Boundary Lines (Boundary Magic Book 2) Page 2

  That in itself seemed unusual at ten p.m., but it was Halloween. I could dismiss the gathering as part of some organized college prank or protest . . . except for the fact that each and every one of them was emitting an eerie, continuous glow.

  Adrenaline surged through me and I wrenched the wheel sideways across the median, spraying cedar chips and bits of shrubbery in my wake. I barely heard the honks and shouts behind me as I stomped on the brake and pulled into one of the entrance turnoffs. Breathing hard, I put the car in park and checked my rearview mirror for cops.

  That was so stupid, I berated myself. Why hadn’t I just pulled off at the next exit and circled back? I could get arrested for that little stunt, and what the hell did I care if . . .

  Then I got a good look at the figures glowing against the darkness, and my thoughts seemed to drift away like an untethered helium balloon. They weren’t at every grave—or even every fourth grave—but there were still hundreds of them, maybe more. If they had heard my tires squeal or the other cars honking when I crossed the median, they weren’t showing it now. They were just standing there, each one staring down at a headstone.

  It wasn’t cold in the car, but there were chills crawling up my back underneath my heavy sweater. Despite everything I’d seen in the last two months, it still took me a long moment to realize that I was looking at ghosts. Actual ghosts. That word didn’t seem to fit them, though. It was too silly, too whimsical. “Ghost” was a construction-paper decoration or an amoeba-like cartoon character. But what I was looking at now was connected to the human souls or spirits that I could see with my magic.

  Then I remembered that weeks ago Simon had warned me I might be able to see . . . what had he called them? Remnants. At the time, I’d been so preoccupied with protecting my niece and learning to use my other abilities that I’d completely forgotten. And I had no idea why there were so many of them in this place.

  I found myself shutting off the car, opening the door. I had no real plan, but I was unbearably curious. More than that: I was pulled to them, the same way I was pulled to Maven, the powerful cardinal vampire of Colorado. Cautiously, I walked toward the closest one, a short, round Caucasian woman with long silvery hair. She was wearing a simple violet cotton dress with a blue apron tied around it in a drooping bow. She didn’t look up as I approached, so I slowly began to circle her, intent on seeing her eyes.

  Before I made it all the way around her, however, I saw the blood.

  It had welled out of a grisly dark slice at her throat, then spilled forward to saturate her dress and apron. It streaked all the way down to pool in her sensible shoes, a red waterfall that still looked wet. For a moment I was tempted to touch it to see if it was wet, but I curled my fingers into a fist to restrain myself. I looked up at the woman’s face. She was around fifty, with empty eyes and wispy bangs that had started to curl away from her forehead, exactly as if she’d started to sweat and pressed them away with a damp palm. Her eyes were cast down at her gravestone, like all the others.

  “What happened to you?” I said softly, without thinking. The woman’s gaze seemed to flicker for an instant, like something buried deep inside her had reacted to me, but then she continued to stare down.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, and my hand automatically rose to touch her shoulder.

  Stupid, stupid Lex.

  A bolt of condensed emotion jolted through my arm, driving me to my knees as the wave of feelings crashed into me. Bright purple flashes of pain, peppery anguish, and oh, such horrible fear. Nononono no why do I have to die I’m still so young what about Jody no I can’t leave her why is he doing this I don’t even know him it isn’t fair please don’t please no—

  As I fell, my fingers lost contact with the woman, and I let out a ragged wail, my butt hitting the dead grass hard. I looked up and saw all of the figures turn their heads sharply, like a coordinated movement. They weren’t staring at the graves anymore. They were all staring at me.

  And their eyes were hungry.

  Chapter 3

  Not daring to breathe, I began inching backward on my hands, wanting to get enough distance from the bloody woman to stand up and run. Now that they were facing me, I could see that many of them had visible injuries: a splash of blood over a teenager’s heart, a missing piece of an old man’s head. One woman had no obvious wounds, but she appeared to be soaking wet, though nothing dripped off her. Her face was bloodless, her eyes bulging, desperate.

  Except for the eyes, all of their faces were completely slack—not like a human at rest or asleep, more like a human with no muscle control at all. Dead. I had seen horrible things when I was in the army, and I’d done some pretty horrible things too. But these people, each in their isolated, timeless, bloodied space, were like grotesque action figures under bell jars. They were gruesome in a way I’d never imagined.

  Their gazes were fixed hungrily in my direction, and I got the sense that they wanted something from me. Something that would consume me, use me up until I was nothing, not even a soul. A few of the closest ones even swayed a little, as if shifting their weight to come after me. I was too overwhelmed to move away. A whimper escaped my lips, and I hated myself for it. At the sound, the ghost nearest me took a slow, laborious step, like his foot had grown roots he had to snap. The next step was much swifter. I braced myself for . . . something.

  Then a short, girlish figure stepped in between them and me. “Go back, go back,” she said softly. “She cannot help you. Not now.” The voice was accentless, in that very particular way of someone who has worked at not having an accent. It was low and gentle and extremely familiar. It pulled at me too, a different kind of glow.

  “Maven,” I gasped.

  “You shouldn’t be here, little witch,” she said over her shoulder to me. “Go back to your car, slowly.”

  I rose to my feet and began to obey, forcing myself to inch backward as slowly as I could manage. I didn’t want to turn my back on those things. Maven started moving backward too, but she kept herself angled between me and the dead. When they could no longer see me, they began to lose interest, and one by one their heads swiveled slowly, unnaturally, back toward their gravestones.

  When I lost sight of them around the hedge, I finally turned and rushed back to my car, knowing Maven would follow. I opened the door and climbed in—only to find her already waiting in the passenger seat next to me.

  I jumped. Goddamned vampires. “Quinn does that too,” I grumbled.

  Maven gave me a slightly confused look, and I realized she hadn’t been trying to startle me. She was just that fast. The cardinal vampire of all Colorado appeared to be a girl of nineteen or twenty, with a fringe of bright orange hair, chunky glasses, and lots of necklaces and rings. Tonight, like every other time I’d seen her, she was dressed in layers and layers of baggy cotton and flannel, like a homeless flower child. I had long since concluded that she was trying to disguise her beauty and immortal poise behind all that junk, but it only partially worked. If you looked past the glasses and unflattering layers and bad haircut, she was still breathtaking.

  I shook my head. “Never mind. What just happened? What were those . . .” I took a breath. “They were ghosts, right? Um, remnants?”

  “Not exactly. Ordinary remnants are like short recordings of a death event. Common enough, and they fade away by themselves eventually. These were . . .” Maven twisted one hand in the air, a human gesture for when you can’t find a word. “Gjenganger,” she said at last. “Restless, unhappy spirits whose deaths were violent enough to leave a psychic impact. I turned them away, but we should still leave. Take me to the coffee shop.” I nodded and started the car, pulling us back onto the highway.

  I wanted more information, but when I glanced at Maven, I saw that she was frowning slightly. Unlike most vampires I’d met, Maven actually did a pretty good job of remembering to practice human mannerisms—she used contractions, laughed, and I’d even seen her flirt with customers at the coffee shop she manages. But s
he often dropped it when there were no humans nearby. The worried expression suggested she was too distracted to drop her own act.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  There was a heavy silence, in which I could practically feel her trying to decide whether to trust me with information. I can never just get a goddamned straight answer from vampires. They have to think eight moves ahead to make sure telling me something won’t hurt them down the road.

  “They should not have been so vibrant,” she said at last. “Gjenganger appear every Samhain, but I have never seen them in such detail.”

  I felt goose bumps prickle my arms under my jacket. Maven was a gajillion years old, so anytime she said she’d never seen or done something, it was significant. “For a moment, I wasn’t sure I could turn them away,” she admitted, and that scared me even more.

  I wondered if I should tell her about the strange vibe I’d felt at the witches’ Samhain celebration. Could the two things be related? It seemed possible, but it also didn’t feel right to expose a potential weakness in the witch clan to the cardinal vampire, even if the two groups were technically allied. When push came to shove, I’d sworn my loyalty to Maven, but that didn’t mean push was all the way to shove right now. It’s probably just Samhain throwing everyone off, like Hazel said, I told myself.

  “Why would angry ghosts listen to you at all?” I asked.

  “They recognize me,” she said simply. “I am death.”

  Her tone was so matter-of-fact, especially from her girlish, teenage-looking mouth, that her words sent chills across my shoulder blades. Then she added, “They recognize you too, boundary witch. You should not be in a graveyard on Samhain.”

  I blinked. I’d looked up Samhain on Wikipedia. It was a pagan celebration for the end of the harvest season, loosely connected to the modern Halloween. It didn’t seem like it had anything to do with boundary magic. “Why not?”

  She gave me a confused look again, as if she thought I was putting her on. “Three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, the gjenganger are tethered,” she explained. “But on Samhain, the barrier between the living and the dead is at its thinnest. That’s why they must return to their . . .” she gestured toward the ground, reminding me of the figures’ downcast eyes. “Their remains.”

  “Oh.”

  Maven gave me a curious look. “I’ve never known a boundary witch with so little understanding of death. Didn’t Hazel Pellar tell you any of this?”

  I shook my head. “She doesn’t . . . well, she says she doesn’t know anything about boundary magic.” Then the implications of Maven’s statement sunk in. “Wait, you know other boundary witches?” I said eagerly, peering over at her impassive face. I still knew so little about what I could do. “Living ones? Where are they? Can I meet them?”

  She sighed. “No, not living. Look, we’re getting off track. I’m here to speak to you about a job.”

  I had about thirty follow-up questions, but I tried to focus. I hadn’t been working for Maven long, and so far she’d required very little of me: I’d really just run a few daytime errands, things Maven and her vampires couldn’t do after business hours. But the way she’d said “job” just now was not the way you talked about picking up dry cleaning or running to the bank—and she’d come to see me herself, which had never happened before. “You didn’t just run into me at the cemetery, then.”

  “No. When you didn’t answer my call, I tracked your phone.”

  Oh. Right. I’d agreed to let Maven keep tabs on me when I’d sworn my oath of loyalty. “What’s the job?” I asked.

  “Two of my people have gone missing,” she replied. “I want you and Quinn to investigate. He’s getting supplies together now.” Her voice was calm, almost dismissive, as though we were discussing her misplaced keys instead of two of her vampires.

  “What kind of supplies?” I asked, wary. Weapons? Was she expecting a fight?

  She turned her head to study me, and I tried not to squirm. “Quinn explained that there are no werewolves in the state of Colorado, yes? And why?”

  I blinked at the abrupt change in topic. “Um, yes. He said that a crazy alpha werewolf started a war here years ago, and you and Itachi destroyed him and scattered the pack.”

  She nodded. “My covenant with the witches is to keep the werewolves out of Colorado for twenty years. In return, they must serve my interests, should I call upon them.”

  “Right . . .”

  “Every full moon, when the werewolf magic forces them to change, I dispatch vampires to the state border to hunt for signs of pack behavior. The last full moon was four nights ago, on the twenty-seventh,” she explained. “My representative at the northeast border was supposed to return to Boulder on the twenty-eighth, but I didn’t hear from her. One of my representatives at the western edge of the state did not report back either.”

  “You think werewolves got them,” I said, fury building in my chest. In Los Angeles, I’d learned that my sister had been killed by a mad werewolf. The idea of getting to hunt and kill some was disturbingly appealing.

  But for the first time that night, Maven hesitated. “It’s possible,” she said at last. “But after what happened with Itachi . . .” She trailed off, leaving me to fill in the blanks. Itachi had been the leader of all things supernatural in Colorado up until a few weeks ago. Maven had assisted him as a sort of advisor, a lieutenant. But Itachi hadn’t liked having a lieutenant who was so much more powerful than himself, so he had tried to have my niece kidnapped in order to increase his long-term power base. Quinn and I had helped Maven bring him down for good.

  “You think they might have fled the state because they were loyal to Itachi,” I surmised.

  Maven nodded. “There has been some . . . unrest over the last few weeks.” There was a sudden hardness in her tone that I recognized. Someone else in her organization had recently deserted, or threatened to mutiny, something like that. Which explained why she’d taken the time to come talk to me herself, instead of sending a minion. She needed to keep the whole thing quiet until we knew for sure there was a problem. The power structure of the Old World, I’d discovered, depended heavily on perception. The more it seemed like Maven didn’t have control of her territory, the less control she’d have over her territory.

  But she knew Quinn and I could be trusted—well, at least as much as she could trust anyone. After all, Quinn had been publicly outed as Maven’s mole in Itachi’s old organization, and Maven had made sure every vampire within a thousand miles both hated and feared me. If she ever lost control of Colorado, we were both toast—and Charlie would be fair game.

  You chose this, I reminded myself. You made a deal; now honor it. “I’m supposed to work tomorrow morning; should I get someone to cover my shift?” I was still technically employed as a register monkey at the Flatiron Depot, a 24-hour convenience store, though I had cut my hours to part-time and switched to day shifts. Maven gave me a stipend, but she didn’t use me often enough to fill my time, and I needed to have a job I could explain to my family.

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” Maven answered. “One way or the other, we should know before sunrise.”

  Well, that sounded ominous.

  Chapter 4

  Magic Beans was located on Pine Street, in between a cutesy store that sold overpriced jewelry and a restaurant that made its own cheese. It was near the Boulderado, a popular tourist hotel, and only a few blocks away from my parents’ mini mansion in Mapleton. I cut across Iris Ave and down Highway 7, hoping to avoid the majority of drunk college students who were likely still roaming Pearl Street, bouncing between bars like balls on a pool table. Despite my efforts, the closer we got to Magic Beans, the more crowded the sidewalks became, and the costumed college kids seemed to have some kind of jaywalking death wish. I came very close to running down three young women dressed as a sexy nurse, sexy doctor, and sexy dolphin (!), respectively, after they decided to run diagonally through an intersection in a drunken, zi
gzag fashion.

  When the sexy dolphin’s tail flared up to reveal shapely thighs, Maven looked over at me, cocking a questioning eyebrow. I just shrugged. “Don’t look at me. When I was twenty-two my costume was desert camo.”

  Finally I pulled into the tiny parking lot behind Magic Beans. I spotted Quinn coming out the back door, headed toward a new-looking Jeep Wrangler Unlimited. He was dressed for fieldwork in dark-washed jeans and an all-weather jacket, and he carried a duffel bag.

  He paused as he saw my car, squinting against the glare of headlights, and my heart did a happy little leap, which annoyed me. I’m in my thirties. I should not get butterflies.

  As we climbed out of the car, Quinn nodded respectfully at Maven, then shot me a quick, private smile that burned through my resolve. I couldn’t help but grin back. “You have everything you need?” Maven said brightly. The perkiness surprised me, but then I realized that she’d dropped into her spacey barista persona, the one she used when she worked the front counter.

  “I think so,” Quinn replied. “I’ll call if we’re not going to be back before sunrise. Hey, Lex.”

  “Hi,” I said. “Where are we going?”

  “Julesburg,” he said, naming a town in the northeast corner of the state. “That’s the closest disappearance.” He tossed the duffel bag into the back of the Jeep and opened the passenger-side door. “Shall we?”

  I looked back and forth between him and the massive vehicle. When the two of us went looking for Charlie’s kidnappers, we’d taken his car or my old Subaru. But I just shrugged and climbed in.

  As Quinn took his turn navigating through the drunken coeds, I looked around the interior of the fancy car, half afraid to touch anything. The Jeep’s dashboard and floor mats were spotless, and when I peeked over my shoulder I saw that the back had been tricked out to include some kind of concealed compartment in the floor that took up the whole width of the Jeep. “What’s with the wheels?” I asked Quinn.