Boundary Crossed

by Melissa F. Olson

  I put on the clothes, folding the scrubs to take them with me. Feeling something in the pants pocket, I reached in and pulled out a blank white card, the size and shape of a business card. Nothing was typed on it, but the words Just in case—Quinn were handwritten on one side, followed by a phone number. I didn’t know when he’d slipped the card into my pocket, but I found myself squeezing it a little to make sure it was real. The edges bit into my fingers.

  Well, crap. It hadn’t been a dream.

  John promised to drop me off on his way to work and went upstairs to get ready. After Sam died, John had decided to take my father up on his offer to come back to Boulder and work at Luther Shoes. He wanted to raise Charlie closer to his mom, and to Sam’s family—us. They’d worked out a whole system where my mom took care of Charlie three days a week so John could save on day care.

  An hour later, John loaded Charlie’s car seat into the backseat of his big 4x4 truck and came over to help me climb into the passenger seat. I could have done it myself, working around the soreness, but I was trying to cover up the extent of my healing, so I made a point to look pained as I got in. It wasn’t that much of a stretch.

  The ride to the cabin was peacefully quiet, but as soon as John pulled into my driveway we could hear the barking. The herd was awake and in full house-protection mode. John put the truck in park and smiled over at me. “You want us to come in with you?” he asked.

  “Nah.” I leaned over the backseat and squeezed Charlie’s hand. “She’s with my mom today, right?” Darcy’s parting shot, This isn’t over, was bouncing around the inside of my sore head.

  He nodded. “Then your folks and Elise are coming over for supper tonight,” he said. “I’m making chili to thank them for helping with the baby this week. If you’re feeling up to it, do you want to come?”

  “Thanks,” I told him, “but I should probably rest.” I kissed my fingers and touched them to Charlie’s tufts of dark hair. “Bye, babe,” I said, leaning over to kiss the top of her head. “Thanks for the ride, John. See you in a couple days.” I had a standing date to babysit on Friday afternoons.

  “I’ll text that morning to make sure you feel up to it,” he suggested. I nodded and started to open the door, but John touched my wrist. “Lex. . .” he began, “I don’t know how to—”

  “You don’t have to thank me,” I interrupted him. I tilted my head toward the backseat. “That’s Sam’s daughter back there. You never have to thank me.”

  John nodded, his face set. “See you Friday.”

  I showered right away and slowly pulled on clean sweatpants and a soft flannel button-down, wearing nothing underneath. A bra would only irritate my already-irritated stitches, and my chest wasn’t so buxom that I’d miss it much. Then I turned my attention to the herd, who weren’t used to being left alone for any real amount of time. Rescue animals don’t deal with separation well, and even though my family members had been stopping by, there were demonstrations of the animals’ unhappiness all over the house. One of the dogs had defecated in a corner of the basement. There were new, jagged tears the size of cat claws through the screen window in my bedroom. A few lamps and books had gotten knocked around, too, probably by Cody and Chip, inseparable mutts who had been found together and tended to lapse into calamitous chases when bored. I didn’t yell at any of them, because I understood. I just cleaned it all up and gave them extra attention.

  The movement was hard on all my sore muscles, so at lunchtime I had four Advil and a liter of water with my grilled cheese sandwich. I also remembered to charge my cell phone, finally. I had seventeen voicemails, mostly from my family and the real police, who wanted a statement. I wasn’t ready to call everyone back yet, so instead I called my store manager, an anxious, heavyset guy who liked to see himself as a generous man of the people, at least until the store owner started breathing down his neck about something. Big Scott—he actually preferred that we call him that—seemed excessively worried about my health, and he offered me two weeks off: one paid, one not. I volunteered to return to work the next day, once the stiffness had gone down a bit, but he insisted on the paid week, which was pretty fair of him. And pretty surprising, considering how hard it would be to cover my undesirable 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. shift. He was probably worried about some kind of a lawsuit.

  By then I was getting tired again. My body had done a lot of healing in a short amount of time, so it made sense that it needed extra energy. I went upstairs to the lofted master bedroom and crawled into bed on my stomach.

  I expected to pass out immediately, but my thoughts were whirling again. Witches. I actually didn’t have too much trouble accepting the idea that witches were real. Boulder is a liberal town with a lot of “alternative lifestyles”—my own father was a semi-reformed hippie who’d gone to Woodstock as a kid—and three of the girls in my senior class had claimed to be Wiccan. As far as I could tell, this meant they wore a lot of long skirts and black lipstick and chokers, and watched some movie about teenage witches over and over, but still . . . It wasn’t that much of a stretch to consider that some of the people who called themselves witches could actually do some things that others couldn’t, like create a medication that could heal me.

  It was the other part I was having trouble with. Vampires. I didn’t read or watch much horror, but even I knew vampires were silly movie monsters, like Frankenstein or the Wolfman. And Quinn had said something about werewolves, too. That was just too ridiculous. How could I possibly take that seriously?

  And yet . . . the little voice in my head insisted. Even if I wrote off Victor’s eyes healing as a weird blood-loss hallucination, I knew I had seen Darcy’s nose set itself. And John had truly believed the story about the raccoon, which meant Quinn really had done something to his brain. So, like it or not, at least some of what Quinn and Simon had told me had to be true.

  But even if vampires were real, what the hell did they want with my niece? Was it possible that whatever was weird about me, this witchblood stuff, had been inherited by Charlie too? I replayed my conversation with Simon in my head. He’d said witchblood was hereditary, that it was passed down within families. But he’d also told me it was dormant until puberty. There would be no reason for someone to kidnap a baby witch. Maybe it had just been a weird coincidence?

  My thoughts skipped back to my own alleged connection to magic. My hereditary connection. Sam’s and my adoption was never a forbidden subject or anything. Every now and then it would come up—when we studied genetics in school, when I had to fill out health forms for the army—but my family rarely talked about it. I rarely even thought about it. My parents were my parents. My cousins were my cousins. It was that simple. Oh, sometimes at big family events I would look around at the sea of honey-blond hair and brown eyes—the Luther family trademarks—and feel a tiny sting of displacement, but Sam and I had never been the kind of adopted kids who dreamed of their birth parents, for the simple reason that we knew our birth mother was dead.

  When we were teenagers, Sam had once asked our parents where we came from. It was dinnertime, and my parents simultaneously put down their silverware and exchanged a look, like they’d been waiting for the question and had run drills. My mother got up and went down the hall to the fireproof box where they kept all the important documents. While she was gone, my father informed us in a grave, heartfelt voice that our twenty-year-old birth mother had walked into a Denver hospital in the middle of a terrible rainstorm, already well into labor. The doctors put her in a room and did what they could for her, but she died after an emergency C-section, leaving behind fraternal twin girls with no names. An effort was made to find the young woman’s family, but it dried up after a few weeks, and we were registered with a social worker. After a few months, we were adopted by the Luthers, a couple who desperately wanted children but couldn’t conceive. They were our parents in every way that mattered.

  Sam and I looked at the birth certifica
tes and newspaper clippings my mother brought back, soaked up the information we found, and promptly forgot about the whole thing. Even later, when Sam went through her teenage rebellion, or when Dad and I fought tooth and claw over my decision to join the army, we weren’t the kind of kids to throw “You’re not even my real parents!” at Mom and Dad. Sam and I weren’t always well behaved, but there was one thing you could say for us: we always knew what we had.

  Now, though, I had to look at the whole thing in a different light. If there really was such a thing as witchblood, we must have inherited it from one of our biological parents. Could that have had something to do with why no one had stepped forward to claim us? Had our birth mother been running from something when she stopped at the hospital in Denver? What about our biological father—had the witchblood come from his side? I didn’t know a single thing about him.

  And I had no desire to, I decided. If Simon was right and I did have some sort of access to magic, I wanted nothing to do with it. I had a good life, with an easy job in my favorite town. I was surrounded by family who loved me, not to mention the herd, and best of all, I could watch Sam’s daughter grow up. From what I’d seen so far, getting involved with magic was dangerous . . . and I’d had enough danger for several lifetimes.

  After a few minutes I began to doze on my bed, with dogs and cats jumping on and off at intervals as they either checked on me or begged for attention—however you wanted to look at that. At four o’clock I woke with a start, because my unconscious brain had made a connection my conscious mind had somehow missed.

  Maybe there was someone I could ask.

  Chapter 9

  I climbed off the big bed as quickly as my sore muscles would allow, heading for the bedroom closet. My army duffel bag was still in the back. I unzipped one of the side compartments and dug out a handful of paper from the trip I’d made to LA ten months ago. I came out with a wad of scribbled notes and addresses, a Xerox of the missing person’s paperwork, and a bunch of receipts. Shuffling through the scraps, I finally found what I was looking for: a business card emblazoned with the logo of the Los Angeles Police Department.

  When John had called to tell me that Sam was missing, I had immediately made arrangements for the herd, packed up my car, and headed west, unwilling to wait hours for the next available flight to LA. I didn’t know the city very well, but Sam was, as she’d said, my goddamned twin. There was no way I wasn’t going to go look for her.

  I spent two feverish days in Los Angeles trying to retrace Sam’s steps and figure out what had happened. At the end of the second day, John got a call from an LAPD detective who broke the news of Sam’s death. My sister had been one of the victims of a serial killer named Henry Remus, who’d kidnapped and murdered four women before dying himself. The police didn’t expect to recover Sam’s body, but there was enough evidence—Sam’s blood and the testimony of her surviving friend, who’d also been abducted—to count my sister among the dead.

  That wasn’t enough for me, though, so I went to see the cop, a homicide detective named Jesse Cruz. He was a pretty good guy, especially considering that I wasn’t exactly using my best manners at the time. He patiently went over the evidence with me again and again, and let me talk to Sam’s friend. Eventually I was convinced that yes, Sam really was dead.

  While we were still talking at the station, though, our conversation was interrupted by a woman in her early twenties, a pretty brunette with bright green eyes who’d called Cruz by his first name. She came skidding into his office, talking fast about something—and then stopped mid-sentence to stare at me. Her face rearranged itself into confusion. “What are you?” she’d asked in a bewildered voice.

  I glanced at Cruz, who’d stood up as soon as the girl rushed in, but he looked as confused as I felt. I rose uncertainly, taken aback by the question. Not who are you. What are you.

  “I don’t . . . I’m Lex.”

  The girl took a step closer to me. “You’re different,” she said curiously.

  Cruz looked steadily at the girl for a moment, and I could almost see the threads of history and emotion woven between the two of them, some kind of deep trust or love. Then Cruz glanced at me and remembered himself. “Excuse us for a moment, Miss Luther,” he said apologetically. Then he stepped between the girl and me and swept her into the hallway.

  I sat back down, but before the office door could swing shut, I heard her say, “Jesse, there’s something weird about her. She’s not human, but . . .”

  When he came back a few minutes later, Cruz apologized for the interruption and told me his friend had just come by to drop off some lunch for him. The story rang a little false, but I dismissed the whole thing—my sister had just died, and besides, it was LA. There were weirdos everywhere.

  Looking back now, though, after everything that had happened in the last few days, I was suddenly convinced that the girl knew something about me. And considering the obvious closeness between them, Cruz had to know it, too. I picked up the phone and dialed the handwritten number on the back of the card.

  The phone went straight to voicemail. “You’ve reached the cell phone for Jesse Cruz,” came his pleasant male voice. “I’ll be out of the country until October first. If you’d like to leave a message . . .”

  I hung up the phone and opened my old laptop—a hand-me-down from John a few years earlier. Glancing at the business card from Cruz, I sent him a quick email asking him to call me as soon as possible. Before I could close the browser window, a new message popped up in my inbox: “Message Not Received.” I clicked on it, my eyes jumping immediately to the line reading, “The employee you’ve contacted is no longer with the Los Angeles Police Department. If you’d like to reach someone else . . .”

  I frowned at the computer, nonplussed. Cruz had quit the force? He’d seemed like a good cop . . . I shook my head and closed the laptop. At any rate, he couldn’t exactly help me protect Charlie from Darcy. She would be safe for a few hours, while John had people over—vampire or not, Darcy wasn’t stupid enough to storm a house with four adults. That would give me a little more time to figure out how to keep her safe. I grabbed the phone again, called the number on Quinn’s card, and left him a voicemail asking him to call me.

  When I hung up, I glanced at my bedside table. Four-thirty. I checked the weather on my phone and discovered that the sun would set in about three hours. I had a little time to kill before Quinn would be available. I dropped the phone on the bed, feeling the irritated stitches pull in my back again. Shit. Those stitches needed to come out. Quinn had said Simon would probably contact me, but I didn’t want to wait.

  Switching back to the computer, I googled Simon Pellar. There was a semi-famous stamp collector with that name, but I seriously doubted the Simon I’d met had been publishing books in 1992. I kept clicking, and to my surprise, a picture of the right Simon came up on the website for UC Boulder. The guy was an associate professor, with an office in the main science building. I thought back to his glasses-and-messenger-bag look. Yeah, I could see that.

  I called his office number and was a little surprised when he answered on the first ring.

  “Simon Pellar.”

  “Hey, it’s Lex,” I said, then added awkwardly, “Um, from last night.”

  “Hey,” Simon said cheerfully. “I was gonna call you later, but it looks like you tracked me down.”

  I blanched. “What were you going to call me about?”

  “You’re a witch, Lex,” he reminded me. “We need to talk about training you to use your magic.”

  Oh. That. “I don’t want to,” I said abruptly, and then immediately felt like a petulant child. “I mean, I have no interest in being a witch. It’s nice that I can’t be pressed by vampires, but I need to get back to my real life. No offense,” I added, feeling like an idiot. No wonder Big Scott thought I gave off a hermit vibe. I couldn’t handle a two-minute conversation with non-fami
ly.

  There was a long pause. “Okay,” Simon said slowly. “Is that why you’re calling? To tell me you don’t want to get involved?”

  “Not exactly,” I admitted. “I have this other problem . . .” I told him about the stitches in my back.

  “Hmm,” Simon said thoughtfully. “I forgot about the stitches. Tell you what: give me your address, and I’ll call my sister Lily. She did a couple of years of medical school; I’ll see if she can stop by.”

  While I waited, I spent time returning phone calls and texts. My dad had checked in from the office, and two of my aunts had offered to drop off some dinners so I wouldn’t have to cook for a few days. Bettina had called twice, and I spent half an hour reassuring her that I was fine, nothing had been her fault, and she’d done a good job by pressing the panic button, even if she couldn’t remember doing it. Rather than return the calls I’d gotten from the police department, I phoned Elise directly. My cousin was annoyed that I’d left the hospital without talking to the police, but we arranged for her and the detective in charge of the kidnapping to come and interview me first thing the next morning.

  When I was finally finished with the calls, I looked around the cabin for something else to occupy me. I don’t usually spend a lot of time sitting still. If I wasn’t working or spending time with my family, I was usually outdoors—hiking or mountain climbing or riding my bike. When the weather was bad, I worked out in the little gym I’d set up in the basement. But I was too sore and weak to exercise, so I headed into the living room to my small collection of DVDs.