Boundary Crossed (Boundary Magic Book 1) (19 page)

I let my hands rest in my lap and stared at Quinn. “Do Maven and Itachi know you’re doing this?”

He shook his head. “And I could get in a lot of trouble if they found out. Technically, neither one ordered me
not
to pursue the case, but if they knew I was following up on my own, they’d probably be pissed.”

“Then why do it?” I asked.

He finally turned his head to stare at me, his cool eyes assessing mine. “Oh,” I said stupidly. “You did this for me.”

“Some of us have a hard time letting a murderous kidnapper get away with it,” he said, throwing my own words back at me.

At that moment John’s hybrid car finally pulled into the driveway, and with a breath of relief I watched as my brother-in-law stepped out of it, wearing his denim jacket, and opened the back door to pull out Charlie’s car seat. I caught a glimpse of the familiar tuft of dark hair as he swung the car seat around the door. John reached back into the car and pulled out something else, too, and I found myself leaning forward a little as I tried to make it out: a wide, thin package on a hanger.

“It’s a tux,” Quinn mused. His night vision was no doubt a hell of a lot better than mine. “Huh. He doesn’t really seem like a tux kind of guy.”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s for my dad’s sixtieth birthday party,” I explained. “My mom had the bizarre idea that black tie would be fun. So now all the Luther Shoes employees who are going have to run out and rent tuxedos, the poor bastards.”

Quinn’s mouth quirked. “I take it you’re not a fan of formalwear.”

“I’m a fan of comfort, durability, and movement,” I said archly. “Not sequins.”

“But you’re going to the ball anyway?”

“I have to.” My mom was going all-out for this stupid thing, even though my dad, as a general rule, didn’t like fuss. When I’d suggested that I would be better off manning the kids’ room— most parties have a kids’ table, but in this case Mom had actually hired a nanny service to take care of the guests’ kids so everyone could enjoy the party—she’d put her foot down and said I was to be charming, polite, and engaged. Apparently I had used up all the sympathy points I’d had left over from my multiple stab wounds. “And don’t call it a ball. It’s a friggin’ birthday party.”

“Where is it?”

I flushed and muttered, “The Glenn Miller Ballroom.”

Quinn’s face broke out into a grin, and I swatted him.

Chapter 26

The next day was a cool, overcast Friday, and Simon came over in the early afternoon so we could do my magic lesson before I had to go babysit Charlie. The dogs announced his presence at one o’clock, and I went outside to meet him, figuring I could avoid his having to deal with the herd. When I stepped out, though, Simon was already halfway to the front door. He usually wore khakis or jeans and a button-down shirt to our practices, the kind of outfit a young professor would wear to class, but today he had on threadbare green cargo pants and a quilted vest over a long-sleeved hoodie with paint on the sleeves. I was immediately suspicious, especially when I noticed that his outfit included a pair of galoshes.

“Simon?” I said warily. “Why are you wearing that?” As I stepped off the porch, I caught sight of his station wagon in the driveway. “And why is there a goddamned
canoe
tied to the top of your car?”

“We’re going to canoe out into the lake,” he said, his voice obnoxiously cheerful, “to see if you can sense life underwater.”

I glared at him. I don’t like large bodies of water. Oh, I’m fine in bathtubs and the occasional swimming pool, but anytime there’s wild, natural water under me, I have a tendency to freak out. Let’s just say there was a reason I joined the army instead of the navy.

My dislike of water extends to a serious discomfort with boating, since I actually fell out of a boat the first time I died. “Not a chance,” I informed him, folding my arms across my chest.

“Look, you need a new location, Lex,” he argued. “We’ve been doing the woods for weeks, and it’s too easy for you now. It’s time for a new challenge.”

“Yeah, your lips are moving, but all I hear is ‘Lex, I want to do an experiment on you,
’
” I grumbled, not moving an inch toward the boat. “I’m a boundary witch, Simon, not a magical guinea pig.”

“It’s not that, I promise,” he cajoled. “But I know Lily’s been helping you work on controlling your emotions. And fear is a really strong emotion. You need to learn how to focus despite it.”

Shit. I really wished that wasn’t such a good argument. But when I was in the army, we rarely dealt with one problem at a time under ideal conditions. Instead, my unit was usually facing several different obstacles at once, in 110-degree heat. And the army trained us with that in mind. I had to admit, this didn’t seem much different—if I ever did get into a situation where I would need to use magic to protect Charlie, I would probably be terrified.

So I went and got my own galoshes, muttering under my breath about mad scientists, and begrudgingly got into the car.

I guided Simon down the scrubby access road toward what Sam and I used to fondly refer to as “the lake.” I’m still not sure if it had an actual name, or if it was just considered an offshoot of the nearby Sawhill Ponds. It was a tiny, green patch of water—Sam and I could swim across it by the time we were ten—and when we were kids, my dad and some of the neighbors had pitched in to stock it with fish. Then my dad got too busy with Luther Shoes to fish much, and I hadn’t been to the lake in years. For obvious reasons.

It was just as I remembered—green water, tiny rocky beach. If anything, it seemed even smaller. But it suddenly struck me as menacing. When Simon opened up the back of the station wagon, I grabbed myself a life jacket, tugging the straps and snapping the buckles very carefully. I looked up when he laughed. “Jeez, Lex, you look like you’re preparing for the firing squad. I promise we’ll stay shallow. And look, the lake is calm.”

I eyed the murky water, which seemed menacing against the overcast skies. It was true that it wasn’t moving much—the breeze wasn’t nearly strong enough to create anything approaching waves—but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the water was my enemy. What bothered me was that I couldn’t see what was going on underneath the surface. Admittedly, I probably wouldn’t run into a whirlpool here, but there could be giant rocks or long tendrils of seaweed just waiting to latch onto us and trap us underwater.

Still, I forced myself to follow Simon, helping him drag the small fiberglass canoe into the shallows. It felt way too light, practically fragile, and I had to choke down my misgivings as we climbed inside. Simon paddled out, not commenting on how hard I was clutching the sides of the canoe, until we were about thirty or so feet from the shore. “Is this far enough?” I asked him through clenched teeth.

“Sure.” He laid his paddle on the floor of the canoe, alongside our feet, and let the boat drift. “Okay, turn on your mindset,” he instructed. This was his preferred term for the meditative state of mind that I perceived as thermal-imaging goggles. I had to admit, “mindset” was a lot easier to say.

I closed my eyes and obeyed. Well, I tried to. But every time I visualized putting on my thermal-imaging goggles, the rocking of the canoe would suddenly unnerve me and I’d lose my grip. I took a few deep breaths, trying to relax my body, and tried again. Nothing. I opened my eyes and glowered at Simon. “You just
had
to bring a canoe,” I said accusingly. “It couldn’t be a nice flat-bottomed rowboat, could it?”

He just smiled benignly. “Try again,” he encouraged. “There’s no rush.”

I harrumphed and closed my eyes again. This time I didn’t try to drop straight into my tunnel-vision frame of mind. Remembering our first lesson, I tried concentrating on what I could hear around me: birds, some chirpy bugs, the slight ruffle of the breeze through the trees near the shoreline. I took a deep breath, letting myself relax. Forcing myself to remember that it was okay.

I took a slow, calm breath. And just like that, I could switch into my mindset. “Got it,” I murmured.

“Good. Now extend it
down
.”

I felt myself frowning. I had never tried that before, because I’d always been on the ground. Carefully, without opening my eyes, I did as he asked.

The first spark was straight under my feet, maybe six inches below the canoe. I assumed it was a fish—the area residents were probably still stocking the pond—but unlike with most of the aboveground animals I’d detected, I couldn’t crack open my eyes to confirm what I was feeling. The second spark was a few inches from the first one, loitering near the drifting canoe’s bow, unaware of its occupants.

“Now go farther, Lex,” Simon said softly.

I nodded at him without looking, and began to widen the beam of my focus. Five sparks. Eight. Thirteen. My God, that one was big. Were all of them fish? Maybe some crayfish? Wait, no, crayfish were only in running water, right? Then what were they, snails? Leeches? I shuddered, my breath coming faster. I
hated
leeches.

“Lex . . .” Simon said soothingly. “It’s okay. Pull back. Turn it off.”

I barely heard him. Thirty sparks of life, and that was in maybe a ten-foot radius. What if I extended it farther? Could I? Sure, it seemed possible, but it might be a bad idea.

Unfortunately, as my brain was still putting that together, I had already done it, pushing my senses out thirty, fifty feet. Oh,
no
. There were so many sparks now, too many for me to count. Just then something bumped the bottom of the canoe near my feet—a large fish, probably, but I squeaked in fear. What if it was a big rock? What if the canoe tipped and we fell in?

Panicking, I reacted defensively. My intention was to break my mindset, like I always did when I was overwhelmed, but without meaning to I sort of
tugged
on it, gathering it back to me. It resisted, like it was stuck on something, so I began to pull in earnest, as though there was an enormous net under the surface of the water and I was holding the edges, reeling it in—

“
Lex
,” Simon was shouting. I felt a sprinkle of water, not more than a handful, spatter on my face. My mindset finally broke, and my eyes flew open, my breath coming hard and fast as I stared at the horrified look on Simon’s face. He wiped his wet hand on the knee of his pants, looking at me with awe and regret and maybe . . . fear. Why was
he
so freaked out? I was the one who was having the panic attack. Although I actually didn’t feel nervous anymore, which was strange. Instead, I felt . . . fantastic.

I was panting so hard that it took me a few seconds to hear it: the
blurp
,
blurp
,
blurp
from the surface of the water. My thoughts frozen, I tilted my head carefully—I wouldn’t risk falling in—to see over the side of the canoe. My eyes flew to the source of another
blurp
, and I watched as the pale white belly of a dead fish popped to the surface, squishing into a space between two other bellies. I gasped, but it was too late to protect myself—my tunnel vision widened, and I finally saw it: dead fish after dead fish, bubbling to the surface in a gruesome landscape all around the canoe, the sight broken up by the occasional frog or slimy black leech.

I had pulled the death-essence right out of them.
Hundreds
of them.

Chapter 27

I don’t remember getting back to the shore. Simon must have paddled us both in. His voice was buzzing at me, but I wasn’t registering a word he said. I was flying high, my brain tumbling in cartwheels inside my skull. The second the canoe hit dirt, I leaped out and took off in a dead run, leaving my galoshes behind when they fell off. I didn’t mind. Bare feet were easier, anyway.

It was half a mile back to the cabin, and I had never run so fast in my life. I felt superb. My arms and legs pumped, hurtling me along the sandy shoulder of the little unmarked road, and I felt like I could run all the way to the state line. I could run forever.

I didn’t slow down until I was a few feet away from my front door. Then I skidded to a sloppy halt, bumping my hip into the doorknob. If it hurt, I didn’t feel it. I grinned at the door for no reason, breathing only a little bit hard. Feeling a sudden twinge of pain, I glanced down at my feet. My breath caught in my throat.

The tops of my feet were grimy, with streaks of dark red. That didn’t make sense: the lake water wasn’t red, it was green. Confused, I put a hand on the door for balance and leaned sideways to check out the bottom of my left foot.

It was covered in oozing red lines that dripped right onto the porch. Still not understanding, I glanced back the way I had come. Red footprints traced my path down the driveway and onto the porch. That was the first moment I realized it was blood.

And the high crashed down around me, letting in the agonizing pain of my sliced-up feet. I screamed. From inside the cabin, the dogs barked and howled in sympathy.

Ten minutes later, I was sitting on the counter in the mudroom with my legs in the utility sink next to me, sobbing as I rinsed off my feet. Simon had been pounding on the door for most of that time, even rattling the doorknob to test the dead bolt, but I had no intention of opening the door to him or anyone else. Probably ever again. Eventually, he took the hint, and the knocking stopped. I was left alone with my thoughts and my bloody feet.

The army teaches you to handle panic, of course. There are a number of big training sessions focused solely on that, and I’d done okay when faced with scary situations in Iraq. But this was different. As I ran the cold water over my feet, trying to clear the blood long enough to see the actual cut, my thoughts tumbled around in a babbling craze, because the scary thing in question hadn’t come from an insurgent or a raid or even the barrel of a gun. It had come from
within me
. I had pulled the life out of those fish, which was bad enough, but then I had
used
it to fuel my body and ignore pain.

I turned the water off, trying to see the cuts on my feet before the blood obscured them again. I’d gotten all the dirt and lake slime off, but there were dozens of small cuts on each foot. Most of them were superficial, but there were two on my left foot and one on my right that looked deep. I was trying to decide whether any of them needed stitches, but between the blood and the tears that continued to course down my face, I couldn’t
fucking see them.
I blew out a shaky breath, frustrated.

Then a terrible thought crossed my mind. I’d felt high, juiced after pulling the life out of those fish. Like a junkie who’d finally gotten a fix. But what was making me high,
exactly
? I had a sudden suspicion.

I pointed at my left foot and murmured the words Simon had taught me, the simple little charm that cleaned an object for you. As I said the words, I moved my finger downward, pointing into the sink because that’s where I wanted the mess to go.

There was a spark of atmosphere in the mudroom, like the pressure right before a thunderstorm, and then every single piece of dirt, blood, pet hair, and dust in the entire room flew into the sink, immediately followed by all the dirty laundry on the floor, the odds and ends I’d taken out of my pockets before putting clothes in the wash, a few pieces of jewelry I’d taken off in the mudroom and forgotten about, and so on. A hailstorm of stuff flew past me to get to the sink, and I almost fell off the counter.

It didn’t stop until the sink was full. I righted my balance and froze, looking around the room. It was spotless. Literally. There wasn’t a speck of dust on the small window ledge, a place I had never cleaned in the three years I’d lived in this cabin. Even the sink fixtures were clean. Mary Poppins, eat your heart out. “A filter, not a focus,” I whispered.

The dogs were barking, scrabbling their claws against the wooden door of the mudroom. Looking back at the sink, I pulled my feet out from under the piles of stuff and examined them. The wounds were bleeding again, and it was still hard to take a good look at them. At first I thought the whole exercise had been basically futile, but then I realized that other than the new blood, my feet were flawlessly clean.
That’s probably good for fighting infection, right?
I thought woozily.

“Okay. I’m gonna need some help after all,” I announced to the pile of clothes. I leaned back a little and dug into the pocket of my jeans. Miraculously, my cell phone was still there, having survived the epic footrace back to the cabin. With shaking fingers I scrolled through my contacts to find Lily’s number.

“This is not good,” she said half an hour later as she examined the soles of my feet. I was still on the counter in the mudroom, where I had set down a few layers of paper towels to staunch the blood that was still oozing sluggishly from my wounds. Aside from not wanting to get blood on the carpets in the rest of the house, the mudroom seemed like the cleanest place for me to wait for Lily. I was leaning way back on the long counter so I could point my toes to the ceiling while she examined my injuries. Her face was about five inches away from my feet, which ordinarily would have embarrassed me, but there was no way in hell my feet smelled bad just then. They were practically gleaming, they were so clean.

Lily finally tore her eyes away and l
ooked up at my face. “I can stop the bleeding, but you’re right, the three bad gashes need a couple of stitches each. Or . . .” She trailed off.

“Or . . . ?” I prompted.

Lily winced. “I could Super Glue them,” she said reluctantly. Seeing the disbelieving look on my face, she added defensively, “Hey, it’s what surgeons do to arthroscopic entry wounds. It’ll sting like a bitch, though, and you’ll still need to stay off them for at least a day.”

“Sold.” After my misadventures with the stab wounds, I was a fan of any plan that didn’t involve getting more frickin’ stitches.

Lily got out her first-aid kit, retrieving the biggest tube of glue I’d ever seen. I looked away, focusing on the ultra-clean ceiling tiles. Agreeing to having my cuts glued shut was one thing, but I wasn’t quite ready to watch it happen.

“So,” Lily said as she worked. “I got the strangest call from Simon on the way here.”

I flinched, struggling not to shift my feet, but didn’t answer. “It seems that he’s with some colleagues from CU,” she continued, “convincing them that a lake full of dead fish is the result of low oxygen levels in the water.”

I considered that for a moment. As excuses go, it wasn’t bad. I didn’t know anything about water oxygen levels, but I remembered something on the news a while back about a bunch of fish dying from the same thing in Southern California. “Are they buying it?” I asked.

“The deoxygenated water thing? So far. The trick is convincing them that they shouldn’t bother with autopsies or water samples. He may have to stall them until dark, then get Quinn to press them.” I snuck a glance at Lily, but she was totally focused on my injuries. Today her dreadlocks were tied back with an aquamarine scarf, and she had on a black off-the-shoulder shirt that reminded me of the top that Sandy changes into at the end of
Grease
.

“There,” she said after a few more minutes, leaning back and looking at my feet with satisfaction. She pulled a roll of white gauze out of her kit and started to carefully wrap it all the way around my foot. “Do you want to tell me what happened?” she asked casually, her tone in direct contrast to the care she was taking with my foot.

“I’m assuming Simon already told you.”

“About the lake, yes.” She cut the gauze with a small pair of scissors, taped it in place, and started to wrap it around the other foot. “But he didn’t have too many details about your bloody run through the country or why this room”—she glanced around”—suddenly looks like Mr. Clean’s personal workshop.”

She started to slowly pack up her supplies, giving me time to gather my thoughts. I sighed and sat up straight, swinging my wrapped feet to dangle them off the edge of the counter. “I pulled out their sparks,” I said quietly. “The fish, I mean. But their death-essence didn’t just go into the air or back into nature or whatever. It went into
me
.” I remembered once again the way that first mouse’s death-essence had looked as it drifted toward me. I shuddered. Now we knew I could pull it into me.

She looked at me thoughtfully. “And it felt good?”

I nodded. “It was incredible,” I admitted. “It was the best high. I ran and ran, which helped take the edge off it. But I still had more.” I gestured at the room.

Lily looked around. “So you decided to practice the cleaning spell?”

“Not exactly.” I leaned forward to bury my face in my hands. “I was just trying to clean my feet,” I said softly.

I felt Lily’s momentary stillness as she absorbed that, and then she boosted herself up on the counter next to me. “Well . . . we knew your powers were strong. And they’ve only been growing,” she said haltingly. “You couldn’t get regular magic to work, but it sounds like when you absorbed some of this essence, you could suddenly do a witch charm. Interesting.”

I lifted my face to look at her. “I’m like a goddamned vampire, Lily. I can suck the life out of things. That’s too much power. It’s too
big
.”

She shrugged. “We knew that magic and creation and life are all kind of the same thing. But maybe death is part of it, too. You stored up these animals’ essence and converted it into magic. Could you do the cleaning spell again right now?”

I considered that for a second. “I don’t think so. I feel . . . depleted. Like the high’s worn off.”

She nodded. “So there you go. You used up the magic, the essence, you took from the fish. Now you’re out again.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” I muttered. “I’m not going to kill living creatures just to clean off my feet. I’m a vegetarian, for crying out loud.”

Lily gave me a rueful smile. “So we’ll teach you a few defensive spells,” she suggested. “Serious, save-your-life stuff, so you can save yourself if you get backed in a corner. That’d be worth killing a few fish, right?”

“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. What if there weren’t any slimy lake fish available? What if I was forced to use someone’s pets? I thought of the herd and tried not to shudder.

“Plus, there’s the whole thing where you can’t die,” she pointed out. “That continues to kick ass. And you can sense the life in a given area, which could be vital someday.”

I shook my head, unconvinced. “It just doesn’t seem like enough.”

“For what?”

To make it worth being a freak?
I thought. But I was smart enough not to say that in front of a representative of Clan Pellar. “To make me attractive as an employee,” I explained instead. It was still true. “So that Itachi will agree to leave Charlie alone.”

That was, after all, the whole reason why I was doing any of this. If I wasn’t still hoping to make a deal with Itachi for Charlie’s childhood, I would have promised never to say anything about the Old World and forgotten I’d ever known any of these people. Well, the vampires, anyway.

As soon as I thought that, my whole body went cold with fear. “Lily . . . we have to keep this between us. Itachi
can’t
know that I can use animal death-essence to fuel magic.”

Her eyes narrowed as she thought through the implications. “You think he’ll force you to start sacrificing things,” she concluded. “Pets and stuff.”

I shuddered. “That would be bad enough, but no. I’m afraid he’ll force me to sacrifice people.”

Lily went still. “Do you think that would work? That you could pull the death-essence from humans?”

I looked her in the eye. “I am never, ever going to find out.”