He hadn’t been alone for weeks. That was the other thing, the thing that was harder to quantify than containment recalibrations and dimensional resonances.
The McAllisters came and went. Not constantly, and not intrusively — theirs wasn’t a clan given to hovering — but with a regularity that had its own rhythm. Tricia McAllister had brought him three casseroles during the first week, each one delivered with a brisk friendliness that didn’t require reciprocation. A young warlock named Luke had appeared one morning to help him move a set of shelves and had stayed for two hours asking questions about ward theory with a directness that reminded Malachi, somewhat painfully, of the curiosity he himself had possessed at that age, before Victoria had decided it was dangerous. Even Angela stopped by from time to time, usually under the pretense of checking on the property’s ward integration. Sometimes, though, he thought she was there simply to remind him that he was being watched — not with suspicion, but with a sort of practical attention, a prima keeping track of everyone within her sphere.
Malachi wasn’t used to being kept track of. For seventeen years, no one had cared where he was or what he was doing, and the adjustment to being noticed — not feared, not hunted, simply noticed — was proving more difficult than any ward calibration he’d ever attempted.
He and Roslyn ate on the back porch, which was small and faced east, offering a view of the valley floor that was better than the house deserved. Soon enough, it would be too cold to sit out there, but for now, he allowed himself to enjoy the way the November sky was doing its evening performance, the clouds above the red rock formations in Sedona turning from gold to deep rose. Roslyn sat in one of the two chairs he’d acquired — plain wooden Adirondacks painted green, a purchase Tricia had assisted with and which he would have been incapable of making on his own — with her legs tucked under her and the container of yellow curry balanced on the armrest.
“Molly Reeves,” she said between bites. “She’s nine and fell off the monkey bars at school. Grade 2 sprain. Her dad nearly had a heart attack.”
Malachi paused with an egg roll held between two fingers. He’d been practicing, but he hadn’t quite mastered chopsticks yet. “Did you inform the girl’s father that a heart attack would be a considerably more serious medical event than a sprained wrist?”
Roslyn’s full mouth twitched. “No, I did not, because I’m a professional.” She gave him a look filled with amusement and warmth in equal measure. “How was your day?”
“I recalibrated the ward spacing in the northwest corner of the cellar,” he replied. “The iron box was producing a low-frequency interference pattern that was affecting the stored compulsion’s containment integrity.”
“Would you mind repeating that in English?”
He took a bite of egg roll and then said, “Two of the objects were bothering each other, so I had to move one.”
Her blue eyes danced with laughter. “See, that wasn’t so hard.”
He let himself look at her while she ate. That was something he allowed himself now — not the covert observation of the first weeks, when watching her had been something he viewed as weakness, but an open attention that she returned with the same steadiness she brought to everything. The sunset light caught the honey-colored strands of her hair where they’d come loose from the ponytail, and her profile was clean against the darkening sky. In that moment, he couldn’t help thinking about how strange it was that a life could change its entire shape and that the change could feel, not like a loss, but like a correction.
“Your mother called me today,” he said.
Roslyn’s eyebrows rose. “She called you?”
“She has my number. You gave it to her.” He paused, considering how best to relay the conversation. “She asked whether I preferred flour or corn tortillas.”
“My dad found a new recipe for green chile stew that he wants to try, so I think her call must have had something to do with that.” Roslyn set down her fork and turned to look at him. The expression on her face was the one he’d come to recognize as her reading of him — not with her magic, which she hadn’t used on him since their last healing session, but with the perceptiveness she’d inherited from a mother who had once heard everything people were thinking, whether she wanted to or not. “She’s inviting you to dinner.”
“I gathered that from the context.”
“And?”
He was quiet for a moment. The question was simple. The answer should have been equally simple, and yet it also contained a complexity he was still learning how to navigate. Jenny Campbell was inviting him to dinner. A mother was including in her family the man who’d kidnapped her daughter because that same man was now something to her daughter that none of them had a convenient word for.
Jenny understood — as perhaps only Jenny could — that the inconvenient things were often the truest.
“Flour,” he said. “I told her flour.”
Roslyn’s mouth curved, and she picked up her fork again and went back to her curry. The sky continued its slow fade from rose to violet above the valley. Neither of them spoke for a while. They’d both learned that the silences between them were as full as the words.
Later, after the takeout containers had been cleared and the porch chairs stood empty in the dark, Roslyn followed him upstairs.
Their bedroom was at the back of the house, a simple rectangle of a space with an east-facing window that looked out over the valley’s scattered lights. They’d chosen the bed together at the furniture store down in Cottonwood, one with a padded headboard and a platform frame. It was a proper queen, because the narrow bed they’d shared in his former home’s spare room had been barely adequate for one person and completely useless for two. She’d pointed that out to him when they were furniture shopping and he’d accepted the fact without argument, which was, she reflected, probably the most decisive non-argument they’d ever had.
The room was simple enough, just the bed, a pair of nightstands and a set of lamps, and a highboy. A wooden chair stood in the corner so he could drape his waistcoat there when he undressed. She’d added a small rug next to the bed because the hardwood floor was cold in the mornings, and there was a third pillow on the bed, since he slept with only one and she needed two. Those small, domestic negotiations had made her happy, had let her realize that he genuinely wanted to make this life with her, that he wasn’t going to disappear from her world as suddenly as he’d appeared.
He turned to her in the lamplight, and she could see the way his face had filled in over the past few weeks. The hollows under his cheeks were gone, the gauntness replaced by the strong, angular structure that had been there all along, just waiting for the damage to recede. His white hair fell loose around his shoulders, and his gray-green eyes were clear and sharp, focused only on her.
She stepped closer and put her hands on his chest, over the place where the void scarring had been, and felt his heartbeat under her palms. It was steady and strong, with none of the irregular quality that had frightened her so much during those first weeks of healing. The channels she’d spent so much time repairing were whole now, running clean and deep, and his magic hummed beneath the surface of his skin with a vitality that told her the work had held.
“Your heart sounds good,” she said.
Was that a glint of amusement in those crystalline eyes? “You’re not on duty.”
“I’m always on duty.” She looked up at him. The lamplight was warm on both their faces, and the distance between them could be measured in the space between her palms and his skin, in the small distance her chin had to tilt to meet his eyes. “Occupational hazard.”
