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

been a suicide, apparently, his car scattered with stray pills and an empty whiskey bottle. The sight of him, sunken and stiff, remained one of my worst memories, because I hadn’t been prepared. By then, I’d experimented with rats, dogs, pigs, even cows, but that first dead human, had shocked me so badly that I had just stood there, staring at the curled fingers of the boy’s outstretched hands. It was like he had tried to claw his way out the window, like he had changed his mind at the last minute and tried to crawl for help.
    But Leo had pulled him out and I’d brought him back, slowly and sloppily, though successfully. I’d almost screamed when the guy’s eyes had opened, when the scratchy moan had come out of his mouth. Then we’d left him sputtering and gasping there in the grass while Leo had half-carried me through the woods, my whole body throbbing with pain. I was sick for almost a week and then after that... it got easier.
    “So, remind me,” I said, getting up to grab myself a beer. I called to him from the kitchen. “You think that the longer I go without doing anything, the more strength I have. But the longer I go, the worst the side effects will be.”
    “Yeah,” he replied, leaning back into the couch cushions. “That’s my working hypothesis. But this last incident doesn’t support that.”
    “Working hypothesis,” I repeated, settling back next to him and frowning when I realized that I’d forgotten the church key to open my beer. “Listen to you, smarty pants.”
    Leo took the bottle out of my hand and twisted the cap off in the palm of his hand, handing it back without really looking at me. “Well,” he said dryly. “I did go to college, you know.”
    My mouth twisted into a scowl, but I knew he hadn’t meant anything by it.
    “All right, then,” I said and took a swig of my beer. “What do you want to do?”
    “I think we should replicate some of these older experiments,” he said, thumbing through the pages. “See if we get different results.”
    I huffed a little. “I was kinda thinking that maybe we could just stay in tonight and –”
    “We can head out to the ranch,” Leo interrupted and I frowned.
    “You want to use my cousin’s cows again.”
    Leo found the entry he was looking for and held it up for me to see. I noted the date – April 24, 2010 – and took the notebook out of his hand to read the entry, curious as to what we had been up five years ago.
    “Four heifers in an hour,” I summarized after scanning the handwritten notes. “I threw up, immediately got an ocular migraine resulting in the loss of vision in my left eye, and had full body shakes for almost forty-five minutes.”
    He nodded along to my description. “Yeah. Easy enough to duplicate. I mean, the parameters are different, because you just resurrected two people not twenty-four hours ago, and back then it had been several months, but... close enough.”
    I set the notebook back down on the coffee table and concentrated on finishing my dinner. The Doritos didn’t really complement my smoky Scotch ale, but I finished them both, keeping my mouth busy because Leo just sat there looking at me, waiting for me to say something.
    Finally, I tilted the beer bottle up, swigging down the last dregs.
    “Fine,” I grumbled and Leo grinned. I couldn’t help but give him a shaky smile in response. It could be like old times, I guessed. The two of us out in the forest, the scent of blood on the wind. I’d be lying if I said I hated the practices all the time.
    “Not right now, though!” I protested, as Leo made a move to get up.
    He just looked at me, questions all over his face, like he had expected us to just go tearing out into the night.
    I motioned to the scattered crumbs of my sandwich, my socked feet. “I just settled in,” I said. “Not tonight.”
    Leo made a frustrated, vaguely inhuman noise, but gave me a curt nod.
    “We can’t just go out into the pasture and shoot a bunch of