Boundary Crossed

by Melissa F. Olson

  I slipped around the side of the house, noting the gravel driveway just beyond it. I could only make out the edge of the driveway in the spill of light from the house, but there was another light on above the barn, a plain, unpainted wooden structure. Simon had been right—the main door, a massive piece of wood that had to be slid back and forth, stood open, a yawning, sinister black hole in the structure. Unlike the Pellars’ cheerful red barn, this one was slightly dilapidated, like years of heavy snowfall had caved in parts of the roof and no one had cared enough to fix it. I kept an eye on the barn, just in case Kirby was hiding out there after all.

  I made it to the door of the house just as my count hit fifty, and pulled the M9 out of the fast-draw holster. I counted off another ten seconds, and at the one-minute mark, I reared back and kicked in the cheap front door.

  Chapter 37

  The door flew inward with a tremendous crash, echoed by another crash deeper inside, as Simon burst through the back door. Quinn would be on the second story, but his entrance was silent—he must have found an unlocked window.

  With the M9 in hand, I moved through a short, shabby entryway and to the right, into a living room where a single standing lamp emitted a wan yellow glow.

  The room was small and looked like a museum diorama of the seventies, furnished with just an old dusty sofa sleeper and an even older armchair made out of material that looked like burlap. The only modern touch was an enormous flat-screen TV hanging on the wall, which said a lot about Atwood’s priorities. I passed through the room and entered an empty kitchen, with fixtures of a similar age and quality as the living room furniture. Then I found myself in a small dining room. I saw movement in the opposite doorway and tensed my finger on the Beretta’s trigger.

  Simon moved through the doorway, a stake in his left hand, the fingers of his right hand stretched out in front of him. The gesture reminded me of the day in his hayloft when he’d used the shielding spell on me, and I realized he was preparing some kind of offensive spell. I lowered the Beretta and nodded at him. “Stairs back this way,” he said in a whisper so low it was almost silent. He jerked his head back the way he’d come, and I nodded and followed him.

  Quinn was waiting for us at the bottom of the steps.

  “The house is empty,” he said in an undertone.

  My chest tightened with disappointment. “What about a basement?” I asked.

  Quinn gestured behind me, and I turned my head and saw a door. “I checked there, too,” he said. “I didn’t see any other buildings when we arrived, so if they’re here, they’ve gotta be in that barn.”

  I winced, remembering Simon’s description of the building where tetanus goes to die. “Then we’ve lost the element of surprise.”

  “Probably.”

  I blew out a breath and turned to Simon. “How many entrances to the barn?”

  The entryway where we were standing wasn’t lit, but there was enough light spilling down from the stairs for me to make out his look of concentration. “Four,” he said at last. “Aside from the big front door there are three more, one in the middle of each side.” He shrugged. “The gable’s boarded up, so there’s no entrance through the hayloft.”

  I met Quinn’s eyes. “The hayloft,” I said, and he nodded in agreement. “Is it like yours?” I asked Simon.

  He shook his head. “In our barn the hayloft extends the whole length of the building. This one is small, maybe . . . mmm . . . twelve, fifteen feet wide, at the west end of the barn.”

  “How do you get up there?” I asked, checking my watch. We’d been in the house for about three minutes, which was forever in an assault scenario. We needed to keep moving, but we couldn’t go in completely blind, either.

  “There’s no permanent ladder,” Simon answered me. “He must keep one on the first level somewhere, and he only props it up when he needs to get up there for something.” He glanced at Quinn. “Like in The Ring,” he added.

  Quinn tilted his head in acknowledgment, although I had no idea what he was talking about. It didn’t matter, though, because the way he described it, the hayloft would be the perfect place to hide something you didn’t want found.

  “I think we have to assume she’s up there,” I told the two men. “Here’s what I think we should do.”

  The three of us went straight through the house’s front door—at this point speed was more important than trying to be sneaky—but fanned out as soon as we were outside, so we’d make a more difficult target.

  “As soon as we’re close enough, you need to sense out the life in the barn,” Simon had told me before we left.

  “What? No, you should do it.” I wasn’t in any hurry to use magic again, tattoos or not.

  “You’re stronger than I am,” Simon said simply. “And you have a wider range.”

  I did? “Simon . . .” I began uneasily, but he broke in.

  “You can do this, Lex,” he encouraged. “It’s just sensing out life. You could do this in your sleep.”

  There was no time to argue with him. I swallowed my excuses and bobbed my head.

  Once we were in the yard, Quinn broke off to the right. He would go around back and try to get into the barn through the boarded-up gable on the second story, much like he’d done at the farmhouse, but he’d wait for Simon’s signal before trying to break in. Simon and I darted to the left, where an enormous propane tank stood a few feet southeast of the barn’s gaping front door. I just prayed that Kirby and Atwood weren’t stupid enough to shoot the tank.

  The most immediate problem was going to be light—there was a fairly bright spotlight attached to the front of the barn, which was probably on some kind of automatic timer, but there were no lights on inside. That gave Kirby a distinct advantage over Simon and me: if we used the flashlights inside the barn we’d be sitting ducks, but if we tried to go without them, we’d cut ourselves on the welding equipment. We had to get the lights on inside the barn before doing anything else.

  We crouched in the shadows, and then Simon nodded to me. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, visualizing myself putting on thermal imaging goggles. Now I was sort of glad that Simon had made me practice turning my mindset on and off under any circumstances, including when I was terrified. Eyes closed, I pushed my senses toward the barn. I’d been worried the tattoos would limit me, but Simon had reassured me that they would only affect the way I manipulated magic, not the way I sensed it out. Right away, I felt a huge pulse of essence at the southern wall, the one nearest us. It was about midway down the barn’s side, probably next to the door. I hadn’t felt a vampire in my senses yet, but I figured it would be different from a human, and this felt human. “Atwood’s by the southern door,” I murmured to Simon.

  “I feel him, too, but that’s as far as I can go. Push farther,” he directed.

  So I did. I felt the next presence at the far end of the barn, probably by the west door. This one felt . . . interesting. Simon had told me that my brain interpreted the magic in a way I could understand, and for whatever reason it usually made sparks of life blue. But this spark was a deep, wormy red. It was a different magic from the magic of creation I saw in humans and animals, or from the yellowish death-essence that drifted out of them when they died. A darker magic. “Vampire,” I breathed. To Simon, I said, “Kirby’s at the west door.”

  I felt, rather than saw, his nod. “Let’s go,” he whispered, starting to stretch upward.

  “Wait,” I said, reaching out to grab his arm. Something was wrong: Tactically, west and south weren’t the right places to guard, not if my niece was in the hayloft. And Charlie was a baby—even if she was restrained in a crib or a car seat, wouldn’t they want someone to be with her? My eyes were still closed, and I pushed my magic harder, feeling past where I’d felt Kirby.

  “Oh, shit,” I hissed. “There are more of them.”

  Simon crouched back down. “Humans or
vampires?”

  “Human . . . there’s another human at the north door. Atwood or somebody else. And that’s gotta be Quinn, on the northwest corner of the building . . .” I opened my eyes, frowning. “There’s a big blank area in the middle, I can’t seem to feel—” Then I got it, and my heart tripped with excitement. “Charlie!”

  “So we have at least one extra human, and an unknown number of people in the hayloft with Charlie. What do you want to do?” Simon asked.

  “Stick to the plan,” I told him firmly.

  He hesitated for just a moment, trying to read my eyes in the shadows, but then nodded. “Go,” I said softly.

  Simon took off to the right, around the front of the propane tank. I followed just far enough to watch him march right up to the barn’s gaping east door, the one closest to us. He stood to one side of the doorway, for a moment, mumbling something. Then he spun on his heel, waving a hand into the barn.

  What followed was the loudest crash I’d ever heard. It seemed to go on forever, a cacophony of metallic screeching and clanking as metal bits big and small slammed into each other. “Anybody home?” Simon yelled. I grinned. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t a signal so much as a distraction. As he reached into the barn, groping for a light switch, I took off around the left side of the propane tank, the Beretta in my hands.

  As I was still approaching the barn, Simon must have found the switch, because a beam of light suddenly shot out of the window in the south door, revealing the silhouette of a tall, broad-shouldered man guarding the door. Caught in the light, he began to move toward me. I cocked the Beretta, pointing it at his center. “Don’t move,” I ordered, but the shadow kept coming. When he was a few feet away, I saw that he was quite young, with a bushy beard and a long, wicked-looking piece of metal pipe in one hand. And I realized that I knew him.

  “Chewbacca?” I said, confused. Why would a freshman pledge from CU be here? “What are you—”

  But he didn’t even slow down. I couldn’t shoot the kid, not until I was sure what team he was on, but the pipe came swinging toward my head like it was a T-ball. I ducked under it, but the kid was fast for his size. He turned around and started toward me again, and as the light caught him, I saw that his eyes were dazed and cloudy. Shit. He’d been pressed. I definitely couldn’t shoot him.

  But that didn’t make his attack any less real. Chewbacca raised the pipe again in an overhead swing, intending to smash the top of my head. I lurched backward, just barely managing to get out of range before the pipe came whistling down. When it hit the ground in front of me I stomped one foot on it, leaned forward and punched the kid square in the nose with my right hand.

  He dropped his hold on the pipe and straightened, looking disoriented. “Chewbacca?” I said hopefully, in case the blow had reversed Kirby’s press, but the kid just gave a little shake of his head and started toward me again. I heard a gunshot echo from the far side of the barn. Shit, I didn’t have time for this. I put the Beretta in its holster and dropped to the ground, kicking my left foot out as fast as I could and sweeping Chewbacca’s legs out from under him. He went down on his ass hard, and I picked up the pipe, wound up, and smacked him on the side of the head, praying I’d used the right amount of force to knock him out but not kill him. He folded to the ground, and I sprinted toward the west side of the barn, where I’d last felt the vampire.

  Chapter 38

  I had the gun ready as I rounded the southwest corner of the barn, but there was no one on that side of the structure. Light was spilling out through the open door, though, and I hopped a decaying paddock fence and raced toward the entryway. I stopped to peek around the rotting wooden door frame.

  And had to take a second look.

  Simon had warned us, but the inside of the barn was still grotesquely fascinating. Atwood had filled the whole space with makeshift tables built of sawhorses, covered by flat, wall-sized pieces of steel. They were placed at random, so there were no neat rows through the building. Then he’d covered every inch of every surface, including the barn floor, with grimy junk. I recognized bits and pieces of engines, rusted coffee cans filled with nails and screwdrivers, blades for everything from forklifts to lawnmowers. There were larger pieces of metal shoved in there, too, and I didn’t recognize most of these: parts from semi trucks, maybe?

  Every bit of it was covered in layers of grease and rust, and Simon was right—everything was sharp. It would have taken me half an hour to walk from one wall to the other—except that Simon had blown an aisle through the very center of the goddamned barn. There was a two-foot-wide path running the length of the space, from where I was standing now to the east door where he’d come in.

  I grinned. Well, that explained the clanging.

  Cautiously, I stepped into the barn, my gun tracking along with my sight as I took in the mess. The hayloft was directly above me, about ten feet up, forming a partial overhang like a theater balcony. And in the center of the makeshift aisle, right below the edge of the hayloft, there was a pacifier. It had to have been dropped or kicked off the edge after Simon created the aisle. I took in a sharp breath, wanting to dance with relief. Charlie was here.

  But I was suddenly very aware of the fact that, despite all the noise, she hadn’t started crying. Why wasn’t she fussing? I took a cautious step forward, into the aisle, but before I could see the edge of the balcony, I heard two quick gunshots from the north side of the barn.

  Shit. I longed to check on my niece, but first I needed to help the others. I spun and flew back out of the door I’d come through. I started to round the corner, but my training kicked in and I jerked to a halt at the northwest corner, peeking around the side of the building.

  There was a frickin’ brawl unfolding on the lawn. No, two brawls. Ten feet in front of me, Kirby had Quinn pinned to the ground and was trying to wrestle a shredder out of his hand. Fifteen feet beyond that, Simon was struggling with a shorter man holding a handgun. He’d managed to point the guy’s arm straight into the air, and the shooter had pulled the trigger several times.

  Of the two of them Quinn seemed to be in greater danger, so as I walked forward I raised the Beretta and fired two shots directly into Kirby’s stupid thick skull.

  That got everyone’s attention.

  Simon and the kid—as I got closer I saw his protruding ears and recognized him as poor Yoda, the other pledge—froze for a moment, staring at me. Kirby swayed back, which gave Quinn a chance to wriggle out from under him. Now Kirby was kneeling, blood pouring from his temple, but even as I circled him the bleeding slowed and then stopped. I stared, fascinated. The bullets hadn’t actually gone through his skull. Did vampires have harder bones than regular humans? Maybe if I used a bigger caliber next time—

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Simon snatch the gun from Yoda and club him on the back of the head. By then I was face-to-face with Kirby, who gave me a woozy leer as he began to push himself off the ground. I holstered the Beretta, swung the shotgun up, and fired into Kirby’s chest from two feet away, the gun pointed directly at his heart.

  Kirby froze in place, his features gone temporarily slack as his vampire healing powers rushed to keep up with his wounds. That was exactly what I wanted. I dropped the rifle and got even closer—Quinn yelled something at me, but I didn’t hear it—and looked straight into his eyes. Shit, I thought, I should have practiced this.

  I breathed in and out slowly, trusting Quinn to help Simon, trusting Simon to keep Quinn from interrupting me. I tuned them out and focused on nothing but Kirby’s eyes. It was surprisingly easy. I’d been practicing my mindset for almost a month now.

  When I was sure I could handle it, I opened up a connection between us. I’m not sure how I did it, exactly, I sort of just . . . willed it into existence, and it was there. I pushed my concentration into it—and nothing happened.

  Kirby began to blink and stir.

  Without my thinking ab
out it, my body did exactly the right thing. I raised my hands and placed them on either side of Kirby’s face, funneling my power into him. And I pushed.

  It was too much. I knew the second I’d done it. I wasn’t used to the tattoos focusing my magic like that, and I’d used more force than I needed to. Kirby whimpered, his mind threatening to break.

  I backed off slowly, carefully, so I wouldn’t give him mental whiplash. Finally, I found a balanced amount of power and asked him the question, even though I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

  “Where is Charlie?”

  “In the hayloft,” Kirby said, his voice flat and dreamy at the same time.

  “Is Atwood with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she hurt?” My voice hardened, and he paused for a long moment.

  Finally he answered, “We gave her a drug to make her sleep, but she’s not injured.”

  I gritted my teeth at that, but forced myself to calm down. Drugging babies was horrible, but I needed to concentrate on the fact that she was safe. And finish this.

  “Besides you, how many people are involved?” I asked. I wasn’t leaving any room for error this time. We were getting every last fucker who’d been involved in this kidnapping.

  “One,” Kirby said, in that same slightly dreamy monotone I’d heard from Darcy.

  Good. “Who?” I demanded. “Who sent you after Charlie?”

  “Itachi,” Kirby said. “It’s his operation.”

  Itachi.

  My mind raced, scrambling to understand. That explained why Kirby had felt it was okay to steal my niece while she was under vampire protection, but according to the vampires, she already belonged to Itachi. Why would he want to steal something he already had?