Boundary Crossed

by Melissa F. Olson

  “Unchained Melody” gets a lot of scorn for being cheesy, but you don’t become one of the most popular love songs in the history of recorded music by accident. Ghost had already been out for over a decade by the time I was in high school, but that song was still the theme of my high school prom when I was a junior.

  It also happened to be Sam’s favorite goddamned song in the world.

  I felt my eyes well with tears. I looked up and there was John, his unruly hair tamed down with gel, his tuxedo just the slightest bit ill-fitting. I smiled. He held out a hand wordlessly, and I took it, allowing him to pull me in for a dance.

  “I miss her, too,” he whispered. “Your mom asked them to play it, in her honor.”

  I nodded, suddenly choked up.

  “Do you remember,” he said into my ear, “when Sam decided to see how many times she could play this song in a row before your dad flipped out?”

  I let out a startled laugh. “Oh, God, I had forgotten about that. Was that during the infamous college road trip?” I felt, rather than saw, his nod. “Poor Dad. He still thought he could talk me out of the army by showing me some fabulous college that would sweep me off my feet.”

  “He was so sure you’d like Berkeley, if we could just make it there. And Sam decided she needed to break his spirit on the first day.” There was a smile in his voice that I found myself echoing.

  “Hey, it was her favorite song.” I shrugged good-naturedly. “What’re you gonna do?” My poor, ex-hippie father was usually the more patient of our two parents, but a man could only take so much “Unchained Melody” in a row before losing it. “How far did we make it?” I asked. “I can’t remember.”

  John lifted his hand, leading me through an effortless twirl. “Salt Lake City,” he said when I returned to him.

  I smiled. “Sam saved us all some time. Even if I hadn’t joined the service, I would never have gone to Berkeley.”

  John’s smile faded, and he pulled me close again so I wouldn’t see his expression. “Because Sam didn’t get into Berkeley,” he said matter-of-factly.

  I shrugged. “But you did,” John pressed. “And Stanford. And USC.”

  I felt my expression harden. “What’s your point?”

  He looked away. The last chorus was beginning, and we would walk away soon. But for some reason it was important to me to understand. “It was so long ago, John. We were kids. What does it matter now that I wouldn’t have gone to a certain school if I had gone to school at all?”

  He sighed. “I’m just . . . I don’t think you give yourself enough credit. You never have. When we were kids, you acted like the sun rose and fell on Sam’s say-so, when you were the one who could have done anything with your life.”

  I stopped dancing then, not caring who noticed us. “You can’t exactly tell me she wasn’t special, John. She was your wife.” I really hoped the words you chose her over me weren’t as obvious to him as they felt in my head.

  “Of course she was special. Of course I loved her. But I just never understood why you decided to write this goddamned narrative,” he said, frustration buzzing in his voice, “that Sam had value and you didn’t.”

  “I never—”

  “When Sam was alive, you made your whole life about protecting her,” John insisted. “Sometimes I wondered if you decided to join the army, to protect the country, just because Sam was in it.”

  “Come on, even I’m not that codependent,” I said, trying to make my voice light.

  “And now that she’s dead,” he continued, like he hadn’t heard me, “you’re making your life all about remembering her. Grieving for her. It’s been almost a year, Allie.”

  “That’s pretty fucking rich, coming from you,” I retorted. “Not exactly back out on the dating scene, are you?”

  He hesitated, and something congealed in my stomach. “Actually, I just started seeing someone,” he said finally.

  We both went still. The song ended.

  “Oh,” I said lamely.

  “It’s getting late,” John said. “I should probably get Charlie home.”

  I nodded, discreetly wiping under my eyes to protect my mascara. “I’ll walk with you, so I can give her a kiss.”

  He started through the crowd, and I trailed after him. After only two steps, though, I felt someone’s gaze on me. I glanced up and met Quinn’s eyes. He nodded me on with his usual implacable expression; he’d heard where I was going. Which meant he’d also heard everything we’d said before that. I blushed. Whatever ground I’d gained with Quinn would be gone now. One step forward, two steps back. Story of my life.

  I followed John silently through the doorway and into the east ballroom, which my mom had rented for the kids. It was like a junior version of my dad’s birthday ball. There were kid-friendly finger foods and a small set of speakers playing age-appropriate music. The room was full of laughing, screaming, running boys and girls, the descendants of all the Luther Shoes employees, and I took a second to privately admire the soundproofing that had kept this cacophony out of the main ballroom. I waved to Jake’s twelve-year-old daughter Dani, who was tucked into a corner with an iPad on her knees. Brie’s sons were there too, but they were involved in an elaborate chase game with some bigger kids, so I didn’t interrupt.

  There was a cordoned-off area for the kids under age two, with a couple of small plastic slides and some baby toys tossed about. No Charlie, though. I trailed John as he headed toward the employee in the baby area, a young woman in her twenties wearing a pink polo shirt that had the words Go and Play Child Care embroidered on the back. “Hey, I’m looking for Charlotte Wheaton,” John said politely. “Is she off getting a diaper change or something?”

  The girl, who had a round face, acne, and the blissful look of someone who truly loves kids, gave John a puzzled smile. “Nobody’s getting changed, but let me check the clipboard,” she said brightly, hoisting a toddler higher on her hip and leading us toward a podium that was stashed against the wall, out of the way of the gallivanting kids. There was a clipboard on top. The girl paged through it. “You signed the waiver, right?” she said absently. John confirmed that he had. “Oh, right here,” she chirped, pointing to a name on the third page. “Charlotte Wheaton, goes by Charlie? I don’t remember her, but”—her cheerful voice faltered—“um, it says she was already checked out, just a few minutes ago.”

  “By who?” John demanded.

  The round-faced girl looked up at him with a hesitant smile. “Um . . . her father. John Wheaton.”

  Chapter 32

  “I’m John Wheaton,” John said, his voice a terrible alloy of anger and fear.

  The girl’s face bleached to a pale white. “I . . . I don’t know what could have happened,” she stammered. “I don’t remember seeing her. Karen?” she called, waving over one of the other two workers. “Do you recall signing out Charlotte Wheaton?”

  “Eighteen months old,” John supplied.

  Karen’s face was as blank as the first girl’s. Instinctively, I spun on my heel and hurried over to Dani, bending down to tug the earbuds out of her ears. “Dani, did you see someone take Charlie?” I demanded.

  She blinked at me, pushing her round glasses higher on her face. “Yeah, that guy came and got her,” she said. “I was trying to help Peter get Chris down the slide, but I figured he was the babysitter . . .”

  “John!” I yelled, startling him out of his heated conversation with the attendants. “I need you to get Quinn right now!”

  “Who?” he said, confused and worried. “We need Elise, we gotta call the cops—”

  “John,” I said, pouring as much patience into my voice as I could manage, “I can go after her, but I need Quinn right now. Please.”

  He looked at me for the length of a heartbeat, then nodded, trusting me. He raced out of the room. I turned back to Dani, crouching down so our faces were level
. “Honey, I need to know what he looked like.”

  “Did I mess up?” Dani asked, her voice edged with fear. “Should I have gone to get Uncle John?”

  I smoothed down her hair. “No, baby, you did just fine. Do you remember anything about how he looked?”

  “He was like in college,” she volunteered. “Um, dark hair. I don’t remember what he was wearing but he was kind of . . . big?” She let go of the iPad and spread her arms, holding them away from her body. “Lots of muscles.”

  Oh, shit. “Did he have a funny hooked nose?” I asked, miming a bump over my nose with one finger. “Like this?”

  She nodded, her face relaxing a little as she realized I knew him.

  “How long ago?” I said urgently, having to concentrate to keep from squeezing her arms.

  “Like, two minutes. Did—”

  John and Quinn ran in, John starting to panic in earnest. “John, I need you to stay calm and keep this quiet,” I said. “I can get her back, but we can’t—”

  “You must be joking,” he interrupted. “We gotta call the police right now, time is everything—”

  I met Quinn’s eyes. The vampire didn’t look confused or upset; he just gave me a calm, what-do-you-want-me-to-do look. “It was Kirby, and it just happened,” I said, ignoring John. “There’s no time. I’m going after him.”

  He nodded. “I’ll press them and join you in a second.”

  I winced, but he was right. If we let John make a big fuss and call the police, Itachi would throw his resources into containment rather than an investigation. “Tell him she’s spending the night at my house,” I said grimly. “He’ll be okay with that.”

  John started to yell at me, and Dani burst into tears, but I couldn’t worry about any of that.

  I was already running.

  Holding the front of my dress, I raced down the stairs at neck-breaking speed, skidding down the last few steps so fast I had to catch myself on the wall. I raced out of the stairwell and burst outside, looking wildly to my left and right. At first I figured he must have used a car for his getaway, but would he have gone for the southeast lot or the southwest one? I took a few steps southwest and realized that traffic was jammed up around the building. The fickle autumn weather had decided on a breath of warmth, and people were everywhere. Between the party and all the regular Saturday night events on campus, a car wouldn’t have been a very dependable way to get anywhere. He would probably have fled on foot, at least at first.

  But that didn’t tell me anything about where he would have gone, goddammit. I turned in a slow circle, peering around the campus, hoping for a flash of movement, for the sight of someone running. There were plenty of people around, but I didn’t see Kirby, or anything else suspicious. I grabbed at my hair, ready to scream. The frat house, I thought suddenly. Would he have gone there to get his car? No, it wasn’t too far, but he would have had to take busy Broadway to get there, which would make it too likely that he’d run into people who knew him.

  The smart thing to do, I decided, would have been to park a block or so away from the UMC, someplace out of the immediate traffic but easily accessible by foot. And if he was planning to get on Highway 36 toward Denver . . .

  Grabbing the bottom of my dress again, I turned and sprinted southeast toward Macky Auditorium, ignoring the renewed surge of pain from my feet. There was a huge lot on the other side of the auditorium, with easy access to the highway and not much visibility. That was where I’d park, if I were stealing a kid.

  I tried to figure out how many seconds I’d lost while I was considering my options. Thirty? Sixty? I ran harder, trying to make it up. The heels were making it hard to move, but my only other option was to take them off, and that’s how I’d hurt my feet in the first place. So I pelted down the sidewalk as fast as I could, ignoring the joggers and strolling couples who stared and murmured as I raced by, my emerald skirt flying behind me like a banner. I put everything I had into forward movement, well aware that if my shoe caught the asphalt wrong I was done. I wondered why my shoes felt wet, then realized that my cuts had reopened.

  I ran across Euclid Ave, weaving through traffic, disregarding the honks and curses. I hit the grass in front of Macky—

  And recognized the wall of muscle twenty feet in front of me. Kirby was strolling along the green lawn abutting the music building, wearing something strapped to his back. I skidded to a stop, but it was too late—he’d heard the crazy woman pounding along the sidewalk in heels and, like everyone else on the lawn, he had turned to look at me.

  There was a long, frozen moment when I registered that he was wearing a BabyBjörn with my niece inside, her eyes wide and unfrightened, looking around the lawn with mild interest. She was okay.

  And then she was turned away from me, as Kirby moved to run.

  I chased him, but I was much too slow. “Stop him!” I screamed desperately to the students loitering on the lawn. “That’s not his kid!”

  Several of them stood up, and two male professors in their forties began to halfheartedly chase after Kirby, who started running full-out. The gap between us began to widen, and I knew I was seconds away from losing Charlie. “No!” I howled, and without thinking I pulled on my mindset again, trying to target Kirby and pull the goddamned motherfucking undead life out of him . . .

  I’d forgotten about what Charlie could do.

  Kirby ran out of sight, completely protected from me by my niece’s power. I kept going for another moment, screaming, knowing it was useless, and then the two professors in front of me dropped to the ground like stones in a pond.

  Then the group of students on the lawn nearest them. Then a jogger. Then two dog-walkers.

  I was watching them in horror when my foot caught a tree root. I went flying through the air, crashing down hard on my right shoulder. I screeched with pain as it dislocated. By the time I managed to struggle to my feet and look around, every single person on the wide Macky lawn had collapsed on the grass.

  The wave of stolen magic hit me, and I lost consciousness.

  Chapter 33

  I opened my eyes to darkness. For a moment I wondered dully if I’d blinded myself with the magic. It didn’t matter, really. I’d lost Charlie, and I’d killed a couple dozen people with my fucking mind. I’d stolen their life force—and for what? I’d been so sure that everything would be fine if I could just catch Kirby . . . and then I’d lost him. By morning Charlie was going to be in another state.

  I had failed to save her, just like I’d failed to save her mother.

  Very slowly, the room around me came into focus, and I realized with a dim sense of relief that I wasn’t blind—I was dreaming. I was sitting on the edge of my twin bed in the bedroom Sam and I had shared at our parent’s house, the one we had insisted on sharing even though the new house had plenty of space. I looked around the room fondly. There was Sam’s mussed bed, looking like she’d just jumped out of it. There was the stuffed bear she’d slept with since we were three, and I recognized the stack of novels on my nightstand as being from my AP English class.

  Then I frowned. Something felt off. I dreamed about my sister all the time, but this felt different. I wasn’t usually so conscious of being asleep, for one thing, and everything was too . . . detailed. My dreams were usually fuzzy and content-oriented—I would dream about this or that event, real or imaginary, and that’s all I would remember later.

  But this time I saw all the minutiae—what I was wearing (jeans and a plain Luther Shoes T-shirt), the names on the posters on our walls, the piles of clothes, clean and dirty, on Sam’s side of the room. It even smelled like the obnoxious floral air fresheners my mom had liked to use throughout the house when we were kids. Had I ever had a dream with smells before? This was too weird.

  “Finally, Allie,” said a voice from in front of me. “It took you long enough.”

  I looked up. There was Sam, sit
ting cross-legged on her own twin bed across from me, though it had been empty just a second ago. She was wearing the same outfit I’d last seen her in: black leggings, ballet flats, and a drapey turquoise top that hid her postpartum baby pooch. My sister had been small-framed, with a brunette pixie cut and big blue eyes that were identical to mine. People had rarely guessed we were twins, and sisters, but if you looked closely, our eyes gave it away.

  “Sammy?” I said in a small voice. I began to stand up, but she shook her head, motioning for me to stay where I was.

  “Sorry, babe, but you can’t hug me. It doesn’t work like that.”

  I looked around for a moment and then sat back on my bed, folding my legs to mirror her. This was how we’d had a thousand conversations in high school, back when Sam and I were making plans to room together at college. Before 9/11, before I’d decided that being a soldier was my destiny.

  “Usually when I dream about you, we get to hug,” I pointed out.

  “You’re not dreaming, Allie,” she told me seriously.

  I snorted. “Of course I am. I’m talking to my dead sister.”

  Sam just raised one eyebrow at me, waiting for me to put it together.

  “I’m talking to my dead sister,” I repeated. “Are you saying that this is real? You’re real?”

  She nodded. “I’m me, or what’s left of me.” Then she put on a low, dramatic voice. “I am the soul of Samantha Wheaton!” A goofy grin broke out on her face.

  I stared back, not believing. This was just another dream—more vivid and heartbreaking than usual, maybe, but still a dream. Wasn’t it?

  Sam arched a single eyebrow at me, a trick she’d always been much better at than I was. “Allie, you know for a fact now that vampires are real, and you’ve personally died and come back several times. How is this any weirder than that?”