Boundary Crossed (Boundary Magic Book 1) (14 page)

“It didn’t feel invasive, though, did it?” Simon asked mildly.

I paused, considering. “No,” I admitted. “It felt . . . fantastic.” I went back to pacing, but I could feel his eyes on me.

“Let’s do it again,” he suggested.

So we did. For the next two hours, I concentrated on the sparks of life in the barn. Simon taught me how to ignore the blaze of his own soul and focus on the mice, until I knew that there were exactly twelve of them in the barn, six were babies, and their nest was seven inches left of the exact intersection of the two walls, underneath the hay. With my eyes closed, I “felt” them inside my head, each mouse represented as a tiny speck that sort of glowed softly, moving as the mouse moved. It was eerie. And completely fascinating.

After two hours my stomach growled, and I opened my eyes to see Simon checking his watch. “We need to wrap this up soon,” he told me, a little regretful. I remembered that it was Friday, and some people actually had to work regular jobs today.

I nodded. I was a little tired, but exhilarated. “That’s amazing,” I said happily. “When you guys talked about learning magic I thought I was going to have to memorize Latin or something.” I could see how being able to sense life could be useful, especially in a combat-type situation.

But Simon smiled ruefully. “Technically,” he pointed out, “you’re not actually
doing
any magic yet. I’ve just been helping you sense the magic that’s out there for you to manipulate.”

My glee dissipated a bit. “Right,” I said.

“I want to do one more thing before we call it a day,” he said, and his voice was suddenly . . . grim. He leaned forward so he could reach into his back pocket and pulled out a leather gardening glove. “Hang on a second,” he told me. I watched him get up and go over to the bale of hay above the mice’s nest, flipping it forward like you’d flip a stone to dig up earthworms. There was a quick rustle of movement and a bit of squeaking as he leaned over and rummaged through the hay.

“Simon?” I said uncertainly. “What . . .”

He straightened up then, the hand with the glove holding one of the little white field mice by the tail. “What are you doing?” I said warily.

“Shh, it’s okay,” Simon reassured me. He sat down on the hay bale across from me, still holding the mouse. I glowered at him, suddenly afraid he was going to drop it in my hair like an eighth grader. But he settled into his seat, holding up one palm in the universal gesture of “I’m not going to hurt you,” and finally I relaxed.

But I shouldn’t have.

“I just want you to focus on its spark of life, please,” Simon coaxed, and I closed my eyes and obeyed. Now that I understood how to extend my senses, I found the mouse’s spark right away.

“Focus on it,” Simon said softly. I did, concentrating on the tiny blue glow.
It was so little
, I marveled. And Simon’s glow was so much bigger, but it was brighter, too. Maybe humans had more of a soul than mice? That would—

Abruptly, I heard a tiny
snap
, and the blue spark of life I’d been focusing on flickered out. No, wait, it was still there . . . but the bright blue glow had been replaced by a sickly, yellowish-brown, gaseous mass.

And then the gas started to drift toward me, like an airborne toxin.

Chapter 20

My focus broke.

My eyes flew open, and I bolted off the hay bale, scrambling backward until my shoulder blades hit a wall. There was no toxin in the air, not that I could see, anyway. Just Simon sitting there with a guilty look on his face and a dead mouse in his hand.

“No!” I shouted. In an instant I dove forward, tackling him to the ground. That was the plan, anyway, but when I was within a hairsbreadth of touching Simon, he calmly held up his free hand, his lips moving inaudibly—and I glanced off him.

Wait,
what
?

I stood up and swung a left roundhouse at his cheekbone, the fury pushing my limbs long before I had the chance to think. Again, he held up a hand, muttering, and I seemed to slide right off into the air near it.

“Sergeant Luther,
calm down
!” Simon barked, and I froze, a decade of instincts stirring back to life in my nerve endings. I managed a slow step backward, my hands still bunched into fists. I could feel the tension forming a U from the ends of my left-hand fingers across my shoulders and down to my other fist, but I couldn’t seem to let go of it. I could hear my breathing, heavy in the quiet hayloft. “Why?” I demanded.

“First of all, let’s keep in mind that it’s a
mouse
,” Simon pointed out, his voice a little heated now. “There are three cats and four kittens on this farm, so this little guy’s days were numbered no matter what.”

I didn’t move. “Second,” he continued. “Stop and assess how you feel right now.”

That took me aback for a second, and I obeyed him without thinking. How did I feel? I felt . . . exhilarated. Fulfilled. The darkness that surrounded me had been channeled into something for a moment there, and it was like I had a purpose again, for the first time since I’d been kicked out of the army. I felt . . . powerful.

“I want to do it again,” I whispered in answer. All the fight went out of me, and I hunched back to my bale of hay. “What’s happening to me?”

“It’s okay,” Simon reassured me, but I didn’t feel very reassured. “Come on, let’s get out of here. Go for a walk.”

I nodded numbly, and he flipped open the trapdoor.

We didn’t speak on the way out of the barn, or as we walked down the driveway. At some point, Simon must have gotten rid of the dead mouse, but I didn’t see what he did with it and I didn’t care. The only thing I could really think about was how close I was to my car.

I wanted to go
home
. I wanted to send gravel flying in the air as I flew out of that driveway and never looked back. I wanted to grab John and Charlie and evacuate them out of the state, forget that I had ever heard the words “boundary witch” or “magic” or “null.” Just start over somewhere else and live a normal life, leaving all my darkness behind.

It would never work, though. I’d given Maven and Itachi my word, and they would never let me grab Charlie and waltz out of there. They’d force me back, if only to make a point about not defying them. And besides, I had roots in Boulder, deep ones. If we ran, Charlie and John might be safe, but I had a couple dozen more family members in this town that the vampires could go after. I’d seen the file they had on me. There was no way it didn’t include all my aunts and uncles and cousins, not to mention my parents. Hell, my dad was the president of Luther Shoes. They could walk right into his office.

No, I had to stay. I had to get control of this. I would just need to be stronger, that was all.

That was all.

We were a few hundred feet down the road when Simon finally spoke again. “These are potatoes, which you probably know,” he said casually, nodding at the field on our left. “Onions on the other side of the road, and we have a lot of tomatoes, too. All in all, we’ve got about four hundred acres. That’s small for Colorado, but it would be pretty big in the smaller states.”

“A farm boy, huh?” I said lightly, grateful for the change in subject. “And a witch. And a college professor.”

“
Associate
professor,” he corrected, grinning.

“What do you teach?” I asked. “No wait, let me guess: Occult Studies? Myth and Mythology? History of Witchcraft? No, that wouldn’t be in the science building . . . or
would
it?”

He laughed again. “Evolutionary Biology. That part is all me, but there’s actually a long history of witches being farmers. It’s one of the few professions where we can use our gifts and still stay under the radar.” He shrugged modestly. “Our crops just do a little better than some.”

“Do you live here, at the farmhouse?” I asked. “You keep saying ‘we’ and ‘our.
’
”

“Not really. I’ve got an apartment in town, near CU,” he told me. “But I grew up here, and I still stay over weekends sometimes, help when I can.” He flashed a grin, his teeth flashing in the late-morning sunlight. “There’s not a lot of testosterone around here, so I think my brothers-in-law appreciate it when I turn up. Two of them work the farm pretty much full-time.”

We walked on for a while, Simon letting me have some space. I wasn’t sure if he had suggested the walk because he knew the activity would make me feel better, or if it was just a coincidence, but I appreciated the exercise anyway. My head cleared up when I was moving. “You said your sisters were witches, too,” I said finally. “Are your brothers-in-law?”

“Nah. Statistically, almost all witches are female,” he said cheerfully. “Men who inherit the magic gene are few and far between. Sybil’s husband, Oliver, is from an old witch family; he just doesn’t have witchblood. Morgan’s husband, Tony, is human, so we’re not allowed to talk about vampires or werewolves in front of him. He knows that my whole family are practicing Wiccans, but we downplay the actual magic part.” He shrugged. “Tony thinks the Pellars have the equivalent of a really green thumb.”

“Hmm.” I tried to imagine telling my parents I was a witch. My live-and-let-live dad would do his best to ignore it; he would assume I was going through a weird fad. My mother would be so grateful that I was interested in something, she’d probably offer to be a witch with me. “What about your girlfriend?” I asked Simon. “Is she a witch, too?”

He glanced over at me, surprised. “How did you know I have a girlfriend?”

“In the hospital,” I said promptly. “Quinn told you to say hi to Tracy, who had gone home ahead of you. None of your sisters are named Tracy, and you’re not wearing a wedding ring.” I shrugged. “Ergo, Tracy is your girlfriend.”

He gave me a sly half grin. “Tracy could be my boyfriend,” he pointed out.

“No,” I said firmly, “You said ‘she’ in the hospital.”

He gave me a surprised look. “Good memory. Yes, she’s a witch. She’s been in our clan since we were kids.”

“High school sweethearts?” I asked, making sure my voice didn’t come out all wistful.

“College,” he said. “We complement each other well.”

That didn’t exactly sound like the basis for a thriving romance, but then again, what did I know? Maybe it worked for them. “What about you?” Simon asked. “Do you have someone?”

“No,” I said. “Most of the guys I meet are half-drunk college kids who come into the store to buy condoms at two a.m. Before that . . . I had a couple of casual relationships in the army, but nothing to write home about. Literally.”

He chuckled and pushed his glasses up on his nose with one hand. “Listen, about Quinn . . .”

I looked at him uncertainly, a little thrown by the segue. He wasn’t about to ask if I was interested in Quinn romantically, was he? I mean, it hadn’t escaped my attention that the guy was great-looking, of course. And, okay, it had certainly been a long time since I’d . . . let’s say
, gone on a date. But Quinn was a vampire. A
vampire
.

Happily, Simon just said, “I heard you were helping him figure out who went after your niece. We didn’t really get a chance to talk about it before, what with my mom and all, but how is that going?”

So I filled him in on the case—what little we knew, anyway. “He’s picking me up tonight and we’re going to talk to Darcy’s . . . um, I don’t know the terminology, but the vampire she was sworn to,” I finished.

As we turned and walked back toward the house, Simon said hesitatingly, “Just . . . be careful, okay? Around Quinn, I mean.”

I paused, forcing him to stop and turn too. “I thought Quinn was your friend,” I said, eyebrows raised.

Simon shrugged. “He sort of is, to my eternal surprise. And I would trust the guy with my life . . . as long as keeping me alive was in Itachi’s best interests.”

I digested that for a moment, then resumed walking. “Vampires aren’t like us, Lex,” he said eventually. “You make your choices based on what’s best for you and the people you love. So do I. But Quinn has to do what’s best for vampires. Specifically, the one he works for. He doesn’t have a choice.”

Lily and Hazel were nowhere to be seen when we got back to the main house, and I realized that neither of them had been out front when we left for our walk, either. Simon must have noticed this when I did, because he dug out his phone from a pocket and looked at the screen, squinting against the sunshine. “Lily texted,” he informed me. “She’s taking Mom into town to run errands, maybe catch a movie. Lily’s really great at helping Mom get her mind off . . . you know.” He gave me an embarrassed smile.

“Her problems?” I volunteered. “Such as the perversion of nature who’s suddenly appeared in her life?”

“Ehhh . . .” Simon tilted one hand back and forth. “She doesn’t think you’re a perversion of
nature
, so much as a perversion of
magic
,” he offered helpfully.

I lightly kicked the back of his knee as he walked, making him topple forward. He managed to right himself without falling on his face. “I may have been
slightly
deserving of that,” he said loftily. Then his face turned serious. “Listen, Lex, I’ll call you tomorrow after I talk to Lily, and we’ll work out a schedule for lessons. But there’s one other thing you need to know today.” He gave me a complicated look, part sadness and part awe. “Now that you’ve used your magic a couple of times, it’s going to grow.”

“So . . . ?” I prompted.

“So, you should know that until you learn to channel it properly”—I thought of the flashlight beam of awareness I’d directed at the mouse, and how damned hard it had been to keep it going
—“you’re not going to have control of it. Magic is tied to emotions,” he explained, “You know how you can channel your feelings into doing something constructive or destructive? The same is true of magic.”

I wasn’t particularly good at channeling my emotions, but I didn’t say that. “Got it.”

Simon hesitated. “In the meantime . . . you’ll feel things really hard.”

I shrugged. What else was new?

“And,” he added with some urgency, “I wouldn’t try to press any vampires.”

But that was, like, the coolest thing I could do. “Why not?”

He shook his head. “You’re gonna be a little unstable for a few weeks while your magic settles in. Which makes it a lot more likely that you’ll slip up, giving a vampire a chance to gain control of you instead. And if they figure out you tried to press them . . .” He shook his head. “They
really
wouldn’t like that.”