As usual, the air smelled like formaldehyde, Simon’s cologne and a bunch of other scents I had no interest in identifying. “How’s teaching?” I asked him. “Don’t you have finals soon?”
He blanched for a moment, then shook his head. “Class is over, and my exams are already written, so there’s not much going on this week.”
I nodded. So much for the theory that school was making him look like that. “Have you learned anything new about the sandworm?” I asked tentatively. Six months was a long time to spend examining one dead body—even one as massive as the Unktehila—but Simon was working around a full-time job and his responsibilities for the witch clan. I knew his progress had been a lot slower than he wanted.
He opened his mouth to answer, stopped, and shook his head, looking frustrated. “I’ve managed to confirm a lot of what we suspected about the Unktehila’s evolutionary ties to other species. It has no direct genetic connection to any of the human-evolved magic species, which is interesting. But I still have no idea why magic bonded with only certain creatures, or why the Unktehila was apparently immortal.” His shoulders slumped. “And I’ve mostly run out of things to test.”
“What were you hoping to find?”
“It’s not that I had a specific goal like that, just . . .” he blew out a breath and removed one of his gloves to scrub a palm through his hair.
“What?”
“Generally, when I—or any other scientist—have an experiment, I can consult hundreds of years’ worth of older tests. But this is the Old World, where everyone just writes everything off as ‘magic’ and goes on with their day,” he grouched. If there were rocks nearby, he probably would have kicked at them.
I looked around for a second, and then dragged a metal lab stool over to where he was leaning on a counter. There was an actual kitchen table meant for the consumption of food, but I’d never seen Simon use it for anything but paper storage. “Aren’t there some things that can only be explained with magic?”
I could tell from his face that this was the wrong question. “Maybe, but maybe not. How will we ever know for sure unless we look for answers? But I can’t get any help, and if anyone else in the history of mankind has ever looked into these questions, there’s no way to know.”
“What about the internet?”
He gave me a look like I’d just walked into his class twenty minutes late. “Lex, there are hundreds of thousands of people online claiming to be witches. Even more claiming to use or study magic. How could I begin to weed out the real from the crazies without violating the law about never telling humans about the Old World? And any other actual witches would be bound by the same law, so they wouldn’t be forthcoming either.” He sighed. “It’s impossible. There could be a dozen other Simons out there asking the same questions I am, but there’s no way of finding them or talking to them.”
I studied my friend. All these months of round-the-clock work, and he hadn’t found the answers he wanted so badly. He looked so forlorn that my Luther family reflexes kicked in, and I impulsively stepped forward to give him a hug. “Trust me,” I said over his shoulder. “There are no other Simons out there.”
I didn’t really expect him to reciprocate, but Simon’s arms went tight around me, and he craned his head to bury his face in my neck. “Oh, hey,” I said, surprised. Awkwardly, I rested my hand on his upper back. He was so warm, compared to Quinn, who only maintained as much body heat as he needed to pass for human. “It’s okay, Simon.”
I’m not a psychologist—if you can fail at therapy, I definitely flunked my VA sessions when I returned from Iraq—but even I could see whatever was bothering Simon wasn’t just about the Unktehila experiments. So I held onto him, feeling the exhaustion in his body. He’d been pushing too hard. If he’d really run out of things to test with the Unktehila remains, what was he still doing in this depressing basement? Simon may not have had a wife and kids, but he had two jobs and a family, same as me. Something else was going on.
“Have you heard from Tracy?” I ventured. He and his longtime girlfriend had broken up months ago, but she was a witch, too. They still had to see each other.
Simon stepped back, looking away. “We don’t really talk, no. The whole clan’s been . . . disrupted. We didn’t even celebrate Beltane this year, for the first time since I can remember. I barely feel like a witch these days.”
I winced. I’d worried about how the Pellars were handling Morgan’s betrayal, but I hadn’t stopped to think about how it must be affecting the other witches in Boulder. Morgan was supposed to have been their next leader. And now she was gone, and the remaining Pellars were distressed and off-balance. Of course that would have ripple effects in the clan.
Simon stepped back a little and looked at me, realizing for the first time that I didn’t look like all my clothes came out of a Goodwill store. “Hey, you look beautiful. Quinn’s a lucky guy.”
I blushed and looked away, mumbling a thank-you. I never did learn to take a compliment, but in this case I was especially embarrassed. Simon and Tracy’s breakup was still fairly recent, for one thing, and I didn’t want to rub my relationship in his face. But if I was being really honest with myself, it wasn’t just that. I’d felt a little spark of something between us ever since I’d used my boundary magic to save Simon’s life—or, rather, bring him back to life. I wasn’t sure if it was a real attraction, or if all boundary witches felt that way about people they’d brought back. I had long since decided not to find out.