Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) - Melissa F. Olson Page 0,10

reminds me of one of my trollops; she was so clumsy—”

And she was off again. I’d forgotten about Nellie’s loopy speech patterns: when she was excited, her diction and vocabulary ran up and down the socioeconomic spectrum and switched back and forth between now and a hundred and fifty years ago. Although I suspected she was always excited. It was like she’d been carefully hoarding decades of conversation for the first person who could see her. “Nellie,” I interrupted. “I need your help again.”

She’d been at the far end of her pacing, but she whirled back around. “Well, of course you do,” she snapped. “You wouldn’t-a come back to visit me otherwise, would you? Would you?”

I winced. “I was working up to it.”

She glared at me, but made a little impatient gesture for me to continue.

“What do you know about belladonna?” I asked.

That brought her up short. For a moment her face was blank. “Why are ye asking me?” she said suspiciously. “Dinna your people explain all this?”

I sighed. Sam and I had been adopted by the Luthers when we were babies, so we had grown up firmly outside the Old World, but Nellie seemed to have forgotten. “No, Nellie. I don’t know my people, remember?” I didn’t mention that I was also trying not to involve the local witch clan this time around. The less Nellie knew about current Old World politics, the less she could use them to manipulate me.

“Ah, yes. Sorry, Lex-girl.” Her face relaxed, but in just a second the distrustful look was back. “Did Pale Jennie send you then?”

Pale Jennie was actually Maven, and she had killed Nellie back in the nineteenth century—but in all fairness, only after Nellie had “killed” her first. That’s what happens when you try to backstab a friend who’s secretly a vampire. “Yes. She asked me to come here and beg for your advice.” That wasn’t exactly accurate, but Nellie had responded well to flattery before. “She thought you’d know all about belladonna and the other herbs.”

Nellie puffed up a little with pride. “I bet she did. Those herbs were one thing I always played close to my chest, even with Jennie. The grist a’ magic, my Ma used to call them.”

“Is that how you learned how to use them? From your mother?”

“Aye. She grew them in her own garden. That was how Ma was able to feed and clothe my brother and me, selling the seeds to anyone with a grudge against something magical.” She scowled. “Colorado weren’t so regulated then. We had no vampire tyrant telling us what we could or could not grow on our own property.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, parsing that for useful information. “So can you tell me if belladonna poisoning has a cure?”

“Aye, I could tell you,” Nellie replied, her eyes glinting with greed. “But I’d need something in return, of course.”

“What do you want?” Nellie couldn’t interact with the physical world, other than creeping people out when she “walked” through them, so there wasn’t a lot she could require in terms of material goods.

“I want you to come by here every day and change the channel to something new,” she said promptly.

I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes. Of course. “Once a month, for a year. And it won’t always be me. Sometimes it’ll be a . . . helper.” I didn’t want to say vampire and set her off on another tirade, but I figured Maven could send one of the Denver vampires to do this, at least sometimes.

“Once a week,” she negotiated. “For the year, and at least once a month it’ll be you.”

“Fine,” I said, managing not to sound begrudging about it. “But I’m not leaving my watch as collateral for that long. This time you’ll have to trust me.”

She pursed her lips, but nodded. “All right.”

“What’s the cure?”

“Ain’t no cure,” she said, looking infinitely satisfied with herself. “Belladonna is powerful; you have to wait for it to flush through the system. Best you can do is speed that up a little.”

“How?”

Her smirk grew even bigger. “Easiest way is to cut the creature’s vein, drain out some of the toxic blood, and feed ’em untainted blood. Then wait a day or so and do the same thing all over. A’ course, the older they are, the faster they’ll heal.”

I gave her a skeptical look. That sounded suspiciously like Nellie trying to get me to bleed unconscious vampires to death, and I said so.

Nellie spread her hands, looking innocent. “Believe