A Grave Tree Read Online Free PDF Page A

My head was flying around the room. I require a new bowl of cereal with one teaspoon of sugar and half a cup of milk. Half a cup, not a whole cup, otherwise there is too much milk.”
    “I’ll get Mark’s cereal,” Caleb announced, rising from the table and hustling to the kitchen.
    “Your head was flying around the room?” Sylvain repeated, his tone only slightly incredulous, given the circumstances.
    “Yes,” Mark insisted.
    Sylvain cocked his head. “Tell me, Mark, when your head was flying around the room, what did it feel like?”
    Mark sagged back down into his chair. “It felt like I was dreaming, like I was in two places at once—in my bed, and in the office, but the words were all garbled, and I can’t remember them.”
    “Except you obviously did just remember some of them,” Sylvain said.
    “I can’t remember anything else,” Mark said quickly. Caleb placed a new bowl of cereal in front of Mark, who hunched over it and resumed shoveling Rice Krispies into his mouth.
    “Very interesting,” Sylvain said, more to himself than to any of them.
    The sound of a vehicle arriving diverted everyone’s attention, except Mark’s, and Abbey turned to see Russell’s white Volkswagen pulling into the drive. Farley leapt up from his spot by the fireplace and ran to the door, his tail wagging, low growls coming from his throat as if he was prepared for anything.
    Sylvain headed to the door. “Listen, I have to be going soon. Russell is going to stay with you while I’m gone. Please don’t try any funny stuff. Remember, this arrangement is for your safety. There are many people who would consider you useful.”
    Assets , Abbey thought grimly.
    Russell stood on the stoop in a tracksuit with four bags of groceries, his pale blue eyes intense. As always, they shifted quickly through the room until they found hers. He was alarmingly handsome, and his tracksuit outlined his rangy athletic body. He had tried to kiss Abbey at the Snowflake Dance, but the fact that he was a senior, and clearly involved in a variety of Sylvain’s initiatives, and was so… focused, was more than a little disconcerting. She had no idea whether he wanted to date her or consume her. She was pretty sure there was no vampire element to the whole witch thing, but if there was, Russell was a sure candidate. She had managed to mostly avoid him at school after the dance.
    After Farley sniffed Russell and scuttled away with an air of wary acceptance, Sylvain assigned Caleb and Mark to put away the groceries while he busied himself with getting ready to depart. Abbey expected Caleb to object, but he got a gleam in his green eyes at the sight of Russell and went promptly into the kitchen with the groceries. Abbey could only imagine what he might be planning.
    “I brought your homework,” Russell said to Abbey, as they stood alone in the now-empty front room while Mark and Caleb sifted through the groceries, extracting and sampling the snack-type foods they favored. “I figured you’d want it.”
    “How did you get my homework?” Abbey said, stacking the dirty plates on the table to take to the kitchen.
    “I told the teachers we were friends. Davison is doing entanglement theory in physics. I thought you’d find it interesting.”
    “I didn’t think you were taking physics,” she said sharply. Russell hadn’t been in her physics class for the first two weeks after the recent semester change.
    “I switched. I figured quantum physics would be far more useful to me than biology, considering…” He left off, but they both knew he was referring to the fact that he, too, came from witch bloodlines, and that quantum physics, and entanglement in particular, could be the underlying basis for their potential powers, which nobody, other than Ian, seemed interested in explaining to them.
    “What do you know about the relevance of entanglement?” Abbey said in a low voice, while Sylvain shuffled things around in his office and cupboard doors