Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) - Melissa F. Olson Page 0,99

needing to tilt my head up to look at him. He stepped forward, advancing on me. In no rush to kill me.

Okay, yeah. I was out of my league. I was not going to beat him with magic.

“All these tricks,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking as I retreated, “and yet you’re still basically a stud horse that the boundary witches trot out whenever they need to put some life back in the gene pool. No pun intended.”

He paused, and I got the impression that for the first time since we’d met, I’d actually thrown him a little. Or just really, really pissed him off. I kept talking, as quickly as I could get the words out. “I mean, they wake you from the dead, update you on our world, and send you out on errands? ‘Hey, Sandy, here’s a cell phone and a combustion engine, now go get a new broodmare and kill all my enemies.’ And you think I’m the lackey?”

His eyes narrowed into slits, and he raised a hand and flicked another powerful wave of energy at me. I was ready for it, though, and I darted sideways, doing a neat little roll that really hurt the bruises on my back. “You know nothing of me,” he spat.

“So explain it,” I challenged. I was backing up slowly again, but he followed. “You’re the Knights of Death’s secret weapon, sure, but do you ever make any decisions? Come to think of it, can you even make the call on killing me? I mean, here I am with my grade-A uterus and plenty of boundary magic.” I gave him a derisive look. “Don’t you need to run this by someone in charge?”

He shot energy at me again, and again I managed to duck it, but not quite as easily this time. My body was slowing down from all the abuse, and it didn’t help that I’d walked through at least three remnants since I’d come out from hiding. But at least he’d shrunk down a little. He stepped toward me again. I didn’t want to keep backing up—he’d killed all the plants in this area, so moving to a new section with more plant life was not optimal—but I needed to buy a little more time to recover before I could fight him. I took another step back.

“You said Maven was an old enemy,” I tried. “Did she actually do something to you, or were you just kind of ordered to hate her?”

I didn’t actually see steam coming out of his blue ears, but the look on his face pretty much implied it. “She is the last of them,” he hissed, and thankfully he stopped advancing. He wanted to be heard, just like every Bond villain ever. “The last of those who opposed our people, who stood by and allowed evocators to be slaughtered like lambs.”

My brow furrowed, and I didn’t have to fake my confusion. “The last member of what?”

His head tilted, as if to say she didn’t tell you? But he answered me.

“The last of the Concilium.”

Chapter 39

I stared, shocked. Maven had once been part of the ruling body for the entire Old World.

My tired, battered brain began to scrape together all the snippets of information that had been right in front of me. I flashed back to a moment six months ago, when Maven was rambling after she defeated Clara. I did not want to lead, you know. The last time . . . ended badly. At the time, I hadn’t really analyzed the statement, but now I realized she had been referring to the Concilium.

This certainly explained why Lysander wanted to kill Maven, but the way he’d said “the last of them” rang a bell in my mind. “The Concilium didn’t fall because of the colonization into North America, did it?” I asked him.

His blue lips twisted in a sardonic smile. “Of course not. It fell because I killed them. All but the youngest member.”

“How?” I asked. I was so intent on the story that for a moment I forgot to be afraid of him. “How could you kill the strongest vampires in the world? Surely you didn’t press all of them. Eventually they must have caught on.”

He nodded, obviously pleased with himself. “I pressed the first two and poisoned the rest.”

“Belladonna,” I whispered. Maven’s aversion to belladonna. No wonder.

“Yes. After it took effect, I tore their heads off.” His lips pressed together in a thin line. “But one of them escaped