A few seconds passed like that, with her arms around him and his weight against her shoulder. The dice were silent in their new containment, and through the walls, she could feel the rest of the collection humming its familiar chorus. His heart beat beneath her palm, steady now, and her magic noted the rhythm the same way it always did.
However, that data meant something different when you could feel it against your own chest.
Then he moved, a slight tensing of his shoulders that signaled he was about to pull away, and she loosened her arms to let him. He sat up slowly, bracing one hand against the floor, and he didn’t look at her.
“The ward will hold,” he said. His voice was hoarse, scraped and rough after the effort of the past two hours. “The new containment is stronger than the original. I built in additional layers to account for the dimensional static.”
“Good.” Her own voice sounded much steadier than she’d expected, and she couldn’t help being relieved by that. “You need to eat something, and then you need to sleep. We’ll do the evening session when you wake up.”
He nodded once, a motion so faint that she might have missed it if she hadn’t been watching for it, and she helped him to his feet in silence. He accepted the assistance without protest, which told her more about his condition than any diagnostic scan could have.
Malachi Van Horn didn’t accept help from anyone unless his body left him no alternative.
They walked back to the study together, her hand under his elbow and his gait unsteady enough that the contact was medically justifiable. At the study door, he stopped, and she felt him straighten, a movement that told her he wouldn’t allow himself to be seen stumbling across his own threshold.
“Ms. Campbell.”
“Yes?”
A pause. He was looking at the doorframe rather than at her, and his hand rested on the wood as though he needed the support but was pretending to be making a casual gesture. “Thank you for not stopping me.”
She could have said several things in response to that comment — that she’d wanted to, that it had been difficult to watch and do nothing, that he’d frightened the hell out of her when he began to collapse. However, she didn’t say any of them, mainly because she’d learned that Malachi heard what you didn’t say much more clearly than what you did.
“You’re welcome,” she told him. “Now eat and go to sleep, in that order.”
She left him at the study door and went back to the kitchen, where the breakfast dishes were still sitting in the sink. After she turned on the water, she picked up the sponge and stood there with her hands under the faucet for a long time, feeling the warmth of the water and the ghost of the heat of his body against her shoulder.
Something had changed. She could feel it in the way her magic still resonated with the impression of his heartbeat, in the way the memory of his weight against her shoulder refused to file itself safely under “clinical contact” and instead wedged itself in a place she didn’t have a category for.
She finished the dishes, dried her hands, and began preparing Malachi’s dinner. Broth, rice, the last of the preserved lemon. Small bites.
Three steps back.
6
She asked the question he’d been waiting for on the eleventh evening, while he was eating the soup she’d made from the last of the canned tomatoes. It was very good, and he supposed he shouldn’t be too surprised. The meals she’d prepared so far had shown some remarkable ingenuity, considering the limited ingredients she had on hand.
“Why do the Van Horns want your collection?”
Malachi set down his spoon. He’d known this was coming. Roslyn had held off for quite some time, waiting until she knew he was well along on his healing journey before she began to truly pry. She already knew about the artifacts, of course, and she knew about the Gibsons and the reasons why they were less than pleased about him occupying even this small slice of their territory. Because of fragments he’d let slip during his daily narrations and from the amber sphere incident, she also understood that his relationship with magic was self-taught, solitary.
But what she didn’t know — what he’d been deliberately withholding — was the reason behind all of it, the history that connected a banished warlock with a house full of dangerous objects to a prima in Manhattan who would cross the country to reclaim what she considered hers.
For a moment, he considered deflecting. After all, he possessed a considerable repertoire of conversational maneuvers he could employ — the redirected question, the partial answer that satisfied the form of a response without providing its substance, the sudden interest in a tangential topic that steered the discussion into safer waters. He’d been deploying these techniques since he was twenty years old, and so far, they’d served him reliably enough.
But Roslyn was sitting across from him at the desk, with the lamplight catching the lighter streaks in her honey-brown hair and her steady blue gaze on his face. She wore one of his white dress shirts because her own clothes were drying on the radiator upstairs. Over the past ten days, she’d rebuilt his magic with her hands and her gift and her relentless, infuriating patience, and something about the plain directness of her question made his usual evasions feel pointless and small.
Because having something in his hands would make this easier, he picked up the spoon again, but he didn’t begin eating. He simply held it, the way he might hold a pen or an artifact, something to help anchor him while he ventured into territory he’d spent seventeen years avoiding.
“Because Victoria Van Horn believes the collection belongs to her,” he said coolly. “Not to her personally — she has no interest in the objects themselves, no understanding of what they are or what they require. She believes they belong to her because I belong to her. Or at least, I did, and in the Van Horn worldview, the possessions of a clan member are the possessions of the clan.”
“Because you were a Van Horn.”
It wasn’t a question. He’d let slip a few things over the past ten days, so he realized there was no reason for concealment now.
“Yes, I was born a Van Horn,” he said. “My mother was Elise Van Horn, a cousin from a minor branch of the family. She was powerful enough to be useful but not prominent enough to matter. My father was a warlock named David Hale, from a small clan in Connecticut that the Van Horns considered beneath them. He died when I was three. I have no real memories of him.”
Malachi paused and noted that his grip on the spoon had tightened. He relaxed his fingers before continuing.
