The Dead (The Thaumaturge Series Book 1) (7 page)

I motioned towards the walls, each lined to the ceiling with neat shelves containing hundreds of glass jars. Running down the center of the room were wooden tables with tea samples and various tea paraphernalia, nestled amongst overflowing pots filled with mint and aloe. Low couches were scattered here and there, with books and some old board games around if anyone was in the mood. It looked homespun and comfortable and I knew it.

He gave an appreciative whistle, and turned to walk down the right side of the shop, admiring the variety. I admired his ass, and the way his jeans flattered his long coltish legs. I tried to do it on the sly, but I glanced up in time to see Corvin grinning at me. It wasn’t a friendly grin and I flushed and looked away.

“We just left a big gathering in Missoula,” Marcus volunteered, stopping to touch a jar of dried slippery elm. He glanced at me over his shoulder. My face went red, and I wondered if he had noticed me checking him out.

“We were there for Samhain,” he continued. “We’re on our way home, but Corvin wanted – “

“Marcus,” Corvin barked. “Quit yapping and get the stuff.”

Marcus’s face twisted just for a second, before smoothing out, and he gave me an apologetic glance. “Sorry. Guess I better get these herbs.”

“Sure,” I said lamely. God, what the fuck was wrong with me? I felt utterly devoid of intelligence.

“Missoula, huh?” I tried, maybe blurting the words a little too loudly. “Lot of witches in Missoula?”

He gave me another look over his shoulder, and I quickly added, “I mean, Montana isn’t exactly a hotbed of occult activity.”

He gave me a quick grin. “Maybe not. But there were, like, hundreds of people there.” Suddenly I got the impression he was much younger than I. He sounded like a kid invited to play with the big kids for the first time.

“Right on,” I said, for lack of anything else.

He leaned over and peered at another line of jars.

“Wow, you have some amazing stuff! Where do you get it all?”

“Um, all over. I have a lot of suppliers,” I said.

“I'm surprised to find this place.” he straightened and looked me up and down. “Pleasantly surprised.”

Warmth flared on the back of my neck and stretched up my face, but it was a good kind of heat. I smiled back, more boldly. “I try to keep a good supply. But still, there are some things you just can't get around here.”

He caught my eye and held it. “I'll bet. What do you do?”

I shrugged and try to smile again, to keep up the banter. “I manage.”

We looked at each for a moment longer and I felt like I was supposed to be saying something. Was he really cruising me? Yes, it seemed like he was. What did normal people do in these situations?

A line appeared between his eyebrows. His lips parted, a small sound escaping them as though he was going to speak. I couldn’t help staring at his mouth, at where the pink tip of his tongue was visible behind his teeth. I found myself leaning forward, my eyes fixed boldly on his mouth.
Christ, his fucking mouth.

“Marcus!”

We both jerked, and Marcus glanced guiltily over at Jim, watching with hooded eyes.

“Yeah,” Marcus said, his voice shaky. When his eyes met mine, they were apologetic.

Feeling foolish and relieved at once, I gave myself a quick mental rebuke, and climbed the ladder to get him his damn herbs.

The rest of the witches waited at the front of the store while I slipped behind the counter to ring up the purchases. I had to refrain myself from asking them to turn out their pockets.

“Quite the place you have here,” Jim told me, rocking back on his heels.

“Thanks.” I grumbled, not looking at him. Marcus handed me a credit card.

“Been real nice seeing you,” Corvin drawled, and I couldn’t help the poisonous little glance I shot him. The other witches were frowning at him, though, so that cooled me down a bit.

“Thanks for your business,” I replied, as politely as I could. Corvin just grinned.

“Thanks again,” Marcus said, as he took his credit card back from me. I carefully kept my fingers from touching his.

“You're welcome.”

“Um . . . we'll be here for a few days,” he said, and I looked up.

“Maybe I'll stop in again?” he said. His eyes were too bright. My heart was beating too fast.

Thoughts jumbled in my head, uneasy and confused. I simultaneously wanted the creepy witches to leave and sexy Marcus to stay. The way his eyebrows came together when he frowned was incredibly distracting. For just a moment, I allowed myself to imagine what he could mean, that perhaps he really was coming onto me, and hell, maybe in my fantasy world I could just lean over and kiss that smile off his mouth if I wanted to. But this was the tightrope I walked, and I had to keep it level.

“Yeah, sure, man,” I said, handing him his receipt. “If you run out of supplies, I'll be here.”

“Thanks,” he said, and I don't know - was that disappointment in his voice?

They walked to the door, filing out one by one until only Marcus remained. He glanced over at me once more. “Uh, thanks again,” he said, holding up the bag of herbs.

“Yeah, take it easy,” I replied. He nodded once, and then was gone, the bell over the door tinkling behind him.

“Seriously?” I fended off Johnny with one hand, my truck keys and phone in the other. Johnny dropped into a bow, and then leaped up with impressive speed, landing a big wet kiss on the side of my face.

“Ugh.” I gave him a knee to the chest, and shrugged off my coat.

“Yeah, seriously,” Leo answered.

He was parked on the couch again, slouched forward with his elbows on his knees as he contemplated the papers spread out across the coffee table. I recognized them, all those old notebooks and sheets of loose leaf and I moved to stand across from him, crossing my arms over my chest.

“Why?” I demanded and he peered up at me with an annoyed tilt to his eyebrows.

“Because we write shit down,” he snapped back. “We always have, and now something’s different.”

I sighed. “Nothing’s different.”

“You did two resurrections yesterday with hardly any side effects at all. I’d say that’s different.”

“Oh, there were side effects,” I said and then scowled when Leo’s eyes lit up triumphantly.

“Great,” Leo said and tapped the notebook with his pen. “Tell me about it so that I can write it down.”

I heaved another sigh but flopped down next to him. The notebooks had started out as a joke, and I thought they were probably my idea, but Leo and I disagreed about that. I’d met Leo when I was seventeen, and right away he’d encouraged me to explore the limits of my ability. He’d wanted to know how often I could do it, and how fresh the bodies needed to be, and how many bodies I could do at a time. He wanted to know how much damage I could repair.

My very first resurrection – my childhood cat, returned to life as I clutched her, wailing, in the field beside our house – had felt like a fluke. The dead gophers and field mice that followed proved it was not. But my ability terrified me, and those early experiments were tentative and without direction.

Leo wanted to set up parameters. He wanted to push me. One night he’d bustled me into my truck and drove me out to a dark pasture. We ended up down in a boggy creek, where a dead cow lay half in and half out of the water. I’d brought it back under his watchful gaze and then one of us – I swear it was me – joked that we needed to start writing everything down. For science. The notebooks were born, and they contained information about every subsequent resurrection I’d ever done, all the way up until Aubrey. It hadn’t even occurred to me to make notes about Aubrey.

Leo held the pen poised above the paper. “Tell me then.”

“Resurrection took place about five o’clock in the evening. Subject brought to my shop. Female, about seventeen.” I said, slipping automatically into the format we had long ago established. Cable crime shows had been my thing for a little while. “Dead maybe three hours. Disemboweled with a knife.”

He scribbled it all down in his pretty cursive handwriting. “Okay. What else?”

“Nothing unusual about the resurrection itself. I got a headache in my left temple, I think, during, and afterwards the side effects were the same.”

“Headache, nausea, tightness in your chest?”

“Yes.”

“Then approximately two hours later you healed the girl at the bar.”

“Yeah, and I still had a headache up until we got home and I ate something.”

“Hmm.” He stuck the pen in his corner of his mouth and studied what he’d written down, then reached for one of the older notebooks and began to flip through it. I took the opportunity to head into the kitchen to scavenge for food.

I wondered if I should mention the witches. The thought made me shake my head, confused at my own reluctance until I thought about Marcus and his pretty green eyes and how he had gently flirted with me. And call me sentimental, but I could count on one hand the number of times men came on to me and I didn’t want to lose the feeling. Even if I omitted the part about Marcus, Leo would still pounce on the incident like a dog on a chew toy, and I didn’t want his vampire slobber all over an innocuous, but private moment.

I put together a sandwich and grabbed a bag of Doritos that was mostly orange crumbs and rejoined Leo on the couch. He glanced up at me distractedly, the pen still in his mouth.

“Look,” he said, tapping his finger on the open page. “It’s been ten months since you resurrected anyone, right?”

“Uh, yep,” I said, talking around a mouthful of deli meat and cheese. “Last time was that car wreck off the frontage road. Last New Year’s, I think.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “And then the next day, we went to that party and you took care of that guy for me, remember?”

Hmm. Yeah. In general, I didn’t dislike watching Leo feed on people, but the guy he had seduced at the New Year's party had been on a whole ‘nother plane of attractiveness and I hadn’t handled it well. We fought the whole car ride home and Leo had left a few days later. Of course I remembered the New Year’s Eve guy.

“I don’t get what you’re looking for,” I said, maybe a little too sharply.

“The last time you did two back to back –”

“You can’t count the New Year's Eve guy,” I interrupted. “That was twelve hours later.”

“Yes, but he was, uh, not in good shape.” Leo had the decency to look a little embarrassed, but I just snorted.

“Not in good shape. Yeah, if I recall, you did a number on him. Like, ripped out his neck.”

Leo scowled. “I’m getting better.”

I chewed my sandwich, shoved a few chips in my mouth.

“Those are just chemicals, you know,” he said, wrinkling his nose as he watched me chew. “Triangle-shaped chemicals.”

“And they’re
delicious
.” I crunched into another handful, making my cheek bulge like a chipmunk. I wiped my orange-dusted palm on my thigh.

“You’re so...” Leo heaved a sigh. “Okay, fine. We won’t count New Year's Eve guy. You did the alcohol poisoning girl and the really gross combine guy two days apart, three years ago.”

“Yeah,” I said, and couldn’t repress a shudder. That combine accident had been horrific.

“And afterwards, you couldn’t get out of bed for days. Your lost vision in one eye.”

“I remember,” I said. “What is your point?”

“My point is, you don’t suffer the same side effects anymore. You’re getting stronger and we need to figure out what your new limits are.”

I didn’t respond and Leo waited, his eyes fixed intently on me, his body turned towards mine so that our knees pressed together.

“The first guy you ever brought back...” Leo said softly and I nodded.

At nineteen years old, I resurrected my first human body. Leo and I had stumbled upon the teenager boy on an isolated Forest Service road, curled up in the driver’s seat of a banged up hatch-back. .He’d been a suicide, apparently, his car scattered with stray pills and an empty whiskey bottle. The sight of him, sunken and stiff, remained one of my worst memories, because I hadn’t been prepared. By then, I’d experimented with rats, dogs, pigs, even cows, but that first dead human, had shocked me so badly that I had just stood there, staring at the curled fingers of the boy’s outstretched hands. It was like he had tried to claw his way out the window, like he had changed his mind at the last minute and tried to crawl for help.

But Leo had pulled him out and I’d brought him back, slowly and sloppily, though successfully. I’d almost screamed when the guy’s eyes had opened, when the scratchy moan had come out of his mouth. Then we’d left him sputtering and gasping there in the grass while Leo had half-carried me through the woods, my whole body throbbing with pain. I was sick for almost a week and then after that... it got easier.

“So, remind me,” I said, getting up to grab myself a beer. I called to him from the kitchen. “You think that the longer I go without doing anything, the more strength I have. But the longer I go, the worst the side effects will be.”

“Yeah,” he replied, leaning back into the couch cushions. “That’s my working hypothesis. But this last incident doesn’t support that.”

“Working hypothesis,” I repeated, settling back next to him and frowning when I realized that I’d forgotten the church key to open my beer. “Listen to you, smarty pants.”

Leo took the bottle out of my hand and twisted the cap off in the palm of his hand, handing it back without really looking at me. “Well,” he said dryly. “I did go to college, you know.”

My mouth twisted into a scowl, but I knew he hadn’t meant anything by it.

“All right, then,” I said and took a swig of my beer. “What do you want to do?”

“I think we should replicate some of these older experiments,” he said, thumbing through the pages. “See if we get different results.”

I huffed a little. “I was kinda thinking that maybe we could just stay in tonight and –”

“We can head out to the ranch,” Leo interrupted and I frowned.

“You want to use my cousin’s cows again.”

Leo found the entry he was looking for and held it up for me to see. I noted the date – April 24, 2010 – and took the notebook out of his hand to read the entry, curious as to what we had been up five years ago.