“That’s putting it conservatively,” Belshegar said, and Roslyn shot him a look over her shoulder that Malachi couldn’t see but could imagine.
“Thank you, Belshegar,” she said crisply. “I can advocate for my own patient.”
The faintest suggestion of a smile crossed the extradimensional being’s face, and Malachi registered, with some interest, that Roslyn’s directness appeared to amuse him rather than offend him. It was, he supposed, an encouraging indicator of the quality of being they were dealing with.
Levi spoke for the first time since entering the room. He hadn’t moved from his position by the bookshelf, and his voice was calm and unhurried, telling Malachi that he’d learned the value of patience over decades of living among people who possessed considerably less of it.
“The Van Horns are outside,” he said.
At once, Angela’s attention snapped to him. Connor straightened, and even Belshegar turned from his study of Malachi’s aura to acknowledge the shift in priority. The domestic drama of the Collector’s fate was, temporarily at least, put aside in favor of the more immediate problem of the hostile witches and warlocks who were presumably still stationed around the property.
“I felt them when we arrived,” Levi continued. “Five sources of magic, ranged around the perimeter of the property. They’ve been probing the study wards, but they pulled back when they sensed our arrival. They’re regrouping.” His head tilted slightly, and Malachi gathered that he was processing information from a source that didn’t correspond to any of the five standard senses. “They’re also afraid. They didn’t expect reinforcements, and they can feel Belshegar’s presence, even if they don’t know what it is.”
“Good,” Angela said, and the single word contained a shift in her bearing that Malachi found informative. The fury was still there — he could see it in the set of her jaw and the brightness of her eyes — but it had been redirected, channeled from the personal grievance of a prima confronting her clan’s enemy to the tactical focus of a leader assessing a more immediate threat. “How long before they regroup?”
“Hours, I think,” Levi said. “They have significant offensive capabilities — fire magic, lightning, and a sleep caster — but they know they’re outmatched now. They’ll need to decide whether to press the attack or withdraw and report to the Van Horn prima.”
“Victoria.” Angela’s lips thinned. “Victoria Van Horn sent a strike team against a solitary warlock and a healer, and she didn’t even come herself?”
“She will,” Malachi said.
His voice was barely functional, thin and hoarse, stripped of the measured cadence that usually characterized his speech, but everyone in the study went quiet when he spoke, and every pair of eyes in the room was now fixed on him. He met Angela’s gaze directly; he owed her that much, and looking away would have been the kind of evasion he no longer had the energy or the right to employ.
“Victoria does not delegate permanently,” he continued. “She sent the strike team as a probe, the way she sends Karl to probe wards. She wanted to know what the house contained, what defenses were in place, and how much resistance she would face. When the team reports back — when they tell her that four new arrivals, including at least one non-human presence, have entered the house — she will come herself. And when Victoria Van Horn commits to an offensive, she doesn’t come lightly.”
Angela studied him for a moment, and he could see her parsing the information, separating the useful intelligence from her personal feelings about the man who’d delivered it. It was, he thought, the mark of a good leader, the ability to accept valuable counsel from a source she despised.
“You know her,” Angela said.
“I was a member of her clan,” he replied, and left the rest of it — the banishment, the twenty years of belonging to a family that had decided he was disposable, the mother who hadn’t intervened on his behalf — unspoken.
The silence that followed his comment wasn’t the comfortable kind, but it was functional. Angela and Connor exchanged a look, and then Angela turned to Roslyn.
“How bad is he, really?” she said. “I need the clinical assessment, not the version you give the patient.”
Roslyn stepped aside, and for the first time, Angela had an unobstructed view of Malachi in the leather chair. He didn’t attempt to improve his posture or compose his expression. There was no point in performing strength he did not possess.
“His magic is functioning at roughly fifteen percent of what I estimate his normal capacity to be,” Roslyn said, and her voice had shifted again. The steel was gone, and now she sounded almost detached, a clinician delivering a report. “The void damaged his channels extensively, and three weeks of healing brought him to approximately sixty percent before the attack last night. The fireballs and the effort he put into defending the threshold burned through most of what I’d rebuilt. The scarring around his heart has tightened again, and the burns on his left side are second-degree. He needs rest, sustained healing, and time. What he doesn’t need is to be moved, interrogated, or subjected to any additional magical stress.”
Angela absorbed all this and then looked at Malachi with an expression he couldn’t quite read. It certainly wasn’t sympathy, and it wasn’t forgiveness, either, but he thought it might be the grudging acknowledgment of a fellow survivor.
“You’re going to live, then,” she said.
“Apparently,” Malachi replied. “Roslyn has been quite insistent on the matter.”
A hint of something that wasn’t quite a smile passed across Angela’s face, there and gone so quickly he might have imagined it.
“All right,” she said, and the words were addressed to the room at large, the prima making a decision and expecting it to be followed. “Levi and Belshegar, I need you to assess the property’s wards and determine what can be reinforced before the Van Horns regroup. Connor, come with me — we need to secure the perimeter and see what we’re working with. Roslyn, you continue treating your patient.” She paused there, and her brilliant green eyes found Malachi’s one more time. “We’ll discuss the rest of this later. All of it.”
The promise in that last sentence wasn’t anything close to subtle, and Malachi received it with a slight inclination of his head that was the closest thing to a bow he was physically capable of producing.
“I would expect nothing less,” he said.
Angela turned on her heel and left the study, Connor following, and the air in the room seemed to expand in their wake, the compressed tension releasing by degrees. Levi pushed off from the bookshelf and followed them, pausing in the doorway long enough to look at Roslyn with an expression that contained something Malachi couldn’t read from this angle, the parental concern of an elder toward a member of the younger generation of his clan, perhaps, or simply the assessment of one extraordinary being recognizing the work of another.
Then he was gone, and it was only Belshegar who remained, still standing a few feet from the chair, still looking at Malachi with that considered, unhurried gaze.
“You aren’t the man you were in Jerome,” Belshegar said quietly.
