Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) (8 page)

C
hapter 12

My knees started to hurt after a few minutes of crouching, and I had to give up and sit down cross-legged, feeling lukewarm blood saturate the back of my pants. I told myself to think of it as a puddle of water, which actually helped a little.

I fed Maven for as long as I dared, but when I got light-headed and started to see spots at the edges of my vision, I had to stop and clutch my hand, trying to slow the bleeding. Luckily, it was only about five more minutes before I heard Simon’s Chevy pull into the little alley between Magic Beans and the next building.

Simon happened to be having dinner at the Pellar farmhouse when I’d called, so he and Lily had made some excuse and driven over together. They climbed out of the car and rushed toward us, each holding a backpack. With a grunt of greeting, Simon unzipped his pack and pulled out the same lantern he’d used when we were hunting the Unktehila, setting it up next to Maven’s body. The blaze of light was almost shocking, and I squinted away from it. I wanted to tell him to turn the lantern off—what if someone saw us?—but we were tucked in a tiny lot behind a Dumpster. I doubted it could be seen from the street.

I’d warned them to wear old clothes, but I didn’t realize how much blood my own outfit had collected until Lily rushed over to me and I followed her shocked gaze downward. My jeans were saturated, my silk blouse and blazer were decorated in damp dark blotches, and my skin was stained red in patches that ran from my arms to, probably, my face. It looked like I’d fallen into a bathtub of red dye. Luckily, I was just too dizzy to be properly grossed out. “This is why I can’t have nice things,” I mumbled to myself.

Lily crouched down near Maven’s head, right next to me. On the other side of her, Simon was pulling out what appeared to be his own personal vampire feeding kit, which included bandages, sterilized needles, IV tubing, and surgical knives. “You’re really going full-time with the Dr. Frankenstein bit, aren’t you?” I asked weakly.

“Frankenstein was just misunderstood,” Simon said, his tone so serious that I couldn’t decide if he was kidding or not. He handed the IV kit to Lily, who’d done a couple of years of medical school. She had already put on surgical gloves, and she expertly inserted an IV into the back of Simon’s hand. It was attached to a long tube with some sort of one-way stopper on the end. Quinn had passed out again, so Simon unceremoniously poked the end of the tube through his lips, provoking a hilariously confused expression from the vampire.

“Hey, dipshit,” Simon said brightly. “Let me get the first round.” Quinn rolled his eyes and held the tube to his lips.

Lily was stripping off her surgical gloves. “Can you feed Maven?” I asked her.

“In a minute. You’re too pale.” She took my wrist, checking her watch with her free hand. “Tachycardic,” she muttered to herself. She reached toward me until she could put both hands on my face, like a mother feeling for a fever. “Shit. You’re clammy. You lost way too much blood.”

“Yeah, I was just starting to think that myself,” I said unsteadily.

“This a severe hemorrhage, Lex. You could go into shock.”

“Later.”

“You need a blood transfusion—”

“Later,” I said stubbornly. I tilted my head toward Maven, lifting my eyebrows.

Lily sighed. “Let me see your hand.” She made a clucking noise when she saw the cut I’d made. “Sloppy. But it shouldn’t scar, since you got some vampire saliva in there. Stitches or butterfly bandages?”

“Butterflies.”

“I figured.” As she taped up my hand, I watched Maven’s still form. She still looked bad, but maybe a tiny bit better than when I’d first arrived? It was so hard to tell with the change in lighting. I wanted to ask Quinn what he thought of her condition, but he’d have to stop drinking blood to answer, and he needed it more than I needed an answer just then.

“How much belladonna did she get?” Simon asked, seeing my gaze. When I looked back at him, I noticed the old spark of scientific curiosity in his eyes. I cocked an eyebrow, and he blushed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean for that to come out . . .
excited
. I’ve just never actually seen any of the Solanaceae in action before. Do you know how strong the dose was?”

“No, but she took two vials in the back.” While waiting for the Pellars, I’d checked Maven for puncture wounds. There were two marks right next to each other in the middle of her back, between her shoulder blades.

“They shot her in the back?” Lily said, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “That’s so . . . tacky.”

“Yes, it is.” I heard the anger in my own voice. It really bothered me that I hadn’t thought of the possibility of a dart gun.

Lily had finished bandaging the back of my hand and was digging into her own pack. She pulled out a half-gallon container of orange juice, with about a third of the juice still inside, and a package of Newman’s Own cookies, handing them to me. “This is what my mom had available. You need the glucose and hydration.”

As I took the food, she picked up the IV kit again and began swabbing the inside of her arm. “I get better veins there,” she said when she saw me looking. “Simon?”

Her brother leaned forward and helped Lily insert the IV needle, moving very slowly so he wouldn’t disturb the needle and tube taped to his own hand. For a moment, watching the two of them literally tying themselves to vampires, I was overwhelmed with gratitude. Simon may have been Quinn’s friend, but neither Pellar really owed the vampires anything. They’d come because I’d asked, and they had done so without a second thought. My vision blurred a little. I told myself it was just blood loss.

“Lex?”
Whoops.
Simon had been talking to me.

“Sorry, what?”

“I asked if you thought there were multiple shooters. Shouldn’t she have been able to dodge after the first dart? The poison can’t work that fast.”

I shook my head. “Dart guns are single-shot weapons. There’s no way someone would have time to reload, which means two weapons firing simultaneously.” Being careful of the bandage, I held out my hands in front of me to demonstrate. “Two shooters is possible, but I’d put my money on one shooter with a sidearm-style tranquilizer gun in each hand. It would be the easiest way to make sure the shots were simultaneous.”

Simon frowned. “If I’m remembering right, those darts don’t hold all that much liquid, though. Would that amount of belladonna really put Maven down?”

“Those weren’t the only shots,” Lily said suddenly, staring at Maven’s linen top. All three of us looked at her. “Look.” With her free hand, she pulled down the neckline, stopping just above the vampire’s breasts. I leaned forward and saw an angry red puncture wound, the size of a really big needle, right over Maven’s heart. I’d completely missed it, having stopped searching after I found the shots in her back.

“Jesus,” Simon breathed. “They shot her twice in the back to incapacitate her, then put a syringe straight into her heart.”

“That’s really cold,” Lily said, awed.

I just stared. It
was
cold. It was also brilliant.

“What are you guys going to do?” Simon asked, looking between Quinn and me.

I met Quinn’s gaze. His color wasn’t all the way back, but his eyes were alert. He tapped Simon on the shoulder and nodded to indicate that Simon could stop the IV. Taking the tube out of his mouth, Quinn said flatly, “Right now, we have to get her the hell out of here. And we need to get rid of all this blood.”

“Are we sure it’s safe to move her?” Lily said.

Quinn leaned forward, getting his face right down next to Maven’s skin, and inhaled deeply. The Pellars and I exchanged a glance, but none of us had any idea what he was doing. After a couple more sniffs, he sat up with a little nod. “When I first found her, she reeked of decay,” he explained. “She was right on the edge. I don’t smell any now. I think it’s okay to move her, but she won’t be out of the woods until we can get her heart to start beating again.”

“Oh! I took Nellie’s advice,” I said, remembering suddenly.

“You went back to see Nellie?” Lily said, at the same time that Simon asked, “What was it?”

“She said we had to drain some of the poisoned blood out first, letting the vampire’s blood pressure drop. Then give them untainted blood. We thought she was messing with us, but—” I pointed to the mark on Maven’s arm. It should have been completely healed by then, but it looked like a fresh scar. “When Quinn’s blood wasn’t working, I tried it.”

“So now what?” Lily asked.

“We’re supposed to give it twenty-four hours,” I said. “That will, um, redistribute the poison in her current blood supply. Then we do the same thing again.”

“None of us are going to be able to donate much in twenty-four hours,” Simon pointed out.

“Especially you, Lex,” Lily added. “You still need to go to the hospital. At least for fluids.”

“Relax,” I told her. “I can’t die, remember?”

She didn’t look comforted. “Maybe not, but if your blood pressure drops off the scale, you can’t function, either.”

Quinn frowned at me, but all he said was, “I’ll talk to my blood bag contacts to see if it’s possible to get a large supply without drawing attention.”

“Which brings us to the immediate problem of where to keep her,” I said, looking at Quinn. “Where are you keeping the other two infected vampires?”

He shook his head. “One of our warehouses in Denver, but we can’t take her there. People know about it, and we don’t know who we can trust.”

“What about one of the, um, portable vampire storage units?” I asked, referring to the empty, clean septic tanks that Maven had stashed all over the state for emergencies.

“Too many of us know where they are.”

Duh, Lex.
“Right.”

Quinn looked at Simon. “Say, dumbass . . . how many people know about your new lab?”

C
hapter 13

Quinn had parked down the street, so Lily, who was the cleanest of all of us, went to his car and backed it into the parking lot, blocking the alley. Quinn popped the trunk and pulled out plastic tarps. He had a lot of them for . . . well, I won’t say situations like this, because none of us had heard of anyone attacking Maven and surviving, but it was his job to deal with the bodies. Mine, too.

Lily put a tarp down in the Jeep’s vampire storage compartment and draped the extras on the seats. Quinn put Maven in the storage compartment, and then he matter-of-factly stripped down to his boxers and wrapped his bloody clothes and shoes in another tarp. Lily didn’t wolf whistle when he undressed, which told me a lot about how freaked out we all were. Maven was down. We were dealing with it, but mostly on autopilot, because . . . God,
Maven was down
.

Quinn rummaged around in the very bottom of the trunk, which was basically his own version of Mary Poppins’s bag, and eventually came out with a garden hose, the kind you could get at any home improvement store. He hooked it up to a spigot on the back of the building, which I’d never even noticed, and began rinsing away the blood, trying to move it in the direction of the nearest sewer grate. I wanted to offer to help, but I was having a little trouble sitting upright at the moment.

I rested my eyes for a second, and then suddenly Quinn was pulling me up, helping me stumble toward the Jeep. He gently dug my keys out of my pocket and tossed them to Lily. Then he wrapped a tarp around me like it was a blanket and planted me on the passenger seat.

I dozed against the window for a bit, barely registering when the vehicle stopped and then started again. We stopped a second time, and I almost toppled out when Quinn opened my door. I would have landed on my face if he hadn’t caught me.

“Come on,” he said gently. He started to pick me up, but I shook my head. I did not want to be carried like a princess. “I am not a princess,” I said out loud. I doubted he followed my train of thought, but he just nodded, put one of my arms over his shoulder, and gripped me around the waist. At some point he had put on a T-shirt and athletic pants. He had a plastic bag in his other hand, and I could hear it swishing as we stumbled into the building.

He dropped me on a stool at the kitchen counter, where I lay my head down in my arms between Simon’s instruments, burrowing from the light. The blood on my clothes was getting tacky, but as filthy as I was, I just wanted to sleep.

Then Lily was there, taking one of my arms and prodding at it. “Hey,” I mumbled, too out of it to be indignant. “Where’s Maven?”

“Hidden in the back room,” Quinn said over my shoulder.

Lily turned my arm over, examining the underside. “She’s got too much blood splashed on her. We need to clean her up so there’s no infection.”

So Quinn and I took a shower together—but only because I needed him to help me stay upright. I kept both hands on the shower stall while he scrubbed at the bloodstains on my skin and washed my hair. It probably would have been tender and romantic if I didn’t kind of feel like throwing up. Every few minutes I started to list to one side and he had to right me.

At least the hot water was waking me up a little. “This isn’t how I pictured our first shower together,” Quinn remarked.

“I never planned to have a shower together at all.”

“No?”

“No. Sex in the shower is like buying a convertible or getting a perm. It seems all fun and sexy in theory, but what actually happens is discomfort and weird hair.”

He threw back his head and laughed, a sound that I felt in my stomach. I’m not a funny person, but man, I
loved
Quinn’s laugh.

He dressed in the same outfit he’d been wearing and helped me dry off. I hadn’t thought to keep a spare outfit in the Jeep, so I had to put on some of Simon’s clothes: a clean pair of boxers and a CU T-shirt, which just generally made me look like it was the morning after at a frat house. But at least I wasn’t covered in vampire blood.

When we were decent, Quinn sat me down at the metal table in the kitchen and Lily, who had cleaned up in the other bathroom and dressed in more of Simon’s clothes, pounced on me with a new IV kit.

“What are you doing?” I asked, my words coming out thick.

Lily shot me a surprised look. “You don’t remember? Damn, you
are
out of it.” She held up a clear plastic tube filled with liquids, as though she were displaying a prize fish. “Your boyfriend got you IV fluids!”

I smiled. “And it’s not even my birthday.”

A few minutes later, Lily and Quinn had rigged up a makeshift IV stand out of a coat tree, and I was shivering in my chair. I always forget how cold IV fluids feel going into you. The damp hair hanging on my shoulders didn’t help much. Lily pulled her chair right up next to me and lined up the side of her body with mine, adding a little warmth. Quinn stood by the table with his hands in his pockets, restless because he couldn’t do anything. His body temp was barely warm enough to pass for human.

Simon came out of the bedroom rubbing his wet hair with a towel, dragging a flannel comforter. “This should help,” he said, tucking it around me. The comforter smelled like Simon—a whiff of farm, a bit of lab chemicals, and Old Spice. I smiled my thank-you.

Quinn and Simon sat down, and Quinn began to explain the situation to both Pellars. He went through the whole story, from the moment Maven had called us in until the moment I’d called them for help.

The mood sobered quickly as the enormity of what was happening began to sink in. Even assuming that Maven recovered, we had no idea how long it would take. According to Simon, it could be weeks or months. And although Quinn was Maven’s right hand, we all knew he didn’t have the raw power to hold the state if anyone came after it. We needed another plan.

“Basically,” Quinn concluded, “We have two choices. We can try to cover up Maven’s current condition, or we can ask someone else to step in and take control in her absence. Like an interim cardinal.”

“Is that a thing?” Lily asked.

He shrugged. “It’s happened before, often during belladonna attacks.” Lily and Simon didn’t notice the note of negativity in his voice, but I picked up on it.

“What?” I asked.

Quinn grimaced. “I’m worried about perception. Things were just beginning to settle down after the Unktehila mess, which itself was right after Maven killed Itachi to get Colorado, at least from a lot of peoples’ perspective. Maven’s enclave is running low on faith and high on uncertainty. To come forward and say that Maven let herself get attacked—”

“But there’s no way she could have seen this coming,” I protested, but he held up a hand.

“I know that, and you know that. But most vampires won’t see things that way. If you succumb to an attack, it’s
always
your fault. You left an opening.”

There were a few seconds of quiet as we all digested this. “Okay, I get that,” I said finally, “but at the same time, hiding the belladonna attack doesn’t seem feasible long-term. We could make up a story for a night or two, but there’s all the practical stuff with the coffee shop—schedules, deliveries, paydays—plus, if one of the vampires from somewhere else in the state walks in with a problem and doesn’t find her here, there will be hell to pay.”

“And whoever did this may be motivated to stir up more shit,” Lily added. “They could either go public with Maven’s absence or come after her again.”

My phone buzzed on the counter. I automatically started to get up, but Quinn waved me down at the same time Simon darted for the phone. Rolling my eyes, I held out my free hand for him to pass it to me. I glanced at the caller ID—St. Julien Hotel—and hit “Ignore.” “Emil?” Simon asked. He’d taken a peek at the screen, too.

I nodded. “I’ll call him back.”

Quinn looked at me with a question on his face, but I just shook my head. I hadn’t even had a chance to tell him about my birth father yet, but obviously the attack on Maven was a hell of a lot more important than my personal identity crisis. I’d tell him later.

The boxers I was wearing didn’t have pockets, so I set the phone on the table in front of me. When I looked up, though, Simon was staring at me. “What?” I asked.

He shook himself, and then said haltingly, “No offense, Lex, but it does seem like a pretty big coincidence that your biological father arrived in town right before Maven was poisoned.”

“Wait,
what
?” Lily exclaimed. Quinn raised his eyebrows at me, which for him was pretty much the same as Lily’s outburst.

I gave them a brief explanation of Emil’s visit that morning. Lily was obviously bursting to discuss it further, but I turned back to Simon. “I agree that the timing seems fishy. But the poisoning started weeks ago,” I pointed out. “Emil just flew in yesterday. Besides, I can’t see any reason for him to go after Maven or the vampires.”

“Neither can I,” he conceded.

“Where were we?” I asked, glancing at Quinn. He looked thoughtful.

“The way I see it, two things need to happen.” He looked at Simon. “I need you to work on the belladonna. Figure out if there’s some shortcut to waking Maven. Failing that, see if you can predict how long it’ll take her to snap out of it if we continue with the transfusions. And test the darts we found to see if they tell you anything about the makeup of the poison. Anything that might help us figure out who did it.”

Simon nodded, brightening. “I can do that.”

“I can help,” Lily chimed in. “I might not know much about evolution, but I know biology as well as Si does.”

“Well, maybe not
as
well,” Simon said under his breath. Lily just rolled her eyes at him.

“What about us?” I asked Quinn.

“We’re going to figure out who did this and kill them. And we’re going to do it really, really fast.”

The best way to trace the belladonna, Quinn explained, would be to figure out who was dealing in the area. He gave Lily and Simon a sidelong look. “I’m not accusing you guys of anything, but you know most of the witches in the state, and the herbs are witch magic.”

“Fetters,” Simon corrected.

“Hmm?”

“The big three—wolfberry, belladonna, and mandragora,” he explained. “We call them the fetters of magic. And they’re
not
witch magic. The witches were just the first to discover their uses.”

“Okay,” Quinn said, “But historically, the majority of people who work with the, uh, fetters, are witches, right?”

“Only because we had to,” Lily said, a little snappish. “No one would goddamn help us, and then you-all started treating us like we were drug lords.”

I blinked, surprised. We had suddenly jumped into a
very
old argument about how vampires hadn’t stepped in to save witches during the Inquisition. If we got into this debate, we might never leave it.

“No one has ever treated you like a drug lord, Lily—” Quinn began, but I poked my free hand out of Simon’s comforter and waved at them to stop.

“Guys, enough. Quinn knows you have nothing to do with the herbs, right, Quinn?” His jaw was a little set, but he nodded. I turned to Simon and Lily. “But if you absolutely had to acquire some belladonna, what would you do? Who would you go to?”

The Pellars exchanged a look, and then Simon shrugged. “Billy Atwood, probably,” he said. “But he’s . . . um, dead.”

That was a nice way to put it. Atwood was the witch I had sort of killed in order to save Simon’s life. “Atwood dealt belladonna?” I asked.

Lily finally tore her glare away from Quinn. “Atwood dealt everything. But there was never much of a market for the fetters in Colorado, since my mother made peace with Maven.”

“Okay, so who would take over Atwood’s business?” I asked. The Pellars shrugged, clueless. “What about the Atwood farm? You said he was the last descendent, but there must have been a cousin or distant uncle or something who would inherit.”

I couldn’t quite interpret the look that passed between the two Pellars—God, I missed sibling insta-communication—but it was Simon who spoke. “Ardie Atwood,” he said softly.

“Who’s she?”

Simon looked at his sister, giving her room to speak. Finally Lily sighed. “She’s Billy’s second cousin, the family black sheep. Because she actually went to college and made something of herself.”

I knew Lily well enough to know when she was holding something back. “And?”

She stared at the table, looking a little sullen. “And she’s my ex.”