Boundary Crossed (Boundary Magic #1)(33)

Then nothing happened.

“You don’t know anything,” Darcy said smugly, her fists uncurling. She bared her teeth again, tensing to strike.

No, Lex, Sam’s voice said in my head, you couldn’t put the tube right up against your eye, or it’d be too dark. You had to leave a little space to let the light in.

I visualized the tubes again, now with a little bit of space between us. The space served as a buffer, letting me stay who I was, out of Darcy’s head. The tingling started along the sides of my vision again and I pushed harder, concentrating on the connection.

Slowly, millimeter by millimeter, Darcy’s face slackened, her lips parting as her jaw dropped open the tiniest bit. Excitement swirled through me so quickly that I almost lost the connection. I had her. Thanks, Sam.

Wait, now what? What the hell was I doing?

“Touch your nose,” I said softly. It was the first thing that popped into my head. Darcy’s right index finger came up and rested on the tip of the nose I’d broken a couple of days ago.

“Good,” I said. Whatever I was doing made her follow directions, but could I use it like a lie detector? “Tell me what you were planning to do with Charlotte Wheaton,” I commanded, feeling sweat break out on my forehead. The connection was difficult to maintain, like holding yourself halfway through a pull-up.

“Our senior was bringing her to the merchant,” Darcy answered tonelessly. “Then the merchant was supposed to get her to her new . . . parents.”

The way she said “parents,” as though it was the closest term she knew to describe something awful, made my blood go cold. “Your senior?” I repeated in confusion. “Like your boss?”

That must not have been the right wording, because Darcy blinked several times, and I felt my control slipping. Gasping with the effort, I blurted, “Tell me who told you to take Charlotte Wheaton!”

I pushed as hard as I could on the connection, and Darcy began, “Our orders . . .”

And then the tip of a wooden stake popped out of her chest. The link between us broke, and I felt myself tumbling through the cardboard tubes into darkness.





Chapter 15



I woke up in the car, the lights of Boulder flashing intermittently over my face.

I sat up fast, looking around. I was in the passenger seat of Quinn’s Toyota. My neck was stiff from where it had been leaning awkwardly against the door, and I wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Quinn was driving, his face grim.

“What happened?” I asked.

“You fainted.”

“I did not,” I said crossly. “Fainting is for preteen girls and those really weird goats. I do not faint.”

For the first time Quinn looked over at me, his eyes rolling. “Okay, then. You abruptly lost consciousness, without any outside force affecting you in any way.”

“That’s better.” I arched my back, trying to stretch the kinks in my neck. “What happened? Where’s Darcy?”

Quinn jerked his head to indicate something over his right shoulder. “She’s in the back.”

I twisted in my seat, seeing a too-small bundle underneath a shabby gray blanket. I leaned over and lifted a corner of the cloth.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Quinn began, but it was too late. I saw the corpse, wrapped in two layers of clear plastic.

“Oh, wow,” I said softly. We were still in the city, and there was just enough light from the streetlamps for me to study Darcy’s body. It still had the blonde hair and the bloodied black jacket, which was somehow a whole lot creepier than if she’d been dressed in trailing bandages like a movie mummy. Because that’s what the rest of Darcy’s body looked like. It was desiccated to the point that I couldn’t even tell if there was any skin left on it, or if I was looking at a skeleton.

I’d seen dead bodies when I was with the army—too many of them. But those had all been reasonably fresh corpses, still in the process of decay and rot. Darcy’s corpse didn’t look like she’d died an hour ago, that was for sure. I looked back at Quinn, raising an eyebrow. “Jesus, how long was I out?”

Quinn let out a surprised laugh. “Our bodies do that when we die. Magic is connected to life; that’s what it prefers. When a vampire dies, the magic sort of abandons them, and the body returns to whatever condition it would have been in if the person had never become a vampire.”

I scrunched my face, thinking again of the horror movies Sam had made me watch when we were teenagers. “I thought vampires turned into dust.”

He shrugged. “Only the really, really old ones do that. Darcy was turned maybe thirty years ago, so she’s not that far along yet. Still a skeleton,” he added, almost cheerfully.

“Oh.”

The head with its bare skull seemed to be staring at me every time we passed a streetlight, so I flipped the blanket back over it and turned around in my seat again, buckling my seat belt. “Aren’t you worried about getting pulled over or something?”

He shook his head. “I checked all the lights already, and I’m driving at exactly the speed limit. Anyway, if I got pulled over, I’d just press the cop to forget me.”

I considered that for a moment. “So what do we do now?”

“Now we need to ditch the body,” he replied, his tone careful. I saw him glance at me out of the corner of his eye and understood that my response in this moment was important. I could ask him to drop me off before he got rid of Darcy’s body, and he might even agree. I had to admit, the idea was tempting: It was late, my body still ached, and the dogs would start tearing up the cabin pretty soon if I didn’t let them out.