The Blood Bundle, Books 1-2: Blood Singers and Blood Song (New Adult Paranormal Vampire/Shifter Romance) (70 page)

The zombie's gaze fixated on mine, it put a hand
on its knee and began to push itself upright. Dull, lank strands of
hair hung loosely from a scalp strung together by a tight mask of
rotten sinew.

Jonesy had long since run out of the cemetery
and was at a “safe” range from what the ground had disgorged.

He better get his ass back
here. He couldn't get away with whacking me
and
not helping me with corpse-boy.

“
Why have you awoken me?” The
words sounded garbled, maybe there was
some
tongue in there?

Must not be rude, not my strongest point.

Out loud I said, “You asked me to.”

John was standing at my right, trying to mask a
fine, all-over tremble. His freckles stood out on a pale face like
beacons of fright.

“What the hell is this?” John asked.

He didn't really just ask
that? John... duh
.

The zombie looked at me with eyes that clung
from threads of sinew; moving wetly in its sockets, sucking like a
vacuum.

“
Why have you woken
me?”
it repeated, shambling a step closer.
The smell... wow. It rose like a torrent of rotting
garbage
.
John clapped his hand over
his nose, taking a step backward.

The corpse took another step closer.

“Got any brilliant suggestions?” I asked John,
my eyes steady on the zombie, hoping like hell John would lend an
intellectual hand.

“
Do
not
have the Zombie Handbook handy,” John said, his
eyes a tad wide.

Not helpful.

The corpse looked at me, head tilted, “You're
just a boy... how could you know for what purpose you have
disturbed my slumber?”

Uh-oh, coming up with an
excuse,
so
not my thing.

“I didn't... mean to wake you up...” I fumbled
out. I wasn't usually this tongue-tied but meeting a corpse in the
flesh (ha-ha) stole my speech.

“
You do not know what you
would have of me? You use your life-force to waken me and yet...
without purpose? Put me back,”
he said
thickly. His clothes hung in tatters and the smell was definitely
old, dark coffin, not that I knew what
that
smelled like.

John's look clearly
said,
do something!
I guess what I
hadn't told my friends was that I had never thought that I could
actually raise the dead. But here he was, standing before me in all
his rotting glory.

Looking out amongst the
teenagers collected outside the cemetery, “To whom much is given,
much is expected. Put me back,”
he
said.

Adults were all the same, even dead, lecture,
lecture.

“
How?
”
I asked.

“
You are the necromancer, boy,
not I.”
Again that quizzical brow over
rotting facial countenance.

Interpretation challenge... but I was
managing.

“
A what?” I asked,
surprisingly calm, for the first time, there were no whispers.
Perfect, blessed silence filled my head. It was the most natural
thing in the world; talking to the dead. Looking at the corpse, its
eyeballs like inky marbles stared back at me with uncanny
devotion.

“
A diviner of the black arts,
magic...”
he replied.

All that time with the star in
my basement, huh,
right
.

I could still taste
distressingly metallic blood in my mouth. I was connecting dots
here, but I had an epiphany, I could put it back with blood! Things
had only gotten
ü
ber-weird when I had my lip busted open by Jonesy. I looked
back at the corpse, Clyde-- no longer feeling that sense of
swimming power just underneath the surface. Now was not the time to
get queasy with the dead. I needed to regain that essence,
fast.

“Ah... hang on a minute,” I said to the corpse,
who stared blankly back... ah-huh.

“John, give me your blade.”

“What the heck Caleb? What are you planning to
do with this...” John said pointing his finger at the patient
corpse, “...thing?” who was as immobile out of his grave as in.

“I figure my blood made it jump out of its
grave, now I need some to put him back and you're going to help
me,” I said in a one sentence rush.

John's face got paler, if
possible. “Ah, we're good friends and all but no
,
not a good plan! We don't know that for sure
anyway.” The logic-master was not feelin' it. Couldn't say I blamed
him, me holding a knife and all.

“... here's the deal, let's do a little
'friendship blood bank' just for the sake of putting the dead guy
back in his grave, eh?” I began tapping my foot on the disturbed
mess of the grave. John would ante up the blood or this was gonna
be a long damn night.

“What?” strained trust crowded his eyes.

“Just here, give me your forearm.” I placed the
side of the blade on his forearm where it shone black in the pale
moonlight. My left hand wrapped tight, steadying his flesh for
puncture.

John took a deep breath,“Okay, but you're going
to owe me, big time.” The whites of his eyes bulging.

I pressed the point of the blade against his arm
until the pressure broke the skin. John sucked in a lungful, blood
welled and I let up the pressure. The zombie's head jerked at the
sight of the blood, causing the disturbing sound of neck bones
popping.

Would I ever get used to that
noise? I repeated the process with my own arm. Our identical wounds
pressed together, I offered it to my zombie. I could feel somehow
that he was mine, I knew it
.

A vibrating tuning fork of trembling power
welled up inside me. A strange mixture of fear, dread and
excitement paralyzed me. My teeth throbbed with the intensity of
it. The zombie's hand snaked out, taking hold of the offered
forearm. It felt cold against my warm flesh, like iced tentacles. I
swabbed a blot of blood, inking it with my index and middle fingers
on the zombies forehead, like warpaint. It rolled those empty eyes
up at me, its dead bones clinging to my fingertips.

We shared a suspended moment
in time, a terrible beauty of control balanced precariously. “Go
back and rest,” I said, feeling that balance reached, that
I
was choosing for both of us.

The zombie reluctantly let go of my arm, sand
through a sieve, lying down on the disturbed ground while his grave
encased him in a shroud of earth.

I was a
corpse-raiser
,
one of two, and it
was not a safe thing to be.

John and I stared at each other over the grave
for a swollen minute, his face showing a mixture of sympathy and
dread. He knew what this distinction would mean for me in the world
we lived in.

I was shaking from the
intensity of it all, there was no controlling it. This was not the
same as Biology experiments and roadkill, this was real, this was
huge. Looking outside the cemetery perimeter at two enemies and one
friend, I knew it was time to swear the group to secrecy. A trickle
of sweat slithered down my back, pooling at the waistband of my
jeans, instantly chilling against my fevered flesh. I didn't want
the same future as Parker, that loss of freedom was so
not
a part of The Plan, my
plan.

John and I headed out of the cemetery in a
wave of uncertain promise.

#

DEATH WHISPERS
is available now~

Books 1-6 on sale now!

Book One of the Savage Series

by Tamara Rose Blodgett

The Pearl Savage

Copyright 2010-2011 Tamara Rose Blodgett

http://tamararoseblodgett.blogspot.com

Smashwords
Edition

ISBN-10:
1463501552

ISBN-13: 978-1463501556

This ebook is licensed for your personal
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Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All rights reserved. Except as permitted
under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication
may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by
any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system without the
prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is a work of
fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products
of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are
not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or
dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely
coincidental.

All rights are reserved.

For Sirena

1890

Samuel laid on his back, gasping for air as
a fish out of the sea...
laboring
. They
had done all they could, now the burden lay with their descendants.
His gaze lingered on the house that he loved, now covered in ash,
the sun no longer a bright orb in the sky, but shrouded in gray. A
hush fell over the land, the environs a pewter wasteland of
nothing, cold seeping into his marrow inch by insidious inch. Many
would enter the spheres that had been constructed by the Guardians.
They spoke of selective population, which rang false to Samuel, or
true, as the case may be, his grandchildren safe and beyond the
pale of this time,
this world that he was
leaving.

He turned his head, rolling limply on its
side, where his gaze captured Mae, also prone, a strange
contraption with hand-hammered copper and a complex, inky black
netting covering the greater part of her nose and mouth, leather
thong-like straps braided and wrapped her skull, pushing strands of
hair around like lost silver. She made odd, whistling noises as she
breathed.

“Samuel, wear it,” Mae said, her voice
distorted as she lifted the matching mask the Guardians had
fashioned in the few preceding months they had been given.

“No, Mae. I wish to enjoy this fore-night
without the chains of their advances.”

Samuel knew his stubbornness would cost him
his life. The Guardians who were equal part savior and bearer of
terrible news had made concessions for the elders. But those which
survived would be the strongest, most virile, agile, smartest and
etcetera among them. Samuel and Mae understood at their advanced
age of sixty and one years both, they would be excluded from the
mercies of the sphere.

With blurred vision, Samuel saw a familiar
dimmed figure approach. “Father! Why do you not take rest in your
own bed?” Stella asked, her comely face a salve in his approaching
death. Her wool skirts swirled as she knelt, setting an illuminated
candle beside him, hissing steam from its seams.

Raising his hand, he cupped the loveliness
of her face, knowing the time had come to enter the sphere the
Guardians had constructed for the
select.
Her eyes brimmed
with tears. “Papa, the Guardians have told you that you might
survive... all is not lost.”

Samuel put a finger to her lips. “Silence
now, child. This is your place now. Do not forget the things you
have been taught. Take this, Dear Heart, hold it safe to your
breast, guard it. It is our history.” Samuel handed her a slim
leather book bound with a black silk tie.

Stella pressed it to her chest, the tears
once held in check, now overflowing down unprotected cheeks. Mae's
eyes met hers. “Go now Stella-girl... take the opportunity you have
been given.”

Her knuckles white as she clutched the
book, misery etched its path on her countenance. “It will never be
the same without you both.”

A clear bell-tone pealed, reminding Stella
of duty. Her duty to leave her parents behind. While the knowledge
of
her
future, the safe environment of the
sphere was a burden laid on her heart.

Stella's face turned to look at the sphere,
shimmering in a watery iridescence as a giant cloche. But people
were not plants, their future safekeeping a promise of a life with
a family, fractured by separation.

Stella bent her head to kiss Samuel and Mae
goodbye. Gently unwinding the face mask the Guardians had
constructed, she laid a kiss, soft as butterfly wings on the woman
who had nurtured her every desire. The skin giving way like
tissue-thin silk under the pressure of her lips. Turning to her
father, his pale blue eyes watering, she cradled his head while she
pressed a kiss to his forehead. She lowered his head and took a
last, lingering look, knowing this was the final time she would
view her parents in this realm.

Lifting her skirts, she pivoted away,
dropping them as she walked...no,
as she ran,
brushing tears
from her cheeks, the book clutched tightly in her other hand, the
candle hanging from its copper loop in her squeezed finger.
Approaching the doorway to the sphere, she was the last
select
to be ushered inside, casting one final glance, she
saw her parents supine forms, clasped hands held tightly, her
mother's mask forgotten beside her.

Stella whirled toward the entrance, losing
hold of the book, dropping it on the earth now laden with ash. She
picked it up, her last gift from Father. Seeing the title, she
peered closer:
Asteroid; A History of When the Rocks
Fell.