Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel (7 page)

A dirty suit.

The guy was filthy, streaks of mud not only ruining the suit but caking his patent-leather shoes as well. Now that he glanced down, Chaz saw the footprints the guy had tracked along the floor.

He was halfway to the poker before the idea that
dude doing B&Es in a suit
might equal
mobster
, but by then he was committed. “Hey. Hey, asshole! What the fuck do you think you’re—”

The guy turned around, startled, and all thoughts of grabbing the poker flew out of Chaz’ head. His skin was grey and mottled, his eyes sunken deep into their sockets. Stringy flaps of skin were all that was left of his nose, and his lips had peeled back to reveal a row of yellowed teeth.

“What . . .” said Chaz. “Who . . .”

The thing dove at him. Thought kicked back in, and Chaz fumbled his way toward the fireplace set.

Too slow.

It bellowed as it came on, the wordless shout turning into a grunt as they collided. Chaz hit the wall hard enough to hear the plaster crack. Then it was battering him, the loose grey skin of its fists coming into frightening focus with each hit. Its fingernails—the ones still attached, that was—were blue-tinged. And sharp. Chaz’ cheek opened up and oozed warm blood down into his collar.

He got his arms up, somehow, into the defensive guard he saw when he watched boxing matches at four in the morning. It seemed much easier on TV, like you could hold out for hours while some huge dude whaled on your arms. Now that he was trying it out himself, Chaz mostly felt like the kid on the playground screaming,
Not the face! Not the face!
while the bullies went to town.

This close, he smelled the graveyard stink of the thing: formaldehyde and congealing organs. It reared back to roar again, and looking out between his arms Chaz got a gander into its tongueless mouth.

That did it. He bulled his way past the thing, driving it enough out of his way that he could reach the rack and grab a poker.

Of course, that meant turning his back on it, and before he could bring his weapon around, it had him by the hair. “Fuck!
Ow!
” It dragged him around in an arc by his ponytail until he crashed, gut first, into the crest of a wingback chair. They seemed all comfy and nice until you had the wind knocked out of you by their hard back edges. The poker fell from his fingers and clanged off the hardwood floor.

“Shit. No you don’t,” he said, but it wasn’t like the intruder was taking suggestions.

It beat him to the poker by millimeters, yanked it away with one hand, and caught Chaz by the collar with the other. He heard the whistle as the thing brought the poker over its head, about to bring it down on Chaz’.

“Aw, fuck,” he rasped. He had time to wish his last words hadn’t been so shitty, when his attacker was yanked backward. Chaz’ collar tore, a hank of fabric going with the thing as it sailed across the room.

Justin.

“Careful,” Chaz yelled. “That thing’s fucking strong.”

But Justin didn’t need the warning. The fangs and claws had come out, twisting the affable bookseller that Chaz knew into someone terrifying. He towered over the thing where it lay dazed and picked it up by the scruff of its neck. The poker was still clutched in its right hand; Justin wrested it away so hard a few of the thing’s fingers went with the length of cast iron.

The loss of its digits didn’t bother it. When Justin pulled it to its feet, it curled its remaining fingers into fists and took a swing. The blow landed, but Justin barely seemed to register it. He swung the poker as though he were Big Papi going for the fences. It connected with the thing’s skull with a dry crunch, but that didn’t bring it down.

It staggered away, bellowing and clutching its ruined head, and made for the door. Justin chased after it, but he was only gone half a minute before he came back in and knelt next to Chaz. “Are you okay? How bad did it get you? Shit, you’re bleeding.”

“I’m fine.” He pushed Justin’s hands away from where his cheek had started throbbing. It wasn’t that he thought Justin would go all Gary Oldman–Dracula and lick the blood off his fingers, but better not to tempt it. “Where is it? Did you kill it?”

“No. It took off, and I didn’t know how bad you were hurt. I can track it, if you want me to. I think . . . I think that’s what I was smelling earlier. Not . . . Not the Clearwaters.”

“Nah. It’s gone for now. Let me hit up the medicine cabinet and see if there’s anything I can clean this cut with, then we’ll see if we can figure out what the fuck it wanted.” He winced as he tried to stand. The rib he’d cracked when they were fighting the Jackals had only just healed, his recovery accelerated by Elly’s salves and spells. That bash into the chair hadn’t been good for it.

Justin helped him keep his feet, only to push him down in the offending chair. “You sit. I’ll see what I can find.” A few minutes later he returned with hydrogen peroxide, cotton balls, and a bottle of prescription-strength ibuprofen just past its expiration date. “I know you’re not supposed to take other people’s medicine, but I thought this might be an exception. Also, let me see your eyes. I just noticed that dent in the wall that’s shaped like your head.”

“I’m not concussed,” said Chaz, but that was the last shreds of his dignity talking. This time, when Justin leaned in to swab the wound, Chaz bore it as stoically as he could, only wincing a little at the sting. “If that son of a bitch gave me, I don’t know, grave herpes, I’m gonna be bullshit.”

“I don’t think there’s such a thing.”

“Yeah, well, I’d better not be the world’s first case, is all I’m saying.”

“What was it doing here?” Justin looked around the room, surveying the damage. “It looks like one of those poltergeist things Elly talks about happened to the shelves.”

“It was going through them book by book. I don’t know what it was looking for, though. It wasn’t exactly the chatty type.” He paused. “Or maybe it was, but the whole no-tongue thing kept it from communicating. Maybe I should’ve brought it a pen and paper. I mean, obviously it can read.”

Justin walked over to the bookcases while Chaz shook out a couple pills and dry-swallowed them. He trailed his fingers along the books that hadn’t been evicted from their shelves, muttering their names to himself. “It’s all literature,” he said. “Stuff Professor Clearwater used for classes.” He stopped to pick up a fallen volume. “Oh. Hey. I think our guy dropped his shopping list.”

He brought it back over to Chaz to show him, but now Chaz’ head was throbbing in time with his cheek. “Sorry, dude, you’re going to have to read them off to me until this stuff kicks in. Anything on the bestseller list?”

“Nothing I recognize.” Sometimes humor went straight over Justin’s head and off into the stratosphere. “It’s occult stuff, though. He was in the wrong library. Going by the titles, it looks like he wanted to learn about raising the dead.”

Chaz blinked. “Uh. I hate to break it to him, but he’s already been raised, if you ask me. What else does he need to know?”

“Maybe how to bring his friends back?”

“Christ, I hope not.”

“The other question is, who brought
him
back?”

A sudden, extreme case of the willies slithered down Chaz’ spine. He’d seen his share of zombiepocalypse movies and, while his recent adversary didn’t seem like he was trying to
eat
Chaz’ brains, he’d certainly been trying to bash them in. Henry Clearwater might have thought his house defensible, but he’d been wrong at the cost of his life. And even though the rotting dude wasn’t a Jackal, it had still given Chaz a good ass-kicking. Justin had been able to handle one, maybe could even have handled another if one appeared. If a whole cemetery came shambling back, though, no way in hell was the kid
that
good.

“I think we’re done here for the night,” he said, and Justin didn’t argue. Chaz’ ribs and assorted other pains protested as they moved about the house turning off lights and locking up. The bruises from last month had finally faded; now he’d have new ones. It pissed him off—not like he was planning to show off his abs to anyone in the near future, but it’d be nice not to look down in the shower and see more colors than a Van Gogh painting.

The anger was better than what lurked beneath it: those moments where he’d been sure he was fucked, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. Didn’t matter that he didn’t have preternatural strength like Justin and Val: Neither did Elly. Neither did Cavale. They were as human as he was, and they could hold their own just fine.

It sucked, being the weakest link.

He tried not to think about it too much.

6

V
AL HAD BANKED
on at least a couple hours to herself after Night Owls closed. Chaz and Justin had headed out to the Clearwater home around one, and she didn’t expect them back until at least five. It meant she’d come home with an armload of magazines, turned the TV on to some awful guilty-pleasure reality show, and sprawled out on the couch in her flannel pajamas to enjoy both.

Somewhere out there, cool vampires were shaking their heads in disgust at how she was squandering her immortality, but Val didn’t care. She was comfy, and on TV a man in a panama hat was pissing off a bear.

It wasn’t like the last month had been a trial—Justin was a perfectly good roommate, and even before he’d been turned, Chaz had spent several nights a week hanging out here with her until dawn threatened, so she was used to having company. It wasn’t like he was always underfoot, either—she had the house to herself when he was off training with Elly, and the nights he wasn’t, he tended to stay up in his room studying. Still, she looked forward to the alone time.

That was the thing about a change in routine: you didn’t know what you valued most until suddenly it was gone. Justin would have been more than happy to give her privacy if she’d asked for it. She probably could even shuffle him off to Chaz’ apartment or Sunny and Lia’s house for a day, as long as they made sure he was covered head to toe in blankets to keep the sun off. Val didn’t have the heart to, though. She didn’t want him to start thinking he wasn’t welcome, and so she intended to quietly relish having the night to herself.

So when she heard the low roar of the Mustang’s engine chugging down her street at four, she couldn’t help but be a little miffed. She sat on the couch,
Cute Country Kitchens
spread across her lap, poised like a parent ready to ask why their kid was out past curfew. Except in this case, she was tempted to scold them for
not
staying out late.

Until the key turned in the lock, the door cracked open, and the smell of Chaz’ blood wafted to her nose.

Val forgot all about being annoyed. Before the magazine hit the floor, she was already in the entryway, Chaz’ face in her hands as she inspected his injuries. The left side of his face was a bruised mess, with a gash on his cheek as the centerpiece. There were streaks of crimson in his pale hair from where it had soaked up his blood like a paintbrush.

“Val, no, come on, I’m okay,” he said, trying to squirm out of her grasp.

Too bad for him, her strength could rival that of the mama bear on TV. “What happened?” She let go once she was fairly sure he didn’t need stitches, but that didn’t mean she was finished with him. These were wounds she could fix herself. She’d dragged him three steps toward the living room before she noticed Justin wavering in the doorway, furiously averting his eyes. “Justin? You okay?”

Chaz snickered, then winced and clutched his middle. “I think he’s not used to seeing his boss in her PJs.”

“It’s . . . it’s fine,” said Justin.

Val looked down at what she wore. The ensemble was about as far from sexy as you could get: a burgundy plaid set, baggy and formless. Chaz was right—it was probably the boss thing more than a woman in her bedtime outfit.
Oh, good lord.
“Justin, there are some days I’d swear it was you who was born in the forties, not me. Do you need me to go change?”

“No. I just . . . what Chaz said.”

“All right. Then you can pour the smartass a whiskey while I get him to the couch.”

Justin disappeared into the kitchen while Val settled Chaz down in her former comfy spot. She let her fangs down and chewed open a spot on her own wrist. It hurt, but in five minutes it’d be as if it never existed. Perks of being a vampire. When the blood was flowing, she let it drip into her other palm, then smeared it onto the furrows running down Chaz’ cheek: the world’s most morbid antibiotic. The wounds closed slowly, her blood mixing with whatever Chaz and Justin had treated them with back at the Clearwaters’.

“This feels so damned
weird
,” said Chaz. He tucked his hands beneath his thighs to keep from poking at his face. He’d received her healing a few times over the years he’d served her, but it never stopped him from squirming and complaining like a kid at the doctor’s office.

“What did it to you?” Val sniffed, subtly as she could.
Was it a Jackal?
But even though she caught a whiff of rot, it wasn’t the spoiled-meat smell of the Jackals that clung to him.

“A dead guy.” He said it so casually, she knew he must be thoroughly freaked-out. “He was poking through the downstairs library, looking for books on necromancy. Maybe he was looking for a good post-grave skin care regimen.”

Justin came back in with the whiskey. “Oh, hey,” he said, seeing Val tending to Chaz’ cheek, “I should’ve thought to do that back at the house. I’ll, uh. I’ll remember for next time.”

Chaz’ scent got spiky.
He’s upset.
He hid it beneath a layer of sarcasm. “Let’s hope there isn’t one, buddy, yeah?”

“Oh! No, I didn’t mean . . .” Justin passed Chaz the glass and retreated to the armchair. “Anyway, that thing was strong, Val. I got it off of Chaz and chased it out, but I’m glad it didn’t stick around to fight.”

Ice rattled against the glass as Chaz lifted it, clicked on his teeth as he drained its contents. That prickly scent came again as Justin spoke, telling her the rest of what they’d seen, but it subsided as the whiskey worked its magic. As she looked at Chaz’ battered face, and at the post-adrenaline shine that haunted Justin’s eyes, an overwhelming sense of déjà vu swept over her.

Her first year in Sacramento, she knew nothing of the Brotherhood. The vampire who’d turned her had a coven of four, and Val made five. They were a bunch of idiots who were going to be young forever, partying their way through the neon-lit nights of the nineteen eighties and beyond. He didn’t tell them about other vampires, or anything else that went bump in the night, and they didn’t care enough to ask.

They didn’t know about the Brotherhood; they didn’t know about the Jackals. They had no way to know a Hunt was happening right in their own neighborhood until the night they’d come home near dawn and found their Renfield—a local girl who wasn’t quite ready to give up the sun—beaten within an inch of her life on their doorstep. A Jackal had seen them, figured they were with the others, and decided to send a message. The Brotherhood wasn’t far behind. A Sister, Delilah (who would someday be Val’s closest friend), healed Carrie’s wounds. She explained who they were as her companions—another vampire Val had never met, a man whose arms were covered in tattooed runes, an old man who looked like a preacher out of a western—milled about, looking for the Jackals’ trail. Delilah spoke about the monsters threatening the humans, and how the Brotherhood hunted them down. How they could always use more help.

That was when Val learned there was more to unlife than eternal parties. It was when she’d joined the Hunt, and it was her life for the next twenty-odd years, until she got out. She got out and came east so she didn’t have to Hunt anymore. Didn’t have to risk losing the people she loved. For nearly a decade, she didn’t. She’d opened her bookstore and lived a quiet life mostly away from vampires and their politics, away from monsters, away from a life of violence and bloodshed. Until the Jackals came to Edgewood on Elly Garrett’s heels, and she’d almost—
almost
—been drawn back in.

She’d refused Ivanov’s offer to rejoin the fold not only because she wanted nothing to do with the
Stregoi
, but also because the Hunt didn’t need her. Now, though, looking at Chaz’ face, bruised for the second time in a month, she thought maybe it did, after all. And it needed her right here in Edgewood.

“Well, shit,” she said. “Looks like I’m heading out tonight after all.” She glanced longingly at her magazines, at the TV buzzing away behind her. On the screen, the man in the panama hat was crashing through the bushes—seemed like the bear wasn’t taking his shit. The cameraperson had to have nerves of steel, to stand there and film it all.

“Heading out?” Chaz scowled when she pushed him back down in his seat. “Did you hear the part where that thing was strong? And obnoxious? And might have friends?”

“I did. I won’t be going alone.”

Chaz slowly swivelled his gaze to Justin, then back to Val. “Look, I know he’s in good hands training with you and Elly, but isn’t it a little soon to be taking Justin out on real Hunts? Putting him up against things that actually want to kill him? On purpose?”

“Hey,” said Justin. “I did okay.”

Val patted his hand. “You did. But Chaz is right.”

“I am?” You could see the realization dawning, as he traded one argument for another, the
go easy on the kid
scowl for the one that read
oh come on, him?

“I’m calling Cavale,” she said, her words clipped to cut off argument. “Justin, you did a good job. You got Chaz out of there and I’m proud of you. But I’m out of practice. If we go back in and get attacked, I don’t want to make a mistake that gets you hurt because
my
instincts are rusty.”

They both looked pouty, but there wasn’t much she could do about it just now.

She had to change out of her pajamas first.

*   *   *

C
AVALE WAS ALMOST
glad to get Val’s call. The casserole . . . thing . . . had turned out all right, at least as far as he could tell. Nothing had burnt, the meat was cooked through, and the kitchen had even smelled pretty good while he made it. He hadn’t died when he ate a slice of it himself, and the plateful had done wonders getting the aftertaste of grave dirt out of his mouth. The rest he’d covered in tinfoil and put in the fridge with a note for Elly:

Look! It’s not poison!

But he didn’t want to be there when she got home, didn’t want to see whether she’d make excuses so she wouldn’t have to heat up a slab. Or whether she’d take it out of the fridge and, dutifully yet dubiously, give it a try. For him. To make him happy.

It was nearly five when he pulled into Val’s driveway. The Mustang was there, which meant Chaz was around. The front curtain twitched and there was his angular face, peering out. Cavale gave him a wave, got a halfhearted one in return as Chaz let the curtain go and turned to say something to whoever stood near him. A moment later, the front door opened and Val stepped out, a battered duffel bag slung over her shoulder.

Oh, thank the gods.

Much as he probably ought to have gone inside and asked Chaz and Justin to recap what they’d seen, he hadn’t wanted the face-to-face with Chaz just yet. He might have asked awkward questions about the dinner-that-wasn’t, and the rest of the night had been too weird for Cavale to want to deal with Chaz being smug.

Val flung herself into the front seat, her kit rattling as she set it down. Her long red hair was pulled back into a hasty ponytail. She wore faded jeans and a grey sweatshirt with the bookstore’s owl logo on its breast. He was almost certain the black boots peeking out from beneath her hems were army-issue; Elly would be jealous. “Thanks for coming,” she said. “Justin’s likely right. Whatever it was probably isn’t coming back, but I didn’t want to take the risk. He’s too green.”

Cavale nodded. “It’s fine. I sort of needed to get out of the house anyway. Weird night.”

She studied him as he backed out of the driveway and pointed the car toward the Clearwaters’. Her scrutiny could be unnerving sometimes, the weight of experience in her eyes as she tried to suss out what you were feeling. Most days it was easy to forget that Val was seventy years old. Some vampires wore the era of their birth like a cloak, letting it show in their word choice, their mannerisms, their style. Val did the opposite, keeping up with the times as though she were a Gen-Xer rather than a baby boomer. “Seems to be a running theme,” she said. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Elly had a run-in with a ghost yesterday afternoon. Kid who lives a couple doors down came by and asked her to get rid of it.”

Val frowned. “Did you guys hang out a shingle or hand out flyers or something?”

“Nope. We’re the weird people living in the creepy house on the hill. It just made the most sense. I mean, if you believe there’s a dead guy hanging out in your basement, you’ve already gotten past the hard part, logicwise.”