Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) - Melissa F. Olson Page 0,81

She seemed awfully fragile for someone so swollen with life.

Kirsten mumbled something under her breath, scratched a circle around herself in the dirt, and sprinkled the herbs. I wasn’t sure what was happening until a sudden lack of light caught my attention. The stars were as bright as ever, but the lights I’d left on in the house had been extinguished. My busted car had vanished from the driveway, and even Kirsten’s rental car seemed to have disappeared from the curb. The house looked completely deserted.

I gaped. “How did you do that?”

Kirsten gestured for me to help her stand, which I did. “It’s tricky, finding a spell that more or less works on witches,” she said cheerfully. “The magic in your blood would block most things I could throw at you directly, but this isn’t a spell to affect you—it’s a spell to bend light. You’re just seeing the effect, like anyone else would. But it only works from a distance.”

“So we can move around inside the house—”

“And it’ll still look deserted, yes. Until first light.”

Within a few minutes we were settled at my kitchen table with tea for me and hot chocolate for Kirsten. She wrapped both of her small hands around the mug, and I marveled at her. She may have dressed like Lily, but she reminded me so much of Maven: the same delicate looks that belied extreme strength and power.

I was dying for her to start explaining, but she sat there for a moment, and I realized she was trying to figure out where to begin.

“Jesse said you only learned about being a witch fairly recently,” she said at last. “Is that true?”

I realized, then, that this woman either didn’t know what I was or was taking the news better than any witch I’d met yet. I was hoping for the latter, but decided not to mention the whole “death in my blood” thing unless I had to. “Yes. But the witches here have been giving me lessons. I’m catching up.”

“Have they explained what boundary witches did during the Inquisition in Europe?”

It seemed like an odd place to begin, even if she did know what I was, but I started to nod. Then I reconsidered what Simon and Lily actually said versus what I’d sort of pieced together from context. “I was told that boundary witches were particularly upset by the persecution of witches during the Inquisition. They wanted to raise the dead and send them after the Inquisitors. I got the impression that a few of them even did it. Then they were stopped.” It occurred to me for the first time that I’d never actually asked what had stopped them. Suddenly that seemed like a pretty enormous oversight.

Kirsten just nodded again, taking a ladylike sip of her hot chocolate. “That’s the cleaned-up version, yes.”

“So what’s the real version?”

“They did raise the dead and send it after the Inquisitors. That part is true.” It should have sounded ridiculous, but her voice was so solemn it scared me. “But it wasn’t an army of the dead, like something out of a horror movie. It was just one person. And he wasn’t really a human.”

“What was he, then?”

She put the mug down, squaring her shoulders. “The first boundary witch.”

Chapter 33

“Technically,” she corrected herself, “I suppose you’d say he was—is—a conduit.”

I frowned. “I’ve heard that word before.”

“I’m sure you have. Conduits are the common ancestors of vampires, werewolves, and witches. You could think of them as . . .” she paused, searching for a word, then gave a little smile. “Super-witches. They were so powerful that it scared even them. In fact, they were too powerful to survive, as a species, because they kept killing each other, or killing humans.” Her smile turned wry. “Historically, humans do not care for being vastly overmatched. Anyway, eventually there was a speciation, and conduits became the three groups you know today.”

“When did this happen?” I asked. “When did humans get magic?”

She gave a little shrug. “Best guess? Early Bronze Age. But that’s more of a vampire question. Most of the witch records about ancient history have been lost over the years, in part thanks to the Inquisition. At any rate, just prior to the speciation, some conduits were born with certain strengths. Like how some modern witches specialize in a certain kind of magic.”

I thought of Sashi. “I’ve met witches like that.”

She nodded. “In this case, the conduit had a talent for interacting with the dead. He was born with it,