Read Online The Dead (The Thaumaturge Series Book 1) by Cal Matthews - Free Book Online

welcome.”
    “Um . . . we'll be here for a few days,” he said, and I looked up.
    “Maybe I'll stop in again?” he said. His eyes were too bright. My heart was beating too fast.
    Thoughts jumbled in my head, uneasy and confused. I simultaneously wanted the creepy witches to leave and sexy Marcus to stay. The way his eyebrows came together when he frowned was incredibly distracting. For just a moment, I allowed myself to imagine what he could mean, that perhaps he really was coming onto me, and hell, maybe in my fantasy world I could just lean over and kiss that smile off his mouth if I wanted to. But this was the tightrope I walked, and I had to keep it level.
    “Yeah, sure, man,” I said, handing him his receipt. “If you run out of supplies, I'll be here.”
    “Thanks,” he said, and I don't know - was that disappointment in his voice?
    They walked to the door, filing out one by one until only Marcus remained. He glanced over at me once more. “Uh, thanks again,” he said, holding up the bag of herbs.
    “Yeah, take it easy,” I replied. He nodded once, and then was gone, the bell over the door tinkling behind him.

Chapter Six
     
    “Seriously?” I fended off Johnny with one hand, my truck keys and phone in the other. Johnny dropped into a bow, and then leaped up with impressive speed, landing a big wet kiss on the side of my face.
    “Ugh.” I gave him a knee to the chest, and shrugged off my coat.
    “Yeah, seriously,” Leo answered.
    He was parked on the couch again, slouched forward with his elbows on his knees as he contemplated the papers spread out across the coffee table. I recognized them, all those old notebooks and sheets of loose leaf and I moved to stand across from him, crossing my arms over my chest.
    “Why?” I demanded and he peered up at me with an annoyed tilt to his eyebrows.
    “Because we write shit down,” he snapped back. “We always have, and now something’s different.”
    I sighed. “Nothing’s different.”
    “You did two resurrections yesterday with hardly any side effects at all. I’d say that’s different.”
    “Oh, there were side effects,” I said and then scowled when Leo’s eyes lit up triumphantly.
    “Great,” Leo said and tapped the notebook with his pen. “Tell me about it so that I can write it down.”
    I heaved another sigh but flopped down next to him. The notebooks had started out as a joke, and I thought they were probably my idea, but Leo and I disagreed about that. I’d met Leo when I was seventeen, and right away he’d encouraged me to explore the limits of my ability. He’d wanted to know how often I could do it, and how fresh the bodies needed to be, and how many bodies I could do at a time. He wanted to know how much damage I could repair.
    My very first resurrection – my childhood cat, returned to life as I clutched her, wailing, in the field beside our house – had felt like a fluke. The dead gophers and field mice that followed proved it was not. But my ability terrified me, and those early experiments were tentative and without direction.
    Leo wanted to set up parameters. He wanted to push me. One night he’d bustled me into my truck and drove me out to a dark pasture. We ended up down in a boggy creek, where a dead cow lay half in and half out of the water. I’d brought it back under his watchful gaze and then one of us – I swear it was me – joked that we needed to start writing everything down. For science. The notebooks were born, and they contained information about every subsequent resurrection I’d ever done, all the way up until Aubrey. It hadn’t even occurred to me to make notes about Aubrey.
    Leo held the pen poised above the paper. “Tell me then.”
    “Resurrection took place about five o’clock in the evening. Subject brought to my shop. Female, about seventeen.” I said, slipping automatically into the format we had long ago established. Cable crime shows had been my thing for a little while. “Dead maybe