The Dead (The Thaumaturge Series Book 1) Read online

  “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.

  “Four heifers in an hour,” I summarized after scanning the handwritten notes. “I threw up, immediately got an ocular migraine resulting in the loss of vision in my left eye, and had full body shakes for almost forty-five minutes.”

  He nodded along to my description. “Yeah. Easy enough to duplicate. I mean, the parameters are different, because you just resurrected two people not twenty-four hours ago, and back then it had been several months, but... close enough.”

  I set the notebook back down on the coffee table and concentrated on finishing my dinner. The Doritos didn’t really complement my smoky Scotch ale, but I finished them both, keeping my mouth busy because Leo just sat there looking at me, waiting for me to say something.

  Finally, I tilted the beer bottle up, swigging down the last dregs.

  “Fine,” I grumbled and Leo grinned. I couldn’t help but give him a shaky smile in response. It could be like old times, I guessed. The two of us out in the forest, the scent of blood on the wind. I’d be lying if I said I hated the practices all the time.

  “Not right now, though!” I protested, as Leo made a move to get up.

  He just looked at me, questions all over his face, like he had expected us to just go tearing out into the night.

  I motioned to the scattered crumbs of my sandwich, my socked feet. “I just settled in,” I said. “Not tonight.”

  Leo made a frustrated, vaguely inhuman noise, but gave me a curt nod.

  “We can’t just go out into the pasture and shoot a bunch of cows,” I pointed out. “We have to, you know, plan this.”

  “Okay,” Leo grumbled.

  “How about Saturday night?” I offered. “When I get back from hunting, we’ll head out and do whatever. Drink blood. Tip cows. Whatever you want.”

  “Fine,” he said, but his shoulders were still hunched up around his ears.

  I took a breath and stretched out one hand, letting my fingers brush against the back of his neck.

  “Anyway, I was thinking we could stay in tonight.” I waggled my eyebrows a bit, to add emphasis but he just stared blankly at me, and a tendril of nerves uncoiled in my belly.

  He stood up abruptly, fast and fluid, and looked down at me. His eyes were dark, his mouth a tight line. “Not tonight,” he said. “I don’t feel like it.”

  I exhaled in the breath I’d been holding and gave a jerky nod. “Sure,” I said and at least my voice sounded steady. At least I could look him in the eye without flinching away. I’d learned a lot over the years.

  “I’ll see you later,” he said, and turned on his heel. He grabbed his coat off the recliner and shrugged it on. When he got to the front door, he glanced back at me with an unreadable expression on his face. “By the way, you should take a shower,” he said. “You smell weird.”

  The door slammed behind him as he left and I sat there in the empty room, willing the hurt and rejection to compact down into the tight little space I kept under my heart. I set the notebooks carefully back on the coffee table, tapping the edges to line them into a neat pile. As I carried my empty dishes back into the kitchen, I realized that I hadn’t told Leo about the witches. My bruised pride was pleased about that. He didn’t need to know everything. I wasn’t obligated to tell him anything.

  I did get in the shower, but I thought about Marcus during and after, as I lay in my bed. If Leo came back that night, he did so long after I’d fallen asleep.

  Chapter Seven

  The next day, Friday, felt weirdly like a movie set into repeat. I got up, went to work, and visited Dahlia and Brittany. My usual customers came in. My least favorite patron, Misty, stayed for an hour and yelled at me for scalding her Maharaja chai. Wordlessly, I tossed the offending tea into the sink, brewed her a new cup, and shoved it across the counter hard enough to make the liquid slosh over the rim of the mug. Her furious eyes flew up to mine, but something in my expression must have cowed her, because she accepted the mug far more meekly than I’d expected.

  I waited for her to begin berating me, but instead she just went back to telling me what an incredibly successfully IT specialist her son was. Apparently he didn’t have the best luck with the ladies, but according to her, he was a special snowflake and didn’t need to waste time with those harpies anyway. When she moved on to complain how her private driveway up Blacktail Road never got plowed, I blocked out her droning and settled onto my stool, staring out the window. The occasional gust of wind rocked the sign above the door. Passersby ran for their cars with their collars pulled up. The gray day fit my mood.

  Around noon, the door swung open and I glanced up as Dahlia blew in, a scarf tied over her hair like an old Hollywood starlet.

  “Hey, you,” she said. “Lock it up for an hour and let me buy you lunch.”

  “Uh-” I said, about to decline, and changed my mind mid-protest. “Okay,” I said, and she smiled, all white teeth and pretty red lips.

  “You look fantastic, by the way,” I told her as we walked down the sidewalk. She had her arm twined through mine and her head tucked into my shoulder. I did my best to shield her from the wind.

  “Thanks,” she said, but the way her eyes stayed down made me pause.

  “Hey, you all right?” I asked, squeezing her arm into my chest.

  “Yeah, fine,” she said, glancing up and giving me a small smile. “Just a bad night. I wanted to make myself feel better, so Brittany did my hair and makeup.”

  “Look’s great,” I said and squeezed her arm again.

  I held the door open for her when we got to the diner, and we settled into a booth by the window. Weak sunlight filtered through the dusty blinds, and I absently brushed some scattered salt off the table and onto the floor. Behind Dahlia’s head, an old painting of a forest fire hung crooked on one nail. I took the menu out from behind the napkin dispenser and the cracked laminate flaked in my hands.

  I liked Hot Shots better than the Dinner Bell, the other diner in town, but my opinion didn’t seem to be a popular one. Even in the middle of the lunch hour, Hot Shots was nearly empty, with only a few other patrons lined up at the counter and filling the booths. Across from me, Dahlia gazed distractedly out the window, her hands laced primly together on the table in front of her.

  “So what’s new?” she asked me, turning to face me with a little sigh.

  I shrugged. “Nothing much. You?”

  She gave an answering shrug, and then we sat in silence until the waiter came over to take our order.

  “Is Leo still in town?” Dahlia asked when we were left alone with our tepid lemon waters.

  I immediately felt a cautious prickle in my stomach, just a reflexive tensing when my private life was openly mentioned. There was no good reason to hide, to keep my whole life a secret. Maybe it was habit. Maybe it made me feel like a snail ripped out of its shell.

  “Yeah, he’s still here,” I said without enthusiasm.

  “Do I get to meet him this time?”

  “Uh, I don’t know.” I gave her an apologetic smile and she shook her head good -naturedly.

  “You and your secret love affair,” she teased.

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Is he famous?”

  “No.”

  “Is he in witness protection?”

  “No.”

  “Married. He’s married.”

  “No.”

  She humphed. We’d played this a dozen times, the guess-Le
o’s-secret-identity game. Dahlia liked it a lot more than I did.

  “Misty stayed for like an hour today,” I told her just to change the subject.

  Dahlia snorted. “Oh, I know. I did her hair last week. Lady likes to talk.”

  “About her son. Did you know that he personally saved a premature baby by getting some hospital’s computers back online?”

  “Ah,” Dahlia said. “Don’t be mean. She’s proud of him.”

  “I’m sure she is.”

  “You know he attempted suicide when he was in high school.”

  “No, I did not,” I said peevishly. “But I still don’t want to fucking hear about it.”

  “She’s lonely.”

  “Aren’t we all, Dahlia,” I said, a little too tightly to be taken as a joke. Her mouth twisted into an S. She put one of her fine-boned hands on top of mine and gave them a squeeze.

  “Do you need to get drunk tonight?” she asked.

  “No, I can’t. I have dinner with Mom.”

  “Afterward, then? You’ll need something after having to interact with Lloyd.”

  “Ugh,” I said obligingly and she smiled.

  “But I can’t,” I added. “I’m going hunting tomorrow and I need to get up early.”

  She nodded, but there was a definite droop to her shoulders.

  “Why?” I asked. “Do you need to get drunk tonight?”

  Dahlia looked up and met my eyes. Her eyeliner made a perfect black wing, her red lips a perfect bow. But her eyes were a little too shiny, the corners of them wrinkling as she clenched her jaw.

  “Oh, babe,” I said softly, and this time I squeezed her fingers. “Sorry, Dahl. Things bad?”

  She looked up and did that little face shimmy thing women do when they are trying not to cry. “I’m fine,” she told me, giving me a brave smile that showed her teeth. She swiped one finger under her eyelashes and dabbed at her lips. I felt a helpless burst of affection for her.

  “I know you are,” I said, letting go of her hand. “But let’s plan on a drink next week, okay?”