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

Oh, just a yawning sense of spiritual doom. Nothing big.

“I’m fine, Chad,” I said firmly. “What do you want?”

“I want you to go with me and talk to Diana Hewitt.”

The name rang hollow, connecting with nothing and I just blinked at him placidly. He waited, clearly expecting some sort of reaction and I flipped the name through my head again, searching.

“Hewitt?” I said finally. “As in... Hewitt Realty?”

“That's her folks. She's an EMT. I think that you should tell her what you can do and—”

“No,” I said. Then, I paused and took a breath to calm the pounding in my head. 

“No,” I said again. “No, no, no, Chad. Fuck. No.”

“Ebron, just think—”

“No!”

He scowled. “
Listen
. She's usually the first on a scene. If she knew to call you—”

“Chad. No. The answer is no.”

He set his jaw and stared out the window, driving with one hand while the other tapped at the fancy looking tablet mounted to his dash. I held my breath, waiting for more argument, but when none came I pressed my forehead back against the cold glass and breathed through the waves of dizziness. My mouth tasted sour, and I had to pee. I wondered if Leo was going to be there when I got home, and if he was, what I was going to say to him. I wondered if he had even noticed that I was avoiding him. That I was having trouble looking him in the eye.

I couldn’t even look myself in the eye, actually.

“My first year as a cop,” Chad said suddenly, “I was in Boise. I got called to a domestic dispute. Some drunk guy got pissed at his ex-wife, and went to her house and beat the shit out of her.”

I sucked in a breath. When I exhaled, the window in front of me bloomed with fog.

“She was trying to get up the stairs and lock herself in the bathroom, but she tripped and she dropped her little baby. A little girl, just about two months old. The fall fractured her skull. She was dead when we got there.”

My forehead was cold from where I pressed it against the window. A little square of ice, right above my eyebrows. I closed my eyes, trying not to picture the limp little body. In my imagination, the baby was wearing a onesie. A Dora the Explorer onesie, like I had seen my friend Brittany's nieces wear.

Chad turned to look at me, and I peeled my face off the window to look back. The flush had spread all the way up to his ears and down his neck. He put both hands on the steering wheel and squeezed. The plastic creaked under his knuckles.

“I know that here in Heckerson,” he continued, “most of our calls are for drunks or car accidents, and we don't have a lot of fatal accidents or murders.”

Ha. What did he know. My mind went back to the last week, which had included at least four murders and resulted in personal mind-fuckery of the first degree and Chad had no idea. Police Officer Chad Metz, Heckerson's finest, a bastion of civic duty and moral fortitude, had no idea that in the last seven days, I had witnessed murder, committed murder, and was currently covering up a murder. Not to mention the fucking grave robbing.
Grave robbing.
Christ. What the hell kind of life was this? What the hell kind of person was I? Chad talked to me like he was trying to recruit me. Like we were on the same team. Like I was one of the good guys.

“But think, Ebron! If a situation like that came up again, like I saw in Boise, you could stop that. You could fix it. Just like that, you could fix it.” His voice lowered, and he gave me another inscrutable look, one that made me feel like shit on a boot heel. “Why wouldn't you want to fix it, if you could?”

I let my head conk against the window again. My heart felt heavy, like an actual, aching weight. Like a stone settled on my chest. Chad turned on the road to my shitty trailer court, and I had to pee so bad that I started jiggling my leg.

“What would you tell her?” I asked out loud. My voice sounded so weird, all garbled and thick, all my consonants hard.

“I'm not sure yet, but I want you to think about it.” Chad pulled his police cruiser in front of my trailer, which was going to make me the most talked about tenant of the trailer park.

“I'll think about it,” I said carefully. I wished I was more sober for this conversation. There seemed to be a real possibility that I was going to say something I shouldn't, that I was going to start blurting out secrets or worse, asking Chad to come in for coffee.

Which was apparently what I did next. Or more precisely, I mumbled the word “coffee” into the collar of my coat, and then Chad unbuckled his seat belt and stepped out of the car. It occurred to me that I was using Chad as a buffer, in case Leo was home. Nothing was guaranteed to agitate Leo more than six feet of meaty American cop. Not that I’d ever explicitly heard him say “fuck the po-lice” or anything like that. He just had that anti-authority vibe.

The passenger side door opened with a metallic squeak and Chad gripped me under the arm, hauling me to my feet.

I made a noise of protest, pushing him off. “Fuck you,” I said. Slurred, perhaps. I paused, rearranging my tongue in my mouth. “Hands off,” I tried, and that sounded better.

Chad frowned, but he let go of my arm. My grumpiness was wearing off on him; usually he was as friendly as a Golden Retriever.

“Sorry,” he said, and gave me a small smile. “Habit.”

“I didn't do anything wrong,” I said, which is of course the sort of thing people said when they had done something wrong. Criminal-type people.

“I know. Sorry.” He shrugged, and looked up the icy steps to the door. I got the hint, and teetered unsteadily up them, gripping onto the railing. I fumbled with the keys with Chad breathing down my neck, and he felt fucking enormous behind me, like a cordial bison. I had to resist the urge to twitch my eyes over my shoulder, but I wanted to. What was he doing, coming here with me? Suddenly I realized that I had been wrong, I wasn't nearly drunk enough. There was vodka in my fridge.

I opened the door, and Chad lumbered in on my heels. Johnny rocketed into me, leaping up and shoving his paws right into my gut, and I stumbled back into Chad's beefy chest. He put both hands on my shoulders to steady me, while I kneed impotently at my lunging dog.

“Sorry,” I said to Chad, and then belched because Johnny had made all sorts of things in my stomach start moving.
Oh, my God, must pee.
Chad started to speak, but something caught his eye and his hands clenched my arms hard enough to hurt.

“Ow!” I said, just as I noticed Leo, standing in the kitchen with his arms crossed over his bare chest, and one leg peeking out from the towel he had draped around his waist.

“Hi,” Leo said, his eyebrows up in his hairline.

“Hi,” I said. I stepped away from Chad and brushed past Leo, smelling my body wash on him as I did so.

“You guys can introduce yourselves,” I said over my shoulder as headed for the hallway. “I need to pee.”

Chapter 2

I stopped off in the kitchen on my way back from the bathroom and splashed some vodka into a water-spotted glass, topping it off with flat 7-Up. Through the kitchen doorway, I saw Leo and Chad facing off, in the armchair and on the couch respectively, sitting in awkward silence. Chad twitched and roamed his eyes around the room, looking uncomfortable and like he deeply regretted forcing me into his squad car. Leo just smirked. He’d put on some sweatpants, but nothing else.

Chad perked up when I joined them in the living room. “I didn’t know you were living with someone,” Chad said in an amiable, I’m-trying-to-make-conversation voice. I squeezed sideways between his knees and the coffee table. He added, much more softly, “Things didn’t work out with the black guy, huh?”

Leo watched us, leaning back in the armchair with one arm stretched behind his head. It made the muscles of his stomach and chest do all sorts of interesting and pretty things, and I intentionally turned my head away to sip from my glass. Ugh. Maybe I really didn't want any more to drink after all.

At the mention of Marcus, though, Leo sat up a little straighter and gave me a looked of feigned indignation.

“What’s he talking about?” he asked. “What black guy?”

Chad winced and shrank down into himself a little, as though he could hide his tree-trunk thighs into the threadbare throw pillows.

“Sorry,” he said. “I think I made a mistake.”

I gripped my cocktail, rattling the ice. “No,” I said. “It did not work out.”

“Oh.” Chad looked back and forth between the two of us for a moment, before visibly bucking up and leaning over to offer Leo his hand. “Officer Chad Metz,” he said.

Leo took the offered hand and shook solemnly. “I'm Leo,” he said, and gave me a twitch of his eyebrow.

“This is Chad,” I told him. I looked at Chad. “We’re not... it’s complicated.”

Chad frowned. “I'm sorry, I think I may have—”

“And how did you two meet?” Leo interrupted.

Chad got all stiff, hunching his shoulders up around his ears.

“It's a small town,” Chad said lamely, at the same time I said, “I brought his niece back from the dead.”

“Oh,” Leo said. He scratched his arm.

Chad sputtered and gasped. “He knows?”

“Of course he knows,” I said crossly. “He's my boyfriend.”

“I didn't know you told anyone else.” Chad's eyes had gotten about three times bigger than usual.

“Are we putting labels on things?” Leo asked me, though I saw the flicker of deep humor in his eyes.

“I have other people in my life, Chad.” I tried one last sip of the vodka, but gave up and set it down on the coffee table. To Leo, I said “You are enjoying this entirely too much.” He just smirked at me.

“So what's your deal?” Leo asked Chad.

Chad glanced at him, flushing red again. He kept his eyes firmly fixed on Leo's right shoulder when he replied. Chad suddenly seemed very much like a cop. Leo suddenly seemed very naked. “I'm just interested in Ebron's talent.”

Leo licked his lips. “Me too,” he said. “Ebron's very... talented.”

“Leo,” I complained and reached for the vodka again.

“Ebron has literally never mentioned you,” Leo said, a little more nastily.

Chad spared me a quick helpless look. His fingers twitched and I involuntarily looked at his service weapon, sitting right there on his hip, all gun-like. I was usually a big fan of the Second Amendment, but ... cop plus antagonizing vampire was not a great equation.

“I'm just trying to get him to see how useful his talent could be,” Chad said. His eyes flickered to me. “If we organized—”

“Organized?” Leo looked straight at me then, all humor gone. “What's he talking about, babe?”

The endearment was entirely for show. It had to be. Leo only called me that in bed. “He wants me to talk to the first responders,” I said. “So that they can call me if they—if there's someone I can help.”

Leo went quiet, his gold eyes fixed on me with enough intensity to make me uncomfortable. I looked away from him, studying the layer of dust on my bookcase. Beside me, Chad shifted all over the place, taking up way too much space and way too much air.

“That's a bad idea,” Leo said finally. Chad made a noise of protest, and Leo held up a hand.

“We've had problems recently,” he said. Like, what's this fucking 'we' he was talking about? I narrowed my eyes at him and he ignored me.

“I'm not saying that he should be advertising it,” Chad protested. “Obviously there'd be kinks to work out, but it would be worth it if he could help people.”

“He already helps people,” Leo said with exaggerated patience.

“I'm right here, you know,” I said, but only Johnny looked at me. He wagged his tail once and then put his head back between his paws.

Chad took a deep breath. “I know, but this way he'd been in the system. The right people would know to contact him. He could save so many lives if—”

“No,” Leo said and I swear he flashed the tiniest bit of fang, just enough to that it might have been imaginary, just enough to make Chad's lizard brain go still.

Leo sighed. “Look, I get what you're saying, officer, but with respect—”

“No, you don't get it,” Chad snapped. “Sorry, Ebron,” he glanced at me, his face like a plum. “But no. You're being selfish. You don't have any idea of much you could help, you haven't seen the things I have.”

Leo geared up to say something back, but snapped his mouth closed when he caught my eye. Because Chad was wrong, but he didn't need to know. He didn't need to know about the broken bodies I’d seen, about the blood on my hands.

“Chad,” I said. He looked at me, all worked up and noble and hopeful and desperate.

I sighed. “I'll think about it.”

“You do that,” Chad said.

Leo glared at me from across the coffee table, quiet and angry and still.

A little while later, after Chad had gone home, I stood in front of my refrigerator and wolfed down a whole Tupperware container of leftover taco meat. My head swam. My leg jittered no matter how hard I pressed my feet into the floor. The cold, greasy meat left an unpleasant film on the inside of my mouth and I shoved the empty Tupperware into the pile of dirty dishes soaking in the sink.

Leo’s eyes burned into my back. His annoyance felt like a physical thing in the room with us, knocking into things and making noise.

“What?” I said. I grabbed the milk and drank a few long mouthfuls straight from the carton. It did nothing to wipe away that greasy meat slime. It just sort of coated it and made it mushy.

“Why didn't you tell me about that cop?”

I shrugged. Sometimes it was easier to have a conversation with Leo when I wasn't actually looking at him. “I didn't think it was important.”

He shifted, his clothes rustling, his leather jacket creaking. So he was going out then. Without me.

“You didn’t think it was important,” he repeated. The linoleum squeaked, and then his hand curled around my shoulder. I tensed, ready to shrug him off, but I stayed still. Still-ish. I swayed a bit and the thought that maybe I was still drunk was a weird relief. I couldn't face him sober, not knowing what I knew. I could hardly face myself sober.