Boundary Lines (3 page)

Chapter 4

Magic Beans was located on Pine Street, in between a cutesy store that sold overpriced jewelry and a restaurant that made its own cheese. It was near the Boulderado, a popular tourist hotel, and only a few blocks away from my parents’ mini mansion in Mapleton. I cut across Iris Ave and down Highway 7, hoping to avoid the majority of drunk college students who were likely still roaming Pearl Street, bouncing between bars like balls on a pool table. Despite my efforts, the closer we got to Magic Beans, the more crowded the sidewalks became, and the costumed college kids seemed to have some kind of jaywalking death wish. I came very close to running down three young women dressed as a sexy nurse, sexy doctor, and sexy dolphin (!), respectively, after they decided to run diagonally through an intersection in a drunken, zigzag fashion.

When the sexy dolphin’s tail flared up to reveal shapely thighs, Maven looked over at me, cocking a questioning eyebrow. I just shrugged. “Don’t look at me. When I was twenty-two my costume was desert camo.”

Finally I pulled into the tiny parking lot behind Magic Beans. I spotted Quinn coming out the back door, headed toward a new-looking Jeep Wrangler Unlimited. He was dressed for fieldwork in dark-washed jeans and an all-weather jacket, and he carried a duffel bag.

He paused as he saw my car, squinting against the glare of headlights, and my heart did a happy little leap, which annoyed me. I’m in my thirties. I should not get
butterflies
.

As we climbed out of the car, Quinn nodded respectfully at Maven, then shot me a quick, private smile that burned through my resolve. I couldn’t help but grin back. “You have everything you need?” Maven said brightly. The perkiness surprised me, but then I realized that she’d dropped into her spacey barista persona, the one she used when she worked the front counter.

“I think so,” Quinn replied. “I’ll call if we’re not going to be back before sunrise. Hey, Lex.”

“Hi,” I said. “Where are we going?”

“Julesburg,” he said, naming a town in the northeast corner of the state. “That’s the closest disappearance.” He tossed the duffel bag into the back of the Jeep and opened the passenger-side door. “Shall we?”

I looked back and forth between him and the massive vehicle. When the two of us went looking for Charlie’s kidnappers, we’d taken his car or my old Subaru. But I just shrugged and climbed in.

As Quinn took his turn navigating through the drunken coeds, I looked around the interior of the fancy car, half afraid to touch anything. The Jeep’s dashboard and floor mats were spotless, and when I peeked over my shoulder I saw that the back had been tricked out to include some kind of concealed compartment in the floor that took up the whole width of the Jeep. “What’s with the wheels?” I asked Quinn.

“Maven’s answer to Air Force One,” he explained. “She bought it shortly after she took over, and lends it to her people when we might need to be out after dawn.”

Ah. “The compartment in the back is lightproof?”

He nodded. “Lightproof, armored, and climate controlled. Cost a fortune.” He shook his head a little. “Maven doesn’t put on airs or throw around money, but she invests where it counts.” His tone was admiring, and I wondered if things had gotten easier or harder for him now that we’d taken Itachi off the board.

“How will she get home?” I asked.

A faint smile crossed his lips. “She’ll ride her bike.”

Ah, Boulder.

When the last lights of the city were behind us, Quinn glanced over at me. “The thing in LA,” he said. “Did you find out what you needed to know?”

“Yes,” I said shortly. “She was eaten by werewolves. I don’t really want to talk about it.”

Quinn nodded, his face falling into its usual implacable expression. I regretted my curt tone. There had been a time when that dispassionate look was the only one I ever got from Quinn, and I’d hoped we were past that. But I just couldn’t talk about Sam right now. “Tell me about the vampires who disappeared,” I prompted instead.

He nodded. “Every full moon, ten of us take a shift patrolling the state borders, watching for any signs of werewolf activity,” he began. “We’ve found natural wolves a couple of times, but never any weres, at least for as long as I’ve been in Colorado. But on the last full moon, two people didn’t report in.”

“Maven told me that much. Who are they?”

“Travis disappeared from Dove Creek, and Allegra went missing out of Julesburg.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Just Travis and Allegra? Don’t vampires
ever
have last names?”

A brief smile twitched across his face, and I felt like I’d scored a
point. “Of course we do, on all our legal paperwork. But those change every few decades, or so I’m told. We typically just use our first names within our own territories. It’s easier to remember—and easier not to expose someone by mistake, like if you were to refer to me as Quinn Adams after I’d already changed my name to Quinn . . . Merlin.” He lifted his hand off the wheel long enough to wave it dismissively.
“Or whatever.”

I laughed. “Merlin? Your example of a fake last name is
Merlin
?” He glared at me, but the smile was obvious in his eyes. “Oh shit,” I blurted. “Don’t tell me that’s your last name
now
.”

Quinn laughed out loud, a sound I’d heard only a few times. It made something in my chest loosen. “No, Quinn is currently my
last
name.”

“So what’s your current first name?”

“Arthur,” he said airily. I laughed, unable to tell if he was kidding or not.

“Back to Allegra and Travis,” I prompted. “Maven brought up the possibility that they might have just . . . defected.”

He considered that for a moment. “It’s possible,” he allowed.

I tried to think through the implications of that. “Hypothetically,” I said in a careful voice, “if Allegra or Travis, or anyone else, for that matter, decided they wanted to leave Maven’s enclave, would there be consequences?”

His brow furrowed. “You mean like, would Maven hunt them down and kill them for leaving?”

“Well . . . yeah.”

“Technically, vampires are not supposed to jump territories without permission,” he told me. “We have to be careful with things like population control and population density, and if everyone starts crossing borders willy-nilly, it increases the chance of all of us getting discovered by the foundings.” That was the Old World term for ordinary humans, and it was always used dismissively, the way you would say “cattle.”

“But Maven’s still trying to lock in control after the takeover,” Quinn continued, “and frankly I don’t think she has the resources to hunt down defectors right now. That’s part of why she waited this long before sending us after Allegra and Travis—she’s been spread too thin to deal with it. Most likely, if someone leaves, they’ll make Maven’s permanent shit list, to be punished later.
I
sure as hell wouldn’t want to be on her shit list, but leaving the state isn’t like an instant death sentence or anything.”

“Hmm.” This was enough to give me a headache. There were too many possibilities, too many suspects, including Travis and Allegra themselves. Once again, I felt like it was my first day at a new job. Everyone else could think faster and clearer than I could because they had decades or even centuries of experience with the Old World, and I had known about it for less than two months. I sighed. “So is it safe to assume Maven didn’t kill them herself? I mean, if she had, there’d be no reason to send us on this little quest.”

“True,” he conceded. “I think that’s a pretty safe assumption, yes.”

Great. So that was
one
person who probably didn’t kill them. “Did Travis and Allegra . . . er . . . know each other?”

He shot me a wry smile. “You mean like, biblically?”

“Well, yeah.”

“No. Travis was a bit of a dandy, and Allegra was really down-to-earth. I can’t see her spending more than two minutes with him.”

There was something in his tone—admiration, maybe? He glanced over at me, and discomfort crossed his face. “Listen, Lex, there’s something else you should know. Allegra and I, we used to . . . date. Years ago.”

“Date,” I repeated.

He sighed. Vampires, I had discovered, don’t technically
need
to breathe, but most of them do out of habit, and to blend in. “We used to sleep together. Recreationally.”

“Oh.” I mulled that over for a moment. Quinn was a relatively new vampire—we had never discussed the specifics of his turn, but I knew it happened between five and ten years ago, in Chicago. I also knew that he had been sold to Maven against his will . . . and that sometime in between getting changed and coming to Boulder, he had attacked his human wife. In that context, it made sense that he’d want to sleep with another vampire: he was wary of hurting humans. Which was pretty ironic given his job as Maven’s fixer.

But then, I knew better than anyone that there was a big difference between hurting someone on orders and hurting someone because you couldn’t make yourself stop.

Still, it was hard to picture Quinn—or any of the other vampires I’d met—craving sex or intimacy at all. They seemed so remote, so detached from their emotions. Yeah, Quinn had shown a little interest in me, and we had kissed, but in that moment, I realized I wasn’t sure how far that interest extended.

I groped for something to say, but what came out of my mouth was, “I wasn’t sure you guys . . . did that.”
Oh, great recovery, Lex.

“What, have sex?” He rolled his eyes. “I’m a vampire, Lex, I’m not dead.”

“Well—”

“You know what I mean,” he replied, a little irritated. “Our bodies can do all the same things human bodies can; we just choose whether to prioritize them. It takes energy—blood—to turn on biological functions, but it can be done.”

I thought that over. “So you get to decide whether or not you’ll . . . um . . . crave intimacy?”

“Yes. Just like I can devote energy to having a heartbeat, sweating, or even eating, although I can’t digest food the way you can,” he said matter-of-factly. “Our bodies adapted to power our basic functions first—hunter instincts, feeding capabilities. Everything else depends on how much blood we drink, how often.”

“Huh.” Science was never my particular interest, but that made a lot of sense, in terms of how vampires had managed to stay hidden within the human race for so long. It also said something about Quinn that he’d chosen to devote energy to human emotions when he didn’t have to.

We rode along in silence for a few minutes, and then I couldn’t help but ask, “Did you love her?”

“No.” His voice was weary. “We got along okay, and we both needed somebody. I care about what happens to her, but I mostly just thought you should know about it since you and I are . . . you know.”

“Interested in each other?” I suggested. It made my heart pound hard in my chest, but I was too goddamned old to play games.

“Yes,” Quinn said simply.

I didn’t know quite what to say after that, so we rode in peaceable silence for quite a while. I was just starting to doze off in my seat when we saw the sign for Julesburg.

“Where exactly are we going?” I finally asked.

“Maven keeps these little chambers buried underground for us to hide in if we get caught away from home,” he explained. “They’re safer than a hotel. We’ll start there, see if we can pick up Allegra’s trail.”

“I don’t suppose it’s a
gigantic
underground chamber?” I said hopefully. “Like the size of a building, with lots of great ventilation and maybe some skylights?”

He smiled. “Nope, sorry. I know you’re claustrophobic, so you can stay on top and guard the entrance.”

“Guard duty?” I said, brightening. “I
love
that plan. I crush it at guard duty.”

We drove all the way through Julesburg, a former stagecoach station whose only real claim to fame was its connection to corruption and torture. The town was named after Jules Beni, a station manager who was guilty of
helping
the horse thieves instead of stopping them. According to legend, Beni was killed by his former boss, Jack Slade, a gunslinger who shot off each one of Beni’s fingers and sliced off his ears to keep as trophies.

Unlike many former Wild West towns, for some reason Julesburg never really caught on as a tourist destination. Today, the population still hovered at a little over a thousand people.

We followed Highway 138 past Julesburg and were nearly to the Nebraska border before Quinn turned off onto an unmarked road headed east into fields of . . . well, something. It was too dark to make out the crops, but eventually the field terminated next to some scrubby woodlands. Quinn pulled off onto a little one-lane offshoot of the road and turned off the Jeep.

“Who owns this property?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “This one’s been tied up in will probate for years and years. I don’t think anyone’s ever discovered one of Maven’s vaults, but if someone did, the foundings would just write it off as some weird construction error.”

“What do you mean, construction error?”

“Come see.” He hopped out of the Jeep, and I grabbed my flashlight and followed him. We walked about fifty feet into the grass, nearly to the edge of the woods, before Quinn found the spot he wanted and dropped his duffel bag next to it. I played my flashlight over the overgrown grass as he leaned down and dug his fingers in, like he was feeling around for something. I was about to ask what he was doing, but by then he was pulling up a four-by-four piece of sod, revealing a green metal circle underneath. It was flat and smooth like an oversized sewer cover, but larger and raised about four inches above the ground, with concrete underneath. Obviously a lid. I crouched down to tug at it, but Quinn grabbed my arm. “Let me,” he urged. “The edges on these things can be sharp.”

I nodded, understanding. There was death magic in my blood, and Quinn was afraid he wouldn’t be able to keep himself from attacking me if I started bleeding. I had more faith in him, but this wasn’t the time to get into it. I gestured toward the lid. “Be my guest.”