Boundary Lines (6 page)

Frowning, Lafferty and Elise both leaned in for a closer look. Simon used the tweezers to gently lift the bone and turn it to the side, revealing two serrated metal pins. His eyes met mine, and now I could see the horror behind them.

“It’s the ilium,” he said softly. “Hip bone. It’s human.”

Chapter 9

As soon as Lafferty realized that the pellet contained human remains, I was hustled out of the room and delivered to a patrol officer, who escorted me back to the lobby. They were polite about it, and besides, I couldn’t really blame them: I was a civilian with a record. I wouldn’t want me anywhere near evidence, either.

I wandered over to a black leather bench and closed my eyes, trying to slow my whirling thoughts. In the last twelve hours, two vampires had been killed, probably by werewolves, and something had killed—or at least, eaten—some or all of a human body and spit it out again. I supposed it was still possible that the gastric pellet had been faked; that it really
had
been the brainchild of a bunch of CU students with too much free time and a key to wherever the university stored their research cadavers. But it seemed too coincidental that this would happen right when a different animal threat was intruding on Colorado.

At the same time, I couldn’t see a connection between the werewolves and the gigantic regurgitated pellet. I didn’t know a lot about how birds or lizards digested their food, but I was certainly familiar with canine digestive tracts, and they didn’t spit out
hairballs
, much less swallow clothes and bones. Just for my peace of mind, I did a quick Internet search on my phone and confirmed that wolves don’t regurgitate gastric pellets.

Then again, I thought as I pocketed the phone again, werewolf
digestion could be different from that of natural wolves, couldn’t it?
Was it possible that werewolves, I don’t know, spat out their undigested
food when they changed back into human form? I had no idea. I
was
still learning about the magic in my
own
blood, much less were
wolf physiology.

I ran out of ideas after that, and the exhaustion began to catch up with me. I even dozed off for a little while on the black leather bench, but I woke up in a hurry when I heard a familiar voice barking out my name.

“Allison Luther,” said Detective Keller’s snide voice, “shouldn’t you be in handcuffs?”

My eyes flew open. Keller hovered over me on the bench, holding a paper coffee cup with “Espresso Roma” printed on the side. He was a balding, tight-lipped man on the wrong side of forty, and he’d had the misfortune of being the officer in charge both times I was arrested. He’d also been on the receiving end of my father’s unasked-for lawyer. Twice. To say he had it in for me would be a hilarious understatement.

I was too disoriented to process his question properly, so I grunted something along the lines of, “Huh?”

“You’re in the police station; I can only assume you’re under arrest for something.” Keller made a show of looking around. “What happened? You get a rookie who had to go back for his cuffs?”

I stood up and stretched to my full height, forcing Keller to take a step backward. I was mostly using the movement to wake up, but his eyes narrowed as though I had physically threatened him. “My friend is consulting with your criminologist,” I said calmly, tilting my head back so I could meet his eyes. Keller was average height, a few inches taller than my five feet five inches, but he acted like a short guy who was overcompensating. Maybe he’d been a late bloomer. “I gave him a ride.”

“Uh-huh,” Keller said. “You sure it’s not the other way around? Your friend’s bailing you out after you got arrested for—what would it be this time? More bar fighting? Maybe some light prostitution?”

I gritted my teeth so the words
watch your mouth
didn’t spill through them. Keller was just trying to get a rise out of me, and this time he was being particularly clumsy about it. I could handle this. “Nope, just waiting on my friend. But hey, maybe next time.”

His mouth twisted into a smirk, and he lowered his voice so only I would hear. “I get it, I get it—you think you’re on the straight and narrow, don’t you? That you’re all rehabilitated? But you and I both know you came back broken. You’ve gotten a taste for hurting people.”

My stomach turned to acid, and I wanted to punch him and laugh it off and burst into tears, all at once. Keller saw that he’d gotten to me, and shot me another triumphant little smile.

Then I was back to just wanting to punch him.

“Lex?” Elise’s voice was worried, and I turned to see her coming toward us. I hadn’t even heard the security door open. “Is there a problem?”

“No problem at all,” drawled Keller, taking a leisurely sip from his cup. He outranked Elise by quite a bit, and now that she’d jumped to my defense he was going to draw out her discomfort. “I was just catching up with your cousin here.”

Elise looked at me worriedly, but I just gave a little headshake, the tension broken. “How’s it going in there?” I asked, turning my back on Keller. If I couldn’t get rid of him, at least I could completely ignore him.

“Dr. Pellar is almost done,” she promised.

Disappointed with the general lack of fear or rancor, Keller grunted and turned to go. “Remember what I said, Luther,” he called over his shoulder as he disappeared into the secure area.

“He’s a dick,” Elise grumbled as he disappeared through the door. She was wearing her jacket, carrying her bag. Done for the day. “You gonna tell me what he said?”

“Nah, it was nothing.” I wanted to dismiss Keller’s words, but in truth they had shaken me to the core. What if he was right? What if I
was
a time bomb, just not in the way he thought? I glanced down at my forearms, where the new tattoos were covered by my jacket sleeves. What if I couldn’t control the boundary magic? A few months earlier, I might not have given a damn what happened to me, but now Charlie needed me to keep the Old World away from her, at least long enough for her to grow up. If something happened to me, my nineteen-month-old niece would be fair game. I shuddered and forced myself to return my attention to my cousin, changing the subject. “So was the commander impressed with your quick thinking?”

Elise flushed with pride, then glanced over to make sure the receptionist was out of earshot. “Well . . . yeah. Kinda.”

I bumped her with my hip. “And was it just me, or was there a little something-something happening between you and the good Dr. Lafferty?”

She looked scandalized, but at exactly that moment the security door opened again and Simon hobbled out. Elise shot me a smug look because it meant she didn’t have to answer me.

There were a few minutes of handshaking and polite good-byes, and at last I was accompanying Simon back to the car. I managed to wait until both of our doors were shut before I said conversationally, “So. What the fuck was that thing?”

“Drive, Lex,” he told me. “There are cameras.”

Reluctantly, I started the car and began backing away. “I think your cousin was right,” Simon began. “I believe it was a gastric pellet. The smell, the contents, the way it was shaped . . . yeah. Elise was smart to recognize it.”

I shot him a wary glance. Simon’s eyes were bright, his cheeks flushed. He was
thrilled
. “I thought it was too big,” I remarked.

“That’s the thing—it’s
way
too big,” he blurted. “And there have been no other signs of an animal like that, so I looked at it in the magical spectrum, and the thing was
buzzing
.” Damn. I wished I’d thought to look at it in the magical spectrum, although unless the thing was actually
alive
, I probably wouldn’t have seen anything. Simon pointed toward the next turnoff. “Can you drop me off on campus? I need to look through some of the collections, maybe check out the journals . . .”

I eyed him. I didn’t want to burst his bubble, especially since this was the most positive I’d seen him since his fall. But under the bright expression, he still looked exhausted. I hadn’t seen dark circles that big since Charlie was a newborn, keeping Sam up all night. “Just to be clear,” I said, “your hypothesis is that there is a giant lizard monster running amok in Boulder, and it
ate
a human being and spat out the parts it didn’t like?”

Simon deflated a little bit then, and he had the grace to at least look embarrassed. “Well . . . yeah. Although it’s also possible that the creature ate a body that was already dead,” he pointed out. “But you don’t get it, Lex. I’ve been studying Old World systemics for years, but there’s just never been enough data to make the connections I need. Whatever made that pellet, if it’s real, could be the Rosetta stone for everything I’ve been working on since I was twenty. Why some species intermingled with magic, and most didn’t.”

Anxiety burned in my stomach, but I wasn’t sure what was causing it. Something about that pellet felt
wrong
to me, but Simon was so excited . . . I was probably just exhausted. I’d been up for nearly thirty hours without real sleep, and I wasn’t a kid anymore. If I didn’t get some rest soon, my vision was going to double.

I dropped Simon off at CU as requested, and finally headed back toward the cabin. After a moment of indecision, I called Lily on the way and filled her in on the morning’s events. I didn’t explicitly say I was worried about Simon, but she read between the lines and promised to check on him after her yoga class. Lily had bounded around from job to job after leaving med school, and at the moment she was cobbling together a living by teaching yoga, selling her photography, and who knew what else. She also served as the de facto doctor for a lot of the witches, myself included. She would check on whether Simon was pushing his body too hard. She offered to come take a look at my head wound, but by now it was just a bump and a small cut that I could hide behind my hair. I thanked her and said I was fine.

I went back to the cabin, showered, minding the bump on my head, and managed to grab a couple of hours of sleep. When my alarm went off I made hasty arrangements for my cousin Brie to check on the herd if I wasn’t back by evening. I spent a fair amount of my spare time babysitting for free, which allowed me to call in such favors when necessary. I grabbed a big to-go cup of coffee at Magic Beans and was on the road to Wyoming by one.

I had a date with a werewolf.

Chapter 10

I’ve spent so much of my life in Boulder—pretty much all of it, minus my time overseas—that sometimes I forget that there are other places. That sounds childish, I know, but I love Colorado, and the hour and a half drive up to Wyoming was a nice, scenic reminder of why. I hadn’t had much sleep, and I’d spent most of the previous night in the car too, but damn if I didn’t have a large delicious coffee, a padded seat, and Brandi Carlile on the old car’s sound system. It was weirdly relaxing. By the time I reached Cheyenne, I had shed most of the anxiety and sense of wrongness that the gastric pellet had stirred up in me.

And also I really had to pee.

Pit stop accomplished, I followed directions on my phone until I pulled into the gate of the Southern Wyoming Sanctuary for Wolves. It was a large wooded property spread out over a series of small hills, and the whole thing was divided into multiple fenced-in paddocks. As I parked the car and walked up the muddy driveway to the welcome center, I could see a pair of wolves peering at me through one of the massive chain-link fences, about twenty feet away.

I stopped in my tracks, gaping at them for a moment. I’d expected them to be big, of course, but I realized in that moment that I had imagined big
dogs
, like Chip and Cody. The wolves just
felt
different from any of my dogs. They didn’t bark when a stranger approached, for one thing, and they gave off an air of detached assessment, like I was being sized up as a food source. Which I probably was. I kept my eyes on the ground and hurried forward to the sanctuary building.

Just inside the door was an enormous wooden receptionist desk, which formed a sort of gateway to the rest of the main room. There was a big cash register on the desk, and most of the room beyond appeared to be devoted to selling wolf-themed objects.

“Good afternoon!” chirped the receptionist, a pretty teenager with a dark curly ponytail spilling out of a khaki hat. The letters “SWSW” were embroidered on both the hat and her polar fleece jacket. She had an ID badge on a lanyard around her neck that read “Christy.” “Welcome to the Sanctuary for Wolves! Are you here for the feeding tour?”

Excessively cheerful people unnerve me. “Um, yeah,” I said awkwardly. “Am I early?”

“Just a bit! Your tour guide will be taking you guys out in about ten minutes,” she promised. I nodded my thanks and wandered around the small gift shop area, examining the wolf-themed trinkets and posters, from “dog tag” necklaces (cute) to mugs to posters and T-shirts. Behind the merchandise, the walls were decorated with newspaper articles about wolves and signs directing the reader to call their congressman about wolf protection laws.

I raised my phone and snapped a picture of the instructions, thinking I might do that when the current crisis was over. I had nothing against wolves, per se. If anything, I felt a little sorry for them, because a long time ago some shapeshifting conduits—the ancestors of all Old World creatures, myself included—had decided to limit their magic to one animal transformation, and they’d chosen wolves as their alternate form. Wolves hadn’t asked to be infiltrated by magical human hybrids who would go on to commit terrible acts, any more than regular red blood cells ask to be infiltrated by cancer.

The rest of the tour group arrived: half a dozen high school kids and a chaperone, some sort of after-school nature club. The kids were jocular and teasing, bumping around the crowded retail space like so many overgrown pups. After one of them sent a display of necklaces crashing to the ground, the middle-aged chaperone lost her patience and threatened to donate the lot of them as the wolves’ next meal. The kids sobered up fast after that—they’d seen the two wolves at the entrance too.

Our guide was a college-aged kid named Phil, tall and lanky, with a habit of speaking very, very fast. He didn’t waste a lot of time with introductions, just picked up a bucket of frozen meat chunks and led our group outside to the first enclosure, which housed the two wolves we’d seen at the entrance. Phil introduced them as Nina and Shikoba, a mated pair who’d been rescued together from a “photo farm,” where animals are raised to be models and discarded as soon as their looks begin to fray.

His wolf activism speech was just getting started, but after a moment I tuned him out, fascinated by the wolves themselves. Shikoba in particular was enormous, over a hundred pounds, with inky black fur and playful amber eyes that danced as they followed Phil’s every move. Nina, a classic gray wolf, seemed more somber, but she focused just as attentively on Phil’s arm as it threw chunks of frozen meat over the fence.

The group moved on, and I had to scramble to keep up. We vis
ited two more paddocks that were similar to the first, each containing
two wolves that stood eagerly at attention, ready for their supper.
At
each enclosure, Phil gave us background on the specific animals, plus more information about the species and a few ways we could help
protect them in the wild. I learned that wolves’ life spans are similar to many dogs, at least in captivity, and that they prefer meat but will
eat
just about anything when they’re hungry. I also learned that captive
wolves were kept in twos because it meant there could only be an alpha
and a beta, first and second command. If a third wolf were enclosed with them, one of the three would become the omega—a term used to describe the wolf that is bullied and picked on in every pack.

That sounded awfully familiar. I had been sent here to find a wolf who had once been the weakest member of the Colorado pack, according to Maven. In werewolf packs, this position was usually referred to as the sigma for some reason. Maven had explained that while werewolves tended to be very protective of their sigma, Trask had preferred to treat his more like wild wolves treat their omegas: lots of bullying, physical torture, mind games. Eventually Trask had broken his sigma’s mind.

I found the werewolf in question when we reached the fourth and largest pen. Like the others, this one had a sign attached to the chain-link fence with a name burned into the wood, but this sign only had one name instead of two: “Tobias.” The wolf in this pen peered at us from behind a tree, revealing a coat of sandy-brown hair skimming the top of a white undercoat, like several of the other wolves. Then he stepped all the way out, toward the fence, and most of the teenagers gasped.

I’d gotten used to the size of the six previous wolves, but even compared to them, Tobias was monstrously large. But it was his attention that was the most unsettling: Unlike the other wolves, who were only interested in Phil and the meat, Tobias eyed every single one of us with a wary intensity that said he
saw us,
not as background noise or distractions, but as real and present threats. He had a sharp intelligence that was so unnatural, I wondered how anyone, even humans, could miss it. I would have known exactly who this was, even if Maven hadn’t given me his name.

“Our next wolf’s arrival is something of a mystery,” Phil said, with
exaggerated wide eyes and a professional smile. “Tobias was found
tied to a tree at the front gate more than ten years ago, with his name written on the leash with a marker. Our staff has never been able
to
determine where he came from, though we did make inquiries.”

I could have solved the mystery for him right then and there. After
the war, Tobias Leine was so traumatized that he wou
l
dn’t even shift
out of his wolf form without hours of coaxing or threats. Even Maven
c
ould see that the sigma had been Trask’s victim, not his co-conspir
a
tor.
Leine was still dangerous, though, and since werewolves couldn’t be contained by psychiatric institutes or prisons, he had to either be killed or go native, staying permanently in wolf form. It was decided that the sanctuary was the safest and most merciful place for him.

Phil threw the meat, and Tobias trotted forward to pick it up. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw nearly all of the students take an unconscious step backward. Even Phil, who hadn’t blinked an eye earlier when one of the Arctic wolves stuck a muzzle through the fence and nipped playfully at his jacket, shot an uneasy glance at Tobias. “As you can see,” he said, gesturing at the attentive wolf, “Tobias is quite large, nearly two hundred pounds. He may be one of the largest wolves in the world. He’d be a record breaker, except for the fact that he’s undoubtedly a dog-wolf hybrid.”

“How do you know?” asked one of the teenagers.

Phil gave him a little frown—he’d obviously been
just
about to explain—but said in the same professional tone, “Full-blooded wolves are usually born with blue eyes, which then lighten to that amber color we’ve seen in all the other wolves today. Tobias, on the other hand, has bright blue eyes.” I stepped closer to see, and sure enough, the werewolf’s eyes were blue, kind of like a husky’s. Or, more accurately, like a human being’s. It was spooky.

Phil began to back away, and I heard myself speak up. “Have you had any problems with him?”

Phil shot me a surprised look—I’d been silent throughout the tour—so I added hastily, “Because of his size, I mean. And he’s the first wolf we’ve seen who’s in a pen by himself.”

Phil nodded. “Good question. Yes, Tobias prefers to be solitary, although he’ll sometimes play with a companion for a few hours. Despite his size, he’s been extremely docile and well-behaved for us. The only exceptions are when we’ve tried to sedate him for routine medical examinations.” He gave a nervous little laugh. “Tobias here will evade the darts, and he always seems to know if we put medication in his food. So we leave him be, and he behaves himself.” One of the teens shot up a hand, but Phil was already backing away, moving on to the next enclosure. “Let’s move on to Juana and Rafael, our pair of Mexican wolves. They’re unique for several reasons . . .”

I tuned Phil out, lagging after the group. When the lopsided mass of teens had all moved away from Tobias, I went to the exterior fence directly in front of the big wolf and crouched down, making it harder for Phil to see me behind the other people.

Tobias cocked his head with innocent curiosity. “I’m here as Maven’s representative,” I said quietly. “Show me that you understand.”

The enormous wolf didn’t respond right away, and after a moment I started to feel ridiculous. But then Tobias thrust his muzzle up quickly before moving it down and up again, and I realized it was a parody of a human nod. “Good. An hour after sunset, I’ll be by your back fence with a vampire. We have some questions. You will be there, and you will be in human form.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the small metal object Maven had given me, making sure he saw the .45 caliber bullet that had been hand-poured out of silver.
Some of the legends are true,
Maven had said, sounding bemused. All of the Old World species came with their little vulnerabilities. The vampires were allergic to daylight, the werewolves to silver. And of course it was painfully easy to kill witches.

Well, most of us.

“Do you understand?” I asked. Another pause, and then Tobias
shook himself, showing me a long, slow yawn. I had five dogs at home;
I recognized this as
Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. I do what I want.

“Try me,” I told him fiercely, hearing the hatred in my voice. “I’d love that.”

“Miss?” Phil called, hurrying back toward me. I quickly shoved the bullet back into my pocket. “Please step away from Tobias. He is
not
a pet . . .”

“You don’t know the half of it,” I muttered under my breath.