Free An Ice Cold Grave by Charlaine Harris

silence. I wanted to ask Manfred how old he was.
    â€œTwenty-one,” he said, and I gave a jerk of surprise.
    â€œI have a little talent,” he said, trying for modesty.
    â€œXylda can be such a fake,” I said, too tired to be tactful. “But she’s the real deal underneath.”
    He laughed. “She can be an old fraud, but when she’s on her game, she’s outstanding.”
    â€œI can’t figure you out,” I said.
    â€œI talk good for a tattooed freak, don’t I?”
    I smiled. “You talk good for anybody. And I’m three years older than you.”
    â€œYou’ve lived three years longer, but I guarantee my soul is older than yours.”
    It was a distinction too fine for me just at the moment.
    â€œI need to take a nap,” I said and shut my eyes.
    I hadn’t anticipated that sleep would drag me down before I’d even had a chance to thank Manfred for coming to see me.
    Bodies have to have rest to heal, and my body seemed to need more than most. I don’t know if that had to do with the lightning that passed through my system or not. A lot of lightning strike victims have trouble sleeping, but that has seldom been my problem. Other survivors I’ve talked to on the Web have a grab bag of symptoms: convulsions, loss of hearing, speech problems, blurry vision, uncontrollable rages, weakness of the limbs, ADD. Obviously, any or all of these can lead to further consequences, none of them good. Jobs can be lost, marriages wrecked, money squandered in an attempt to find a cure or at least a palliative.
    Maybe I would be in a sheltered workshop somewhere if I hadn’t had two huge pieces of luck. The first was that the lightning not only took things away from me, but left me with something I hadn’t had before: my strange ability to find bodies. And the second piece of luck was that I had Tolliver, who started my heart beating on the spot; Tolliver, who believed in me and helped me develop a way to make a living from this newfound and unpleasant ability.
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    I could only have been asleep for thirty minutes or less, but when I woke up, Manfred was gone, Tolliver was back, and the sun had vanished behind clouds. It was nearly eleven thirty, by the big clock on the wall, and I could hear the sound of the lunch cart in the hall.
    â€œTolliver,” I said, “do you remember that time we went out to get a Christmas tree?”
    â€œYeah, that was the year we all moved in together. Your mom was pregnant.”
    The trailer had been a tight fit: my older sister, Cameron, and me in one room, Tolliver and his brother, Mark, in another, Tolliver’s dad and my pregnant mom in the third. Plus, there was a never-ending flow of the low-life friends of our parents coming in and out. But we kids had decided we had to have a tree, and since our parents simply didn’t care, we set out to get one. In the fringe of woods around the trailer park, we’d found a little pine and cut it down. We’d gotten a discarded tree stand from the Dumpster, and Mark had mended it so it would work.
    â€œThat was fun,” I said. Mark and Tolliver and Cameron and I had come together during that little expedition, and instead of being kids who lived under the same roof, we became united together against our parents. We became our own support group. We covered for each other, and we lied to keep our family intact, especially after Mariella and Gracie were born.
    â€œThey wouldn’t have lived if it wasn’t for us,” I said.
    Tolliver looked blank for a minute, until he caught up with my train of thought. “No, our parents couldn’t take care of them,” he said. “But that was the best Christmas I’d had. They remembered to go out and get us some presents, remember? Mark and I would rather have died than say it out loud but we were so glad to have you two, and your mom. She wasn’t so bad then. She was trying to be