Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel (14 page)

“Okay.” The bell over the door rang, the first students of the late rush stamping their feet and blowing on cold fingers as they came in from the cold. “I should, uh, get back to work. But thank you. And I’m sorry if I said things I shouldn’t have.”

Chaz waved it off. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, kiddo, it’s that honesty and communication are fucking important.” His tired muscles protested as he levered himself up out of the chair. Val still hadn’t emerged from the rare books room, which was good. He was still pissed but after the talk with Justin, guilt had slipped itself into his feelings cocktail. A lot of his anger bordered on irrational: he wasn’t a fighter. Cavale was. But that didn’t mean Chaz liked being made to feel protected. Coddled. Fragile.
I should tell her about the training.

Then another group of students came in, and one of them made a beeline for him. “Can you help me find a book?” she asked. “I saw it here last week but I forget the title. It had a blue cover?”

He’d catch Val later.

Maybe.

12

C
AVALE NEVER DID
well with suspense. He didn’t like mystery novels, bounced right off movies that kept you guessing, and if he knew a surprise was headed his way, he’d dig and dig and dig until he had an idea what it was. It probably had something to do with long nights when he and Elly were little, waiting for Father Value to come home from vanquishing Creeps. No one who went into a nest was ever guaranteed to come out, not even the man they saw as their father, and thus imagined invincible, or immortal, or both.

Turned out he wasn’t either in the end, a fact that Cavale had long since come to terms with. Elly, though? Father Value had been in the ground five weeks or more, and she still wasn’t quite there. She didn’t doubt that he was gone—Elly wasn’t one to surrender to fantasy—but he knew she pored over those last few days with him, looking for something she’d done that had broken his mojo. Point was, he’d never had any. He was a member of the Brotherhood, trained to be good at what he did. That didn’t make you unkillable; it just made it harder on whoever was trying.

Elly knew
that
, too, but she didn’t always act like it.

Like tonight.

She’d be on high alert—she always was. But her texts had set Cavale’s own alarm bells ringing, enough that he wanted to jump in the car and race up to Southie himself to help. Nothing good came from vampire turf wars. He’d tried telling her that when she took the job for Ivanov, but she’d taken it anyway.

Because if there was one other thing Father Value had passed down to them both, in spades, it was pride.

His internal scales teetered between
don’t smother her
and
fuck her pride
. The more he checked his phone, where that last text (
Fine. With Katya.
) waited for its follow-up, the harder it was to sit tight. He busied himself with projects that were absolutely not related to her situation. The holy water supply needed replenishing—if he filled a few extra bottles, so what? The duffel bag of monster-hunting equipment he kept by the front door needed reorganizing; so what if the cedar stakes ended up at the top?

She’s fine. She said so. Katya’s a pain in the ass, but she’s on Elly’s side. They’re all right, they’re all right, they’re all right.

His phone buzzed at last. New text:
We’re all right.

He was in the kitchen when it came through, wearing a track between there and the front door with his pacing. Relief coursed through him as he read it; he clung to the counter to keep his knees from giving out. The phone buzzed again:
Saw sigil on a vamp. Necromancer sent him after the Oisín. Too far gone before I realized.

After the ghouls this morning and his reading this afternoon, it was all he could do not to text back
Come home
. Instead, he tapped out a
Be careful
, and a
Call if you need
, and let her go about her night.

Then he grabbed his coat and keys and set out into the neighborhood. He had leads to follow up and nervous energy to work off.

Cavale’s house was the last officially inhabited house in the neighborhood. When he looked down one side of the hill, he saw lights on in the other residences, could see people moving about behind curtains as they went about their nighttime rituals. Down the other way, the houses were dark—no heat, no electricity, no one watching the news before ascending the stairs to their cozy beds.

But there were people there, all the same.

It had come to him in his sleep, why the ghoul’s face had been so familiar that morning. Cavale had seen him before, hurrying along the sidewalk, hands shoved deep in his pockets because he had no gloves. In the mornings, he’d been headed toward the bus stop, maybe off to work, maybe just getting out of the neighborhood. At night, he’d shivered his way past, back to one of the houses that sat empty, but not. Sometimes a plastic bag full of stuff from the gas station hung from his wrist; most times he’d been empty-handed.

Cavale hadn’t paid that kid much more attention than he paid any of the others who walked the same route. The community of squatters down the other side of the hill was an open secret in the neighborhood. No one on this side begrudged them what warmth and shelter they could claim because
this
neighborhood, like so much of Crow’s Neck, was full of people who were one crisis away from the same. One trip to the emergency room, one expensive car repair, one unexpected bill, any of them setting off a cascade that went beyond a bounced check and a bank fee (potentially catastrophic themselves) into bigger problems—lost hours at work leading to a firing; firing to a missed rent check; missed rent check to an eviction notice.

He descended into the forgotten part of town, assuming the same stance the squatter kids did: hands in pockets, shoulders scrunched, head down. The posture was as much about keeping warm as it was signaling you weren’t looking for trouble. Cavale figured it was like other places he and Elly’d been with Father Value: most people would leave you alone down here—if you lived in one of these houses, you had fuck-all worth stealing anyway. But sometimes new faces appeared, intent on taking as much of your nothing for themselves as they could.

Growing up, they’d lived in enough bad neighborhoods to know that most of the inhabitants were good people.

About half of the streetlights still worked along this stretch of road. The power company wasn’t in a huge hurry to fix the ones that were burnt out or broken. The amber glow threw long shadows across overgrown lawns gone to seed and gave a washed-out look to the graffiti on the boarded-up houses. Lots of the homes had been broken into, boards ripped off the windows, locks forced on the doors. Copper pipes could be traded in for good money, and the local scrapyards didn’t ask questions. Cavale had been in some of these houses when he’d first moved into his own. In some of them, whole chunks of wall had been sledgehammered or crowbarred in, so scavengers could rip out the electrical wire. Strip the coating off that and you got even more copper.

A lot of the squatters nailed blankets to the windows. It trapped in the heat and blocked out the light. When a cop car cruised along, the officers tended not to look too closely as long as it wasn’t obvious someone was inside. Cavale caught flashes of light here and there, as curtains twitched or a corner of fabric fluttered in the breeze. Some of the houses had functioning fireplaces, which was good. Others, the residents had dragged old grills or camp stoves inside, or snagged barrels from construction sites.

Cavale paused at the bottom of the hill, where his road and another intersected. Crossroads were places of power, if you were looking to conjure someone. Or something. Tradition had it you could sell your soul at them, trade it like so much copper wire for fame and riches. They were places where worlds touched, where the veil wore thin.

It was the symbolism that mattered for Cavale’s purposes. He pulled a pendulum from the pocket of his jeans, a heavy quartz crystal strung from a silver chain. Then he unfolded a square of white silk. He’d drawn Udrai’s sigil on it in black marker in the middle. At the corners were the runes of a tracking spell. Didn’t even need blood to activate this one. Not when he was starting at a crossroads. He held the pendulum over the cloth and waited.

At first it hung steady, unmoving. Cavale took slow, deep breaths and relaxed as best he could. It was cold out here, the first hint of winter numbing his fingers and the tip of his nose. He could see his breath on the still air when he exhaled. That feeling of being watched came back, but it could be anything, out here: squatters wondering what the hell this weirdo was doing, standing in the middle of the street staring at a necklace; ghouls or ghosts watching him at the necromancer’s bidding; or the simple feeling of being out in the open, exposed, with no one watching his back. Father Value would be having a fit right now if he saw this.
If you got bit, Cavale, you’d have only yourself to blame.

No, actually, if Father Value saw him out here alone, he’d say,
Why aren’t you with Elly? Why aren’t you watching over her? If she gets hurt, it’s your fault.

Old man never did give a shit about me, did he?

It had never been a case of
Dad likes you best
between Cavale and Elly. Cavale’d never once begrudged her the affection Father Value showered on her. She was his sister, and he’d take a Creep’s bite to the throat for her. He’d never deny her anything if he could avoid it. It didn’t stop him from wishing, back then, that Father Value could show even a fraction of that fondness for Cavale.

Didn’t matter. The man was dead, and Cavale had walked out on that life well before the Creeps got him. He tamped down the old hurts and concentrated on the pendulum.

It moved in tiny circles at first. Those, he could ascribe to the turning of the earth, or to his own micromovements—his muscles moving in such minuscule increments that his eyes and brain agreed he was holding steady. It’d be a fair assessment. Dowsing worked that way, as did Ouija boards, when the people holding the forked stick or the planchette weren’t trained in magic. But in the right hands, they
worked
, they responded. They answered to nudges from spirits, or fluctuations in the ley lines. They could sniff out a magic user’s trail like a bloodhound.
If
you knew how to work with them. If you were good enough.

Cavale was pretty damned good.

The pendulum stopped its lazy circles and began describing a small arc, only a few degrees from vertical. North to south, east to west, points in between. Then, when its swing was moving northwest-southeast, it found the path. The crystal hung at an angle, defying gravity at thirty degrees or thereabouts, like someone had pressed pause on a recording. The chain was pulled taut, pointing off into a cluster of houses. When Cavale started walking in that direction, the pendulum stuttered back into motion, only this time, instead of moving in all directions it stuck to that northwest-southeast arc, even if he turned.

Better than a compass.

He skirted up close to the house directly in the pendulum’s path, bent at the waist to keep below window height. It was a one-story ranch, its formerly cheery red siding faded to rust with neglect. The place seemed empty, not a single blanket covering a window, no sound of conversation from within. When Cavale risked a glance inside, he saw only bare rooms—peeling paint, loose floorboards, part of the ceiling buckled from water damage.
Nobody home but us mice.

The pendulum swung again, sticking almost straight out toward the south.

Did he sneak around me?

He followed its lead, moving as quickly and quietly as he could toward where the crystal pointed. As he darted across the street, he kept an eye out for other movement in the area—for shadows shifting when they ought to be still, or for ghostly orbs flitting about like pale fireflies. Other hunters, modern-day ghost chasers, swore by gadgets that read electromagnetic fields or detected temperature fluctuations. Cavale supposed they were valid, in their way—same as with Ouija boards and dowsing rods, as long as the user was competent, they could make it work.

But Cavale liked the older methods. Technology wasn’t his thing. He felt clumsy around it—other people his age were constantly wired; he only accepted the weight of his phone in his pocket because Elly might call. So he got it done the old way, following the pendulum, looking for orbs, feeling for cold spots rather than reading them off on infrared from a distance.

Another house, and again while he scouted the vacant property the crystal swung in a different direction. The necromancer was fucking with him. Had to be. That feeling of being watched—a gentle pressure at the back of his head, the itch between his shoulder blades, the suspicious, furtive, too-perfect silence throbbing in his ears—came on even stronger.

It was all Cavale could do to stay where he was and not dive for cover. Father Value would be shaking his head and
I told you so
-ing in whatever afterlife he’d gone on to. Rather than feel embarrassed, though, that realization strengthened his resolve. Funny, the way resentment worked.