Malachi met his eyes, which were deep green, old forest moss compared to Connor’s jade and Angela’s emerald. In those eyes, he saw a depth of perception that went beyond the mortal, an awareness that read not just his damaged aura but the shape of everything he had been and everything he’d become in the three weeks since a healer had knelt beside his chair and chosen to save him despite every reason not to.
“No,” Malachi said. “I am not.”
Belshegar nodded once, as though the answer confirmed something he’d already known. Then he followed the others out of the study, leaving Malachi alone with Roslyn in the room that had been their world for three weeks and which was now, suddenly and irrevocably, part of a larger one.
Roslyn turned to face him, and her eyes were bright with tears being held back by sheer force of will. She looked wrung out, running on nothing except the stubborn core of a spirit that refused to stop until the job was done. She had just stood between him and her own family, between him and the prima of what might now be the most powerful witch clan in the Southwest, and she hadn’t moved.
“Well,” she said, and the word probably sounded a bit less steady than she would have preferred. “That went about as well as could be expected.”
He wanted to say that what she had done — not just now, with her family, but all of it, from the first night when she’d chosen to heal him instead of letting him die — was the most extraordinary thing he had witnessed in a life that had included some fairly remarkable events. Her courage made him ashamed of his own considerable history of self-interest, and her steadiness made the years of solitude he’d endured seem not like the principled choice he’d always claimed it was, but like the waste they had actually been.
All he said, though, was, “Thank you.”
She looked at him for a moment, then moved across the room and sat down on the floor next to his chair in the same spot she’d occupied through the long night. Then she leaned her head back against his knee.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Now shut up and let me rest before your former family tries to kill us again.”
He placed his hand on her hair, and she closed her eyes. Beyond the study walls, he could hear the McAllisters moving through his house — assessing his wards, checking his defenses, occupying his territory with a certain efficient purposefulness that felt like relief rather than intrusion.
His house was no longer his alone, and his wards were no longer sufficient. Everything he was and owned had been breached more thoroughly than the Van Horns had ever managed, and the force that had accomplished this wasn’t fire or lightning or sleep magic but something far more difficult to defend against.
No, they were people who cared about the woman sitting at his feet, people who had come here because she’d called. They represented everything he’d spent seventeen years convincing himself he didn’t need.
Malachi closed his eyes and let them stay.
16
Roslyn was in the kitchen early that evening when she sensed a shift in the wards that Levi and Belshegar had spent all afternoon reinforcing. It seemed strangely familiar, and she realized she’d felt this same thing the night before, when Karl Van Horn’s sleep spell had rolled through the cracks in Malachi’s defenses and nearly taken her down.
Van Horn magic. More of it this time, stronger and coming from a lot more directions than just five people could account for.
She set down the glass of water she’d been drinking and moved to the kitchen window, then pulled the curtain aside just enough so she could see the yard. The light was fading, the sky above the bluff had the dull pewter color it turned in the hour before full dark, and the overgrown grass between the house and the property wall looked empty.
But it wasn’t. She could feel them out there, their massed magic pressing against the ward perimeter from the north, the east, and the south, a coordinated formation that left only the western side, the one with the cliff drop to the ocean, unguarded. They’d boxed the house in and left one way out, and that way led off a cliff.
Cute.
Angela was already in the entryway, Connor at her side. Seeing them together, both of them dark-haired and green-eyed, matching each other’s stride without even thinking about it, was a sight Roslyn found oddly reassuring. They fought as one, Malachi had told her that afternoon while she changed the dressings on his burns, and their combined power was greater than the sum of its parts. Prima and primus, bonded magic, a weapon the Van Horns wouldn’t have encountered before.
“How many?” Angela asked Levi, who stood at the foot of the stairs with his head tilted in that way he had when he was processing information from a dimension no normal human could perceive.
“At least ten,” Levi replied. “Possibly twelve. I can sense the five from last night, plus reinforcements. One signature is considerably stronger than the others.”
“Victoria,” Roslyn said, and Angela’s jaw tightened.
Of course, Roslyn had never met Victoria Van Horn. She knew of her only through Malachi’s careful, clinical descriptions — a prima who led through authority rather than finesse, whose magic was broad and forceful and who believed that the possessions of a clan member were the possessions of the clan. What Malachi hadn’t said directly, but what Roslyn had guessed from the way his voice went flat whenever her name came up, was that Victoria was the kind of leader who took things because she could, a woman who’d thrown away a twenty-year-old boy for the crime of being interested in the wrong things.
Roslyn didn’t like her already, and she doubted her opinion was going to change anytime soon.
“Victoria doesn’t matter,” Angela said. There was a hardness in her voice Roslyn hadn’t heard before, something that went far beyond the controlled fury of the morning. “She’s their coordinator, not their strongest fighter. If we take out her offensive line, she’ll lose her advantage. Levi?”
“I’ll handle the sleep caster,” Levi said, his voice calm. “His magic works by exploiting the target’s own neural pathways. It won’t affect me.”
Because Levi’s neural pathways, Roslyn thought, weren’t exactly standard equipment.
“Belshegar and I will take the front,” Connor said, and Roslyn saw Angela flash him a look that was half exasperation and half fierce protectiveness.
“Belshegar and we will take the front,” Angela corrected him. “You and I fight together. That’s not negotiable.”
