Boundary Born (Boundary Magic Book 3) - Melissa F. Olson Page 0,4
concern and, yes, a little fear. My insides twisted with guilt. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Haven’t done that in a while. Caught me off-guard.”
“It’s okay.” Lily’s eyes dropped to the small body at her feet. “You drained him?”
I nodded. Lily hadn’t actually seen me do this before, but she knew about the time I’d accidentally sucked the life out of all the fish in a small pond during a magic lesson with Simon. “Well, good,” she said shakily. “I’m glad it still worked with the tattoos.”
Right. Lily had created the griffin tattoos on my forearms as a way to help me focus my magic. “I didn’t even consider that it might not,” I admitted. “I just sort of reached.”
She nodded. “We gotta tell Simon the training’s paying off.” She squatted down to get a closer look at the fox, rubbing her ankles with one hand. “Oof. I don’t know what that position would be called—”
“Upside-downward facing dog?” I suggested.
She barked out a laugh. “Yes. Change approved. Anyway, I’m gonna feel it tomorrow.” She leaned forward, peering at the fox’s corpse, until her closeness started to make me nervous.
It was such a normal, nonmagical question that it took me a moment to process it. Something had to have infected the fox, and if there were animals running around with rabies, informing animal control would be the right thing to do. Then again . . . “Do you want to explain how we killed it?”
“Uh, good point. I guess we better call Simon, anyway.”
I checked my watch. Nine-thirty. “He’ll probably be, um . . . working.”
Lily snorted and went to the steps to get her phone out of her bag.
Leaving the fox corpse where it was, I began straightening the furniture while Lily talked to her brother. When he wasn’t doing stuff for the witch clan, Simon worked as an evolutionary biologist at the university. This wouldn’t be the first time I’d called on him for biology help. Nearly six months earlier, an ancient snakelike creature called the Unktehila (or the sandworm, if we’re being informal) started eating people in Boulder, and Simon was a huge part of figuring out what it was and how to kill it. Afterward, he had asked my boss Maven if he could study the remains as part of his ongoing research into Old World biology.
Maven had done him one better. She’d set him up with a small basement apartment in one of the buildings she owned, and refitted it into a sort of makeshift laboratory, although Simon actually lived there as well. I hadn’t spent much time at the basement lab, but last I’d checked it was a pretty depressing place: concrete floors, blank white walls, no TV or music to distract from the hum of equipment. Plus many chunks of dead snake monster. Lily referred to it as the Basement of Dr. Moreau.
After a short exchange, Lily stuffed the phone in her pocket and reported, “He said it sounds like an average case of rabies, and you shouldn’t touch the saliva without gloves.”
I blinked. “That’s it? He doesn’t want to come look at it?”
She rolled her eyes. “He also asked me to remind you that he is not a veterinary pathologist and he hasn’t dissected anything but the sandworm and its pellets since grad school.”
“So he was testy.”
She held up her fingers with the thumb and index half an inch apart. “Little bit.”
I frowned, but this wasn’t the time to discuss Simon’s ongoing withdrawal from the world. “Should we bury it?” Lily asked me, looking at the fox’s corpse again.
“I have a better idea. It’s just . . . grosser.” I went to a shelf above the washing machine and grabbed a couple of rags, positioning them over my hands like makeshift oven mitts. Moving toward the fox, I stepped over it until I had one foot on either side of its head. Then I bent down, held the head carefully with the rags, and tilted it backward. “Plug your ears, Lily,” I advised. She clapped her hands over her ears, and I twisted until the fox’s neck snapped with a sickening crunch.
Even though her ears were covered, Lily jumped, cursing. “Why?”
I straightened, tossing the rags on top of the body and wiping my hands on my gym shorts. It wouldn’t exactly cleanse me of dead fox germs, but it was a psychological thing. “Now I can call my cousin, the