The Dead (The Thaumaturge Series Book 1) (18 page)

I turned away, and busied myself with tidying up my work area. My hands shook when I lifted a pot of herbs and I put it down abruptly. Marcus watched with laser focus, and he opened his mouth to say something else, but I held up a finger, dragging my vibrating cell phone out of my pocket.

It was a text from Dahlia. It read only “Bryler hasn’t seen them. Sorry.”

Frustrated, I shoved the phone back in my pocket and looked back at Marcus. He raised an eyebrow.

“Nope,” I said. “No luck.”

I registered the disappointment on his face as his shoulders slumped a little.

“So what do we do now?” he asked.

The memory of his blood on my hands came back to me, unbidden, and piggybacking on that, the thought of Aubrey, laying there gutted like a deer. Then I knew exactly what I had to do.

It wasn't hard to track her down. Heckerson is a small town, and while I kept to myself as much as possible, I lived here my whole life and families knew each other. Aubrey Lindstrom lived with her parents and sisters in a modest two-story house pleasantly situated right next to Rock Creek, making it feel secluded and rural, though the house was near the center of town.

“So when did this happen?” Marcus asked. He sat beside me in my idling truck. Close beside me. He had slid across the bench seat until his thigh pressed against mine and the gearshift stuck up smack dab between his legs. I gave him a look and he just smiled back, all coy. I tried to think of the last time someone other than Leo or Cody had been in my truck and couldn't think of anyone. Leo certainly never sat close enough to me for our thighs to touch. I drove to Aubrey's house with determination, handling the stick shift like it was a live grenade.

“Thursday night,” I said, watching out the window for some sign of life at the house. It was Sunday, after all, and most of the good people of Heckerson would be in the middle of the late morning church service, or getting in line for the Dinner Bell's brunch buffet.

“The night we got into town,” he said softly. He turned to look at me. His proximity made meeting his eyes uncomfortable. His warm breath ghosted across my cheek. “You said that we had similar injuries. What exactly were those injuries, Ebron?”

“Shh for a second, okay?”

“I'll find out when we talk to her.”

“You aren't going in there with me.”

Marcus went stiff at my side, and he half turned, shoving his knee up against the back rest until he faced me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his face like storm cloud brewing, but I just swallowed and focused on the house.

“Ebron.” he grabbed my shoulder, and twisted me towards him. I didn't like that, being touched without permission. Instinctively I threw him off with a violent jerk of my arm. It wasn't a shove, not quite, but he wasn't expecting it and my elbow connected with his chin hard enough to make him gasp and double over.

“Shit.” I unbuckled my seatbelt and moved toward him, taking his shoulders in my hands and looking down into his face. “Are you okay? Sorry, I didn't mean -”

He kissed me, and the shock of it drove any other thoughts right out of my mind.

His mouth was very warm against mine, his lips soft and open. Sometimes Leo had a tendency to kiss me like he was trying to bite me through his lips; this was nothing like that. It was tender and slow, with an edge of uncertainty that made it all the more sweet. He brought his lips together a little, and then opened them again, deepening the kiss, and I felt something in me loosen a bit.

I cupped his jaw between my palms, feeling the scratchiness of his whiskers and the smooth satiny skin below his ears. He moaned a little, and the sound further enflamed me. His lower lip caught between mine, and I ran my tongue over it, tasting him finally.

We broke off, breathing into each other's mouths. No part of our bodies touched but our lips, and my hands on his face, but I felt powerfully connected to him. When his green eyes finally opened and crinkled a little at the edges as he smiled, I felt like they were a lifeboat bearing me out a storm.

“See?” he said softly, and I felt his lips move against mine as he spoke. “That wasn't so hard, was it?”

I wanted to laugh at that, at such a stupid thing to say. Because it had been hard. I felt like I had crossed some line, that something in me was changed. I wanted to cry for some inexplicable reason, and so I kissed him again, more deeply this time and our tongues met somewhere in the middle.

We quickly found our rhythm, our mouths meeting to slide together. He drew back a bit, taking my lips between his and peppering them with tiny kisses that felt like they were on fire. His hands slid up past my shoulders, knocking my ball cap off and knotting in my hair. He tugged a bit, and I responded by finally putting my arms around him and dragging his body the rest of the way across the bench seat and almost into my lap. His legs tangled with the gearshift and the truck gave a little lurch, breaking us apart.

Which was, of course, when it occurred to me we were parked in the middle of town, with houses only a few hundred yards away. Though we were partially obscured by the trees and the dim lighting, we were terribly exposed.

“Wait, wait,” I said, pulling back. His fingers tugged my hair, and he laughed a little as he pulled them out.

“What?' he said, his eyes bright, full of warmth.

“We're in the middle of the street. Anyone could walk by.”

If he was disappointed, he didn't show it. He just nodded, and took a few deep breaths, cocking his eyebrow . “Damn,” he said breathlessly. “I knew it was going to be good with you.”

I smiled, but doubt was eating at me. Was I really doing this? Was I really going to do this? It seemed more and more likely I was. My hands were on his sides, feeling the slow rise and fall of his breaths. I fixed my gaze on his mouth, and he slowly licked his lips. A shiver went through me at the promise of that mouth.

“Later then?” he asked.

I swallowed hard.
Such a bad idea
. But I nodded anyway, licking my lips and tasting him there.

“So what's the plan then?” he jutted his chin towards Aubrey's house.

“I just need to talk to her. I want to see if she remembers anything.”

“How bad was she hurt?”

“Pretty badly.”

“But you fixed her?”

I looked at him warily, keeping my face as neutral as I could. “What do you mean?”

“Come on, Ebron. I'm not stupid. There isn't a scratch on me. But I was covered in blood when I woke up at your house. Drenched in blood, actually, right? So much blood you had to throw away my clothes. So where did it come from?”

I didn't respond, my mind racing. No easy lies came to me, nothing plausible that made any sense. Fuck, I should have thought about that, it was so obvious. Of course he had been covered in blood. I was the one who had stripped him down and helped him into the shower.

“Well, come one,” Marcus said, all snotty again. “I'm just waiting to hear the brilliant lie you come up with.”

“That was fast,” I shot back, vaguely disgusted with myself. Last night, Leo had suggested holding Marcus hostage and I had resisted. I kind of wished now that I had agreed to that. Maybe if I thought about him in those terms, as my prisoner, as the enemy, I could get myself in the right headspace and stop thinking about the way his mouth felt under mine, and how his hips had made this jerky little circle when I touched him. It was exactly because of shit like this that I always felt like I was a walking bruise, wincing and flinching all the time. I couldn't ever see the lines people drew.

“What?” he said.

“A minute ago your tongue was in my mouth and now you're insulting me. Just saying. That was fast.”

“Ebron . . .” he sighed tiredly, like I was just so fucking exhausting and went back to staring out the window at the weakly shining sun.

“I can't talk about it now,” I said, hoping that that was enough to placate him.

“Why? Need to wait to get permission from your vampire?”

“Because I don't trust you!” I snapped back, stung.

“Well, that was fast.” He looked back at me, and I noticed for the first time his eyebrows could look exceptionally cruel. “A minute ago you were kissing me and now I can't be trusted? Geez, Ebron.”

I wanted very badly for the whole conversation to be over. I thought about just putting the truck in drive and heading back to the trailer. There I at least could leave him to his own devices and just disappear into my bedroom. Just get the fuck away from him. Or, better yet, I could just lean across him, open the passenger side door, and shove him out with a boot to his ass. Then he wouldn't be my problem anymore.

But I wanted to have something to give to Leo, any bit of information, that would sort of, you know, cushion the blow for when he came home and saw that Marcus was there. I wondered if he would be able to smell Marcus on me, on my mouth, and decided I had better not think about that. Would Listerine do anything for me? Of course, he would still smell me on Marcus.

“I'm going to go knock on the door,” I said, as cordially as I could manage. “Please wait here.”

“Fine. Leave the truck running, it's freezing.”

A lot of things came to my head, like
spoiled brat
, and
gas ain't free, money bags.
I considered turning off the truck and taking the keys with me, just to be a dick, but it
was
cold out, and it seemed like a pointless argument anyway. He didn't look at me as I slid out of the truck and slammed the truck behind me. He wouldn't steal the truck, I told myself. He wouldn't.

There were no signs of life at Aubrey's house. My boots slopped loudly over the slushy sidewalk, sounding harsh and exaggerated. The hem of my workpants stained muddy brown. There were no other footprints in the remaining snow, but the driveway looked dry, so I couldn't tell if any cars had come or gone.

Once I got up to the front door, though, my courage completely failed me and I loitered there, shifting back and forth from one foot to another. It wasn't as though I had never spoken to one of the people I had resurrected - I had, numerous times, because it was a small town. I usually only had three or four resurrections every year--almost always local people. Still, it was almost a couple dozen people running around that I had brought back from the great beyond.

Not all of them remembered me; some, like Marcus, had very few memories of the events immediately before and after their deaths, but others recalled everything. And of course, the dead people don't haul themselves to my doorstep. They always brought at least one other person with them, people who had heard whispers about me, desperate enough to set aside their fear and doubt. They were the ones that get me business, by word of mouth, hush-hush conversations at bars.

I was grateful for the business, but I fucking hated running into these people afterward, in the toilet paper aisle or when I picked up Johnny’s heartworm medication. I knew they were scared of me. Fuck, I scared myself.

But I never - ever - questioned someone about how they died, about the circumstances of their death. I didn't want to know, didn't want to get mixed up in anyone else's business. Keeping a low profile was hard enough, and I barely succeeded at that.

Not to mention my worst nightmare--that some religious fanatics or, God-forbid, the US government heard about me. No, I didn't talk, and I strongly encouraged my, uh,
clients
, to keep quiet, too. Yeah, it was paranoid, especially for a little Podunk town like Heckerson, but after seeing the damage people did to each other, I didn't want to take any chances.

I knocked before I could talk myself out of it. I didn't feel well, and when I glanced back at my truck and saw Marcus's blurry face behind the windshield, I felt even worse. Maybe she wasn't home. Maybe Leo would show up tonight and announce he had discovered a bear killed Aubrey, and we could stick Marcus on a bus and life would go back to normal.

Nothing happened behind the door. I stepped back, bracing the expensive glass storm door against my back and looked over the rail to peer into the front window.

And saw Aubrey holding the curtain aside, staring back at me.

A weird yelpy grunt got stuck in my throat and I jerked backwards, hitting both my elbows and my head on the glass door behind me. It made a rattling crash. For a second I worried I had broken the damn thing, but it held. When I looked back to the window, Aubrey was gone, the curtain rippling into place.

There was a scrambling noise behind the door as the locks were clicked and then the door cracked open. Aubrey's pale face appeared in the space between the door and the door jam, like Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
. She looked just as deranged.

“Aubrey?” I said cautiously, really not liking the crazy-eyed stare she had going on. Her hair hung in limp clumps around her incredibly pale face.

“Yes.” Her voice sounded strong, though, and she opened the door a little wider, looking up at me. I hadn't realized when she was lying dead on my table how tiny she was. She couldn't have been over five feet.

“I'm Ebron?” I said, completely winging it. “I, uh, helped you out the other night?”

“Yes,” she said again. “I remember.”

“You do.” I swallowed, shoving my hands in my pockets and then taking them out again. “Can I ask what exactly you remember?”

She considered me, giving me a long hard look that made me uncomfortable. I really hadn't expected her to be so self-contained. I had limited experience with teenage girls, but I assumed she would be flighty and pepper her speech with incomprehensible text talk. This girl was sizing me up like she was about to go for my throat.

“It's cold,” she said finally, opening the door the rest of the way. “Come in. Take your shoes off, please. My mom's rules.”

“Sure,” I said. I cast a look over my shoulder towards the truck, which looked pitifully lonely in the gray light. I couldn't see Marcus now - he was just a blurred shape behind the windshield.

I followed Aubrey into the front hall. She continued on, her bare feet padding quietly over the thick, white carpet, but I stopped short and looked down at my crusty work boots. Why hadn’t I worn sneakers? It would take me forever to lace those back up. I knelt, tugging at the laces until I could wrench each boot off and I lined them up neatly beneath the white wooden hall bench that dominated the entryway. My nose twitched at the heavy scent of glass cleaner. A clock ticked loudly above my head.