Boneyard (The Thaumaturge Series Book 2) (21 page)

Chad grabbed my elbow again and steered me through the people moving purposefully around the second ambulance, parked half off the road.

“Here,” Chad called and several EMT’s looked over as we approached.

“Let us through,” Diana added and Chad shoved me forward clumsily. Hands moved to catch me, and then two of the EMT’s stepped aside and guided me to the opened back of the ambulance. I looked at Chad uncertainly and he nodded, giving a wave to indicate that I should climb up.

I did, awkwardly, grabbing the bar handles and hauling myself in. The interior of the ambulance felt oddly secluded, distant from the chaos outside, and I spared one second to glance back at Chad and Diana’s anxious faces, and then to let my eyes wander over the unfamiliar terrain of the ambulance’s interior, before turning my attention to the boy laying on the gurney.

His face was
fucked up
and I swallowed hard, pushing away all the instinctive horror and disgust to sit at his side. Someone had placed an oxygen mask on him, and it covered his bloody nose, the gory mess that was his mouth. A deep gash on his forehead had completely removed his right eyebrow. Blood and dirt and chopped up skin matted the entire side of his face, clumped like hamburger up into his hair. Blood sluggishly dripped out of his ears. A sheet covered him, hiding the rest of his injuries, but despite the minute rise and fall of his chest, he didn’t have long.

I turned back to Chad. “Do you know his name?” I reached under the sheet as I spoke, fumbling for the boy’s hand. It was reflexive; I just wanted to give him some comfort, but I froze self-consciously when I saw Chad track the movement.

“It’s Mason Dernburg,” Diana supplied. My eyes flicked to her and she shrugged. “I recognize him,” she said.

How can you?
I wanted to ask. Half his face was gone. Where was his eyebrow? On the center line somewhere? Shards of glass dusted his hair. But I nodded and reached under the sheet, taking his hand in mine and resting our joined fingers against his thinly wheezing chest. I felt a bump under my wrist and prodded under the sheet until my fingers touched something scratchy and brittle. When I tugged down the sheet enough to see, I saw his corsage, two pink roses still pinned neatly to his blood-splattered tux.

“Mason,” I said and squeezed his hand. I closed my eyes and let the pull take me upwards.

The witches
had
left me with a gift, one that I hadn’t expected. They’d given me a boost, a surplus of energy that I hadn’t realized I’d needed. Healing the body never took much effort—searching for, and then guiding back, the soul was the real heavy lifting. But now, healing felt as easy and as natural as breathing. I gathered the light to me like I was picking field daisies, easy as you please. I showered them down on Mason Dernburg’s broken and bloodied body without so much as a twinge of a headache. I watched the lights burrow into him, lighting him from the inside and making him glow. My breath left me in a gentle exhale. It was easy. So easy.

Vaguely, I was aware that I had an audience, EMT’s crowded together and craning their necks to get a better view. Unbothered, floating in that sacred blissful state where everything was inky black and glowing light, I watched Mason’s skin come together like water drops, watched his teeth wriggle and sprout out of his healing gums like grass shoots. Under my hand, his fingers gave a twitch. His eyelids fluttered.

The EMT’s gasped together in chorus when Mason sat up.

I turned to Chad, and licked away the fine mist of sweat that had beaded on my upper lip. My head felt cottony, but nothing hurt. “Okay. Next one?”

He tore his eyes away from Mason and gave me a slow nod. I patted Mason’s arm and the boy just blinked at me blankly.

“Where’s Sarah?” he asked faintly.

“I’m going to go see her now,” I told him. I patted his arm again and moved to crawl ungracefully out of the ambulance. The gathered crowd stepped away from me as I dropped down onto the blacktop.

Diana stared at me, open-mouthed.

“How did you do it?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I just can.”

“Come on, Ebron,” Chad murmured. He put an arm around my shoulders this time and guided me away. I leaned into the contact, appreciating his solid bulk, the warmth of him. Some of Mason’s blood had smeared on the sleeve of my coat and I absently rubbed it away.

“The other two are dead,” Chad briefed me as we walked. “They’re bad, Ebron.”

“Limbs missing?” I asked, as casually as I could. I hated severed limbs.

He shook his head, cool and professional. “No. Severe head trauma from being thrown from the vehicle. Broken bones, lacerations and abrasions. Internal injuries. Spinal injuries.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Can you fix that?” he asked carefully.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I never really know. It’s not an exact science.”

“Thank you for coming,” Chad said suddenly, fiercely. He gave my shoulders a squeeze and released me.

A sheet-covered body lay before us, the edges of it ruffling in the wind. The EMT kneeling beside it stood and backed away, eyeing me with trepidation. I gave her a nod and focused all my attention on the task at hand. The body looked small under the white sheet. So lonely. I thought of all the parents lying awake, worrying for their kids. I thought of the phone call these kids’ parents wouldn’t receive, of the funerals that didn’t have to be planned.

I crouched beside the lonely figure and Chad took a knee beside me. I reached for the corner of the sheet but stopped, glancing at Chad. Diana rejoined us, squatting beside us on the cold asphalt.

“Is it okay?” I asked. It seemed oddly intrusive. The dead were so defenseless.

Chad took my hesitance as a sign of nerves, and squeezed my shoulder. “It’s okay,” he soothed. “Do you just need to see her face?”

“That’s fine,” I said and slowly he peeled the sheet down, revealing a shock of black hair, tangled and knotted with bobby pins and blood. Like the boy, blood covered much of the girl’s face, though she seemed to have landed mostly on her head. The area just above her temple looked misshapen, and I had the sense that if I touched it her skull would just mush in like rotten fruit.

Her face, bloody and cut with glass but mostly intact, tilted towards me and deep sadness rolled through me at the sight of her wide, surprised eyes. Blood had pooled in the hollow of her throat. Her necklace, a tiny heart on a chain as fine as thread, lay half-submerged in gore.

Her chest did not move. The stillness always surprised me. That harsh reminder that we were nothing but meat.

I reached for her hand, just on instinct, searching under the sheet. Diana touched my arm and shook her head when I looked at her.

“Her dress is torn,” she said softly. “Leave the sheet.”

“Oh,” I said numbly. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Diana said and suddenly gave me a sad smile. It made me warm to her, that she too felt the need to protect these crushed little bodies, to stand between them and any emotionless eyes.

Turning back to the girl, I instead smoothed a strand of sticky dark hair from her forehead. I focused on her sightless gaze, the blood faintly misting the whites of her eyes, and latched on to the pull when I felt it. I let myself float upward.

“We don’t know her name,” Chad said faintly, his voice fading as I ascended.

“It’s fine,” I whispered and opened my eyes to darkness, sprinkled with pinpoints of light.

I floated in the darkness for a few long seconds, relaxing into the easy nothingness, resting against the calming dark. It folded around me, the void, like a blanket or the arm of a friend. So tempting, just to lean into that comfort and let it take me.

With reluctance, I moved upwards, climbing sluggishly through the twinkling lights. Noises raked for my attention, commotion just outside the door of my safe, dark world. I squinted in concentration, moving further upwards and opening myself to welcome the lights.

They came to me; warm like kisses over my face, tickling over my arms. I cupped them close as they melted together, forming a gently glowing ball. As it grew, pressure increased in my temples and I took a deep breath to steady myself.

I drifted down, the ball held carefully between my palms. The further down I drifted, the louder the noises became. Instinctively, I wanted to pull away from the harsh voices in the physical world. I wanted to drift away into the darkness.

It took effort to open my eyes and lower the light onto the girl’s still body. I guided the warm glow to the crown of her head, watching the light touch and spread, enveloping her head and neck with luminescence. A few tendrils worked their way down, tracing down the bloody paths of her body. The dent in her head sunk in, bubbled out and then went still.

I sat back with my heels and gave a sigh. When I opened my eyes, Chad stared back at me with anxious eyes. Red and blue lights pulsed in flashes. A gust of cold air blew over my sweaty face and I gave a shiver, but welcomed the chill. I worked my jaw a little, trying to relieve the ache in my temples.

“It didn’t work?” Chad asked after a moment.

“I’m not done,” I replied shortly. Over his shoulder, on-lookers milled around, gathering in small groups. I glanced around and saw that more ambulances had arrived, probably from neighboring towns. Great. More eyes. More mouths. Fuck, fifty bucks said that I was going to be on someone’s fucking Instagram. Leo was going to
kill
me.

Diana now stood beside one of the ambulances, her hands cupped before her pleadingly as she spoke with two men in police uniforms. They craned their necks to look past her, fixing alarmed gazes on me.

I looked back at Chad. “This is not going to end well.”

His eyes flicked down to the girl. Together, we watched her lips part as she sucked in a light breath.

“This is the best possible outcome,” he replied softly.

“Not for me,” I snapped back. So much for self-preservation.
Sorry, Leo.

Very aware of the attention on me, I closed my eyes again and retreated back into the safety of the higher planes, moving up quickly despite the roll of nausea in my guts. The girl’s soul wouldn’t be far. I could do this if I didn’t think about it, if I pushed Leo out of my mind and just concentrated.

I floated upwards, my senses straining outwards for any sign of the soul. I wondered what I looked like to those gathered, a scruffy hick in a scuffed Carhartt coat, kneeling on the icy blacktop with my hands hovering over the poor girl’s head like some sort of lunatic faith healer. I couldn’t shake the weight of the eyes on me. Everyone was watching. Everyone would know. I was doing the exact opposite of what Leo had told me—
implored me
—to do and I wasn’t so stupid to think that there wouldn’t be consequences.

But what could I do? What choice did I have? I couldn’t just let them die here, not if they didn’t need to. And it
was
needless. Stupid. Fixable.

I couldn’t just let them die.

I didn’t have it in me to let them die.

Found out, though. I was found out. My cover—tenuous though it had been—was blown. Everyone would know. I should have just considered myself lucky that nobody did have out their phones, live Tweeting every detail. ‘Four Kids Die in Horrific Crash, but when He Showed Up, You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!’ Christ, I was losing it.

I felt myself slipping. Lights blurred past me, the darkness yawning out. Struggling to remain aloft, I tried to focus, to forget everything but the soul waiting for me. But my skin crawled, as though the gazes on me were physical things prodding at me, scratching at me with mad curiosity.  For a brief second, the soul flashed before me, but I reached for it too late, my concentration shattering and I tumbled back into the physical world entirely without grace.

My eyes flew open. Chad stared back at me, leaning forward so far into his crouch that he had to brace himself with one hand. The girl lay between us, her chest rising with thin, shallow breaths.

“What happened?” he asked urgently. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I said quickly, but couldn’t stop myself from looking past Chad, following movement behind me. Something had changed; the assembled crowd of emergency personnel had dispersed, sprung back into action while I’d struggled to find the girl’s soul. Scratchy voices blared over hand-held radios and someone called out instructions. Diana seemed to have vanished into the suddenly urgent melee. I blanched, turning my head. Heat spiked into my temples and I winced.

“What is it?” Chad repeated. Snow had gathered in his eyelashes and he blinked rapidly a few times. The wind had chapped his cheeks.

“Everyone’s going to know, now,” I said and then wished I hadn’t. Who was I to complain, with a recently dead teenager before me and a still-dead one not far off? My problems at least didn’t include being violently thrown from a moving vehicle. My eyebrows hadn’t been scraped off by rocky concrete. My heart still beat, wildly as a caged bird, but undeniably pumping.
Perspective
. I just needed perspective.

I needed a drink.

“I mean, it’s fine,” I added quickly. “I just—I can feel everyone watching. How I am going to explain this?”

He leaned forward a little more, balancing on his toes in way I hadn’t thought of man of his girth capable. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Diana and I have talked about it—”

“You weren’t supposed to tell her unless I agreed,” I interrupted hotly.

Chad’s eyes flickered down to the girl between us. “I know,” he said softly. “But I knew you would say yes. I knew you would do the right thing.”

“Fuck,” I muttered.

“We’ll figure something out, okay? Just... save these kids.” He reached out, putting one big hand on my shoulder and squeezing. “Okay, buddy?”

Oh, fuck my life.
I sagged a little under his touch, but gave him a quick nod and turned my attention back to the girl. I thought of her and tried to clear my mind of everything else. Just her, and her tangled dark hair. Just her, and the delicate shell of her ear, studded with half a dozen tiny hoops. Just her, and the blood misting her face and the glass shards on her lips.