Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) - Melissa F. Olson Page 0,26

start to obsess over Emil’s visit again. My first impulse was to stop at John’s house to visit him and Charlie, but they were in Orlando, and besides, John didn’t want to see me.

On a whim, I decided to swing by the Basement of Dr. Moreau to check on Simon. It had been ages since we’d just hung out.

Simon’s lab was a converted two-bedroom apartment off Longbow in the same building where several of the Boulder vampires lived. Because it was one of Maven’s properties, the building had been renovated so that the basement dwellers had a separate entrance from the humans who lived aboveground. By mutual agreement, everyone in the building left their neighbors the hell alone.

I had a key to the outer door that led to the basement, in case there was ever a security concern. When I knocked on Simon’s door, he opened it just wide enough to stick his face out. Tall and lean with a nerdy-surfer thing going on, Simon was probably the crush of every undergraduate girl at CU . . . most of the time. Tonight, he looked exhausted and distracted, and he was wearing a blood-spattered lab coat and I-just-murdered-someone leather gloves. “Hey, Lex,” he said wearily. “What’s going on?”

“Um . . . hi. Can I come in?”

“Oh. Right.” He opened the door, ushering me in quickly. It was a little pointless, given Maven’s total control over the building, but it never hurt to be cautious. Inside, the apartment had been refitted with lab gear, including several enormous machines that I couldn’t have identified if my life depended on it. If it had been anyone else, I might have suspected the gear was just for show, but I was pretty sure Simon used every bit of equipment in there. There was even an enormous aquarium against the back wall, which contained skin beetles that spent their lives eating the flesh off Unktehila bones. I purposely didn’t look at it. I’d made that mistake before.

As usual, the air smelled like formaldehyde, Simon’s cologne and a bunch of other scents I had no interest in identifying. “How’s teaching?” I asked him. “Don’t you have finals soon?”

He blanched for a moment, then shook his head. “Class is over, and my exams are already written, so there’s not much going on this week.”

I nodded. So much for the theory that school was making him look like that. “Have you learned anything new about the sandworm?” I asked tentatively. Six months was a long time to spend examining one dead body—even one as massive as the Unktehila—but Simon was working around a full-time job and his responsibilities for the witch clan. I knew his progress had been a lot slower than he wanted.

He opened his mouth to answer, stopped, and shook his head, looking frustrated. “I’ve managed to confirm a lot of what we suspected about the Unktehila’s evolutionary ties to other species. It has no direct genetic connection to any of the human-evolved magic species, which is interesting. But I still have no idea why magic bonded with only certain creatures, or why the Unktehila was apparently immortal.” His shoulders slumped. “And I’ve mostly run out of things to test.”

“What were you hoping to find?”

“It’s not that I had a specific goal like that, just . . .” he blew out a breath and removed one of his gloves to scrub a palm through his hair.

“What?”

“Generally, when I—or any other scientist—have an experiment, I can consult hundreds of years’ worth of older tests. But this is the Old World, where everyone just writes everything off as ‘magic’ and goes on with their day,” he grouched. If there were rocks nearby, he probably would have kicked at them.

I looked around for a second, and then dragged a metal lab stool over to where he was leaning on a counter. There was an actual kitchen table meant for the consumption of food, but I’d never seen Simon use it for anything but paper storage. “Aren’t there some things that can only be explained with magic?”

I could tell from his face that this was the wrong question. “Maybe, but maybe not. How will we ever know for sure unless we look for answers? But I can’t get any help, and if anyone else in the history of mankind has ever looked into these questions, there’s no way to know.”

“What about the internet?”

He gave me a look like I’d just walked into his class twenty minutes late. “Lex, there are