Boundary Lines (18 page)

Her eyes popped open and she jerked her hands back, looking at me with confusion. “How did you . . .”

She trailed off, and I had to prompt, “How did I . . . what?”

Sashi blew out a sharp breath. “Sorry, let me just try that again.” She took my arms and closed her eyes, and her brow furrowed almost instantly. When she opened her eyes a moment later, she withdrew her hands again, more slowly this time.

“Something . . . unusual is happening,” she said finally. “I should be able to sort of listen to what’s happening in your body, but I didn’t think I’d actually be able to communicate with it.”

“But you can?”

“Easily.”

I opened my mouth to explain that something was off about the magic in Colorado right now, and this could be related, but I stopped myself. Here was a chance for independent confirmation of our theory about the magic going haywire in Colorado, and I didn’t want to sway Sashi’s opinion. “Hang on a moment,” she said, standing up. “I’m gonna run next door and read Grace. I want to know if it’s you, or if it’s this place. Something’s not right.”

I nodded and waited where I was as Sashi used her key to enter Grace’s room. She was back in seconds. “Well, it’s not just you,” she said. She was rubbing one hand with the other and then switching, as if they were injured or scarred. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“Yeah, about that. One of the reasons I need to talk to this specific remnant is because we think something is . . . stirred up with the magic here,” I explained. “I would love to get your impression of how it feels, since your power is a little more . . . um . . . family-friendly than my own.”

“Oh.” She nodded slowly, processing that. “Don’t you have other witches who can give you that kind of feedback?” she asked. “Sybil and her sisters and brother?”

“That situation is complicated,” I said honestly. “I’m trying to figure out exactly what’s going on so I can put a stop to it. It’s causing all kinds of problems.”

Sashi just shrugged. “It’s like a boost, really. Like I’ve suddenly got a bit more . . . juice. But it doesn’t feel like it’s fully under my control, either. It’s . . . well, ‘artificial’ isn’t quite the right word . . . but it feels forced.”

“Huh.” No one had actually put it like that before, but if whatever was messing with the magic in town was actually
boosting
power, that might explain why it was affecting less powerful witches more than those who already had strong magic, like Hazel—and, apparently, myself. I remembered Hazel’s analogy about magical ability working like a battery. It was as if everyone had been given a charge.

Like it or not.

Sashi took a deep breath. “Are you sure you want me to work on you?”

I nodded. “I’m sure.”

“All right.” She took my hands again, and this time kept her eyes closed, cocking her head a bit as though she were listening to something. Maybe she was. Seconds passed, and then something began to spread through me: some kind of glow or warmth. It started in my center and undulated outward in small waves. It slowly faded, taking with it all the aches and pains from the fight with Tony. I suddenly felt my stiff muscles unknot and relax, felt the strength return to my limbs. It wasn’t the same feeling you get from painkillers—not a numbing. It was more like a cleansing. “Oh,
wow
,” I breathed. “That’s amazing.”

“Thanks,” Sashi whispered. “But I shouldn’t have been able to do that.” She frowned again, and opened her eyes to give me a puzzled look. “I shouldn’t be able to help a witch this much. Even your magic is wide open for healing right now, Lex.”

“That’s good, right? Did you do it?”

“Not yet . . . listen, I found the psychic scar tissue. I haven’t pried into it yet, but I can sense that you’re right—it has to do with you blocking something when you were young.”

“And?” I prompted.

“And . . . um . . .” She squirmed in her seat, looking suddenly uncomfortable. “I’m not quite sure how to say this, but that’s not the only mental block your mind has built for you.” I froze. “Did something happen to you a few years ago, in the desert?”

Chapter 29

Without meaning to, I jerked my hands away. I could feel the blood drain from my face, and my just-restored body tensed up all over again.

I could never remember exactly what happened to me during those final days in Iraq. The last thing I recalled was riding in the Humvee. We were guarding a supply line along the desert road, and my gunner was joking about his girlfriend’s aversion to his new mustache. Then there was noise, heat, and a sensation of movement like we were being dragged.

The next thing I knew, I was staggering out of the desert outside the town, covered in dried blood with sand caked into it. My clothes were in shreds, and I had internal injuries, shrapnel wounds, and burns on my back that had been done with something like a hot poker. The doctors in Germany had called it torture, but I couldn’t remember any of it.

I’d always been grateful for that. Despite the urging of the shrink I’d talked to at the VA, I’d never wasted a moment trying to bring those memories back. I’d recovered, come home, and attended the funerals of all of those who’d died around me.

But I still woke up sometimes with the taste of sand in my mouth.

Unable to bear Sashi’s kind gaze, I jerked my chair back and paced over to the window, looking out on Spruce Street. “I was a soldier,” I said to the window. My voice sounded brusque, though that hadn’t been my intention. “I don’t remember all of it.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Sashi said carefully, “The human brain is incredibly complicated, Lex. I’m very good, but I can’t promise you that I can heal one scar and leave the other. It may be an all-or-nothing prospect.”

I nodded, understanding the weight of the decision before me. I stared through the window glass, not really seeing the street beneath me. I didn’t know what having those memories back would do to me. I didn’t even know if I’d be able to function. If I curled up in a catatonic ball underneath Sashi’s hotel bed, I wouldn’t be much good to Maven, or Charlie, or anyone else.

On the other hand, if I
didn’t
do this, we had no way of contacting the one spirit who might be able to help us. The sandworm, the Unktehila
,
would keep killing people. The vampires would challenge Maven again, and more of them would die. And the werewolves . . . I shivered. The goddamned werewolves would come back into Colorado. And all of that was before I even took Charlie’s future into account.

I went back and sat down at the table. “Do it,” I said simply.

She nodded. “This will take a few more minutes,” she warned me. “The brain is a very complex instrument, and even healing a simple clot or cut takes time. Healing the mind is a much more delicate endeavor.”

“Got it.”

She shot me a brief, sympathetic smile, and closed her eyes again.
I closed mine too, trying to think of something else, trying
not
to con
centrate on those last days in Iraq. I thought about Charlie, and what
she was doing right then—it was one of my mother’s days to take
care
of her, so she was probably giving my niece a midmorning snack right now. John and my father were both working at Luther Shoes. I
pictured their offices, the route I would take to visit them. Elise would have finished caring for the herd by now, so she was probably already
at home, recovering from her night shift. My cousin Jake, the vet, would be at his clinic, and his daughter Dani would be in—

The rush of images abruptly snapped over me, like a pile of sticks breaking over my head. Only it wasn’t on the outside of my head, it was
inside
, and there was no stopping the memory of pain, such pain, and the thirst and tears. I tried to jerk my hands away from Sashi’s, to make it stop, but she held me fast, and I was too overwhelmed by the burst dam of memory to fight her.

The night was overcast. So dark; a frightening, muggy blackness. We never even saw the IED. Cisco had died in the crash, and Myers and Randolph were shot as they crawled away from the ruins of the Humvee. They’d taken me, kept me alive, because I was female. Didn’t remember some of that. I remembered being told that the army thought I was dead, thought I’d been vaporized in the explosion.

They didn’t want information. That was the scariest part. I fought, hard, and they hurt me. Then they killed me: slashed my femoral artery. The blood exploded out of it. They’d videotaped this part, I thought—I still had nightmares about that video surfacing.

I woke up in a shallow grave at the edge of town. I was facedown, curled up; there was a little air . . . my eyes opened and I began screaming . . .

“No!”

I skittered backward until I reached the end of the little space between the wall and the bed, pulling my knees against my chest defensively. “No no no no no,” I chanted.

“Lex . . .” Sashi’s voice seemed to be coming from a great distance. She approached me, crouching down, and I flinched away. “I did my best,” she murmured. “But I imagine some of the memory is bleeding through. What can I do to help?”

I shook my head, unable to form thoughts just then. It was too much, too overwhelming. I’d begun rocking back and forth, hitting my back against the wall on each rotation.

A moment later Sashi threw something around my shoulders. The bedspread. She set pillows on either side of me, building me a sort of fort. I nodded my gratitude, and the thaumaturge reached out to smooth my hair, but I flinched away from her.

“Lex . . .” Sashi said gently. “Why don’t I take Grace sight
seeing? You can just rest here for a little while.”

She began to move away, but I reached out and grabbed her hand. “I didn’t expect you to be so nice,” I whispered.

Something passed over her face then, a shadow. A very old sadness. “I won’t say I’ve been where you are,” she said quietly, “but I do know how it feels to try to make something better, only to have the rug pulled out from beneath you at the moment you thought you had your footing.” She squeezed my hand. “Is there someone I can call?”

It was daylight. Quinn wasn’t available. “Simon,” I mumbled. “Simon Pellar needs healing. My phone . . .”

She nodded. “I’ve got this. You just rest.”

I found myself tipping sideways onto a pillow.

Chapter 30

When I opened my eyes, I was in the bedroom that Sam and I had shared when we were kids.

On previous visits I’d started out very disoriented, but this time I knew I was in the space my brain had created so I could visit my sister, sort of my psychological safe room. Sure enough, Sam was sitting cross-legged on her bed, watching me quietly. This was the adult Sam, as I’d last seen her.

“Sammy?”

“Hey, babe,” she said quietly. “How are you feeling?”

“I hurt.”

Sam just nodded. “I know.”

“Why are you here?”

“Because you called for me.” She wrinkled her nose good-naturedly above her grin. “You screamed at me, actually. It was very annoying.”

I felt a corner of my mouth lift despite myself. Sam’s smile had always been infectious. “Pull you away from anything important?”

She stuck her tongue out at me. “You know I can’t tell you that.” I had no idea where people went when they crossed the line between living and dead, and Sam wasn’t allowed to tell me much about it. The one time she’d tried to talk about her death, she’d been blinked away from me.

“I’m sorry about your memories,” Sam offered.

I shook my head, trying to find words. “It’s not the pain,” I said at last. “The memory of physical pain is always terrible, but it’s never as bad as the experience itself.”

“It was watching them die,” Sam said matter-of-factly. “And being helpless.”

I stared at her. “You could see that inside my head?”

She gave me a wry smile. “I just know you, babe.”

I missed her so much right then; it was like a fresh ache in my stomach. Why did she have to die? Then fresh tears overwhelmed me as I remembered what I’d learned in LA. “You were eaten by a werewolf,” I said abruptly.

Sam didn’t look the least bit ruffled. “Yes.”

“I am so sorry, Sammy. But . . . why did you send me to LA?” I asked, giving voice to the question that had haunted me since I’d found out what really happened to my sister. “Why did you think I needed to know?”

“I thought you had the
right
to know,” she corrected me, her face softening. “The Old World keeps secrets, Allie. That’s what they do. And I was afraid if you didn’t find out the truth for yourself, someone would use it against you later.” She winced. “Granted, I didn’t realize just how badly the trip would go for you.”

I bit my lip. “Was it . . . were
you
in terrible pain?”

Sam leaned back, considering her answer for a long moment. “I was,” she said finally. We didn’t lie to each other, which was something I loved about my twin. We told it like it was. “It took me a while to die, and pretty much the whole time I knew that I was
going
to die. I was so
angry
. . . and so worried about John and Charlie.”

She leaned forward, her hands lifting from her lap, and I could tell she was struggling not to touch me. That wasn’t allowed. “But—and this is gonna sound like I’m blowing smoke up your ass, I know, but I swear it’s true—as I was fading, and lost the energy for rage or worry, I felt this great sense of peace, because I knew with perfect certainty that you would protect them.” Sunlight shone out of her smile. “And I was so right.”

“I feel like I’m hanging on by my fingernails,” I confessed. “Or like the little Dutch boy, trying to hold back the whole dike with one finger.”

Sam shrugged. “Part of that is just what it feels like to love a child,” she said, not unkindly.

“But I have no idea what I’m doing,” I whispered. “And I don’t know how to keep going.”

“Well, that’s part of loving a child too,” she said with a tiny smile, but then gestured at the tattoos that crawled up my arms and to my hands. “Do you know why Anna always said that griffins were your spirit animal?”

I looked down at the designs. Lily had created them, but it was our cousin Anna who’d first suggested the connection. “She just said they symbolized courage and boldness.” I shrugged. “I assume it was her way of saying she believed in me.”

Sam nodded. “That’s true, but first and foremost, griffins were guardians. Protectors of the divine.”

My eyes met hers. “If we’re going for symbolism, wouldn’t a phoenix be more appropriate? You know, with the whole not being able to die thing?”

Sam shook her head hard, suddenly fierce. “No, babe. Boundary magic is what you can
do
, not who you are. When we were kids, you protected me, and then you protected our country, and now you’re protecting my daughter.”

“Sometimes I think protecting the country was easier,” I grumbled, but I couldn’t hold back a smile.

She smiled back. “Regardless.
That’s
the person you chose to be.” Sitting back, she waved a hand dismissively. “The rest of this is logistics.”

I raised my eyebrows.
“Logistics?”

“Okay, maybe it’s a
touch
more stressful than logistics,” she allowed, “but you know what I mean. You already know what you need to do, babe. You just have to figure out how to do it.” She cocked her head for a second, like she was listening to something, and then she smiled again. “Maybe he’ll help.”

“Who?”

“I need to go, Allie,” she said in reply. “But listen. There’s one more thing you need to know: not all the werewolves are evil.”

“One of them
killed
you,” I said, anger rising in my voice. “And I saw what it did to your friend Lizzy. How can you say—”

“Babe, you’re gonna have to trust me on this,” she interrupted. “Setting aside what Henry Remus did, werewolves are just sort of tormented by what they are. Stop seeing them as demons, and start thinking about what they bring to the table.”

“Sammy—”

But of course, she was already gone.

When I opened my eyes, I was curled up in a ball in Sashi Brighton’s darkened hotel room.

I could see sunlight peeking through a crack in the curtain, and I was relieved that I hadn’t slept through the whole day. I stretched out my limbs, which were still remarkably ache-free, at least compared to how stiff they’d been in the morning. I decided that Sashi was worth every penny of her consultant fee.

My legs felt shaky, but I needed to get moving. Rising, I went over to collect my keys and cell phone from the top of the TV stand where I’d stashed them while Sashi was working on me. To my relief, the clock said 10:45—I’d only been out for a few minutes, though it had felt longer. I turned back to clean up my blanket fort—and almost bumped into a man.

“Aaaah!” I reared back just in time. He just stood there in a suit and tie, giving me a placid look. He was short—roughly my height—and appeared to be in his late forties, with pale thinning hair and a surprisingly calm expression. “Who the hell are you?” I screeched.

The man smiled politely and gave a little bow. “Hugh Mark, hotel manager, at your service, miss.”

“Oh,” I said, taken aback. Mark hadn’t been standing there a moment ago, and I was in between him and the door. That was impossible, unless—

I looked at his suit, but I didn’t know anything about men’s fashion through the decades. “When did you start working here?” I said carefully.

“I became assistant manager in 1912, and took over as hotel manager in 1917. I have been here ever since.” He looked fondly around the old-fashioned room.

I went over to the bed and perched on the edge, feeling completely discombobulated. First the memory dump, then talking to Sam for the first time since my trip to LA, and now a ghost? I was talking to a
ghost,
in broad daylight. In the middle of someone else’s hotel room.

In broad daylight.

Maven and Sashi had both mentioned that remnants could only be seen at night. But if magic was all stirred up in the area, maybe it was affecting the remnants themselves?

“And what year is it now, Mr. Mark?” I asked.

His face clouded over with confusion. “Why, it’s 1934, of course, but . . .” He trailed off as his eyes landed on the television, my clothes, and Sashi’s modern luggage. “I’m sorry, miss, I seem to be a bit muddled at the moment.”

Whoops, I’d pushed him too far. Quinn had said most of them were only an echo of themselves, like a little bit of a recording. It
seemed as if he could only answer a few simple questions before deferring
back to his “
can I help you” default. “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Mark,” I said quickly. “I’ve been very pleased with the service here.”

He brightened. “Is there anything else I can do to help you, miss?”

I thought it over.
Was
there a way this guy could help me? “Can you tell me anything about how I look to you? Do I have the same appearance as the other hotel guests?”

The uncertainty on his face cleared up a little, but doubt lingered around the edges of his features. “Not entirely, miss. If you don’t mind me saying, I’d wager that compared to the rest of our guests, you have a sort of veil about you.” He frowned. “Only, veils usually
conceal
something. Yours makes you more vibrant.”

I considered that for a moment. So, to the remnants, I looked different from other living people. Interesting.

You know what you need to do . . . you just have to figure out how to do it.

“Mr. Mark,” I said, “would you mind if I shook your hand?”

The remnant seemed surprised, but he gallantly offered his arm. I reached out and tried to take his hand. It took me a couple of tries, because at first my fingers passed right through him. Then I realized I could rest my fingertips on the back of his hand very lightly, sort of like touching the surface tension of water without sticking your hand all the way in. When my fingertips connected, a startled look bloomed on Mark’s face.

“Miss . . .” he said shakily. “What’s happening?” He lifted his head and looked around the room again. “I don’t . . . this is wrong. This is all wrong.”

“Take it easy,” I said gently. “Keep your hand still, please. You died, Mr. Mark. Do you remember that?”

A pause, followed by a reluctant nod. “It was at the breakfast table, here at the hotel,” he whispered. “I’m a specter, aren’t I?”

“I’m afraid so.”

He nodded, anguished. “There are a number of us here in the hotel. We see each other sometimes, but we’re generally so
unaware
. What has changed?” He looked down at my fingers. “Are you doing this, miss?”

“I think so. Why didn’t you cross over?”

“I . . . I was afraid for the hotel, and for my family. They lived here with me, and I worried about what would happen to them when I was no longer manager. I lingered too long . . . and then it was too late.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Mark,” I said, meaning it. “That must be awful.”

“Thank you, miss.” He looked at me hopefully. “Is there—pardon me, miss, but is there anything you can do? Can you send me across?”

Now it was my turn to be surprised. I hadn’t even considered the possibility. “I don’t know,” I confessed. “Hold still a minute.”

I closed my eyes, took a breath, and dropped into the mindspace where I could sense life. Humans and witches tended to glow sort of bluish in my mind, and vampires were a dark, rich red. I didn’t know if I’d be able to sense Mark at all, but sure enough, he was there: a silver-gray outline, faded, yet undeniably
there
.

Using the same techniques I’d experimented on with mice, I tried to pull at his spirit. Nothing happened. I opened my eyes and looked into Mark’s eager gaze.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know how to help you.” His face fell. I added, “But I’ll try to find out.”

I pulled my hand back, and instantly Mark gave me a confused look. “I hope you’re enjoying your stay at the Boulderado, miss,” he said pleasantly. “Is there anything I can help you with?”