Grave Mistakes – AJ Aalto

I grimaced, unable to lie my way out of that one, either. I reached for the hand sanitizer, rubbed a generous blob all over my hands to the wrists until it was dry. Then I popped the lid on my cup and said, “Your coffee is getting cold.” Hood stared at the side of my face and I steadfastly ignored him, staring out at the headstones closest to the church parking lot.

My cheeks started feeling warm under my mask, and I wondered if I could make him flee the car and this conversation if I fake-coughed real loud. Let’s see… phlegm- ridden gurgle or dry hacking cough? “Why are you smirking?” Hood asked. “I’m not! You can’t see.” “I can so,” he said. “Your eyes are crinkling.” “Keep yer nosy eyes on your own face, weirdo.” “What does that even mean?” “It means I want out of this car and away from you so I can drink my coffee.”

I hopped down out of the car, pulled my mask off, and sipped my coffee, letting out a loud, exaggerated sigh of refreshment. The passenger door slammed as Hood joined me outside; he stayed on the other side of the Hummer’s massive hood, lingering by the grill, carefully shedding his mask. The metal clip had left a pinch mark on the freckled bridge of his nose. He took the lid off and sipped his coffee, too, his pale lashes fluttering closed.

I felt a deep jab of protectiveness come over me, and once again noticed the dark circles around his eyes and the slouch in his shoulders. I could smell the hand sanitizer on him when the wind shifted. “You’ve had a bad week,” I said softly, cocking my head.

“Tell me the parts you’re comfortable sharing.” He nodded wearily. “Since this all began, I’ve been having really intense dreams. I hear that’s pretty common.” I smiled sadly. “Our sleeping brains deal with our waking challenges to help us cope. For most of us, the pandemic is different than anything we’ve faced before. Unique danger pings our focus. We’re going through disrupted sleep, high anxiety, heightened alert, and restlessness, so if we have episodes of broken sleep, the brain tries really hard to force us into REM, and we get this kind of rebound effect which causes even more vivid dreams.

Then we grow accustomed to the threat, and we sleep more deeply, and we dream some more. It’s pretty fucked up right now.” Hood processed that, nodding, using the act of sipping his coffee as a time-buying activity. “Last week, I started seeing my old deputy, Neil Dunnachie. Every night. Over and over.”

Copyright 2022 A.J. AALTO Cover Design by Angelica Hagman Edited by Rafe Brox Formatting by Kody Boye Publishing Services This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. OceanofPDF.com CONTENTS Author’s Note Grave Mistakes About the Author OceanofPDF.com This story is for Jennifer Louise Wheeler, Who lets me steal her memes.

OceanofPDF.com AUTHOR’S NOTE For my regular readers, Grave Mistakes, a “Between the Files” story, is the first short tale in the Grave Mistakes Duology, and takes place after the novel Kindred Spirits. It is followed by Grave Dealings. CW: Please do note that both of these stories were written in 2020-2021, during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and Marnie’s reality very much reflects this event.

What Would Marnie Do? Well, pretty much as she always does, except with a mask on. OceanofPDF.com GRAVE MISTAKES I started the day the same way I’d started all of them since the pandemic lockdown began — lazing in bed because Sheriff Rob Hood couldn’t torture me with pre-dawn training runs. Instead, I was having French toast delivered by a snooty English dead guy who liked French kissing and French cursing and all manner of aristocratic finery.

For once, I was all his; he didn’t have to share me with local law enforcement, or Supervisory Special Agent Chapel of the FBI’s Preternatural Crimes Unit, or Mark “Kill-Notch” Batten, the annoyingly hot vampire hunter, or my personal casework. In short, I was full-on spoiled rotten, pampered beyond belief, and my Cold Company was delighted to accommodate.

I’m Marnie Baranuik, and as a preternatural biologist, Dual-Talented psychic, and DaySitter to an immortal, I have kind of a weird life. I live in Ten Springs, Colorado in a cabin on Shaw’s Fist Lake and have been trying to sever my ties to law enforcement for pretty much as long as I’ve had ties. I’d spent far too much time getting bitch-slapped by poltergeists, blowing zombies to smithereens, chasing putrefied ghouls, and relocating boggles of varying sizes and inclinations to bite, so hiding from a plague was a piece of cake.

All I had to do was stay home in my pajamas, which was precisely what I’d been fighting to do for the last five years. Outside of my cabin, I’m about as non-essential as they come.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: e1eec60f02678a0f
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 525,791 bytes (0.501 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 62
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 105.17 minutes
• Total Words: 21,033
• Total Characters: 116,593
• Average Words per Page: 339.24
• Average Characters per Page: 1880.53

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