Boundary Lines (13 page)

But Simon shook his head resolutely. “I’ve thought about it,” he said. “The timing does seem strange. But, look, after the nightmares started, I actually increased my research into boundary magic. It was something to do while I lay around recovering.”

“You didn’t tell me that!” I interrupted. It came out more accusatory than I’d intended.

Simon just arched an eyebrow. “You were in LA,” he pointed out, his voice mild. “You only just got back.”

Right. Duh, Lex. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Did you find anything?”

“I still haven’t found a connection between nulls and boundary magic,” he said. “I confirmed that for trades witches like us, trying to do boundary magic is almost guaranteed to fail. It’s dangerous, unstable. But it’s totally different for you. You can manipulate line magic because you are
of
the line magic.” He reached for my hands, gently turning them over to expose the griffin tattoos peeking out from under my sleeves. “And these help keep you steady. Anyway, everything I’ve read suggests that what you can do is self-contained. You followed the rules: traded a life for a life. There’s no reason why bringing me back would affect vampires or witches.”

I felt my shoulder sag with relief. “Thanks, Simon.”

“Thank
you
.” He gave me a wan smile. “I can handle some nightmares, if it means more time with my family. With my work. With Tracy.”

“Right.” I realized he was still holding my hands, so I drew them back and jammed them into my pockets. “Are you—”

Then the ground began to rumble beneath us.

Chapter 21

I’d felt a small earthquake once, while I was visiting Sam in Los Angeles. It was just a tiny vibration, so minor at first that I wasn’t even sure it was there. This was a lot like that—except this tremble didn’t stop. It kept coming, kept building. Then the ground exploded twenty feet to our left.

I switched on the flashlight and swerved it in that direction just in time to see earth falling back down, looking for all the world like a mine had gone off. My flashlight beam trembled as the dark hole began to birth a writhing mass of shadows and mud. It emerged slowly, insidiously: first a pointy, rock-hard snout as big around as my biggest dog, then a head covered in those flat, hard scales you see on dinosaurs in movies. I stared, entranced. It was thin, only about as big around as my waist—no, wait, check that. As it surfaced, the elongated tube of snake seemed to fatten and swell, like a rat coming through a particularly tiny hole. Once it emerged, the coil thickened to an impossible girth—the thing had to be at least six feet in diameter. That was how it got around without leaving a wide tunnel behind, I realized.

It didn’t even come all the way out of the ground, just rose and rose until it towered above us. The visible length of creature doubled
over and opened its snout, displaying unbelievably sharp teeth. Its jaw
unhinged, like a snake, and both Simon and I instinctively shrunk
back, though I doubted it was even aware of us yet. It began to cough.

“That’s impossible,” I breathed. Simon and I had been talking about the sandworm for two days, yet my rational mind had never really believed in it. Now it was real, and all I could feel was . . . small. And infinitely fragile.

“Everything about this is impossible,” Simon whispered back. “Got your gun?”

Right. I brought up the shotgun, taking the safety off in the same motion. The sandworm stopped regurgitating and swerved its enormous snout toward the noise. Two tiny fissures opened on what would sort of be its face, and then the fissures cracked open to reveal wet, slitted eyes. They were covered in clear mucus, like it had more than one set of eyelids.

My finger tightened on the trigger, but I hesitated. It felt wrong to just flat-out shoot this thing—what if Simon was right, and it wasn’t a mindless killing machine? What if we were dealing with an intelligent being?

You dare.

Simon and I both dropped to our knees, clutching our hands to our ears. The words actually
hurt
, in a sharp, not-quite-real pain that was exactly like someone scraping nails down a chalkboard on the inside of my skull. As soon as those first words faded and I could think clearly again, I realized that the sound hadn’t come from the creature’s mouth, but from inside our own heads.
It
can get inside our heads
. And it spoke English. For some reason that threw me almost as much as the telepathy.

The minds I consumed spoke this language and know your weapon, so I do as well. Why do you come to me with killing tools?

“Aargh,” was all I managed to say. The concept of a talking telepathic snake monster had shorted out my brain.

I felt the creature sort of settle back, like it realized its speech was
hurting us and was adjusting its frequency. Beside me, Simon was
crouched defensively, and I could see his lips moving in a spell. What
ever he was doing, I figured it was up to me to distract the sandworm.

“You . . . are . . . killing . . . my . . . people,” I said out loud. Each word was an effort, but dammit, there was no way I was just going to
think
at this thing.

It regarded me for a long moment.
They are not yours.

The words didn’t hurt this time, but I still felt like my brain had
been scraped over a cheese grater. The creature’s eyelids lowered farther,
so we could barely see any evidence of its eyes. I clenched my teeth and pressed on, “This city belongs to my mistress, the vampire ruler
of this
territory. She does not approve of eating humans. Nor do I.”

I could feel, rather than see or hear, the creature’s baffled curiosity.
Then why did she awaken me?

Huh? I almost said exactly that, but managed to scrape together the words, “She didn’t.”

The creature made a hacking sound, and I got the distinct impression I was being snorted at.
Then she does not control the vestige, and I care not what she wants.

“What vestige?” I yelled. “What are you talking about?” It began to turn away, and in desperation I shouted, “Hey! I’m talking to you!” Without thinking, I bent down and picked up a rock the size of my fist, then threw it at the sandworm with all my strength. It glanced harmlessly off its scales, but the sandworm turned in annoyance, and skin flaps like a cobra’s hood spread ominously from its skull.

You interfere. I do not suffer interference.
Its head snapped with movement, backward, then forward again, and a luminescent ooze spattered from its jaws toward the two of us.

“Lex!” Simon yelled, and he limp-darted toward me, grabbing my arm and raising the palm of his free hand. The slime smacked into the naked air a foot in front of his fingers before dropping to the ground, where it began to hiss. A shield spell. He’d prepared a shield spell and gotten it over both of us.

My jaw dropped open. “Venom,” he explained grimly. “Remember the Mongolian Death Worm?”

Fear hit me hard—a gripping, overwhelming terror that threatened to root me where I stood. But I would not give in to it, not before, not now.

“Is the shield one-way or two-way?” I asked Simon urgently, lifting the shotgun.

“Shoot it!”

With no further prompting, I squeezed the trigger, and the shotgun roared. I was expecting to blow a small crater in the sandworm’s belly, but the shot just glanced harmlessly off its long, flat scales, whistling away into the dark. I cursed and dropped the shotgun back on its strap.

The sandworm paused, its mouth still open, its fangs displayed. A long, forked tongue as wide as my waist snaked quickly out of its mouth and back in.
You smell of death. I know this smell,
it thought at me.
Chills crept across the back of my neck.
You are a line-walker. Death-trader. Bridge-maker.

Boundary witch. The sandworm knew I was a boundary witch.

It slid a few feet to one side and turned back to regard me with curiosity.
What is this word you call me in your mind? It is impudent.

“Sandworm?” It had picked that out of my brain? “Um, what would you prefer to be called?”

It paused, considering that, and I realized it hadn’t once blinked those big stone-like eyelids since emerging from the ground.
The people who once roamed here, they called me Unktehila,
it said finally.
They were not impudent, and I allowed many of them to live. I will allow you to live this night too, necromancer. Tell your mistress I obey none but the vestige. It is my sun, and I will not tolerate interference in my orbit
.
Faster than I would have imagined possible, the great face swiveled to Simon.
You, wounded disruptor, I will eat, the next time I am hungry.
With a careless, lazy motion, it slid higher out of the ground, its hood flattening against its neck as it bent double once more and coughed. A slimy, sucking noise told me that it had just hacked up another gastric pellet.

Without another word—thought or spoken—it turned its snout back toward the ground and began to burrow. I ran forward a few steps, but the thing was surprisingly fast, and I was suddenly convinced it was using some kind of magic to manipulate the earth above and below it. The ground seemed to seal shut beneath it, leaving only a tiny area of disturbed soil. Simon and I stared at each other, and I was pretty sure my own expression mirrored his.

What the hell just happened?

But before either one of us could remember how to speak, a different voice cut through the darkness behind me, from the other side of the rock cluster. “The fuck was
that
?”

Simon and I both spun around, and I lifted the shotgun unconsciously. Quinn stood up behind us and raised his hands when he saw the Ithaca. I lowered the shotgun and gaped at him. Blood had soaked his white shirt and was gleaming on his dark suit pants. There were small cuts and abrasions all over his face and hands, which meant his vampire magic had been too busy tending to other, greater injuries to heal the cosmetic ones. He swayed a little on his feet, and I realized with sudden fear how terribly pale he was. “Sorry’m late,” he slurred. “We’ve got trouble.”

With a hiccupping noise that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob, he collapsed onto the ground.

Chapter 22

Simon and I both darted toward Quinn, but Simon’s leg slowed him down, and I got there first. “Quinn? Quinn! Open your eyes!” Slowly, the vampire obeyed me. “What do I do?” I asked desperately.

His lips moved, trying to say something, but he didn’t have the strength to push air through his vocal chords. That scared me nearly as much as the sandworm had. I ripped at his once-white shirt, popping off the buttons. His flat chest was bloody, and a wide puncture mark an inch to the left of his heart oozed watery blood. Someone had tried to stake him, and they’d come damned close to succeeding. His eyes drifted shut again.

“He needs blood,” Simon said grimly. I hadn’t even seen him drop to his knees beside me. “Do you have a blade?”

I searched my pockets and found the small Swiss army knife I’d tucked in with the flashlight. “I can do it,” I told him.

“You can fight,” Simon replied. “I can’t. And I’ve done this before.” Simon and Quinn had worked together long before I knew the Old World existed. He picked up the knife, and without another word, made a careful slice across the back of his left hand near the wrist. I knew just enough about anatomy to know he’d purposefully nicked one of those minor veins doctors use to insert IVs. Blood spurted, and Simon held it up to the vampire’s mouth. “Quinn,” Simon said softly. “You gotta drink this, man.”

No response. Crowding Simon aside for a second, I reared back and slapped Quinn hard across the face. “Quinn!”

His eyes opened. “Drink,” Simon said again, and this time Quinn’s lips parted to accept the blood. After maybe thirty seconds, he raised a shaky hand and pushed Simon’s wrist away.

“Lex,” he gasped. “Maven was challenged. Clara. She was smart. Came after resources first . . .” His voice faltered, and his eyes pleaded with me to understand something.

But I was lost. If one of the other vampires had challenged Maven for this territory, it
made sense that she would go after Quinn, a powerful mind-presser and probably Maven’s most loyal follower. Was I included as one of her resources? But I wasn’t home; in fact, no one knew where I was except the two men before me. “They’re coming after me? Is that what you’re saying?”

He made a sound like the beginning of
no
and shook his head. He was fading again, but when Simon held out his dripping wrist, Quinn shook his head. “Charlie,” he whispered. “They’ll go after Charlie.”

Oh, God.

Time stopped for me, the way it only can when you receive truly terrible news. For some reason, my brain started to shuffle through all the moments in my life when time had bent itself like that for me: When I’d drowned as a teenager. The day the towers fell. When I had stumbled out of the Iraqi desert, the only surviving member of my squad. When John had first called to say Sam was missing.

I shook myself violently and forced my mind to return to the present. My eyes met Simon’s, and he tilted his head in the direction from which we’d come. “Go. I can handle this.”

I looked helplessly at the fading vampire and the injured witch, hesitating. My friends were so vulnerable. “
I’ve got this,
Lex,” Simon barked. “Go get Charlie!”

I sprinted for the car, pulling out my flashlight on the way.

With the beam bobbing ahead of me over the trails, I used my free hand to call Elise, figuring that of all the humans I knew, she had the best bet of slowing down a vampire. Shooting Tony had definitely slowed
him
down, and if she stayed close enough to Charlie, a gunshot would put any attackers down permanently. But Elise’s cell phone went straight to voicemail. I tried John’s cell, and then my mother’s. No one was answering. I was trying to dial the police station when I tripped over something hard and went sprawling on my face.

The flashlight flew out of my hand, and the phone tumbled away into the darkness.
Ow.
I mumbled some colorful language and slowly picked myself up. With a groan, I flexed my limbs and managed to stagger over to the flashlight. Nothing was broken, but I would be stiff and bruised in the morning. Well, more stiff and bruised than I already was. I shone the light down on my legs and saw a tear in my jeans, a tiny smear of blood where I’d scraped my knee. Great. I looked for the phone for a moment, but it was nowhere to be seen. I patted my front pocket to make sure I still had the car keys and started running again in a mincing lope, cursing myself for trying to dial the phone and run at the same time.

I agonized over it for a moment, but reluctantly took the time to stow the shotgun in the trunk and the revolver in the glove box. Driving with them on the passenger seat wasn’t safe.

John’s house was only a couple of miles away, but it seemed to take me hours to get there. I was so focused on checking the mirrors and the windows for danger that I was practically in his cul-de-sac before I saw the flashing red and blue lights of the cruisers parked outside his house.