Boundary Crossed (Boundary Magic #1)(47)
“Her problems?” I volunteered. “Such as the perversion of nature who’s suddenly appeared in her life?”
“Ehhh . . .” Simon tilted one hand back and forth. “She doesn’t think you’re a perversion of nature, so much as a perversion of magic,” he offered helpfully.
I lightly kicked the back of his knee as he walked, making him topple forward. He managed to right himself without falling on his face. “I may have been slightly deserving of that,” he said loftily. Then his face turned serious. “Listen, Lex, I’ll call you tomorrow after I talk to Lily, and we’ll work out a schedule for lessons. But there’s one other thing you need to know today.” He gave me a complicated look, part sadness and part awe. “Now that you’ve used your magic a couple of times, it’s going to grow.”
“So . . . ?” I prompted.
“So, you should know that until you learn to channel it properly”—I thought of the flashlight beam of awareness I’d directed at the mouse, and how damned hard it had been to keep it going—“you’re not going to have control of it. Magic is tied to emotions,” he explained, “You know how you can channel your feelings into doing something constructive or destructive? The same is true of magic.”
I wasn’t particularly good at channeling my emotions, but I didn’t say that. “Got it.”
Simon hesitated. “In the meantime . . . you’ll feel things really hard.”
I shrugged. What else was new?
“And,” he added with some urgency, “I wouldn’t try to press any vampires.”
But that was, like, the coolest thing I could do. “Why not?”
He shook his head. “You’re gonna be a little unstable for a few weeks while your magic settles in. Which makes it a lot more likely that you’ll slip up, giving a vampire a chance to gain control of you instead. And if they figure out you tried to press them . . .” He shook his head. “They really wouldn’t like that.”
Chapter 21
On the way back into Boulder, I grabbed a veggie sub from a chain place, driving with one hand so I could inhale it in the car. I was back at my cabin by mid-afternoon. My whole body was exhausted from the night of body disposal and the day of magic lessons, but I wasn’t ready for sleep yet. I was in terrible need of a reality check—and so were the animals. Shelter pets tend to thrive on routines, and I’d been doing nothing but breaking ours for the last week.
So instead of a nap I went straight to the backyard and threw a tennis ball for a while, enjoying the fall sunshine and the infectious excitement of the dogs. Only Cody and Chip, both retriever mixes, actually fetched the ball, mind you—Pongo found toys uninteresting but enjoyed snuffling along the edges of the fence, and Dopey was simply too stupid to grasp the concept of bringing something back. Once in a while she would follow Cody and Chip for the first ten feet as they chased the ball, then scamper back to me, expecting praise for her accomplishments. I just laughed and complied.
After about an hour I went inside and took a long, hot shower, taking the time to shave my legs and pluck my eyebrows. Then I pulled on my nicest jeans and paired them with a camisole—I still wasn’t supposed to wear a bra—covered by a nice long-sleeved knit top. I brushed my hair out in the mirror and nodded to myself. This was another Sam strategy—she always insisted that the key to feeling better inside was looking better on the outside. It had always sounded stupid and vaguely sexist to me—especially since I’d spent so many years trying not to look attractive—but I still appreciated the sentiment.
I realized that I suddenly, desperately missed my sister. She was the only one I could talk to about . . . well, I wouldn’t say “stuff like this,” because finding out that I had a magical connection to the forces of death isn’t the kind of thing that happens every day. But Sam was always the one person who accepted me in every way. Besides, she was my twin. She would’ve had the same witchblood.
I wondered, not for the first time, if that could have saved her life. Would she still have died if her magic had been active, too? Probably not. But then again, in order for her magic to have become active, she would have had to die when we were teenagers. This was all too messed up to contemplate.
At four-thirty I left the house for my regular Friday date. Okay, well, “date” might have been pushing it, but it was probably the closest I got these days.
After Sam died and John came back to Boulder to work at Luther Shoes, my parents worried about him constantly. A twenty-nine-year-old widower who spent every moment either working for his father-in-law or taking care of his baby daughter? They decided he was in desperate need of some fun, and since they were still worried about me, too, they concocted a brilliant plan: all of a sudden, John’s whole division started going to happy hour at one of the Boulder bars every Friday after work. There was some sort of trivia game on Fridays, and John was involuntarily drafted into the Luther Shoes employee team. And since Friday was my regular day off, and I didn’t tend to socialize with any bipeds, I was recruited to babysit Charlie every Friday evening.
John and I put up a token protest, of course—it’s grating, having your parents manipulate your social life at thirty—but we both had to admit the plan was a good one. I loved spending time with my niece, and having a regular date to see her gave me something to look forward to each week. And John, whether or not he was willing to admit it, could use the distraction of a weekly evening out with someone who was able to say more than six words.