Boundary Lines (4 page)

Quinn reached down with one hand and easily lifted the steel cover, which came up with a sucking
pop
. There was a cavernous hole underneath, the interior so dark that my flashlight beam barely penetrated it, even when I crouched down. It smelled like concrete
and earth, but the air wasn’t particularly stale.

Directly below us I could just make out a small metal stepladder, but there was nothing around it except for gray concrete. “Uh, Quinn?”
I said. “Is this a
septic tank
?”

“We prefer to think of them as ‘portable emergency storage chambers,
’
” he deadpanned.

Well, that explained the “construction error” concept—if anyone ever found this, they’d just figure a tank had been installed and then the homeowners had changed their minds. “That’s . . . kind of brilliant,” I admitted.

Quinn nodded, then frowned. “I smell blood.”

Before I could respond, he abruptly planted one foot on the concrete rim and dropped into the hole, landing without a sound. If I hadn’t seen the little stepladder, I might have worried he’d just drop down forever, like in
Looney Tunes
cartoons.

I leaned down as far as I could before fear enveloped me. Septic tanks were what, eight feet by twelve feet? Something like that? I shivered. Not that different from the inside of a Humvee. “Quinn?” I called. “Um, is she down there?”

“No, but there’s something written on the wall.” His grim voice wafted up out of the darkness. He sounded far away now, and I wondered just how deep the tank was. “It’s too dark, even for me. Can you pass down the lantern?”

“Yeah.” I pulled the camp-style lantern out of his duffel bag, switched it on, and put one hand on the rim of the concrete lip to steady myself so I could lean forward and lower it down by its long cord.

The concrete was old, or maybe I just put my hand on exactly the wrong spot, but the palm-sized piece directly under my hand crumbled off, and my fingers slipped off the lip. I tried to jerk backward to right myself, but my center of gravity was too far over the chasm by then. I tumbled forward into the hole, and the next thing I felt was the impact of concrete on my skull.

Chapter 5

“Lex!”

To my surprise, I did not wind up as a skin-bag of shattered bones on the floor of the concrete tank. Instead I found myself awkwardly positioned in Quinn’s arms, as though we were dancing and he’d led me into an elaborate dip. Only my head was about three inches above the floor of the concrete tank.

I was disoriented from my head smacking into the concrete opening on my way down, so it took me a few moments to get my bearings and realize he had caught me. It didn’t help that the heavy-duty lantern was rolling away from us, sending light spinning across the walls. It finally came to rest against the wall of the tank, leaving my left side bathed in light, the right side in darkness. “Thanks,” I said, my voice coming out dazed and thick. “Think I hit my head.”

Quinn didn’t answer or even move to help me up. He just froze in place, his arms locked around my back, our faces less than a foot apart. I heard a miniscule
tap
. . .
tap
. . .
tap
. . .
on the concrete just below me. Like something dripping. My fingers rose to touch my temple where it had hit the concrete, and came away bloody. Only then did I finally register the long, warm trickle of hot liquid that ran down the side of my head into my hair.

I didn’t think I was seriously hurt, but head wounds bleed like a son of a bitch—and Quinn was captivated by the magic in my blood.

“Hey—” I squirmed to get away from him, but his body was
locked in place. I could only see one of his eyes in the half-light, but his
pupil was dilated to the edge of the iris, his nostrils flaring.
“Quinn!”
I yelped, wriggling harder. His weight finally shifted, but it was in the
wrong direction, pressing me to the floor. Holding me down.

Talk to him,
commanded a voice in my head.
Make him see you
.

“Quinn, you have to push past it,” I whispered. “You have to get over this if we’re going to work together.
Be
together.” I felt like I was babbling, and the words didn’t seem to have any effect on him. “Please, I know you can do it.”

He showed no sign that he’d even heard me, just relaxed his own weight down on top of mine, leaning against my body, smothering my options. For a moment I had that specific, explosive sense of terror that’s familiar to so many women—but Quinn had no interest in raping me, and my fear dissolved as he began nuzzling the side of my head, straining toward the blood. I didn’t fight him as he licked at the wound, instinctively understanding that it would only make him use more strength, trap me further. He pulled back to meet my eyes, and a flare of new pain ignited in my head. He was on vampire autopilot now, trying to press his victim into submission.

But I do not press. And I am no one’s fucking victim.

His hand came up and brushed against my cheek, intending to turn my face sideways for better access. But that freed up my arm, and for just a moment, I could move.

I could have clocked him. I almost did: Violence was the time-tested Lex reaction, after all. But I knew that if I hit Quinn, the best-case scenario was that it would bring him back to his senses. Once he was in control again, he would hate himself for attacking me, even though he wasn’t really causing me any harm just yet. No, what I really wanted was to show him he could stop
himself
. So without thinking much about it, I grabbed his face hard, turned it toward me, and pressed my lips against his.

His body went completely rigid for a moment, frozen again. I could probably have stopped there, but instead I traced my fingers along his cheek and slid them into his hair. I nipped lightly at his lips, then more urgently, and at last he relaxed, his mouth softening against mine. And before I knew it, he was kissing me back, tentatively, as though he’d just woken up. As our lips opened I tasted blood in his mouth,
my
blood, but it was no more than if I’d bitten my own lip, and by then I was too caught up in the kiss to be bothered. When I didn’t pull away, Quinn’s arms went to my hips, firmly flipping us over so that I was on top of him, in control, and I smiled into his mouth. He was back.

Still kissing him, I scooted down his body until I was more or less in his lap, and then sat up so he was forced to either follow me or break the kiss. He propelled himself upward, his mouth moving from my lips down the line of my jaw and down my neck. I shuddered with pleasure, opening my eyes to see stars. A tiny hole of stars. Anyone could come along and put the lid back on the septic tank, and then we’d be trapped in here forever, buried alive.

The claustrophobia slammed down on me, and I forgot all about my hormones. Terror raced through my body, crushing my chest, and Quinn went still as he sensed, or maybe smelled, the change in me. I scrambled off his body and stood up unsteadily, lunging for the stepladder. But in my haste, I somehow managed to kick it farther away. The ladder crashed into the lantern, sending the light swinging wildly around the small space, and I was sobbing for breath now, convinced I couldn’t get enough air.

“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.”