Which meant her phone was gone, too.
Car keys, gone.
Crap.
The room didn’t offer many clues as to her location. In addition to the bed, it contained a wooden dresser with a cracked mirror, a straight-backed chair, and a braided rug that had faded to a uniform gray-brown. The wallpaper was dark and old-fashioned, a pattern of climbing vines that might have been attractive once but now just made the walls feel as if they were closing in on her, although she realized the oppressive sensation could have been mostly to do with her current state of mind. Wherever she was, the room looked like it had been furnished with the bare minimum and then forgotten.
But now she could feel something strange, a low, buzzing static that was like standing too close to a transformer. She didn’t think it was hostile, but it sure as hell wasn’t welcoming, either.
And even though the sensation was entirely novel, she still thought it could be only one thing.
Magic.
Among witch clans, magic was something used cautiously and only in ways that no civilian would ever be able to notice. Although she knew Jerome was protected by wards set there to prevent any incursions by evil magic, she’d never been able to feel them. The only time she’d ever really felt magic in action was during the battle between the McAllister clan elders — and her cousin Brianna and her husband Bill — and the strange warlock they knew only as the Collector. Because that confrontation had involved unleashed magic that resonated across this dimension and the next, she’d been able to sense it even from the clinic, odd ripples and pulses that felt like distant thunder and made the hair on the back of her neck want to stand up.
Whatever surrounded her now, though, seemed entirely different.
She made herself get up from the bed. The dizziness receded enough for her to move, although her legs were unsteadier than she would have liked. Dimly, she realized the shaking had nothing to do with physical weakness and everything to do with the growing realization that somehow, she’d been taken. Someone had used magic to pull her out of her life and deposit her in this place, even though she had absolutely no idea how they’d managed to do such a thing. Yes, she knew there were witch-kind who could teleport, such as Devynn Rowe’s husband, Seth, but this wasn’t teleportation.
This was snatching someone out of their life and sending them someplace completely different.
Despite her shaky legs, Roslyn made herself go to the window anyway so she could try to get some idea of where she’d appeared. The glass was old and wavy, distorting the view, but she could make out enough to know that she stood on the second floor of a large house. Below her was a yard that had gone to seed, all overgrown grass and untrimmed hedges, and beyond that was a street lined with other houses, most of them not much more than tall, bulky shapes in the gloom. At first glance, the place almost felt like Paradise Lane in Jerome, with its rows of Victorian houses and large front yards, the slope of a street that clearly had been built on an incline. But the sky was a flat, oddly pearlescent gray, and somewhere in the distance, she could hear the sound of waves.
Not Arizona, then. Not anywhere close to her landlocked home state.
That realization made her breath catch. Somehow, she’d known from that first gulped breath that she had to be very far away from the Verde Valley, but for some reason, seeing it right in front of her made the reality so much more awful. She gripped the window frame and made herself breathe, counting the same way she did when a patient’s condition was worse than expected, and she needed to keep her composure so she could focus.
Four counts in, hold for four, four counts out.
The breathing exercise was one she’d taught herself during her clinicals at Northern Pines, when she was learning to manage the emotional toll of seeing people in pain every day, and it had served her well enough in the years since.
It helped. As she breathed, the panic receded to something almost manageable, and she turned away from the window to face the closed door of the bedroom. Her healing gift was already reaching out of its own accord, the way it always did when she sensed illness or injury nearby. There was someone else in this house, someone whose magic had been badly damaged, depleted almost past recognition. Their signature was faint enough that she nearly couldn’t read it through the odd static that permeated the building. Her gift had always been persistent, though, and it was telling her now that whoever was down on the first floor seemed to be in serious trouble.
The injured person felt like a warlock.
The smart thing to do, of course, would be to find a way out. She should test the windows, check the door, and look for any weakness in the magical barriers she could sense surrounding the house. Her magical healing gift wasn’t anything that could be used in a fight, but she had the same basic abilities as any witch or warlock; she could open a lock with a thought and summon enough flame to start a fire or set a candle alight. If the warlock downstairs was as wounded as her initial impressions suggested, he might not be in any condition to stop her from escaping.
But she was a healer, and the pull of the warlock’s depleted magic was almost physical, a tug behind her breastbone that her training and her gift both wouldn’t allow her to ignore.
She moved across the room and tried the door. It opened without resistance, which surprised her. If someone had gone to the trouble of snatching her across what felt like several state lines, she would have expected them to at least lock the bedroom door.
The hallway beyond was dim and smelled of dust and old varnish. More dark wallpaper, with an ornamental plaster ceiling above and a narrow staircase at the far end that descended into deeper gloom. The static was stronger out here, and beneath it, Roslyn could feel individual impressions of objects she knew instinctively weren’t ordinary — a low hum from behind a closed door to her right, a faint whispering that seemed to come from somewhere below, and an overall sense of things held in careful suspension, restrained by barriers that were slowly losing their strength.
She knew she’d never felt anything quite like it, and, like any witch, she’d seen a lot of strange things in her life. This was different, though. This seemed to be a house full of magical objects, dozens of them, all warded and contained…and the wards were failing.
The warlock seemed to be on the ground floor, somewhere toward the back of the house. She followed the staircase down, one hand trailing along the banister, her gift reaching ahead of her like a blind person’s cane. The front entryway was large and dim, with hardwood floors and a massive oak door that felt practically stiff with magic. She didn’t touch it.
Instead, she followed the pull of the wounded warlock down a hallway lined with closed doors, past a room that she thought was also full of warded objects — the source of much of the static — and toward a door at the very end that stood slightly ajar.
A pause to pull in a breath, and then Roslyn pushed it open.
The room was a study, lined with bookshelves and dominated by a massive oak desk. A leather chair sat behind the desk, and in the chair was a man.
He was unconscious, or very close to it. His head had fallen back against the leather, and his eyes were closed. White hair hung past his shoulders in lank, unwashed strands, and the clothes he wore — what looked like the remains of what had once been an expensive charcoal suit, complete with a waistcoat he’d apparently buttoned all the way up as if dressing for dinner — were filthy and torn. His skin had the grayish pallor of someone who hadn’t seen sunlight in a very long time, and was stretched tight over cheekbones and a jaw that might have been handsome if he hadn’t been so drawn and ill. In his left hand, he held a small, dark shard of something glassy. In his right was a brass compass that had gone dull and dead.
He looked like someone who should be in an ICU being fed intravenously, not sitting in a leather chair in a dusty study.
Despite the filth and the emaciation and the lank hair, though, she recognized him.
