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Back Up From the Grave Save as PDF
Chapters (52)
  1. Dedication
  2. Acknowledgments
  3. Contents
  4. Prologue
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. Thirteen
  18. Fourteen
  19. Fifteen
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-one
  26. Twenty-two
  27. Twenty-three
  28. Twenty-four
  29. Twenty-five
  30. Twenty-six
  31. Twenty-seven
  32. Twenty-eight
  33. Twenty-nine
  34. Thirty
  35. Thirty-one
  36. Thirty-two
  37. Thirty-three
  38. Thirty-four
  39. Thirty-five
  40. Thirty-six
  41. Thirty-seven
  42. Epilogue
  43. An excerpt from Halfway to the Grave
  44. An excerpt from One Foot in the Grave
  45. An excerpt from At Grave’s End
  46. An excerpt from Destined for an Early Grave
  47. An excerpt from This Side of the Grave
  48. An excerpt from One Grave at a Time
  49. About the Author
  50. By Jeaniene Frost
  51. Copyright
  52. About the Publisher

I stared into his light blue eyes and knew he wasn’t bluffing. If we so much as twitched, he’d pull the trigger, and the power of that handgun would blow his skull to kingdom come. Did he know anything that I couldn’t find out by hacking into the computers here? Maybe, and that wouldn’t do.

“Oh, Bones,” I said sweetly.

Madigan’s eyes bugged as Bones said, “Already done, Kitten.”

Then Bones walked forward with deliberate, taunting slowness. Madigan’s hand lowered from his head even though his thoughts screamed in protest. His frustration was a symphony to listen to as he realized he didn’t have control of his own body. I came forward, too. Smiling.

Without a single advance thought to warn us, his jaw snapped. Bones lunged, digging his fingers inside Madigan’s mouth, but it was too late. Foam bubbled past Madigan’s lips, and his eyes rolled back in his head. Then his whole body began to convulse.

“No!” I gasped, recognizing the signs of cyanide poisoning. Seeing the half-dissolved capsule encased in a fake tooth that Bones swept out of his mouth was almost redundant. It must have contained a massive dose—Madigan’s pulse skyrocketed, then abruptly stopped.

“No you don’t,” Bones snarled.

He slashed his wrist with a fang and held it to Madigan’s mouth, working the other man’s throat to force him to swallow. Then he pounded on Madigan’s chest, trying to manually circulate the healing powers of his blood through him.

It wasn’t enough. Crimson bubbled past Madigan’s lips, and his eyes became fixed and dilated. It happened so fast, he didn’t have time for a final thought. If he had, it would have probably been Fuck You.

And he had fucked us. Frustration and denied rage frothed up in me. After all he’d done, Madigan had managed to escape even when we had him trapped and cornered. Anything about his backers and the results of his twisted experiments that weren’t saved in the computers were now out of reach forever.

“Damn you,” I said in a voice choked from fury.

Bones dropped Madigan and leaned back, giving the dead man a coldly calculated look.

“He thinks he’s escaped us, but perhaps not.”

Twenty

Twenty

Once they’d gotten the liquid silver out of Tate, he, Juan, and Cooper did a sweep of the facility, making sure more guards weren’t holed up somewhere waiting for their chance to attack. Denise still hadn’t returned with the missing child, but I wasn’t worried. Only demon bone stabbed through her eyes could kill Denise, and Madigan didn’t have any. Almost no one did. Demon bone was harder to come by than astatine.

Dave, however, was with Bones and me. He stared down at Madigan’s corpse, his mouth compressed into a thin, tight line.