I tore my eyes away from the trapped wraiths and made myself look at her. “I know why Morgan picked this place, and I know why she set the meeting for before sunrise.” I gestured toward the line of blood. “If I cross that, the wraiths—the stronger ghosts—will try to tear me apart.”
Keith had edged up along the side of the tunnel, and now he peeked around the corner, trying to figure out what I was seeing. Maybe it was my imagination, but the ghosts seemed to reach for him too.
Mary’s brow furrowed. “What if you run through real fast?”
I shook my head. “When I touch one of them—any one of them—I’ll feel the psychic imprint of their death. It’s—” I tried again to swallow, despite my dry mouth. The sight of the livid, burning wraiths pounding silently against my barrier was unnerving as hell. I forced my eyes away again. “It’s rough,” I finished. “They all burned to death. I wouldn’t make it to the cave entrance.”
She pursed her lips. “Can’t you, like, get rid of the ghosts?”
I almost laughed. “I’ve never even tried laying a wraith, and to lay any one of them, I’d need to be able to concentrate. To relax.”
“Huh.” She glanced up at the tunnel again, her face sort of admiring. “You have to admit, it’s a hell of an obstacle.”
I think I nodded, but I wasn’t really sure. “How about we go in there and drag Morgan out?” she asked.
“That could work,” I admitted. “But we have no idea what she has in there.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Mary said frankly. “If it’s the only way to end this, we need to go in.”
“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that,” Keith said.
I was so distracted that I barely heard him speak, and by the time I registered the words and turned my head, he had pushed Mary into the tunnel wall and was raising the barrel of my gun to shoot Finn in the chest.
He moved the barrel toward the other wolves. I shoved Tobias away from me, back the way we’d come. Keith had the gun pointed at Alex. “Run!” I screamed, and then I tackled Keith, aiming sideways so I wouldn’t fall across the line of blood.
With everyone off-balance and moving, Keith’s second shot went wide. I heard either Tobias or Alex yelp, a terrible pained sound, but they both kept running.
Keith flung me away easily. It was all I could do to throw up my arms and keep my head from hitting the rock wall. My elbow smacked into it instead, sending reverberations all the way into my shoulder. The pain made me dizzy for a moment.
I could hear growls and a scuffling of feet as Mary attacked Keith, but by the time I turned around, he had the revolver jammed under her chin and she had gone very still, her eyes huge.
He pressed up with the barrel, forcing her to her tiptoes, her teeth bared in rage.
“You,” I said stupidly, clutching my elbow and leaning against the rock. I had forgotten my claustrophobia, even forgot to look at the wraiths trapped a few feet away.
“Me,” Keith said, his gaze never leaving Mary’s. I looked down at the enormous brown wolf. A pool of blood was spreading away from his body. There was a shimmer that I couldn’t quite focus on in the dim light, and then the wolf was gone, replaced by the corpse of an enormous nude man.
“No,” Mary choked. Her eyes were full of tears.
I let go of my sore elbow and slowly drew my left arm behind me, going for the pancake holster. “Stop moving, Lex,” Keith snapped.
Mary had to speak through gritted teeth. “Why?”
Keith reached up with his free hand and smoothed the hair away from her face. “I don’t know where to begin,” he said simply.
A tear rolled down Mary’s cheek. “Ryan. Matt. Cammie.”
Keith sighed. I was watching carefully, but he never let up pressure on that gun. “Matt would have made a shitty alpha. And you and Ryan were getting too close,” he said, as though that explained every single thing he’d done.
“You have a thing for me.” Mary’s voice was bitter. “You cowardly little fuckwit.”
“Enough,” rang a familiar voice. I turned my head back to the wraiths—and saw Morgan Pellar come striding through the middle of them, swinging something around her finger. It was hard to get details through all the remnants.
She stepped carefully over the line of my blood, closing in on us. I wasn’t going to get a better moment.
I pivoted on my heel, driving my left fist at her with everything I had . . . which wasn’t a whole lot, thanks to the shoulder I’d wrenched earlier. Morgan took the haymaker on her cheekbone, her head whipping sideways. She stumbled a step, leaning on the wall next to Keith. I raised my other fist and stepped closer to hit her again, but to my surprise she calmly took the gun from Keith and shot Mary through the meat of her upper arm.
Mary howled with pain, and I froze. Morgan gave me a very severe look, like I was a naughty toddler. “That was your fault. I hope that punch was worth it.”
She handed the gun back to a disgruntled-looking Keith and spun Mary around, pushing her face into the stone wall as she snapped something around her wrists. Mary screamed with pain again, and I realized that Morgan had locked her into a pair of silver handcuffs.
“Stop!” I cried, reaching for the cuffs. Keith pointed the revolver at my forehead, and I backed up again. “Take them off her.”
Mary was taking short, shallow breaths now, trying to bear up against the pain of burning silver. Two lines of blood, from the entry and exit wounds, ran down her arm, converging into a dark worm of red. She still managed to mumble, “Hit the bitch again.”
Keith pulled a pair of gloves out of his pocket and began putting them on.
“What about the two that got away?” Morgan asked him.
Keith snorted. “Those two won’t be a problem.” Wearing the gloves, he grabbed the handcuffs and wrenched Mary’s manacled hands up behind her back. She sobbed with pain as he marched her deeper into the hall, right through the wall-to-wall ghosts.
I was so distracted by them walking right through my own personal nightmare that I failed to notice Morgan wrapping a zip tie around my own wrists, in front of me, until she pulled it tight enough to bite into my skin. I gave serious thought to another head-butt, which Morgan apparently read on my face. “Touch me again and Mary will pay for it,” she promised. “Silver heals human-slow. How many holes before she bleeds out?”
I dropped back, eyeing the gauntlet of wraiths over her shoulder, and Morgan coolly thrust one fist into my stomach. I hadn’t been ready for it, and I doubled over. Before I could recover, Morgan had looped another zip tie around the first, making a sort of handle. She reached out one polished leather boot and scuffed away the line of my blood.
“No!” I yelled, but of course I was too late. Morgan yanked the zip tie and dragged me right into the crowd of burning wraiths.
No, oh God, no, Jeannie, I love you so much . . .
Make it stop! Somebody just bloody shoot me!
It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts—
WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY—
It went on and on.
As I was yanked through ghost after ghost, my mind was barraged with fragments of their last moments, as though for a second, I became each person. Most of them couldn’t form a coherent thought through their terrible pain, the worst I’d ever felt. I had been cut up, shot, and broken, but none of it compared to the sensation of being burned alive. It was like being tattooed over every inch of your body simultaneously. Only worse. Many of their final thoughts were just endless screaming.
The wraiths hurt the most—they didn’t just exude pain; they were full of rage and malevolence and a hatred so powerful that it sucked the breath out of my lungs. They tore at my psyche, trying to take something from me—my life force? My magic? Blood? I didn’t know what they wanted, and I didn’t know how to fight them. After some time—a few seconds? Hours?—I sagged down, unable to control my body enough to keep my feet under me. Morgan began to drag me, but the psychic attack didn’t let up, and then I lost s
ome time.
I know I screamed. I screamed and fought as long as I could, but eventually I couldn’t keep myself together enough for either. I might have fainted, or maybe my brain just sort of short-circuited; I don’t really know. Everything faded away into a distant blur, followed by darkness.
Chapter 42
The next thing I was aware of was an icy-cold shock, as a pail of near-frozen water was dumped over my head.
“What—what—” I sputtered, sitting up so fast I got dizzy. I’d been lying on my back in a massive underground chamber—the cave Mary had told me about. My hands were still zip-tied, and I realized that my ankles had been secured as well. Great. Someone had removed the sidearm from the holster at my back, and when I lifted my bound hands to touch my chest, Valerya’s bloodstone was gone.
“Oh good, you’re awake,” Morgan said cheerfully. She was standing over me swinging an empty five-gallon bucket.
I lifted my bound hands to push wet hair out of my face and glared up at her—but I was distracted by my surroundings. This was the cave Mary had told me about. The egg-shaped sandstone chamber was as tall as a two-story house, and about half as wide. I had pictured moisture running down the walls and active stalactites, but it was dry and pretty, lit by yellowish camp lanterns that gave it a soft, comforting glow. Natural rock formations turned the walls into wavy, eclectic works of art, and the room was even warm, thanks to a small generator and some strategically placed space heaters. I spotted two exits, at more or less opposite sides of the room, one at my nine o’clock and one at my four o’clock.
I looked farther up. There was a ledge going most of the way around the dome, six feet from the top. A werewolf I’d never seen before was lying on the ledge at an angle, watching me lazily with its head resting on its enormous front paws.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Morgan looked around with obvious pride. “I was skeptical at first, but it’s really come together.”
I snorted. “A cave lair, really? Did you watch too many Bond movies as a child?”
Her smile didn’t waver. She tilted her head toward the exit on my left. “If you don’t like it, we could go back down to the hallway.”
That exit must lead to the wraith tunnel. I closed my mouth. The ghosts hadn’t been able to follow us in here—they were apparently limited to the area where they’d died—but the memory of their pain was fresh in my head, and I had a feeling it would be a long time before it faded from memory. Shuddering, I pulled my knees close to my chest and tucked them between my bound arms. I felt weak and achy. Was it possible to get a psychic hangover? Or some sort of brain flu?
Morgan sighed down at me, shaking her head. “Why do you do this to yourself?”
I said nothing.
“All you had to do was run an errand with your niece,” she said with exaggerated patience. “I’m not a vindictive person; I was willing to let go of everything that happened between us in the past. But you just couldn’t be a grown-up, could you?”
“How long was I out?” I asked, hoping it was past sunrise. I never saw ghosts during the day, not even wraiths.
Morgan smiled, reading my thoughts. “Only about fifteen minutes. Still plenty of ghosts in the hall, if you’d like to run the gauntlet again.”
I blocked the thought, trying to stay focused. “Why am I not dead?”
“Because,” she said pleasantly, “there’s something Keith would like from you first.” Her eyes flicked sideways. “We had hoped your aunt might be able to help us, but she either doesn’t know how or is too stubborn.”
“What do you want?”
“Why, for you to lay the ghosts, of course.” Morgan pointed to the other side of the chamber, and I followed her gaze to a waist-high hole in the stone. “They’re right on the other side of that.” She made a little disgusted noise. “I thought you would do it the moment you saw them, but apparently I overestimated your resolve in the face of tunnels.”
“That’s what this was all about? Laying ghosts?”
Morgan shrugged. “I did want you to bring Charlie. It would have made things so much easier later this morning. But I can find another way in. A deal is a deal, and Keith wants those ghosts laid to rest.”
“Why?”
She pressed her lips together and crossed her arms over her chest, her message clear: I was just the help. The help didn’t require details.
“Knowing what happened might affect whether I can lay them,” I told her. I was counting on her not knowing anything about boundary magic.
“Do I really have to spell it out?” she said impatiently. “He killed them.”
I stared at her for a moment. “He was an engineer,” I said slowly, “for the department of transportation.”
She waved a hand in a circle. “Yes, yes, there was a terrible accident, the city hushed it up, you get the idea. He says they haunt him in his sleep, whatever that means.”
Ghosts aren’t only tethered to places. When Keith had been asleep at the lodge, I’d seen a ghost practically on top of him.
The people Keith had killed were anchored to the tunnel, but somehow they were also haunting him, and not in a metaphorical way. I lifted my head to the ceiling, not caring who heard me. “Goddammit, Sam,” I said loudly. “Thanks for all the no help.”
Morgan was bending down, taking hold of the zip-tie handle again and pulling me up. “Come on, now, we’re running out of time. Sunrise is in forty minutes, then you’ll be of no use to me.”
“Just kill me,” I said tiredly. I’d like to say I was being brave against a hostile combatant, but mainly I was terrified of trying to lay the wraiths. If Morgan was going to kill me either way, I’d rather she just got on with it.
Morgan stood again, throwing up her hands. “See, this is exactly what I’m talking about! You’re so pointlessly obstinate!” Raising her voice, she added, “Keith! You’ll have to bring them in!”
There was another shuffling noise, this time coming from the exit at my four o’clock. It was a short, narrow gap that would require a human to turn and crab-walk at an angle. There was some grunting and snarling, but then Mary edged into the room sideways, her hair mussed and wild. She was still wearing the silver handcuffs behind her back, and I thought I could smell the skin on her wrists burning. When she was all the way in the room, she fell to her knees, her teeth gritted against the pain.
There were more noises, and then a body was shoved through the gap behind Mary, instantly crumpling onto the cave floor. At first I thought it was a dead stranger, but then I recognized the hairdo. Parts of the braid were still holding together.
“Katia!”
I tried to army-crawl over to her with my hands and ankles bound, but Morgan said impatiently, “Oh, for God’s sake, this could take all day. Just bring her over.”
Keith, who had shoved Katia’s body through, emerged from the gap and grabbed her by the waistband of her pants, hauling her easily toward me. When they were still four feet away, he tossed her, and she slid across the rough sandstone floor to rest at my side.
I looked right into his eyes. “I will kill you for this,” I said coldly.
Keith swallowed, his eyes darting to Morgan. From the floor, I heard Mary’s soft, pained voice, forced through her teeth. “Get . . . in . . . line.”
Katia groaned softly and I scooted closer, shocked that she was still alive. Her arms were bare, and her torn shirt had ridden up, so scraping against the floor must have hurt like hell. Awkwardly, I rolled her over so I could see her face. It was puffy and swollen, her lower lip the size of a banana.
Mary had been watching all this, and she knee-walked closer, meeting my eyes. “Pulse and breathing are strong,” she muttered, trying to look as though she weren’t in agonizing pain. “I think . . . mostly cosmetic injuries. To upset you.”
“Well, it worked,” I said through gritted teeth. Rage erupted in my chest.
I glared up at Keith again and he actually flinched. “Let them go,” I snapped. “Let them both go.
”
Morgan sighed. “Here we go again,” she said to the heavens. Then she dropped her head to look down at me. “Don’t be so dramatic. No one’s going anywhere. After you perform your little ritual, I’ll send her to the ER.” She gestured at Katia. “You’ll stay here until my mother drops the barrier to Colorado, and for a full day afterward. Then you’re free to go.”
Now it was my turn to roll my eyes. “Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious,” Morgan insisted. “I’m still willing to deal, Lex. I was always willing to deal. I heard you quit working for Maven, which means I’ve done absolutely nothing to her or her people.” She allowed herself a tiny smile. “Certainly nothing anyone can prove.”
I was suddenly really proud of the punch I’d managed to land on Morgan earlier. “Why would you let me go?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Despite your efforts, I’m still confident I can convince the Colorado witches to put their trust in me.”
“That’s why you didn’t take Lily hostage until your mom dropped the ward,” I said, understanding. “You still want all the witches to love you.”
Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t deny it. “As I was saying, once I’m leader, Maven will have no choice but to work with me. And you’ll have to either leave the state or beg for your job back. Either way, you won’t be a threat to me.”
“Morgan, you tedious bitch,” I said conversationally, “I will always be a threat to you.”
As if I hadn’t spoken, she sashayed over and crouched in front of me again, resting her elbows on her knees. She smiled at me and confided, “Personally, I hope you decide to run. There would be a delicious poetic justice to you being forced away from your home, cut off from your family.” She flipped her hands, palms up. “But I’m good either way.”
I tried to keep my expression level, but Keith said to Morgan, “Her pulse is picking up.”
“And Mary?” I said to Morgan. “What happens to her?”
Morgan stood up, waving a hand as though Mary were an inconvenient rash. “Mary will stay with Keith until she learns some manners.”
Boundary Broken (Boundary Magic Book 4) Page 27
