Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel (4 page)

“Huh.” That was as close as Chaz would get to admitting
he
hadn’t noticed it, but that wasn’t a big surprise. Not only could Sunny and Lia outmother most bears; they could be damned discreet about it while they were doing it, too. He tapped the cover of
Cooking for Beginners
. “We sell a lot of that one to the kids moving into the student apartments. It actually forgives you for using frozen veggies and shit. The other one gets a little, uh. Snobby.”

Cavale put
Cooking for Beginners
atop the other. “Beginners it is, then. I’ll put the other one back.” He took a step back, paused. “Hey. Uh. Thanks.” The word had a weight to it, more than just
thanks for the help
. Could’ve meant a lot of things, but Chaz figured it was, quite likely,
thanks for not being a shithead about this
.

Chaz gave him what he hoped was a decent bro-nod. “Sure thing.”

He probably could have walked Cavale up to the register and told Kate to give him the friends-and-family discount, but that might seem outright friendly. He wasn’t quite ready to take that step.

*   *   *

V
AL HAD BEEN
up and about for half an hour before Justin came plodding down the stairs. He smoothed the corkscrews out of his dark hair with one hand, rubbed the sleep-sand out of his eyes with the other. Not for the first time, Val was struck by how his tawny irises caught the low light. A month ago, they’d been liquid brown.

A month ago, Justin had been human.

He’d adjusted fairly well to the whole “becoming a vampire” thing, partly out of necessity, she supposed. If he hadn’t accepted the offer when Elly suggested Val turn him, he’d have joined the ranks of the Jackals—and that would have lasted about as long as it took for Elly to stake him with her silver spike. Then he’d just have been dust.

He’d dropped most of his classes for the semester, since attending during the day was no longer an option. He’d kept the one night class that had already been on his schedule, and a couple of his professors—the ones in the English department who’d also known and loved Henry Clearwater—had agreed to let him complete his courses as independent studies. Not because they knew what he’d become, of course, but because they’d received a call from his counselor suggesting he was too grief-stricken to function at his full academic capacity just now.

Val had been particularly proud of those calls, as guilty as they made her feel—neither she nor Justin liked using the Clearwaters’ deaths as an excuse, but there weren’t many other ways to keep him matriculated without exposing his newfound immortality. Justin had asked about practicing Command with them, but she’d shot that one down. She suspected he was too newly made for the ability—somewhere between hypnotic suggestion and flat-out mind control—to have any real effect, but if she was wrong, the last thing any of them needed was him accidentally turning his professors’ brains to mush over the phone.

They’d moved most of his things from his dorm room to Val’s house, where he’d taken over one of her spare bedrooms. He hadn’t quite made himself at home yet, insisting he’d figure something out, get an apartment of his own as soon as he could. Val found it unlikely unless he hit the lottery, but it was sweet that he didn’t want her to think he was freeloading off her.

“Morning. Uh. Evening,” he said, shuffling into the kitchen. He opened the fridge and stared into it ponderously: an old habit dying hard. His choices amounted to lamb’s blood, lamb’s blood, or lamb’s blood, since Chaz’ leftover meatball sub wasn’t something Justin could digest anymore. He opted for the lamb’s blood, pouring it from its plastic deli tub into a pint glass. He made a face as he drank it down, and Val couldn’t blame him. Cold, dead blood would get you through, but that didn’t mean it was enjoyable.
Like cram
, he’d said to Elly once, before he gave up trying to get her to read Tolkien.

“How’d you sleep?”

Justin eyed her over his breakfast. “If I say ‘like the dead,’ are you going to throw something at me?”

Val groaned. “No, but I’ll tell Chaz he’s being a terrible influence on you.”

“Then I won’t get him in trouble. I slept fine. No dreams, no . . . anything, really. I closed my eyes when the sun came up, and next thing I knew I was awake sometime after it went down. That’s normal, right? I mean, for us?”

Val resisted the urge to pat his hand. “Yeah, it is. Most of us sleep like that. I can probably count on one hand the times I’ve dreamed since I was turned.” She didn’t know why that was, what changed between life and death that would affect the capacity to dream. Of the vampires Val had met, only a few of them dreamed regularly, and those ones . . . they were a little fucked-up, as Chaz would say.

He drained the rest of his glass in one long, grimacing gulp and asked, “What’s the plan for tonight?”

“Get your running shoes on,” she said. “We’re going out.”

Elly was in charge of most of Justin’s training—he’d asked Elly specifically to teach him to Hunt: how to track down the Jackals, how to kill them, how to survive the fight. She’d taken the request seriously. A couple nights a week, she would lead Justin out into the abandoned streets that made up half of Crow’s Neck, run him through drills, and teach him what she knew about the Creeps, as she and Cavale called the Jackals.

But Elly could only show him how to do things at human speed. There were things he needed to know about being a vampire, too, and since Val was his maker, it fell to her to teach him.

It wasn’t like she was friends with many other bloodsuckers, as a rule.

They walked along Edgewood’s darkened streets, leaves crunching under their feet. It was too early in the evening for them to run at full speed out here—too many students walking home from classes, too many cars cruising past. They could have run through backyards and woods and side streets to get where they were going, but Val took the opportunity to test Justin’s other senses instead. She asked him to sniff the air and tell her what he smelled. They strolled behind a group of Delta Mus, and Justin relayed their conversation to Val in hushed tones. They continued on this way past the college, out toward Edgewood’s outskirts, until they reached the graveyard.

It wasn’t the sprawling modern cemetery the Clearwaters had been buried in. That was on the other side of town. This one had last been used in the colonial days, and while Edgewood’s historical society came by once a month to pull weeds and mow the grass, it was by and large forgotten by the rest of the town’s residents. It got some traffic in the summer, when tourists came through to take gravestone rubbings of the few Revolutionary War soldiers buried here, or when genealogy buffs came seeking out their ancestors’ resting places. Tonight, though, it was empty. Justin announced its lack of lurkers as they stood at the gates; Val’s nose had told her the same a block ago.

“I thought this counted as consecrated ground,” he said, peering inside dubiously. “Chaz didn’t think the Creeps could follow us to the Clearwaters’ funeral, at least.”

“If someone’s specifically blessed a patch of ground, sure, but the whole cemetery? They generally don’t. And anything blessed in here has long worn away.”

Justin got that look on his face, the one that said he was trying to find the diplomatic way to ask a question.

“Spit it out.”

“Uh. He’s your Renfield. Shouldn’t he . . . know that sort of thing?”

“If it were two hundred years ago, maybe. He and I don’t spend a lot of time hanging out in graveyards discussing the rules. Besides,” she said, quirking a grin at him, “has it crossed your mind he might have just been talking out his ass to reassure you? It hadn’t been a good few days for you.” He stood there, gaping and processing that last, as she hopped to the top of the gates and dropped lightly down on the other side. “Come on. Let’s get started.”

He made the jump easily, only a little bit of scrambling when his confidence faltered toward the top of his arc. Then he was over, and Val guided him deeper within, away from the street.

They spent nearly an hour among the graves, Val running Justin through the moves Elly’d taught him, only faster. She led him blurring along the faint old walking paths, disappearing with a burst of speed, requiring him to find her by scent and sound alone. They tussled between stones adorned with winged skulls and strange angels, careful not to stagger into any and knock them over: control was as important as speed.

He got the drop on her, once, barreling into her and sending them both sprawling. When they stopped moving, Justin was on top, his hands forcing Val’s shoulders to the ground. “Ha,” he said, then, “Wait, shit. If I let go on either side . . .”

“. . . I’ll have an arm free, yeah. That’ll cost you an eye, at least. Do you want to try again?”

But he was looking away, focused on something behind her head. “Do you see that?”

She bent her head back as far as it could go, but all she managed to do was tangle more leaves into her unbound hair. “I’d look, but you sort of have me pinned.”

Over the last month, he’d grown markedly more self-assured, though whether that came from his newfound vampire abilities or Elly’s training, Val wasn’t sure. He walked straighter, moved less timidly.

One thing he hadn’t lost was the ability to turn crimson at a moment’s notice.

He clambered off her now, muttering apologies as he offered a hand up. Val took it and let him lead her over to see what he’d spotted.

They were near the far edge of the cemetery, where only the old cast-iron fence kept the woods from encroaching. The gravestones back here were weathered, some of them little more than stubs sticking out of the earth like uneven baby teeth. Most of the names and dates on these ones had been worn away by three centuries of New England weather. An undisturbed blanket of grass and moss covered the ground.

Except in one spot, where the earth was freshly turned.

They approached quietly, even though Val still didn’t smell anyone nearby. No one but she and Justin had been here for hours, at least, but it seemed suddenly disrespectful to tromp over to an open grave.
As though we haven’t been using the place as a playground all night long.

“Did someone dig this guy up?” Justin bent and ran his fingers over the stone. The letters had mostly eroded, but he found the faint grooves after a moment.
Webb
, they read.

Val picked up a handful of dirt and let it fall through her fingers. “I don’t think so. The hole’s not big enough for someone trying to get to the coffin.” The hole was maybe two feet all around and looked more like something had exploded up out of the ground than dug down into it.

“Look there.” She pointed at the edge of the churned earth, where five long, raking lines led into the middle. “I think it’s supposed to look like Mr. or Mrs. Webb climbed out themselves.” She straightened and paced around the grave in a widening circle. “There.” She showed him a bony handprint pressed into the dirt, and some footprints beyond it.

Justin came to stand beside her, eyes wide. “Are you about to tell me this guy’s a zombie? Because Elly hasn’t taught me the first thing about fighting zombies.”

Val snickered. “No, since I’ve never met one. I’m pretty sure what we’re looking at here is someone’s idea of a hilarious prank. Doesn’t one of the fraternities scare the shit out of their pledges every Halloween?”

“Beta Epsilon, yeah.” Justin had rushed them, Val knew, but he never made it past the first couple of weeks. Justin didn’t talk about it, but by the growl in his voice, he was still pissed about whatever had happened. “Ugh, fuck those guys. Can we get out of here before they come back and finish setting up? They’ll probably want to put buckets of pigs’ blood in the trees or something.”

“All right,” said Val. “Let’s go.”

“Assholes.”

“When we get you feeding on real people, maybe I’ll let you bite one.”

He made an even more grossed-out face than when he’d been drinking the lambs’ blood. “Did you ever notice the smell when they come into Night Owls to buy their CliffsNotes? Those guys bathe in so much of that body spray shit it’s probably seeped into their bloodstreams by now. I’m not eating
that
.”

3

E
LLY LAY ON
her back on a plank spread across two ladders, painting runes of warding on the ceiling plaster with a toothpick. She’d found herself restless after leaving Cinda’s house, her mind abuzz with too many questions about the ghoul, who controlled him, how they were doing it. Runework calmed her, the more complex the better. It came to Cavale easy as breathing; Elly needed practice. So she’d driven into Edgewood, presumably to work on runes and calm her spinning mind. Not at all—at all!—for companionship.

The smell of chocolate chip cookies drifted in from the kitchen. They were being baked by a succubus, which didn’t move the needle on Elly’s strange-o-meter, but the succubus was making them specifically
for her
, which sent the needle well into the red. She wasn’t used to people doing nice things for her.

A clatter and a squeal almost made her botch the letter she was working on. Sunny ducked into the living room, and when Elly peered down at her from her plank, the short, dark-haired woman stood beneath, stretching up on her toes to offer a spoonful of pilfered cookie dough. The handle of another spoon protruded from Sunny’s mouth; she grinned around it.

“Raw cookie dough can kill you!” Lia called.

“Nah,” said Sunny. “I’m not human.” Or at least, that was what it sounded like. The spoon garbled her words a bit.

Lia poked her head through the doorway. Her blond hair was swept back in a bun, which was a good thing, the way she waved her dough-covered wooden spoon in admonishment. “You’re not, but Elly is.”

Elly reached for the spoonful of dough Sunny still held up to her. “I’ll take the risk.” The sweet combination of brown sugar and butter and chocolate chips exploded on her tongue, made her
mmmm
in appreciation.

Lia shook her head and heaved a dramatic sigh that was undermined by her smile. “Fine. Second batch is down two cookies thanks to you two, though.”

“Three,” said Sunny.

“What?”

“I caught you sneaking your own taste when I came to steal ours.”

Lia went completely poker-faced and said, with all the calm of a politician under siege, “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Then she disappeared back into the kitchen.

“Come on down,” said Sunny. “You’ve earned a break.” She held the ladders steady while Elly climbed down. “We really appreciate you doing this.”

Elly paused at the bottom and eyed her handiwork. From down here, the runes would look like irregularities in the plaster to the untrained eye, especially when the paint dried. Which was how Sunny and Lia wanted it, considering they entertained normal human beings from time to time. Both women held day jobs—Sunny as a counselor, Lia as a gym coach at the local college—and as far as their colleagues knew, they were just a happy suburban couple with a nice home.

Which, until Elly had arrived in town last month, had pretty much been true. Elly’d come to Edgewood full of grief and vengeance, and she’d brought monsters on her heels. They’d made a stand here, in Sunny and Lia’s living room, and Elly still felt a pang of guilt when she caught sight of a claw mark gouging the wood or a fresh patch of spackle to hide a dent in the wall from someone’s fist. They’d done a fantastic repair job in a short amount of time, but Elly knew where to look, what corners they hadn’t quite finished fixing yet.

They probably ought to have asked her never to come back, thanks,
don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out
, but they hadn’t. That wasn’t how they operated. Even asking her to help refresh the house’s wards wasn’t done out of punishment or repayment—Elly and her brother Cavale were good with wards, different kinds from the demonic ones the ladies had already put up on their own, and they’d insisted on paying her for the work she did.

The cookies were a bonus.

Sunny led her over to the couch—another new delivery—and they sat quietly, licking the last of the dough off their spoons. Elly appreciated the tasty distraction; she was terrible at small talk.

Lia joined them a few minutes later, peeling off her apron (which read
Hell’s Kitchen
) and plopping down in the chair near Sunny. “First batch is cooling, you vultures, so you can spoil your dinners.” She scanned the ceiling much as Sunny had, nodding in satisfaction. “Those look good.”

“I’m almost done,” said Elly. “The basic ones are down, and most of what I needed to tailor to you two specifically. The rest, I’ll need to know, uh,
who
to protect you from. Or what.”

Elly couldn’t read the look they exchanged. It held a lot of things: anxiety, a guardedness Elly herself was familiar with, other emotions she couldn’t parse from their faces.

“The underworld,” said Lia at last. She plucked Sunny’s hand from the armrest, ran her thumb over her partner’s knuckles.

“That’s . . .” Elly paused, not quite sure how to answer. “That’s kind of a tall order.”

“I know. We don’t know who might be looking for us. Or if anyone even is.”

“Someone always is.” Sunny’s good humor had fled. “We’d fetch a handsome reward for whoever dragged us back there.” A shiver went through her. She edged closer to Lia, though Elly wasn’t sure she was aware she was doing it.

“I’m guessing it was a bad situation?”

Lia nodded. “Bad then, exponentially worse if we’re brought back to face punishment for running away.”

“How’d you get out in the first place?”

“Easy enough to get lost in the chaos of a battle,” said Lia. “We waited until our master’s attention was elsewhere, took our knives, and fled.” She was referring to the keris knives they kept in a mahogany box upstairs. The serpentine blades had come out when they’d fought the jackal-headed Creeps, their silver lengths smoking with each kill. Elly knew they were sacred, maybe even imbued with some kind of spirits. She would have loved to try them out, feel their weight in her own hands, but she got twitchy if anyone else handled the silver spike that was her own preferred weapon; she could only imagine how
wrong
it would feel to Sunny and Lia if someone else touched their knives.

“How long ago was this?”

“Years and years,” said Lia, with a significance Elly thought might mean
centuries
instead.
Millennia, maybe.
In the kitchen, the timer beeped. “Oops. Second batch is done, excuse me a moment.” She headed for the kitchen, looking relieved at the interruption.

Sunny gave Elly a wan smile. “I’m going to see if she needs help,” she said, and hurried along in Lia’s wake.

Elly watched them go, then returned to her makeshift scaffold. Sunny and Lia had welcomed her as family this last month. She didn’t know what she’d done to deserve that, but she knew one thing: you defended family with your life.

*   *   *

E
LLY’S CAR WAS
in the driveway when Cavale got home from work. They’d realized pretty quickly, with him having a day job and her spending a few nights a week prowling the streets of South Boston for Ivanov, that they needed to be a two-car family after all. He’d taken a couple thousand dollars of his savings and (over Elly’s insistence that she’d take the bus until she could save up on her own) bought her something used but sturdy.

Chaz had taken one look at it and named it a shitbox, but from the way he whistled through his teeth and spent the next weekend with his head stuck under its hood, it was a
good
shitbox. Most days, Cavale couldn’t get a read on Val’s Renfield; that was a prime example. For a twig of a guy, Chaz loved to let his mouth run. Sometimes it seemed like he
wanted
Cavale to take a swing, even, and one of these days, Cavale just might. But the day they’d bought it, Cavale had mentioned the car in front of him and he’d volunteered to take a look. No prompting from Val, not an eyelash batted by Sunny. Not even a trace of his usual smarminess when he showed up at their house.

Probably because it was for Elly. If it’d been my car, he’d have filled the vents with spider eggs.

Chaz had gone over every inch of that vehicle and made the damned thing not just run but
purr
. Elly’d been driving it ever since without a problem, which Cavale had to sheepishly admit made him feel the tiniest bit better about her taking the job with the
Stregoi
. He hadn’t been able to talk her out of taking it, and he wasn’t there to watch her back while she wandered Boston looking for trouble of the bloodsucker variety, but at least he knew she wasn’t going to break down somewhere along 95.

He lugged the groceries inside,
Cooking for Beginners
tucked under his arm. He’d dog-eared a page that looked promising and stopped on the way home for ingredients, determined to have something ready for her when she got back from Southie. Full dark had fallen while he agonized over whether there was a noticeable difference between yellow onions and Spanish ones; he’d expected Elly would be on the road by now, but catching her here was a nice surprise. Maybe he’d be able to feed her
before
she left, if he could figure this stuff out.

“Elly? El?” he called as he bumped his way through the front hall.

“In the kitchen.” She sat at the table, head bent over one of the half-dozen books open in front of her. A legal pad with a sigil of some sort drawn on it lay atop one of them, notes in Elly’s cramped handwriting surrounding it. Her dark hair was getting longer, he noticed, as she tucked a lock behind her ear and looked up at him. The ragged edges were softening as they grew past her chin. A smear of paint had dried on the back of her hand; she must have spent part of the afternoon at Sunny and Lia’s.

It was still a surprise, seeing her here in his house. He kept expecting to wake up one morning to a letter of farewell, the idea of staying in one place too much for her after all. Or maybe not even a letter, just a call from somewhere on the road, her breathing
Sorry
into the receiver before hanging up.

He hadn’t even done that much for her, when he’d left her with Father Value.

“What’s that?” He pointed at her research.

She eyed the shopping bags warily. “You first.”

“I, uh. Heh.” He cast about for a place to put the bags down. The table was out: the counters were covered in drying herbs, spell components, and an assortment of stakes in various stages of sharpening. The chairs were draped with drying laundry. He settled the bags on the floor and showed her the cookbook. “I figured you’d have been on your way in to Boston. I was going to perfect one of these and have it ready when you got home. But I can make it now, if you’re hungry.”

She shifted one of the books over to reveal the open box of Girl Scout cookies it had been hiding. “I’ve sort of eaten.”

“That’s not dinner.”

“Says the man who considers Pop-Tarts a food group.”

“Fair point.” He abandoned the groceries for the time being, plunking down in a chair beside her. He perched on the edge of it, so his back wouldn’t get soaked from the wet jeans behind him. “So what is all this? And where did you get a box of those at this time of year? I didn’t think they came out until the spring.”

“I know a guy.” She passed him a cookie and watched him nibble around its minty chocolate edge. It was a practice they’d both picked up with Father Value. Treats were few and far between; you ate them slowly, so they lasted as long as possible. Elly’s quirked brow told him she’d noticed it without her calling him on it. Conversations about their childhood were full of land mines. “Actually, I know a girl. Do you know the Palmers? They live a couple doors over, down the hill.”

The name was familiar, but he didn’t make a habit of talking to his neighbors. “Should I?”

“Probably not. But I met their daughter today. Cinda. She came here looking to hire us.”

He stopped nibbling. “Hire us to . . . ?”

“She had a ghost in her house. I got rid of it for her, no charge, but she insisted I take a box of those from her freezer.” She passed him the legal pad with its blue-inked sigil. “I saw this on the ghost’s arm. I don’t think that it was a tattoo he had when he died, but I can’t prove that it was fresh. I don’t know.” She sighed, squinching up her face, looking for the right words. “It seemed like the most
real
thing about him. Besides the gunshot wound that kept opening up and leaking all over the place, that is. But this was newer.”