Boundary Crossed (Boundary Magic Book 1) (23 page)

Chapter 34

We made our way out of the building that way, with Quinn supporting me as I staggered forward. Then he grunted with annoyance and abruptly reached down to scoop up my legs, clasping me to his chest. My dress had torn a little when I’d fallen, but I still felt like I was on the cover of a goddamned romance novel, getting carried around in my formal gown. It would have been embarrassing as hell if I’d had the energy to give a shit.

Neither of us said anything as he hauled me to his car, but I caught Quinn glancing down at my feet a few times, and I realized he could smell the blood that had seeped out of my reopened wounds, gluing my shoes to my feet. Gross. It was sticky and uncomfortable, but I figured it might be even worse for Quinn if I took the shoes off, so I just tried to ignore it.

The edges of my vision seemed to blur and twitch. Now that my body was in motion, the scenery rushing past me, I was having trouble keeping my eyes focused on one thing, so I closed them. My skin felt like it was about to explode. “Quinn,” I whispered. “It’s getting worse. Hurry.”

He tore down the country roads, arriving at the Pellar farm in about half the time it should have taken. When Quinn finally put the car in park, I braced myself against the dashboard and squinted. A few different sets of headlights were backing away from the farmhouse, so I figured the meeting had to be breaking up. That was probably for the best.

Quinn took one of the spots that had just been vacated, blocking in a red minivan. He came around and opened my car door. I managed to unbuckle my seat belt before he scooped me up again. “I can walk,” I said woozily, but neither of us really believed me.

There were a few voices moving in our direction, chatting and laughing. The voices kept stopping when they got close to us. I ignored all of that and closed my eyes so I didn’t have to try to interpret any more images with my addled brain.

Later—a minute? Ten minutes?—I heard Quinn call out Lily’s name. I lifted my head again. We were in a big, open clearing behind the farmhouse, and there were candles everywhere. I couldn’t understand how the flames were staying lit . . . or why the air above them was so shiny. “Pretty,” I murmured.

“What happened to her?” said Lily, who was right next to my head now. Or at least her voice was.

I jumped in Quinn’s arms. “Hey, Lil,” I said drunkenly. “The lights are super pretty.”

Lily looked at me hard. “
Simon!
” she shouted, without looking away from me.

Simon moved away from a group of people and jogged over. “You better set her down,” he told Quinn. There was concern in his voice, real concern, and I squinted hard at him.

“You sound sad, Simon,” I told him. There was someone hovering at his shoulder, a pretty Asian woman with jet-black hair cut to frame her face. “Ooh!” I said happily. “Simon’s lady love! Simon says you’re a witch, too.” I giggled. “Heh. ‘Simon says.
’
”

“She’s getting worse, I think,” Quinn said over my head. “She was coherent when she first woke up, but she’s losing it.”

He started telling them about Charlie, and I tuned out, not wanting to let them kill my buzz. At some point Quinn put my legs down, but his arms were still the only things keeping me upright. Lily began touching me, but that was okay. I’d seen her boobs, so we had real trust.

Then Simon reached a thumb up and lifted my eyelid, shining a penlight in my eye. “Hey!” I complained. “Not cool, Simon!” I tried to karate-chop him away, but my arms weren’t working quite like I wanted. I sighed and endured his examination of my other eye. There was some more discussion, and when I tuned in again Simon was saying, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” There was a frown in his voice.

“I have,” announced an annoyed, steel-cut voice.

Suddenly Hazel fucking Pellar was in my line of sight, moving her son aside to peer at my face. She put her hands on my cheeks, probing my skin. I could feel energy pass between us, but I didn’t know if it started from her or me. “She’s magic-drunk,” she said matter-of-factly. “Witches aren’t meant to hold this much magic inside. We’re conductors, not car batteries. She needs to ground it.”

There was an uneasy silence, and I saw Hazel look back and forth between her two children. “What?” she demanded.

“That could be a problem,” Lily said sheepishly. There was a pause; then she added, “We’ve only taught her one spell, and she overdid it.”

At the same time Simon chimed in: “She can’t manage regular spells yet.”

There was a terrible silence. “But you should see her sense out life?” Lily offered in a small voice. I started snickering, which probably didn’t help.

“You two
swore
to me,” Hazel exploded, “that you were just trying to teach her control! Not teach her everything
but
control.”

That made me mad. “Hey! That’s not fair,” I said, glaring at Hazel. Or trying to, anyway—her image kept flickering around like one of those jumping spiders. “They’ve been
helping
me, working their asses off and donating time that I’m sure they’d rather spend doing a million other things instead of—”

“
Lex
,” Quinn interrupted. I paused. The hair on my arms was standing on end, and there was an electric charge in the air, like when I’d done that spell in the mudroom. Hazel was watching me with narrowed eyes, and I dimly realized that whatever she’d thought of me before today, I’d just made it a lot worse. I whimpered.

“She’s too powerful,” Hazel snapped. “I warned you about this—”

“
Please
,” I broke in. “I have to save my niece. Please. Whatever’s going on, I have to save her tonight. Please, she’s a null, and this vampire took her—”

Hazel drew in a sharp breath. “Your niece is a
null
?”

She said something to Simon and Lily for a minute, and they answered, but I barely heard what they said. “Do you guys hear kind of a buzzing?” I wondered aloud.

I got distracted for a while, listening to the buzz, and then Quinn’s voice was whispering in my ear. “Lex, honey,” he said, “There’s too much magic in you. It’s too much for your body.”

I could hear the thread of worry in his voice. I turned to look at him, and for a second I thought I could even see it. I raised my hand to run a finger along it, but instead I touched his face, experimentally running my finger over his lips, tracing a line across his cheek to his ear. “Do you like me?” I asked idly.

Amusement sparked in his eyes. “Much to my chagrin,” he said solemnly. “But I need you to listen. Lily thinks she knows a way to get the magic out, but it’s going to hurt.”

“What happens if she doesn’t?” I asked, immediately proud of my competence.

“We don’t know,” Quinn told me. “You could die, or you could hurt someone.”

“Do it,” I said. He said something else after that, but I didn’t hear it because the buzzing was back, bigger, like a wave that had chased the smaller wave that came before it. “What?” I yelled.

The second time I half heard him and half read his lips, until finally I understood what he was trying to tell me.

“I’m gonna have to hold you down.”

Chapter 35

I would never remember much of the next few hours, except the pain.

Lily needed me to lie on my stomach with my arms stretched in front of me. I held still as long as I could, but then the pain was too much. I began to struggle and then fight them outright. It was just in my nature.

Eventually, Quinn had to lie down on my back to hold me with his body weight, but even he couldn’t keep
all
of me from moving, and for a few seconds it looked like I was going to hurt Lily very badly. Then Hazel, of all people, lay down on the ground in front of me and took my hands. She looked straight into my eyes without fear, and I obeyed her order to be still.

Then finally the pain was gone, and it was like gravity had suddenly been restored to the world. Up was up, down was down, and I was me again. For a second the relief was so great I almost blacked out. I think I maybe did lose consciousness briefly, because when I opened my eyes I was lying on my side in the field, not touching anyone. I curled inward, enjoying the feel of the cool grass on my skin. Then I realized that the pain in my shoulder was gone. I wiggled my feet experimentally. They also felt fine.

I sat up without incident and looked down at my dress. The skirt was in tatters and one strap was ripped off, but the upper half was still more or less intact. “Quinn?” I said, squinting against the dim light. The only light in the field emanated from the candles, which I now realized were encased in long vertical tubes of glass, to protect them from the wind.

“I’m here,” came his voice from behind me.

I turned around and saw him sitting in the grass, peering at me over the screen of a cell phone. “Where is everyone?” I asked. “Did I hurt someone?” A new thought occurred to me. “Was it all a dream?”

He smiled briefly. “No and no. Hazel thought it might be best to give you a little space, and Lily needed to rest for a while. It took a lot out of her, but she’ll be fine.”

“What took a lot out of her?” I asked, puzzled.

I saw a strange look come over his face, mostly thanks to the glow from his phone. “You don’t remember what she did?”

“No . . .”

“Look at your arms,” he instructed.

I held out my arms and tried to look. There was some sort of marking covering my forearms, stretching down over my wrists and almost into my palms. “What is it?” I asked.

“Here.” Quinn tapped something on his phone’s screen, then scooted across the grass and held it up to my arms. The light from the phone flared, and for the first time I could make out the swirling black ink that crawled up my arms.

“You guys tattooed me?” I said in amazement. It was a hell of a lot of tattooing. “Why?”

“To pull the power out,” Simon called. I looked up, and when my eyes adjusted to the dimness again, I could see him hurrying across the lawn toward us. A flashlight beam bounced along in front of him.

“Lily’s tattoos,” I remembered. “She said they were a long story.”

Simon nodded. He knelt down in front of me and gently took my hand, flipping it over to inspect the tattoos with his flashlight. “They look good.”

In the better light, I could see they weren’t just swirling patterns—my arms were a mirror image of each other, and together they formed an emblem. “A griffin,” I said, looking up at Simon in wonder. I was wearing the little griffin earring studs at that moment, which seemed like an unbelievable coincidence.

He smiled. “She’s been working on the designs pretty much since we met you, but she wasn’t sure it was a good idea.” He shrugged.

“What do they do?”

Simon answered, “Think of them like . . . a funnel. They’ll let you channel magic through your hands. That should help with the problem you’ve been having.”

“A filter, not a focus,” Quinn reminded me softly.

“Oh,” I said. “Not that I’m not grateful, but why do this now?”

“We had to get the magic out of you,” Simon explained. He gestured at my arms. “The only way to construct something like this on a witch is by using the witch’s own power. Lily’s tattoos took her a couple of years to complete, using a little bit of power each time. Yours drew all the power out at once, more or less.”

“They’re not even bleeding,” I said, examining them.

“True.” He smiled at me. “You should be feeling better in general, because of transferring so much magic. I can explain, but it’d take a while, and I know you’re in a hurry.”

“Charlie,” I said suddenly. I looked at Quinn. “What time is it?”

“Two a.m.,” he said matter-of-factly. Two in the morning wasn’t exactly late for him.

Then again, it wasn’t late for me, either. I stood up. “We’ve got to—” I wobbled, a little unsteady. “Where do we go?”

Quinn shook his head. “That’s a good question.” He held up his phone. “Itachi and Maven have their vampires watching the highways, all the major roads out of the state. Kirby tried to pass into Wyoming two hours ago. They turned him around, but he got away.”

“Was Charlie in the car?” I asked.

Quinn shrugged. “Our people only saw the top of a car seat, but presumably.”

It made me oddly relieved that Charlie was in a car seat. It was kind of stupid, since I knew Kirby could still do any number of horrible things to her, but at least if they got into a fender bender she’d be fine. “Okay.” I paced a few feet away, thinking. My shoes still felt sticky and disgusting, but I could handle that. I paused and turned back to Quinn. “What time does the sun rise?” I asked. “Seven? Quarter after?”

He nodded. “About that.”

“Then we’ve got five hours before he tries to leave the state again,” I concluded.

It was Simon who said, “How do you figure?”

“Charlie,” Quinn said, understanding dawning on his face.

I nodded. “Kirby’s got a null with him, so he can go out in the sun. His smartest move is to wait until dawn, when all the vampires guarding the border will have to go to ground. Then he can sashay right out of Colorado.”

“If they cross the state line,” Quinn said quietly. “Itachi and Maven can’t help. She’ll disappear.”

I nodded and resumed my pacing. “How do we find them?” I glanced at Simon. “You said something once about using spells to find things?”

He shook his head. “We’d need something of Kirby’s, preferably hair or fingernails. But even then it’s unlikely the magic would work.”

“Because he’s also magic?”

Simon nodded. “That, and because he’s with a null. I’m not sure anyone could find a null.”

“Shit.” I paced to the edge of the candlelight, then back. It was getting downright cold out here, and I longed to go inside the farmhouse, which was now glowing with light. But I wasn’t ready to face all those people—the ones who’d had to hold me down while I screamed.

I needed to focus on the problem at hand. I needed a plan. “Back to the plan,” I muttered. What was Victor and Darcy’s original plan for Charlie? They were going to take her to Nolan’s house. Nolan was then going to take her to a middleman—Kirby?—who would take her out of state. Like links in a chain, presumably to avoid accountability. Each person would only have the baby for a few hours, so they wouldn’t appear suspicious.

I stopped pacing and turned back to the two men, who were watching me. Simon looked a little bemused, which was kind of fair. I probably looked ridiculous, with the ruined dress and my hair and makeup smeared everywhere. Quinn’s expression looked as implacable as ever at first glance, but I was getting better at reading the subtleties. He was watching me intently, looking for an opening to jump in and help.

“Was Kirby always in on the plan?” I said to him. “We were both so sure he wasn’t involved after we spoke to him at the fraternity.”

He shook his head. “I’ve been thinking about that. I could be wrong, but I believe Kirby was recruited later, after the attempt with Victor and Darcy failed.”

“You don’t think he could be the middleman?” I asked. “The ‘merchant’ who was supposed to get Charlie from Nolan?”

Quinn shook his head, but Simon visibly jumped. “Wait, say that again,” he urged.

I raised an eyebrow, but said, “Darcy told me that she and Victor were taking Charlie to their senior—Nolan—who was taking her to the merchant. The merchant would place Charlie with new . . . well, she used the word ‘parents,’ but it felt like she meant something more insidious.”

Simon closed the space between us in three steps and took my arm. “You’re positive she used the word ‘merchant’?” he said.

“Yeah, why?”

Simon looked from me to Quinn, then back at me. “Because the Merchant isn’t just a middleman. He’s a witch.”