Boneyard (The Thaumaturge Series Book 2) (17 page)

At the word “mummy” Chad Junior’s head jerked up and he looked back and forth between us.

“Mummies are monsters,” he announced to us and then went back to tapping energetically at the tablet screen. 

“That’s right, son,” Chad agreed, but his eyes were on my face.

“Is Dana pressing charges?” I asked.

He blinked. “Charges? What are you talking about? No, not at all.”

“Then why did you want to talk to me?”

He shifted, clutching at his coffee cup. “Her story didn’t add up. She called us very early Thursday morning, claiming that she had found her dad in his current state when she arrived in Heckerson around nine the previous night. But when we got there, we found a ...” he trailed off, shaking his head. “I’ve never seen anything like that. He was moving around, but he was all—well, you know, right?”

I gave a quick nod and he just shook his head. “It was disturbing, Ebron.”

Disturbing. Fucking word of the day.

“How are they explaining it?” I asked.

“Severe malnourishment and dehydration. That’s the official cause of death.”

“There was a bowl of mac and cheese right next to him,” I said.

Chad looked at me with sharp, appraising eyes. “Has this ever happened to you before?”

I glanced at the kid, but he was utterly oblivious. Apparently talking about dead bodies over breakfast was old hat for him. We had a lot in common, this kid and I. 

“No,” I said. “At least not with humans. I’ve had a few animals... he’d just been there too long, Chad. I couldn’t, you know,
work
with that.”

“But it did work,” he insisted, leaning forward in the booth. “He had a heart beat when we got there.”

“The body, yes. But the soul...” I trailed off, shrugging.

Chad slumped back into the booth, staring at me.

“I left my bag there,” I said. I stirred my omelet into a pile and took another bite.

“I know,” he said. “I saw it. The same one you had when you did Natalie. I can get it back for you.” He gave me a significant look, “How did he really die? Do you know?”

“Carbon monoxide poisoning. Pretty sure.”

He considered me. “So no crime was committed.”

I exhaled. I suddenly had heart burn. “No. Of course not.”

“She called you when she found the body.”

“Yes.”

“And this is what I’m talking about!” He leaned across the table again, his ample chest pressing into the edge. “She should have called the first responders! If you’d talk to Diana, we could work through the proper channels. What if Dana did decide to point a finger at you?”

Nerves flew up through my stomach. “You said she wasn’t going to! Oh, God, my fingerprints are probably everywhere.”

“No, she’s not...” He waved dismissively. “I’m just saying hypothetically—how would you explain the fact that you were there?”

“It's my word against hers, I guess.”

“Did you call her that night?”

I grimaced and looked away. Chad nodded. “You have an alibi for Wednesday night?’

“Yes,” I said peevishly. “I was with
you
.”

He dipped his head in acknowledgment but forged on. “Ebron, you need to take this as a sign. You shouldn’t be freelancing this. If things go wrong, you have no protection! No one to back you up!”

I barked out a strange, harsh laugh. “Things are always going wrong! Everything is wrong. I shouldn’t even be able to do this, Chad. More people knowing about me puts me in more danger, not less.”

“Diana won’t talk—”

“You don’t know that,” I snapped. “You don’t know how ruthless people can be when you have something they want.”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “Yes, I do. And that is why you
need
backup. You need to trust someone, Ebron.”

I scowled and looked away. The other breakfast diners seemed to have lost interest in us and resumed their cheerful morning chatter. Chad Junior’s tablet sang about cheeseburgers and little Junior sang along under his breath.

Chad shook his head and gazed over my shoulder a bit, his eyes far away. Something passed over his expression, something dark and sad. I took a sip of my orange juice and winced at the sudden burn.

“You okay?” I asked when he continued to zone out, his jaw going slack.

His eyes flicked back to mine. “Oh, sorry. Just weird stuff going on. Hey,” he said as though it had just occurred to him. “You know anything about that body that disappeared?”

My heart gave a jolt. I tried to keep my eyes from sliding to the window, out of which the Cutlass sat in plain view. I tried, but I couldn’t help but look over at it, and then I winced, half expecting Chad to arrest me on the spot.

“I don’t know, it’s weird, man,” I stumbled out. “Really weird, you’re right.”

Chad deflated a little. “Yeah. No trace of her, can you believe that? I bet it has something to do with those witches that were in town last week.”

“What,” I said, too startled to even manage inflection.

He gave me a conspiratorial look. “I know, right? This town. But yeah, there were apparently a coven of witches that came through last week. Hey, you probably met them—they probably shopped at your store.”

“A lot of people come through,” I said quickly.

He nodded affably. “Yeah? That’s good. I’m glad you’re doing well.”

“How do you know about these witches?” I asked, shooting for casual but probably sounding suspicious as hell.

Chad reached over to adjust some button or knob or whatever on his kid’s little tablet. The kid beamed up at him, little toast crumbs on his cheeks and a grape jelly mustache on his lip.

“We have a specialist in town,” Chad said, off-hand as he tapped at the screen. “He’s been working their case for years. If you see something, let me know, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.
Specialist?
Did he mean Weber? I flicked a look out the window again, where the Cutlass sat all shiny in the mid-morning sun.

“What happens now?” I asked quietly. “To Dana’s dad, I mean.”

Chad turned back and watched me for a second’s wait. He heaved a sigh. “The body’s been released to the family. As far as the state of Montana is concerned, no crime has been committed.”

I nodded. “And what about me?”

“Consider my advice. Please? Other than that, relax. You look terrible. Go on a date with your scary as... ” He mouthed ‘fuck’ at me. “...boyfriend and try not to get into trouble.”

I snorted and reached for my orange juice, but thought better of it in light of the battery acid currently crawling up my esophagus.

“That reminds me,” Chad said, stretching back in the booth as the waitress began to unload plates of pancakes and bacon in front of him. “Do you want to join my fantasy football league?”

The Cutlass sat boxed in between two big Ford trucks, the one on the driver’s side parked so close that I had to squeeze my ass past the side mirror. The car now smelled of bleach and lemon scented cleaning wipes and when I turned up the heat, the smell intensified. I rolled down the window and turned onto the street. Gray skies loomed overhead. The buildings I passed looked small. I saw no one on the street. Heckerson felt empty and lonely and dark.

My life felt like a series of cluttered rooms, like I constantly just waded from one mess to another. Maybe I could be one of those people who compartmentalized, I thought as I headed past the rows of mailboxes leading to my Mom’s house. I didn’t need to think about everything at once. Box one—dead bodies in my bathroom. Don’t think about it, it’s being handled. Box two—bad news lawyer asking questions. Pack it up, man. Box three—Cody possibly thought that I was evil and now there was a creepy priest sniffing around. Yeah, that one was definitely going on the back shelf. Closed up with heavy duty packing tape.
At least I can't get arrested for being an unnatural sodomite. The march of progress continues.
Box four—annoyingly pushy cop. At the moment, Chad was the least of my worries. Body snatching investigation? Did that warrant its own box? I’d toss it in box one and then ignore them both until they went away.

The unpaved road up to my Mom’s hadn’t been plowed and the Cutlass bumped and rocked over the snow drifts. My truck sat alone by the garage and no other cars were in the yard. I breathed a sigh of relief. Mom would be at work, stripping sheets down at the motel. Lloyd probably was down at the Knights of Columbus Hall, watching football and throwing back highballs.

The dogs trotted beside the Cutlass as I inched it up to the garage. “Hi, guys,” I said when I hopped out to open the door. I scratched their ears, their wiggling butts. Porky, my Mom’s lumpy, geriatric blue heeler, hopped up into the Cutlass and I let him stay there, perched in the passenger’s seat while I backed the car into the garage.

I let myself into the house and set the key fob down on the kitchen counter. I hadn’t been alone in the house in years and it felt weird, how quiet it was, how still. The furnace hummed in the background, but my footsteps sounded very loud as I clomped down the stairs to my childhood bedroom. The bedspread looked thin and flat. A thick layer of dust covered the dresser and the old CRT television set. I’d spent so much of my teenage years alone in this room, so often scared of, both of what I was and what I was learning I could do. The first time Leo had kissed me had been in this room.

I went back outside and scanned the snow-covered trees. As a kid, I had spent nearly every free moment I had running through those woods, me and my dogs. There was something immensely comforting about the familiar shape of the rocks, the well-known pattern of the trees.

It wasn’t a conscious decision, but I found myself walking towards the old fort I had built the summer I was ten. That summer I had patiently hauled lumber and tools out to a small clearing, and painstakingly constructed the fort against the hollow of where an old spruce and some rocks met in a V. When I finished it, a few weeks before school started, I had thought that it was the best looking fort ever made and had pleaded with my mom to come out and see it. She’d never found the time but I kept going when I needed to get away, right up into high school. Then I used it mostly to get high or drunk, or both, and later to experiment with the few dead animals I managed to find.

And then when I was seventeen, I found a dead fox and everything changed.

I had carried it back to the fort. I sat it in my lap on the big rocks outside and slowly restored life to its stiff limbs, rising up into the new and wondrous plane that I had only just started to explore. When I let it go, watching its silver fur flash into the dark woods, I had looked up and there was a man standing in front of me.

“How did you do that?” he had asked, and that’s how I met Leo.

The place looked different in the sunlight. The last eight or ten years, I’d neglected upkeep, and the fort looked both smaller and shabbier in the daylight. The dogs had followed me up from the house and immediately set to work peeing on everything in sight. I meandered around the clearing, touching the cold, weathered wood and picking up the stray pieces of garbage lying about. Beer bottles and some Red Bull cans littered the crude wooden floor and tatty blankets lay wadded up in one corner. I wondered what teenagers were using it. Probably the Carver kids, from the other side of the hill. They had dug a new fire pit, closer to the treeline than the old one, but ringed with flat rocks and cut stumps for seating. I dusted the snow off one of the stumps and sat down.

I don’t know.

That’s what I had said to Leo after he’d asked me. He had taken a step backwards, then another, then somehow, in a series of movements so quick that I couldn’t keep my eyes on him, he moved into the trees and reappeared, an owl hanging limply from his hands.

“Try again,” he’d said, and thrust it at me. I had just looked at him, and wordlessly taken the owl into my hands. It was so newly dead that it hadn’t taken any effort at all to restore. Even with my fledgling powers it was easy to coax it back, to then fling it into the sky and listen to the
whoop whoop
of its wings as it flew up to the trees.

“That’s interesting,” Leo had said, raising one eyebrow.  “What’s your name?’

“Ebron White,” I told him, standing up. He was the most handsome man I had ever seen in real life, movie star handsome, with smoldering eyes and a perfectly stubbly beard and dark hair curling around his ears. By seventeen, I was very aware of all the ways that I was different from everyone else and no stranger to as much gay porn I could discretely procure (which admittedly was not much) but he was the first man that I had ever
wanted.
My heart had started booming in my chest, a dark and secret thrill running through me. He had seen me. He knew.

He lifted his head and sniffed in my direction. His eyes flared gold, just for a second, I intended to ask him his name too, but instead I said, in a voice so calm it shocked me, “And what are you?”

He looked surprised too, because back then Leo thought he was doing a great job of blending, and he was, but I could tell right away he wasn’t human. The sniffing, the eyes, how his limbs sort of moved in the wrong direction at times. How every movement was controlled and tiny, with no energy wasted. And something else, something I didn’t have the words for. All the bits of me that weren’t quite right recognized him.

To his credit, Leo had been honest with me right from the beginning.

“I’m a vampire,” he’d said, watching me very closely. “Don’t freak out. I think we should talk.”

The word itself hadn’t meant much to me, not at the time. It had been so utterly unbelievable, so ridiculous that it had almost been funny. My mind had broken off into forks, one screaming,
he knows
and the other whispering,
he’s beautiful.
“Okay,” I’d agreed and started to walk back towards the road. He followed, but when I glanced back at him, he just looked confused.

“It’s getting cold,” I said. “We should talk in my truck.”

“Oh,” He’d said, and followed me through the trees without a word, sliding gracefully into the passenger seat when we got there. He just watched while I took my pipe out of the glove box and fired up the bowl. His nostrils flared delicately and he’d rolled down the window but he didn't say anything.