and I was so startled that I flinched away. After a few seconds, though, Beau collapsed onto the ground next to Warton’s remains, and I scooted over to his side. He whispered something, and I had to lean close to his ear to hear it over the low, insistent drone of the alarm. “Something’s . . . wrong.” His eyes were still pleading, and despite his age and authority, for a moment he reminded me of an injured boy who just couldn’t believe his fun evening had gotten dangerous so quickly.
I looked over his body, touching his clothing lightly as I moved the folds aside to check for cuts or bleeding. “I can’t find an injury,” I said.
Automatically, I rested my hand on his forehead, like I did when Charlie had a fever. Beau’s skin was very cool, but no more so than Quinn’s when he hadn’t fed for a while. “You’re not going to die on me, are you?” I asked.
Beau gave a tiny headshake. “I feel . . . awful. But I don’t think it’s getting any worse. What just happened?” His eyes rolled toward me, widening. “Are you all right?”
“I seem to be fine,” I admitted, but then I felt some kind of irritation on my chest, under my clothes. I reached for the cord that held my crystals, pulling it out of my shirt. My mother’s bloodstone looked perfectly fine, but the mahogany obsidian from Quinn . . . it was disintegrating.
“What is that?” Beau said as we watched it crumble away until it was just a pile of dust in my hand.
“Mahogany obsidian. It’s for protection from a psychic attack. Hold on.”
Standing up, I went over and looked at the display where this had started, the one with the mannequins in uniform. The large glass bottle had actually exploded—I could see shards glittering in the exhibit spotlights—but it hadn’t even tipped over the mannequins. The only physical damage seemed to be to the trunk where Tobias landed and the glass case that Warton and Beau had hit.
I looked from the glass shards to the pile of dust in my hand, and then I heard my sister in my head, her voice hushed with awe. Holy shit, Allie. That was a spirit bottle.
I was going to ask what that meant, but then I realized I didn’t have to. Maybe my subconscious was making the right connections, or maybe it was a boundary magic thing, but I just knew.
“Beau,” I said in a shaky voice, “I think I know what happened to your missing ghosts.”
“You’ll have to explain it to me, but not now.” The vampire started to sit up, wincing and holding on to his stomach.
“Are you sure you should—” I began, but he cut me off.
“I pressed the night guard to go home, which means the police will get that alarm,” Beau said. “I need to press them, clean up here, and take care of poor Warton.” He looked down mournfully at the empty suit where his friend used to be, then wrenched his gaze back to me. “You should probably go make sure your friend doesn’t eat the police when they arrive.”
“Oh, shit.” I hurried back through the exhibit until I reached the glass doors leading into the lobby. Tobias had managed to slide the door closed after him, but I wasn’t sure how much it would protect me if he’d truly lost it. I stood next to the wall and craned my neck to peek through the glass.
Just a couple of feet away, on the other side of the door, I could see a tangled pile of clothing and Tobias’s sturdy brown boots. Beyond them, an enormous sandy-brown wolf was pacing back and forth in a familiar anxious lope. I went still, viscerally reminded of when I’d first seen him, prowling a cage at the animal preserve. He’d barely made it a step away from the door before he’d started pulling off his clothes.
I took my cell phone out of my pocket—the blast didn’t seem to have affected it—and called Mary, Tobias’s alpha.
“Lex?”
“Hi, Mary. I’ve got a bit of a situation here.”
“Is Tobias okay?” she demanded.
“Yes,” I answered immediately, because I understood she meant physically. “I mean, he looks okay. But he changed without meaning to.”
There was a sharp intake of breath. The full moon had been two weeks earlier, so Tobias shouldn’t have needed to turn until we got back to Colorado. “Tell me what happened.”
“I don’t really know what happened. I