“Simultaneously. The resulting discharge would be” — he considered and rejected several adjectives to describe the fallout of the wards’ collapse, ultimately deciding on something that was probably far too understated — “significant.”
A muscle in her jaw tightened, but she still seemed calm enough as she asked, “How significant?”
“Significant enough that it would be impossible to hide the damage from the civilian authorities,” he told her. “Several of the items in the basement vaults, if they were to discharge simultaneously in an uncontrolled manner, could affect an area more than several square miles. And the secondary effects — dimensional thinning, residual magical toxicity — would persist for years.”
A few seconds passed as she stood there and looked at him. He couldn’t read her expression with any certainty, but he thought he detected something that might have been a grudging reassessment. Not respect…he wouldn’t flatter himself that she’d moved from hostility to respect over the course of a single conversation…but it looked to him like a recognition that the situation she’d been pulled into was far more complex than she’d initially assumed.
“So you’re telling me,” she said, eyes narrowing ever so slightly, “that you’ve spent years collecting the most dangerous magical objects in existence and storing them in a house with no backup plan, and the only thing preventing some kind of magical catastrophe is you staying alive to keep the wards in place.”
When she put it that way, the situation did sound rather foolish.
“I prefer to think of it as a calling,” he replied, and decided to leave it at that. There was no need for her to know, let alone understand, all the myriad factors that had brought him to this place.
Those blue eyes narrowed even further. Her lashes were long and thick, and he assumed they must be natural, or surely her mascara would have smudged or run by now.
“It feels more like criminal negligence to me,” she remarked, “but I suppose the distinction is academic at this point.”
The healer reached for his wrist again to check his pulse. He allowed the contact, although the pressure of her warm fingers on his skin made something flutter inside him, a reaction he attributed to a prolonged absence of human touch and nothing more.
“I need to do a full examination,” she went on. “Chest, temples, the secondary pulse points at your ankles and the base of your spine. I have to map the scarring so I can develop some kind of treatment for you.”
Those words made a flicker of surprise go through him. “You intend to stay.”
Now she raised a well-arched eyebrow. “You kind of made sure of that when you yanked me here.”
He didn’t hear any bitterness in her voice, which surprised him somewhat. However, there wasn’t any warmth, either. What he detected was a sort of flat pragmatism, as if she’d assessed her options and determined that, since she couldn’t change her circumstances, then she would simply have to work within them.
“Your wards won’t let me leave,” she continued. “Also, I don’t have my phone, and even if I could somehow get past those wards, I don’t even know where I am, although I know it’s somewhere near the ocean. So yes, I’m staying. I’m going to treat you…mostly because if you die, the situation you’ve just described will kill a lot of innocent people who have nothing to do with whatever grudge you’re nursing against my family.”
He gazed back at her and said coolly, “It isn’t a grudge.”
Once again, her brows lifted. “I really don’t care what you call it. The end result is the same.” She rose to her feet then and moved behind his chair. “I’m going to place my hands on your temples. Try not to be difficult about it.”
Easier said than done. The examination required her to touch him over and over again, and each point of contact sent her magic deeper into his system than the emergency stabilization had reached. Her fingertips at his temples were the worst…or the most revealing, which he supposed amounted to the same thing. From that position, her gift seemed to trace not just the physical damage to his magic from his extended time in the void but the very patterns of how he used his gift, the habitual channels he’d worn smooth over decades of warding work, the places where he’d pushed too hard for too long. Her touch wasn’t painful, but it was invasive in a way he found almost unbearable — not because of the magic itself, but because of what it revealed. She was seeing him. Not the curated version he presented to the world, the one that could put on alternate appearances as the situation required, but the damaged thing underneath.
When her palms pressed flat against his chest, he felt his breath catch before he could prevent it. The void scarring there was dense and concentrated around his heart, and her powers moving through it felt like warm water flowing over a burn. The relief was so immediate and so acute that he had to close his eyes and pray that his face revealed nothing of what he was feeling.
Her hands circling his wrists came last, and by that point, he’d retreated so far into his own defenses that he was narrating the history of the astrolabe in the East Gallery in a voice that sounded like a man giving a museum tour while trying to ignore the way his house was burning down around him.
As she worked, he kept his eyes fixed on a point slightly above the bookshelves and maintained his commentary throughout, since silence would have been an admission of vulnerability he wasn’t prepared to make. To keep that silence at bay, he told her about the artifacts — their provenance, their properties, the care required to keep them safely contained. He described the warding techniques he had developed over decades of trial and error, the way each object required a unique containment solution because no two artifacts responded to the same magical frequencies. And he explained, with more detail than he knew was strictly necessary, the theoretical framework for dimensional energy storage and why the objects in his collection were so much more dangerous than ordinary enchanted items.
He spoke about all of this because talking about the collection allowed him to pretend that this was an intellectual exchange between equals rather than a medical examination of a dying man by the only person who could possibly save him.
To his relief, the healer let him talk. She didn’t interrupt or ask him to be quiet so she could concentrate, and she didn’t give any indication that his running commentary was either welcome or unwelcome. No, she simply continued her work with the same methodical thoroughness she’d brought to everything else, and when she was finished, she stepped back and regarded him with an expression that made his stomach clench, as if it understood the bad news before his brain did.
“I think I can stabilize your magic,” she said. “The degradation can be stopped before it gets any worse, and with daily treatment sessions, we can begin restoring function to the parts of your gift that are still viable.” She paused there, and he could see she was choosing her next words with care. “But I need you to understand something. Full recovery — whatever ‘full’ turns out to mean in your case — is going to take weeks. Not days, weeks. During that time, you can’t use any magic. None. Not to reinforce the wards, not to check on the artifacts, not to light a candle or open a lock or do any of the hundred small things that I’m sure you do with magic without even thinking about it. Nothing.”
Impossible. “That is not — ” he began, and she shook her head.
“This isn’t negotiable.” She’d broken into his protest without raising her voice, and somehow her calmness made her words sound more authoritative than if she had shouted. “Every time you use magic, you’re drawing on a source of power that’s barely holding together. It’s like trying to run on a broken leg. You might get where you’re going, but you’ll cause damage that I can’t repair. The void scarring is bad enough already. If you keep pulling from a compromised gift, the scarring will spread to parts of your magic that are currently healthy, and what could have been a lengthy recovery will become a permanent disability.” She let those words settle on him before she added, “So you’ll rest, you’ll eat what I put in front of you, you’ll submit to treatment twice a day, and you’ll leave the wards to do their job on their own until I tell you otherwise.”
All he could do was stare at her. She stared back at him coolly. Someone else might have looked compromised by their lack of sleep or the inherent lack of authority that came with rumpled clothes badly in need of changing and hair that needed brushing. But somehow, she was giving orders to a warlock who had once made the prima of her clan negotiate with him as an equal.
The appropriate response, of course, would be to reassert his authority. He needed to remind her that this was his house, his collection, and his life’s work, and that he had been managing all of it quite capably for seventeen years without the assistance of a small-town nurse practitioner some ten years his junior. He had the words ready. He knew they were good words, precise and cutting and perfectly chosen to establish that whatever temporary authority she might have gained from his incapacity, the fundamental power dynamic in this house remained unchanged.
But he didn’t say any of them.
Because the most unsettling thing — more unsettling than the prognosis she’d just given him, more unsettling than the damage to his magic — was that he was going to obey her. Not because she was right, although she was, and not because he had no choice, although he didn’t. But because something in the way she’d delivered that ultimatum, without anger and without fear, without any apparent need for him to agree or approve or even respond, had cut through his defenses more effectively than any magic he had ever encountered.
