Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) - Melissa F. Olson Page 0,6
myself by figuring out why Maven had called me in on a Tuesday. I had fallen into the habit of dropping in at Magic Beans, Maven’s twenty-four-hour coffee shop, on Sunday and Thursday nights to see if she had any daytime errands for me. A summons tonight meant some sort of Old World emergency, which was bad.
On the other hand, if there was a problem, Quinn would be there—we did this job together—and I was looking forward to seeing him. In theory, we’d been dating for six months now, but the first few months of that had been spent dealing with the aftermath of the Unktehila’s rampage. It hadn’t just killed people in Boulder; it had also attacked a spa in Indian Springs, leaving behind a lot of evidence and plenty of witnesses. Before confronting the creature, we’d arranged for a vampire to wait at the main exit of the spa to catch the people who were stampeding out of the building. She had used vampire mind control—“pressing minds”—to convince them nothing had happened. But a few people slipped the net, including a very sweet and unfortunately photogenic young mother and her toddler, whom the Unktehila had briefly cornered. The young woman was already on the nightly news screaming “giant snake monster” while the rest of us were still off dealing with the bloodshed.
I had to admire the way Maven had handled the whole thing. The official story she’d cooked up was great: some of the natural chemicals used in the spa went bad and were circulated in the air, causing temporary (but harmless) hallucinogenic effects. Several spa clients panicked and stampeded, causing a great deal of damage to the building’s interior.
Maven also sent vampires to work their magic on the authorities, getting them to stay out of the spa building while a “team of specialists” safely aired it out and checked for any people left in the building. The police were so busy calming witnesses, dealing with reporters, and handling the minor injuries caused by the public panic that most of them never did much to investigate the chemical story. Those who did follow up were pressed to stop.
The Grizzly Springs and Spa couldn’t survive the blitz of negative publicity that followed. I’d felt a little sorry for the spa’s owners, an older couple who reminded me of my own ex-hippie parents. But Maven, who has money the way other people have skin cells, quietly made them a very generous offer for the property, which of course they took.
Although everything appeared to be tied up with a neat bow, Quinn and I had been kept busy making sure the frayed ends of the official story held together. It wasn’t enough to just buy the property and shut it down. Stampeding, hallucinating spa guests could explain a great deal of damage, but they definitely couldn’t explain the snake-monster-sized holes in the walls and the pool floor. And as it turned out, the building couldn’t simply be demolished because of the fragile underground tunnels that ran beneath it. So Maven had to renovate the whole place, which meant pressing the minds of a number of construction workers on a regular basis. Pressing minds was Quinn’s department, but I had to hang around during the daytime to make sure it was working, which meant he and I were on opposite schedules for months.
And then there was the problem of the Unktehila’s body. Vampires and werewolves returned to regular human corpses after death, which made body disposal fairly simple. But the Unktehila was something else, an ancient being fused with magic in a way that was intricately tied to its biology. After its death, it had stayed exactly what it was: a fifty-foot snakeoid creature with a diameter of more than six feet. Quinn and I had spent a very messy, very disgusting week sneaking it out of the building in pieces. A lot of pieces.
After months of this around-the-clock work, plus the holidays and a two-month stint as interim store manager at the Flatiron Depot while Big Scott had knee surgery, things had finally begun to settle down for me. I was really hoping that whatever Maven was bringing me into now would be minor. An errand, maybe. Yeah, an errand would be nice.
Chapter 3
Magic Beans takes up a funny little building on Pearl Street, right in the heart of busy downtown Boulder. There are plenty of coffee shops in the area, but Magic Beans is notorious for two things: being open