Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel (8 page)

“Fair enough.”

“So she went, and took care of it, and brought me back what was left to examine.” He sucked in a breath, half expecting to taste that stale dirt again. “Someone raised it, Val. On purpose. And when I tried tracing the source, it . . . reacted. I don’t know if it was an attack, or if I tripped their defenses. Probably the latter.”

“Bloody hell. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I’ve seen spookier. But like I said, weird night. Anyway. Want to fill me in on what the guys saw?”

She’d given him the brief rundown on the phone. Now she went into a slightly longer version, adding in details as best she could from Justin and Chaz’ account. Partway through reading the titles off the crumpled list the thing had dropped, she paused. “Do you think they could be related? This and the ghost Elly dealt with?”

It had been at the back of his mind since her initial phone call. He nodded. “If the exorcism had been routine, I’d say it was just a coincidence. But with what I felt earlier, and how Elly described it to me, I’d say it’s a safe bet.”

The Clearwater house looked undisturbed as they pulled into the driveway. Like most of the other houses on the street, the windows were still dark. Only a few residents were up and about at this hour, probably people who worked in Providence or Boston, or teachers getting ready for a day of classes. In Crow’s Neck, plenty more lights would be on, cars already sliding out onto the early-morning streets, or more likely, people setting out on bikes or on foot to the bus station a mile away. They might as well have been different planets, let alone different neighborhoods.

They got out of the car and took a quick trip around the outside, Val sniffing the air the whole time. No matter how many times Cavale’d come here in the last month, he couldn’t help but marvel at the size of the house. He’d been in a few that rivaled it over the last couple years—old rambling Colonials collected their fair share of ghosts, after all—but the idea of
living
in a place this grand was beyond him. He still sometimes felt overwhelmed by all the space in his house, and that place could fit inside the Clearwaters’ two or three times over.

“Do you want to do a walk-through?” he asked, as they completed their circuit.

“I don’t think we need to.” Val gestured down the street. “He went thataway. I don’t smell anything newer, so I don’t think it came back after Chaz and Justin left.”

“Are we following it on foot, or driving?”

She checked her watch—one of the few things that (if you were stretching for it) might give away her age. So many people relied entirely on their phones to tell the time these days; not a lot of them bothered with watches anymore. Val always had hers on. It was a practical measure as much as an indicator of her era, though—if your phone died and you weren’t sure how close it was to sunrise, you were pretty well fucked, she’d explained once. “We have another hour and a half until dawn. Let’s walk. I can’t imagine it stuck to the streets for long.”

In fact, it hadn’t. Cavale followed Val through backyards and over fences, grateful that the cold weather had hardened the ground and meant they weren’t tramping through mud. Though that meant their prey hadn’t left much in the way of footprints, but Val said the scent was pretty strong. They trespassed over the greens at Edgewood’s golf course—were it summertime, there’d be die-hard players teeing off already, getting in a round as day broke. The golf course gave way to untended, overgrown fields, and Cavale had a vague sense of where they were. When they came upon the cast-iron fence of the boneyard, he knew for sure.

Val groaned. “Are you kidding me? Justin and I were here earlier tonight.”

“Did you see anyone?”

“No, we . . . Oh, shit. We didn’t, but Justin smelled something. And one of the graves was disturbed. We thought—no,
I
thought—it was a fraternity prank. Damn it.” Cavale knew that tone all too well, the distinct sound of someone kicking their own ass.

Because if she’d recognized what she was seeing, it might not have gone to the Clearwaters’, and Chaz wouldn’t have gotten hurt.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s see if it’s gone to ground, or what.”

“Yeah, okay.” Val turned to him, fingers locked together. “It’s a tall fence. You want a boost?”

He took it, pulling himself up and over the top and dropping down lightly on the other side. Val didn’t need to climb. Once he was out of the way, she took a couple steps back, gauged the distance, and leapt. By nature, she was a graceful woman. Seeing her move like this reminded him that there was an
inhuman
grace to her, too: the perfect arc of her jump, the lines of her body as her feet left the ground, the catlike precision of her landing. Cavale knew he’d hit the ground quietly; Val didn’t make a sound.

“This way.” She headed off along the fence, skulking low along the old, thin stones. Cavale kept up with her. They hadn’t brought much along for weapons—Val had grabbed a utility knife from her bag, stubby and single-edged, the bottom half of the blade serrated. He wondered if she’d robbed an army surplus store at some point. Cavale had a knife of his own, more of a dagger, really, that he’d rubbed with lavender and sage oil before leaving home.

They heard them before they saw them, the
thunk, sssss
of shoveling, the scrape of metal on wood. Two of them, neck deep in the grave they were digging up. Neither saw Val or Cavale sneaking up, so intent were they on their task. In the scant starlight, Cavale was able to get a decent enough look to put a name to what they were: “Ghouls,” he said, barely even breathing the word, knowing Val’s hearing was better than human. He’d encountered ghouls before, the first when he was barely twelve years old and Father Value had taken him out to Hunt. Cavale had dispatched it on his own, with the old bastard watching.
Critiquing.
Cavale was never sure whether Father Value would have stepped in if the ghoul got the upper hand. Maybe. Probably.

Val nodded and pointed at the opposite side of the grave. Her meaning was clear—she’d come in from one side, he’d come in from the other, and they’d take them by surprise.

It was textbook, really, and it made perfect sense why. She’d learned from the Brotherhood out west. Cavale’s training came at the hands of Father Value, who’d been Brotherhood since probably well before Val ever drank her first drop of blood. Once Val moved off, he gave her a ten-count.

Then he darted for the grave, dagger at the ready.

She swooped in from the other side, reaching it at the same time. Her strength let her pluck the first ghoul out by his moldering lapels, the thing letting out a wordless shout of surprise.

Cavale wasn’t quite as nimble, but that was all right. He hauled his up by the collar of the dirty sweatshirt it wore, dragging it up over the lip of the grave and sending it flailing along the leaf-covered ground. It got its feet and its brain working in tandem in fairly short order, enough to get itself upright again and wheel on Cavale.

Wait, is this one alive?
For a second he was sure of it, until he saw the blue-tinged lips and the way the eyes had glazed over. No, but he was young, maybe even younger than Elly’s ghost had been this afternoon. “I don’t suppose you remember how you got out of the grave?” he asked.

He got about the answer he expected. The ghoul rushed at him, bent low like a linebacker, attempting to take Cavale out by the waist.

Cavale wasn’t much of a football fan. He dodged aside, his hand snaking out with the dagger as the ghoul went past, slicing open its sleeve. It managed not to fall back into the open grave, bringing itself up short and whirling around again to see where Cavale had gone.

Unfortunately for the ghoul, the answer was
right behind you
. Cavale caught its arm as it brought it up for a swing, his dagger flashing up to stab it in the gut. The smell of burning, rotting meat filled the air, the lavender and sage doing . . . not their intended job, but
a
job. The ghoul let out a ragged moan and sagged into Cavale. Even clouded, he could see the fright in its eyes.

Then he looked at its arm, the one he still held, and he blinked. That symbol, the same one Elly had drawn from him before she went to Boston, was seared into the ghoul’s forearm. “Shit. Shit!” He let the ghoul fall, dragged it a couple of feet to give himself room, and let it curl itself around its wounded abdomen as he swept the leaves away around it and enclosed it in a crude circle. He carved runes into the ground with his knife, similar to the ones he’d drawn on his kitchen table a few hours ago.

From the other side of the grave, he heard Val at work with her own knife, and the telltale thud and roll of a decapitated ghoul. You could destroy a lot of things by cutting off their heads and burning the bodies. They hadn’t brought lighter fluid with them, but for now, the way Val stood over it and wiped her knife clean, Cavale didn’t think they’d need either.

“Stay there, you little bastard,” he said. With the last runes in place, he realized he’d need a lot more blood than he’d get reopening the cut on his left hand. “Hey, Val?”

She was next to him before the words even finished echoing. “What’s going on here?”

“It’s the same magic. The same person who brought back the ghost Elly sent packing is controlling these guys.” He pointed at her knife. “I hate to ask, but can you provide the blood for this one? It’s kind of a big circle.”

“I don’t think there’s any need.”

“Sure there is. If we’re fast enough, I can trace it back to the source.”

She shook her head and hunkered down beside the ghoul. “He’s not moving, Cavale. Whoever did this, they just cut their losses.”

Sure enough, it lay perfectly still. The sigil had disappeared; that dull intelligence was gone from its eyes. “God
damn
it.” He reopened the cut anyway, just to see. No magic. No echo. All they had now was a corpse in the center of an inactive circle.

But there was something about it. Something utterly mundane.

“Val, I think I recognize this guy.”

7

T
HE VAMPIRES WENT
into a closed-door meeting once they got back to Ivanov’s. Elly hung around for a while, but eventually one of the lackeys came out to tell her she was free to go. She slid off the barstool where she’d spent an hour nursing a soda and pretending to watch TV and got out of there. On one hand, she didn’t like not knowing what was being discussed in Ivanov’s office. On the other, turf disputes didn’t actually concern her. Her job was to protect Ivanov and the
Stregoi
. How they handled the beef with the
Oisín
only mattered to her if she needed to stake some of the rival vamps.

Other than that, not her problem.

So she found herself with a free night. She could have gone straight home, back to Crow’s Neck and that dinner Cavale had promised, make an attempt at not being the world’s most ungrateful sister, but a few hours and a bloodsucker pissing contest hadn’t changed her feelings on it. It was early enough, too, that Justin would still be at work. Heading home for a training session led right back to the previous problem: time to kill while Cavale cooked her dinner.

She mulled her options over while she sat in her car waiting for the heat to kick in. Chaz had worked miracles on it, sure, but there was only so much even he could do for a twenty-year-old shitbox. The engine got warm on its own time, which would mean a winter of chattering teeth and blowing into her hands while she waited for the sweet, sweet hot air. It was more than she was used to having, though. She wasn’t about to complain.

Besides, she knew where she was going. Not home, not to Val’s or the bookstore, or anywhere in Edgewood.

Elly drove out of Southie, down the street that ran between Babe Ruth Park and the beach. Kids still roamed about the park, but if any of them were a bunch of mouthy newbie vampires, she had no way to tell. She headed down Morrissey Boulevard, past the UMass Boston campus, past more parks, past those huge painted gas tanks where, if you looked for them, you could see the silhouettes of Barney Rubble and Ho Chi Minh. Then she turned off into Dorchester and wound her way along the streets until she came to the one where she was pretty sure the Creeps had kept Chaz hostage last month.

He hadn’t had much for her to go on: the colors of the houses nearby he’d been able to glimpse through dirty windows, a street number but not its name, the shape of the tumbledown one-car garage in the back. He’d been unconscious when they brought him in, and was forced to lie beneath a blanket (and several Creeps) when they’d taken him back to Edgewood. The best he’d been able to do on the way out was try to count the turns, but even then his memory was unreliable. He remembered the turn before the highway best, the change in the tires’ pitch as they drove over some kind of metal grate.

Chaz hadn’t pressed Elly about the woman he’d met since that awful night, even though he thought the Sister looked enough like Elly to maybe be her mother. But when she’d asked if she could hypnotize him, to try to get him to recall a little more—“to see if we can track the Creeps”—his eyes had widened in momentary surprise. Elly wasn’t the type to ask favors. But he recovered quickly, maybe saw the
forget it
forming in the way she’d pursed her lips, and said yes before she could withdraw the request.

Elly wasn’t generally a fan of hypnosis. Even if the subject could be put under, what they remembered wasn’t always entirely accurate. It was better than nothing, though, and it turned out Chaz went under easily. He’d retraced the route for her, swaying to whichever side he said the car was turning, telling her what songs were playing on the Creeps’ tinny radio.

He couldn’t tell her how fast they’d been going, or anything the Creeps had said, but she didn’t need it. She’d written the directions down, then reversed them. When Cavale was at work during the day, she’d gone to the library and spent several afternoons with mapping programs open in one window and a cobbled-together YouTube playlist in another.

That was when she’d happened on the picture of the old red drawbridge over the Neponset River, with its metal-grated platform. She’d found her starting point.

It took another week for her to work up the courage to ask Chaz to come for a ride with her. He’d said yes as soon as she stammered out the request. He made some joke about owing her one for not planting any weird post-hypnotic suggestions, but she thought maybe he wanted to find those kids the Creeps had in their service as much as Elly said she wanted to find the nest itself. They’d tried tracking them by a few strands of hair Katya had yanked out of their leader’s head the night of the battle, but the Creep woman must have done something to make herself untraceable. Cavale’s spells had gotten them nowhere.

Chaz went, though, no fuss, and even kept his eyes closed once they got off the highway and went over that bridge. The sound of it made him break out in a cold sweat, but when Elly offered to pull over and call it off, he insisted she keep going. From there, she’d brought them into the heart of Dorchester, to where she’d estimated he’d been held, and they spent the afternoon doing a slow trawl through those neighborhoods. If you plotted their progress on a map, she figured, it would look like one of those mazes that show up in kids’ activity books: dead ends, sharp corners, routes traced and traced again.

But eventually, Chaz had bolted upright from where he’d been slouching farther and farther down in the seat, and said, “There! That one!”

It was a two-story house nestled in among triple-deckers. The paint might have been dark green once, but it had faded over the years. Huge chunks of it peeled away from the siding. The porch sagged, its boards exposed and rotting. The tiny patch of a front lawn was overgrown with brown, dead grass and littered with broken bottles and fast-food wrappers pitched from passing cars. Elly had insisted on going in first, just in case. Not that the Creeps would be awake with the sun up, but if they needed to take on a pack of kids brainwashed into serving the monsters (and they had to be brainwashed, didn’t they? Who would ever join up with the Creeps willingly?), she wanted to get in the first hits. Scare them enough and make them turn tail, maybe.

He’d bristled at the suggestion, but didn’t argue the point. Elly knew how to fight. She was the protector here.

Only there was no one there to protect him from. They’d both felt it, stepping up onto the rickety porch: no one was home. The front door swung open easily. They hadn’t even bothered to lock it when they left. Inside, Chaz took one look at the front room and spent a minute holding on to the door frame. Thin, stained mattresses lay abandoned on the floor. Someone had wiped out most of a ritual circle, but a few symbols remained chalked on the wall like a hastily cleared blackboard. Elly recognized some healing runes and wondered if they’d been drawn by her moth— by Marian, the Sister Chaz had met.

They’d walked through the house, but nothing useful had been left behind. Chaz declined a look in the basement, where the Creeps had slept while he was here. Elly only went down the first few steps before the putrid meat stink of them drove her back up. She saw flies alighting on trash heaps, boarded-up cellar windows, and eye-searing Creepscrawl defacing the concrete walls. But no Creeps.

Chaz was perfectly happy to get the hell out of there when she suggested it. They’d taken a stroll around the block, to see if anything else seemed significant. Of the scant few neighbors they encountered, none of them knew where they’d gone. None of them even really seemed aware anyone had been living there. When Chaz asked if they’d seen a woman who looked like Elly, they struck out there, too. She was relieved. Mostly.

He hadn’t come back with her since; there hadn’t been any need to. Far as Chaz knew—far as
anyone
knew—she’d gone back only one more time after that, to see if anyone came by at night. No one had.

The truth was she’d been here a few times now—more than a handful, less than a dozen—and the story was always the same. She didn’t expect anything different tonight as she parked on the street a couple houses down and settled in. Late as it was, people were still out.
Probably coming home from the bars.
It was just about two o’clock, time for last call. Even Ivanov’s kicked you out eventually.

People were bundled up against the cold, making it harder for Elly to get a good look. But no one scurried up that walkway. No one so much as looked at the Creeps’ old hideaway. Certainly not anyone who, when she could get a decent gander, might be the woman from the Brotherhood.

It was for the best, really. What would she even do? Invite the woman to come sit in her car and warm up? What did you say in a situation like that? “Hello, we’ve never met before, but I think you might be my mother. Also, I hear there’s a big nasty Jackal alpha who’s holding your husband hostage. Do you both need rescuing? Is the man they’re keeping my father?”

She sat for an hour with the engine running, fewer and fewer people trickling past. All around, houses went dark until, at three thirty, Elly gave up for the night. She had other things to do and a long drive to get to them. Like all the other times, she drove away with a mix of disappointment and relief.

*   *   *

S
TOPPING FOR COFFEE
and gas on the way home meant she must have just missed Cavale. He’d left a note tacked to the fridge for her:

Gone to Val’s. Something up at the Clearwaters. Everything okay, will fill you in when I get back. Casserole on the middle shelf if you’re hungry.

—C.

She opened the door to peer at it, and couldn’t help the grin at the sticky note on the tinfoil:

Look! It’s not poison!

She’d grabbed a crappy breakfast sandwich with her coffee, the kind with limp, stringy bacon that probably didn’t even come from a real pig, and topped with cheese that got gross fast if you let it cool down. The guilt she’d felt wolfing it down in the parking lot and getting rid of the incriminating wrapper dissipated—if she was going to sample Cavale’s cooking, he ought to be home for it.

Of course, now she was keyed up with nothing to do. Her options here were bed and TV, neither of which appealed. She’d been denied a good brawl earlier, spent a couple hours holding down a barstool, and another couple doing fuck-all in her car. She needed to
move
.

Twenty minutes later, she pulled up in front of Val’s. Chaz’ Mustang was still there—he was probably waiting for Val and Cavale to get back to hear about what they found. When Elly’d called, Justin had answered on the first ring, sounding freaked-out and worried. He gave her the rundown of what had happened, and when she offered to come over to spar in Val’s basement, he answered as eagerly as if she’d offered to come over and bone him.

Which she hadn’t. Wouldn’t.

He was a vampire, for Christ’s sake, and one with vestiges of a Creep spell camped out in his head. That was just all kinds of
no
.

Justin met her at the door, ushering her inside. Chaz was sprawled out on the couch, his head resting on an ice pack, his face one big bruise on the left. He looked up from the
Star Trek
rerun he’d been staring at and gave her a wave. “Hey, Elly, how’s tricks?”

“Fine,” she said. “Do you want me to, uh . . . ?” She gestured at his face. From the way he winced as he sat up, she guessed his ribs had taken another knocking around, too. “I don’t have my kit with me, but I can figure something out.”

“Nah.” He picked up a glass from the coffee table and swirled the finger of whiskey inside. “I’m self-medicating.”

“But if that’s a concussion, you shouldn’t . . .” She trailed off when Justin plucked at her arm.

“He’s had a long night,” he murmured. “Probably best to leave it be.”

Chaz watched the exchange, the corner of his mouth quirked into a grin even though Elly was pretty sure he couldn’t hear what Justin said. “You kids go on and do your thing. I’m fine, I swear.”

She let Justin lead her downstairs. Val’s basement was half-finished, not the dreary, musty place Cavale’s was but a sealed concrete floor and walls, a laundry nook, and several pieces of discount-store furniture laid out on some clearance-sale throw rugs. It wasn’t a very lived-in space; the few times Elly had hung out here, they’d mostly stayed upstairs. There was enough room, with minimal rearranging, for her and Justin to be able to go over some moves.