Boundary Lines Read Online Free

she’d said “job” just now was not the way you talked about picking up dry cleaning or running to the bank—and she’d come to see me herself, which had never happened before. “You didn’t just run into me at the cemetery, then.”
    “No. When you didn’t answer my call, I tracked your phone.”
    Oh. Right. I’d agreed to let Maven keep tabs on me when I’d sworn my oath of loyalty. “What’s the job?” I asked.
    “Two of my people have gone missing,” she replied. “I want you and Quinn to investigate. He’s getting supplies together now.” Her voice was calm, almost dismissive, as though we were discussing her misplaced keys instead of two of her vampires .
    “What kind of supplies?” I asked, wary. Weapons? Was she expect ing a fight?
    She turned her head to study me, and I tried not to squirm. “Quinn explained that there are no werewolves in the state of Colorado, yes? And why?”
    I blinked at the abrupt change in topic. “Um, yes. He said that a crazy alpha werewolf started a war here years ago, and you and Itachi destroyed him and scattered the pack.”
    She nodded. “My covenant with the witches is to keep the werewolves out of Colorado for twenty years. In return, they must serve my interests, should I call upon them.”
    “Right . . .”
    “Every full moon, when the werewolf magic forces them to change, I dispatch vampires to the state border to hunt for signs of pack behavior. The last full moon was four nights ago, on the twenty-seventh,” she explained. “My representative at the northeast border was supposed to return to Boulder on the twenty-eighth, but I didn’t hear from her. One of my representatives at the western edge of the state did not report back either.”
    “You think werewolves got them,” I said, fury building in my chest. In Los Angeles, I’d learned that my sister had been killed by a mad werewolf. The idea of getting to hunt and kill some was disturbingly appealing.
    But for the first time that night, Maven hesitated. “It’s possible,” she said at last. “But after what happened with Itachi . . .” She trailed off, leaving me to fill in the blanks. Itachi had been the leader of all things supernatural in Colorado up until a few weeks ago. Maven had assisted him as a sort of advisor, a lieutenant. But Itachi hadn’t liked having a lieutenant who was so much more powerful than himself, so he had tried to have my niece kidnapped in order to increase his long-term power base. Quinn and I had helped Maven bring him down for good.
    “You think they might have fled the state because they were loyal to Itachi,” I surmised.
    Maven nodded. “There has been some . . . unrest over the last few weeks.” There was a sudden hardness in her tone that I recognized. Someone else in her organization had recently deserted, or threatened to mutiny, something like that. Which explained why she’d taken the time to come talk to me herself, instead of sending a minion. She needed to keep the whole thing quiet until we knew for sure there was a problem. The power structure of the Old World, I’d discovered, depended heavily on perception. The more it seemed like Maven didn’t have control of her territory, the less control she’d have over her territory.
    But she knew Quinn and I could be trusted—well, at least as much as she could trust anyone. After all, Quinn had been publicly outed as Maven’s mole in Itachi’s old organization, and Maven had made sure every vampire within a thousand miles both hated and feared me. If she ever lost control of Colorado, we were both toast—and Charlie would be fair game.
    You chose this, I reminded myself. You made a deal; now honor it. “I’m supposed to work tomorrow morning; should I get someone to cover my shift?” I was still technically employed as a register monkey at the Flatiron Depot, a 24-hour convenience store, though I had cut my hours to part-time and switched to day shifts. Maven gave me a stipend, but