Boundary Crossed Read online

“Oh, wow,” I said softly. We were still in the city, and there was just enough light from the streetlamps for me to study Darcy’s body. It still had the blonde hair and the bloodied black jacket, which was somehow a whole lot creepier than if she’d been dressed in trailing bandages like a movie mummy. Because that’s what the rest of Darcy’s body looked like. It was desiccated to the point that I couldn’t even tell if there was any skin left on it, or if I was looking at a skeleton.

  I’d seen dead bodies when I was with the army—too many of them. But those had all been reasonably fresh corpses, still in the process of decay and rot. Darcy’s corpse didn’t look like she’d died an hour ago, that was for sure. I looked back at Quinn, raising an eyebrow. “Jesus, how long was I out?”

  Quinn let out a surprised laugh. “Our bodies do that when we die. Magic is connected to life; that’s what it prefers. When a vampire dies, the magic sort of abandons them, and the body returns to whatever condition it would have been in if the person had never become a vampire.”

  I scrunched my face, thinking again of the horror movies Sam had made me watch when we were teenagers. “I thought vampires turned into dust.”

  He shrugged. “Only the really, really old ones do that. Darcy was turned maybe thirty years ago, so she’s not that far along yet. Still a skeleton,” he added, almost cheerfully.

  “Oh.”

  The head with its bare skull seemed to be staring at me every time we passed a streetlight, so I flipped the blanket back over it and turned around in my seat again, buckling my seat belt. “Aren’t you worried about getting pulled over or something?”

  He shook his head. “I checked all the lights already, and I’m driving at exactly the speed limit. Anyway, if I got pulled over, I’d just press the cop to forget me.”

  I considered that for a moment. “So what do we do now?”

  “Now we need to ditch the body,” he replied, his tone careful. I saw him glance at me out of the corner of his eye and understood that my response in this moment was important. I could ask him to drop me off before he got rid of Darcy’s body, and he might even agree. I had to admit, the idea was tempting: It was late, my body still ached, and the dogs would start tearing up the cabin pretty soon if I didn’t let them out.

  But I was the one who’d begged to work for vampires, and the one who’d insisted on helping Quinn tonight. I had asked for this. And if I tried to pick and choose which parts of Quinn’s job to do with him, it wouldn’t speak well of my willingness to be a team player.

  Besides, it wasn’t like we were burying an innocent, or even a human. I’m not a fan of killing by any means, but Darcy had come after Charlie, which was one offense I could never forgive. And she would have killed Quinn and me both if things had gone a little differently. I wasn’t going to shed any tears for her.

  “Okay,” I said finally.

  We drove in silence for a while after that. I knew this was my chance to ask some questions about the supernatural crap I had suddenly become a part of, but I just didn’t have the stomach for any more information right then. Instead, I fought to think about something that didn’t involve bodies or bloodshed. Each time I tried, though, my thoughts returned to Charlie. It was aggravating.

  Quinn drove us through the outskirts of the city and into the mountains, the darkness deepening until there was nothing to see that wasn’t in the car’s headlights. The night was overcast and quiet, and after a while a chill crept into the car. I reached over and turned on the heater.

  “Sorry,” Quinn said. “I don’t really get cold. I mean, I do, but it takes a lot.” His voice had taken on a shade of awkwardness.

  “Yeah?” I said, stretching my legs out in front of me to get my toes closer to the heater. “That must be nice.”

  “Listen, Lex,” he said, clearly uncomfortable. “I wanted to thank you.”

  I turned my head to look at him, but his eyes were fixed on the road. “For what?”

  “For sticking around when I was unconscious. Not letting Darcy . . . you know.”

  He still didn’t look at me, and I realized that Quinn was embarrassed. He was supposed to be the vampires’ enforcer, and he’d let himself get benched by a psycho wielding only a front door. In front of me, the newbie human. “It never occurred to me to leave,” I said honestly, turning my head to look out the window so he could have a little privacy. Vampires could get embarrassed. What a weird concept.

  After a couple more miles’ worth of silence, Quinn asked, “Did Darcy say anything while I was out?”

  I considered that. “She said they were taking Charlie to some kind of middleman or dealer, who would hang onto her until someone else was ready to act. A ‘senior.’ I assumed that meant whoever she was working for.” I didn’t mention the weird link I’d created between us. Until I knew exactly what I’d done, and whether I could do it again, it didn’t seem like a good thing to share.

  “She used that word, ‘senior’?” Quinn’s voice had taken on interest.

  “Yeah, why? What does it mean?”

  He shrugged. “Pretty much what you said—someone she considers a boss, a superior. It might even just be a vampire who’s a lot older than her—‘senior’ is a term of respect.”

  “Could she have meant the vampire she’s pledged to . . . Kirby, right?”

  I couldn’t see Quinn’s face very well at the moment, but I could practically hear the wheels turning in his head as he considered this. “Not necessarily, but it’s possible,” he said finally.

  “Or maybe it’s the vampire Kirby’s pledged to,” I pointed out. “Itachi.”

  To his credit, Quinn didn’t immediately leap to his master’s defense. He took a moment to consider it. “I honestly don’t think Itachi is responsible,” he said at last, and I realized that for the first time since I’d met him, he sounded completely human. For just a moment I caught a glimpse of what Quinn must have been like as a cop in Chicago . . . and as a regular man. He had a calmness, a centeredness, as if he considered everything thoroughly before acting. Then the glimpse was gone, and the unreadable Quinn had returned. “By Old World rules, he already owns your niece,” he said, still talking about Itachi. “There’s no reason for him to try and steal the kid away from himself.”

  I couldn’t really argue with that. “Okay, but we do know that Maven was right; Victor and Darcy were working for someone,” I said aloud. “Only Darcy was our best lead to finding out who that was, and we just killed her.” I felt my fingers clench into fists.

  “Don’t worry,” Quinn reassured me. “Tomorrow night we’ll go talk to Kirby.”

  I glanced at the clock. “It’s only midnight. Why wait?”

  The side of Quinn’s mouth turned up. “Have you heard the expression ‘Don’t shit where you eat?’”

  Apparently, disposing of bodies happened often enough for Quinn to have a regular body dump site. Unfortunately, it was two hours outside of Boulder.

  We drove into Rocky Mountain National Park for nearly ninety minutes. When we finally pulled off the highway, Quinn followed a few dimly lit streets before turning onto a completely dark, unmarked dirt road that led deeper into the park. Wherever we were going, it was a very specific destination. “How did you guys pick this place?” I asked, shaking my head a little. When it came to the middle of nowhere, there were an awful lot of places to choose from in Colorado.

  “It has a certain . . . cachet,” Quinn said dryly. The dirt road dead-ended, and he pulled the Toyota to a stop. He got out and popped the trunk, pulling a heavy-duty flashlight out of the tightly packed space. He handed it to me. “I can see pretty well in the dark,” he explained, “so you can hold the light.”

  He gathered Darcy’s body out of the backseat, still wrapped in both the plastic and the blanket, and then I followed him along a path across the scrubby mountain desert. We left that path within minutes, but even in the rough terrai
n Quinn strode along gracefully, at a pace that most speed walkers would admire. I had to struggle to keep up with him, partly because my body was still stiff, but mostly because I had to pick my way along with the flashlight, stepping around scrubby plants, fist-sized rocks, and prairie dog holes. I was used to hiking, even right here in the park, but Quinn’s speed was making me feel like a clumsy tourist—and he had to carry the awkward bundle of skeleton with him.

  We kept hiking for almost forty-five minutes, until we reached a broad expanse of land next to the mountain. The place didn’t look like it’d seen a human in decades, if ever. Suddenly I had to work hard not to get spooked. This was mountain country, but the emptiness and isolation reminded me too much of Iraq for comfort. I moved my light up toward the backs of Quinn’s legs, to remind myself that I wasn’t alone.

  Finally, we saw a sign of human civilization—an enormous, decrepit sign that read KEEP OUT. NO TRESPASERS. The writing was in fading red paint on weather-beaten wood, and as my light played over it, I realized the sign was nailed to some kind of door that seemed to lead right into the mountain. It was secured with a huge, rusted padlock that looked older than I was.

  “Speak, friend, and enter,” I murmured under my breath.

  “Oh, that movie you’ve seen?” Quinn tossed over his shoulder.

  “I read the books,” I told him. “When I was a kid.”

  Other than the still-reddish paint, time and Colorado dirt had turned everything in sight more or less the same rusty brown color, and it took me a moment to realize that the heavy door was the entrance to one of Colorado’s many abandoned mines. This must have predated the park. Quinn went right up to the entrance, ignoring the padlock. I trained my light on the door while he set the bundled body on the ground and reached for the sign. I’m not sure what I was expecting—maybe another display of vampire strength—but Quinn just dug his fingers into the sides of the giant sign and tugged on it. The heavy sign immediately came away in his hands, leaving a neat hole big enough to step through.

  I laughed. “Clever.”

  Quinn shrugged. “Keeps out the riffraff. There’s a mine shaft in there that goes down a hundred feet. That’s where we’re dumping her.” He paused and wheeled around, as if something had just occurred to him. “You claustrophobic?” he demanded.

  “Uh . . .” I wouldn’t say I was afraid of enclosed spaces, exactly, but like many soldiers who’d served time inside a giant tin can with a metaphorical target painted on it, I didn’t exactly enjoy them. The cramped office in Magic Beans was about as small as I could easily handle. I didn’t want to tell Quinn that, though.

  Quinn stepped closer to me, giving me an appraising look. “I can take it in by myself,” he said levelly.

  I shook my head. “I’m fine,” I said through gritted teeth.

  His gaze didn’t leave my face. “You’re not fine,” Quinn decided. “Hang on a second.”

  In a blur of movement, he and the bundle disappeared through the hole before I could say another word. “Dammit, Quinn!” I stepped up to the hole and leaned in, pointing my flashlight in either direction. Just a long, low hallway on either side. “Shit,” I said, with feeling. No way was I going in there without knowing which way he’d gone.

  I drew back and noticed that the clouds had parted, revealing enough starlight for me to see an outcropping of rock a few feet away from the mine entrance. I went and sat down. There was nothing to do now but wait, and—

  Before I could even finish the thought, Quinn was back, popping out through the hole as nonchalantly as if we’d been playing hide-and-seek. Damn, I thought. How fast were these people?

  “See? Just took a second,” Quinn dismissed. “Let’s go.”

  On the hike back to the car, I said angrily, “I would have gone in with you, you know. I could have handled it.”

  Quinn didn’t answer until we were twenty feet or so down the path. Then he mumbled, “I was in the Gulf War. The first one.”

  “You fought in Desert Storm?” I said, surprised.

  He shrugged. “I was eighteen, kind of naive and stupid. Served two years in the infantry so I could go kick some ass.” The wry smile that followed was the most human expression I’d seen on him yet. “Seems like a hundred years ago, now. I remember riding around in the Humvees, though.”

  “Yeah.” My body was warm from the hike, but I shivered anyway.

  “You do a lot of patrols?” Quinn asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Most people stopped asking questions at that point, but Quinn pushed on. “Any explosions?”

  “Four,” I said shortly. The scars on my back twinged as I remembered. “The last sent me home.”

  I saw him nod. “PTSD?”

  “No.” It had been a near thing, but I’d technically escaped the diagnosis that plagued so many American soldiers returning home from war. I credited Sam for that. Sam and some damned convenient memory loss about my last two days in Iraq.

  “I had it,” Quinn said abruptly. “PTSD, night terrors, claustrophobia, the whole thing. Embarrassing, back then.”

  “You got treatment?” I asked, curious despite myself.

  Quinn shrugged. “Nah. Just time. I can still remember those night terrors, though.”

  We walked on in a slightly more companionable silence, all the way back to the Toyota. I realized, for the first time, that with vampire speed Quinn could have probably made the whole hike in a quarter of the time it had taken both of us.

  The drive back to Boulder was mostly uneventful. I began to doze after forty-five minutes, then started awake when I heard Quinn’s voice float over from the driver’s side. “You’re really serious about working for him, aren’t you?”

  “I’m really serious about Charlie,” I said quietly. “And I don’t know of any other way to keep her safe other than to back the horse I think will win.”

  Quinn was quiet as he digested this. I got the impression that he had as many questions for me as I did for him, but neither of us were showing any more cards tonight.

  Chapter 16

  At seven-thirty the next morning, two hours after I’d finally collapsed in my bed, my cell phone began to shriek.

  Dopey and Pongo were in bed with me, but neither of them stirred at the angry little machine vibrating on my nightstand. I was tempted to follow their example, but I reluctantly reached over and grabbed the stupid phone, answering without bothering to look at the caller display.

  “‘Hate you,” I mumbled, by way of greeting.

  “Hey, Lex!” said a familiar cheerful voice. “It’s Lily.” When I didn’t answer right away, she added, “Lily Pellar?”

  “Yes.” I managed to pull myself up until I was more or less sitting. Dopey woke up and looked at me with vacant good cheer, part of her tongue sticking out between her teeth. “What’s going on?”

  “My mother spoke to Itachi last night. I understand the vampires want you to undergo training after all.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Cool. Simon has classes today, so I’ll be leading your training session.”

  I yawned. The conversation wasn’t quite interesting enough to keep my eyes open. “Uh-huh.”

  “We can do it at my mother’s farm. It’s kind of Witch Central in Boulder, so you should know where it is, anyway. I’ll text you the address. Just wear something comfortable. Come by in, say, an hour.”

  That got my attention. “Wait, what?”

  She’d already hung up.

  I set an alarm for eight-fifteen and went back to sleep. It wouldn’t leave me enough time to shower, but at eight-thirty in the morning Lily Pellar could deal with however I smelled.

  Unfortunately for me, the dogs flipped out at eight, going on a full-out barking spree. Dopey and Pongo launched themselves off the bed, and I peeled my eyes open for just long enough to throw a pillow at the bedroom door, shutti
ng it behind them. If they wanted to bark at rabbits through the living room window, they could damn well stay out there.

  A moment later, however, the doorbell rang. “Nooooooo,” I groaned. Had Lily decided to come pick me up? What kind of monster did this sort of thing to a person?

  But when I got to the door and waded through the herd of barking dogs and curious cats, it wasn’t Lily on the doorstep. The cops. I’d completely forgotten that I’d agreed to give my statement this morning. Stepping away from the little window in the door, I looked down at myself. I had managed to strip out of my dusty clothes the night before, exchanging them for an oversized army T-shirt and underpants. My auburn hair was alternately plastered to my face and poking up in different directions, and my fingernails were encrusted with dirt. Great.

  I opened the door a crack, leaning around the frame to greet my cousin Elise and . . . oh, shit, Detective Keller. “Sorry, guys, I was just getting dressed,” I said apologetically, gesturing helplessly to indicate that I was sans pants. Keller craned his head a little, trying to see what I had going on beneath the T-shirt. Enjoy the gray cotton panties, asshole. “I’ll be right with you. Elise, give me a second to get to the bedroom, then come on in. You know where the coffee is.”

  My cousin opened her mouth to respond, but I had already shut the door and was hightailing it for the bedroom. I turned off the alarm clock and started yanking open dresser drawers, snatching the first pair of jeans and T-shirt I saw. “Son of a bitch,” I swore to myself. Of course it was Keller.

  Boulder isn’t big enough to have a designated homicide-robbery division. Instead, there are about twenty detectives who investigate anything from sexual assault to bank robbery to kidnapped pets. With so few spots, it’s difficult for regular patrol cops to get promoted—Elise had been trying for years—and Detective Neal Keller was the kind of guy who loved to lord his power over the cops he outranked. I’d lived in Boulder my whole life, and I knew that most of the city’s police were good people doing tough jobs. Keller, though, was a first-class dick.