Boneyard (The Thaumaturge Series Book 2) (28 page)

I didn’t want to recognize that, though. He’d lied to me. I’d asked him straight up and he’d lied to me.

I didn’t want to douse the flame. I wanted to breathe on the spark. Make it burn.

Getting to my feet, I stalked to kitchen and threw open the refrigerator. I cracked a beer. My mind felt like a balloon, filling up with uncomfortable thoughts that I wanted desperately to go away.

I’d killed Corvin. Marcus lied to me. Leo killed Morgan.
I created a zombie!
Dead witches in my bathroom. Grave robbing. Nosy priests and bossy cops. Fuck.
Did I mention the fucking zombie?
My life was ridiculous.

I stumbled back into the living and collapsed clumsily on the couch. My beer frothed over the lip of the bottle and I swore, covering the whole thing with my mouth and sucking off the foam. My head swam with disjointed thoughts. I thumbed my phone back to life and scrolled to Marcus’s contact entry. I stared at his name and pictured his stupid, fucking face and his pretty, pretty eyes and his lying mouth and I got up to get another beer.

Armed with a beer in hand and my throat burning from a fortifying shot of vodka, I settled back into the couch and picked up my phone again. What would Marcus be doing on a Monday night? Having dinner with his family, eating filet mignon off expensive china? I imagined white-gloved servants leaning over him to refill his wine glass. Or maybe not—maybe he was with Jim and Shaina, freaking out over all the ways he was connected to his murdered coven-mates and wondering when the police would knock on his door.

Ha.
I snorted. Join the fucking club. I took another gulp of beer and let my thumb hover over the screen. I would just call him. Yell at him. Lay all the blame at his feet. It would be cathartic. I just had to push the button and he would be back in my life.

My skin itched madly from the inside. I couldn’t stop my knee from bouncing. I chewed on my right ring finger, gnawing at the cuticle until I tasted blood. I didn’t want to hear his voice. Did. Didn’t. He’d made the choice to lie to me. Leo had killed her and Marcus had known and together they’d let me believe that everything was fine. Like I was some fucking chump.

Push the button.
All I had to do was call him and I would hear more of his lies. For all I knew, he had already come up with some way to pin the murders on me. I’d been there, of course. They’d died in my shop. Their bodies sat there still, stinking and rotting. He could make me the murderer, no problem.

I can make it your problem.

When I did push ‘call’, though, all the anger drained out of me like the balloon had popped, and I deflated back on the couch. Marcus’s ringback tone was something chirpy and upbeat and I hated it, just on principle. I waited as it played on uninterrupted. Two rings. Three. Four. I had not considered that he wouldn’t answer, and when the robotic voice came on the line asking me to leave a message, I dumbly sat there and listened to the beep.

“Marcus,” I said, and then stopped to clear my throat. “Marcus,” I tried again. “It’s Ebron. I...” My breathing felt funny. Completely unbidden, my mind conjured the image of Corvin’s skull exploding in a fine, red, mist. I saw Morgan, crawling on her knees through the sticky, spreading blood. I saw Marcus, his thighs spread and trembling there on my very couch. I saw Leo’s face when he’d walked through the door.

My thoughts lagged. My jaw felt weirdly heavy and all the words I wanted to say jammed up behind my tongue.

“Forget it,” I croaked. “Forget you know me.”

I ended the call. The beer and vodka sloshed around in my stomach. My guts cramped up and I knuckled the hollows of my own tired eyes.

Shakily, I got to my feet and went into the kitchen, tossing the empty beer bottles into the garbage. My hands operated without direction from my brain, moving things around and tidying up. The trailer felt too quiet and I didn’t want to be alone with my unquiet thoughts.

I thought about calling Dahlia. I desperately wanted to know how Danielle was, if she was awake. But my earlier calls had gone straight to voicemail and she hadn’t returned my texts. And I didn’t want to talk to Cody, the traitorous bastard. My warm kitchen seemed to close in around me. The nearly empty vodka bottle waited on the counter top and my eyes kept roaming back to it.

Leo would call. I just had to hold it together until Leo called with a way to fix it. My trembling hands inched towards the bottle. I picked it up and overturned it in the sink, watching in glug down the drain.

Later, I sat on my back porch, shivering in my ratty sweatshirt. The stars bloomed overhead in the crisp, dark sky. The moments ticked by and I grew colder. My phone was silent at my side.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said aloud, just to throw it out there into the world.

Around midnight, it began to snow.

Chapter 18

Dahlia called as I drove to work the next morning. I hastily shoved my travel mug at—not in—the cup holder and hot tea splashed all over my hand. Hissing, I swiped the tea off on the leg of my jeans and sucked my sore fingers. Somehow, I managed to prop my phone against my ear before it went to voicemail.

“Dahlia?” I asked.

“Hey,” she said softly. My heart kicked me in the ribs as I tried to decipher her state of mind from that one quiet word.

“Hey,” I replied. “How are you? How’s Danielle?”

“She’s good,” Dahlia said, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Yeah?” I said. “She’s, uh, awake?”

“Oh, yeah,” Dahlia said. “Of course. I can’t thank you enough, Ebron. What you did? Oh my God, Ebron, if you hadn’t been there...”

She hiccupped, her breath going shaky and I drove in silence. So the soul had found its way back, even as careless and as sloppy as I’d been. I guess it’d been a fifty/fifty shot, but I just wasn’t used to the odds working in my favor.

“Anyway,” Dahlia said when she’d composed herself. “She’s getting released from the hospital today. We’ll be heading home in a few hours and I just wanted to tell you that Thanksgiving is still on. You’re coming, right?”

“Oh,” I said. “Er, I mean, yeah? I didn’t plan...”

“No, we want to,” she said firmly. “We want you to come over. Brian’s heading back to Boise—”

“Really?” I interrupted. “He’s not sticking around? After everything?”

She guffawed bitterly. “He couldn’t get out of here fast enough, Ebron. He’s just so different these days. And I’d rather him not be around the girls, with him acting like this.”

“Wow,” I said. What a dick. “Dahlia? I ran into him at the hospital.”

“Oh,” she said and yeah, there was something in her voice that gave me pause.

“He sort of mentioned that, uh, he wanted me to stay away from you? What’s with that?”

She sighed heavily. “I should have told you. He thinks that there’s something going on between me and you. Sorry. You just have a lot on your plate and I didn’t want to burden you with this too.”

I floundered. “I... I—”

“I know,” she said. “Don’t worry about. He’s leaving. He won’t be here on Thanksgiving. So it’ll just be me and the girls and Brittany. And you and Leo, right?”

“I guess,” I said reluctantly. “Well, me. Maybe Leo.” If he were back in time. If I could bribe him with blood, or something.

“Ebron,” Dahlia said quietly. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am. If I lost her... thank you so much. God, thank you, you just... you saved my baby girl, Ebron.”

“It’s okay,” I said helplessly. I mean, ‘you’re welcome’ didn’t seem like an appropriate response. ‘No problem’? Uh, no, kind of a big problem actually.

I turned into the parking lot of my shop, my windshield wipers ramped up to deal with the steadily falling snow. Brittany’s car sat alone in front of the hair salon and I thought I’d bring her some tea in a little bit.

“Is she going to be okay?” Dahlia asked in my ear, her voice going even softer. “I mean, is there anything I should know about taking care of her... after that?”

I turned off my ignition and sat there with snow swirling across my windows. “She should be fine,” I said, as reassuringly as possible. “She is fine, right, Dahlia? Back to her old self?”

“Yes,” she said. “She’s shaken up. She doesn’t remember the accident, but she says she remembers your face. She wants to talk to you, when you have a chance.”

A swear word formed in my mouth, but I bit it off. “Of course,” I said. “I’ll see her on Thanksgiving.”

“Thank you, Ebron. If there’s ever anything we can do for you...”

“I know,” I said.

“And everything else is okay with you?” she asked. “Aside from Brian being a jerk?”

I smiled humorlessly. “I’m dealing. Thanks for calling, Dahl.”

“See you on Thursday.”

“I’ll be there with bells on,” I said.

Work felt like walking through a strange dream, a peaceful respite when the rest of my life was such a nightmare. Customers sorted through the bulks bins, bought tea pots and aromatherapy satchels, debated between white and hei cha. Misty didn’t come in. Nobody mentioned witches or dead bodies or miraculous resurrections, though I did get a few “didja hear about the car accident last night? Thank God, no serious injuries”.

“Thank God,” I echoed and busied myself stocking dried ginseng and mugwort. The mugwort reminded me of Marcus and I wished I hadn’t called him the night before. He needed to not be in my life.

Brittany visited me at lunchtime, long enough to throw herself into my arms and cry about Danielle.

“Is she going to be okay?” Brittany sniffed into my shoulder.

“Dahlia said she’s fine,” I replied, gently peeling her off my chest.

“So fucking scary,” Brittany said. “I mean, any day could be your last. You just never know.”

“Yeah,” I agreed darkly, and watched her disappear into the whirling snow, loping towards her half-covered car with her dark hair bouncing.

Jonathan Weber didn’t show up either, and it wasn’t until I was closing up that I realized I’d been holding my breath all day, expecting him to prowl through the door. But the sky grew dark and my customers tapered off into nothing and Weber never showed. I twisted the key in the lock, letting out a sigh of relief as I did so. I ducked back behind the counter and turned off the music, letting the quiet of the shop settle around me. My shoulders sagged, my spine curling.

I wiped down the counters. I swept and mopped and righted the jars on the shelves. Outside the street lights illuminated the thick flakes of snow, casting warm yellow light through the big picture window. My footsteps sounded loud on the wood floor. The heat of the busy day faded and the heater kicked on, blasting me with warm air.

I sat down on one of the recliners arranged in a messy semi-circle around a coffee table. Some nights, a friendly group of board game enthusiasts used the space for their games, but today an older couple had sat reading. I picked up the tatty paperback the woman left behind and stacked it on top of the other paperbacks I’d collected from random generous readers. A few quarters scattered across the glass tabletop. I stacked those too, right in the center. The mint plant on the adjacent end table and I got up to water it, gathering up the shriveled dead leaves that had tumbled to the floor.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know I was going to go look at the bodies. I knew, I just wanted to pretend for a little longer that I wasn’t the type of person to go gawk at them. I wanted the ruse that I was just going about my business like any normal shopkeeper, tidying my store and enjoying the quiet after a long day on my feet.

Finally, after dusting the shelves and stocking the dried vanilla and consolidating all the trash into one large, plastic bag, I ducked through the door marked ‘employees only’ into the back storage room where I grew my fresh herbs under heat lamps.

I hadn’t turned the heat lamps off when Leo had warned me to do so; the backroom simply got too cold and my lovingly tended plants would freeze. Instead, I’d hoped that bathroom would stay colder than the rest of the room and that the clove and digitalis would cover whatever smells the bodies produced.

I didn’t want to... but I didn’t
not
want to, either. The urge felt overwhelming, and I found myself striding past the metal tables towards the shadowed corner. Before I even really knew what I was doing, I reached for the doorknob to the small bathroom. Some deep revulsion welled up inside me and I paused.

I only heard the scratching because I was holding my breath.

Only, it was more like a rustling, something dry and low. The sound sent a chill zinging up my spine and for one, wild, terrifying second, I thought that the sound came from inside the bathroom. That Corvin and Morgan had returned to life without need of my help, and now wormed over each other on the bathroom floor, their sagging limbs twisting and writhing, their mouths working in disjointed snaps. In that second, I believed it so strongly that when a heavy hand fell on my shoulder, I shrieked and flailed back.

“Fuck, Ebron!” Leo yelled, dodging my elbows.

“Leo!” I launched myself at him. No conscious thought required. I saw him and I needed him.

His jaw jammed into my shoulder when we collided and he let out a surprised “oof!”

“Sorry, sorry,” I said and squeezed my arms around his broad back. I buried my nose in his hair, taking in his unique smell—trees, cold fur, leather—and closed my eyes. Just for one instant, I could wish away all my problems and just be safe with him in my arms.

But Leo pulled away almost immediately, drawing back with a strange look on his face.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said and the hardness in his voice made my stomach drop a little.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” I said. “I hadn’t heard from you and—”

“I called,” he interrupted, sounding defensive. “A couple of times. You didn’t answer.”

“I was in the hospital,” I replied, which was the shortest route around the truth he wasn’t going to be happy to hear.

His eyes went wide and his hands flew to me. “When? Are you okay? What happened?”

“I’m fine,” I said. He rucked up the back of my shirt and spread his fingers across my back.