Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) (12 page)

C
hapter 20

“
No
!”

I didn’t even hear myself scream it; I was too busy scrambling over the bed to lunge at Emil.

He was expecting it. He sidestepped me easily, and Quinn and I went down in a tangle. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Simon running at Emil, but the older man clocked him in the jaw, using Simon’s own momentum against him. Simon fell down, momentarily stunned, and Emil used the opening to bolt out the door.

I ignored him, totally focused on the wooden stake sticking out of Quinn’s chest. It was thicker and more crude than the spelled stakes we used, and—oh my God it was in his
body
—

He’s not dead,
I told myself, though my breath was coming out in a ragged panic. Vampires start to decay immediately when their hearts are destroyed, and Quinn’s eyes were open, his hands twitching. Emil had either missed the heart or only nicked it.

“Quinn!” I yelled, but his eyes had gone distant, his body focused on repairing itself. My hands fluttered over the stake. It just looked so wrong sticking out of his chest that my fingers itched to pull it out, even though my old first aid training screamed at me to resist.

I looked frantically at Simon. “Should I pull it out?” My voice came out high and shrill.

Simon didn’t answer. He was on his hands and knees, looking dizzy. I hesitantly wrapped both hands around the stake—and gasped in shock as Quinn’s hands went around mine.

“I’ll be okay,” he wheezed. The stake must have punctured a lung. “Go after him.”

“I don’t want—”

“Simon’s got this. Go!”

Groaning with frustration, I staggered to my feet and stepped over Simon, who was giving me a reassuring nod as he struggled to his feet. I stumbled a little as I went through the living room, still a little shaky from blood loss and shock, but by the time I made it through the door, I was at a full run.

The sun was down, which would hide the new bloodstains on my sleeves, but it also made it harder to spot Emil. Then I caught movement in a streetlight down the block—a large figure barreling around the nearest corner. I sprinted after him, feeling slow and discombobulated.

What the hell was going on? Why would my father attack Maven? Wait, was he even my father? Sure, he’d shown me that picture of Valerya, who looked just like Sam, and he and I did look related. I was sure I hadn’t imagined that. But why would my biological father want to hurt Maven? Was he the one who’d been after her all along?

Wake up, Lex.
Emil had belladonna in his system. What were the odds of two unrelated people having one of the fetters at the same time in the same place? Emil must have been the one who’d originally poisoned her and the Denver vampires. The next time I talked to Sam, I was gonna flip out at her.

I ran harder. Belladonna or not, Emil was surprisingly fast as he hurtled through the streets. I run three or four times a week, but not usually right after losing a third of my blood volume. At best I could only maintain the gap between us, never close it.

After nearly ten minutes I realized that he was running with certainty, like he knew exactly where he was going, and that scared me. What was he planning? Before I could work out what was ahead of us, Emil veered left, racing straight into the traffic on Third Street. I halted, but he managed to weave neatly through the cars, hitting the other side and regaining his stride.
Shit.
I was gonna have to follow.

I bolted forward, watching the incoming traffic and zigzagging as much as I could. I was so busy making sure I didn’t get hit that I nearly missed Emil’s sudden left turn. He circled the outside of a deserted parking lot, and now I was convinced he
did
have a plan. I imagined a map of Boulder in my head. The busy street to my left had to be Longbow Drive. But where was Emil going? There was nothing over here.

Then I remembered.

Boulder has so many tourist-friendly attractions that it’s easy to forget about the less-flashy ones, such as the Leanin’ Tree Museum and Sculpture Garden. It’s kind of a funky combination of a greeting card factory and a historical art museum. I’d never actually taken the indoor tour, but I liked to come to the sculpture garden sometimes for the quiet. It was a small, simple space, just grass interspersed with bronze figures in classic Western scenarios: an elk with his head lifted to bugle, a buffalo, that kind of thing.

Sure enough, Emil ran across the paved entrance that led to the museum grounds, barreling toward the sculpture garden. For a moment I thought he’d be trapped against the eastern wall of the garden—it was closed at night, and the entrance was around the side—but Emil ran straight into the chest-high hedges that formed the border, barely slowing down as he crashed through them and disappeared.

When I finally caught up, I paused just outside the broken hedges. There was no sense of movement inside, but he couldn’t have raced all the way through the garden and out the other side by now. Was he trying to ambush me? I squinted, but it was too dark to see anything but shadows. In the dim light, the statuary seemed strangely ominous.

I crept forward, cautious. “Emil?” I called. No reply. “Is that even your real name? Are you actually my father?”

No answer again. I didn’t like this. The garden was shaped roughly like a rectangle, with a corresponding oval-shaped path inside. Visitors could stroll around the oval walkway and see the statues on the grass. I stepped toward the path, strangely reluctant to cross onto it. This whole situation had “trap” written all over it.

Then again, what could happen? Emil didn’t have magic, and I would have noticed if he carried a firearm. “Okay, fine,” I yelled. “How about you tell me what you have against Maven?”

Somewhere in front of me there was a low, dry chuckle that lifted the hairs on my neck. “This isn’t how I wanted to do this,” said his voice, wafting out of the darkness. He was panting, out of breath. Well, good. “But you forced my hand. You really are quite like your mother that way.”

I fought the impulse to shiver. “So you
did
know my mother,” I called back, trying to keep him talking. The sound bounced off the walls and the bronze sculptures more than seemed natural. Where
was
he?

“He’ll be cross with me,” the voice went on, as though I hadn’t spoken. “It wasn’t supposed to go like this. But I think he’ll forgive me. If you survive, he’ll know you’re worth all the trouble.”

Fuck it. I was not going to stand here and play mind games with shadows. I stepped forward, crossing the oval path into the inner courtyard.

At last, I saw him. He was crouching next to my favorite statue, a life-sized female settler with her baby strapped to her chest. I felt a bizarre spark of indignation, like he was defacing the sculpture just by being next to it. His hand was on the ground, resting on something cylindrical that was nearly as long as my forearm. A piece of glass?

“Who? Who will be cross?” I asked.

When he spoke, his voice curled with reverence and fear. “Our father,” he said, and twisted the glass sideways.

There was an explosion of smoky light—no, several small explosions, dotting across my vision. There was no sound, but the lights began to move closer to me, forming shapes. Human shapes. They were ghosts. I backed up, heading away from the settler statue, but when I turned to run, I saw there were more of them behind me. I whipped my head around, looking for Emil, but he’d vanished.

I couldn’t even process that, though, because the ghosts were getting closer, surrounding me in a shrinking circle. I was starting to make out details: the bloodstains, the missing limbs, the gunshot holes. Their faces were twisted with anger and their mouths opened and closed soundlessly as they glared at me.

A jolt of recognition hit me. Oh, God. I’d seen these things on Halloween, when they had to return to their graves, but this time they had a terrifying sense of purpose. They reached out for me, and with every step, they seemed to solidify further.

Emil—whoever he was—had found a way to weaponize the wraiths.

C
hapter 21

As the wraiths advanced, I spun in a circle, counting. There were eight of them, and they were moving slowly, but they were still closing in. The light coming off them had faded, and they were now terrifyingly solid-looking, even more so than Nellie had been when the ley line was active. My best option was to act quickly, while there was still enough space between them to run. I picked the two that were farthest apart and sprinted for the space between them.

The woman on the right couldn’t have been more than twenty when she died, and her hairstyle suggested the sixties or seventies. The ghost on the left was a cowboy in his forties, his eyes bulging out and an angry line of red running across his neck. His clothes were probably from the mid-nineteenth century, although it was too dark and I was moving too fast to look closely. I put my head down and ran, hoping that if they closed rank I would slide through them.

But that’s not how it happened.

The woman didn’t react in time, but the man leaned sideways into my path and held out a rigid arm, clotheslining me at the chest. My legs flew forward and my torso flew back, my back slamming into the ground. The man planted a heavy boot on my chest, squatted, and wrapped his hands around my throat, his face twisted in a snarl.

I panicked.

My legs kicked out wildly, ineffectively, while my fingers scrabbled at his hands. They were locked tightly around my throat—real, so real—and now the young woman was coming around to help him, trying to trap my legs. I was focused on evading her, unwilling to be completely pinned down, but that meant my attention was divided and I couldn’t get the man off and I couldn’t breathe—

Stop reacting like a victim, Allie!
Sam’s voice screamed in my head.
Show this fucker who you are.

With enormous effort, I shut down the panic and assessed. These two had me pinned, and there were more behind them, eager to help restrain me. I wasn’t going to get out of this by physical force. It took every bit of concentration I could muster, but I managed to drop into my boundary mindset, expecting to see these things as glowing blue images, like the fox. Instead, the human-shaped figures crouching over me were completely colorless—swirling, silver-black pieces of light that felt
wrong
in my mind. No, not just wrong—
wronged
. Something had been done to these things without their consent.

But that didn’t make them any less deadly. My concentration was beginning to waver, and I knew I was on the verge of losing consciousness.
Think, Lex.
I let go of the cowboy’s iron fingers and focused on his essence, trying to manipulate it the way I usually did—pulling it toward me with imaginary fingers. I couldn’t get a grip, though—the oil-slick surface was too slippery.

But the wraith felt my clumsy attempts and paused in confusion, his grip loosening long enough for me to get a few desperate gulps of air. I was so grateful for the oxygen, though, that I lost control of my mindset, and the wraith’s grip on my throat tightened again. The female was sitting on my legs now, trapping me, and I couldn’t even see past her—the other six wraiths had surrounded me, packing tightly around me like I was at the bottom of a football dogpile.

Panic rose in my chest again, but I pushed it down. I was
not
going to die like this, goddammit. I had been through too much to be killed by a bunch of costume-party rejects. I forced myself into the mindset again, examining the cowboy wraith’s swirling, polluted aura. Okay, I couldn’t pull it. But I extended my imaginary fingers again, and this time I
stirred
, sending the swirls of sickness dancing frantically through his form like bubbles in boiling water.

The ghost let go of me, and I could sense its confusion and bewilderment. I didn’t stop to see what happened, though. I rolled over as hard as I could, disrupting the female wraith on my legs and sending her off-balance. I crawled through the jumble of ghostly bodies, pushing aside legs and arms. Now their numbers worked to my advantage. There were too many of them to grab me properly; they kept tripping over each other. They were clumsy, like they’d forgotten how to move in the physical world. I crawled forward and stumbled to my feet, but the cowboy, who seemed like the strongest of them, grabbed hold of the back of my shirt and yanked, sending me stumbling. I whipped around and swung a roundhouse at him, but it was like hitting a pillow—the ghost absorbed the force without even moving.

Then he hit me. And it was not at all pillow-like.

His open-handed blow struck the left side of my head and clubbed me to the ground as effectively as a baseball bat. I sprawled on my face in the dirt path, and immediately felt the cowboy crouch on my back like a demon, his forearm sliding beneath my chin so he could strangle me again. My vision blurred, and there were wraiths on my arms and legs again. I felt myself fade and wondered if a boundary witch could die like this, at the hands of the dead. It looked like I was going to find out.

Then all of them abruptly vanished. Every single one, like someone had flicked off a switch.

I couldn’t hold up my head, and it plopped down into the dirt. Someone hunched down in my field of vision, a warm hand that pushed hair out of my face.

“Lex? Lex!” My eyes focused just long enough to see Simon, who was holding the long, translucent piece of glass. Then I was out.

Chapter 22

The first thing I felt was a cool hand squeezing mine. I knew that temperature. Quinn.

When I opened my eyes, he was leaning over me with worry etched in his face, which seemed odd to me. I wasn’t used to seeing Quinn with actual emotional expressions. I opened my mouth to say I was fine, but nothing came out but a dry rustle.

“Shh,” he murmured. “Lily said you shouldn’t try to talk yet. Whatever got you, it damn near crushed your trachea.” He gave me a thin smile. “Of course, she used a lot more words to explain it. Those Pellars and their big science words.”

I chuckled, which made me dizzy with pain for a second. It must have showed on my face, because Quinn winced, his hand stroking the uninjured side of my face. “Sorry, I’m so sorry. No more jokes. I’m glad you’re okay.”

My eyes dropped to his chest. He was wearing a clean button-down shirt, although I could see a tiny smear of dried blood near his collarbone. He followed my eyes down, touched the spot on his chest where Emil’s stake had pierced him. “Oh, yeah, I’m fine. I drank some of the bagged blood I got for Maven, and it’s almost healed. I’m a lot more worried about you.”

I couldn’t say anything yet, so I just smiled at him. The left side of my face ached with the movement. Quinn’s eyes softened, but didn’t leave my face.

I glanced around without moving my neck, recognizing the concrete walls and the sparse furniture. It was the Basement of Dr. Moreau, but this was Simon’s bedroom. Probably Maven was still in the spare room. I flexed my arms and legs, trying to feel for broken bones. My body was weak and exhausted, not to mention sore, but generally okay. Quinn saw the movement. “You’re going to be fine,” he assured me. “Scrapes and bruises on your back and chest. You’ve also got a pretty impressive bruise on your cheekbone, and your throat will hurt for a few days, but Lily said you just need rest and some ice packs.”

Emil
? I mouthed.

His face clouded over. “He got away. Simon and Lily are working on a locator spell using the crystals we found, but it’s already failed twice. I went back to the St. Julien and pressed a bellboy to get into his room, but it was empty.” He kissed my forehead again. “I’m going to go get that ice pack.”

When he was gone, I began to drift off again. My last thought before I sank into the dark was:
crystals
?

The next time I woke, the clock next to Simon’s bed said 7:42, presumably in the morning. Someone had left the little lamp on the dresser switched on, so I had no trouble making out the figure huddled in the bed next to me, snoring lightly. Lily.

“Hey,” I tried to say, but it came out as an unintelligible rasp. Lily’s eyes popped open anyway. “Hi!” she said, relief heavy in her voice. She sat up, folding her legs in a lotus position. “Thank the goddess. I was a little worried when the ice packs didn’t wake you up. Here.” She twisted at the waist and picked up a sweating glass of water from the nightstand. There was a bendy straw inside. “You need to keep drinking, or we’ll have to do the IV again.”

I took an experimental sip of water. My cheek hurt when I closed my lips around the straw, but swallowing wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. The cold water felt wonderful and painful at the same time. It was like trying to drink when you have strep throat. Or after the tracheotomy I’d gotten the previous year.

Lily was watching carefully, giving me a little nod of approval when I was able to get the water down. “Good. Your trachea is swollen, but the hyoid bone is intact. You might be a little nauseous or light-headed today from the hypoxia, but you’ll be fine in a couple of days.”

She called for Simon, who leaned in the doorway and gave me a tired smile. “Welcome back to the living,” he joked. Lily smacked his arm, but without much energy. They both looked exhausted.

The cold water soothed the back of my throat, so I tried a whisper. “Did you find Emil?”

Simon’s face darkened. “No. Our locator spells aren’t working.”

Lily gestured helplessly. “We need either something that belongs to him or something that’s a part of him, like hair or fingernails. But the only thing we have is the crystal he left behind, and that’s gravitational magic, so it’s all wonky.”

“His blood?” I whispered. There must have been a little bit left in the IV tubing.

But Lily shook her head. “We tried, but the belladonna in his system messed it up. It was like when Emil tried a locator spell for you and your sister at the same time—the results were all confused.”

“No matter how many times we tried,” Simon added, dejected.

That’s why they looked so tired. They’d been up all night trying spells. For me. “Where does your mother think you are right now?” I whispered.

Simon and Lily exchanged a complicated look. It hit me in that moment that by dragging them into this mess, I had more or less asked Simon and Lily to choose loyalty to me over loyalty to their own mother, to their own kind. Shame burned my cheeks as I absorbed the size of that.

But before I could apologize or beg for forgiveness, Lily answered me, her words rushing out in a burst. “We had to tell her, Lex.” Her hands twisted together in knots.

“You . . . Hazel knows about Maven?”

Simon looked away. “This whole thing has sort of snowballed out of control—” Lily began, apologetically.

I waved a hand around for her attention, and she cut herself off. “It’s okay,” I croaked. “I get it. What did she say?” A terrible thought occurred to me. “Is Maven—”

“She’s fine,” Simon assured me. “Or in the same condition as she was last night, anyway.”

“We told Mom about the attack and your father trying to kill her. She said that as long as there’s a chance of Maven recovering, she’ll stand by her promise,” Lily explained.

“But,” Simon added, holding up a finger, “she said she can’t really help us, especially if it takes a while for Maven to wake up. Mom’s not just the witches’ leader—she’s their representative. If the other clans learn that Hazel Pellar had the chance to usurp Maven and didn’t take it, there will be problems.”

Lily batted her eyes with great innocence. “If, on the other hand, Hazel Pellar’s reckless younger children decide to go rogue and help the vampires, that’s certainly not Hazel’s fault.” Despite the difference in their skin tones, Simon’s smile matched his sister’s perfectly.

I bit my lip. “If the other witches find out you guys are trying to save Maven . . .”

“There’ll be a witch hunt, so to speak,” Lily said cheerfully.

“But if we can resolve this quickly, there’s no reason for them to find out,” Simon finished.

I felt the prick of tears in my eyes. I blinked hard, not knowing what to say. I had pledged loyalty to Maven, and more importantly, I still believed she was my best chance to keep Charlie safe. As long as she was—well, whatever passed for alive for vampires—I had to do everything I could to keep her in power. But if she died, or someone found out she was paralyzed and took action against her, I wasn’t the only one who would suffer. We would all be screwed.

“So,” Lily said, “what do we do next?”

Slowly, I pulled myself into a sitting position and swung my legs over the side of the bed. Lily’s hands hovered nearby to spot me. The movement was awful, but I’d had worse.

“I need everything you know about crystals,” I told her.