Boneyard (The Thaumaturge Series Book 2) (3 page)

“What's the big deal?” I said, knowing it would irritate him. “So the EMTs call me. More work, more money.” I shrugged again. “If I can help people ”

He gripped harder and jerked me around until I faced him. His mouth drew into a line in the middle of his dark beard and a vein pulsed on his forehead.

“You cannot draw attention to yourself,” he said, with a little shake of my arm.

“I'm not,” I snapped. When I moved, it brought me right into the circle of his arms and our eyes met.

“Especially now,” he insisted and I looked away. He didn’t let me; he grabbed my chin and forced me to face him.

“The last thing we need is a cop sniffing around,” Leo said. “Why do I have to explain this to you? If anyone finds her, you go to prison, Ebron.”

“
I
got to prison?” I snapped. “So I’m taking the fall for you? I’m not the one who killed her, Leo. I’m not the one who fucking
stole
her body.”

He scowled. “No one will go to prison, not if you stop fucking bringing
cops
around. What is the matter with you?”

“I’m trying to act normal! He’d be suspicious if I hadn’t let him inside!”

“We have to figure something out,” Leo said. “Soon.”

“You think?” I yelled, shrill and urgent.

Turns out that nothing really tests the mettle of one’s relationship like a good old-fashioned grave robbing. Maybe we could have weathered the whole murder thing—I’d killed Corvin, Leo killed who knows how many people—but grave robbing? On top of the murders? I couldn’t cope.

On its own, grappling with my new identity as a killer took a lot more brainpower than I had anticipated. I couldn't sleep without having nightmares of Corvin's brains blown out over the hardwood floor. I kept feeling the blood finely mist my face as I pulled the trigger. I couldn't concentrate. I kept snapping at people when they tried to talk to me.

And only two days after the showdown at my tea shop, when the news of an exsanguinated body spread through Heckerson, Leo admitted to me that the body was Morgan, the powerful witch who’d attempted to kill me and my cousin Cody. In Cody’s case, actually, she’d succeeded. I hated her. I had the chance to kill her myself, but couldn’t make myself cross the line. Hearing Leo confess that he’d done what I couldn’t... well, I’d be lying if I said that I mourned her death.

I couldn’t really bring myself to regret Morgan’s death. What I did regret was that somehow in the confusion of that night, Leo had dumped her body behind a gas station. I didn’t really have the whole story; he seemed embarrassed about it. He’d intended to go back for her, he told me defensively—but a dumpster diving drunk found her first. Thus necessitating the grave robbing. Body snatching. Corpse retrieval operation. Whatever.

Plus, my cousin Cody wouldn't return my phone calls and since he’d been killed that night, and then subsequently resurrected, I felt like we should probably clear the air. He'd suffered a few shocks himself in the last week, not the least of which was finding a dead body and then seeing that body brought back to life, so I wasn't without sympathy.

And then... I had told Leo I loved him. And wouldn't ya know, he had told me he loved me back. That was taking some getting used to as well, because even after all the years of pining and wanting and itching for him, there really hadn't ever been a time where I had thought that he might have felt the same way about me. I hadn't ever let myself hope that he might want me back.

My whole life felt like a shattered mirror. Every now and then there were flashes of what it had been, but I kept cutting myself on the pieces.

“I want to go to bed,” I told Leo and he sighed. He had a leather jacket clad arm on either side of me, pinning me right up against the warmly whirring dishwasher. I wanted to sink down into his arms, press my face into his neck and close my eyes.

“We need to talk about this tomorrow,” he said, his eyes boring into me.

“Yeah,” I said. “We do. In particular, we need to talk about moving her. She can’t stay in my shop, Leo.”

“You want her here?” he countered. “I can stick her in the shed.”

“I didn’t want any of this,” I snapped. “And I want her gone.”

“Oh, wah,” he said. “Fucking buck up. No one is going to find her. Unless, of course, you keep bringing fucking
cops
around!”

“I’m going to bed,” I said flatly.

“Fine,” he said and when I pressed against his arm, he let me go. I made a hasty retreat to my bedroom, my heart pounding. In the bathroom, I peed again, and then fished my phone out of my pocket.

I had six missed phone calls. Three from Dahlia. One from Chad. One, thank God, from Cody.

And one from an unknown number.

I wanted nothing more than to take a hot shower and then sink down into my bed and forget the whole miserable day. But I couldn't help the nagging little thought that maybe someone needed me. Maybe I could make a deposit against the bounced check that was my life. I checked the timestamp. Missed call, nine minutes ago.

I hit redial. Three rings. Then a woman's voice, high, frantic.

“Hello? Hello?”

“This is Ebron White, I had a missed call—”

There was a gasp and a cry and then a rush of words, and then I hung up and got dressed and intercepted Leo just as he was starting out the door.

I tossed him my truck keys. “There's a dead guy. I need you to drive me. I'm still drunk.”

“Fine,” he said. “But this has got to be the last one, Ebron.”

“Fine,” I said and followed him out the door.

Chapter 3

“Here,” Leo said, shoving a Styrofoam cup of gas station coffee into my hands. He slid into the driver’s seat and slammed shut the door.

“Did you...” I stared at him expectantly. He rolled his eyes, but tossed me the Reese’s Pieces I had requested.

“You need to eat more protein,” he said, watching me tear into the candy.

I stopped and rolled my eyes at him. There was an oral sex joke in there somewhere, but I just didn’t have the energy. “Just drive.”

“Seriously, that's just carbs. You need—”

“Leo,” I warned, popping a handful in my mouth.

“I saw this documentary on Netflix, about sugar consumption and—”

“Drive, Leo!”

He grunted, but put the truck in gear and flipped a U-turn to get back onto the road. I found it weird that he buckled up. I wondered if a vampire had ever gotten in a car accident and been hospitalized. The doctors would have to know, right away, that something wasn't right. Did stuff like that happen? Were there really Men in Black, running around smuggling whiplashed vampires out of hospitals and gathering alien technology?

“Did you talk to Cody yet?” Leo asked out of the blue.

“No. He won't call me back.” But he had. That's right. I thumbed through my phone, looking at Cody's name on my missed calls list.

“Give him time.”

“I am.” I opened a new text message, selected Cody's name, and stared at the blank screen.

“He found out about you, about me, got killed, got resurrected—all in one night.

“I know. I was there.” I sipped my coffee. Leo had thoughtfully added vanilla creamer in it, like he knew I liked.

“I'm just saying that it's a lot.”

I typed
Sorry I missed your call. Worked late. Talk tomorrow?
and then stared at the phone.
I hated how it sounded, all needy and apologetic. I got that Cody was freaked out, yeah, but it wasn't like he had to live that shit every day. Not like me. I pushed send and looked back out the window. Leo gently took my phone out of my hands and the glow of the screen bathed his face in soft light. We waited at a stop light, the streets outside empty and dusted with snow. The turn signal
tocked tocked
, loud in the silence of the truck. When the light turned, Leo drove the truck north. We headed towards the foothills, dark and shrouded by thick winter clouds.

“You have to turn around,” I said after a while.

“No, I'm using the GPS on your phone. This is the right way.”

“No, it's not,” I said in a sing-song and he growled.

The headlights illuminated frozen pastures cut by barbwire fences. The moon overhead shone full and bright, and for once the truck pumped out warm air. I ran my fingers over a ragged tear in the bench seat upholstery and wished that Leo and I weren't arguing so that I could put my head in his lap and go to sleep.

“So uh...” Leo cleared his throat suddenly and I looked at him dully. He didn't turn his head and I studied his profile in the dim light of the dashboard.

“What?” I asked, when nothing else was forthcoming.

“What's with the mid-week bender?”

I sighed. Chad asking that was one thing but Leo lived with me, part-time at least, and he knew my drinking habits well. I liked a beer as much as the next guy, but I rarely drank on week-days and I didn't much like getting drunk. I hated being out of control, even temporarily.

“Dahlia took me out after work,” I said and it sounded lame even to me. Because Dahlia and I had gone out after work dozens of times and I had never before gotten shit-faced and escorted home by a cop.

“Okay,” he said carefully. It was the careful part that gave me pause, and I took a fortifying sip of coffee. Leo was always careful of me physically—I trusted that he would never hurt me—but he had never spared my feelings before.

I squinted at him. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Leo.
What
?”

“You're avoiding me.”

I scoffed because it was expected. It was instinct. Leo and I had been, well,
Leo and I
, for going on ten years and we both knew the rules, both knew the peaks and valleys of our relationship, the well-worn trails of what was acceptable. Expected: Leo being emotionally distant. Expected: me sucking up every scrap of his attention like a friend-zoned teenager. Not expected: me to lie to him and certainly not me to avoid him.

“I'm not,” I insisted.

“You’re lying,” he said. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “This is because of the girl? The witch? Because of... what happened?”

“I’m not—it’s not—”

“Ebron,” he said, soft and pleading. “Fucking tell me.”

“I—” I opened my mouth and all the words got bottlenecked there, jamming against my tongue and I couldn't force a single one out. It was all too much; the whiskey and chocolate and taco meat in my stomach and the lies hanging between us and the dead girl, there was always some dead body I was dealing with. And I was a murderer too.

“Pull over,” I said.

He shot me a dark glance. “There's no shoulder on this road.”

It was true. We'd turned off the interstate and were bumping along a lightless rural route, the potholes packed with muddy snow.

“Pull over,” I said again. “I got to puke.”

“Ugh.” He rolled his eyes and slammed on the brakes, making me jerk forward. When the truck stopped, I scrambled out just in time to spew bitter black sludge all over the icy road.

I braced my hands on my knees and spat noisily a few times, then leaned back against the side of the truck. The cold wind felt like a balm on my flushed skin. Sweat froze against my forehead and I closed my eyes.  My heart thudded in my chest. I wanted the cold wind to hollow me out and leave me nothing but a husk. I wanted the night to be over.

When I climbed back into the truck, I felt about a thousand times better though, and I gave Leo an embarrassed little nod.

“Sorry,” I said.

He wrinkled his nose. “Your breath smells.”

I took a sip of my coffee and he scowled harder.

“That's not going to help.”

“Just drive please,” I said, and rolled the window down to get a refreshing burst of cold over my face. He reached across my knees to dig through the glove box, triumphantly unearthing a scratched tin of Altoids. He shoved them at me and I crunched through three of them, grimacing at their bite. Who liked the cinnamon ones anyway? Nobody.

We drove in silence for a while, farther up the bumpy rural road. As we gained in elevation, it started to snow more heavily and the headlights illuminated the blinding flakes. Leo squinted into the windshield.

“Are you sure this is the right way?” I asked, glancing down at the GPS app opened on my phone.

“Yes. It's right at the end of this road.”

“Where?” I peered into the darkness. “I don't see a turn off.”

“Past those trees.”

“There're trees everywhere,” I grumbled. “We're in the middle of the mountains.”

But then I did see the side road, barely visible, covered in snow and leading into tree-lined darkness. Leo turned off, carefully as the truck slid, and we inched along, bumping and dipping over the uneven road. I braced my hands against the cold plastic of the glove box. The seat belt cut into my neck every time I jolted forward. All the rocking made me have to pee again. The road narrowed after only a few yards and then dense trees closed in around us, branches scraping against the windshield and catching against the front of the truck.

“I'm pretty sure this is the start of a horror movie,” Leo said, giving me a tentative smile.

I snorted. “Two guys alone in the middle of the woods? I'm pretty sure that's the start of a porn.”

“Bow chicca bow wow,” he sang and smiled at me, a gentle, grateful, smile, and my chest loosened. I took another sip of coffee and with some relief thought that I was finally nearing sobriety.

Abruptly, the road dipped and the truck slid again on an icy patch. I caught a glimpse of lights up ahead and jerked my chin in that direction.

“See that?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Christ, you better charge for mileage.”

“No kidding.”

The trees cleared enough to reveal a small dwelling, half hidden in the gloom of the forest. A faint light shone from the small window beside the building's door, but I felt no reassurance. The building—structure, really—sat squat and compact, and in the darkness I couldn’t make much sense of it. I could see bare poles made up the front, a sort of ramshackled cabin. Towards the back, half lost in shadow, the structure stretched out, a dilapidated trailer messily tacked on the side. It hardly looked habitable, let alone inviting.