Boundary Crossed (Boundary Magic #1)(59)
One Thursday night in mid-October, I was sitting in my car outside John’s, munching on a bag of barbecue chips and waiting for him to get home with the baby so I could get my hit of Charlie-is-safe relief. It was nearly eight, so I figured he’d probably gone to my parents’ or his mom’s house for dinner and would be back any minute.
There was a sudden knock on the passenger window. I jumped in my seat, and looked over to see Quinn waving at me with a little smirk on his face. We hadn’t spoken since the night he’d called to tell me the vampires weren’t sure about me. Part of me still hadn’t forgiven him for dropping the case . . . or for telling Itachi and Maven that I was unstable.
Even if it was true.
I sighed and unlocked the door, watching as he climbed into the car. To my horror, I realized that I was actually kind of glad to see him. Between the way he’d tattled on me and Simon’s warning about vampires’ motives, I wanted to loathe his undead guts. But there was also a part of me that found him very . . . comfortable to be around.
“Is it absolutely necessary for you to scare the shit out of me every time we meet?” I demanded.
“Hey, Lex,” he said, ignoring the question. “How’s tricks?” He glanced around the car. I keep it fairly neat, but there were a few empty containers from fountain sodas and chips that I hadn’t gotten to yet. “I see you’ve developed an exciting new interest in stalking.”
“Is there news from Itachi?” I asked fervently. “Did they make a decision about me?”
He shook his head. “No, sorry. The coffee shop gets really busy this time of year—midterms—and there’s been a bit of trouble with one of the Colorado Springs vampires. I think they’ve put the whole situation with your niece on the back burner. Charlie’s still protected,” he added hastily. “Just not a priority right now.”
I didn’t bother saying that Charlie was always a priority to me. Quinn already knew. “Then why are you here?” I asked coolly.
He gave a little shrug. “Just checking in. I hear you’ve been keeping up with the magic lessons. How did you get Mama Pellar’s permission?”
I smiled wryly. Three afternoons a week, Simon or Lily came over to the cabin to teach me magic. Whenever I asked about Hazel’s thoughts on my training, though, they inevitably changed the subject. “I don’t actually know,” I admitted. “I’m not one hundred percent sure she even knows.” I got the sense that Simon and Lily had told Hazel that it was better to have me on their side than for me to be an unknown quantity, but they were too polite to tell me that.
Quinn nodded impassively. “How are the lessons going?”
I automatically opened my mouth to answer but caught myself just in time, turning in my seat to fully face Quinn. John’s street was well lit, and the vampire was looking at me with calm curiosity. “Who’s asking?” I said bluntly.
A flicker of surprise crossed his features, either because he didn’t expect me to see through him, or because I’d hurt his feelings. If I hadn’t seen the look on his face when my palm had started bleeding, I wouldn’t even know whether he had feelings. “Just me, Lex,” he said quietly. “I promise.”
“The lessons have been fine,” I said. Then I sighed, relenting. “Okay, not that fine. I’m learning more about what I can do—Simon geeks out about it on a regular basis—and it turns out I’ve got plenty of juice. But so far I’m a filter, not a focus.”
Quinn nodded again. “You can pull the magic through you,” he translated, “but you can’t push it where you want it to go?”
“Something like that.” I gave him a brief rundown of my training. For most of the sessions, we would go out behind my small backyard and stand near the fence that formed a border with the forest just beyond my cabin. Whichever Pellar was helping me would have me sense out the life in the forest. I had gotten good at visualizing myself putting on night-vision goggles and then filtering my vision until I caught the glowing sparks of mice, squirrels, and rabbits. I started to understand the sizes and shapes, although that wasn’t precisely the right word, of the different creatures.
When Lily was my teacher, the practice would be laid-back and exploratory: she was big on improvisation, letting the lessons go wherever they took us. Eventually she started working with me on tethering down my emotions so my magic wouldn’t flare up and overwhelm me anymore. Simon, on the other hand, was much more organized and regimented. He actually brought a clipboard out to the backyard with us, using it to take notes on my capabilities. I’d made him swear he wouldn’t kill anything just for my education again, so his big thing was to have me practice turning on my magical plane mindset over and over again until it became second nature. When I got good at switching it on and off quickly, we started working on concentration, making sure I could hold the thermal-imaging mindset without getting easily distracted. Which usually meant trying to do it while Simon tossed pinecones at my face.
One day, during a Simon practice, I had a breakthrough. We were working on expanding and contracting the beam of my scrutiny, so I would concentrate on a space about twelve feet by twelve feet, and then narrow my focus down to a single small nest of field mice within that square before repeating the process. That afternoon practice had run long, and the sky had started to darken while we were still working. As I was concentrating on the mice, there was a sudden rustle of feathers and air, and I felt the larger spark of an owl swoop down onto my mice, snatching one of them up.