“It disintegrated? And now you don’t even have it?”
Whoops. I realized my mistake. “I have my old obsidian. It’s going to be okay,” I said. “But I gotta make this call.”
“Yeah. I know.” He read off the number. Tucking the phone against my ear, I picked up a pen from Beau’s desk and scribbled it on my hand, wincing as my wrist complained about the movement. “I love you,” Quinn said when he finished.
I needed to tell him about Holly, but this wasn’t the moment. It could wait until I got home. “I love you too.”
I hung up the phone and stared at the phone number for a second, bracing myself. Then I took a deep breath and dialed it into the burner.
Sophia answered on the fifth ring. “Who is this?” she demanded. “Do you know what time it is?”
“It’s Allison Luther.”
The line went quiet for a long moment. “I thought you and I agreed we wouldn’t be speaking again. You killed my son.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, telling myself not to engage. “Sophia, I need information about boundary magic, and you can tell I’m pretty desperate, because I’m calling you.”
She snorted. “Go fuck yourself.”
“People will die,” I snapped, hoping she hadn’t hung up. “Because of boundary magic. Don’t you think there’s been enough of that?”
“Oh, please,” she scoffed. “All that power, and you still don’t get it. Boundary magic is simply a mirror we hold up to people. They choose to play games with death. They choose to ask questions they don’t really want answered. I never—”
“Sophia, cut the shit,” I interrupted. “I need to know about spirit bottles.”
I’d hoped to surprise her out of her rant, but the phone went so quiet that I checked the screen to make sure she hadn’t hung up on me. “Spirit bottles,” she said thoughtfully. “I haven’t thought about those in a long time. I prefer the crystals. They hold more.”
Something in my stomach unclenched. “So you do know about spirit bottles.”
“Of course I do,” she said irritably, as though I’d been surprised she knew about the alphabet. “They were a precursor for my own work. But I have no interest in helping you.”
“Do you have an interest in money?” Unless her situation had changed, Sophia ran Emil’s crystal shop and held seances to make ends meet.
The old woman was quiet for a moment, then: “You don’t have enough money to buy me.”
Well, that was true. “I’m calling as a representative of someone who does. He wants everything you know about spirit bottles, and he’s got deep pockets.”
Another silence, but I figured I was on the right track. “Look, I get it. You don’t want to help me,” I went on. “But I’m not acting in my own interests. I’m not even in Boulder. I’m working for the cardinal vampire of Atlanta.”
“Abner Calhoun?” she said, sounding interested for the first time. Apparently Beau was notorious.
“Yes. It’s his town, his problem. But I can’t fix it without your help.”
I figured she’d like that, and I wasn’t wrong. Sophia’s throaty chuckle came over the line. “So you’re working as a consultant, and you promised more than you could deliver, eh?”
I didn’t give a shit how Sophia wanted to look at it. I didn’t even care if she was right. If making me sound like an incompetent con artist got us to answers, that was fine. “Something like that.”
“All right,” she said after a long moment of deliberation. This time it was probably just to make me squirm. “Ten thousand dollars, deposited into my account. Then I’ll answer any questions you want. But I want Calhoun on the call.”
Ugh. “And afterward we return to our previous arrangement?”
“Yes, as long as you promise never to call me for a fucking favor ever again.”
I didn’t really think ten grand qualified as a “favor,” but I didn’t care. “Give me the account number, and I’ll call you back.”
As soon as I hung up, I went out to the foyer to find Milburn. It took less than five minutes for him to get the money deposited in Sophia’s account. He hadn’t blinked an eye when I’d mentioned the amount, and he’d scoffed at my suggestion that we run it by Beau. “Trust me, that amount is not a problem,” he assured me. Must be nice to be a cardinal vampire.
When the money stuff was sorted out, I followed the sound of breaking glass to the butler’s pantry, where Beau was sorting