Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) - Melissa F. Olson Page 0,35

take her to snap out of it if we continue with the transfusions. And test the darts we found to see if they tell you anything about the makeup of the poison. Anything that might help us figure out who did it.”

Simon nodded, brightening. “I can do that.”

“I can help,” Lily chimed in. “I might not know much about evolution, but I know biology as well as Si does.”

“Well, maybe not as well,” Simon said under his breath. Lily just rolled her eyes at him.

“What about us?” I asked Quinn.

“We’re going to figure out who did this and kill them. And we’re going to do it really, really fast.”

The best way to trace the belladonna, Quinn explained, would be to figure out who was dealing in the area. He gave Lily and Simon a sidelong look. “I’m not accusing you guys of anything, but you know most of the witches in the state, and the herbs are witch magic.”

“Fetters,” Simon corrected.

“Hmm?”

“The big three—wolfberry, belladonna, and mandragora,” he explained. “We call them the fetters of magic. And they’re not witch magic. The witches were just the first to discover their uses.”

“Okay,” Quinn said, “But historically, the majority of people who work with the, uh, fetters, are witches, right?”

“Only because we had to,” Lily said, a little snappish. “No one would goddamn help us, and then you-all started treating us like we were drug lords.”

I blinked, surprised. We had suddenly jumped into a very old argument about how vampires hadn’t stepped in to save witches during the Inquisition. If we got into this debate, we might never leave it.

“No one has ever treated you like a drug lord, Lily—” Quinn began, but I poked my free hand out of Simon’s comforter and waved at them to stop.

“Guys, enough. Quinn knows you have nothing to do with the herbs, right, Quinn?” His jaw was a little set, but he nodded. I turned to Simon and Lily. “But if you absolutely had to acquire some belladonna, what would you do? Who would you go to?”

The Pellars exchanged a look, and then Simon shrugged. “Billy Atwood, probably,” he said. “But he’s . . . um, dead.”

That was a nice way to put it. Atwood was the witch I had sort of killed in order to save Simon’s life. “Atwood dealt belladonna?” I asked.

Lily finally tore her glare away from Quinn. “Atwood dealt everything. But there was never much of a market for the fetters in Colorado, since my mother made peace with Maven.”

“Okay, so who would take over Atwood’s business?” I asked. The Pellars shrugged, clueless. “What about the Atwood farm? You said he was the last descendent, but there must have been a cousin or distant uncle or something who would inherit.”

I couldn’t quite interpret the look that passed between the two Pellars—God, I missed sibling insta-communication—but it was Simon who spoke. “Ardie Atwood,” he said softly.

“Who’s she?”

Simon looked at his sister, giving her room to speak. Finally Lily sighed. “She’s Billy’s second cousin, the family black sheep. Because she actually went to college and made something of herself.”

I knew Lily well enough to know when she was holding something back. “And?”

She stared at the table, looking a little sullen. “And she’s my ex.”

Chapter 14

Lily decided that I needed food to go with my IV fluid, and everyone but Quinn needed coffee. She went to the apartment’s little kitchenette and began banging around, muttering under her breath, as Simon told Quinn and me the story.

Lily and Ardie had attended CU at the same time—Lily as an undergrad, Ardie as a masters student in ecology. They knew each other a little from witch business, but CU was the first time they’d met on neutral territory. Both were from old witch families, both were idealistic and optimistic about magic, and both wanted to break out of the family mold. The way Simon told the story, it was almost inevitable that they would start dating.

Unfortunately, both families objected. The Atwoods were homophobic, not to mention worried about dying out. They wanted Ardie to have babies as soon as possible. “They had actually tried to push Ardie at me a few times, hoping to increase their political capital, but I was with Tracy,” Simon told us. “Anyway, they got pissed about Ardie dating a non-reproductive option, even if she was a Pellar.”

Meanwhile, Hazel Pellar couldn’t care less about bisexuality, but she considered her children, and the Pellar line, better than the “backwoods Atwoods,” who would surely drag Lily