Not personally, of course. She’d never seen this man in the flesh, had only heard him described by her fellow McAllisters who’d confronted him more than a year ago on a promontory above Jerome. But their descriptions had been detailed enough — white hair, cruelly handsome features, haughty bearing — and even in his current state of ruin, he was still recognizable enough.
The Collector.
The man who’d sent servants to steal from her family and who’d tried to manipulate the extradimensional being Belshegar into betraying the people who trusted him. The same man who’d personally confronted the McAllister clan, threatening them with the power of artifacts he’d spent years hoarding for reasons no one fully understood.
Her cousin Brianna had nearly died banishing this man to a void between dimensions.
But he was here, somehow alive. And he’d brought her to this place.
He was critically ill, magically damaged, and in need of immediate treatment. But he was also an enemy, the man who’d caused her clan fear and pain and who’d more than earned his exile.
Her healing gift, which didn’t care at all about clan politics, quietly assessed his condition. His magic was badly degraded, eroded by what she could only assume was prolonged exposure to whatever dimensional space Brianna had sent him to. In response to that loss, his body was shutting down, organs beginning to fail as the magic that had been sustaining them sputtered. Without intervention, he would be dead within days, possibly hours.
But she could walk away. She could find a way out of this house, get to a phone, and call her family. They would come for her. Angela and Connor and Belshegar and the clan elders would descend on this place and deal with the Collector, and whatever happened to him after that wouldn’t be her problem.
She also knew, as she stood in the doorway of that dusty study with the sound of distant waves filtering through the walls, that she wouldn’t walk away. Not because she felt sympathy for the man in the chair, and not because she was naïve enough to think that healing him would earn his gratitude or make him less dangerous.
No, she wouldn’t walk away because she was a healer, and this was what healers did. It was what her training demanded, what her gift demanded, and what the name she bore practically demanded of her.
Years ago, her Aunt Roslyn had died alone and in pain because no one had been able to reach her in time.
Roslyn would never let someone die in front of her if she had the power to prevent it. Not even this someone.
So she set her jaw, made herself cross the room, and pressed two fingers against the pulse point beneath his right ear. His skin was cold and papery, and his pulse was thready and fast, his heart working too hard to compensate for a body that was losing its fight. Her gift flowed through the contact, instinctively taking note of the damage his body had suffered, and what it showed her was worse than she had initially thought.
“Goddess help me,” she murmured, and got to work.
2
Someone else’s magic was inside his body.
Was he being attacked? Had the wards broken down somehow?
But then he realized that an attack wouldn’t feel like this. An attack was sharp, intrusive, a violation of the body’s natural defenses, while what he was feeling now seemed to be almost the opposite. This was a warmth that moved through him with deliberate care, seeking out the damaged places at the center of his magic and doing something to them he couldn’t quite identify but which his body seemed to welcome in a way he found alarming.
Someone was healing him.
He opened his eyes.
The study looked much as it had when he’d lost consciousness, except the curtains had been pulled back from the windows, letting in a flat gray light that told him it was either very early morning or very late afternoon. The dust motes drifting through the light gave the room a quality of suspended animation, as if even the air had been holding its breath while he slept.
The healer was sitting in the straight-backed chair she had pulled up beside his leather one, and she had two fingers pressed to the inside of his left wrist. Her eyes were closed, her expression one of focused concentration, and she didn’t immediately seem to notice that he was awake. She was younger than he’d expected, in her late twenties at the very most, with light brown hair pulled back from a face with arched dark brows, a straight nose, and a mouth fuller than it probably should have been. She was wearing what appeared to be the clothes she’d arrived in, a turquoise blue cotton blouse and dark jeans and a brown cardigan, all of them somewhat rumpled from what he assumed had been an uncomfortable night spent in a chair rather than a bed.
She had stayed with him. That was either very dedicated or very foolish.
He suspected it was a little of both.
“You can stop that,” he said.
Her eyes opened. They were a vivid blue almost the same color as her shirt, almost the same hue as the prized Sleeping Beauty turquoise of her home state. Those eyes regarded him calmly, and something about her gaze felt almost impersonal, as if she’d decided the best way to handle her current situation was to act as if he was no different from any of her other patients.
“You’re awake,” she said. She spoke softly, but there was a strength to her tone despite that, the kind of strength that told him she fully intended to do whatever needed to be done.
“An astute observation.” His voice wasn’t much more than a rasp, effectively undermining the cutting effect he’d been aiming for. His throat felt as though it had been scoured with sandpaper, and when he tried to sit up straighter in the chair, the muscles in his back and neck vociferously protested.
“Don’t move yet.” She released his wrist and stood, and he noted with some irritation that she moved with a kind of unhurried efficiency, something he hadn’t expected from someone in her current situation. “You’ve been unconscious for roughly twenty hours. Your blood pressure is low, you’re severely dehydrated, and your magic is — ”
Irritation stirred despite his weariness. “I am aware of the state of my magic.”
