Boneyard (The Thaumaturge Series Book 2) (4 page)

The headlights of the truck bounced over a dark yard strewn with garbage, dead pieces of automobiles and unidentifiable debris. A newer model Subaru Forrester with Missoula license plates was parked out front, right beside a snowmobile.

“Well,” Leo said. “That's fucking creepy.”

“This is the place?”

“Yeah, this is the address you gave me. I don't like this.” 

“I'm really glad you're with me,” I replied, staring at the ‘Don't Tread on Me’ banner displayed on the side of an outbuilding, right next to a mounted pair of antlers and a tall stack of reflective traffic pylons.

Leo pulled the truck up beside the Forrester and killed the engine. The cab of the truck went dark and for a second we sat there, staring at the creepy house and listening to the wind howling through the swaying trees. Despite the car out front, the whole place felt abandoned, desolate and ominous. I had half a mind to tell Leo to put the truck in reverse and get us the fuck out of here.

“Horror movie,” I said out loud and Leo hummed in agreement.

“Come on,” he said, opening the truck door with a metallic creak. “At least you have your own supernatural body guard.”

“Lucky me,” I said, and followed behind him across the snowy gravel yard. We paused on the front stoop and Leo lifted his head, scenting the cold air.

“Smells a little ripe,” he said, giving me a significant look.

I could smell something too, even with my weak human nose, and another tendril of apprehension wormed into my belly.

“Maybe we should—” I started to say and then the door flung open, revealing a manic-eyed woman in a Montana Grizzlies sweatshirt.

“My dad,” she gasped and Leo and I exchanged a glance.

“Okay,” I said, startled. She looked back and forth between us in jerky whips.

“Come on!” she cried and turned away, vanishing into the gloom of the house.

With the door open, the smell almost gagged me. It was rot and garbage, shit and dust, all rolled up, set on fire and then shoved in my face. I blanched, and beside me, Leo actually gagged. He turned his head to the side and panted.

“Fuck,” he said, looking at me with watering eyes. “That's disgusting.”

“Go,” I said, nodding towards the door and he scoffed.

“Yeah, right. You first.”

“Some bodyguard,” I grumbled, stepping into the house. Under my feet, the saggy linoleum gave way with a groan and right away I bumped up against a stack of damp newspapers and cardboard that reached over my head. I shivered, no warmer inside that it was out and glanced around the room, taking stock.

Garbage. As far as I could tell, the place just overflowed with garbage and stacked boxes.  The horrible smell started to invade my throat. Feeble light emanated from a single source, coming from the front corner, but it was enough to help me make out the stacks of books and piles of clothes and lumpy black garbage bags.  A narrow pathway threaded between the stacks of clutter, and I inched through it, following the sound of the woman's harsh breathing.

“Hoarder?” Leo whispered, right at my shoulder. His arm covered his nose and mouth. Above the black leather of his sleeve, his eyes squinted into slits.

“Apparently,” I whispered back, grimacing as my leg brushed against a fish aquarium stuffed full of what appeared to be raw animal pelts, stripes of red gore still clinging to the undersides. Carefully, we picked our way through the squalor, bumping against newspapers and lampshades and mountains of canned food.

“Here.” I stepped past the stacks and found a small clearing, a little oasis in a desert of crap. The woman stood anxiously beside a maroon armchair and in the armchair sprawled a corpse. I'm not ashamed to say that I gagged, spun on my heel and would have fucking made for the hills if Leo hadn't been right behind me. He grabbed my arms to steady me, looking over my shoulder as he did so and even he recoiled.

“Holy shit,” he said and made a weird spitting noise like a cat that's huffed gasoline.

“Oh my God.” I panted into his shoulder, trying to suck oxygen and not suck in that god-awful burnt piss smell at the same time.

“It's my dad,” the woman wailed from behind me and Leo shoved me back a little, his eyes wide and freaked.

“You're on,” he said, planting one hand between my shoulders and pushing me forward.

I couldn't look at the corpse, though the initial visual impressions of
rot
and
sag
and
gape
burned the backs of my eyes. I stared at the woman, breathing with my mouth open.

“I can't fix that,” I said desperately and her face crumbled like a tissue, her small mouth turning down and a low pitiful moan coming from it.

“Look, I'm sorry,” I tried, and involuntarily glanced down at the body. This time I couldn't look away, my treacherous eyes cataloguing every detail of the corpse, from the stretched black lips to the sunken eyes to the stiff folds of the flabby neck skin.

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.

“You have to help him,” she cried, reaching for my hand and hanging onto it. Her hands were freezing, her vaguely pretty face suddenly familiar. “Everyone says you can.”

“Do I know you?” I asked. Also,
everyone
?

“Dana,” she said, tapping herself on the chest. “Dana LeBreche. We went to high school together.”

“Dana,” I repeated. I remembered a smiling brunette, a member of the debate team, a friendly nerd who got along well with everyone. She bore little resemblance to shell-shocked woman in front of me, her eyes swollen with tears and her short hair pulled back from her face into a messy ponytail.

“What happened to him?” Leo asked, suddenly pushing past me and leaning over the recliner to examine the corpse. I breathed through my mouth, the smell cloying in my throat, but the stench wasn’t coming from the body. It hardly smelled of decay, the freezing cold keeping the body from really rotting. No, it was the house around me that reeked and I wondered if it had smelled this bad when the man had been alive, if he had lived in such appalling squalor.

“I dunno,” Dana said. She sniffed loudly, and ran her sleeve under her running nose. “Dad and I don't... we aren't—” tears welled up again and for a minute she just cried, staring down at the corpse. I tentatively touched her shoulder, my heart pounding.

“Dana. I'm sorry,” I said again and she nodded jerkily.

“I haven't talked to him in a couple weeks,” she said, her voice a little stronger. “He drinks.” She glanced at me, at Leo, meeting our eyes to give weight to her meaning and we both nodded in understanding.

“We fight,” she added. “He doesn't...” A frustrated sigh took the last of her sentence and she turned her face away, visibly trying to calm herself.

I took my hand away, giving her what privacy I could, and Leo caught my eye. He nodded down at the corpse and I reluctantly moved closer.

“Heart attack?” I whispered. The body sacked out limp on the recliner, a faded blue crocheted blanket over its knees. The armchair pointed at an old rabbit-eared TV, the screen blank. Beside the armchair, a flimsy little side table held a bottle of Canadian whiskey and a saucepan filled with some moldy yellow lumps. Leo sniffed at it and glanced at me. “Mac and cheese,” he told me quietly.

“Hypothermia?” I guessed again. “It's freezing in here.”

“Maybe. Or carbon monoxide poisoning.” Leo jerked his chin towards the corner. “That's a wood stove.”

“How long do you think he's been dead?” I asked, very quietly. Dana caught my attention as she turned, halfheartedly wiping the mascara off her cheeks.

“I don't know,” Leo said, just as quietly. He glanced at Dana, and then casually turned his back on her, so that he faced only me. “I'm a little more familiar with
fresh
bodies,” he whispered.

Those words hit me like a ton of bricks, because yeah, I
fucking knew that
. I went hot and then cold and I looked away, my eyes bouncing all over from the pitiful corpse to the pitiful garbage stacked all around me to the pitiful grief-stricken daughter.  Exhaustion washed over me.  Suddenly the position of the body, folded into a worn recliner and facing a small, out of date TV, seemed incredibly sad.

“I think it's been a couple of weeks,” Dana supplied. “I spoke to him a few days before Halloween. I asked him to come to Missoula for the kids' costume parade. He didn't show up though, and I was really angry and—and—” she broke down again, and this time Leo simply drew her into a hug, slipping an arm around her shoulders and just pulling her into his arms like they knew each other.

I scoffed, but it seemed to be exactly what she needed. Her arms locked around his waist and she buried her face in the soft leather of his coat and she just cried. Leo held her and whispered things to her. I stood there awkwardly, all third wheel, me and the dead guy. Absently, I poked my finger through a hole in the seam of the recliner's upholstery, tearing some threads and feeling the material catch on my ragged cuticles. My hand hovered only a few inches from the dead guy’s wispy white hair. I jerked my hand back and curled it into a fist.

After a bit, Dana's tears tapered off and she peeled away from Leo's chest with a few lingering sniffs. He kept his hand on the back of her neck and stared at her intently, the big hero all of a sudden, and I glared at him. When he didn't so much as look at me, I cleared my throat.

Dana's eyes flickered to me, and then back to her dad's body. “He didn't show up at the house,” she continued. “I didn't call because I was mad, but then when I did call he didn't answer. And he doesn't go far from this house, he's barely gone anywhere in three years. Finally, I just, I just figured something was wrong, because he always calls back, or leaves a message or something. We don't get along, but he stills calls back.”

“Okay,” I said, before she could dissolve into tears again. “So we're talking two weeks then.”

She sniffed. “At least.”

I looked back up at Leo then, because he knew my limitations as well as I did. He shook his head slightly.

“I can't, Dana,” I said, as gently as I could. “I'm sorry but I can't.”

Her breath hitched and she began shaking her head.

“I'm sorry,” I said again, more desperately. “It's been too long. I can't.”

“You won't even try?” she cried and stared at me defiantly, her small face tear-streaked and fierce.

I exhaled, releasing the breath I didn't know I held. When I was a teenager, Leo and I had tried all sorts of experiments. It was horrible, really, what we did. It was sick. But I needed to know what I could do, to understand the power inside me, and Leo seemed desperate to understand my limits too. So I went along with it. Encouraged it. Never minded when Leo killed animals in all sorts of creative ways and left their bodies out for days, weeks, so I could try to put their slashed and bloody pieces back together. To see how far I could stretch, how far I could go. We both knew that a two-week old corpse was outside of my range.

I shook my head emphatically, but Leo spoke. “He can try. Ebron, you can try.”

Surprised, I met his eyes and he gave me an encouraging nod, a strange expression on his face.

“I can try,” I repeated and her face lit up in relief.

“I can try, but it won't help.”

She wasn't hearing me though. Relief bloomed on her face like a sunrise, like a clear sky. It almost made it easier to breathe through the stank air.

I floundered, unsure of what to do. She stared at me with sudden hope. Leo just looked mildly curious, his head slightly cocked as he stared at the corpse.

“Um,” I said. “I need a few things from the truck.”

“Oh, sure,” Dana said, moving backwards to make space. I had to shimmy my way around her to get to the pathway carved through the crap.

“Leo,” I hissed, when he made no move to follow me. “Can you, uh, help me?”

“Okay,” he said slowly, frowning at me as though the request was strange.

“What do you need?” he asked as we twisted our way through the garbage land mines.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I whispered shrilly. “I can't do this.”

He frowned and shouldered me towards the door.

“Leo!”

We stumbled down the stairs together and for a second we both just stood there, sucking fresh air when it hit us.

“Oh God,” I said. “I think I'm going to puke.”

“Yeah, that's pretty bad,” he agreed, straightening up and leaning his head back, inhaling deeply of the cool night air.

“You know I can't do this.”

“I don't know that. Neither do you. Try.”

“He's been dead for two weeks.
At least
two weeks. There's no way—”

He turned and faced me, taking hold of my wrist where it poked out of my heavy coat. “Last time we tested this was ten years ago, babe. Things have changed since then. You know what you're doing now.”

I flexed my hand, feeling the circle of his fingers around my wrist.

“The fuck I do,” I replied. “I don't know anything. I'm just winging it; I'm always just winging it.”

His eyes went suddenly sharp. “Even after last week?”

My chest closed up. I slowly extracted my wrist from him. “Especially after last week.”

“Ebron. We should talk about it. We
need
to talk.”

I pushed past him, slogging through the snow to the truck. “We will,” I said over my shoulder. “We will.”

I opened the driver's side door and slammed the seat forward, rummaging in the back for the little travel bag I had stuffed with herbs and oils. I had no real use for any of it, but people tended to appreciate the effort. It seemed to ease their minds that I had to perform some sort of ritual, rather than just yanking people out of death like it was a normal Wednesday thing to do, as casual as going to the bank or picking up a bucket of chicken for dinner.

“Really?” Leo asked, watching me pull out the bag.

I shrugged. “It won't matter. I can't help him.”

“I'm just saying that you should try. I think we should consider the possibility that last week altered your parameters.”

“Altered my parameters?” I asked. “You mean the witches?”

He shrugged. “I think they, uh, gave you some extra oomph, yes.”