“It’s okay,” the girl said, and wiggled her fingers experimentally. She gave a small wince, one she quickly suppressed.
Roslyn smiled at her. “You’re tough, you know that?”
Something brightened in Molly’s face, the way a child’s face often did when they heard an adult say something about them that wasn’t a worry or a warning. As Roslyn watched the little girl smile, a familiar warmth went through her. Nothing magical about it, just the ordinary human satisfaction of making someone’s bad day a little more bearable.
She gave Molly’s father the take-home instructions, wrote the PE excuse note, and walked them both out through the clinic’s front entrance. The waiting room was empty, the last appointment of the day finished. Now the late afternoon light was slanting through the windows and falling across the row of mismatched chairs in the waiting area that she still hadn’t gotten around to replacing. Through the glass door, she could see the usual quiet, late-day activity at the strip mall where the clinic was located. A couple walked into the State Farm office next door, while a woman left the nail salon with freshly painted nails held carefully in front of her like small, wet offerings.
Cottonwood in November. The air outside would be cool and dry, scented with the faint aroma of woodsmoke from someone’s fireplace and wild grass that by now had turned to mostly straw. She’d missed this during those weeks in Oregon, missed it more than she’d expected — the quality of the light, the openness of the sky, the feeling of being in a place where the landscape stretched out in every direction and you could see weather coming from forty miles away.
She flipped the sign in the front window to CLOSED and then stood for a moment in the silence.
Her mother had called this morning, the way she did most mornings now, although the calls had changed gradually over the past couple of weeks. In the beginning, right after Roslyn had come home, the calls had been daily and anxious, Jenny Campbell’s voice still tense, as if she halfway expected her daughter to disappear right out from under her nose all over again.
Roslyn understood, or at least, she thought she did. She’d vanished for almost a month, snatched out of a parking lot by a magical artifact and held in a house on the Oregon coast. No amount of rational explanation could fully ease the terrible fear her mother had lived with during those weeks of silence.
But Jenny’s calls had gradually gone from anxious check-ins to something closer to the type of conversations they used to have. This morning, she’d called to tell Roslyn that Colin had found a recipe for green chile stew he was determined to make for Sunday dinner. Cole and his girlfriend were driving up from Tempe, and her mother had added that Roslyn should bring Malachi.
She’d said it casually — bring Malachi, if he’d like to come — and Roslyn had heard the deliberate care underneath the easy tone. Her mother was making a point of including him, not because it was easy, but because Jenny Campbell had once fallen in love with a civilian man, someone doubly suspect because he wasn’t just not a warlock, but because he was also a journalist, and journalists were people that witch-kind tried to steer clear of. She understood better than anyone else in Roslyn’s life what it meant to build something with a person her family wasn’t entirely comfortable with.
And there had been a brief exchange only a few days after she’d gotten back, when she’d sat in her parents’ kitchen during her lunch break and her mother had asked, “Do you love him?”
Roslyn had replied simply, “Yes, I do.”
That hadn’t been the end of her mother’s concern, but Roslyn liked to think that it had been the end of the beginning.
Her father was a lot harder to read. He might be retired now, but he would always be a journalist, and when she’d first told her parents the full story — the kidnapping, the healing, the relationship that had slowly grown from distrust — he’d listened with his full attention and had asked direct questions about timelines and logistics and the nature of Malachi’s injuries. He hadn’t asked about feelings.
But two days later, he’d sent her an article about the psychology of bonding under extreme circumstances, which was his way of asking whether she was sure about how she felt. She’d called him while she was on a break at the clinic and told him she was, and he’d said, “All right, sweetheart,” in a voice that meant he believed her, even if he wasn’t entirely comfortable with what he believed.
Connor was another matter entirely. The primus had made his opinion of Malachi clear during the confrontation at the house in Astoria and didn’t seem to have changed it much since then. He tolerated the arrangement because Angela did, and Angela tolerated it because she understood that the collection’s keeper was now an asset to their clan, rather than a threat.
Besides, Roslyn had made it plain that the matter wasn’t open for negotiation. But she could still feel Connor’s lingering distrust every time they were in the same room, a wariness that wasn’t hostile so much as watchful. Roslyn wasn’t even sure whether she could be angry with him about that, not when Connor had faced so much in the past. It didn’t seem too strange to her that he’d need some convincing to believe a former enemy might actually now be an ally.
So she didn’t push it. Connor would come around in his own time…or he wouldn’t…and either way, his opinion of the situation wasn’t going to change anything.
Now that her workday was over, Roslyn tidied the exam room, restocked the supply cabinet, and changed out of her lab coat in the tiny bathroom at the back of the clinic. The face in the mirror looked like hers — the same dark honey-colored hair framing it, the same turquoise eyes — but there was something different about that reflection now, a steadiness she couldn’t quite describe. She’d gone to Oregon as a woman who had built a good, careful life and come back as someone who now understood that good and careful weren’t always the same thing.
After locking up the clinic, she got in her car and drove home to Jerome with the windows cracked and the early evening air streaming in, cool enough to warrant the sweater she’d thrown on over her long-sleeved T-shirt. The road climbed in switchbacks up the flank of Mingus Mountain, and she took the curves almost without thinking, since she’d been driving this route since she was sixteen and could probably navigate it in her sleep. The valley spread out below, and behind her, the cottonwoods along the Verde River showing their last traces of gold before winter stripped them bare. Ahead of her, Jerome clung to its mountainside in its improbable way, an old mining town that had almost died…but hadn’t.
The house on Juarez Street was set back from the road on a quiet block below Main Street, a modest two-story farmhouse with a large front porch and a yard that was mostly rock and native scrub. It wasn’t Malachi’s Victorian home in Astoria — it was smaller and less dramatic, without the sweeping Pacific views or the imposing entryway — but some solid weeks of work had made it livable, and the wards seemed to have taken to it beautifully. She could feel them as she pulled up, layered and solid, integrated into the existing magical protections the McAllister elders had maintained in Jerome for generations. The house felt settled in a way the Victorian never had, as though the objects inside it had finally stopped holding their breath.
She got out of her car, carrying a bag from the Thai place on Main Street — yellow curry for her, pad see ew for Malachi, along with chicken fried rice and mango sticky rice, because why not? — and walked up the porch steps.
The front door opened for her.
Malachi heard Roslyn’s car before she reached the house, which wasn’t remarkable in itself — the old Volkswagen’s electric motor had a certain quality that distinguished it from the other, newer vehicles on the street. After two weeks of listening for it, the sound had become as familiar to him as the hum of his own containment wards. What was remarkable was the response it produced in him, a sort of anticipation, a shift in the quality of the evening from solitary to something else.
He opened the door and watched her come up the steps with a takeout bag in one hand and her keys in the other, her hair pulled back in the low ponytail she wore at the clinic. Her face looked a little tired, but it was a good tiredness, the kind of tiredness that came from a day spent taking care of other people. She smiled when she saw him, the small, warm smile she reserved for him and which he’d identified as one of the most significant discoveries of his adult life.
“Pad see ew,” she said, and held up the bag.
“Thank you.” He took the bag from her and stepped aside so she could come in. Her shoulder brushed his chest as she passed, a contact so brief and so casual that it shouldn’t have registered at all. And yet it did, because every point of contact with this woman mattered every single time, and he’d stopped pretending otherwise.
The house was smaller than his previous home, as he’d anticipated when Angela first described the property to him. The study where he’d spent seventeen years sitting in a leather chair and tending to a hundred and two artifacts had no equivalent here, so instead, the collection occupied the entire ground floor, arranged in a configuration he’d spent weeks devising, each object positioned according to the complex web of spatial relationships that governed their containment. The bone dice sat on a shelf in what had originally been the living room, their probability field safely contained within the room’s dimensions. The silver astrolabe occupied a case near the far wall. The glass jar of weather-working — which had given them trouble during the move and which he still checked twice daily — rested in a custom cradle Belshegar had helped him design, its energy finally settled, as though the desert air agreed with it.
The basement vaults had been the most challenging problem to solve. The house had a cellar, but it was shallower than the Astoria basement, which had required him to rethink the spacing between the twenty most volatile objects and recalibrate every ward accordingly. He’d spent the first week in Jerome doing almost nothing else, working from dawn through the evening with a focus so absolute that Roslyn had to remind him to eat, a reversal of their original dynamic that he’d found equal parts irritating and quietly gratifying.
Belshegar had been invaluable. The extradimensional being’s understanding of the objects’ properties exceeded Malachi’s own in certain ways — he could perceive aspects of their energies that no human senses, however gifted, could access — and their collaboration had revealed things about the collection that Malachi had never known. Three of the objects in the basement contained trace dimensional resonances that suggested they’d been created not by human magic but by something older and less classifiable, and the implications of that discovery were still unfolding in Malachi’s mind, a thread he could follow for years.
