in the McAllister bloodline and that Roslyn had shaped into something uniquely her own.
