Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) - Melissa F. Olson Page 0,27
hundreds of thousands of people online claiming to be witches. Even more claiming to use or study magic. How could I begin to weed out the real from the crazies without violating the law about never telling humans about the Old World? And any other actual witches would be bound by the same law, so they wouldn’t be forthcoming either.” He sighed. “It’s impossible. There could be a dozen other Simons out there asking the same questions I am, but there’s no way of finding them or talking to them.”
I studied my friend. All these months of round-the-clock work, and he hadn’t found the answers he wanted so badly. He looked so forlorn that my Luther family reflexes kicked in, and I impulsively stepped forward to give him a hug. “Trust me,” I said over his shoulder. “There are no other Simons out there.”
I didn’t really expect him to reciprocate, but Simon’s arms went tight around me, and he craned his head to bury his face in my neck. “Oh, hey,” I said, surprised. Awkwardly, I rested my hand on his upper back. He was so warm, compared to Quinn, who only maintained as much body heat as he needed to pass for human. “It’s okay, Simon.”
I’m not a psychologist—if you can fail at therapy, I definitely flunked my VA sessions when I returned from Iraq—but even I could see whatever was bothering Simon wasn’t just about the Unktehila experiments. So I held onto him, feeling the exhaustion in his body. He’d been pushing too hard. If he’d really run out of things to test with the Unktehila remains, what was he still doing in this depressing basement? Simon may not have had a wife and kids, but he had two jobs and a family, same as me. Something else was going on.
“Have you heard from Tracy?” I ventured. He and his longtime girlfriend had broken up months ago, but she was a witch, too. They still had to see each other.
Simon stepped back, looking away. “We don’t really talk, no. The whole clan’s been . . . disrupted. We didn’t even celebrate Beltane this year, for the first time since I can remember. I barely feel like a witch these days.”
I winced. I’d worried about how the Pellars were handling Morgan’s betrayal, but I hadn’t stopped to think about how it must be affecting the other witches in Boulder. Morgan was supposed to have been their next leader. And now she was gone, and the remaining Pellars were distressed and off-balance. Of course that would have ripple effects in the clan.
Simon stepped back a little and looked at me, realizing for the first time that I didn’t look like all my clothes came out of a Goodwill store. “Hey, you look beautiful. Quinn’s a lucky guy.”
I blushed and looked away, mumbling a thank-you. I never did learn to take a compliment, but in this case I was especially embarrassed. Simon and Tracy’s breakup was still fairly recent, for one thing, and I didn’t want to rub my relationship in his face. But if I was being really honest with myself, it wasn’t just that. I’d felt a little spark of something between us ever since I’d used my boundary magic to save Simon’s life—or, rather, bring him back to life. I wasn’t sure if it was a real attraction, or if all boundary witches felt that way about people they’d brought back. I had long since decided not to find out.
Simon, perhaps picking up on my thoughts, took another, more awkward step away from me. “How is Quinn?”
“He’s good,” I said. “He says you owe him a call about playing . . . um . . . Border . . . Redemption? Something like that.” Simon and Quinn had been friends for years, though for appearances’ sake they often pretended they couldn’t stand each other. Until I started sleeping over at Quinn’s, I hadn’t known that they played video games in secret, like a weird online bromance affair. A vampire and a witch being friends wasn’t forbidden or anything, but it was a little weird. Then again, I was a witch sleeping with a vampire, so I was even weirder.
“Right. Yeah, I’ll do that soon,” Simon promised. “And you guys are good?”
Were we? Well, probably as good as a witch-vampire relationship could be. “Yeah. But, Simon—”
“Listen, I should probably get back to it,” he broke in. “Some of these tests are time-sensitive.”