Boneyard (The Thaumaturge Series Book 2) by Cal Matthews Read Free Book Online Page B

deep into the bench seat and exhaled. “I went too high. I couldn't breathe.”
    “Too high,” he repeated softly.
    “Yeah. Higher than I usually go. Fuck, Leo, we shouldn’t have done this. We shouldn’t have left him there with her. We left her there with a fucking zombie .”
    He was quiet for a long time, chewing at his lower lip with one long, delicate fang. The sight of it simultaneously disgusted me and turned me on, which made me hate myself and I tucked my chin into the collar of my coat. The full body pain explosion had mostly faded, leaving a beast of a headache throbbing in my temples and behind my eyes. Glass half full though; I could say with certainty that I was no longer drunk.
    “I can go back,” Leo said finally, and I turned to look at him slowly. His voice was strange, tentative and for a second I didn't realize what he was offering.
    When I did, though, my stomach corkscrewed and my heart thudded. “Leo. Jesus Christ.”
    “I'm just saying,” he said softly.
    “What, exactly? You're just saying what ?”
    “A fire wouldn't be out of the ordinary. There was a wood stove—”
    “You mean her, too, don’t you? Burn the house with both of them inside. You'd seriously kill that woman? She has kids .”
    “Who the fuck cares?” he snapped back. “People die every day. I'm just saying—”
    “No! Leo, fuck! You can't be like this! You—you just can't!”
    He scowled. “You gotta start thinking self-preservation, Ebron. What have I been telling you? You keep calling attention to yourself. That cop. This woman. Why am I the only one between the two of us concerned with keeping you alive?”
    “My life is not in danger,” I growled, shoving the ice scraper to the floor and then giving it an extra kick for emphasis.
    “You don't know that!” he yelled.
    “Do you?” I yelled back.
    “Let's recap,” he said, all snotty. “Last week—murderous witches. This week, weird cop wants you on the payroll and we end up at the hoarder-from-hell death house. Fucking zombies , Ebron!”
    “Chad isn’t going to say anything. And I shouldn’t have used that word. Zombies aren’t a thing.”
    “Well, you sort of just created one, there. Congratulations, Doctor Frankenstein. Anyway, that’s not the point. How do you think it will look, her showing up at the hospital with that thing? Just days after—after—”
    “Oh, you mean just days after we stole a body from the morgue? Yeah, weird shit going on in Heckerson lately.”
     “So let me cover this up,” he growled, glowering at me. “Let me keep you safe.”
    “So,” I said through clenched teeth. “You want to kill yet another person to help cover up the murders that we’ve already committed? Clever. Love it.”
    He glared and took a turn much harder than was necessary, making my stomach ball up and knock into the back of my throat. We turned onto the highway and lights in the distance caught my eye. As we watched, an ambulance approached and then went screaming by us, turning onto the rural route.
     “I'm trying to look out for you,” Leo said into the heavy silence. “You'd be dead a couple times over if I hadn’t been there last week. Or who knows, maybe those witches were planning on kidnapping you and harvesting your organs. My point, Ebron, is that you apparently have no interest in saving your own skin, so I have to do it for you.”
    I stared sullenly into the side mirror, watching the rotating lights of the ambulance disappear into the trees. My whole mind was a seething, boiling mass of cascading emotions. I very badly wanted to hit something. I squeezed my fists until I could feel crescents cutting into my palms.
    “Hello? Ebron?”
    “I get it, Leo. Shut up. Please, God. Just shut up.”
    He kept shooting me glances with various degrees of hostility, but I just stared out at the fences whizzing past the truck. We finally pulled into the trailer court at almost two in the morning. I jerked groggily when the truck