Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (Dead Things Series Book 1) Read Free

moved out of view only to reappear in her bedroom window. When she yanked her dress over her head, he dropped his gaze to his phone, glancing at the time. It was almost time for check-in. He was to call every six hours, no exceptions. It was part of the reason he’d almost declined the offer. He wasn’t much for deadlines; he felt it stifled his…creativity.
    They were quite insistent he be the one who watched the girl, despite his taste for exotic cuisine and his penchant for homicide. It made no sense. Mace knew where he ranked among his kind. He was very much a last resort. He wasn’t a babysitter or a bodyguard. They didn’t hire him to follow humans, no matter how bizarre they appeared. They didn’t even hire him to kill humans.
    He pulled a granola bar from his bag and tore into it. It didn’t satisfy his hunger but it gave him something to do with his hands. As he watched, she stopped to answer the phone. She became more agitated as the call went on, finally slamming the phone down in its cradle and ripping it from the wall. She smashed it on the floor. His brows knitted together, she was acting quite strange since the funeral.
    He wanted to talk to her. He needed to know what she was, but his orders were clear. Observe her behavior and report what he sees. Do not interact with her. Do not to kill her. They stated the latter explicitly…twice. He was to report anything unusual immediately.
    The term unusual was subjective, it would seem, because everything about this girl was unusual. She had no friends, she interacted with very few people, she only went to school once in the last four days and when she had, she’d kept her head down and hadn’t spoken a single word. Her classmates hadn’t been so kind. It seemed not even the death of a parent, could stop people from being people. She didn’t acknowledge them in any outward way.
    She hadn’t been back since. Instead, she chose to hide in the cemetery. He’d first thought her there to visit her father. He’d been wrong. She was familiar with the cemetery in a way no girl her age should be. She knew everybody, literally, every…body. She spent hours putting single flowers on the graves of the deceased. She lit the candles often left as tribute. She carefully righted trinkets friends and family left behind. She wasn’t respectful of the dead; she was reverent.
    When she wasn’t tending the dead, she was talking to them. Before that first day in the cemetery, he’d thought her mute. Then, he’d watched her have a forty-five minute conversation with a mausoleum with the name Arsenault etched across the top. As she carried on her one sided chat, she drew, pencil flying as she sketched the face of an old man dressed in his Sunday best and a beat up fedora.
    It was safe to say his new charge had a singular preoccupation with the dead. Perhaps they were speaking to her. Even so, it wouldn’t explain why he was watching her; his employers rarely concerned themselves with the special humans. But after what he’d just witnessed in the cemetery, he supposed it was safe to put her firmly in the non-human column, breed undetermined.
    Given her fascination with the dead, he would almost think Valkyrie or reaper but power didn’t seek them out. He’d watched that power come for her, swirling up from the ground and swallowing her whole. She’d stood there paralyzed, helpless to do anything. Had she unwittingly called that power to her, or had it come for her of its own free will? He wasn’t sure which was worse.
    He supposed she could be a witch but she hadn’t been in control of the power. If she was a witch, she was very new or completely incompetent. Perhaps if he could get close enough to see her mark it would give him a clue as to her origins but that would mean getting closer. He’d already gotten too close. He’d already interfered. He’d disobeyed his direct orders.
    They knew what they were getting into when they’d picked him so the fault lay