Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel (6 page)

“We . . . What?” Katya twisted around to face her boss. “Why would we do that?”

He sat back, leather creaking as he sank into the chair’s lush padding. “Because for all its population, Boston is a small city geographically speaking. And South Boston an even smaller part of that. There is room for us all.”

“You can’t mean that,” said the blonde. “It’s not how things are done.”

Perhaps Katya was allowed to question Ivanov, but he wasn’t having it from this other woman. “Dunyasha,” he said, his tone that of a father disappointed in his child. Elly’d picked up a smattering of Russian over the last few weeks, mostly swears. She knew a diminutive when she heard one, but all the sweetness went out of it when it was a centuries-old vampire saying it like you’d let him down.

Dunyasha—Elly had no idea what name it was derived from—took the hint and shut up.

“We’ll see what they want, how much, when. And if they’ll agree to our conditions, perhaps we can work with them.”

“What conditions are those?” asked Katya.

“That, I need time to consider. First we see if they’re even willing to talk, or if they merely wish to
take
. If it’s the latter . . .” He shrugged. “Then we teach them to mind their manners. I trust that’s a lesson you can impart, my dear.” He leaned forward again and ran one long finger beneath the chain of Katya’s bracelet. The sound of fangs rattling was loud in the quiet room. “Go to them tonight. I see no reason to delay. Take Elly with you. And Theo.” As he named the last, his gaze flicked to the blonde.

He’s daring her to argue.
She didn’t, though she patted Theo’s hand. If the jewel-encrusted rings adorning her fingers were real and not colored glass, this woman had some serious money.

Elly could suss out things about the woman by what she wore and what she said. But the nuances of interactions with other people? She’d spent her formative years learning the habits of monsters rather than people; Elly didn’t know quite what meaning to read into that pat. Reassurance? Concern? Was Dunyasha Theo’s lover? His maker? She tucked the woman’s name away for later. Maybe Val would recognize it.

*   *   *

E
LLY ATE A
solitary dinner up at the front while the vampires talked other business. Ivanov’s bar lacked a kitchen, so they’d struck up a relationship with the sub shop across the street. Patrons were welcome to bring food in, as long as they were drinking. Elly wasn’t, but she was crew. It amounted to about the same. She felt a little guilty wolfing down her steak and cheese, imagining Cavale back at home wrestling with a recipe.
I’ll be hungry again when I get home. I can at least try a few bites.

Wary as she was of Katya, it was a relief when the
Stregoi
woman came to find her and told her—with a shove on the shoulder—it was time to go. Theo, following in her wake, gave Elly an apologetic smile.

They’d barely gone ten feet from the door when Katya pulled up short. “I’m going ahead,” she told them. “I can scout around without those pups seeing me.” She didn’t wait for acknowledgment, blurring away before either Elly or Theo could react.

“Perks of bein’ fuckin’ ancient,” Theo muttered.

“You can’t do that yet?” Asking a vampire their age was a bit of a faux pas, despite the fact most of them seemed to want you to be impressed by their longevity. Many of them dropped names to give it away:
“So I said, ‘Mr. Roosevelt—’ Teddy, this was, I said . . .”
Sometimes they gave away the
when
of their making by their idioms or their style. “Working-class guy from Southie” could have put Theo’s creation anywhere within the last half century, but Elly had heard enough gossip to know he’d been turned sometime in the mid-aughts. The degree of his abilities interested her. Justin could move scary-fast, sure, and his new strength meant he had to hold back when she trained him, but he was no match for Val, who’d been around a few decades. Maybe if she got to see Theo in action, she could formulate a theory on how quickly their powers ramped up with age.

Theo shook his head. “Nah, not like that. I can do a couple things, but next to her, my training wheels are still on. Anyway, it’d be rude to make you get there by yourself.” He smiled. “Unless you don’t want the company?”

“Company’s fine,” she said, though her reasons were more about intel-gathering than friend-making. Just because he was being nicer than the Renfields
now
didn’t mean it would last.

It was a fifteen-minute walk from the bar to the park. They could have taken Elly’s car, but this let them get a better lay of the land. That, and at this time of night, finding a spot near Ivanov’s again after would be a pain in the ass.

Southie’s streets were familiar to Elly by now, although few of the patrols she’d been sent on since she’d been hired had yielded even a little trouble. Ivanov had brought her on board in case the Creeps started trouble in Boston. There’d been a few nests of them, clustered together like rats in places they could live unnoticed, but since the night they’d attacked Night Owls, they’d gone
extremely
unnoticed. As in vanished completely, which Elly didn’t believe for a second.

Ivanov had also wanted Elly as a bargaining chip, should the Brotherhood ever give the
Stregoi
trouble, but they hadn’t been around, either. Not that she’d know any of them on sight—the only people from the Brotherhood she knew were dead. Father Value had never even told her about its existence, and Henry Clearwater had only enough time to give her the basics before the Creeps killed him. She could ask Val, maybe, but Elly had the sense asking Val about her time as a Hunter would go over about as well as asking Cavale anything about his years with Father Value.

Tonight was the first time something might actually
happen
, and while wishing for confrontation was generally a bad idea, Elly couldn’t help but hope for some fisticuffs. Fighting the ghost in Cinda’s house that afternoon had gotten her blood up.

They passed a boarded-up storefront. Graffiti covered every inch of the plywood, most of it tags from local street artists or wobbly attempts at genitalia. It was the
Stregoi
symbol that caught Elly’s eye, and the fresh ogham script that had been scrawled over it. “Wait,” she said. Her first week on the job, Katya had provided her with a phone. Elly didn’t love how it tethered her to the
Stregoi
, but it came in handy now. She couldn’t read ogham script, but Cavale would know what it said. She snapped a picture, the flash making the drips of red spray paint look even more like blood. “Okay, let’s go.”

“They keep doing that,” said Theo. “We thought it was kids, you know? Then, a couple months ago, these little shits started showing themselves. Picked a few fights, flashed their fangs.”

“What happened to them?”

“They got the shit kicked out of them. Went running home to Mama.”

“Do you we know who Mama is? Where she sleeps?” They were well out of the gentrified section now, headed into an older part of Southie. The cars lining the streets here were older models, in varying degrees of repair. The houses were packed tightly together, some of them seemingly held up only by the buildings to either side. It was the kind of neighborhood the people living in the million-dollar condos would wrinkle their noses at. Or would buy out from under the residents, knock down their old homes, and price them out of the new ones.

“No to both of those. My maker thinks they have to be close, though. Too many of them appearing too fast. Someone’s churning out newbies quicker than you can breed rabbits.”

“Your maker. Was that the blond woman? Dunyasha?”

Theo winced. “Yeah. But you don’t want to call her that to her face, if she ever lets you look right at her. Stick with
ma’am
or
miss
.”

Elly disliked the woman more and more. “You two seem . . .”

“Mismatched?”

“Yeah.”

“Opposites attract, right?” His laugh rang hollow, but Elly didn’t push. After a minute he said, “I don’t know. Maybe vampires have midlife crises. Or maybe I was just a good enough minion that she figured this was better than finding my replacement in fifty years. Ain’t gonna question it too much.”

Elly did her best to suppress a shudder. Would Ivanov do the same for her, if she proved useful enough? It was supposed to be a choice, becoming a vampire. Sort of stupid to convert someone against their will—it would give them extra strength and speed if they decided to come at you with a stake as vengeance. And Ivanov wasn’t stupid.
And if he was, Cavale would come help me kill him.

If Theo sensed her revulsion, he ignored it. “Anyway, it seems I get to keep being useful. I got Southie in my blood, unlike the rest of them. These guys we’re meeting, I’m the one they reached out to in the first place.”

They came out onto Columbia Road, crossing the tree-lined strip that separated its lanes, and entered Babe Ruth Park from the north. Fittingly, a handful of baseball diamonds dotted the grounds, though at this time of night no one was playing. It wasn’t deserted, though, even for a cold October night. A few clusters of people hung out, the bright red tips of their cigarettes flaring as they took drags.

Katya strolled up to meet them, her hands shoved deep into her pockets. Far as Elly knew, vampires didn’t feel the cold, but Katya liked to put on a show. “They’re on the far side,” she said. “Three of them. I could have snapped all their necks and put them in the bottom of the harbor before they even knew I was there. Make them swim home with their heads on crooked, stinking of dirty water.” She tilted her own to illustrate. “But no. We have to be
civil
.”

Civil or no, Elly let her right arm hang loose at her side, the weight of the silver spike she carried a reassurance. A good shake and it would slip free of its strap and into her palm, from there into a vampire’s chest. Silver didn’t kill vampires unless you got them in the heart, but it slowed them down. It was too bad the
Stregoi
frowned on her carrying cedar stakes—which
did
kill vampires—into the bar; they’d come in handy about now.

The three had claimed a bench overlooking Carson Beach, which bounded the park on one side. They broke off their conversation as Elly, Katya, and Theo approached. In their faded jeans, hoodie sweatshirts, and scowls, they resembled any of the other youth hanging out around here.

“Sent in the big guns, I see,” said one of them. She stepped forward, pushing her hood back to show her face. The breeze picked up tendrils of her long, curly black hair and waved them about like Medusa’s snakes. “Well, one of them, anyway.” The woman nodded to Katya.

“You wanted a meeting,” said Katya. “So talk.”

“I’m Deirdre. This is Thomas and—”

“I’ll forget your names before we leave the park. What do you
want
.”

Deirdre didn’t let Katya’s impatience rattle her, perhaps because the two at her back were huge. They didn’t say anything, but from their postures Elly could tell they were ready for violence. “We represent the
Oisín
.” She pronounced it
o-sheen
, a word that tugged at Elly’s memory. She tucked it away for later. “And we want to split the city with you.”

“You are lucky,” said Katya, “that I was instructed to hear you out. Otherwise you’d be standing there wondering where your tongue had got off to, for that foolishness.”

The other two tensed, their hands going for the front pockets of their sweatshirts.

The movement wasn’t lost on Katya. For a moment, Elly tensed, too, preparing to dive at the closer one at first twitch. She could at least get him on the ground, maybe even have time to lodge the spike in his side. But Katya held up a hand, as much to tell Elly and Theo to hold as to show off her bracelet where the
Oisín
could see. Her laughter rang out over the fields. “Oh, please,
please
tell me your instincts are still so human that you’ve brought guns. Tell me, can you draw them faster than I can take them from you and shoot you myself? Have you etched little crosses on the bullets’ heads, too? We can find out if it works, if you’d like.”

“It’s all right. Stand down.” Deirdre didn’t turn to her companions, keeping an eye on Katya.
Smart woman.
They obeyed her, but neither appeared happy about it. Deirdre didn’t seem very happy herself, but for other reasons. “Theo, I thought you said we could work this out.”

He shook his head. “No. I told you I could ask for a meeting. I never promised anything beyond that.”

“And here we are,” said Katya. “Meeting. I tell you now, we won’t split the city. If you’re very, very good, we will let you continue to live in it. That is where we start. Ivanov will have other requirements. Shall I do you the favor of returning to him with your grateful acquiescence?”

Deirdre stared at Theo for a long moment. Her posture was rigid, angry. Her face, though, was soft with shock and betrayal. Theo looked away. Deirdre’s eyes hardened as she dismissed him. “Tell him we will split the city, one way or another. Tell him the Romanovs fell; so can he.”

Katya’s smirk faded. “Run,” she said to Deirdre, all her mirth turned to fury. “Run now, or you’ll spend your millennia
crawling
.”

They weren’t stupid enough to test her. All three turned and fled, speeding across the boulevard between the park and the beach, running along the sand until their silhouettes were lost against the dark Atlantic Ocean.

5

S
O FAR, NONE
of the neighbors had commented about the odd hours Chaz came to the Clearwater house. It wasn’t like sorting through books made a lot of noise, except when he knocked over a precariously stacked pile and filled the air with profanity. But he did that quietly, at least, when it happened. Bad enough hearing your voice echo through an empty house in the wee hours. Worse when the house had been a murder scene barely a month past.

Other people had the luxury of saying they didn’t believe in ghosts. Chaz knew better. His best friend was a vampire; he hung out regularly with succubi. You’re damned fucking right ghosts were real. His lone comfort, here in this home-turned-abattoir, had come from Cavale of all people. After a walk-through, one that involved smudge sticks and crystals and all sorts of occult ritual shit Chaz didn’t understand, Cavale had declared the house free and clear of lingering spirits. Which was good, since Chaz didn’t think Justin would take it too well if he bumped into his beloved old professor’s shade during a sorting session.

Not that he would’ve blamed the kid.

He only wished the crime scene cleaners had been able to do as thorough a job as Cavale. It wasn’t the police department’s job to clean up the aftermath of a murder. That responsibility lay with the homeowners, or in this case, their next of kin. Some of the cost was covered by insurance. The rest, Val had paid for out of Night Owls’ emergency fund when Helen’s family balked at the expense. Those services didn’t come cheap.

They weren’t paid to make it look pretty, just to remove the biohazards. The crew had been respectful as hell—since they did the cleaning during daylight hours, it had fallen to Chaz to be there with them. He’d done his best to stay out of their way, sticking to the shambles of the Clearwaters’ downstairs while they worked up above.

Elly had been there when it went down—she’d been the reason the Creeps came to Edgewood in the first place, chasing her and the book she’d stolen from them. The Clearwaters had given her sanctuary, and her hostess gift had been death. She’d been barricaded in the second-floor library with Henry and Helen, listening as the Creeps barreled around the house, making their way to where the humans had hidden. They’d dispatched the first few to make it past their wards, but for Helen Clearwater, whose only experience with the Creeps had been the stories her husband told, it was too much.

She broke and ran. Henry had followed after her.

They didn’t make it far before they were driven back into the library.

When Val and Chaz had come to the house the night after the murder, Chaz had gotten an eyeful of a real crime scene—something he’d never wanted to have. Blood everywhere, books and debris strewn about, ash and ichor from the Jackals they’d managed to take out covering it all like a film.

Now you could point out where they’d died by the missing sections of carpet, the heavy bleach smell in the doorway, and the places where chemicals had leached the color from the spattered wallpaper.

It was a terrible thought, and Chaz hated himself a little every time he thought it, but Helen’s last act had probably saved some of the books. The cleaning process wasn’t kind to sturdier materials, like walls and baseboards and flooring; it would wreak unspeakable havoc on books. Chances were, it would have destroyed some of the older tomes Henry had collected, the ones he stored on the shelves far in the back of the room that spanned half the house. Chaz never let himself think too far beyond that, about
what
and
why
, but there it was. Dying just inside the library’s entryway meant Val, Elly, and Cavale (and, he supposed, himself and Justin) had access to all kinds of obscure occult stuff.

Justin was with him tonight. He’d done the same as he had the first couple times he’d come with Chaz, refusing to look anywhere but straight in front of him until they got to the library—“straight in front of him” coinciding with “the back of Chaz’ head.” There was missing carpet leading deeper into the library, too, but only fifteen feet or so. One of the detectives thought Henry might have dragged himself away from the fighting for some reason, judging from the blood trail. Pulling himself out of the fray to rest by the shelves, then back to where Helen lay, to expire with his wife in his arms.

Chaz had pored over the books near that spot a hundred times, had brought them back to Val’s house and set them up in the exact order he’d found them, but neither of them had been able to find what the significance might have been. If there even
was
any. Maybe the old man had simply tried getting to the phone to call nine-one-one and realized it wasn’t going to happen. They could speculate for the rest of their lives and never know.

Justin had set himself down in the far corner, working on a stack of books Chaz had set aside the day before. He’d been quiet the last few minutes, none of the usual
scritch
of pen on notepad as he marked down the books’ conditions and subject matter, or the soft
thunk
as another one went into a box marked
Edgewood
,
Resell
, or
Store
. “Store,” to outsiders, might indicate the book would end up at Night Owls. In truth, those were the ones headed for Val’s.

“How are you doing over there, man?” Chaz turned around from his own stack to see Justin hunched over a particularly fat tome. It took up most of his lap, making him look like a kid reading an oversized book of fairy tales.

“This one’s annotated,” Justin said, not looking up.

“Anything interesting?”

“Probably only to me.” He tried to hide it as Chaz came over for a closer look, but then he relented. “It’s poetry. John Donne.” He passed the leather-bound edition to Chaz as though he were handing over the Holy Grail.

Chaz had never had much of a head for poetry, unless you counted the lyrics to eighties hair band songs as such. Tortured artists from the seventeen hundreds just didn’t do it for him. Still, he held the book reverently—as much out of respect for Justin as out of protocol. Sure enough, the margins were filled with notes in the professor’s cramped handwriting. As he turned to the front to see when it had been printed, something slipped out from between the covers and fluttered to the floor.

Justin snatched it up. Most of the time, Chaz still thought of him as the gangly, awkward kid he’d been when they’d hired him. Other times he moved with that ridiculous vampire speed, and Chaz was reminded of his own relatively weak physicality.

“What is it?”

“A picture.” Justin stood so they could both look at it: Henry and Helen Clearwater, waving from the open front door, keys in their hands. “I think it’s the day they bought this house.”

They looked so happy in the shot, so very goddamned
vital
. “You should keep it,” said Chaz. “The picture and the book. Get a frame, hang it up, you know?”

Justin didn’t respond at first, staring intently down at the photo. It took a few seconds for Chaz to register the way his nostrils flared, and how he’d started taking slow, shallow sips of air, the way you do when you’re trying not to smell something rotten.

“I can’t block it out,” Justin said. “The smell of death, it’s everywhere in here. I can’t . . .”

“Take a walk.” Chaz took him by the shoulders and steered him out of the room. “Go on, go for a spin around the block and clear your head. It’s okay. Take as long as you need.”

“Yeah, I . . . That’s a good idea.” He walked the first few steps down the hall, but by the time he reached the stairs he was moving at a lope.

Chaz waited until he heard the front door slam before he unclenched his fists.
Close fucking call, there.
The night they’d come in here after the murders, Val had nearly lost control when she got a noseful of the Clearwaters’ blood and the Jackals’ scent. She’d kicked him out of the library with her fangs and claws showing and bloodlust in her eyes. Justin didn’t have nearly her level of control. He hadn’t changed, not quite, but Chaz saw the fingertips of his cotton gloves stretching as Justin’s nails elongated. Sure, his hands hadn’t bent and twisted into a vampire’s ugly fucking claws, and no fangs had peeked out beneath his lips, but the transformation didn’t take terribly long.

And even without fangs and claws, if the kid had wanted to bash Chaz’ face off a wall or a desk while they waited, he was more than capable. Chaz wasn’t keen on the idea of being Justin’s late-night snack.

He figured when he came back, he’d remind Justin that he didn’t
have
to breathe, didn’t have to smell whatever the cleaners hadn’t been able to wash away. But it seemed prudent to first let him calm down and work some of that sorrow and anger out with good old fresh air. Later, he’d tell Val about it, to be on the safe side. Justin had come with him a few times now and had never gotten that close to losing it. Far as Chaz could tell, nothing had changed from the last time to this aside from finding that book. He didn’t know if strong emotions could bring on the old killing urges, but hey, it got the Hulk going; why not a new vampire whose mentor had been brutally murdered?

Chaz worked on getting himself back to calm. Wouldn’t do for Justin to come back in and pick up on Chaz’ fear. It’d be apologies and offers of atonement for the rest of the night, and fuck that noise. They were cool. Chaz was cool. Everything was goddamned cool.

He got back to sorting and stacking, losing himself in the rhythm of it. Most of the books up here were going to end up at Val’s. Whatever logic Henry Clearwater had used to categorize the books, it had died with him. No card catalog, no ledger, no mysterious ciphers for them to decrypt. Chaz had booted up the slim laptop they’d found downstairs, hoping for a stroke of luck, but the only one he got was that the professor hadn’t password-protected the machine. Once Chaz was in, everything on the drive was Edgewood-related. Any hopes the old man had gone digital—spreadsheets, Internet library sites—were quickly dashed. Which meant more work for Chaz, trying to get the gist of the books and figuring out where the hell this shit would go, according to the Dewey Decimal System.

“Have to see if we can convince Justin to take some library science courses next semester,” he muttered.

A prolonged thud came from downstairs, accompanied by the susurrus of pages that could only be a book avalanche.

“Speak of the devil,” Chaz said. He hadn’t heard Justin come back inside. The first-floor library didn’t hold much of interest—what they hadn’t already gone through could go straight to Night Owls when they ran out of time in the house—but maybe it was better for Justin to work down there tonight. Far as Chaz knew, no fighting had gone on in there. The smell of death shouldn’t be so bad.

Another series of thuds, these ones almost rhythmic, as though Justin were taking a book down and tossing it over his shoulder. Chaz stood frozen for a moment, making sure he was hearing right.

The whispery sound of a book sliding from the shelf.

A shirring of pages being flipped.

The thud of the book hitting the wall.

The slap as it landed on the floor.

Shuffle-step.

Repeat.

“The fuck?” He set down the book he’d been assessing and crept to the top of the stairs. If Justin was down there Hulking out, sneaking up on him was probably a colossally stupid idea. But . . . abusing books wasn’t Justin’s MO. Especially not when the volumes in question belonged to the Clearwaters. He would just as soon dig Henry and Helen up and piss on their corpses.

The noises came again. Chaz was halfway down the stairs when he realized he hadn’t thought to grab a weapon.
Shit.
Both libraries had fireplaces. If Chaz could get to the hearth before whoever was down there, he could grab the poker off the rack and use that. Other than that he’d have to rely on yelling and waving his arms about, and hope it was some neighborhood punk he could put a good scare into. It wasn’t like he could grab any knives from the kitchen; Helen’s relatives had made off with every bit of silverware and cutlery.

At first peek, his neighborhood-punk theory seemed solid. From the back, he caught sight of shoulder-length hair, a little on the greasy side. Then he saw what the guy had on, and it didn’t compute.
Who wears a suit to do their breaking and entering?