Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) (2 page)

C
hapter 2

I didn’t think; I just jumped down and banged on the side of the washing machine. “Here, here!” I yelled, and the fox paused for a moment, looking over its shoulder at me in confusion. Then it looked back at Lily, who was struggling to stand on numb feet. I could practically see the fox reach the obvious conclusion: of the two of us, she was the easier target.

I grabbed the nearest thing at hand—a small bottle of stain remover—and hurled it at the fox, managing to clip its left back leg. It turned its head for long enough to send me a perfunctory hiss, but immediately turned to creep toward Lily. She limped backward, but not fast enough. I started toward them, and like a dog being chased by its owner, the fox sped up.

When it was less than a foot from Lily, I panicked, and my instincts took over completely. I dropped to my knees and reached for my magic.

It took less than half a second—
thank you, Simon
—to drop into my boundary mindset, the trancelike state that lets me see the spark of living creatures. When I opened my eyes, it was like staring at the world through thermal-imaging goggles. Lily’s life force was brightest—a huge, humanoid blue glow. The little fox’s essence was much, much smaller, the size of a matchbox, and it should have been blue as well, but there was something wrong with it. The color was swirling with black, which I’d never seen before.
What the hell?

No time. I reached out a hand and visualized the tattoos on my wrist sprouting into long, snaking extensions of my fingers. My phantom fingers encircled the fox, tightening around its essence. Then, as my real fingers curled back toward my body, the invisible fingers pulled the life spark of the fox away, separating it from its physical body.

I’d done this with animals before, but for a moment the fox seemed almost to resist me, which was a first. I pulled harder, and the spark of swirling light came away in my fingers, immediately turning a sickly, yellowish-brown color, the color of death.

But it was still swirling with black.

I could absorb death magic into myself for a power boost, but I instinctively knew I didn’t want that blackness anywhere near me. Gritting my teeth with concentration, I allowed the vaporous color to dissolve through my ghostly fingers until it was gone. Then I blinked away the mindset and climbed to my feet.

Well, that was the idea, anyway. I’d forgotten how much playing with death essences affects me. As I tried to stand, the surge of power hit me, and I stumbled, pausing to savor the dark sweetness of boundary magic.
Mine, mine, mine
pumped my thoughts, and I felt a great burst of exhilaration and greed.
More
. I wanted to do it again, but this time—

“Lex?” Lily’s voice was tentative, a little weak, almost . . . afraid. Of me?

I shook my head violently, clearing the fog of death magic from my mind. When I looked at Lily, she was standing near the fox’s corpse, staring at me with concern and, yes, a little fear. My insides twisted with guilt. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Haven’t done that in a while. Caught me off-guard.”

“It’s okay.” Lily’s eyes dropped to the small body at her feet. “You drained him?”

I nodded. Lily hadn’t actually seen me do this before, but she knew about the time I’d accidentally sucked the life out of all the fish in a small pond during a magic lesson with Simon. “Well, good,” she said shakily. “I’m glad it still worked with the tattoos.”

Right. Lily had created the griffin tattoos on my forearms as a way to help me focus my magic. “I didn’t even consider that it might not,” I admitted. “I just sort of reached.”

She nodded. “We gotta tell Simon the training’s paying off.” She squatted down to get a closer look at the fox, rubbing her ankles with one hand. “Oof. I don’t know what that position would be called—”

“Upside-downward facing dog?” I suggested.

She barked out a laugh. “Yes. Change approved. Anyway, I’m gonna feel it tomorrow.” She leaned forward, peering at the fox’s corpse, until her closeness started to make me nervous.

“Don’t touch it, Lil.”

“I won’t. We’re thinking rabies, right? Should we, like, call someone? Animal control?”

It was such a normal, nonmagical question that it took me a moment to process it. Something had to have infected the fox, and if there were animals running around with rabies, informing animal control would be the right thing to do. Then again . . . “Do you want to explain how we killed it?”

“Uh, good point. I guess we better call Simon, anyway.”

I checked my watch. Nine-thirty. “He’ll probably be, um . . . working.”

Lily snorted and went to the steps to get her phone out of her bag.

Leaving the fox corpse where it was, I began straightening the furniture while Lily talked to her brother. When he wasn’t doing stuff for the witch clan, Simon worked as an evolutionary biologist at the university. This wouldn’t be the first time I’d called on him for biology help. Nearly six months earlier, an ancient snakelike creature called the Unktehila (or the sandworm, if we’re being informal) started eating people in Boulder, and Simon was a huge part of figuring out what it was and how to kill it. Afterward, he had asked my boss Maven if he could study the remains as part of his ongoing research into Old World biology.

Maven had done him one better. She’d set him up with a small basement apartment in one of the buildings she owned, and refitted it into a sort of makeshift laboratory, although Simon actually lived there as well. I hadn’t spent much time at the basement lab, but last I’d checked it was a pretty depressing place: concrete floors, blank white walls, no TV or music to distract from the hum of equipment. Plus many chunks of dead snake monster. Lily referred to it as the Basement of Dr. Moreau.

After a short exchange, Lily stuffed the phone in her pocket and reported, “He said it sounds like an average case of rabies, and you shouldn’t touch the saliva without gloves.”

I blinked. “That’s it? He doesn’t want to come look at it?”

She rolled her eyes. “He also asked me to remind you that he is not a veterinary pathologist and he hasn’t dissected anything but the sandworm and its pellets since grad school.”

“So he was testy.”

She held up her fingers with the thumb and index half an inch apart. “Little bit.”

I frowned, but this wasn’t the time to discuss Simon’s ongoing withdrawal from the world. “Should we bury it?” Lily asked me, looking at the fox’s corpse again.

“I have a better idea. It’s just . . . grosser.” I went to a shelf above the washing machine and grabbed a couple of rags, positioning them over my hands like makeshift oven mitts. Moving toward the fox, I stepped over it until I had one foot on either side of its head. Then I bent down, held the head carefully with the rags, and tilted it backward. “Plug your ears, Lily,” I advised. She clapped her hands over her ears, and I twisted until the fox’s neck snapped with a sickening crunch.

Even though her ears were covered, Lily jumped, cursing. “
Why
?”

I straightened, tossing the rags on top of the body and wiping my hands on my gym shorts. It wouldn’t exactly cleanse me of dead fox germs, but it was a psychological thing. “Now I can call my cousin, the vet, and he can test it for rabies,” I explained. “If he asks, it ran into the washer and its neck snapped.”

“Oh. Good call.”

“Of course,” I said with exaggerated regret, “this probably means we’ll have to put off the movie.” I shook my head. “So sad.”

She tossed a water bottle at my face, but I caught it easily. As I unscrewed the top and took a gulp, I headed for my own phone, which I’d left on the bottom step. I called Jake, who was characteristically cool about the idea of getting a rabies-infected fox corpse delivered to his house at ten o’clock on a weeknight. I could have left it until the next morning, but I just didn’t trust my rescue animals to stay away from the body.

And, okay, I just wanted to be rid of the thing.

I hung up with Jake, but before I could put the phone back down, it buzzed in my hand. New text. I frowned down at the screen.

“Is it your undead boyfriend?” Lily said brightly. She made a fake kissy sound. “Tell him I said hi.”

I made a face at her. Sometimes I missed the days when Lily and Quinn couldn’t stand each other. “No, it’s from Maven,” I replied. “She wants me to come in right away.” Maven kept her communications brief and friendly, but there was no mistaking her text for anything but a command. I looked at the dead fox, then at my friend. “So, Lily,” I began. “I need a favor.”

She wrinkled her nose at me. “Ewww, really?”

I found an old cardboard box for Lily, who held it as far away from her body as she could. “Rabid fox in a box,” she grumbled. “I swear this is the beginning of a twisted Dr. Seuss book.”

While she took the fox-box out to her car to keep it away from my animals, I ran upstairs to throw on jeans and a T-shirt. I also strapped a shredder stake to my arm with two doubled-up athletic headbands. Months ago, I’d nearly died for lack of a shredder. I no longer left the house without one. This meant that I wore long sleeves all the time, but that was fine by me. When summer came, it might be a different story, though.

Lily had returned and was waiting for me at the front door, twirling her keys around one finger. Despite her earlier complaints, she seemed pleased to be doing something useful, which probably had a lot to do with her inability to master the art of punching people.

I was just flicking off the lights to leave when I realized my skin was tingling. I paused and held up my arm, examining one of my tattoos. Was it pulsing? Or was something wrong with my eyes? “Lil . . .”

I felt, rather than saw, her turn and look me over. “You killed the fox,” she said, understanding. “You have to ground the magic, Lex.”

Oh. Right. Witches are made to channel, not possess. If I didn’t expel the death magic, I could end up “magic-drunk,” which was not nearly as fun as it sounded. Unfortunately, I only knew two trades witch spells, and one of them involved throwing people backward. “Hang on.” Stumbling a little, I made it back down the basement stairs and planted my palms flat on the floor so the tips of my tattoos touched the cold concrete. I mumbled the spell Simon had taught me for cleaning a space.

“Good,” Lily said approvingly, as the grime, fur, and fox saliva vanished from the floor. “The tattoos help with your control.”

“Yeah, thanks to you.”

I gave Lily Jake’s address, waved goodbye, and climbed into my own ten-year-old Outback, steeling myself for a nighttime drive into Boulder. Since I’d unblocked my ability to see ghosts, being behind the wheel after dark had gotten . . . complicated. A lot of people die in car accidents each year, and their deaths are so sudden and traumatic that they often leave behind remnants, spiritual snapshots of the dead. Driving
through
translucent figures of people was unnerving as hell, so these days I rarely drove anywhere after dark unless my job or my family required it. I had developed a few routes that bypassed as many ghosts as possible for when I needed to go somewhere alone at night, but I still had to mentally brace myself every time.
They’re not real people,
I would tell myself.
They’re just psychic echoes.

It sort of helped.

I tried to distract myself by figuring out why Maven had called me in on a Tuesday. I had fallen into the habit of dropping in at Magic Beans, Maven’s twenty-four-hour coffee shop, on Sunday and Thursday nights to see if she had any daytime errands for me. A summons tonight meant some sort of Old World emergency, which was bad.

On the other hand, if there
was
a problem, Quinn would be there—we did this job together—and I was looking forward to seeing him. In theory, we’d been dating for six months now, but the first few months of that had been spent dealing with the aftermath of the Unktehila’s rampage. It hadn’t just killed people in Boulder; it had also attacked a spa in Indian Springs, leaving behind a lot of evidence and plenty of witnesses. Before confronting the creature, we’d arranged for a vampire to wait at the main exit of the spa to catch the people who were stampeding out of the building. She had used vampire mind control—“pressing minds”—to convince them nothing had happened. But a few people slipped the net, including a very sweet and unfortunately photogenic young mother and her toddler, whom the Unktehila had briefly cornered. The young woman was already on the nightly news screaming “giant snake monster” while the rest of us were still off dealing with the bloodshed.

I had to admire the way Maven had handled the whole thing. The official story she’d cooked up was great: some of the natural chemicals used in the spa went bad and were circulated in the air, causing temporary (but harmless) hallucinogenic effects. Several spa clients panicked and stampeded, causing a great deal of damage to the building’s interior.

Maven also sent vampires to work their magic on the authorities, getting them to stay out of the spa building while a “team of specialists” safely aired it out and checked for any people left in the building. The police were so busy calming witnesses, dealing with reporters, and handling the minor injuries caused by the public panic that most of them never did much to investigate the chemical story. Those who
did
follow up were pressed to stop.

The Grizzly Springs and Spa couldn’t survive the blitz of negative publicity that followed. I’d felt a little sorry for the spa’s owners, an older couple who reminded me of my own ex-hippie parents. But Maven, who has money the way other people have skin cells, quietly made them a very generous offer for the property, which of course they took.

Although everything appeared to be tied up with a neat bow, Quinn and I had been kept busy making sure the frayed ends of the official story held together. It wasn’t enough to just buy the property and shut it down. Stampeding, hallucinating spa guests could explain a great deal of damage, but they definitely couldn’t explain the snake-monster-sized holes in the walls and the pool floor. And as it turned out, the building couldn’t simply be demolished because of the fragile underground tunnels that ran beneath it. So Maven had to renovate the whole place, which meant pressing the minds of a number of construction workers on a regular basis. Pressing minds was Quinn’s department, but I had to hang around during the daytime to make sure it was working, which meant he and I were on opposite schedules for months.