Vial Things (A Resurrectionist Novel Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

lay my sleeping bag.”
    “Ploy,” I whisper. Hesitating, I reach a hand to touch his shoulder.
    Just before I make contact he breaks out of the trance. “I can’t sleep there, okay?” he snaps. Nudging me aside, he grabs the mugs off the counter. “Do you have sugar?”
    The words are a snarl. We’ve grown accustom to shoulder shrugs and subject changes. Neither of us are an open book. Still, the edge to his voice stings. I swing the cabinet door wide and dump a dozen sugar packets on the counter beside him as he fills our coffee mugs.
    He gives his head a little shake. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s…Someone cut him.”
    The camps have their share of violence. Most days the papers don’t even report on the stabbings and fights there anymore. It’s bad press for the tourism. From the scars I’ve glimpsed on Ploy’s shirtless torso, he’s seen his share. I wonder if he knows how to handle a knife. I’m going through my arsenal in my head, choosing one I can spare when it occurs to me that the dead kid probably had a knife, too. It hadn’t helped him.
    It could have been Ploy.
    The thought splits through me in a way I’m not entirely comfortable with. You’re just covering your own ass , I remind myself. Otherwise you wouldn’t be okay with leaving him on the couch as some sort of human tripwire. “Was it a fight, then?”
    He sits down in one of the chairs and picks at his sandwich. “He was laid open.”
    “Did he have defensive wounds?” I ask and then realize how callous the question is. I’m used to bodies, death, clinical descriptions.
    “No, you don’t understand,” he says as I hand him his cup of coffee and lean against the counter with my own, blowing over the steam. “Laid open. Like how frogs get dissected.” He’s fiddling, not paying me any attention. “And his insides were gone .”
    My mug slides through my hand. I catch it, my reflexes kicking in before it even leaves my fingers. Hot coffee sloshes over the rim. Trembling, I set it on the counter. “What?” I manage, wondering if the shake in my voice is pronounced enough for him to hear.
    “They were gone, Allie. Stomach, intestines, liver, all that stuff. Scraped clean. Gone.”
    My body numbs except for a tingle of nerves, anticipation, fight or flight. “How long had you known him?” I ask, trying to mask the panic in my voice, make it comforting, but this time it doesn’t work. Maybe he picks up something in the tone or maybe it’s the wrong question to ask after a bombshell like that. Either way, he looks up at me. I force a sad smile and hope he’ll think I’m just uncomfortable. Luckily, he seems to take the bait.
    “Couple months. He came from up North.” Up North is code for not from her e. Everywhere is North from Fissure’s Whipp.
    “Was he on the run?” I swallow hard. I shouldn’t ask, but I have to know. Have to be sure. “From the police…or something?”
    The last two words hang in the air between us. I watch him weighing the pause I hadn’t meant to include, my awkward silence. But the missing organs, they can only mean one thing. He was like me. My head spins. He was a resurrectionist like me. Someone killed him. Someone had known his own blood would heal his organs, even damaged. Someone had known the body can’t heal what isn’t there.
    Someone is hunting us.
    “Allie?”
    I want to tell Ploy that it’s okay. Not to panic. That this isn’t like my parents. That it must be a mistake. Flashes come to me. Going in the door. Two bodies on the floor. And I’d left them there. Just left them and taken off running, not stopping until I’d gotten to my aunt’s house the next town over, my sneakers bloody and my parents dead and…
    “Allie?”
    I can’t catch my breath to answer him.
    He’s off the chair and at my side in the space of a blink. “I don’t know why I told you that. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking and it freaked me out so bad to find him like that