Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) (16 page)

C
hapter 29

Despite the overcast skies and the smell of impending rain in the air, I felt a lot more relaxed than on my last visit to Nellie’s building. The brothel was much more palatable in the daylight; it crossed the line from “horror-movie creepy” back over to “old and rundown.” When I was sure no one was watching, I ducked around the corner and went in through the back, happy not to have to mess with a flashlight.

There wasn’t any furniture in the brothel, so I just sat down on the steps in the main entryway and opened the paper bag I’d gotten from the metaphysical store in Denver. The new stones were individually wrapped in tissue paper, but I managed to unwrap all of them without actually touching them, arranging them gently on the stair next to me, so they still rested on their tissue paper. I’d left the stones from Blossom in the car—I didn’t want to be protected from ghosts this time; I wanted to talk to one.

I pulled out the small encyclopedia of stones and crystals I’d bought, looking down at the cover, which featured a painting of a New Age goddess. Lily would probably know exactly what it meant.

“This is so stupid,” I muttered under my breath as I opened the book. But Simon had told me that some stones did work for witches, and I’d felt the little buzz of vibration at Blossom’s store. And I had time on my hands. What was the harm?

Blossom had said that crystals had to be cleansed before they would really work, so I flipped through the book to the section on crystal cleansing. Sunlight and running water were two of the most common options, so I gathered up the stones, pulled the bottle of water out of my bag, and headed over to the window where a board had rotted through, allowing for a bright stream of sunlight the size of a paperback. I held up the stones and dumped a thin stream of water over them, feeling like a complete and total idiot.

Back on the steps, I sat down and opened and closed my hands rapidly, warming them up again. The book I’d bought had a lot of information about chakras and meditation, not to mention instructions for things like body layouts and dreamwork, but even I had limits to the suspension of disbelief. I picked up a small, irregularly formed stone about the size of a large strawberry: cassiterite. In the sunlight I could tell it was brown, but without direct light it seemed like more of a milky black. The clerk had promised me that this specimen hadn’t been dyed or irradiated, even though I still wasn’t sure what that meant.

I just held the chunk of cassiterite between my palms, brought it to my lips and breathed on it. And I hoped.

Blossom had called cassiterite a “threshold stone,” and to me, that sounded like something a boundary witch might use as she interacts with the boundary between life and death. I was hoping it might give me just enough of a threshold to talk to Nellie.

I don’t know how long I sat there with the stone warm in my hands, but after a few minutes my thoughts wandered and I noticed the shape of it, all the little planes and angles jutting together in a complex non-pattern. My mind started to relax, and the word “threshold” started bouncing through my thoughts. What an odd term. A threshold could mean a doorway, but it could also mean a new beginning, like when someone says they’re on the threshold of discovery. Or it could mean someone’s limit, like the threshold of pain. Thinking about the word
pain
made the image of Sam’s desecrated body pop briefly back into my mind, but I pushed it away determinedly.

Nellie, focus on Nellie
, I told myself. I was starting to feel more stupid than I had before, which was saying something. I didn’t even know if Nellie’s spirit was normally aware during the day, much less—

“Just sits there staring at nuthin’ like she’s got all the time in the world, when she’s been making a big show of being so busy,” came a cross, familiar voice. It sounded faint, and from no particular direction. “Meanwhile I could be doing naked cartwheels in front of her nose and not get so much as a how-do-you-do—”

“Nellie?” I said, freezing in place like I was an antenna that had just received a flicker from the right channel.

“And now she’s talking to me just like she thinks I’m gonna respond, well!” Usually when Nellie spoke, her voice seemed to come from her body, like a live person. But now it came from everywhere and nowhere, like an echo chamber without the actual echo.

“I
can
hear you,” I said loudly, feeling jubilant. I scanned the room. “Where are you?”

A pause. “You’re bein’ truthful? You can hear me talk?”

“Yes!”

“I’m . . . oh . . . three steps to your left and four steps forward. You canna see me?”

“No.” Simon had told me that gravitational magic was weaker than witch magic, so maybe that was why I could only hear her faintly. But it was broad daylight outside, and I called that a win. I had made a telephone to the dead.

Excited, I said, “Nellie, I need to talk to you, and I don’t have time to mess around with bargaining and stroking your ego, okay? I don’t know how long this crystal thing will work.”

There was a very tense pause, and then her wary voice said, “I’m listening.”

“Remember I told you there was someone poisoning vampires with belladonna? Well, he’s in Boulder, and he’s interested in me for some reason. He attacked me with wraiths last night. Angry ghosts,” I added, in case Nellie’s terminology was different.

“That where you got that bruise on yer face?” she demanded. “And the one on yer neck?”

“Yes.” My scarf must have slipped, but I didn’t want to let go of the stone to fix it.

There was indiscriminate grumbling. “Doesn’t he know who you are?”

“That’s just it, he knows
exactly
who I am. He has boundary blood, too, but it didn’t activate. That’s why he uses crystals.” I told her about the wraiths trapped inside the crystals, and how I suspected Emil’s mother had helped him trap them in there.

“Aye, the wraiths, as you call them, they can touch us. To them, we are the gatekeepers. I’ve never heard of ’em being quite this stirred up, though. And I’ve never heard of anyone using them to kill one of us.”

“It didn’t seem like he wanted them to actually kill me,” I allowed, trying to remember Emil’s exact words as he’d sicced the wraiths on me. “It was like he was testing me,” I said. “Trying to determine my worth.”

“Let me think,” was Nellie’s gruff response. I couldn’t see her, but I could imagine her pacing in her thick pumps, her heels drumming soundlessly on the old wooden floors. I held as still as possible, trying not to think about the dampness on my palms. Would it interfere with whatever was allowing me to use the cassiterite? If it did, would I be able to “call” Nellie back?

“When I was alive,” she said finally, “the Christians were mostly done hangin’ witches, but there were still those that hunted us. There was a group that was always looking for those with witchblood—but they were only interested in necromancers. Evocators, we were called then. This group was always offering money, favors, power. Whatever it took to find us.”

“Did they kill the evocators?”

“Can’t be certain,” she replied. “There were hints that you could make a good living if you went with them willingly, but that might have been a lie they spun to get evocators to cooperate. I never heard of anyone going with them and coming back.”

That didn’t exactly seem like information I could run with. “Did this group have a name?”

“Aye. Our mothers used it to scare us. It isn’t easy to frighten children who see their parents speak to the dead, but when we were naughty they would threaten to sell us to those people. I remember once, my sister ’n me—”

“Do you remember the name?” I interrupted, and it took all my willpower to maintain my patience. I had this terrible idea that the stone would stop working right before she gave me something I could sink my teeth into.

She sighed loudly. “It were some highfalutin’ Latin words. Lemme see. Milt . . . milli . . .
milites mortis
,” she said triumphantly. “If that’s not it, it’s something close.”

Finally. Real information. My shoulders sagged in relief. “Thank you, Nellie. I owe you one, and I won’t forget.”

She cackled. Apparently it was my day for old women to cackle at me. “Oh, I won’t let you forget,” she said smugly.

I got up and flipped the channel on the television, which would save me a trip in the near future. I was about to say goodbye, when another thought occurred to me. “The wraiths. Nellie, can you tell me how to dispel ghosts?”

Another pause, this one so long that I was staring to fear I’d lost the connection. “I don’t know how,” she said at last.

“Oh, come on.”

“It’s true! I never learned.”

“Nellie,” I said impatiently, looking around the brothel, “this is a two-hundred-year-old building. People must have died here, but I’ve never seen any remnants, even when I was here at night. Because you got rid of them when you were alive, and you’re the last to die here. You know how to banish ghosts.”

Her voice went cold. “I got nothin’ to say about that.”

I could have walked away then, but what if Emil attacked with wraiths again? What if they mobbed me before I could disturb the grid? “Nellie,” I called into the empty room. “If you tell me how to banish them, I’ll come back every week, myself.”

Nothing.

“I’ll even bring tea,” I tried. “And you can tell me stories about the brothel.”

I checked my watch. Ninety seconds dragged by before she spoke again.

“Even if I did know how to banish them back across the line,” Nellie said, “how do I know you wouldn’t try to banish
me
?”

“You’re not hurting anyone, as far as I can tell,” I said. “I have no interest in banishing you if you don’t want to go.”

“I gotta think about it,” she said at last. “You come yourself next time, and we can talk.”

And no amount of begging on my part would change her mind.

It was late afternoon when I got back to Boulder, and although sunset was still a few hours off, the skies were dark with the threat of rain. I had managed to get grime from the brothel all over my clothes, so I decided to stop at home to change and take care of the animals before I met up with Simon and Lily. I called to find out where they were, but Simon didn’t answer. Ordinarily I might worry, but he
had
said he and Lily were going to nap, and given how hard they’d been pushing, I couldn’t blame him for turning off his ringer. I left a voicemail briefly outlining what I’d learned from Nellie.

When I arrived at the cabin I parked in the driveway instead of the garage, since I’d only be there for a few minutes. As I hurried up the little pathway to the house, I heard an unfamiliar ringing coming from the car. The disposable cell phone. I jogged back to the passenger door, opened it, and snatched up the phone without looking at the number. “Cruz?”

“Yeah, hey. Listen, I talked to the head of the witches here. She had a follow-up question.”

I bumped the door shut with my hip and turned back toward the house, fumbling to get my keys out of my jacket pocket. “I’m listening.” I put the key in the lock and paused, missing the next thing Cruz said. Something was wrong. I put my ear against the door—not a single dog was barking. Had they not heard me? I took the phone away from my ear and made a little scratching noise on the door with one fingernail, which would usually drive the dogs into a barking frenzy.

Dead silence.

“Hello? Lex?”

“Yeah, sorry, Cruz. What did she ask?”

“I said, she wanted to know if animals in your town have been going insane. Foaming at the mouth kind of insane.”

I went completely still.

And that’s when the attack came.

C
hapter 30

I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye and instinctively ducked. The phone slipped out of my hand as I flinched to my left, away from the threat. I felt the air over my head shift as a huge hand crashed into the side of the house, right where my right ear had been a moment earlier. When it pulled back there was a fist-sized dent in the metal siding.

I came up with my fists held in front of my face like a boxer, dancing back to get a glimpse of my attacker. And for the second time in fifteen seconds, I froze from shock. Because of the
size
of him. His eyes were at least two feet above mine, which had to make him well over seven feet tall. He wore an enormous, buttoned black raincoat that must have been made for him, because it went down to his midcalves. His body still strained against the fabric, but not because of that carved, gym-rat look. No, his bulk was hard and dense, concrete poured into a man-shaped mold.

My eyes finally made it all the way up to his face, and with another shock I realized that his skin was . . . blue. I blinked hard to make sure the overcast daylight wasn’t creating an optical illusion. But no, it was definitely a washed-out, frostbite blue. His features were cruel, commanding, and so remote it chilled me. I had thought that Quinn’s expressions were impassive. This guy looked like he came from another planet.

No, that wasn’t right. He
should
have looked silly, too big and too alien to fit in against the background of the world around him. It should have been absurd. But there was such an intense quality of menace coming off him that I could nearly taste it on the air. It turned my insides to snow.

“What the fuck are
you
?” I blurted.

A thin smile appeared on his thin lips. “Careful, daughter. Do not ask questions unless you are certain you want the answers.” His voice was low and hollow sounding, the way a big dog’s bark sounds from its barrel chest. Despite his earlier attempt to clobber me, he stood there unmoving, his hands drooping down by his sides.

“I’m not your daughter,” I said automatically.

“Semantics. Your mother’s egg was fertilized with my seed. You are my biological material.”

His tone was so matter-of-fact that I didn’t have it in me to doubt him. In that moment, somewhere in the back of my mind, something delicate and vital began to break down. I pushed it away. “Did you hurt my animals?”

Genuine confusion appeared on his broad face. I pointed toward the door. “My dogs. Did you . . .” I swallowed hard, unable to stomach the word on my lips. “Hurt them?”

Distaste twisted his features. “I see. No. I have not entered your abode.”

Then why weren’t the dogs barking? “What do you want?” I blurted.

The smile that twisted his lips was greedy, a child set loose in the candy aisle at the grocery store. “I want you, Allison Alexandra Luther. Revenge on an old foe is an attractive boon, but she hides like a cockroach from the light, and I grow tired of her games.” He spread his hands wide, and I almost bolted at the small movement. “You are mine, and you have value to me.”

He said it like I should be honored.

“No. This is . . . no,” I sputtered. I began backing away slowly, because that’s what you do with really super crazy people. The creature advanced at the same pace. I retreated to the wide area I’d left between my car and the garage door, but it wasn’t far enough. I eyed the car door. Could I move fast enough to get in and get the car started before he stopped me?

He saw me looking and smiled indulgently. With an amused shake of his head, he leaned down and picked up the front bumper of my old Subaru with one hand, lifting it to his waist. His movements were graceful, easy, and so
human
. . . and so was his cruel little smile as he let go of the bumper, letting the car crash down. Both front tires gave out with a nervous pop.

I began to choke on the air I was breathing. I backed up a little farther, shaking my head in denial. I was going into some kind of shock. This couldn’t be my father. This made no sense. Nothing made sense. “This can’t be happening,” I whispered.

He advanced again, his arms slowly beginning to rise toward me. “I see that my son has hurt you,” he said disdainfully, eyeing the bruises on my face and neck. “That was not his place. You can be certain that I will have words with him when we get home.”

“
Home
?” I squeaked.

“To your brothers and sisters. They have been waiting for one such as you.”

My knees gave out then, and I collapsed into the grass on the other side of the driveway. Fear washed over me, and for the first time in my entire life, I didn’t bother to even fight it. He began to bend toward me—to take me, I think, but I didn’t care anymore. I was done.

And then Simon’s little Chevy plowed into the creature’s knees with enough force to send it exploding through my garage door.

The driver’s door flew open right in front of me, and Lily’s head popped out. “Get in the fucking car!” she screamed.

I stumbled to my feet and ran.

I don’t remember fastening my seat belt, or any of the ride, for that matter. There was a buzzing that wouldn’t stop, some bright lights, and my hands were clutched tight around my seat belt. I’d drawn my knees up to protect them, protect my insides. Eventually the car stopped, and my door was opened. There were voices, too, and they were raised, but I wasn’t registering any of it.

“I swear, Simon, we are deep in
we need a bigger boat
territory here. I don’t know what that thing was, but it was after her. And now she’s catatonic, and I don’t know what we’re supposed to do.”

“Did you look at the guy’s aura?”

“Uh, no, Si. I was a little too busy getting us the hell out of there before it ate us!”

“I highly doubt he was going to
eat
you. Could he have been her father?”

“Um, does she
look
half-blue to you?” Lily’s voice scoffed. “No way.”

“He wasn’t really blue, Lily. I told you, your eyes were playing tricks on you. You should have taken a picture.”

“Taken a . . . Are you
kidding
me?”

I wished they would stop. I wished they would just go away and leave me here. Maybe I could pass out, and Sam would be there, and she could explain. Or maybe she could get our mother to explain.

But would it even matter?

The voices eventually faded, or maybe my brain finally figured out how to tune them out. I stared at the dashboard, and time stopped meaning anything to me. It wasn’t meditation, and I’m not sure it was shock. I was just
done
. Time passed, and I was fine with that.

I started in my seat when a cool hand touched my cheek. I was still clutching the seat belt in front of my chest. I didn’t let go.

“Lex,” Quinn said quietly. He was kneeling awkwardly in the footwell of the passenger side. There was no sign of Simon or Lily. “What happened, honey?”

“That thing is my father,” I whispered. “I’m half monster.”

I let him reach across me and unclick the seat belt, then carefully thread it through the space between my arms and my body until it wound back into its spot. Gently, he grasped my ankles one at a time, sliding them off the seat. I didn’t resist when he reached down for me, just allowed him to wrap my hands around his neck and pull me out of the car. I couldn’t seem to find my footing, so I leaned against him, letting his arms keep me from crumpling.

He stroked my hair. “It’s okay,” he whispered.

“No. It’s really not.”

“Lex,” he said again, his voice patient. “Look at me.” But I couldn’t. He reached down and tilted up my chin. “You’re talking to a
vampire
,” he said, with just a trace of humor on his lips. “I have to drink human blood in order to function. I can press any human to do anything I want. I’ve killed people, Lex. For no other reason than my boss said it was necessary. Who’s the monster here?”

The first tear wobbled its way down my cheek. He reached up with a cool thumb and wiped it off my face. “I guess I’d just gotten used to the new world order,” I mumbled. “Vampires, witches, werewolves. But that thing we saw wasn’t any of them, and it wasn’t human. And I’m its
daughter
.” My body began to shudder. He held me tighter.

“And now that you know this, are you any different than you were yesterday?” he asked. Pragmatic, as usual. “Nothing has changed, Lex.
You
haven’t changed. You just know something that you didn’t know before, that’s all.”

I kissed him then, because how could I not? He returned the kiss with enthusiasm, being careful not to touch the bruise on my face, and heat flooded into my numb body, reminding me of everything I already had. Then I opened my eyes for a second and noticed a rack of shovels and rakes. They seemed oddly familiar. I pulled back and looked around us. Where the hell were we?

It was obviously someone’s garage. And I’d been here before.

Then I finally put it together. Simon and Lily had needed to come up with a hiding place for Maven’s body, and they couldn’t take her anywhere that was connected to the witches. So they’d set up a new base of operations in a place Emil wouldn’t know about. A house they knew would be empty.

John’s house.