3 Blood Lines Read Online Free PDF

away. The night would never be the same for them again.
    They moved to surround him.
    He allowed it.
    “So, why aren’t you fucking dead like the rest of the fucking queers?” Their leader, for all packs have a leader of sorts, reached out to shove a slender shoulder, the first move in the night’s entertainment. He looked surprised when he missed. Then he looked startled as Henry smiled. Then he looked frightened.
    A heartbeat later, he looked terrified.
     
    The double doors to the Egyptology workroom had been painted bright orange. As Reid Ellis put his passkey into the lock, he wondered, not for the first time, why. All the doors in this part of the hallway had been painted yellow or orange and while he supposed it looked cheerful it didn’t exactly look dignified. Not that the folks in the Egyptology Department were exactly sticklers for dignity. Three months ago, when the Blue Jays had lost six ball games in a row he’d gone in to find one of the mummified heads set up on the table with a baseball cap perched jauntily on its desiccated brow.
    Now that baseball season was over, he wondered if anyone in the department owned a hockey helmet, rest in peace being the kindest epitaph one could give the Leafs even this early in the season.
    “And what’ve you got for me tonight?” he asked as he hooked one of the doors open to make way for his cart—they weren’t actually scheduled to have the floors done, but he liked to keep up with the high traffic areas by the desk and the sink—then he turned and got his first look at the new addition to the room. “Holy shit.”
    Palms suddenly wet, mouth suddenly dry, Reid stood and stared. The head had been unreal, like a special effect in a movie, evoking a shudder but easy to laugh at and dismiss. A coffin though, with a body in it, was another thing altogether. This was a person, a dead person, lying there shrouded in plastic and waiting for him.
    Waiting for me ? His nervous laugh went no further than his lips, doing nothing to displace the silence that filled the huge room like fog. Maybe I should just go, come back another night. But he stepped forward; one pace, two. He’d forgotten to turn on the lights and now the switch was behind him. He’d have to turn his back on the coffin to reach it and he couldn’t, he just couldn’t. The spill of light from the hall would have to be enough even though it barely chased the shadows from around the body.
    The breeze created by his approach stirred the edges of the plastic sheet, setting it fluttering in anticipation.
    “Jesus, this is too weird. I’m out of here.”
    But he kept walking toward the coffin. Eyes wide, he watched his fingers grab the plastic and drag it off the artifact.
    Man, I am going to be in deep shit. Maybe if he put the plastic back the way it had been, no one would ever know that he . . . that he . . . What the fuck am I doing?
    He was bending over the coffin, breath slamming faster and faster against the back of his throat. His eyes stung. He couldn’t blink. His mouth opened. He couldn’t scream.
    And then it started.
    He lost his most recent self first: the night’s work, all the other nights of work before it, his wife, their daughter, her birth, red-faced and screaming—“ Honestly, Doc, is she supposed to look like that? I mean, she’s beautiful but she’s kind of squashed . . . ”—the wedding where he’d gotten pissed and almost fallen over while dancing with an elderly aunt. He lost nights drinking with his buddies, cruising up and down Yonge Street—“ Lookit the melons on that one!”— The Grateful Dead blaring out of the car speakers, the smell of beer and grass and sweat soaking into the upholstery.
    He lost his high school graduation, a ceremony he’d made by the skin of his teeth—“ Think maybe now you can get off your ass and get a job? Now you got your fancy piece of paper with your name on it?” “I think so, Dad. ” He lost the humiliation of not making the