Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) (10 page)

C
hapter 16

The Atwood place was on the outskirts of Gainesville, a tiny town that existed mostly as a gas stop on the way to better things. At one time the Atwoods ran a working farm, but the land had been sold off in patches for decades now. The last time we’d been there, to save Charlie, all that had remained was a shitty house and an old barn. When we arrived, I saw that both structures had been razed to the ground. The rest of the property still looked neglected, so it all resembled the “before” photo in some HGTV show. My heart sank. What were the odds we would find anything useful here?

But we tried. Armed with my cell phone and a flashlight, Quinn and I spent the next hour tramping around the property, looking for anything resembling belladonna. I had to go slow, and a lot of my energy was devoted to hiding how weak I felt.

It was, unfortunately, a complete waste of time.

“It’s too overgrown here,” I said finally, panting a little. “There could be belladonna under or between any of these plants and we’d never know, especially in the dark.”

“You’re right.” He checked his watch, looking defeated. “It’s almost four. We might as well go back to your place. You look like you’re about to fall over.”

“I’ll have you know,” I said severely, “I’ve got another six or seven minutes of standing before I fall over.”

“Color me chastised, then.” He offered his arm so gallantly that I had to accept.

We called the Pellars on the Jeep’s bluetooth, but Simon was a little snappish at the request for an update. He suggested that I get some sleep and try him in the late morning. Well, he didn’t so much suggest it as bark it and hang up. We headed back to the cabin.

Walking through the front door felt wonderful. I’d locked the dogs in the back bedroom when we stopped to change clothes—animals don’t much care for vampires—so my bedroom was blissfully empty. I was ready to collapse onto the bed, but Quinn closed the door behind him and pounced on me. Lifting me by the hips so his face was level with my belly, he blew a raspberry into my skin. “Hey,” I said, laughing. “What’s gotten into you?”

He let me slide down his body until we were face to face. “Nothing, I just . . . feel weird all of a sudden.”

“Weird how?”

“Sort of . . . calm.”

I stroked his cheek. It was true, the shadows of Maven’s attack had fallen away from his eyes. “Is that a bad thing?”

“Of course not, but . . .” The little thinking wrinkle between his eyes grew deeper, which I privately found adorable. “You have to understand, humans feel this huge variety of moods and emotions, but we don’t usually operate on that kind of scale. To have my mood change all of a sudden, especially in the middle of a crisis—” he broke off abruptly, ducking his head to kiss me. It started out relatively chaste, but then Quinn’s tongue darted into my mouth and it got interesting really quick. “Sorry,” he murmured when I finally came up for air. Quinn didn’t technically need it. “Was I saying something?”

“I think you were suggesting we move to the bed.”

Afterward, I pushed aside a tangle of sheets so I could rest my body against his. He kissed the top of my head, and I tilted my face up to look at him.

“So, Elise wanted to know if we’d go out with her and Natalie.”

“A double date? Like, with me?” he teased.

“None of the other guys I’m seeing are available,” I informed him.

He laughed, then went quiet, the smile fading off his face. “You know why we can’t, right?”

“Yeah, I know.” He wasn’t human. If Elise saw the two of us together, she’d start to wonder why our relationship didn’t seem to be progressing, why I still wasn’t bringing him to family events. Once that domino fell, it was only a matter of time before she started asking dozens of other impossible-to-answer questions. Why didn’t we hang out in the daylight? Why didn’t he ever eat? Why did my animals hate him? Right now, my entire family thought of Quinn as that guy from my old softball team who was my occasional plus-one. None of them could ever think Quinn and I were serious.

Which meant that in addition to my witch abilities, there was another big part of my life my family could never know about. I felt the chasm between my two lives get a little wider.

Quinn saw it on my face. “You wish we were a normal couple,” he said quietly.

“It’s not that. I mean, yeah, it would be nice if we were both just human, and if Charlie was just human, too, but . . . I guess I’m realizing for the first time that I
like
some of that cheesy couple stuff,” I confessed. “Double dates. Game nights. Saturday afternoon trips to Whole Foods.”

“We could have a game night. Let’s see, we’ll get Maven, Hazel, the werewolves, of course—”

I tried to smack him with a pillow, but he yanked it out of my hand with vampire speed. “No fair,” I complained.

A grin spread across his face, and he propped his head up on his elbow. “Okay, here’s something normal we can do. Tell me something about you that no one knows.”

I wrinkled my nose at him. “Seriously?”

“Yep. We’re doing this.” He turned sideways, propping his head on his hand. “I’m waiting.”

I thought it over for a moment, but nothing came to mind. I don’t actually keep a little mental database of things I don’t tell people about myself. “There’s nothing. I’m an open book.”

He threw back his head and laughed that full-throated, unrestrained laugh that I loved. “Lex, you are one of the most self-contained people I’ve ever met, and I mostly hang out with vampires.”

“Fine. I . . . um . . . I’ve been going to school.”

His eyebrows lifted. “To CU?”

“Yeah. I’ve been auditing classes.”

“Since when?”

“A couple of months after I got back from Iraq.”

He sat partway up in the bed. “That’s why you have so many books on your living room shelves.” I nodded. “Why don’t you enroll for real? Get your degree?”

I snorted. “In what? And for what purpose? I don’t exactly need a BA to be a register monkey. And there are no other day jobs that would let me dick around with my schedule so I can work for Maven when she needs me. Plus, I don’t have time to deal with homework and exams and all that.” I shrugged. “I just like to learn.”

He leaned forward to kiss me, but I poked him in the ribs. “Your turn. Tell me something that no one knows about you. And make it good.”

The mirth dropped away, replaced by a grimace. “I have a daughter,” he said quietly.

That brought me up short. Quinn
never
talked about his life as a human in Chicago. All I knew was that he hadn’t started working for Maven by choice, and that at some point he’d hurt or maybe killed his human wife when he lost control of his hunger for blood. In the back of my mind, I’d presumed the two things were sort of connected, like maybe he’d accidentally attacked his wife and the Chicago cardinal vampire had shipped him off to Colorado. But he’d never mentioned having a child, and I hadn’t asked.

Now I wasn’t sure what to say. Finally, I settled on, “What’s her name?”

“Holly.” He smiled, eyes full of memory. “Holly Noelle. She was born Christmas Day, and my wife insisted.”

It was so strange to hear him talk about this. I checked myself for any signs of jealousy or anger, but I was just sad for him. His family thought he was dead, and the man he’d once been really
was
dead. At the same time, if Quinn wasn’t that man, who was he? I stroked his cheek.

“How old is she?” I asked.

“Twenty, now.” Quinn had been in his mid- or late thirties when he was turned, and now he’d always look that way. “She can’t know I’m . . . still around, for obvious reasons, but I keep tabs on her, within the rules.”

Vampires weren’t allowed to have any contact with their old lives, but Quinn had found a work-around. He probably kept an eye on her online—that was easy these days—but I decided not to ask. Then I could never be made to tell.

“Does Maven know about her?”

“Of course. Holly is the leash I come with,” he said sourly. “‘Here, take Quinn, and if he ever disobeys you, use his daughter against him.’”

“You really think Maven would do that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “She’s been decent to me—as domini go, I have no complaints. But all my experience with other vampires has suggested I can’t trust them.”

There it was again.
Them
. “You know,” I said carefully, “You’ve never told me about how you were turned.”

He was quiet for a long time. I let the silence play out, not sure if he was avoiding the question or trying to decide how to answer. “I was a cop, you know that part,” he said finally. I nodded. “I
lived
for my job. I had a wife and a little girl, but I was never focused on them. I always wanted to get back to work. I think . . .” He paused for a moment. “I loved my wife, but I rarely thought about her when she wasn’t right in front of me. I treated her like an accessory.” The bitterness was back in his voice, but this time it was all directed at himself.

“Anyway, a few years after I made detective, I got this weird case: young women in their twenties, very beautiful, were vanishing into thin air. Five of them went missing within about three months. I thought maybe I had a serial killer on my hands. And I was
thrilled
.”

His voice was full of pain and regret, but there was plenty of anger there too. “I dug into the disappearances, and realized they didn’t play out like the average murder, or even the average sexually motivated attack. Each woman packed a bag before she disappeared, which implied they knew they were leaving. But none of them said anything to their friends, their families, or their jobs. At first I thought maybe the murderer had convinced each of them that he was taking them away for the weekend or something, but that didn’t explain why they didn’t tell a soul they were leaving town. One woman’s mother was dying in the hospital; you’d think she’d at least say goodbye. It didn’t add up.”

“So you kept digging.”

“Yes. I was sure this was the case that was going to make my career. At the same time, I would often sort of lose interest in it, practically forgetting the whole thing. Then I would go back to the office and find notes all over my desk, and I’d get interested again. I kept another set of notes at home, and sometimes it’d work the other way around. Later, of course, I realized I was being pressed to forget, but at the time I thought someone was drugging me. I started leaving myself little notes, little clues to remind me to keep pushing. And then I . . . I pushed too hard.”

His voice quieted, so I prompted him. “The women,” I said. “They were being turned into vampires?”

“The ones who survived the process, yeah. As it turns out, there’s this vampire pimp in St. Louis, Oskar. He wanted to add to his stable of hot vampire girls, but we’re not allowed to stay in the same city after we turn.”

“So he came up to Chicago to recruit.”

“More or less. I never did find out if the girls really wanted to be vampires, or if they were being pressed to think something else was happening. All I know is that I eventually got too close to this guy, and he . . .
noticed
me.”

His voice caught at the end, so I tried to help him skip ahead in the story. “And turned you.”

But Quinn shook his head. “No. The vampire that Oskar sent after me was supposed to kill me.”

“How did you survive?”

He winced as his eyes filled with the memory of pain. “I was dying, but I managed to get to my gun. I shot her once in the heart, once in the neck. It didn’t kill her, but it was enough to get her to back off while she healed. I crawled out into the street where there were too many witnesses for her to finish me off.”

“You got her blood on you?” I had only a rudimentary understanding of vampire biology, but I thought you needed to ingest vampire blood in order to turn.

He nodded. “I was in too much shock to realize it in the moment, but I’d nicked her carotid artery at close range, so blood went all over my face and into my mouth.” He gave me a wan smile. “Still, I shouldn’t have turned—the odds are terrible. But here I am. I refused to swear troth to Oskar after that, so he sold me to Maven.”

“I’m sorry,” I said softly.

Quinn shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

It really wasn’t, not to a vampire, but I didn’t say that. I considered asking him about attacking his wife, but decided it wasn’t the right time. “Thank you for telling me,” I said instead.

He rolled over on top of me, holding himself up on his elbows so our bodies pressed together. “If you
really
wanted to thank me,” he began very seriously, and my laughter rang through the house.

I woke up alone the next morning, as usual, but this time I felt exceptionally relaxed and peaceful—and I hadn’t had a single dream about Iraq.

I stayed in bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling, thinking over the case, feeling lazy. Eventually, I reached out to check my cell phone. I’d missed a text from a number I didn’t recognize.
Lex, this is Emil. I don’t mean to pressure you, but I need to leave town tomorrow night. Can we talk today?

I started to text back a “sure,” but before I could hit “Send” my phone rang and a picture of Simon replaced the text screen. I answered.

“Hey, Simon,” I said through a yawn. “Good morning. Or noonish or whatever. What’s up?”

There was a momentary pause. “Um, are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m great.
You
sound stressed, though.”

“Have you seen the news today?” Simon asked. “The thing about Gunbarrel Ave?”

“Nope, I just got up.” I flipped off the covers and got up, stretching. The dogs on my bed looked up, tails wagging hopefully. Quinn must have opened the back bedroom door before he’d left. I patted my leg, and they stampeded off the bed en masse. They were so loud that I missed the next thing Simon said to me.

“Sorry, what?”

“
Lex
,” he yelled. “Listen to me. The police found a body last night.”

C
hapter 17

I blinked, frozen with my hand on the doorknob. “Anyone we know?”

He sounded exasperated. “No, but Boulder averages like, one murder a year. Doesn’t it seem like an awfully big coincidence that someone is killed right after the attack on Maven?”

“Huh.”

“Yeah, ‘huh.’ You should call your cousin to see if it was a vampire.”

My brow furrowed. “But Elise doesn’t know about vampires.”

I heard a noise that sounded suspiciously like Simon thunking his head against a wall. “No, I mean a vampire might have killed the guy. You know, drank all his blood?”

“Oh. Right.”

“Are you high right now?” he asked.

I considered the question. “Not unless Lily put something special in my IV.”

Simon didn’t laugh. “Then can you stop by the lab? I need to talk to you about my findings.”

“Sure, I can do that,” I said.

There was a pause. “Maybe get some coffee or something, too, Lex.”

Simon hung up without another word, and I shook my head a little, trying to clear it. I did feel awfully foggy, although physically I felt pretty good. I must just need coffee, I decided, and padded out to the kitchen, humming the theme song from one of Charlie’s favorite kid’s shows.

After I let the dogs out and finished my first mug, I remembered what I was supposed to be doing. I turned on my computer and checked the newspaper’s online home page. Sure enough, the top story was about the body of a forty-year-old man that had been found in a Dumpster behind a tech park. There was no information about the man’s identity or the cause of death, so I called Elise. She was working day shifts that week.

“Hey,” came Elise’s low voice. “Hang on a second.” Louder, she yelled something that sounded like “a hamburger and fries,” and I realized she was at a drive-thru. It was almost noon—of course she was getting lunch.

After a tinny voice told her to pull ahead, Elise was back. “Listen, today’s crazy, I’ve got like five minutes to eat—”

“That’s okay. Are you working the body thing?”

“
Everyone’s
working the body thing,” she grumbled. “I’ve been pointlessly knocking on doors all morning.”

“Can you tell me how he died?”

There was a long pause, and then a muffled exchange while Elise got her food. When she spoke again, she’d put on her professional cop voice. “You know I can’t talk about it, Lex.”

“To the newspapers and the public, yeah. But I’m not looking for trade secrets here, just what’s going to be on the Daily Camera website by close of business.”

She sighed. “We don’t know how or why he died, okay? There wasn’t a mark on him. Right now the ME’s suggesting an aneurism, but that’s kind of what she says when she has no idea.”

“So it might not have been murder.”

“We don’t
know
,” she said impatiently, her mouth now full of food. “Why are you asking, anyway?”

I paused. Why hadn’t I figured out what to say before I called? “Just curious, I guess,” I said lamely. “It wasn’t anyone we know, right?”

“Nah, just some electrical engineer from Fort Collins, worked in the tech park. Listen, I’ve
really
got to go. Love you.”

She hung up before I could say anything else.

I looked down at Chip and Cody, my two Lab mixes, who were looking at me with identical eager expressions. “Why is everyone hanging up on me today?” I asked them. Chip licked the air in front of his face, and Cody bumped his nose into my leg. “Okay, well, as long as it’s not me.” I shrugged and went to get dressed, humming.

As I got closer to Simon’s lab, I started to feel the pressure again. Maven was paralyzed for God knew how long, whoever did it was still running around free, and we had no leads, unless Simon had pulled a CSI miracle and traced the source of the dart guns. Somehow I doubted that.

When Simon opened the door to the Basement of Dr. Moreau, I nearly took a step back. His eyes were red and his hair was wild, like he’d been trying to pull it out by the roots. There were coffee stains down his shirt, and he looked haggard. “Whoa,” I said, handing him a fresh coffee. “You, um, look like you’ve been working hard. Where’s Lily?”

He took the coffee and ushered me inside, his movements slow, like it was hard to move his limbs around. I reminded myself that he’d lost a lot of blood the night before, too. “Taking a nap in my room.”

We went to the small kitchen table, which was now covered in binders and scribbled notes. I sat down in my chair from the night before.

“Did you talk to your cousin?” Simon asked.

“Yes. They actually can’t figure out how the guy died—no external marks—but the current theory is aneurysm. Doesn’t sound like a vampire attack.”

He sighed with relief. “Well, thank God for that. Mom called me this morning, worried it might have been an Old World attack.”

“Has Maven improved at all?” I asked.

“That’s kind of the problem,” he began. “Still no heartbeat, and her color isn’t any better than it was last night—I’ve been taking photos and comparing them. It’s like she’s frozen exactly where she was after you fed her last night.”

“You mean after Lily fed her.”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t. That’s why I called you here. Lily and I have been running tests with samples of Maven’s blood.” He gave me a rueful smile. “It’s possible that Lily’s a tiny bit better than I am at human and vampire physiology, but don’t tell her I said so. Anyway, we examined both the intravascular changes to Maven’s blood, compared to a sample of Quinn’s, and the belladonna has created a reaction that pretty much mimics the effects of disseminated intravascular coagulation—”

“Simon,” I interrupted. “I need the idiot’s guide to this explanation.”

He sighed and rubbed his face with his hands. “Right, sorry. Basically, we looked at how different donor blood reacts to her tainted blood. Vampire blood does almost nothing for her. Human blood sustains her, so she doesn’t starve, but it doesn’t actually counteract the belladonna. It will just keep her in stasis until the poison eventually wears off. Nellie’s method of bloodletting may help a little, but judging from the reaction I’m getting from her cells, I’d estimate six to eight weeks before it’s out of her system.”

I cursed and got up from the table, pacing a little. That was way too long. We were going to have to go with the interim solution, but who could hold the state for two months? Clara was powerful, but I’d pressed her
hard
to keep watch over Charlie, and I’d never tried to undo a press. Besides which, I had no idea how to organize Maven’s contacts to get Clara back from Florida.

Simon’s voice behind me was soft. “Um, there’s one other thing, though.”

I spun around to look at him. “
Your
blood is different,” he said. “It’s like . . . well, ‘antidote’ is too strong a word, but it actively counteracts the belladonna. I can’t really explain it, except—”

“Death in my blood,” I finished for him. “The connection between boundary magic and vampires.”

He nodded. I started pacing again, planning now. “So I donate again tonight. And tomorrow night. Lily can keep giving me IVs—”

“No, Lily can’t,” came a tired voice from the doorway. I looked up and saw Lily leaning against the doorframe, yawning. Her hair was mussed and she looked nearly as exhausted as Simon.

“Sorry, baby sister,” Simon murmured. “We didn’t mean to wake you up.”

She shrugged it off. “Too much coffee to sleep well, anyway.” She began eyeballing my coffee cup where I’d abandoned it on the table. I motioned for her to help herself, and she seized it like Charlie attacking graham crackers. After her first sip, she turned to me. “Lex, you can’t donate again for at least a couple of weeks. Your body can’t handle it.”

“I can’t—”

“Die, I know,” Lily interrupted. “But you don’t heal any faster than anyone else. Your body can’t replace blood any faster.”

“So I’ll feel shitty for a few days,” I reasoned. “How bad could it be?”

Simon arched an eyebrow and gave me a little
you shouldn’t have said that
smile. Lily marched over to his whiteboard and picked up a marker. “The human body is roughly seven percent blood. You weigh . . . what? A hundred and twenty pounds?”

“One twenty-five.”

She wrote the number on the board and did some complicated math that involved long division. “That means your body has approximately three point seven liters of blood, which is, what? Almost eight pints?”

She glanced at Simon, who’d pulled out his phone and was using a calculator app. He nodded. “Seven point eight.”

“Right.” She wrote the number on the board. “Last night you lost almost a third of your blood. You were damned lucky you didn’t go into shock. If we did that to your body every night, without allowing it time to replenish—” She shook her head. “You could go into a coma.”

“So? I’d wake up, right?”

Simon and Lily exchanged a look of annoyance. “It could cause neurological damage, Lex,” Simon told me.

“We are not taking that chance.” Lily’s voice was firm.

I threw up my hands. “What choice do we have? We’re talking about risking the
possibility
of neural damage to one person versus the possibility of a supernatural war breaking out in Colorado.”

“You’re thinking like a soldier.” Simon’s voice was mild, but he brought me up short. When I looked at him, his eyes were fixed on the whiteboard. “There might be another way.”

“What are you thinking?” Lily asked him.

“Lex isn’t the only person in Boulder with boundary witchblood.”

I blanched. “You’re not serious.”

“Who? Charlie?” Lily said, looking back and forth between us. “She’s a null, she won’t have the boundary magic in her system—”

“No,” I said heavily. “Simon wants us to call my biological father.”