Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) - Melissa F. Olson Page 0,73

of discovery. Or it could mean someone’s limit, like the threshold of pain. Thinking about the word pain made the image of Sam’s desecrated body pop briefly back into my mind, but I pushed it away determinedly.

Nellie, focus on Nellie, I told myself. I was starting to feel more stupid than I had before, which was saying something. I didn’t even know if Nellie’s spirit was normally aware during the day, much less—

“Just sits there staring at nuthin’ like she’s got all the time in the world, when she’s been making a big show of being so busy,” came a cross, familiar voice. It sounded faint, and from no particular direction. “Meanwhile I could be doing naked cartwheels in front of her nose and not get so much as a how-do-you-do—”

“Nellie?” I said, freezing in place like I was an antenna that had just received a flicker from the right channel.

“And now she’s talking to me just like she thinks I’m gonna respond, well!” Usually when Nellie spoke, her voice seemed to come from her body, like a live person. But now it came from everywhere and nowhere, like an echo chamber without the actual echo.

“I can hear you,” I said loudly, feeling jubilant. I scanned the room. “Where are you?”

A pause. “You’re bein’ truthful? You can hear me talk?”

“Yes!”

“I’m . . . oh . . . three steps to your left and four steps forward. You canna see me?”

“No.” Simon had told me that gravitational magic was weaker than witch magic, so maybe that was why I could only hear her faintly. But it was broad daylight outside, and I called that a win. I had made a telephone to the dead.

Excited, I said, “Nellie, I need to talk to you, and I don’t have time to mess around with bargaining and stroking your ego, okay? I don’t know how long this crystal thing will work.”

There was a very tense pause, and then her wary voice said, “I’m listening.”

“Remember I told you there was someone poisoning vampires with belladonna? Well, he’s in Boulder, and he’s interested in me for some reason. He attacked me with wraiths last night. Angry ghosts,” I added, in case Nellie’s terminology was different.

“That where you got that bruise on yer face?” she demanded. “And the one on yer neck?”

“Yes.” My scarf must have slipped, but I didn’t want to let go of the stone to fix it.

There was indiscriminate grumbling. “Doesn’t he know who you are?”

“That’s just it, he knows exactly who I am. He has boundary blood, too, but it didn’t activate. That’s why he uses crystals.” I told her about the wraiths trapped inside the crystals, and how I suspected Emil’s mother had helped him trap them in there.

“Aye, the wraiths, as you call them, they can touch us. To them, we are the gatekeepers. I’ve never heard of ’em being quite this stirred up, though. And I’ve never heard of anyone using them to kill one of us.”

“It didn’t seem like he wanted them to actually kill me,” I allowed, trying to remember Emil’s exact words as he’d sicced the wraiths on me. “It was like he was testing me,” I said. “Trying to determine my worth.”

“Let me think,” was Nellie’s gruff response. I couldn’t see her, but I could imagine her pacing in her thick pumps, her heels drumming soundlessly on the old wooden floors. I held as still as possible, trying not to think about the dampness on my palms. Would it interfere with whatever was allowing me to use the cassiterite? If it did, would I be able to “call” Nellie back?

“When I was alive,” she said finally, “the Christians were mostly done hangin’ witches, but there were still those that hunted us. There was a group that was always looking for those with witchblood—but they were only interested in necromancers. Evocators, we were called then. This group was always offering money, favors, power. Whatever it took to find us.”

“Did they kill the evocators?”

“Can’t be certain,” she replied. “There were hints that you could make a good living if you went with them willingly, but that might have been a lie they spun to get evocators to cooperate. I never heard of anyone going with them and coming back.”

That didn’t exactly seem like information I could run with. “Did this group have a name?”

“Aye. Our mothers used it to scare us. It isn’t easy to frighten children who see their parents speak to the dead, but when we