Grave Matters

Book 2: A Night Owls Novel

by Lauren M. Roy

Genres: Fantasy; Contemporary Fantasy; Urban Fantasy

Synopsis

Night Owls bookstore always keeps a light on and evil creatures out. But, as Lauren M. Roy's thrilling sequel continues, even its supernatural staff isn’t prepared for the dead to come back to life…

Elly grew up training to kill things that go bump in the night, so she’s still getting used to working alongside them. While she’s learned to trust the eclectic group of vampires, Renfields, and succubi at Night Owls bookstore, her new job guarding Boston’s most powerful vampire has her on edge—especially when she realizes something strange is going on with her employer, something even deadlier than usual…

Cavale isn’t thrilled that his sister works for vampires, but he’s determined to repair their relationship, and that means trusting her choices—until Elly’s job lands all of the Night Owls in deep trouble with a vengeful necromancer. And even their collective paranormal skills might not be enough to keep them from becoming part of the necromancer’s undead army…

Release date: February 24, 2015

Publisher: Ace

Print pages: 304

Sample

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1

ELLY DREAMS OF heartbeats. Slow and steady ones, the kind you count in the dark to help you sleep; fluttery rabbitlike ones, thready and fearful, the kind that something nasty might hear, and track you to your hiding place. She dreams of the way Justin watches the pulse in her throat sometimes, before he remembers himself and looks away.

Then there are the dreams where the heartbeats are as loud as footsteps, become footsteps, and those are the worst. They always end up the same dream: the one where she runs away, pulse pounding in time with her feet as she flees from the Creeps.

The dream where, several stories above, those jackal-headed monsters catch Father Value and beat him nearly to death, then let the fall finish the job. She tries to find him, willing herself to turn around, take that stairwell, get up there and help, but her body never obeys. She runs through mazes of poorly lit corridors, accompanied only by the slamming of her feet and her hammering heart, expecting to find a Creep around every corner, rotten meat on its breath as it laughs at her, laughs and laughs and laughs, while above, Father Value screams.

Sometimes she can pull herself out of it, shouting loud enough to wake Cavale when she claws her way to consciousness. Other times, like now, she’s trapped in those endless hallways with the blood in her ears going bam bam bam.

Bam bam BAMBAMBAM.

And a voice calling, “Is anyone home? Hello?”

No, wait. That’s not how this goes.

It was enough to yank her out of the dream, past grogginess to fully awake, just the way Father Value had taught them.

The clock read three thirty as she rolled out of bed and slipped toward the front of the house, mentally scrolling down the list of who it might be. She’d been asleep since coming home from Sunny and Lia’s around noon. Cavale wouldn’t be home from his day job for another couple hours. Val and Justin were basically cordwood until sunset, and Chaz probably had bookstore things to do. Plus, they all had keys, and none of them sounded like a ten-year-old girl.

The knocking grew even more insistent. Every few seconds the doorknob rattled as the kid outside gave it a try. Poor thing can’t know Cavale has half a dozen locks installed.

It was the nature of the neighborhood. He’d been able to buy the house for a song because no one lived here unless they had to, really. Crow’s Neck might have been a booming suburban haven fifty years ago, but these days it was a nearly dead sprawl. Doors left unlocked were an invitation for mischief, theft, or squatters.

Cavale’s residence being the spooky old house on the hill meant the local kids usually left them alone. They had the occasional ring-and-run—especially at Halloween, when going up to the witch’s door meant you were the bravest on the block—but Cavale said no one ever came around for boring things like selling magazines or candy bars for school fund-raisers. They were too afraid he’d scoop them up and bake them into a pie, or put a hex on them, or whatever witches were supposed to do to children these days.

Which meant when Elly finally undid the last of the locks and cracked open the door, the Girl Scout uniform tripped her up. From the khaki vest with Troop 305 sewn on the right, Elly had her pegged as a middle-schooler. It was the color she’d worn during her own brief stint in scouting; Cavale had helped her cajole Father Value into letting her join, pooled his allowance with hers to get her a hand-me-down uniform, and gone with her to argue for a full refund at the thrift store when Elly was kicked out of the troop two weeks later for frightening the other girls with her stories.

This kid wasn’t here to sell cookies. The way she snatched her hand back, Elly must have caught her going for another try at the doorknob. Her fingers trembled as, deprived of their target, they sought out and fiddled with the bright blue beads at the ends of her many tiny braids. She looked up at Elly with wide, red-rimmed eyes and kept peeking back over her shoulder as if she were being followed.

“Please help me,” she said. “Someone’s in my house.”

Shit. Any number of possibilities had flashed through Elly’s mind on seeing the girl’s fear, most of them having to do with bullies giving chase. A month ago, the sight of a frightened little girl would have had her thinking monsters and reaching for Silver and Pointy, but she didn’t bother marveling at how . . . mundane she’d grown. Burglars were just as real a threat as Creeps.

She opened the door the rest of the way and made room for the girl to get past her. “Come on in, and we’ll call the police.”

The girl’s eyes bulged as she peered behind Elly. Nothing scarier there than bunches of drying herbs—Cavale never did spellwork where anyone could see on a cursory glance—but any gander into the hallway would probably get the kid tons of mileage with her friends once she’d recovered from today’s real-life fright. She shook her head, though, and stayed where she was. “They won’t come. Not before my mother gets home.”

She wasn’t wrong. This section of town was low-priority unless there were gunshots involved, and even then the police were slow to respond. Elly backed up another step. “Here’s what we can do, then. Where’s your house?”

The girl pointed partway down the hill, to a one-story ranch with peeling green paint.

“Okay. We’ll call the police anyway. It’s worth a try. We can sit in the parlor and watch out the window. When your mom comes home, if the police haven’t come yet, we’ll go out and stop her before she goes inside. How’s that sound? We can have some, uh.” She’d been too damned busy these last few days to do any grocery shopping, and Cavale was useless at it. “Cereal, maybe, if the milk’s any good.”

Another head shake. “It won’t matter. Calling them or waiting for my mom.” She muttered something else, too low to hear.

“What was that?”

“I said, they can’t see him.” She balled her fists and stared a challenge at Elly. Now that she’d said it aloud, the words came in a rush. “Grown-ups can’t see him, but he’s been there all week, and he’s getting mad. My friend Leila said that guy you live with is a ghost hunter or something, and maybe you are too. So I need to hire you.” She reached into her uniform pocket and pulled out a paper-clipped stack of one-dollar bills. “I can make the rest up to you. Like a payment plan. Or I can do chores for you, mow your lawn or something. Shovel snow when winter comes.” She cast a significant glance at the tangled, overgrown mess that was Cavale’s front yard. As she talked, Elly watched some of her fear melt away, to be replaced by determination.

For the second time in as many minutes, Elly found herself tripped up. So it’s monsters after all? She was still getting used to interacting with people on a regular basis—people who weren’t Father Value, people who were blissfully unaware of how real beasties and ghoulies were—so she’d have to tread carefully until she was sure. Freaking out an already freaked-out kid would go all kinds of wrong. “Can . . . can your friend Leila see him?”

The girl tsked, and stopped just short of rolling her eyes. “Of course she can. She says kids are more sensitive to these things. They said so on that ghost hunting show. And now she won’t come over my house again until he’s gone.”

“You said he’s mad. Did he hurt someone?”

“No. Not yet. But he’s knocking things over and I get blamed. Mom says I’m acting out.” This time she didn’t stop the eye roll.

Elly raked a hand through her hair, thinking. “What does he look like?”

“I don’t know. Dead? Maybe he’s my dad’s age? Or was when he died? He’s a white guy with long hair, and he has a big hole in his chest. Sometimes it bleeds. I guess he must’ve been shot.”

Yeah, the kid was right—the police weren’t going to be any help on this one. “Do his clothes look old-fashioned?”

“No. He’s got a concert tee shirt on. One of those ones with the tour dates? When it’s not all bloody you can see it’s from last year.”

“How long have you guys lived in that house? Have your mom or dad done any kind of landscaping or something? Renovating the basement?” If he was newly dead, maybe he’d been killed there before they moved in, or someone had hidden the body on the property and the family had disturbed the grave.

But the girl said, “Since I was five, so like seven years?” and Elly’s theory went splat.

To hell with theories. The methods don’t change much between one cause of a haunting and another. It might be easier to put a ghost to rest if all you needed to do was give their bones a proper burial, but you didn’t always have the bones to work with. A couple weeks back, they’d laid a wraith to rest with nothing more than some personal effects and a poem. Improvisation is the best tool in your box, Father Value liked to say, and that was how Elly lived. “All right. Let me grab a few things and we’ll see what we can do.”

The girl let out a huge sigh of relief; her shoulders lost their scrunch. She held out the clipped stack of ones, but Elly waved it off.

“When we’re done, you owe me a box of cookies.” One more aspect of that whole polite-society thing dawned on her. “Hey, uh, you got a name?”

A pause. She fingered a badge on her beige sash, with the word safety embroidered on it in bright green. Somewhere along the way, this girl had learned that first tenet of Stranger Danger: don’t tell them your name. On top of that, maybe Best Friend and Supernatural Expert Leila had told her precautionary tales about giving witches your true name. Whatever the cause of the internal struggle, it lasted only a few seconds. “Cinda,” the girl said.

“Nice to meet you, Cinda. I’m Elly.”

Cinda stayed on the porch while Elly ducked into the house to collect her tools. She was a brave kid; Elly gave her major points for keeping calm with a pissed-off ghost at home. That didn’t mean she was quite ready for a trip through the spooky witch house. That was probably for the better—Cavale had left a stack of books on the couch, most of them open to pages that were varying degrees of disturbing if you didn’t live a life steeped in magic.

Elly’s eye fell on one particular spread, depicting a demon eating a woman’s heart. Okay, maybe even if you did.

She took a ketchup bottle filled with holy water, a pair of smudge sticks, a vial of lavender oil, a handful of crystals, a few other odds and ends, and shoved them into a plastic shopping bag. She debated strapping the silver spike to her wrist but decided against it—if Mom came home and found a strange woman doing all sorts of woo-woo shit in her house, with her sixth-grade daughter watching, well, Elly’d be in enough trouble. Best not to be armed, too.

Besides, silver didn’t do much of anything to ghosts and wraiths, whichever this might be.

Cinda leaned on the railing, staring down the hill at her house as Elly came outside. She eyed the plastic bag, clearly disappointed. “Is that, uh, your kit?”

“Yup.”

“In a bag from Food Stop.”

“Yup.”

“What are you going to do, throw a can of soup at it?”

“If that’s what it takes.” She held the bag open so Cinda could see what was inside. “If I walk down the street with a bag covered in runes, or some ancient carved box, anyone who sees will be curious, won’t they?”

“I . . . guess?”

“This draws less attention. You don’t want people knocking while I’m down in your basement getting rid of a ghost, now, do you?”

“No, I guess not.” Cinda’s mouth twisted in a bitter line. “No one really bothers with anyone else, anyway, though. It’s not that kind of neighborhood.”

Elly had no response to that—Cinda was right. The girl shrugged and led her down the hill.

*   *   *

HOUSES IN GENERAL were a new concept for Elly, “normal” houses even more so. Father Value would find an apartment for them to squat in from time to time, but they rarely had furniture beyond pallet beds and secondhand tables and chairs. No pictures on the walls, no magnets on the fridge—if the places even had a fridge.

She’d mostly gotten used to Cavale’s house; the biggest shock these days was that he still seemed to want her in it. The furniture was secondhand, refurbished to the best of Cavale’s ability. Some nights she’d come home to find him asleep on the couch, book spread across his chest. Of course, the book was often some obscure occult tome he’d taken from Val’s collection at the bookstore, Night Owls, but it was almost, almost an image from a normal life.

Val’s house was the next step up, on a pretty, tree-lined street in quaint, sleepy Edgewood, not a paint peel anywhere on the outside. Inside, you’d even think it was the home of a businesswoman doing moderately well for herself: furniture being slowly upgraded from the original cheap discount-store stuff to the real thing. (The bookcases must have been the first to get replaced, Elly suspected. Not a piece of particleboard in sight, there.) It looked normal until you realized there was no food in the cupboards, never a dish in the drainer, and the only time there might be food in the fridge was when Chaz had come over, ordered dinner for himself, and forgotten to bring home his leftovers.

That, and when you noticed the blackout curtains hanging on all the upstairs windows so Val and Justin didn’t have to sleep on the cold, packed dirt floor of the basement.

Sunny and Lia pulled it off the best: beautiful home, happy, well-to-do couple, and home-cooked meals every Sunday if anyone wanted to come by. Except they were succubi, and Elly knew it, and that made her less twitchy than if it were someone normal when she sat at their kitchen table and tore into a piece of roasted chicken.

Cinda’s house, then, set Elly’s nerves jangling. They entered through the side door into a cluttered kitchen. Most of the surfaces had things on them: mail piled on the counter, last night’s dishes in the sink, schoolbooks and craft projects littering the table. Every inch of the fridge was covered—report cards, photos, the week’s school lunch schedule clipped from the newspaper. Elly paused to look at a picture of Cinda and her parents. The Christmas tree loomed in the background. Mom and Dad waved at the camera. At first glance, Cinda seemed to be scowling, but on closer inspection she seemed to be fighting back a grin herself.

“They insisted on wearing those stupid matching snowman sweaters,” she said, coming up behind Elly. Even now, she seemed stuck between grown-ups, ugh and smiling at her parents’ goofiness. Elly had absolutely no context for it. Father Value had never owned anything remotely like a snowman sweater, and certainly never made her and Cavale pause for embarrassing family portraits.

From below them came a thud that made the dishes rattle, saving Elly from having to come up with a response. Oh thank God. “Where’s the cellar door?”

The ghost in the basement was the only thing here she truly understood.

While Cinda slid open the barrel bolt, Elly took out the vial of lavender oil. A long time gone, the Brotherhood would have burned dried lavender flowers and rubbed sigils onto their faces with the ashes. Elly found it much more convenient to go to a craft store and buy essential oils from the potpourri aisle. She thumbed a streak of it above each eye, fished her crystals and holy water from the Food Stop bag, then nodded to Cinda to crack the door.

Sometime back in the eighties, the downstairs had been finished and turned into an entertainment room. Cinda’s family had brightened up the wood paneling with colorful posters, but the dark walls beneath made it slightly claustrophobic anyway. An overstuffed couch dominated the far side of the space, facing a TV with a game system hooked up to it. Bookshelves overflowing with books and board games and baskets of art supplies covered one wall. Beside the couch, bent to get his fingers underneath for another lift-and-drop, was Cinda’s ghost.

Elly hmmphed from the stairs. “Slamming furniture around and blaming it on a Girl Scout. That’s where you’re going with this afterlife thing? Really?”

He looked up at her, surprised, and stepped back from the couch like a kid caught contemplating the theft of a candy bar.

“Yeah, I can see you. Can you talk?”

He opened his mouth, but the only sound he made was a staticky hiss. It reminded Elly of a radio stuck between stations; if there were words buried within, she couldn’t make them out. The problem with ghosts was, they were never consistent. Some of them would jaw your ear off if you let them. Others stuck with the more traditional wailing and rattling of chains. What they could do depended on how they’d been called from beyond the grave. The ones who wanted to communicate and couldn’t? They tended to get pissed.

Like this guy.

He squared his shoulders and advanced on her, skirting the couch on his way past.

Still moving like he’s alive. Doesn’t know all the neat tricks he can do yet. “Don’t you want to try knocking once for yes, twice for no first?”

“I tried asking him that,” said Cinda from way too close. “It makes him upset.”

Elly bit back a curse. Without turning to look at the kid, she reached out and gave her a shove. “Get upstairs. Close the door behind you and lock it.” A sharp intake of breath from Cinda, the kind you took before spouting off an argument. Elly recognized it because she was occasionally guilty of it herself. “Go.”

There was enough snap in her voice that Cinda listened. Her footsteps pounded up the stairs; the door slammed a second later.

“And pour a line of salt along the threshold!” Elly yelled.

The ghost hadn’t stopped coming. He was halfway across the long, narrow room, taking his time getting to her. He’d been in his mid- to late thirties when he died, assuming the manifestation matched his age. If it weren’t for the pallor, Elly might even have called him handsome. Long, dark red hair hung loose, down past his shoulders. It got ugly from there: The tee shirt, emblazoned with the name of a local band, had a jagged hole just above the heart. Pale skin peeked through. Elly couldn’t help but watch as a smooth, unblemished patch of his pectoral blasted outward, tatters of skin peeling back like flower petals.

Or like a bullet exiting.

Shot in the back, she thought. The wound began to bleed, fluid so dark red it was nearly black spilling forth in pulses, soaking the front of the tee shirt.

Elly stepped out into the room, keeping her back to the wall and circling away from the ghost. She could end it violently if she had to, but better if she could get him to go peacefully. Besides, something wasn’t adding up about this, and she wanted answers before dispatching him back to the grave.

She didn’t have much time to contemplate. One second he was a good five paces away; the next he was up in her face. Did he just figure out a new trick, or was he holding out on me before? Either way, he had the creepy teleportation thing down.

“Easy, now,” she said, but he wasn’t interested in talking. He let out another hiss of static and shoved her against the wall. New trick number two. The poster behind her tore with the impact as he pushed her higher. His face wasn’t so handsome now, the pallor slipping toward rot, blood gathering at the creases of his eyes like tears. Dirt was caked beneath his fingernails, and as he drew back for a slap, she saw that a couple of them were peeled back like he’d tried to drag his way along a hard surface.

He’d likely died frightened. Probably still was, even. Doesn’t mean I have to let him smack me around.

She thrashed in his grip, kicking and flailing until she jarred herself loose. The ghost might not have consciously realized he could spend most of his time all see-through and, well, ghosty, but he flickered out for a heartbeat, incorporeal.

The second Elly felt him lose tangibility, she dropped to a crouch and rolled. When she came up to the balls of her feet, she scuttled around behind him.

As soon as she’d gotten a look at the room, she’d assessed everything in it for its potential as weapon or cover. Books as projectiles, video game guitar as club, plenty of breakables if she needed a sharp object. Give her ten seconds and Elly could make this room into a battlefield, hopefully one that gave her the advantage.

But no way in hell would Cinda be able to explain that to her mother, so Elly had to play it clean. That meant staying close and ending it quickly.

The ghost spun, expecting Elly to have straightened. She stayed low instead, driving forward and bulling into him with her shoulder. The wall shuddered as he crashed into it, that damn print tearing, the abuse too much. Elly got a noseful of him: blood and grave dirt, the faint ozone smell she’d come to associate with hauntings. He battered at her, fists pounding at her back, cuffing her upside the head. She didn’t think he’d been in many fights while he was alive.

She kept him pinned as best she could, one hand flailing for her pocket. She’d shoved a handful of obsidian dust in there while putting her kit together, and brought it out now. Tiny shards dug into her skin as she shoved herself backward and down, executing a mangled sort of reverse somersault to give herself some distance. She’d never been a graceful fighter, but efficient? That was what mattered.

He was flickering again now, uncertain. Elly pitied him, but there simply wasn’t time for her to soothe an angry ghost; that could take days, let alone hours. Hell, Cavale had one customer he’d been working with for years.

The quick and dirty way, then.

The obsidian dust looked like beach sand in her palm. The overhead track lighting caught its facets, made them glitter. Elly danced in close and blew a puff of it at the ghost.

He threw his arms up to block, old living instinct kicking in. There was something written on his forearm, a sigil scrawled in black marker. It looked . . . new. Fresh.

It wasn’t one Elly recognized, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t just an ill-advised tattoo. “Someone’s tagged you,” she said.

Another one of those staticky hisses. He clawed at his face, dragging bloody furrows down his cheeks. His thrashing now had nothing to do with Elly; he didn’t so much as swipe at her as he staggered past, hiss-howling in agony.

But obsidian dust shouldn’t hurt.

It was a cleanser, a purifier, like all the other tools she’d brought.

The dust should have stopped him and calmed him, given her time to light the smudge sticks and send him on his way. This . . . You’d have thought she’d hit him with acid.

Books and games cascaded to the floor as he careened off the shelves. The flickering came more rapidly—some of his flails knocked things over; other times his hands passed through whatever he tried to send flying. The wound in his chest seeped faster, leaving a spoor trail along the stick-on laminate tiles. Elly took up a smudge stick and sparked her lighter. The thick scent of lavender and sage filled the air as the dried herbs caught.

She picked up the ketchup bottle filled with holy water and crept toward the ghost. He’d stumbled into a corner, near the door that would lead to the bulkhead and outside. If he saw her coming, he paid no heed. Pieces of obsidian dust stuck to his face, held there by his own blood.

“I’m sorry,” Elly said as she squeezed out a curve of holy water, trapping him against the walls. “I don’t know what’s wrong.” Two brightly colored cereal bowls had been left on an end table, the potato chip crumbs inside the evidence of Cinda’s and Leila’s last afternoon snack. Elly snatched them up and shook them out. She lit the second smudge stick off the first and set them down in the bowls to either side of the ghost’s new prison.

He slammed himself from one wall to the other and back again. Wisps of smoke drifted off his forearm, where the sigil had gone from ink black to molten red.

“I grant thee rest,” Elly intoned, her voice steady despite the strange spectacle before her. She squirted another line of holy water and waved the smoke from the smudge sticks toward him. “I grant thee forgiveness. I grant thee closure.”

He backed into the corner and slid down the wall, leaving a streak of blood like a paint smear.

“Your debts are paid. Your journey ended.” She held up a piece of white string, snapped it. “What tied you to this earth binds you no longer.”

He threw his head back and screamed. An actual human scream this time, not the hiss of an untuned radio. When it ended, he turned his arm to show Elly: the sigil was gone.

“What bound you?” she asked, then thought of the better question: “Who did it?”

But Elly was good at what she did. Damned good. Even as he held the arm up, he was fading, fading, gone.

She stood alone in the semitrashed basement in a spreading puddle of holy water, ringed by smoke. Mission accomplished and all, but I could have used another few seconds. Damn it.

The creak of the door upstairs. “Elly?”

“I thought I told you to sit tight.”

“It got quiet,” said Cinda, ignoring the question. “Is he gone?”

“Yeah, he is. You can come down now.”

Cinda gasped when she got to the bottom of the stairs, but not at the state of the room. Instead, she pointed at Elly herself. “You’re . . . That’s . . . That’s a lot of blood. Are you okay?”

Elly glanced down at herself and saw the mess for the first time. “It’s his, not mine. He got a little, uh. Leaky.”

Now Cinda took in the room, including the trail the ghost had left. She paled. “I don’t think I can clean all that up before my mom gets home.”

“It’ll go away,” said Elly. “It’s ectoplasm.”

“Like from that movie? With the slime ghost?”

“Yeah. Well. The term’s a lot older, but yeah.” The kid probably didn’t want a lecture on ghost hunting in the eighteen forties right then. “If we let those burn awhile”—she gestured to the smudge sticks behind her—“they’ll clear it up. Sort of like sunlight killing mold.”

Cinda bit her lip. “Will it be gone before my mom gets home? In like an hour?”

“Enough of the way that she won’t notice it, at least. Let’s pick up the stuff she will see.” Really, Elly wanted to bolt. To gather her things, get out of here, and go look up that sigil. Someone had raised that ghost, and whoever did it had been fighting her attempt at exorcism. She wanted to know why, and who.

But Justin had been trying to instill some degree of social skills in her, and if she bailed on Cinda now, she had a feeling he’d be disappointed when she recounted the story later. Plus, the kid was all right in Elly’s book. She’d done as she was told—mostly—and kept a cooler head than most people would have when faced with a haunting.

So she stayed.

2

CHAZ BOTH WAS and wasn’t a fan of October in New England.

About midway through the month, the weather got squirrelly as fuck—crisp fall days bookended by raw, cold, and rainy on one side and summery surges on the other. Not that his apartment was ever what y