really excited and ask a bunch of questions I couldn’t answer.
But he was right; I looked like shit. “I didn’t sleep well last night,” I admitted.
“The nightmares?” he said sympathetically.
For a moment, I just stared at him, because that was exactly the reason.
Three months earlier, Simon’s sister Morgan had dragged me through a tightly packed group of ghosts. They’d died horribly in a fire, and it was like being yanked through their deaths, one after another. It had happened to me before, but never so concentrated, and never wraiths, and never . . .
Anyway. The point was, I hadn’t told Simon, or anyone else, about the tunnel. Even the werewolves who were there with me, like Tobias and Mary, didn’t really understand how bad it had been. How could Simon know I was having nightmares?
When I didn’t say anything, he added, “You had them when we were at the hotel, remember?”
I swallowed a slightly hysterical laugh, forcing myself to take a slow breath instead. Simon thought I was having the Iraq nightmares again. Which, to be fair, I still was. These days it was like a competition in my subconscious for which nightmares would get center stage. “I’m fine,” I told him. “You ready to keep going?”
Simon didn’t move from the wall. “You know, Quinn could do this in about two seconds, by himself,” he grumbled. “Tell me again why we have to help Katia move.”
“We don’t need magic to fix all our problems,” I reminded him. “And you’re helping because you live in the building and had literally nothing else to do today.”
He glared at me but gave a grudging nod. Lily was tied up in clan politics, and unless any major security issues came up, Simon actually had free time. He was an assistant professor at the University of Boulder, but he was on spring break for the next week.
The stairwell door above his head swung open with a little pop of air pressure, and Katia’s head poked through, looking down at us with obvious anxiety. “Are you all right? Did one of the legs break on the couch? Let me help you—”
“It’s okay,” Simon reassured her, straightening up a little bit. “It’s a two-person job; Lex just needed to rest for a second.” Gallantly, he picked up his end again. “Come on, Lex, jeez.”
Katia, who was no fool, gave me an inquisitive look. I waved a hand and got a grip on the underside of the couch again. “Do you want to hold the door open for us?” I offered, more to give her something to do than because we needed it.
“Oh! Right! Yes!” She hurried to push the door open, pressing her back against it to create as much space as possible.
I fought down a smile.
Katia was a boundary witch too, but she had spent nearly twenty years under the control of a cruel, abusive vampire named Oskar. After he was killed Katia hadn’t wanted to swear an oath of loyalty to another vampire, which eventually forced her to leave Colorado. When I’d gotten in trouble in Wyoming, though, Katia had come running—and been beaten nearly to death as a result.
While she was healing, I’d found a kind of loophole to get her back to Boulder: I had started my own witch clan, which meant my aunt could swear loyalty to me rather than Maven. But that still left Katia with the problem of no money or possessions, not to mention finding a place to live.
She had insisted that she didn’t want any handouts—clearly my stubbornness was genetic—but as usual, my family chose to interpret that in their own way. No one wrote her a check, but my dad bulldozed her into taking a job in the Luther Shoes plant. Katia turned out to be great at it.
Two months later, she’d saved up enough for a deposit on an apartment. Her credit history was an issue, but after getting turned down for several places, Katia had finally agreed to take a vacant apartment in a building owned by Maven. And my aunts and cousins had gleefully donated all their old furniture to fill it.
Katia had been stunned by all this generosity—even though I explained that at least two of my aunts had just been looking for an excuse to redecorate—and the rather entertaining result was that she was fiercely protective of her mismatched, secondhand furniture.
In the apartment, Katia guided us to the far wall of the living room. “Let’s try it here,” she said. She nibbled