Boundary Crossed (Boundary Magic Book 1) (18 page)

“Fine,” I said shortly. “I can do that.”

Well, I could try.

Chapter 25

I’d missed a call from Simon while I was sleeping on Saturday. I called him back, and we arranged another training session for the following week. That Sunday I went back to work at the Flatiron Depot. Big Scott had scheduled a second manager for my first night back, so I ended up having a nice, quiet shift restocking the shelves and working on inventory. At break time, I ate two pieces of the “
Welcome Back” cake Big Scott had bought from the nearest Safeway, and by the time I returned to work Monday night, all the cake was gone and everything was back to normal. I found it surprisingly comforting to be at work, where I always knew what to do and nobody threw around made-up words for mythological happenings. A couple of nights later I even worked with Bettina, who still seemed confused as hell about what had happened the night Charlie was taken. I figured out pretty quickly that it was best not to mention it.

The following Friday I took care of Charlie like always, and the next night my parents took me out to dinner “just to catch up.” My mother spent most of the time talking about my father’s upcoming sixtieth birthday party, and I pretended that I’d never forgotten about it. The Luthers had a big family dinner every few weeks to celebrate all the birthdays that month—there were too many of us for individual celebrations—but this was going to be different. It was the first major family event since Sam’s death, and my mother was determined that it would be a Big Deal. There’s not much of a Who’s Who in Boulder, but what little “high society” we did have would all be there.

A little more time passed, and with the exception of spending a few afternoons a week with the Pellars, my life actually started getting back to normal. My extended family slowly toned down their hand-wringing after what they’d perceived as a garden-variety kidnapping attempt, if there is such a thing. I went hiking with my cousin Anna, babysat for my other cousin Brie, and went to the shooting range with Elise. She gave me the good news that the police had decided I was no longer an official suspect.

“Even Keller?” I asked skeptically.

She made a face. “Okay, he still thinks it was you, but then he probably thinks you’re behind every bad thing that happens in Boulder.”

“He’s like the Sheriff Teasle to my John Rambo,” I grumbled, but I couldn’t entirely blame the guy, either.

When I wasn’t spending time with my family or the herd or at work, I kept to myself, which was exactly the way I liked it.

But although days, and then weeks, slipped by with no word from the vampires and nothing remarkable happening in Charlie’s life, there was still a part of me that just couldn’t relax. Mostly it was because I’d started having these dreams. They were tangled, patchy things, wisps of conversation layered under snatches of dread and the occasional bolt of pure panic. I would wake up disoriented and confused, with Sam’s face in my mind and the vague sensation that I needed to be with Charlie
right now
. There were usually three or four members of the herd staring at me when I woke up, with resigned expressions on their faces that said their mistress had finally lost it.

Now that I was back on my regular work schedule, I was sleeping from midmorning to late afternoon, and the dreams haunted me more often than not. After one terrible week during which I had the dreams every “night,” I started the habit of driving over to John’s house around sunset, when he usually put Charlie to bed. I would park a few houses down and watch the house, like I was on a stakeout in one of those generic cop shows. His neighborhood housed a lot of professors who came and went at odd hours, but if anyone ever noticed me, they didn’t seem troubled by it. I still felt like a creep or, at the very least, an idiot, but I couldn’t seem to stop.

During these vigils, I thought a lot about my dead sister, wondering for the thousandth time what she would think of all this. I thought about John, whom I’d been careful to avoid seeing alone. And, to my surprise, I thought about Quinn, especially the moment when he’d begged me not to let him hurt me.

Each time when I finally left to let the dogs out before my eleven o’clock shift, I would feel the dread and panic start to bleed back into my mood.

One Thursday night in mid-October, I was sitting in my car outside John’s, munching on a bag of barbecue chips and waiting for him to get home with the baby so I could get my hit of Charlie-is-safe relief. It was nearly eight, so I figured he’d probably gone to my parents’ or his mom’s house for dinner and would be back any minute.

There was a sudden knock on the passenger window. I jumped in my seat, and looked over to see Quinn waving at me with a little smirk on his face. We hadn’t spoken since the night he’d called to tell me the vampires weren’t sure about me. Part of me still hadn’t forgiven him for dropping the case . . . or for telling Itachi and Maven that I was unstable.

Even if it was true.

I sighed and unlocked the door, watching as he climbed into the car. To my horror, I realized that I was actually kind of glad to see him. Between the way he’d tattled on me and Simon’s warning about vampires’ motives, I wanted to loathe his undead guts. But there was also a part of me that found him very . . . comfortable to be around.

“Is it absolutely necessary for you to scare the shit out of me every time we meet?” I demanded.

“Hey, Lex,” he said, ignoring the question. “How’s tricks?” He glanced around the car. I keep it fairly neat, but there were a few empty containers from fountain sodas and chips that I hadn’t gotten to yet. “I see you’ve developed an exciting new interest in stalking.”

“Is there news from Itachi?” I asked fervently. “Did they make a decision about me?”

He shook his head. “No, sorry. The coffee shop gets really busy this time of year—midterms—and there’s been a bit of trouble with one of the Colorado Springs vampires. I think they’ve put the whole situation with your niece on the back burner. Charlie’s still protected,” he added hastily. “Just not a priority right now.”

I didn’t bother saying that Charlie was always a priority to
me
. Quinn already knew. “Then why are you here?” I asked coolly.

He gave a little shrug. “Just checking in. I hear you’ve been keeping up with the magic lessons. How did you get Mama Pellar’s permission?”

I smiled wryly. Three afternoons a week, Simon or Lily came over to the cabin to teach me magic. Whenever I asked about Hazel’s thoughts on my training, though, they inevitably changed the subject. “I don’t actually know,” I admitted. “I’m not one hundred percent sure she even knows.” I got the sense that Simon and Lily had told Hazel that it was better to have me on their side than for me to be an unknown quantity, but they were too polite to tell me that.

Quinn nodded impassively. “How are the lessons going?”

I automatically opened my mouth to answer but caught myself just in time, turning in my seat to fully face Quinn. John’s street was well lit, and the vampire was looking at me with calm curiosity. “Who’s asking?” I said bluntly.

A flicker of surprise crossed his features, either because he didn’t expect me to see through him, or because I’d hurt his feelings. If I hadn’t seen the look on his face when my palm had started bleeding, I wouldn’t even know whether he
had
feelings. “Just me, Lex,” he said quietly. “I promise.”

“The lessons have been fine,” I said. Then I sighed, relenting. “Okay, not that fine. I’m learning more about what I can do—Simon geeks out about it on a regular basis—and it turns out I’ve got plenty of juice. But so far I’m a filter, not a focus.”

Quinn nodded again. “You can pull the magic through you,” he translated, “but you can’t push it where you want it to go?”

“Something like that.” I gave him a brief rundown of my training. For most of the sessions, we would go out behind my small backyard and stand near the fence that formed a border with the forest just beyond my cabin. Whichever Pellar was helping me would have me sense out the life in the forest. I had gotten good at visualizing myself putting on night-vision goggles and then filtering my vision until I caught the glowing sparks of mice, squirrels, and rabbits. I started to understand the sizes and shapes, although that wasn’t precisely the right word, of the different creatures.

When Lily was my teacher, the practice would be laid-back and exploratory: she was big on improvisation, letting the lessons go wherever they took us. Eventually she started working with me on tethering down my emotions so my magic wouldn’t flare up and overwhelm me anymore. Simon, on the other hand, was much more organized and regimented. He actually brought a clipboard out to the backyard with us, using it to take notes on my capabilities. I’d made him swear he wouldn’t kill anything just for my education again, so his big thing was to have me practice turning on my magical plane mindset over and over again until it became second nature. When I got good at switching it on and off quickly, we started working on concentration, making sure I could hold the thermal-imaging mindset without getting easily distracted. Which usually meant trying to do it while Simon tossed pinecones at my face.

One day, during a Simon practice, I had a breakthrough. We were working on expanding and contracting the beam of my scrutiny, so I would concentrate on a space about twelve feet by twelve feet, and then narrow my focus down to a single small nest of field mice within that square before repeating the process. That afternoon practice had run long, and the sky had started to darken while we were still working. As I was concentrating on the mice, there was a sudden rustle of feathers and air, and I felt the larger spark of an owl swoop down onto my mice, snatching one of them up.

As the mouse died, its spark didn’t just fade out—it
changed
into that same sickly, yellowish-brown, concentrated mist that had drifted toward me from the dead mouse in the hayloft. And I had a realization.

“As it turns out,” I told Quinn now, “I’ve been feeling these sort of sparks of life, but they’re more than just little blips on my radar. They’re
containers
for the death-essence. Or at least that’s how my brain interprets it.”

Quinn considered that for a long moment, then asked, “What happened to the essence when the mouse died?”

I shivered. “It drifted toward me. It was . . . attracted to me.”

“Wow,” Quinn said, impressed. “You really do have death in your blood.”

After that epiphany, if I really concentrated during my practices, I could actually
feel
the death-essence within each blue buzz of life. After all, the potential for death is in all living things. I didn’t say that to the undead vampire beside me, though.

“Can you do the same stuff that the other witches do?” Quinn said idly. “Protection spells and healing and whatnot?”

“No,” I admitted. Simon had tried to teach me a very simple charm to clean something. I’d seen him use it on
an old grill behind the cabin, forcing the dust and grime off it in one small, potent burst of magic. Then he’d reached down and picked up a fistful of dry dirt, depositing it on top of the grill. I hadn’t been able to clean off a speck. “Apparently, if it doesn’t have to do with death, I can’t access it.”

“What about your niece?” he pressed. “Did you ever ask Simon about a connection between nulls and boundary witches?”

I eyed him suspiciously. “What is this, a quilting bee?” I retorted. “Do you really expect me to believe you tracked me down just to play catch-up?”

A long moment ticked by with Quinn’s face frozen on neutral. “Yes, I asked,” I muttered.

“What did he say?”

“He’s looking into it,” I said tiredly. This particular subject had been an ongoing source of disappointment for me. “Apparently there aren’t many witches who study the scientific or historical connections between different types of magic, or if there are, they don’t talk to each other. Simon’s been doing research, but he said it isn’t easy to find records of nulls, and the ones that he’s found show no particular connection to boundary witches.”

“What about the other way around?” Quinn asked. “Has he found boundary witches who have connections to nulls?”

I shook my head. “That’s even harder, apparently. Nobody’s wanted to admit to being a boundary witch since the Inquisition.” Not that I could really blame them.

“You could ask Maven,” Quinn pointed out. “She’s known a few nulls.”

I considered that for a moment, then shook my head. “Maybe after Simon exhausts all his options. Right now I’m still trying to get her and Itachi to see me as a useful employee. I’m not sure asking for favors is the right way to go about it.”

We sat there in silence for a few more minutes, staring at John’s house. “What exactly is your plan with this?” Quinn said eventually. “You’re hoping the bad guy makes a run at her during the three hours a day you happen to be watching?”

I thought of the dreams I’d been having. “It’s not that,” I told him stiffly. “It’s just that these are the only three hours of the day when I’ve been getting any peace.” He opened his mouth to respond, but before he could say anything, I added tartly, “See, some of us actually have a hard time letting a murderous kidnapper get away with it.”

Quinn didn’t meet my eyes, just stared straight ahead out the windshield. His jaw tensed and untensed, as if he was trying to decide whether or not to speak. Finally he sighed and reached into the breast pocket of his leather jacket. He pulled out a wad of paper and tossed it to me.

“What’s this?” I clicked on the car’s reading light and unfolded the bundle, scanning the top few lines. “Phone records?”

He nodded. “For Victor, Darcy, Kirby, and Nolan. Those weren’t easy to get, by the way. Vampires almost exclusively use prepaid cell phones.”

“You pressed some people,” I summarized. I looked down at the list of numbers, but nothing jumped out. “Is there anything here?”

“Not really. They all mostly called each other, like a closed loop. And Itachi and Magic Beans. Kirby contacted his fraternity brothers, of course. Darcy called a few clothing stores.”