Boneyard (The Thaumaturge Series Book 2) (9 page)

Their noise had alerted the ranch to my presence. Aunt Sharon came out on the porch, dressed in her riding clothes. The cows had been moved to winter pasture, but Aunt Sharon also raised champion quarter horses.

“Hi Ebron,” she called, giving me a little wave.

I stood up and walked over to say hi, noting with a sigh how her smiled looked just a little too forced. If I was a holiday and birthday phone call kind of kid, Cody was a complete mama's boy. He had probably told her everything, including the part where he had been stabbed and temporarily dead.

“Cody's in the big garage,” she told me. Her ice blue eyes fixed on me. She looked uncomfortably like my mother.

“Okay, thanks,” I said. I tried for a smile and it felt weird on my face, like my lips pulled too tight, or in the wrong direction. I tried to adjust them and it made me bare my teeth at her. Her eyebrows dipped in.

“Something going on with you?” she asked bluntly, in with the characteristic boldness that differed from my mom. My mom was all passive-aggressive simpering. Sharon attacked and asked questions later. With her at the helm, the ranch had never been anything but a success. 

“No,” I said and stopped with the weird lip waggling. I took off my baseball hat, smoothed my hair back, and then put it back on. I lifted one foot and propped it on the lowest step. This close to her, I smelled the grassy smell of horse coming off her. Her spurs jangled as she shifted her weight. I wasn't dismissed and I knew it.

“Cody's concerned for you,” she said after making me squirm for a bit.

My head jerked up. “I'm concerned for him,” I said carefully.

“He's alright,” she said and then heaved a sigh. “The divorce has been rough on him. I'm glad you're there for him, but I don't want you mixing him up in any trouble though. I heard there was a police car at your trailer the other day.”

I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes. “Officer Metz is a friend of mine,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed. “A friend, huh? You might do well to remember that he is
married
.” 

I scoffed, so surprised that I couldn't form words. She watched my reaction closely and my speechlessness must have passed some sort of test, because her expression eased a bit.

“Not that I think you would do that,” she amended a little more gently.

“Do what? He's a friend. A
friend
.”

She nodded. “That's what I told your mom. Word just gets around, y'know, and people make up stories.”

“What stories?” I asked quickly, panicked.

“Oh, they don't know nothin’ about your private business,” she said, waving at me vaguely as though to indicate the gayness just oozing off of me.

“I just want to talk to Cody,” I said, a little desperate to get away from her.

“Sure,” she opened the screen door, propping it open with her hip. “You take care of yourself, Ebron.”

“Yeah, thanks, Aunt Sharon,” I replied, and hustled away from her. I fled across the front yard and headed around the back of the main house towards the outbuildings. It was still light out, but a hazy red sunset started to edge the top of the distant mountains. I headed toward the light on in the big garage.

Cody looked up as I slid the big metal door open and his face went from curiously welcoming to cornered stray cat in about half a second. I held up my hands placating.

“I just want to talk,” I said.

He stood up slowly from the edge of a blue tarp scattered with half a dozen greasy pieces of machinery. Wiping his hands on the legs of his dirty coveralls, he looked anywhere but at me.

“Would have called you back, dude, if I wanted to talk.”

I stopped, standing halfway away from him on the floor of the garage. He flipped a ratchet nervously through his fingers, squinted up at the dusty analog clock on the wall, nudged a splotch of grease with his boot, but he wouldn’t look at me.

“Look, I’m sorry, man,” I finally just blurted out.

He scowled. “I’m not mad. I just don’t want to talk yet.”

“Okay,” I said, but I just stood there because the fuck I was just going to walk out, leaving him standing there all twitchy and sad.

“I should have told you years ago,” I said. “When we were kids or something. I didn’t mean for you to find out about it like this.”

He looked at me then, blinking at me owlishly. “You mean about you being gay, or you doing the other thing?”

“The... other thing,” I paused, considering. “Or both, I guess. I thought you already knew about me, y’know, being gay.”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter to me. I guess I did, since you hang out with Brittany all the time and you’re not banging her.”

“She has a boyfriend,” I protested.

He shrugged. “You never dated in high school, neither. And at my wedding, you could have hooked up with any of those bridesmaids and you didn’t. And your mom told my mom that you have a ‘special friend’—” Cody emphasized with finger quotes, “who stays with you now and then. Not hard to figure out, dude. And dude, you own a
tea shop
.”

“And herbs,” I said, shrugging. Then I waited, hoping for anything more, but he just turned his back and started putting his tools away, wiping the greasy ones on a rag and stacking them all in a corner of the tarp.

“Are you okay?” I asked after about thirty seconds of dead quiet.

“Yep.”

“Fuck, Cody, come on. I’m sorry, all right? I’m sorry I got you involved with any of it, but it’s not like I was just going to leave you dead. I had to do something.”

He made a hissing noise and shot me a dark glance over his shoulder.

“I know resurrections aren’t easy, I know they hurt, but shit, man, I brought back three people that night. I dry-heaved for days.”

He turned his back to me, and I knew him well enough to recognize the set of his spine. His hands fisted at his side, and I was just so nervous, so desperate for him to relent and forgive me and give me his goofy Cody smile and make everything right with the world again. I couldn’t stop talking, words spilling out of me, everything I should have told Dahlia but hadn’t.

“And then Wednesday night, man, I had another one and everything went really wrong. He was dead for too long and I couldn’t find him, and I just went too far and hey, do you remember Dana Fogerty? From high school? Probably not, she’s my age. It was her dad, man, and now, I don’t know, I just screwed everything up. His body came back but not anything else and I didn’t know what to do.”

At some point in my rambling, he turned and looked at me, his gaze withering and cold.

“Nothing else,” he repeated flatly.

“Yeah. I think I may have created a zombie. I don’t know what to do.”

He looked at me for a long moment, wide-eyed. Then he sighed and said, “Dude, what happened to me was the scariest thing ever, man. I died. Like, I felt myself die. And then you did that to me, and it hurt
so much
. Like I was getting turned inside out. What you did? I’m not sure you should be doing that. Maybe Dana’s dad was a sign. You know, that you should stop.”

I felt like the air was sucked straight out of my lungs. “How can you say that?” I said to him. My fingers went numb. The back of my jaw tingled, like I was going to be sick. “If I hadn’t done what I did, you would be fucking dead, Cody.”

“I know,” he said quietly.

I huffed, anger starting to replace the surprise. All my thoughts felt slippery, like I couldn’t keep them in my head. There were just feelings and images and the twisting of my guts.

“You think that would have been better?” I snarled at him. “Your mom and dad, planning your funeral? You wanted to stay dead?”

He shook his head sadly. “I don’t know, man. It’s just... what are you that you can do that? Haven’t you ever asked yourself?”

My anger felt like it was pulsing out of me in shock waves, like the tools hanging on the pegboard walls should start to rattle with the force of my rage. “All the time, Cody. I think about it all the time.”

“But what you do—”

“I help people!” I exploded at him. “You, Marcus, Aubrey, Jim and Shaina. All of you would be dead. And so many others! Hunting accidents and drowned kids and suicides. I
fix
them!”

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” he said softly, and the anger went out of me like helium from a popped balloon. My shoulders sagged and I took a step back.

“I got to go,” I said, after a moment of silence.  It was too heavy, the quiet between us, all the words gone wrong and nothing else to say.

He nodded. “I’ll call you when I want to talk, Ebron.”

“Fine,” I wanted to add,
sorry I saved your life,
but the words felt like thorns on my lips and I just turned away instead.

When Leo got home, later that night, he found me sitting on my back porch, sipping on a beer and attempting to chain smoke.  He stopped, framed in the doorway, and watched me raise a shaking hand to my lips and exhale a plume of smoke into the crisp air.

“Those things’ll kill ya,” he said, then seemed to come to some sort of decision and plopped down next to me, nudging his knee against mine.

I occasionally bummed cigarettes off my mom and my friend Brittany—
whom I was not banging
—when we were at the bar, but I hadn’t bought my own in years. He picked up the pack off the steps, examined it, and then, to my surprise, pulled a cigarette out with his long slender fingers. He stuck it between his lips and waited until I fumbled in my coat pocket for the lighter.

He sucked in, the hollowing of his cheeks making his face look gaunt and somehow more dangerous.  “Hmm,” he said, exhaling through his nose like a badass and holding the cigarette between two fingers with practiced ease. “I haven’t had one of these since around 1982. Were you born then?”

“No,” I said flatly.

“I was still in California. Generally, I preferred a different kind of smoking,” he continued, gazing at the cigarette thoughtfully. “But these have a certain appeal, don’t they?”

“They go good with beer.”

He glanced down at the long necked beer bottle sitting between my feet. “Getting drunk again?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

I felt him watching me and it didn’t escape my notice how he leaned in a little, his nostrils flaring as he scented at my shoulder. I wondered what secrets my smells gave away.

“Are you falling apart, Ebron?” he asked.

“Leave me alone, Leo,” I replied.

“You saw Cody,” he said.

“Yep.” I took drag, and then a gulp of beer, and then another drag, sucking the cigarette hard enough to make the cherry glow.

“He’s not dealing well,” Leo tried again and I snorted.

“No. No, he is not.”

“Ebron, come on. Talk to me.”

I shook my head. Pressure throbbed behind my eyes. If I said even one more word, I would start to cry. I expected Leo to push it, but he just nodded and we smoked our cigarettes and watched the stars come out.

After a bit, two or three cigarettes later, when I felt lightheaded from the nicotine and my jaw relaxed enough for me to breathe, I leaned into his shoulder. He just sighed, like something in him had relaxed. He drew me closer, tucking me into his side. He turned his face into my hair and nosed a little at my ear.

“I like your haircut,” he said quietly.

“Thanks. Dahlia.”

Lips against my temple and despite myself I pressed against him a little harder. It was a little too cold for porch drinking and the heat of his body felt good.

“I think I’d like to meet her sometime,” he said, his mouth moving lower, ghosting kisses down my neck. My body did things without consulting my brain, like tilting my head back. Right away he kissed my throat, all wet and hot.

“She’d like that. She thinks you’re my imaginary boyfriend.”

“Hmm.” He raised one hand and hooked a finger in the collar of my coat, pulling it open so that his mouth could reach my collar bone, the very top of my shoulder. I shifted, warmth beginning to pool in my crotch.

“Is that what I am?” he whispered. “That’s the second time you’ve called me that. Am I your boyfriend?”

I froze, the butterflies in my stomach turning to stone.

“What else should I call you?” I asked, starting to pull away.

He drew me back and pressed an apologetic kiss against my cheek. “It’s okay. I don’t mind.”

“No, tell me what I should call you. I don’t know what we are to each other.”

Leo slid an arm around my back, pulling me closer to him. My foot knocked over my empty beer bottle and we both watched it rattle down the steps.

“Do you need that?” he asked, very quietly, his fingers on my chin turning my face towards his. “Some sort of, I don’t know, commitment or something? Will that help you?”

“Help me with what?” I didn’t want to meet his eyes, so I focused on the way his hair curled around his ear, in a perfect little ringlet like it had been styled that way. I knew it hadn’t. He just looked that good all the time.

“Help you to know that I’m in this with you?”

I exhaled softly, and straightened a bit, looking out across the small rectangle of dark yard, past the chain link to where my truck sat under the carport. Familiar sights, familiar things. I had resurrected my first human body when I was nineteen years old and Leo had been by my side even then. It had never occurred to me that he wasn’t in this with me. I just wondered, as I had since I had met him, why he was sticking around.

“‘Boyfriend’ is just an easier way of saying ‘part-time undead lover,” I said without looking at him. I tucked my hands up under my own armpits. The side of me that was pressed into him was warm and the side that wasn’t felt like an icicle.

Hi lips twitched. “I’m not undead.”

“Okay, part-time... supernatural fuck buddy? Nosferatu roommate?
Vampyr
booty call?”

“I beg you to never say ‘vampyr’ ever again.”

“Speaking of which,” I said, and I wondered why I was changing the subject. “Did you want to go out? To eat?”

“I’ve eaten,” he said quietly, the smile dipping off his face. That explained the heat radiating off of him, the blood warming him from the inside.