Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) (4 page)

C
hapter 5

I couldn’t hear.

No, wait, I
could
hear, it’s just that everything was drowned out by the ringing.

I shook my head to clear it, but that only made my skull ache. I registered the tendrils of my own hair on my face and finally pulled together that I was upside down, still secured by my seat belt. It was surprisingly dark, though of course the desert was always like that at night. I fumbled at the seat belt latch, but my fingers were clumsy, or maybe it was stuck. The buckles weren’t where they were supposed to be, which only furthered my confusion. Had this Humvee been remodeled or something?

I gave up on the seat belt and reached out with my hands, feeling around for my gunner, my driver. Where the hell was the rest of my platoon? The ringing was finally beginning to fade, so I tried calling out their names, listening hard for one of them to reply. But then a hand covered my mouth.

I fought it, my fist beating against the arm that held me in place. Then a voice spoke right next to my ear. “Shh. Lex, honey, it’s me. It’s Quinn.”

I went still, and the whole thing came back to me. I wasn’t in Iraq; I was in Maven’s tricked-out Jeep, and someone had rammed into us on the scenic overlook, flipping us over. I nodded my head to show that I understood, and he took his hand away.

Quinn was right-side up, having disengaged his seat belt and crouched next to me. Both airbags had gone off, which explained the trickle of blood from my nose. I touched it gingerly. It hurt, but it didn’t seem broken. I distantly wondered if Quinn was bothered by the smell of my blood. Then I heard a pop and felt the seat belt loosen, and before I knew it Quinn was helping me down so I didn’t fall. I crouched next to him on the roof of the Jeep, silently thanking Maven for getting such an awesome vehicle. Things would have gone very differently in my little sedan.

“Where are they?” I whispered.

“Waiting for us to crawl out.”

I shivered. “Are they human?”

“Vampires, I think. Three of them. I only saw one face, but I’m pretty sure he was one of the Denver villani.”

I thought quickly—or as quickly as I could, having just had my bell rung. “Weapons?”

“Just a handgun and a shredder. My bag of tricks is in the back; I don’t think we can reach it.”

“Flares?” The rest of them had the advantage of vampire eyesight, but I couldn’t fight if I couldn’t see.

Quinn, who had no trouble seeing in the dark, reached for the glove compartment, and thrust a couple of road flares into my hand a moment later. I looked around for a moment, then extended the little legs on one of them and set it on the battered windshield behind me, where it wouldn’t start an actual fire. I used the igniter cap to get it started, just like lighting a match. It burst into hissing light.

Having any kind of light was a relief. I could make out Quinn, looking concerned and determined, and the remarkably intact interior of the reinforced Jeep.

“How do you want—” I began, but was interrupted by a long, earsplitting screech that started at the back of the car and traveled slowly toward the front. I froze, listening for footsteps, but I couldn’t hear anything over the piercing squeal of metal tearing up metal. They were keying the side of the Jeep, but with something a whole lot bigger than a key.

The sound stopped abruptly, a few inches down the car from my window.

Then a new sound burst into my ear, making me jump backward, bumping into Quinn. “Little pig, little pig, let me come in,” sang a male voice, right on the other side of the car door. I felt Quinn press a sidearm into my back, and I slowly took it. I could only make out a blurry circle for a face.

“Not by the hair of go fuck yourself,” I yelled back. As fast as I could, I raised the 9 mm and fired two quick bursts at the face.

There was laughing outside the window. Goddamned vampire reflexes. “
This
is the chick everyone’s afraid of?” said the same voice. He came strolling around the front of the car, as if baiting me to shoot again. I waited.

“She’s not so tough,” agreed the other, a woman this time. She had been behind him, and was now standing by my window. The man continued walking his lazy circle around the Jeep, while the woman hovered next to my window. If Quinn was right, there was a third vampire in the darkness somewhere.

They were surrounding us.

I glanced at Quinn, who raised an eyebrow, asking what I wanted to do. He was the investigator, but I was the soldier. He’d defer to me in this situation, but the problem was that all our options were shitty. If we went out, we’d have to climb awkwardly out of the flipped Jeep. Quinn could do it fast enough to attack, but it would take me a few seconds, and he couldn’t keep all three of them off me while we were cornered like this. Even if they did let me climb out safely, there wasn’t a lot I could do with my magic other than press them, and I couldn’t do that without being able to clearly see their eyes.

The woman leaned down to the hole in the bulletproof glass and took a big whiff through her nose. I’d once seen Quinn do something similar. “I can smell your fear, darlin’. And the death in your blood. Mmmm.”

I raised the sidearm and shot for the same hole in the window, just on general principle, but she danced back, laughing. “Why don’t you come out and play with us?” she called out.

Then it hit me—why hadn’t they already killed us? They could have kicked in the Jeep’s windows and dragged us out by now, or hell, just tossed in a Molotov cocktail and called it a day. But they were keeping their distance. I looked at Quinn again. I could tell he was thinking the same thing, but he seemed as puzzled as I was.

“We’re pretty comfortable right here,” I yelled.

“Oh, we don’t care about your boyfriend,” the woman said through the hole. “We just want you. But if you don’t come out, we’ll have to come in, and then we won’t be
nearly
so nice to Mr. Quinn.”

Shit.
Quinn read my thoughts and shook his head violently. When I shifted my weight, he actually grabbed my arm. “Don’t you dare,” he whispered.

Behind him, the male vampire started to kick the safety glass of the driver’s side window. He was deliberately slow about it, but he’d still get through the glass in a few seconds. There was no time. I leaned forward and kissed Quinn, taking the hand he’d laid on my elbow and moving it down to my forearm, so he could feel what was under the jacket sleeve. “Take the third,” I breathed, hoping the shattering glass would hide the sound.

Quinn’s face was tight, but he nodded, trusting me.

Big hands were reaching into the Jeep, swiping toward Quinn in a blur. “Okay!” I shouted. “Leave him alone, I’m coming out!”

The hands receded. “Throw that pistol out first, darlin’,” drawled the woman near my window. “We don’t want any accidents.”

Damn.
There went Plan A. I ejected the clip and tossed the sidearm out the open window, hearing it clatter away. “That’s a good girl,” she purred.

Anger flared inside my head, but I was focused now. I put the clip in my jacket pocket just in case. Then I climbed over Quinn and started to crawl through the open window.

The male vampire was leaning against the Jeep, smirking. I made a show of scraping my back on the window, wincing. I reached up my right hand. “A little help?”

He hesitated for a second, but then gave a tiny shrug. There were three of them, and to him I was one little human. He reached down and took my right hand with his left.

God, I love being left-handed.

I popped up as fast as I’d ever moved in my life, swinging the shredder around to plunge it into his chest. And left it there.

Shredders are spelled to destroy whatever they touch when they’re at rest, basically causing a mini-implosion. The idea is to get to the vampire’s heart, but I hadn’t had the leverage to get it all the way through his breastbone. So instead it destroyed his breastbone. And probably some of the tissue around it.

The vampire dropped to the ground, screaming and clutching at his chest. The female vampire sped around the car toward me, but I’d spent years handling road flares, and I had the cap off and the igniter struck by the time she reached me. She couldn’t slow her momentum in time, so she wound up colliding with the flare, which burned my wrist a little. I’d been hoping to actually stab her with the thing, but I settled for setting her clothes and her long blonde braid on fire.

Howling with pain, she ran for the scrubby dirt on the other side of the bicycle path and dropped to the ground, trying to roll herself out. I had to drop the flare, but just as I did, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and saw the third vampire hurtling toward me. My would-be attacker was abruptly blindsided by Quinn, who burst through the car window like a missile, launching both of them into the darkness. The light wasn’t bright enough to make out their fight, but I heard scuffling and snarling. I ran for the discarded gun, picked it up, and snapped the magazine back in, whirling around to point it at the fight.

“It’s okay,” came Quinn’s voice out of the darkness. “He’s dead.”

I nodded, only then realizing it had gone quiet. I turned the weapon toward the female vampire, but there was nothing left but a skeleton-shaped fire. I relaxed my arm, lowering the sidearm.

Quinn’s form morphed out of the darkness. “Your wrist,” he said, reaching for me.

I realized I was rubbing it absently with my free hand. “Oh! It’s fine.” I let him look, but it was barely a first-degree burn. I’d put some salve on it and forget about it.

“Can you get the flashlight?” I asked Quinn. “Let’s talk to our survivor.”

We converged on the male vamp, who had gone still on the ground, both hands still clutching his chest like he could hold the bones together himself. It had to hurt like hell. Quinn snapped on the flashlight and held it high. The vampire blinked in the sudden light, looking at me with fear.

Good. He should be afraid.

Then I realized he was avoiding my eyes, his gaze darting from my forehead to my chest to Quinn, then back again in a frantic loop. He’d been warned not to look at me. Interesting. “What’s your name?” I asked him.

His lips moved, but only a wheezing hiss came out. “The stake must have punctured a lung, maybe both,” Quinn observed. “He needs air to talk.”

I sighed. “Do you still have baggies in the glove compartment?”

The next few minutes were fairly disgusting, as Quinn had to shove a plastic baggie into the vampire’s chest to cover the hole in the lung. I was all for sharing work, but I decided that in this case my best contribution would be holding the flashlight.

Quinn’s hands were still actually
in the vamp’s chest
, holding the baggie in position, when I asked again, “What’s your name?”

“Kraig,” he breathed, still avoiding my eyes. “With a K.”

I blinked.
That’s
what he wanted to use his breath on? “Who sent you after me, Kraig?”

Without moving his arm, he lifted a shaky finger and pointed it toward the back of the car. “Ford.”

Quinn and I exchanged a look. So the vampire who’d hung back in the shadows had been the head vampire in Denver. “Is he your dominus?”

“Yes. Yes.” His answers were coming fast, as if to show how cooperative he could be.

“How did you find us?”

“Followed the big Jeep,” he wheezed. “Figured you’d visit the bloodbags.”

Quinn shot him a disgusted look. Kraig was referring to human people. “Why did Ford want you to come after us?” I demanded.

“Don’t know.”

“What did he want with her?” Quinn asked, jerking his head toward me.

“Don’t know.”

I moved closer, crouching down next to him. The injured vampire still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You get a choice now, Kraig,” I said softly. “Do you want me to press you, so I can see if you’re lying, or would you rather we just killed you?”

He agreed to be pressed.

When he finally looked at me, I honed in my focus and called up a connection between us. As soon as I felt it lock into place, I asked him all the same questions again. Unfortunately, Kraig had been telling the truth about not knowing anything. Ford was his dominus—his lord, for lack of a better term—and Ford had said they were to take me alive. That was all Kraig needed to know. He had no idea what Ford was planning to do with me after they took me. He was just a grunt.

I wasn’t sure what to do with him after that. The domini-villani relationship is complicated. It’s difficult, if not downright impossible, for a lower vampire to resist an order from a dominus, so it was hard to entirely blame Kraig for the attack. I decided to just ask him. “Tell me if you had a choice about capturing me,” I commanded.

He paused, examining the question. Vampires can’t lie when I press them, but sometimes they need to consider before they can answer. “I could have resisted,” he said finally. “I did not.”

Quinn stepped away to report all of this to Maven. I held on to my control over Kraig, though I couldn’t really ask him any more questions while his lungs were still healing.

In the end, with Maven’s blessing, I pressed him to go to Boulder on foot and throw himself on Maven’s mercy. I also said he couldn’t feed on the way, which would make the trip very painful.

When Kraig had completely disappeared into the darkness, Quinn and I set about cleaning up the mess from the crash. Compared to dealing with thousands of pounds of giant reptile, it really wasn’t that difficult. We buried the vampires’ remains a few hundred yards away, called the police, and told them Quinn had driven the Jeep and I’d driven the pickup. Quinn pressed them into buying the story, and we called in Quinn’s favorite towing company to tow both cars. It was scary how good I was getting at this.

C
hapter 6

The tow truck dropped off the Jeep at the same body shop where Maven had commissioned the custom work, and I made a mental note to call them the next morning to arrange service. When we finally got back to Magic Beans, only a couple of hours before dawn, there was no sign of Kraig-with-a-K. When we got back to her office, though, Maven was clearly pissed—but not nearly as upset as she’d been about the belladonna poisoning. An attempted betrayal was something she was used to.

“So,” I said, because I needed to make sure I understood what was happening. “We’re thinking Ford was going to make a move against you, and he decided to get rid of Quinn and me first?” It wasn’t a terrible plan—Quinn was deeply loyal and Maven’s best troubleshooter, and I could press vampires.

She sat in her office chair, her small hands steepled in her lap. “Something like that,” she said at last. “I don’t understand where the belladonna comes in, though.”

“Maybe he’s the supplier,” Quinn suggested. “When you showed signs of interfering with his business, he tried to take you out.”

“But then why poison his own people?” I argued.

A different kind of man might have been upset that his girlfriend was contradicting him in front of the boss, but Quinn just shrugged and said, “Because they found out what he was doing, and they needed to be silenced so he could usurp Maven.”

“That must be it,” Maven said, but her face was still troubled.

I told Maven what Nellie had said about belladonna, and with a sour look she agreed that the whole “flushing with blood” plan was probably Nellie messing with us. I didn’t mention what Nellie had told me about Maven’s obsession with the herbs. It didn’t seem like a great idea to antagonize her when she was already angry.

She sent us home after that, and I was more than a little relieved to leave her presence. Since there were less than two hours until sunrise, Quinn decided to head back to his apartment. He squeezed my hand. “Are we still on for tomorrow night?” he said, his voice low.

Tomorrow night. I stared at him blankly, and he grinned. “Date night, remember? An actual date? No sandworm bits, no blood, no Pellars, much as we love them. Just you and me like regular folks.”

I flushed a little. “Right. Date night. A thing which I can totally do. Wait, if we’re not hip deep in sandworm viscera, what are we even going to talk about?”

“Boring things,” he said solemnly. “Local elections. Gluten allergies. The effects of marijuana legalization on the state economy.”

“Oh, so, Boulder things.”

“Exactly.”

I stood on my tiptoes and gave him a light kiss. “You’re on.”

I was smiling when I climbed into my car to head home. But something about Ford and the attack still wasn’t sitting right. It wasn’t until I’d gotten back to the cabin, showered off the road dust, and climbed into bed that I figured out what was bothering me.

Why had they wanted me alive?

In the early morning hours when I finally went to sleep, I dreamed of the desert. Again.

I never used to dream about my last two days in Iraq. Until last fall, I couldn’t even remember the events that had culminated in me stumbling out of the desert, covered in sand and dried blood. Oh, I had plenty of nightmares after my discharge, but those were generic, comparatively toothless, and they eventually faded after I took in my rescue animals. But I never dreamed about the worst of it.

Then, six months ago, I learned the reason: my brain had walled off those memories to protect itself from the trauma. A healing witch had inadvertently taken down that wall when she restored my ability to see ghosts. I was aware of the irony: I’d wanted to see ghosts in order to speak to Nellie, and now I couldn’t avoid my own personal ghosts. Each night, I thrashed against the blankets and experienced the same horrors all over again. Helplessness. Pain. Violation. Grief. Impotent hatred and fury for the people who had hurt me and killed my friends.

If Quinn was there, he would wake me up, never minding if I hit him or screamed in the process. He would hold me and kiss away my tears, reminding me that I was home, safe. That I had a different life now. And that would help me cope until the next night, when it would happen all over again.

Only one thing ever varied in the dream. Sometimes, when I relived those days, I had my boundary powers, the ones I’d developed and practiced since that night vampires had tried to kidnap Charlie. In this version, as I dragged myself away from the blast that had destroyed our Humvee, I saw the perpetrators closing in and I howled, reaching for my magic. Their life forces flew into my hands, their corpses dropping instantly into the dirt. And I
laughed
.

“No!”

I woke up drenched in cooling sweat, blinking against the morning sunshine. Automatically, I reached for Quinn, but he wasn’t there, of course. I curled into myself, bringing my knees to my chin, shaking. Next to me, my dim-witted Yorkie, Dopey, nosed my side, making a little whining noise.

“Sorry, girl,” I mumbled, not quite myself yet. “M’fine.”

I don’t know how long I laid there, staring at the ceiling and trying to collect the person I’d rebuilt after I’d been forced out of the army. The next thing I knew, my phone was vibrating on the nightstand. I reached over and picked it up to see the screen. Jake.

I answered the phone, glancing at the clock on the bedside table. It was almost ten. “Hey, Jake.”

“Hey. I got your, um, present.” I smiled. Nobody considered a dead fox much of a present, not even Jake. “Do you want the good news, or the bad news?” he went on.

I sat up in bed, petting my herd of rescue animals as they began wandering in to greet me. “Um, the good news, I guess.”

“It’s definitely not rabies.”

I relaxed a little. “Oh, okay. Good. Wait, then what’s the bad news?”

“The symptoms got me curious, so early this morning I called a couple of other vets in town,” he reported. “There are three more cases just like this one: a wild animal that has suddenly lost its mind and attacked someone.”

Simon would have sounded a little excited by the prospect of a medical mystery; hell, he’d probably be rubbing his hands together. But my quiet, even-tempered cousin couldn’t enjoy a situation that involved dying animals. “Attacks? Was anyone hurt?”

“Mostly the other animals were too small to do much damage, but a college kid did get his arm scratched up pretty good by a squirrel.” Jake replied. “The hospital gave him the rabies treatment right away, although an autopsy revealed that the squirrel didn’t have it.”

“So what did it have?”

“No idea. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s probably some sort of new virus that can go from animal to animal—but not to humans. It happens sometimes.” Humor crept into his voice. “And before you ask, the college kid did
not
turn into a zombie. That was Dani’s first question.”

I had to smile at that. Jake’s daughter Dani was probably my favorite of all my cousins’ kids. “All right, well, thanks for getting back to me. I’ll keep an eye on the herd when they’re outside, just in case.”

“Good idea. Meanwhile, the Department of Natural Resources is looking into it.”

We spent a few more minutes catching up on family news. Dani was thinking about trying out for the volleyball team in the fall, which would be her first team sport. She had also been exchanging e-mails with Grace Brighton, who was the daughter of my friend Sashi, the healing witch in Las Vegas. Grace was a couple of years older than Dani, but apparently they spent hours playing some online game together on the weekends. Jake and his wife Cara were even talking about going down to Vegas for Dani’s thirteenth birthday in a couple of months.

When I eventually hung up the phone, it was with some trepidation. I was a little nervous about the two sides of my life—boundary witch and family member—intersecting in any way. Then again, Grace didn’t know anything about the Old World, and Sashi was doing her damnedest to keep it that way.

At the same time, I couldn’t believe Dani was nearly a teenager. I could swear I’d been changing her diapers a week ago. I felt a stab of nostalgia. Soon she’d be too busy to come over here and play with the herd, and too grown-up for our Pixar movie nights with the other kids.

Feeling old and tired, I considered just staying in bed. But I could never fall back asleep after one of those dreams, not without Quinn, anyway. So I let the animals out and took a quick shower, put salve on my burn, and dressed in jeans and an old purple shirt that used to be my sister’s. Sam had given it to me while she was pregnant with Charlie, complaining that it was too tight around the middle and it would never look good on her flabby mom belly again. Smiling a little at the memory, I padded into the kitchen to check my calendar. I was pretty sure I had to work at the Depot at one, but since becoming semi-nocturnal, I’d gotten the days mixed up before.

The doorbell rang before I made it to the living room. I jumped a little, and all around me dogs began barking hysterically, working extra hard to make up for the fact that they hadn’t heard anyone approach. Generally the only person who could surprise the dogs was Quinn, because he was vampire-sneaky. “Dropped the ball, guys,” I muttered.

The animals swarmed the front door, and I had to wedge myself between them to get to the little glass window. When I peeked through, I saw an unassuming Caucasian man with his hands stuffed in his pockets. When he saw me, he held up his hands slightly in an unconscious nonthreatening gesture. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I automatically thought
salesman
.

He said something, but I couldn’t make it out over the barking. I cracked the door, jamming my body in it to keep the dogs inside, and opened my mouth to get rid of him. He overrode me.

“I’m sorry to just drop in on you like this,” he called over the noise, “but I didn’t have a number for you. My name is Emil Jasper, and I . . . well. I’m your biological father.”