The bell went silent, and the vibration ended. The bronze cooled in her hand, and the artifacts on the shelves resumed their quiet humming as though nothing had happened. Roslyn opened her eyes and found Malachi watching her.
“It’s done,” she said.
“Yes.” His voice was barely a whisper. “They’ll come.”
She didn’t ask how he knew. She didn’t need to. She knew it the same way she knew her own heartbeat, not because she could see or measure it, but because it was something that existed at the center of her being, constant and as reliable as anything in her life had ever been.
Her family would come. The McAllisters always came for their own.
She set the bell on the floor next to the chair because her hand was shaking too badly to place it back on the shelf without risking a fumble, and she sat down on the floor with her back against the chair and her head tipped back until it rested against Malachi’s knee. His hand found her hair — tentative at first, as though he expected her to pull away, and then settling, his fingers resting against her temple in a touch that wasn’t quite a caress and not quite a clinical assessment, but something in between that was entirely theirs.
“How long?” she asked.
“Depending on who heard it and what resources they have available?” He was quiet for a moment, thinking. “Hours, perhaps. If Belshegar is with them, possibly less.”
Hours. She could hold on for a few more hours, and so could the study wards. Everything hurt, and she was so tired that closing her eyes felt like falling. Hours were manageable, though, because hours had an end, and the end would be the sound of her family coming through the door.
She hoped.
So she closed her eyes and let herself rest just for a moment, with Malachi’s hand in her hair and the bell cooling on the floor beside her as the dawn light strengthened through the curtains.
15
The world seemed as if it was folding itself around him, and Malachi’s eyes snapped open.
What had awoken him wasn’t a sound in the conventional sense, not a crack or a boom or any of the usual auditory manifestations of magical transport. What he’d heard, or at least felt, was a distortion in the fabric of the room’s ambient energy, a compression and release that made every artifact on the shelves go silent for half a second before they resumed their steady hum. The study wards noted the intrusion as a change in pressure, and his resonance gift — diminished as it was — still recognized the signature of the event for what it was.
Extradimensional travel. Not teleportation, which displaced air and left a small vacuum in its wake. This was something else, something that bent the distance between two points rather than crossing it, and the only being he knew of who could do such a thing was the one he’d once ordered to collect those two artifacts from the McAllister clan.
Belshegar.
And that meant Roslyn’s signal had worked.
He’d been drifting in a space between sleep and consciousness when the distortion pulled him to the surface. Roslyn was no longer beside his chair. He could feel her presence elsewhere in the study — near the door, moving — and then he heard people speaking in the hallway beyond.
“Where’s Roslyn?” A woman’s voice, sharp and worried. “Where is she?”
“She’s here, she’s safe, she’s — ” That was Roslyn calling out to the strange woman, her words tumbling faster than he was used to hearing from her, and something in their cadence made him realize that she was crying, or trying very hard not to. “I mean, I’m okay. I’m okay, Angela.”
“You’re definitely not okay.” That was the strange woman again, closer now. Then Malachi heard the study door open quietly, telling him that Roslyn must have released the ward lock from the inside, and then the room was no longer his.
Four people entered. His resonance gift noted each of them even before his eyes fully focused, reading their magical signatures the same way it read the properties of the artifacts on his shelves. The first signature was bright and complex, green-tinged and layered, a compound power that indicated shared magic and decades of practice. The second was similar in frequency but darker in tone, jade to the first one’s emerald, a complementary signature that interlocked with its partner so seamlessly, they read almost as a single presence. Paired magic. Prima and primus, bonded so deeply that their powers had fused at some fundamental level.
Angela McAllister and Connor Wilcox. He’d studied them before the Jerome confrontation, had analyzed their capabilities with the thoroughness he applied to any strategic problem. Angela was the prima — the McAllister clan leader — and her power lay in the bright, focused energy she and Connor could channel together, a combined force that had been formidable enough to drive back his servants during the battle on the promontory. Connor Wilcox, her consort, was her match in strength if not in type, his magic possessing the denser, more complex quality that characterized the Wilcox bloodline.
The third signature was something he couldn’t adequately categorize, and this unnerved him. His gift had always been able to read magical presences the way most people read facial expressions. But the third presence in the room defied any true classification. It was human in shape but not in substance, and it had a kind of magic that existed simultaneously on multiple frequencies, as though the person producing it had roots in dimensions that Malachi’s mortal senses could only partially perceive.
Levi McAllister. Brianna’s father, although “father” was a term that required significant asterisks. He’d been summoned to this plane by a desperate witch named Zoe Sandoval, had arrived as something formless and terrible, and had somehow become the soft-spoken, quiet man who served as a McAllister elder and whose warding skills were, by all accounts, exceptional. He wasn’t human. He wasn’t precisely anything else, either. He simply was, in a way that made Malachi’s resonance gift faintly uneasy, the way a compass needle twitched when it encountered a magnetic anomaly.
The fourth signature was the one that sent a cold thread of recognition through his body.
Belshegar, the extradimensional being he’d once manipulated with a fabricated story about a Council and a transgression, the creature whose desire for a human form he’d exploited to ensure his service. Belshegar, who’d eventually discovered the deception and sided with the McAllisters, and who…most likely…hadn’t forgotten any of it. His signature was warm and vast and patient, but it still didn’t feel particularly reassuring, not when Malachi had once treated him as a tool.
He opened his eyes fully and took stock of the current situation.
Angela McAllister stood in the center of the study. She was smaller than he had expected. He’d encountered her only briefly during the Jerome confrontation, and his memories of that night were filtered through the fog of combat and artifact use, so the details had been unreliable. In person, without the distortion of battle, she was a woman in her mid-fifties who looked a decade younger, with dark hair and emerald eyes that were, at this moment, burning with a fury so tightly controlled that it seemed to raise the temperature of the room by at least ten degrees. She wore jeans and a gray sweater, with turquoise earrings barely visible through the wavy masses of her dark hair. Her hands were clenched at her sides, and he could tell she was restraining herself from doing something she very much wanted to do.
Connor stood at her shoulder, tall and dark-haired, his jade-green eyes fixed on Malachi with an expression far less controlled than his wife’s and therefore much less ambiguous. He looked like someone who was assessing exactly how much force would be required to permanently end their current problem, and who was clearly not opposed to applying that force in the near future.
