enough to read it, but I could hear the dogs whining behind me and I doubted they would stay put much longer. Besides, this man was beyond medical help.
As I walked back to Chip and Cody, I put the M9 back in my bag and pulled out my cell phone. I probably should have dialed 911, but there were still a few people at Boulder PD who weren’t exactly members of my fan club. Instead, I called my cousin Elise, a detective in the department. She would know it was serious if I was calling her at work.
Sure enough, Elise answered on the second ring. “Lex? Everything okay?”
My mouth felt dry, and I swallowed hard so I could speak. “I’m fine, but I’m at Chautauqua Park, I was hiking, and . . . there’s a body.”
To her credit, Elise hesitated for only about three seconds. “I’m on my way.”
I put the phone away and took out the dogs’ leashes. My hand was shaking a little, and it took two tries to clip the leash onto Cody’s collar. I told myself it was just adrenaline. There was a thigh-high boulder near where I’d turned off the trail. I led the dogs back to it and sat down, staring at the sky without seeing anything.
Just before Christmas, I’d used boundary magic to do something that still horrified me. I had raised the dead.
I’d needed to question someone so I could save my aunt’s life, but the boundary witch who’d told me how to perform the ritual, Nellie, had tried to convince me that bringing someone back was too dangerous. “Once you raise the dead,” she had warned, “they’ll begin to call to you.”
It was an odd statement, especially coming from a ghost, but Katia would have died if I hadn’t intervened. At the time, it hadn’t felt like I had much of a choice.
A couple of weeks later, when Katia and I had both recovered from our injuries, I’d returned to Nellie’s brothel to ask her about the warning. Nellie hadn’t toyed with me, or even demanded some kind of payment for information. She just gave me a surprisingly sad smile and told me I would understand soon.
Was this what she’d meant? Was I now some kind of psychic bloodhound for dead people? Did that include only the recently dead, or people who hadn’t been laid to rest in a grave? What were the rules here?
Every time I thought I understood what it meant to be a boundary witch, I got blindsided again. A lot of that was because I’d been raised with no knowledge of magic. This time, though, I’d walked myself right into this mess without asking any questions. I had raised a fucking dead person. The image of the poor woman’s face filled my head, and I felt a great swell of hatred—for myself, for my magic, for my stupid decisions.
Chapter 2
My thoughts were still churning two hours later, as I sat on the same boulder and watched Elise talking to the small group of people working around the body. One of them was the patrolwoman who’d taken my statement, but I hadn’t bothered to remember anyone’s names. I was starving, I wanted a shower, and I was struggling to stay awake. I’d put Chip and Cody in my car when the police had arrived so they wouldn’t drive everyone nuts, but that had left me with nothing to do but sit and wait for the police to dismiss me. It had been so long since I’d had a full night of sleep, but it wouldn’t look great if I nodded off thirty feet from a dead body.
Finally, Elise finished her conversations and turned to walk toward me. “Well?” I asked my cousin, squinting up at her in the stark afternoon sunshine.
Elise sat down next to me, snapping off a glove so she could push her short honey-blonde hair behind her ear. “I’m not supposed to tell you,” she said in a low voice, “but his name is James Cumberland; he’s a retired professor at CU. His bracelet says he has a heart condition. We’ll do an autopsy, but the medic says this looks like a textbook natural death.”
I breathed out a sigh of relief. It was sad that Cumberland was dead, but if he had been murdered, I would be spending a lot more time with the Boulder Police than I cared to. I was in BPD’s good graces at the moment—against my wishes, Quinn had once pressed