Boundary Crossed

by Melissa F. Olson

  “Good,” Simon murmured. “Now extend your senses and feel the temperature of the room, the air on your skin.”

  “Extend my senses? What does that even mean?” I grumbled, keeping my eyes closed.

  “Have you ever had a minor injury or a headache?” Simon asked, his voice still low and soothing. “And you take some ibuprofen or aspirin to make the pain go away?”

  “Of course. I did it this morning.”

  “Well, a few minutes after you take the medicine, you focus on the place in your body where the pain was, and you sort of listen to that spot, to see if the pain’s gone yet. You sense it out, for lack of a better phrase.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Now do that with your skin. Sense what your skin is feeling, and then extend those senses farther to feel the air in the room.”

  That made more sense to me, and I tried to do as he asked. But after a few seconds I lost my focus, and images began to click through my brain—a slide show of my life, mostly my life in the army. I’d seen it many times before. When I’d first gotten home, I’d seen it every time I blinked.

  Abruptly, I opened my eyes and scrambled off the bale of hay. I stalked across the open floor to another stack and climbed on, not pausing until I reached the open window above the top bale. I leaned out and took a deep breath. When I turned around, Simon hadn’t moved except to open his eyes. He was watching me calmly. “What are we doing?” I demanded. “This can’t be magic.”

  “Technically, this is meditation,” Simon said easily. “I needed to know how well you could concentrate.”

  I looked away. “Not very well.”

  “Then we’ll try something else,” he said levelly. “Sit down, please.”

  Reluctantly, I abandoned the breeze and returned to my original seat.

  “This time, I just want you to listen,” Simon coaxed. “Close your eyes and make a list of everything you hear.”

  Okay, that I could do. I strained to hear something. There was the sound of an engine in the distance, maybe a tractor or a riding lawnmower. I could hear a few bird calls through the open window, too. And something else. Off in the corner, I heard the tiniest rustle of hay. “I think you have mice,” I said, my eyes still closed.

  “We do.”

  “Is that what you wanted me to listen for?” I asked, trying to keep the impatience out of my voice. What do you want me to do? This was for Charlie, after all. He just needed to name something and I’d do it.

  “Sort of. Concentrate on the mice, the same way you concentrated on your body. Focus on the sound.”

  So I closed my eyes again and concentrated on the corner of the room where I’d heard the hay move. With great effort, I tried to focus my attention on that spot.

  Just as my concentration started to slip, I felt something: a tiny living spark, smaller than a grain of rice. There was a sort of color to it—a pretty, glowing blue. I let out a tiny gasp and opened my eyes, losing it.

  Simon was looking right at me, and I knew that however different our talents might be, he could feel it too. “What was that?” I asked wondrously.

  He gave me a small smile. “You were sensing magic. Some people call it the soul, or the spark of life. People perceive it differently—your brain finds a way to interpret it that makes sense to you. For me magic is . . . mmm . . . sort of a density in the air. Lily envisions a third eye she can switch on and off. Whatever works for you. Can you do it again?”

  I closed my eyes again and extended my senses, as Simon had instructed. This time it was easier to find the spark, because I knew what I was looking for. I concentrated on it, on the blue almost-glow that emitted from the mouse. In Iraq I’d looked through thermal imaging goggles a few times; this felt a lot like that. A sea of darkness interrupted by a bright flash of warmth.

  “It’s like heat-sensing goggles,” I said softly, without opening my eyes.

  “Good,” Simon encouraged. “Now push out farther. Find the rest of them.”

  I tried to extend the area of my senses, but it got spread too thin, and I lost the first spark. I went back to it and started again, thinking again of the heat-sensing goggles. This time, instead of concentrating on the first spark and expanding in all directions, I moved it, like a flashlight beam in the dark. I pointed the beam of my attention toward the same spot and tried to push past it. I found that first rice grain of life again, then another behind it. And another.

  A moment later my beam reached the back of the loft and abruptly flared and expanded. Suddenly there was a huge flash of magic, blinding in its radiance. My eyes flew open, and I lost my grip on the beam.

  “That was me,” Simon said calmly. “You sensed my life force.”

  “You could feel that?”

  He shook his head, bemused. “No, just a logical guess.”

  I shook my head, standing up and hopping off the bale of hay so I could pace across the expanse of clear wooden floor. I was totally unnerved. “I don’t like this. I don’t think . . . Mice are one thing, but I shouldn’t be able to feel other people’s life forces. It’s . . . invasive.”

  “It didn’t feel invasive, though, did it?” Simon asked mildly.

  I paused, considering. “No,” I admitted. “It felt . . . fantastic.” I went back to pacing, but I could feel his eyes on me.

  “Let’s do it again,” he suggested.

  So we did. For the next two hours, I concentrated on the sparks of life in the barn. Simon taught me how to ignore the blaze of his own soul and focus on the mice, until I knew that there were exactly twelve of them in the barn, six were babies, and their nest was seven inches left of the exact intersection of the two walls, underneath the hay. With my eyes closed, I “felt” them inside my head, each mouse represented as a tiny speck that sort of glowed softly, moving as the mouse moved. It was eerie. And completely fascinating.

  After two hours my stomach growled, and I opened my eyes to see Simon checking his watch. “We need to wrap this up soon,” he told me, a little regretful. I remembered that it was Friday, and some people actually had to work regular jobs today.

  I nodded. I was a little tired, but exhilarated. “That’s amazing,” I said happily. “When you guys talked about learning magic I thought I was going to have to memorize Latin or something.” I could see how being able to sense life could be useful, especially in a combat-type situation.

  But Simon smiled ruefully. “Technically,” he pointed out, “you’re not actually doing any magic yet. I’ve just been helping you sense the magic that’s out there for you to manipulate.”

  My glee dissipated a bit. “Right,” I said.

  “I want to do one more thing before we call it a day,” he said, and his voice was suddenly . . . grim. He leaned forward so he could reach into his back pocket and pulled out a leather gardening glove. “Hang on a second,” he told me. I watched him get up and go over to the bale of hay above the mice’s nest, flipping it forward like you’d flip a stone to dig up earthworms. There was a quick rustle of movement and a bit of squeaking as he leaned over and rummaged through the hay.

  “Simon?” I said uncertainly. “What . . .”

  He straightened up then, the hand with the glove holding one of the little white field mice by the tail. “What are you doing?” I said warily.

  “Shh, it’s okay,” Simon reassured me. He sat down on the hay bale across from me, still holding the mouse. I glowered at him, suddenly afraid he was going to drop it in my hair like an eighth grader. But he settled into his seat, holding up one palm in the universal gesture of “I’m not going to hurt you,” and finally I relaxed.

  But I shouldn’t have.

  “I just want you to focus on its spark of life, please,” Simon coaxed, and I closed my eyes and obeyed. Now that I understood how to extend my senses, I found the mouse’s spark right away.

  “Focus on it,”
Simon said softly. I did, concentrating on the tiny blue glow. It was so little, I marveled. And Simon’s glow was so much bigger, but it was brighter, too. Maybe humans had more of a soul than mice? That would—

  Abruptly, I heard a tiny snap, and the blue spark of life I’d been focusing on flickered out. No, wait, it was still there . . . but the bright blue glow had been replaced by a sickly, yellowish-brown, gaseous mass.

  And then the gas started to drift toward me, like an airborne toxin.

  Chapter 20

  My focus broke.

  My eyes flew open, and I bolted off the hay bale, scrambling backward until my shoulder blades hit a wall. There was no toxin in the air, not that I could see, anyway. Just Simon sitting there with a guilty look on his face and a dead mouse in his hand.

  “No!” I shouted. In an instant I dove forward, tackling him to the ground. That was the plan, anyway, but when I was within a hairsbreadth of touching Simon, he calmly held up his free hand, his lips moving inaudibly—and I glanced off him.

  Wait, what?

  I stood up and swung a left roundhouse at his cheekbone, the fury pushing my limbs long before I had the chance to think. Again, he held up a hand, muttering, and I seemed to slide right off into the air near it.

  “Sergeant Luther, calm down!” Simon barked, and I froze, a decade of instincts stirring back to life in my nerve endings. I managed a slow step backward, my hands still bunched into fists. I could feel the tension forming a U from the ends of my left-hand fingers across my shoulders and down to my other fist, but I couldn’t seem to let go of it. I could hear my breathing, heavy in the quiet hayloft. “Why?” I demanded.

  “First of all, let’s keep in mind that it’s a mouse,” Simon pointed out, his voice a little heated now. “There are three cats and four kittens on this farm, so this little guy’s days were numbered no matter what.”

  I didn’t move. “Second,” he continued. “Stop and assess how you feel right now.”

  That took me aback for a second, and I obeyed him without thinking. How did I feel? I felt . . . exhilarated. Fulfilled. The darkness that surrounded me had been channeled into something for a moment there, and it was like I had a purpose again, for the first time since I’d been kicked out of the army. I felt . . . powerful.

  “I want to do it again,” I whispered in answer. All the fight went out of me, and I hunched back to my bale of hay. “What’s happening to me?”

  “It’s okay,” Simon reassured me, but I didn’t feel very reassured. “Come on, let’s get out of here. Go for a walk.”

  I nodded numbly, and he flipped open the trapdoor.

  We didn’t speak on the way out of the barn, or as we walked down the driveway. At some point, Simon must have gotten rid of the dead mouse, but I didn’t see what he did with it and I didn’t care. The only thing I could really think about was how close I was to my car.

  I wanted to go home. I wanted to send gravel flying in the air as I flew out of that driveway and never looked back. I wanted to grab John and Charlie and evacuate them out of the state, forget that I had ever heard the words “boundary witch” or “magic” or “null.” Just start over somewhere else and live a normal life, leaving all my darkness behind.

  It would never work, though. I’d given Maven and Itachi my word, and they would never let me grab Charlie and waltz out of there. They’d force me back, if only to make a point about not defying them. And besides, I had roots in Boulder, deep ones. If we ran, Charlie and John might be safe, but I had a couple dozen more family members in this town that the vampires could go after. I’d seen the file they had on me. There was no way it didn’t include all my aunts and uncles and cousins, not to mention my parents. Hell, my dad was the president of Luther Shoes. They could walk right into his office.

  No, I had to stay. I had to get control of this. I would just need to be stronger, that was all.

  That was all.

  We were a few hundred feet down the road when Simon finally spoke again. “These are potatoes, which you probably know,” he said casually, nodding at the field on our left. “Onions on the other side of the road, and we have a lot of tomatoes, too. All in all, we’ve got about four hundred acres. That’s small for Colorado, but it would be pretty big in the smaller states.”

  “A farm boy, huh?” I said lightly, grateful for the change in subject. “And a witch. And a college professor.”

  “Associate professor,” he corrected, grinning.

  “What do you teach?” I asked. “No wait, let me guess: Occult Studies? Myth and Mythology? History of Witchcraft? No, that wouldn’t be in the science building . . . or would it?”

  He laughed again. “Evolutionary Biology. That part is all me, but there’s actually a long history of witches being farmers. It’s one of the few professions where we can use our gifts and still stay under the radar.” He shrugged modestly. “Our crops just do a little better than some.”

  “Do you live here, at the farmhouse?” I asked. “You keep saying ‘we’ and ‘our.’”

  “Not really. I’ve got an apartment in town, near CU,” he told me. “But I grew up here, and I still stay over weekends sometimes, help when I can.” He flashed a grin, his teeth flashing in the late-morning sunlight. “There’s not a lot of testosterone around here, so I think my brothers-in-law appreciate it when I turn up. Two of them work the farm pretty much full-time.”

  We walked on for a while, Simon letting me have some space. I wasn’t sure if he had suggested the walk because he knew the activity would make me feel better, or if it was just a coincidence, but I appreciated the exercise anyway. My head cleared up when I was moving. “You said your sisters were witches, too,” I said finally. “Are your brothers-in-law?”

  “Nah. Statistically, almost all witches are female,” he said cheerfully. “Men who inherit the magic gene are few and far between. Sybil’s husband, Oliver, is from an old witch family; he just doesn’t have witchblood. Morgan’s husband, Tony, is human, so we’re not allowed to talk about vampires or werewolves in front of him. He knows that my whole family are practicing Wiccans, but we downplay the actual magic part.” He shrugged. “Tony thinks the Pellars have the equivalent of a really green thumb.”

  “Hmm.” I tried to imagine telling my parents I was a witch. My live-and-let-live dad would do his best to ignore it; he would assume I was going through a weird fad. My mother would be so grateful that I was interested in something, she’d probably offer to be a witch with me. “What about your girlfriend?” I asked Simon. “Is she a witch, too?”

  He glanced over at me, surprised. “How did you know I have a girlfriend?”

  “In the hospital,” I said promptly. “Quinn told you to say hi to Tracy, who had gone home ahead of you. None of your sisters are named Tracy, and you’re not wearing a wedding ring.” I shrugged. “Ergo, Tracy is your girlfriend.”

  He gave me a sly half grin. “Tracy could be my boyfriend,” he pointed out.

  “No,” I said firmly, “You said ‘she’ in the hospital.”

  He gave me a surprised look. “Good memory. Yes, she’s a witch. She’s been in our clan since we were kids.”

  “High school sweethearts?” I asked, making sure my voice didn’t come out all wistful.

  “College,” he said. “We complement each other well.”

  That didn’t exactly sound like the basis for a thriving romance, but then again, what did I know? Maybe it worked for them. “What about you?” Simon asked. “Do you have someone?”

  “No,” I said. “Most of the guys I meet are half-drunk college kids who come into the store to buy condoms at two a.m. Before that . . . I had a couple of casual relationships in the army, but nothing to write home about. Literally.”

  He chuckled and pushed his glasses up on his nose with one hand. “Listen, about Quinn . . .”

  I looked at him uncertainly, a little throw
n by the segue. He wasn’t about to ask if I was interested in Quinn romantically, was he? I mean, it hadn’t escaped my attention that the guy was great-looking, of course. And, okay, it had certainly been a long time since I’d . . . let’s say, gone on a date. But Quinn was a vampire. A vampire.

  Happily, Simon just said, “I heard you were helping him figure out who went after your niece. We didn’t really get a chance to talk about it before, what with my mom and all, but how is that going?”

  So I filled him in on the case—what little we knew, anyway. “He’s picking me up tonight and we’re going to talk to Darcy’s . . . um, I don’t know the terminology, but the vampire she was sworn to,” I finished.

  As we turned and walked back toward the house, Simon said hesitatingly, “Just . . . be careful, okay? Around Quinn, I mean.”

  I paused, forcing him to stop and turn too. “I thought Quinn was your friend,” I said, eyebrows raised.

  Simon shrugged. “He sort of is, to my eternal surprise. And I would trust the guy with my life . . . as long as keeping me alive was in Itachi’s best interests.”

  I digested that for a moment, then resumed walking. “Vampires aren’t like us, Lex,” he said eventually. “You make your choices based on what’s best for you and the people you love. So do I. But Quinn has to do what’s best for vampires. Specifically, the one he works for. He doesn’t have a choice.”

  Lily and Hazel were nowhere to be seen when we got back to the main house, and I realized that neither of them had been out front when we left for our walk, either. Simon must have noticed this when I did, because he dug out his phone from a pocket and looked at the screen, squinting against the sunshine. “Lily texted,” he informed me. “She’s taking Mom into town to run errands, maybe catch a movie. Lily’s really great at helping Mom get her mind off . . . you know.” He gave me an embarrassed smile.

  “Her problems?” I volunteered. “Such as the perversion of nature who’s suddenly appeared in her life?”

  “Ehhh . . .” Simon tilted one hand back and forth. “She doesn’t think you’re a perversion of nature, so much as a perversion of magic,” he offered helpfully.