Boundary Crossed (Boundary Magic #1)(63)

I didn’t slow down until I was a few feet away from my front door. Then I skidded to a sloppy halt, bumping my hip into the doorknob. If it hurt, I didn’t feel it. I grinned at the door for no reason, breathing only a little bit hard. Feeling a sudden twinge of pain, I glanced down at my feet. My breath caught in my throat.

The tops of my feet were grimy, with streaks of dark red. That didn’t make sense: the lake water wasn’t red, it was green. Confused, I put a hand on the door for balance and leaned sideways to check out the bottom of my left foot.

It was covered in oozing red lines that dripped right onto the porch. Still not understanding, I glanced back the way I had come. Red footprints traced my path down the driveway and onto the porch. That was the first moment I realized it was blood.

And the high crashed down around me, letting in the agonizing pain of my sliced-up feet. I screamed. From inside the cabin, the dogs barked and howled in sympathy.

Ten minutes later, I was sitting on the counter in the mudroom with my legs in the utility sink next to me, sobbing as I rinsed off my feet. Simon had been pounding on the door for most of that time, even rattling the doorknob to test the dead bolt, but I had no intention of opening the door to him or anyone else. Probably ever again. Eventually, he took the hint, and the knocking stopped. I was left alone with my thoughts and my bloody feet.

The army teaches you to handle panic, of course. There are a number of big training sessions focused solely on that, and I’d done okay when faced with scary situations in Iraq. But this was different. As I ran the cold water over my feet, trying to clear the blood long enough to see the actual cut, my thoughts tumbled around in a babbling craze, because the scary thing in question hadn’t come from an insurgent or a raid or even the barrel of a gun. It had come from within me. I had pulled the life out of those fish, which was bad enough, but then I had used it to fuel my body and ignore pain.

I turned the water off, trying to see the cuts on my feet before the blood obscured them again. I’d gotten all the dirt and lake slime off, but there were dozens of small cuts on each foot. Most of them were superficial, but there were two on my left foot and one on my right that looked deep. I was trying to decide whether any of them needed stitches, but between the blood and the tears that continued to course down my face, I couldn’t f*cking see them. I blew out a shaky breath, frustrated.

Then a terrible thought crossed my mind. I’d felt high, juiced after pulling the life out of those fish. Like a junkie who’d finally gotten a fix. But what was making me high, exactly? I had a sudden suspicion.

I pointed at my left foot and murmured the words Simon had taught me, the simple little charm that cleaned an object for you. As I said the words, I moved my finger downward, pointing into the sink because that’s where I wanted the mess to go.

There was a spark of atmosphere in the mudroom, like the pressure right before a thunderstorm, and then every single piece of dirt, blood, pet hair, and dust in the entire room flew into the sink, immediately followed by all the dirty laundry on the floor, the odds and ends I’d taken out of my pockets before putting clothes in the wash, a few pieces of jewelry I’d taken off in the mudroom and forgotten about, and so on. A hailstorm of stuff flew past me to get to the sink, and I almost fell off the counter.

It didn’t stop until the sink was full. I righted my balance and froze, looking around the room. It was spotless. Literally. There wasn’t a speck of dust on the small window ledge, a place I had never cleaned in the three years I’d lived in this cabin. Even the sink fixtures were clean. Mary Poppins, eat your heart out. “A filter, not a focus,” I whispered.

The dogs were barking, scrabbling their claws against the wooden door of the mudroom. Looking back at the sink, I pulled my feet out from under the piles of stuff and examined them. The wounds were bleeding again, and it was still hard to take a good look at them. At first I thought the whole exercise had been basically futile, but then I realized that other than the new blood, my feet were flawlessly clean. That’s probably good for fighting infection, right? I thought woozily.

“Okay. I’m gonna need some help after all,” I announced to the pile of clothes. I leaned back a little and dug into the pocket of my jeans. Miraculously, my cell phone was still there, having survived the epic footrace back to the cabin. With shaking fingers I scrolled through my contacts to find Lily’s number.



“This is not good,” she said half an hour later as she examined the soles of my feet. I was still on the counter in the mudroom, where I had set down a few layers of paper towels to staunch the blood that was still oozing sluggishly from my wounds. Aside from not wanting to get blood on the carpets in the rest of the house, the mudroom seemed like the cleanest place for me to wait for Lily. I was leaning way back on the long counter so I could point my toes to the ceiling while she examined my injuries. Her face was about five inches away from my feet, which ordinarily would have embarrassed me, but there was no way in hell my feet smelled bad just then. They were practically gleaming, they were so clean.

Lily finally tore her eyes away and looked up at my face. “I can stop the bleeding, but you’re right, the three bad gashes need a couple of stitches each. Or . . .” She trailed off.

“Or . . . ?” I prompted.

Lily winced. “I could Super Glue them,” she said reluctantly. Seeing the disbelieving look on my face, she added defensively, “Hey, it’s what surgeons do to arthroscopic entry wounds. It’ll sting like a bitch, though, and you’ll still need to stay off them for at least a day.”