Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) - Melissa F. Olson Page 0,45

God for that. Mom called me this morning, worried it might have been an Old World attack.”

“Has Maven improved at all?” I asked.

“That’s kind of the problem,” he began. “Still no heartbeat, and her color isn’t any better than it was last night—I’ve been taking photos and comparing them. It’s like she’s frozen exactly where she was after you fed her last night.”

“You mean after Lily fed her.”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t. That’s why I called you here. Lily and I have been running tests with samples of Maven’s blood.” He gave me a rueful smile. “It’s possible that Lily’s a tiny bit better than I am at human and vampire physiology, but don’t tell her I said so. Anyway, we examined both the intravascular changes to Maven’s blood, compared to a sample of Quinn’s, and the belladonna has created a reaction that pretty much mimics the effects of disseminated intravascular coagulation—”

“Simon,” I interrupted. “I need the idiot’s guide to this explanation.”

He sighed and rubbed his face with his hands. “Right, sorry. Basically, we looked at how different donor blood reacts to her tainted blood. Vampire blood does almost nothing for her. Human blood sustains her, so she doesn’t starve, but it doesn’t actually counteract the belladonna. It will just keep her in stasis until the poison eventually wears off. Nellie’s method of bloodletting may help a little, but judging from the reaction I’m getting from her cells, I’d estimate six to eight weeks before it’s out of her system.”

I cursed and got up from the table, pacing a little. That was way too long. We were going to have to go with the interim solution, but who could hold the state for two months? Clara was powerful, but I’d pressed her hard to keep watch over Charlie, and I’d never tried to undo a press. Besides which, I had no idea how to organize Maven’s contacts to get Clara back from Florida.

Simon’s voice behind me was soft. “Um, there’s one other thing, though.”

I spun around to look at him. “Your blood is different,” he said. “It’s like . . . well, ‘antidote’ is too strong a word, but it actively counteracts the belladonna. I can’t really explain it, except—”

“Death in my blood,” I finished for him. “The connection between boundary magic and vampires.”

He nodded. I started pacing again, planning now. “So I donate again tonight. And tomorrow night. Lily can keep giving me IVs—”

“No, Lily can’t,” came a tired voice from the doorway. I looked up and saw Lily leaning against the doorframe, yawning. Her hair was mussed and she looked nearly as exhausted as Simon.

“Sorry, baby sister,” Simon murmured. “We didn’t mean to wake you up.”

She shrugged it off. “Too much coffee to sleep well, anyway.” She began eyeballing my coffee cup where I’d abandoned it on the table. I motioned for her to help herself, and she seized it like Charlie attacking graham crackers. After her first sip, she turned to me. “Lex, you can’t donate again for at least a couple of weeks. Your body can’t handle it.”

“I can’t—”

“Die, I know,” Lily interrupted. “But you don’t heal any faster than anyone else. Your body can’t replace blood any faster.”

“So I’ll feel shitty for a few days,” I reasoned. “How bad could it be?”

Simon arched an eyebrow and gave me a little you shouldn’t have said that smile. Lily marched over to his whiteboard and picked up a marker. “The human body is roughly seven percent blood. You weigh . . . what? A hundred and twenty pounds?”

“One twenty-five.”

She wrote the number on the board and did some complicated math that involved long division. “That means your body has approximately three point seven liters of blood, which is, what? Almost eight pints?”

She glanced at Simon, who’d pulled out his phone and was using a calculator app. He nodded. “Seven point eight.”

“Right.” She wrote the number on the board. “Last night you lost almost a third of your blood. You were damned lucky you didn’t go into shock. If we did that to your body every night, without allowing it time to replenish—” She shook her head. “You could go into a coma.”

“So? I’d wake up, right?”

Simon and Lily exchanged a look of annoyance. “It could cause neurological damage, Lex,” Simon told me.

“We are not taking that chance.” Lily’s voice was firm.

I threw up my hands. “What choice do we have? We’re talking about risking the possibility of neural damage to one person versus the possibility

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