Boundary Lines (Boundary Magic Book 2) Page 4

  “Lex!” Quinn had realized what was happening. I got a quick glimpse of the wall behind him before he wrapped his arms around me. “Close your eyes,” he whispered. “You can breathe, I promise. Just close your eyes and you’ll see.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to trust him. But even without being able to see the concrete walls, I knew they were there, and it felt like they were closing in. I couldn’t get my breathing to slow down.

  “Hang on, I’m gonna boost you out,” Quinn said as he pulled away from me. I opened my eyes and stared into his face. “Put your foot in my hand,” he instructed. “On three. One, two, three!”

  Without even a grunt of effort, he lifted me up, and for a second I flew like the girl at the top of a cheerleader pyramid, not that I’d ever been a cheerleader. I hit the grass and tumbled, but he’d judged the distance well, and I managed to turn it into a sort of dizzying roll, coming up on one knee. When I found my balance, I let my body sag back down so I was lying on my back, staring at the sky, my breath finally slowing down.

  Quinn popped up through the hole a moment later. He didn’t try to touch me, just collapsed next to me on the cold, dying grass. We stayed that way for a moment, side by side on the ground, neither of us quite sure what to say.

  “Honestly,” I panted, “we have the most fun.”

  He laughed, a startled, sonorous sound that I could see myself getting addicted to. “How’s your head?” he asked.

  I touched it gingerly. I had a mild headache, and would probably have a bump the next morning, but the bleeding had already stopped. “Fine, I think. I’ll have Lily look at it when I get back to town, but I don’t think it’ll even need stitches.”

  I heard his head nodding against the dry grass. There was a silent moment where we could have discussed the kiss, but I watched it come and go without working up the nerve.

  “Did you see the message?” he asked at last.

  The message. Right. The whole reason we were in the septic tank in the first place. “Yeah.” I’d noticed the rust-colored words painted on the wall of the tank, but my gaze had only touched on them briefly given all the . . . distractions. The picture surfaced in my memory, the words finally registering. “Was that her handwriting?”

  “I think so. And definitely her blood.”

  I didn’t ask how he could tell. I didn’t really want to know. I was getting cold, so I sat up and wrapped my arms around my knees. “So she was wounded?”

  “Not necessarily.” Quinn sat up next to me and draped an arm around my shoulders. His body gave off very little heat—probably another conservation of energy thing—but I appreciated the gesture anyway. “There’s no blood spatter anywhere else, and I can’t smell any up here either. More likely she wanted to leave a note, but there wasn’t time for her to find a paper and pen. She probably bit her finger, wrote the message, and went to investigate.”

  Allegra had left just five words, painted in her own blood: Quinn—howling to the north.

  Chapter 6

  “This means she didn’t just defect, right?” I asked Quinn.

  He was silent for a moment, thinking it over. “With anyone else—hell, even with Travis—I’d argue it doesn’t prove anything,” he said slowly. “If a vampire hated Maven’s leadership, the best way to escape her grasp unscathed would be to skip town and blame it on the werewolves. It’d create a lot of confusion and distraction, giving them the chance to get far enough away that Maven couldn’t find them.”

  “But . . .” I prompted.

  “But Allegra doesn’t play games,” he stated. “It’s one of the reasons why I liked her. If she didn’t want to be under Maven’s rule, she’d either ask for her freedom or quietly leave the country.”

  “So we think it’s werewolves,” I concluded.

  “Yeah,” he said heavily. “We think it’s werewolves.”

  Quinn got out his phone and paced a little ways away to check in with Maven and get instructions. Wanting to help somehow, I found his spare flashlight in the duffel bag and began pulling out cleaning supplies, figuring she’d at least want us to clean up the blood. I was also hoping Maven would send us after the werewolves. Nothing sounded better to me at that moment than looking a werewolf in the eyes before I killed it.

  If that sounds harsh, well, I had my reasons. When, less than a year ago, my twin sister, Sam, was murdered in Los Angeles, the police had told us that she was the victim of a serial killer and that we would probably never find her remains. But being a boundary witch allowed me to talk to Sam, now on the other side of that life/death border, in my dreams. During our last conversation, she’d urged me to talk to Detective Jesse Cruz of the LAPD and find out how she had really died. Hence my trip to LA to find him.

  After I managed to convince Cruz that I already knew about the Old World—that I was now a part of it—he and his friend, Scarlett Bernard, finally told me the truth about my sister’s murderer: he was a werewolf, trying to make himself a mate. I’d heard from Simon and Lily that magic had been fading in the world for generations, and apparently this made changing someone into a werewolf far from a sure thing. The werewolf in LA had killed three women, including Sam, before successfully changing the fourth, Lizzy. I’d met her briefly, and she was a mess from the werewolf magic. She called herself a monster, and I couldn’t exactly disagree.

  Any doubts I’d entertained about whether Sam was actually dead had vanished the first time she reached out to me from the other side. But my parents . . . I was pretty sure they were holding on to a tiny bit of hope that she was still alive somewhere. I had asked Scarlett if I could take her body back to my family, for closure. But as it turned out, she had tossed my sister’s corpse in a furnace—like she was garbage—to hide any supernatural evidence. And now my parents and Sam’s husband had nothing to bury, and they never would.

  The worst part was that I was now a member of a team that did the exact same thing: covered up crimes, destroyed bodies. I’d signed on before I’d really felt the impact of what it would mean, what I might be doing to other families, and I’d done it to save Sam’s own daughter.

  I flopped back in the grass, which made my head ache even more. Everything in my life had become so complicated.

  “Lex? You okay?”

  I snapped back to attention, sitting up again. “Yeah. What did Maven say?”

  Even in the flashlight’s dim beam, I could see Quinn eyeing me. “She wants us to come back. Allegra’s note is too vague for us to go after the wolves tonight. We need more intelligence.”

  There was a weight to his voice, enough to make me forget my own problems. “What’s wrong?”

  He shook his head. “Werewolves sneaking into Colorado is bad enough. It means they’re not afraid of Maven like they should be. More importantly, though, this means Maven has technically broken her covenant with the witches. If they find out, all hell could break loose. We’re gonna need to hit back hard and fast.”

  “A war,” I said softly.

  We cleaned up the writing in the septic tank—well, Quinn did. I stayed up top and checked the area for footprints or other telling signs of our presence—and left for Boulder just before two in the morning. On the way, I called the Flatiron Depot to tell them I’d be too sick to come in for my shift late that morning. If there was going to be a war, I would be needed, which meant I had to get a few hours of sleep before night fell again. I wasn’t twenty anymore; lack of sleep was like a toxin to my body.

  Quinn was subdued and quiet on the three-hour trip back to Boulder, and I wasn’t sure what to say to him. Our second kiss had happened right next to the damning evidence that his friend was probably dead. I didn’t know how to process that, and I’d never even met Allegra. Was he feeling guilty? Grieving? Or—and this was somehow scarier—had it not affected him at all? When I glanced over, Quinn was as unreadable as ever.

  On top of all that, I really wanted to know how hard it was to kill a werewolf, and how the wolves had managed to take down
a vampire, but it didn’t seem like the right moment to ask him if werewolves ate vampire bodies—a thought that sounded so ridiculous in my brain that I had to bite down on a laugh.

  Maybe I’d hit my head harder than I’d thought.

  When we finally arrived back at Magic Beans, Maven was waiting for us in her office, a cramped little space attached to the big concrete-floored room in the back of the building. I struggled not to yawn as Quinn filled her in on the night’s events. When he was finished, Maven stared thoughtfully into space as if she were reading through a list of her options. After a few minutes of her silence, I had to make a conscious effort not to jiggle my knee up and down.

  “What troubles me,” she said at last, and I nearly started in my chair, “is that there were two attacks, from two sides.”

  Quinn nodded. “I was thinking the same thing. I know I haven’t been around that long, but I’ve never heard of werewolf packs joining forces against a common enemy.”

  Maven shook her head. “They’re too territorial for that, too competitive.”

  I spoke up. “Do we know for sure that’s what happened?” They both looked at me with polite interest, like I had performed a card trick rather badly. “I mean, isn’t it still possible that Allegra was attacked, but Travis . . . defected?”

  “No,” Maven said, without a hint of uncertainty in her tone. “After speaking with Quinn, I called one of my vampires in Grand Junction and had him check out the storage chamber Travis was using. He found Travis’s wallet, car keys, and car still there.” She gave a little shake of her head. “There was a thousand dollars in that wallet, just sitting there.”

  Quinn nodded as if that was particularly significant, and I raised my eyebrows at him. “Travis has . . . had . . . expensive tastes,” he explained. “Burberry, Saint Laurent, Dior Homme, that kind of thing.”

  I gave him a slow blink. “I have heard one of those words before.”

  “The point is, he wouldn’t have left cash behind. Or his car,” Maven cut in. “We need to assume that he’s dead, as well.”

  “So what now?” I asked. “Do we go hunting?” I tried not to sound hopeful, but I’m not completely sure I succeeded.

  Quinn frowned. “Unless they’re still in Colorado, it’ll be difficult to identify the specific werewolves who did this.”

  “They won’t be,” Maven replied. “A pack in wolf form may be able to take out a vampire, but they wouldn’t dare face us as humans, not when we’re expecting it. They’ll stay over the border, out of my territory.”

  I must have looked as confused as I felt, because she added, “With the exception of the pack’s alpha, and perhaps beta, werewolves can’t change form very often. They have to shift on the full moon when their magic is strongest, but other than that”—she shrugged—“maybe once, twice a month, at the most. We should have at least a week after the full moon before they can manage another attack.”

  “So three days from now,” I said, just to clarify.

  Quinn frowned. “There’s another thing that doesn’t make sense. If they were really trying to attack us, why linger on the border? Why not sneak into the state as humans, change on the full moon, when they’re most powerful, and come after us en masse?”

  I nodded, picking up on his line of thought. “And if this wasn’t their big attack, why warn us by taking out two of your scouts? No one was expecting two packs to work together. If they were going to do that, why give up the element of surprise?”

  The three of us looked at one another, but no one had a good answer. “We need more information on the werewolf packs,” Maven said simply.

  Well, that seemed easier said than done. I had no idea how to get more intel on werewolves. Quinn gave me a quick glance that said he was just as much in the dark as I was on this subject.

  “After the conflict with Trask,” he began, naming the werewolf who had caused the original war, “did you keep tabs on any of the packs in the area?”

  Something hardened in Maven’s eyes. “Itachi had that responsibility,” she said in a brittle voice. “But he kept the information to himself. As I was only an advisor, it was not my place to question him. And since his passing”—which was a really nice way to say since I ripped his heart out of his chest cavity—“I have found no records of any kind on the werewolves.”

  I opened my mouth to ask if she’d learned anything else since she’d taken over, but I stopped myself just in time. Quinn had implied that Maven was barely holding her territory together at the moment. There was too much confusion and unrest over Itachi’s death, not to mention the discovery of both a boundary witch and a null within her enclave. When would she have had time to spy on werewolves in other states?

  “However,” Maven continued, possibly noticing my dismay, “I do know of one werewolf you can ask, just over the border in Wyoming.” Her eyes fixed on me. “You’ll need to introduce yourself during the day, however.”

  “Why?” Quinn asked.

  I could have been imagining things, but for a moment I thought Maven’s eyebrow quirked with amusement. “Because that’s when the nature preserve is open.”

  Chapter 7

  We spent a few more minutes making plans before I finally trudged out to my car. Maven and Quinn would need to go to ground for the night anyway, and I was so exhausted I was almost nauseous from it. It was hard to believe that only a few hours earlier, I had balked at going home after Hazel’s party. Now I was ready to cry with relief at the sight of my own driveway.

  My home was a modest three-bedroom fishing cabin near the Sawmill Ponds, about twenty minutes outside of Boulder proper. After I had returned from Iraq, my parents had insisted on giving it to me outright. I tried to refuse, but Sam had eventually made me see that I would be doing them a kindness if I accepted: The rest of my squad had been killed in an IED explosion in Iraq, and my parents were so stupendously grateful to have me home and alive; they’d been desperate to do something to take care of me. So I let them give me the cabin, and in return, they didn’t bat an eye when I more or less let my rescue animals half destroy it.

  I was aching for sleep—and from the bump on my head—but I made myself stay awake long enough to carefully wash the dried bloodstains off my skin from where I’d hit my head. There was probably still a bit of dried blood in my dark red hair, but you couldn’t see it, and I decided a shower could wait until the morning. Before I could collapse, I took ten more minutes to feed everybody, let the dogs out, and scoop the cats’ litter boxes. My usual herd of three cats and four dogs had recently grown by one: I was currently fostering a one-year-old pit bull named Lady, and she was so happy to see me I thought she might tip her crate over before I could get it open. I felt guilty for being gone so long, and eventually fell into bed with three of the five dogs crowded around me.

  Before I could do more than wiggle into a comfortable position, my phone began to chirp where I’d left it on the bedside table. I groaned and rolled over to check the caller ID, figuring it was Old-World related. Who else would call me before six in the morning?

  But to my surprise, the caller was my cousin Elise, a patrol officer for the Boulder Police Department. I knew she was working watch three this week, the night shift, but that still didn’t explain why she’d call me before six in the morning. For some reason my thoughts leaped to Charlie, and my heart skipped a beat before I answered.

  “Lex?” Her voice was breathless with excitement. “Hey, sorry to call so early, but random question: Are you still in touch with that biologist from CU?”

  I blanched, thrown off by the whole idea of a connection between my personal life and the Old World, but after a moment I remembered: a few weeks earlier Elise had invited me to coffee on a day I had a magic lesson with Simon. I try to lie to my family as little as possible, so I’d said I was meeting up with a CU professor, the brother of a friend, to talk about auditing one of his classes. “Uh, yeah, we’re still in touch. Why, what’s up?”

  “We got a call from
an early-morning hiker who found a sort of bundle of something slimy on one of the Chautauqua trails,” she explained, the words tumbling out of her mouth so fast that the meaning seemed to appear in my brain a full second later. “My commander thinks it’s just garbage, but it looks animal to me. I thought it might be worth having a scientist look at it before our criminologist takes it apart.”

  “A bundle of something slimy,” I repeated, trying not to sound as skeptical as I felt. The Old World was facing a serious threat from the same monsters who had killed Sam, and Elise was worried about some gooey clump of trash?

  “Yeah, I know it sounds crazy. But I’m trying to go the extra mile here, Lex,” she wheedled. Elise wanted to be a detective someday. “I can go through the university, of course, but they won’t be open for a couple of hours, and the watch commander is humoring me by waiting this long. You said your friend’s brother was a biologist, right?”

  “Uh, evolutionary biologist, yeah.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  Hmm, good question. “I honestly have no idea.”

  “Well, can he come take a look?” she pleaded. “Please? As a favor to me?”

  I rubbed my eyes with the heel of one hand, trying to think. Elise was pushing awfully hard, and she was family, so I couldn’t say no. At the same time, I wasn’t sure Simon would be up for this kind of adventure—the last time I’d seen him he’d needed crutches to walk—but I couldn’t actually tell Elise that Simon was too hurt, since I had no idea what story he’d told the university.

  “Let me call him,” I said finally. “I’m not sure he’s the guy, but he should know who is.” Elise thanked me profusely, and I promised to call her right back.