Boundary Crossed (Boundary Magic #1)(78)
Simon’s expression turned thoughtful. “He’s hungry, for one thing. Always striving for upward mobility. And he has no scruples. If someone promised him enough money, he’d be happy to kidnap a baby. He’d probably see it as his chance to graduate to a better class of badass.”
“Plus he’s a fall guy,” I said, remembering the links in the chain. As evidence goes, it was thin, but the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that Kirby had gone back to the Merchant’s to hide out until daylight. He would want to stay away from the other vampires—it was too likely that they would tattle to Itachi if he went to them—and since we hadn’t found the Merchant during the first go-round, there was no reason for Kirby to think we’d find him now. No one knew that Darcy had mentioned the word “merchant” to me, and if she hadn’t, we would never have thought to look for a witch.
Quinn caught up with us, walking on my opposite side. “We’re sanctioned,” he said grimly. “Kirby and this Merchant, if necessary.”
Simon held up a hand. “Whoa. Atwood is a piece of shit, but he’s a witch piece of shit. Our problem. I’m coming with you, and I’ll take care of him.”
Quinn opened his mouth to protest, but I held up my hand. “Stop. Simon comes, and we’ll fight about it in the car.” I looked down at the remains of my dress and my blood-soaked shoes. To Simon, I added, “Does Lily keep any clothes here? And maybe some sneakers?”
Ten minutes later I met the two of them at Quinn’s car, wearing Lily’s black leggings, ribbed white tank top, and black motorcycle jacket, which strained at the arms—I had more muscle than its owner. Lily didn’t have any sneakers at the farmhouse, but Hazel had reluctantly handed over a pair of crimson Keens that were a size too big for me. They didn’t do much for the rest of the outfit, but at that point I was willing to take anything as long as it wasn’t sticky or high-heeled.
I had longed for a shower, but settled for rinsing the dried blood off my feet in the bathroom sink and splashing water on my face to get rid of the smeared makeup. I slicked back my hair with water to keep it out of my face. My shoes and dress had gone straight into the bathroom garbage. Hopefully none of the borrowed clothes would suffer the same fate. The leather jacket alone probably cost two weeks’ pay at the Depot.
Lily had looked drawn and exhausted, but she’d promised she would be fine. When I tried to thank her and Hazel, they just waved me on. “Get that null back,” Hazel said, her expression grim. “You’re going to need her.”
Gainesville was a minuscule town about fifteen miles north of Boulder, near the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. The population was something like a thousand people, which meant they had a few bars, a single gas station, and not a whole lot else. Gainesville was a town you drove through on the way to a music festival in Lyons, not a place where anyone actually chose to stop.
And yet here we were, leaving for Gainesville. “Weapons?” I asked Quinn before we got in.
He nodded. “Everything we need is in the trunk,” he promised.
Quinn drove while I sat shotgun. Simon and Quinn spent the first third of the drive fighting over which of them had the responsibility to kill Billy Atwood, if it came down to it. I ignored the argument. I didn’t care what happened to Atwood. All I cared about was making Charlie safe.
They finally agreed to play it by ear, which they frankly should have thought of to begin with, and as the argument wound down I turned to look at Simon in the backseat. “What’s the layout of the property?” I asked. “Where will this guy be keeping her?”
“Billy lives in what’s left of the Atwood farm,” Simon explained. “It’s not a working farm like ours. It’s basically just a small house and an old barn he uses for welding projects.”
“Where would he keep Charlie?” I asked. “The house?”
Simon looked uneasy. “You gotta understand, I’ve only been to check on this guy twice to make sure he wasn’t abusing magic. And both times he was working out in the barn when I got there. I’ve never even been in the house.”
“Well, you’re all we’ve got,” I said firmly. “So take a guess: house or barn?”
“Hopefully the house,” he said. “He usually keeps the stuff he fences in the barn, but the place is like something out of a horror movie: the whole building is packed wall to wall with welding gear and junk, all of it with sharp edges and covered in rust. It’s a tetanus outbreak waiting to happen.”
“That seems idiotic,” I said. “What if a neighbor kid wanders in?”
Simon shrugged. “It’s dangerous, yeah, but it acts as its own security system. Nobody wants to look through that death trap to find the valuables he hides in there. It’s crammed so full of metal edges that it’s impossible to move from one wall to the other unless you know the place. I don’t think Atwood even bothers closing the barn door at night.”
“That is literally the worst environment I can imagine for an eighteen-month-old,” I said. Panic clawed up my rib cage as I involuntarily pictured Charlie toddling around in a room like that. “He wouldn’t keep her in there, would he?”
“Probably not,” Simon said. “But like I said, I don’t know the layout of the house at all.”