Boundary Crossed

by Melissa F. Olson

  “Yes,” Quinn said. “This was thirteen years ago, before my time. All I really know is that she summoned every vampire who’d sworn troth to her—and believe me, the girl’s lived long enough to collect quite a few allies. She promised them a place in her new enclave if they fought for her. Itachi became her second-in-command, and he called in all of his vampires, too, including Nolan.”

  “Jesus, it sounds like a war,” I said in awe. “How the hell did they keep it quiet?”

  Quinn shrugged. “Like I said, it was before my time, but Maven’s been covering up murders for hundreds of years. Anyway, when it was over, most of the regular vampires who helped ended up in Denver or Colorado Springs, including Nolan.”

  I considered that for a few minutes. Something about the dynamic between Maven and Itachi felt off to me, and I said so.

  “Maven . . . doesn’t want to lead,” Quinn explained after a moment’s hesitation. “I’m not sure why, exactly. Something to do with her history. She has serious power, but no interest in being in charge of a territory. Itachi, on the other hand, doesn’t have as much juice, but he’s plenty ambitious. So he leads and she kind of . . .”

  “Acts as his muscle?” I suggested.

  He smiled. “Something like that.”

  I thought that over for a few minutes. I couldn’t really see Maven, the teenaged bag lady with the orange hair, as the equivalent of a four-star general. Then again, she had seemed much more powerful than any of the other vampires I’d met. “How old is Maven?” I wondered aloud.

  “I’m not really sure,” he admitted. “But from things she’s said, I’d guess Middle Ages.” His expression turned grave, and I got the message: don’t piss her off.

  I would sure as hell try.

  We headed into southwestern Denver, and a little over an hour after we left Boulder, Quinn pulled into the parking lot of a swanky condo building in the Cherry Creek neighborhood. It was a mostly residential area, with lots of cul-de-sacs and big single-family houses that probably cost more than I’d earn in two lifetimes at the Flatiron Depot. Nolan lived in a lone condo park in which six or seven buildings were clustered around a small central area, where there was probably a pool and a walking path. We circled the enormous square parking lot a few times until we found a sign for units 8 to 12.

  The inside of the building had the same restrained sense of wealth as the outside, like this was a place for people who had plenty of money but no desire to flaunt it. In the lobby, Quinn pushed the button for Nolan’s unit a few times, getting no response. He glanced over his shoulder at me, and I shrugged. This was his show. I was just the on-the-job trainee. Quinn sighed and glanced around, then planted his feet and tugged hard at the handle of the interior door. It cracked open with a terrible metallic crunch.

  Nolan’s condo was on the basement level. We found the stairs, which led us past a small gym and a sauna before depositing us in front of the door of unit 12. Quinn knocked, waited for a moment, then knocked again. “Nolan?” he called, his voice authoritative.

  “He’s probably just out,” I reasoned. “Getting, um, food.” I still hadn’t completely wrapped my head around the idea of vampires existing on blood they drank from regular people.

  “Probably,” Quinn said, but he looked up and down the hall again. When he was sure no one was coming, he got down on his hands and knees and put his face right next to the crack of the door. Then he sniffed in long, deep inhalations that held no embarrassment or self-consciousness.

  I tensed. Of the few vampires I’d met, Quinn seemed the most human. But moments like this one reminded me that I wasn’t dealing with an ordinary man. I heard Simon’s voice in my head. Vampires aren’t like us, Lex.

  I thought of the horror in Hazel Pellar’s eyes when she looked at me. Then again, I wasn’t much like “us” either, was I?

  Finally Quinn straightened up, looking put out. “What?” I asked.

  “Blood,” Quinn said shortly. “Too much blood.” He took a closer look at the door, which was far less secure than Victor and Darcy’s door had been. There was a single dead bolt and an ordinary knob lock. “From now on, I’m bringing lock picks everywhere we go,” he grumbled. Before I could respond, he leaned back and kicked the door so fast that I could barely follow the motion of his leg. The door shot open, and I heard the knob crunch into the plaster wall behind it. I raised my eyebrows at Quinn. “What is it with you and doors?” I asked. He gave me a sheepish look and stepped forward, flicking a light switch on his right.

  My first thought was that whoever had killed Nolan had made no effort to hide his body. The dead vampire’s skeleton was sitting three feet away from the door, wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt. The clothes puddled around the skeleton, which was situated on top of a large red stain. I was so busy looking at all that bright red blood that it took me a moment to realize there was no skull attached to the body.

  “Lex,” Quinn said impatiently, and I registered that it was at least the second time he’d said my name. “You need to come in and close the door.”

  “Right,” I said stupidly, stepping all the way in and shoving the door closed behind me. It didn’t latch, but it stayed more or less shut. “Where’s his head?” My voice came out sounding like a little kid’s, and I swallowed.

  “Here.” Quinn had wandered into a small kitchenette on our left, just behind the counter. “It rolled.”

  “Right.” I shook off the shock—I’d seen much worse, just not this weird—and moved closer to the body. “Do we think it’s Nolan?” I asked.

  Quinn came over to the skeleton, studied it for a second, and then squatted down near the left arm. I tried not to flinch as he gently picked up the skeleton’s hand, which snapped loose in his fingers despite the care he took. There was something shiny on the wrist, which slid off the forearm bone into Quinn’s hand. He studied the fancy-looking watch for a moment and tossed it to me. “It’s him.”

  I caught it and, seeing an inscription on the back, read it aloud. “For N, my greatest soldier, a token of my thanks. —I.” I looked up at Quinn. “This could have been planted on the body,” I pointed out. “Nolan might have killed someone else to fake his death.”

  Quinn shook his head. “Look around. This wasn’t a fight. Besides the big pool, there are only a few drops of blood on the carpet, and none on the walls. Nolan let someone else come in, someone he trusted enough to turn his back. That’s how he died.” He jumped up and circled the body to stand behind me, gently taking my shoulders and positioning me just inside the door. “You’re Nolan. While your back is turned”—he swung an imaginary dagger—“I take a swing and lop off your head, which isn’t as easy as they make it look in the movies, by the way. You pretty much need vampire strength. Anyway, this happened fast, just inside the door. You wouldn’t stop to put a watch on someone before chopping off their head.”

  “It could have been put on the body afterward,” I pointed out, although we both knew I was just playing devil’s advocate.

  Quinn was shaking his head before I’d finished the sentence. “That thing is brittle as shit—pardon my language.” He nodded at the watch in my hand. “The clasp on the watch is complicated. No way you could get it on the skeleton without snapping off its hand.”

  “Gross,” I said. “But okay, I agree that it’s probably Nolan.” I glanced around. I’d never seen an actual beheading, but I’d seen arterial spray before. Quinn was right. There wasn’t enough blood. “But that doesn’t explain why the blood is in one neat puddle like that. If his head was cut off, shouldn’t it have spurted everywhere?”

  “Yes,” Quinn said absently. “But I don’t think he bled at all.” Before I could ask what that meant, he abruptly reached forward and flipped the skeleton over.

  I jumped, half expecting it to roll the extra two feet and bump into my ankles. But it just lay there on its back, allowing me to see the empty plastic bag that
had been beneath it.

  “A blood bag,” Quinn said. He got up and went over to the fridge, beckoning me to follow. I stepped carefully over the body and joined him.

  He opened the fridge door, exposing neat rows of deep red IV bags. “Most of us drink live, but Maven has a private donation center set up for anyone who wants it, or for those of us who aren’t great at pressing foundings,” Quinn told me. “The bag was still was in his hand when he answered the door, which confirms it was a vampire.” Before I could ask, he added, “If it’d been a human, Nolan wouldn’t have still had the blood bag in his hand.”

  Okay. “What do we do now?” I asked.

  Quinn looked straight at me, his gaze so intense that I flinched. “Nolan being dead . . . it complicates things,” he said frankly. He dug into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. “I gotta make a call, and then we’ll take a quick look around.”

  Quinn, as it turned out, wasn’t responsible for doing the vampire dirty work in Denver— they had their own person for that. After placing the call, he grabbed a wooden chair from the small table in the living room and used it to prop the door shut. “We don’t have a lot of time,” he said, “so search fast.” He looked around. “Why don’t you start in the living room? I’ll head for the back bedroom, and we’ll meet in the middle.”

  So for the second time in two days, I found myself searching a vampire’s quarters for clues. Nolan’s place was the opposite of Darcy and Victor’s filthy college apartment: the condo was tidy and sparsely decorated, with simple, comfortable furniture and lots of neutral colors. There weren’t even a lot of places to search. I had only gotten as far as flipping through the stack of reading material on Nolan’s side table—fishing magazines, an invitation to a condo association meeting, some junk mail—before Quinn called for me.

  I followed his voice to the little bedroom at the end of the hall. I rounded the door frame, and right in the center of the otherwise empty room I saw a big pile of brand-new baby gear, still packed in bags and boxes. There was a high chair, a Pack ’n Play, an economy-sized box of diapers, a changing pad, and two bags bearing the logo of a popular kids’ clothing store. I reached into the clothing bag and pulled out a package of onesies, size eighteen months. An involuntary shiver shook me where I stood.

  “This is where they were bringing Charlie,” I whispered.

  Chapter 24

  Quinn just nodded, his face expressionless. I tried to focus on the logic, the chain of events, before I lost myself in what could have happened. “Victor and Darcy picked up Charlie,” I said slowly. “They realized they’d forgotten to bring any diapers from John’s house . . . and maybe they didn’t know Nolan already had some here. So they stopped at the Flatiron Depot to grab a package before leaving Boulder.” I looked around the room. “This wasn’t her final destination, though. Darcy said their senior was going to take Charlie to the ‘merchant,’ which I figured meant middleman.”

  “That makes sense,” Quinn agreed. “They’d want to get her out of Itachi’s enclave as quick as possible. Besides, if the plan was for Charlie to stay here, Nolan would have set all this stuff up. My guess is that he was storing it here, maybe overnight, and was planning to hand it off with the baby.”

  “But who killed Nolan? It wasn’t Victor or Darcy. That puddle of blood is bright red. He was killed tonight, probably while we were talking to Kirby.” So not Kirby, either.

  “Well, we know there’s a fourth player in the kidnapping,” Quinn said. “The person who wanted Charlie. Whoever it is doesn’t want to make another grab for her right now, not while Itachi and Maven are watching her. But Nolan was a loose thread.”

  “Meanwhile, we’re looking for the kidnapper,” I finished. “It was only a matter of time before we found Nolan, and whoever did this knew it.” I gritted my teeth, fighting down the urge to punch something. “We must have missed this guy by minutes.”

  Quinn checked his watch. “Speaking of which, we need to get going.”

  “What? Are you serious?” My voice came out harsher than I’d intended, and frustration was turning my stomach. Quinn and I were at a dead end, and we both knew it. I just wasn’t ready to admit it yet. “We’ve barely looked around.”

  “The Denver crew’s gonna be here any second,” the vampire explained.

  “But we don’t know anything,” I protested. “We haven’t searched enough—”

  “There’s not going to be anything else here, Lex,” Quinn insisted. “Nolan was a pro. He was too careful to leave evidence of who he was working for, and even if he had made a mistake, the killer would have found it first.”

  I pointed at the stack of baby supplies. “Then why didn’t the killer take this stuff?”

  “Because,” Quinn said patiently, like I was a particularly dimwitted child, “he—or she—wanted us to find it.”

  I shook my head, confused. “Why would he want us to find it?”

  “Because he’s done, at least for now.” Quinn nodded at the baby stuff. “He didn’t move it to a new location, he didn’t smuggle Nolan out of state to keep him away from Itachi’s investigation. We’re supposed to find this and know that he’s done. It’s over, Lex.”

  I stared at him, incredulous. “Over over? Are you suggesting that we just stop looking for whoever kidnapped my niece?”

  There was a knock on the front door, and Quinn grimaced. “Can we agree that there’s not going to be anything else in here, and move this conversation outside?”

  I allowed Quinn to lead me down the hall and back to the entryway, where we let in two vampires dressed in jeans and CU sweatshirts. The woman looked to be about my age, with a blonde ponytail tied high on her head and a gigantic tote bag in lieu of a purse. The man seemed a few years younger, with an earring and shaggy hair that curled past his ears. They looked like any normal couple on their way home from a football game, except for their unreadable expressions and the easy, fluid way they moved. Quinn didn’t introduce us; he just gave the vampires a tight nod as we edged past them toward the door. They returned the nod in perfect, eerie unison, and I was careful not to touch them as we went by.

  Back at the car, Quinn started for the driver’s door, then glanced over his shoulder at my face and stopped. “What do you mean, it’s over?” I demanded. “We’re not done. I’m not done. Someone killed Nolan, and whoever did it was in on Charlie’s kidnapping.” I glared at him, my hands balled into fists. There were people talking and laughing at the far end of the lot, and Quinn stepped very close to me before answering.

  “I’ll talk to Maven and Itachi,” he said quietly. “But I know exactly what they’re going to say.” A bitter expression crossed his face. “‘Sometimes the cost of secrecy is not knowing the whole truth.’ Three of the four players are dead, and the fourth player is walking away. That will be good enough for them.”

  “But there are other threads to pull,” I said through gritted teeth. “Itachi has contacts with the police, right? Maybe he can get into Nolan’s financials and find out who paid for the baby stuff. Or we can go back to Kirby and push harder. Victor and Darcy’s neighbors, we never did get to talk to them, and maybe they—”

  “Stop, Lex,” Quinn interrupted. “This guy killed a high-ranking vampire, a frickin’ general in Itachi’s army. You don’t think he’ll have covered the rest of his bases? And if we go poking around at Nolan’s bank or Darcy’s building, we may end up accidentally pointing him at people who really don’t know anything. We’ve been outmaneuvered. We’re done.”

  “And where does this leave me?” I demanded. “I was supposed to help you find and stop this guy. It was my goddamned field test. If I don’t get this position with Itachi, he’s not going to leave Charlie alone.” My voice broke on Charlie’s name, and I hated how weak that sounded.

  “I’ll tell them you did good work,” he promised. “I’ll make sure he and Maven know this wasn’t your fault.
”

  “That’s not good enough,” I sputtered.

  Quinn studied my face for a moment. I don’t know what he saw there, but he closed even more of the distance between us, until we were close enough for him to whisper. “Do you need to hit me?” he said.

  My eyes widened. “What?”

  “You’re shaking,” he said matter-of-factly. I looked down at my fists. Sure enough, there was a visible tremor. Glancing around, Quinn quickly reached out and grabbed my hands, stilling them.

  I reacted without thinking, jerking my hands back and snapping them out to shove Quinn hard into the side of the car. He hit it with an audible thump but didn’t react. The voices at the other end of the lot went quiet.

  Quinn just leaned there, his eyes probing mine. “Feel better?” he asked, his voice still low. “I meant it, you know. You can hit me if you want. You might break your hand, but if it you think it’ll help, I won’t stop you.”

  Balling up my fists, I spun on my heel and paced a few feet away, my body thrumming with unspent anger. When I was sure I wasn’t actually going to hit him, I turned and stalked back. He had straightened up, but was still leaning against the car, motionless. I just stared at him, seething. I’d struggled with anger since I’d gotten out of the army, but something different was happening now. It felt like rage was rolling through every part of my body, seeping out from my chest down into my legs and fingers, pushing out against the inside of my skin. You’ll feel things harder, Simon had told me. I felt like I was going to explode.

  Quinn’s nostrils flared suddenly, and he glanced down. “Lex,” he said softly, genuine concern in his voice. I followed his eyes down to my left hand, which he took gently, turning it over and uncurling my fingers. There were four thin trickles of blood trailing from my palm. I’d clenched my fist hard enough to draw blood. “Oh,” I said lamely. “Does that—”

  Quinn dropped my hand and jerked away from me. His pupils had dilated, and he turned his head, avoiding my eyes. “Christ . . . did Simon say anything about your magic growing?”