Without another word, I handed him my cell phone and strode past him into the kitchen. From the hallway I could hear a woman’s voice cooing at my niece, and part of me relaxed a little. Was it all a misunderstanding? I hadn’t known that John and his girlfriend had progressed to sleepovers, and I didn’t love it, but everything sounded okay.
About two steps before I reached the kitchen, though, I realized that I recognized the voice that was humming to Charlie. I rounded the corner and saw her, wearing a pretty white nightgown, rocking back and forth with my niece draped over her shoulder. John’s cell phone sat right in front of her.
I started forward, but she held up her free hand. “That’s far enough. Let’s keep your hands where I can see them, shall we?” I froze, and Simon and Lily’s eldest sister smiled at me. “Hello, Lex.”
I swallowed hard. “Hello, Morgan.”
Chapter 42
“Did you just call her Morgan?” John asked, stepping into the kitchen behind me. “This is Sarah, my girlfriend.”
“That’s not her name,” I said softly.
“Well of course it is,” Morgan laughed. “Oh, I’m sorry, I see the confusion. My full name is Morgan Sarah, I just prefer to go by the latter.”
“That’s probably it then.” John went around the kitchen island to peck her on the lips. “How’s my girl?”
“She passed out again, of course,” Morgan/Sarah said with false good humor. “Right when I had the pan all ready.” She took a step to the right so we would both see the cast-iron saucepan full of milk on the stove.
“Of course,” John said, picking up an apple from a bowl on the island and shining it on his shirt. He moved it toward his mouth to take a bite.
“John,” I said in a low voice. “You need to take Charlie and step away. This woman is not who you think she is.”
My brother-in-law’s hands went still and he shot me a bewildered look. “Lex, what are you talking about? I saw the message on your phone, but it’s just some weird fluke. Charlie is fine.”
“This woman has been lying to you,” I said desperately. “Please, take Charlie from her. You have to trust me.”
His brow furrowed, and he opened his mouth to answer—but then the saucepan of hot milk struck him square on the back of his head.
John’s eyes rolled up as he crumpled forward, smacking his forehead on the counter as he went down. “No!” I cried out, starting forward to help him. Morgan held up a warning finger, stopping me in my tracks. Charlie was stirring in her arms. The witch whispered some soothing words to her, and my niece snuggled into her neck.
My fists clenched, and for a moment the only sound in the kitchen was the drip-drip-drip of the spilled milk. At that moment I hated her worse than I’d hated any person in my entire life.
“It was you,” I growled. “All this? The ley lines?”
“Calm down, Allison,” Morgan said in that same soothing tone. She opened the drawer in front of her and pulled out a 9mm Sig Sauer. “I would hate to have to use this on someone.”
The sight of a sidearm that close to Charlie made me go cold. Stall for time, I told myself. Just about the only thing I could do was stall for time and hope Lily got bored and came in, or John woke up. If he was still alive. I swallowed my pride and tried to modify my tone to sound awestruck. “How did you activate the ley line?”
Morgan snorted, hard enough to make her perfect cascade of earth-mother hair tremble. “I have you to thank for that. Really, everything that’s happened is your fault, Allison.”
“How do you figure? And stop calling me Allison.”
Her eyes hardened. “Of course, I’ve known for a long time that I would need to be more strict than my mother: her peace-and-love hippie shit was great once upon a time, but the real world is much harsher than that now.” She cuddled her head against Charlie’s. “Still, I was planning to bide my time until our contract with Maven was up, but when you showed up with your complete lack of control and your ridiculous amount of death magic, trying to poison the clan, I had to move up my time line.”
“The spells?”
She glowered at me. I’d interrupted her. “I asked around,” she snapped. “There’s a storage facility in San Diego where we keep the oldest spells, the stuff nobody bothers with anymore.” She shrugged. “A full week buried in dusty boxes, but I had to do it. I couldn’t risk you hurting someone.”
“Me?!” I cried, tilting my head toward John. “I haven’t hit anyone with a pan today, Morgan.” Sure, I’d killed a giant snake monster, but still.
Morgan shrugged, unruffled. “Sacrifices have always needed to be made for the greater good, Allison.”
“And is John one of those sacrifices?” I countered.
She looked down at him, like she’d genuinely forgotten he was there. “No. Just a means to an end.” She bounced Charlie lightly in her arms. “I needed a contingency plan, just in case the werewolves didn’t invade, or you threw a wrench in things, which of course you have.” She sighed. “Maybe I should have shot you right away in the beginning. Saved everyone the trouble.”
“How exactly do you see this going down?” I said quickly. Keep her talking. “You kill me, you’ll go to jail.”
She gave me an annoyed look. “Come on, now. Don’t insult my intelligence, not when I’m holding this cute widdle baby,” she kissed the top of Charlie’s head.
I thought my own head might explode when I saw that, but I kept my mouth shut. Seeing that I wouldn’t take the bait, Morgan sighed and waved the Sig at the back door. “Bad guys came in, hit John, and shot you. I managed to hide in the bathroom with the baby. End of story.” She leveled the weapon at my head.
“And Charlie?” I insisted. “If I’m going to die, at least let me know what’s gonna happen to my niece.”
She thought for a moment, then set the Sig back down in front of her, bobbing her head in concession. “Fair enough. I’m not a monster. You’ll be happy to know that I have no real interest in Charlie, and no intention of interfering with her upbringing. After I shoot you, she and I will just make a quick run to the coffee shop to shoot Maven before we go to the police station.” She looked down at her nightie. “Should I change first, do you think, or will this be more sympathetic?” I just stared at her. “Anyway, in a week or two I’ll quietly break up with John, and Charlie will go on living her life. Unless I need her again. Of course, there are a number of vampires and witches who know of her existence now; I can’t help that. Maybe John can get a security system or something.” She shifted Charlie in her arms and picked up the Sig again, pointing it at my head.
“There’s just one problem with that plan,” said a voice just over my shoulder. “Maven isn’t at the coffee shop. She’s at the farmhouse accusing Sybil of all your crimes.”
Lily. Behind me, she stepped forward out of the shadows, and I silently moved aside to let her in.
Instinctively, Morgan pointed the weapon at the new threat. “You’re going to shoot me too, big sister?” Lily snapped. “Am I going to become another casualty in the Morgan Pellar world domination plan?” Her voice was raw with pain.
Morgan wrinkled her nose. “Really?” she said to Lily. “The farmhouse? Drat.” Her lips worked a little, like she was trying to get a bad taste out of her mouth. “I had hoped she wouldn’t get that far, certainly not this quickly.”
“You framed Sybil,” Lily said. Tears were running down her face. “You’re setting her up to take a fall for you.”
“All I did was ask her to do a couple of spells for me,” Morgan said airily. “That ley line spell has to be renewed every night, and I have things to do. Anyway, Sybil doesn’t know anything, and Maven should be able to smell that on her. I doubt she’ll kill Sybil.”
“What is wrong with you?” Lily whispered.
Morgan looked genuinely angry at that. “I am trying to take care of you,” she hissed, with a little stomp of her foot. “Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted, Lilith? For all of us to take care o
f you, let you be the free-spirited wild child? You want to go flouncing around teaching yoga and following your passions, well, this is what it costs.” She tilted her head at me. “I’m not going to let her destroy our clan while you’re off picking daisies.”
“Look at what you’re doing right now!” Lily cried. “What would your kids say about this? Your husband?”
Morgan rolled her eyes, but I didn’t hear her response. I had a really bad idea. Like, really bad. But it was the only idea I had, so what the fuck, why not run with it? “So shoot me,” I said very loudly. The Sig swerved back toward me, as confusion erupted on the faces of both Pellar sisters. “Lily can keep her mouth shut. She knows how to go along with things. I’m close enough to Charlie, it should work. Just shoot me.”
“Lex—” Lily cried.
“Shut up, Lily,” Morgan snarled. “Okay, fine,” she said to me. She thumbed the safety off the weapon. “You asked for—”
There was a blur of motion, and then Clara was there, coldcocking Morgan right on the fucking chin.
She had to slow to human speed when she got close to Charlie, but she still managed to wrench both the Sig and the baby away from Morgan as the witch tumbled to the ground.
Charlie woke up with an annoyed squall, and I rushed forward and scooped her up, hugging her to my chest. “Wek!” she cried, because my name is tough to say when you’re not even two. I held out my hand, and Clara handed over the sidearm. I hit the button to release the magazine, letting it fall onto the floor.
“You couldn’t have come in a bit earlier?” I said to her.
“Safety was on,” she said with a shrug, and this time I heard the slight Eastern European accent. “I know guns. No danger with the safety on.”
“She had Charlie!”
“You heard her,” Clara contended. “No harm to baby. Baby was fine.”
Lily had gone over to check on John right away, which I appreciated. “He’s breathing,” she reported. “But his pulse is weak. He needs to be in a hospital.” She turned around to face her sister, but Morgan was already struggling to her feet. Her nose was pouring blood and she screamed in frustration. “You ruin everything!” she yelled at Lily. She took a step toward her little sister, and I moved backward, getting out of the way so Lily could back up.
To my surprise, though, Lily held her ground. In fact, she raised one hand and yelled something, and I saw the same saucepan that had been used to attack John go flying across the room to strike Morgan in the stomach, knocking her backward with such force that the older woman left a dent in the cupboard. Morgan’s eyes went huge with surprise. “How . . .” she gasped.
Lily’s smile was ice cold. “Apex magic.” She reached into her jacket pocket and held up the little journal that Simon had left in the Jeep. “I’d say you should try it sometime, but I’m not sure you’ll live that long.”
“Bang,” Charlie said happily.
Epilogue
On a cold Monday morning, a few days before Thanksgiving, I wrestled a new eighteen-inch television into the boarded-up brothel in Denver. Lily trailed behind me, holding a plastic bag with the new bunny ears.
“Hello?” I yelled after I’d jimmied the door. “Nellie?”
“Is she here?” Lily asked, peering over my shoulder. It was the first time I’d ever seen her wearing plain old everyday blue jeans, but of course she’d paired them with a faux snakeskin jacket. She’d been wearing that particular jacket a lot lately, and I was pretty sure it was meant to poke fun at her brother.
“I guess she’s not visible during the day anymore,” I said, shrugging. Morgan had confessed that the only way to keep the ley lines active in our low-magic times was to perform a ritual every single night. Once she stopped doing that, the haywire magic in Boulder began to settle back down. Hazel estimated it’d take a couple more weeks to get back to normal.
“That sucks,” Lily said, disappointed. “I mean, I know I can’t see her, but I had like, a thousand questions for you to translate.”
“Too bad,” I said. I was a bit relieved, actually: Nellie was undoubtedly a gold mine of knowledge about boundary magic, but we had only just finished cleaning up all the fallout from the last big magic crisis; I wasn’t interested in dicking around with my powers right now.
We set up the television in the main entryway. Electricity had been a problem, until I took it to Maven, who somehow arranged for power to be turned back on in the lower floors of the brothel, no questions asked. While I squatted in front of the TV, messing with the bunny ears, Lily stood up and looked around. “It’s weird to think that Maven was once a—what did you say they called themselves?”
“Soiled doves,” I supplied. “Although there were like a dozen other terms too.”
“Right. Soiled dove.” I looked up in time to see her plop down on the steps, surveying the boarded-up windows, the miles of spiderwebs. I thought the whole place was creepy as hell, but Lily was looking around like she had special time-travel goggles. “There was a whole world here once,” she marveled. “A whole society and system of rules.”
“With lots of disease, abuse, and corruption,” I put in. “Not to mention corsets.” I went back to fidgeting with the bunny ears, balancing on my heels.
“Speaking of corruption,” Lily said slyly, “how’s vampire sex treating you?”
I lost my balance and toppled over, sending the antennae smacking on the floor behind the TV. Lily whooped. “That good, huh?” Her face went serious. “Or, wait, that bad?”
“That’s none of your business, Lilith,” I said severely, but I smiled as I picked myself up and went after the bunny ears. To my surprise, being on the floor actually seemed to help.
“Come on, one detail,” she coaxed. “Does he use superspeed during sex? Do vampire superpowers extend to, you know, stamina? Does he drink your blood after? During?”
I made a face. “You have put way too much thought into us having sex. How about I’ll tell you one thing if you promise never to use the phrase ‘vampire sex’ again?”
She clapped her hands. “Deal.”
I thought it over. Quinn and I had been spending almost every night together over the last couple of weeks. We were just . . . hungry for each other. But I’d taken to leaving his place before dawn. I said it was to take care of the herd, but we both knew I didn’t want to be around when he went cold. “He doesn’t drink my blood. He says he doesn’t want to, but I know he’s afraid he wouldn’t be able to stop himself,” I said quietly.
Lily wrinkled her nose. “I meant, like, a sexy detail, but I’ll accept that answer for now.”
“Oh, good. What a relief.” I finally got the TV channel to come in clearly, and I stood, wiping my hands on my pants. Then I went over to the closet and retrieved my watch, fastening it around my wrist. It felt good to have it on again, like that piece of Sam was back with me. “How’s your family doing?” I asked Lily. She’d been awfully quiet on the ride to Denver.
“About like you’d expect. Mom’s taking it hard. She’s talking about just canceling Thanksgiving this year.”
After we’d subdued Morgan, Lily had restrained her while Maven and Hazel had a big sit-down meeting in Maven’s office that lasted until dawn, and picked up again the following night. Hazel had eventually persuaded Maven to let her eldest daughter live, but Morgan would be banished from the state of Colorado for the rest of her natural life. One toe over the state line, and Maven would eviscerate her. It was actually pretty generous of Maven to let Morgan go, especially now that she would be able to use apex magic to stir up shit in someone else’s territory. But that was some other henchwoman’s problem now. I was done with Morgan.
For her part, Hazel had promised not to tell any other members of Clan Pellar about apex magic, or do any in front of them. The other witch clans in Colorado would not be told about it either, and both parties would carry out the terms of their original covenant as closely as possible.
Hazel had done the best she could, but Morg
an’s crimes and her banishment were creating a lot of drama in the family, considering that her soon-to-be-ex husband lived in town with their children. He was going to have to decide whether to move the kids to wherever Morgan ended up, start driving them to meet her, or withhold custody altogether. Morgan would have to go along with whatever he decided.
“What about your brother-in-law?” Lily asked me. “Have you told him yet?”
I wrinkled my nose unhappily. Clara had helped me rush John to Magic Beans, where Sashi had just enough juice left to heal his head wound. Then Quinn had pressed him into forgetting the whole night and thinking “Sarah” had left town . . . it had been a whole big tap dance, but he’d eventually bought it.
I hated keeping John in the dark, so as a kind of reward for saving her life again, Maven had given me permission to tell John about the Old World and Charlie’s place in it. I sighed. “No, and I have no idea when or how. It needs to be soon—he has too many questions I can’t answer, but it’s just . . .”
“Hard,” she finished. “I get it. You love him, you want him to know, but you want to protect him too.”
“Exactly.”
She shook her head. “These ties among family, they’re so strange, aren’t they? Like, I hate Morgan. Hate her. But she’s my sister and I love her too, and part of me wants good things to happen for her.”
“Yup.” I rested my chin on my knees, copying Lily’s posture. “Family’s complicated. Did I tell you that John asked me if Sashi has a boyfriend?”
“What? No!” She considered that for a second, and huffed, “I’m actually a little offended he got over my sister that quickly.”
Oh, jeez. I shook my head and leaned back against the steps. “Visualize me hitting you with a pillow . . .” I began.
Acknowledgments
The book you’re now holding is arguably the most-researched project I’ve ever worked on, and it was only possible with a lot of help from a number of pleasant and gracious people. First and foremost, thank you to my Boulder guide, Brieta Bejin, who gave up the better part of a weekend to patiently show me around her city, and answered follow-up questions pretty much until I turned in the final draft. My deepest thanks to Pat Kociolek of the Museum of Natural History at the University of Colorado Boulder, who was willing to humor my bizarre questions about snake monsters, and to all the nice folks at the Boulder Police Department, who were so generous and gracious that now I feel a little bad about Keller. Thank you to the Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center for giving me the chance to observe real wolves (I really don’t think any of them were shapeshifters, but I was very respectful just in case), and to my beta-reading rock star, Elizabeth Kraft. My gratitude also goes out to Sybil Ward (no relation to the fictional Sybil) and Brandon Beaty, who both read through the story for errors in the military references or lingo. Thanks to Brandon, I may never use the word “gun” again.
Boundary Lines (Boundary Magic Book 2) Page 28
