Joyce & Jim Lavene - Taxi for the Dead 02 - Dead Girl Blues by Joyce Lavene, Jim Lavene Read Free Book Online Page A

qualify as black magic?”
    I pulled up the picture I’d taken of Harold in the alley. “This. I was skeptical at first, but I don’t see any way a normal killer did this, do you?”
    He still handled the cell phone as though it was made of crystal, carefully keeping his fingers on the edge of the device. “Yes. I see what you mean. Definitely magic.”
    “Would you be willing to come and take a look at it, at Harold? Abe wants me and Debbie to figure out who killed him.”
    “Of course he does. I’m sure he doesn’t want to be near anyone who could do this.” He handed the phone back to me. “Not tonight, surely. Are you coming to bed?”
    Abe’s people don’t sleep. When he’d first told me that, I thought it would be a great thing. Think of the things you could do besides sleeping . Not to mention feeling as though I would never sleep again after Jacob’s death.
    But two years into my life as a zombie, I realized why people sleep—boredom and an empty feeling at night when everyone else was asleep around you. Maybe if I’d had a job at night it wouldn’t have been so bad. As it was, I would have begged for just a few hours of unconsciousness.
    When Lucas had come into my life, I’d found that he could provide that quiet. When I lay beside him I could close my eyes and the world faded away. It was such a blessed relief that I’d taken to being with him every night.
    Addie said that I was disgracing Jacob’s memory and that I was a dim-witted slut to spend my resting time with Lucas. It was the only thing she didn’t like about him. In the balance of things, she found it was easier to blame me than him since he did so many other wonderful things that took care of her beloved home.
    “No. Not yet. Maybe not tonight.”
    He searched my face. “There is more, isn’t there? It involves Jacob, doesn’t it?”
    “Yes.”
    “I can help, if you’ll let me.”
    “Thanks. But not tonight.” I touched his handsome, angular face. “I’ll be up when I’m done if Kate isn’t awake.”
    He looked a little hurt that I didn’t want his help and that I didn’t want to sleep with him. But I needed to be alone with my thoughts about Jacob’s death and the riddle of what was killing people in the woods on that curve.
     

Chapter Seven
     
    Sometimes I felt as horrible and guilty as Addie always reminded me that I should by being with Lucas. I had expected to spend my twenty years mourning my husband. I hadn’t expected Lucas to pop into my life.
    Sometimes I even managed to feel guilty about him. I didn’t know how he felt about me, but I didn’t love him. I had just come to depend on him.
    He’d claimed when we met that I was a witch because no one else could have yanked him from his own time and into mine. As far as I knew, he still believed that. We never talked about it anymore.
    He may have been an evil sorcerer, as the Wikipedia page had claimed. Abe’s necromancer, Jasper, had said the same when he’d come to the inn to kill him.
    I’d seen Lucas do magic, but it was always as though it had burst from him during an emotional response. He never used magic to clean the house or trim the hedges. If he was a sorcerer, evil or otherwise, he was content living without his magic.
    At least as far as I knew . Lucas was careful with what he said. I wasn’t sure what he was holding back, but my cop gut told me there was something.
    He claimed Abe’s magic was dark and that he was taking advantage of all the LEPs. He’d promised to free me from it without taking away my time with Kate. But he’d never said how or when he was going to do it, and I hadn’t asked.
    I wandered through the quiet inn, listening to the sounds of the old house settling and birds sleeping in the rafters. I could close my eyes and find my way through the darkness. Light and dark were the same to me. I had seen things I’d never seen before I’d died. My senses were more acute.
    Addie had kept Jacob’s childhood bedroom