Grave Matters

by Lauren M. Roy

  The poltergeist shifted atop him, not letting up, merely getting comfortable. As it did, it pressed against the lump of quartz in Cavale’s pocket. If I can get to it . . . He bucked once, twice, not dislodging it, only getting himself the range of motion to reach in—there!—and clasp his fingers around the stone. The second he had it, the poltergeist tumbled away. It howled in fury, swirling around Cavale like a tiny tornado.

  But it couldn’t touch him.

  He threw himself past it, toward Lia. She saw him coming, stopped slapping at the empty air, and stretched out a hand toward him. When they touched, the spirit that had her recoiled with a fingernails-on-chalkboard screech that Cavale felt in his teeth. Lia’s boots hit the floor and she plucked his butterfly knife from his fist. Burst capillaries ringed her blue eyes with crimson, and angry purple bruises were already welling up on her throat. “Get us out of here,” she rasped. “Too many.”

  Much as he wanted to argue, to insist they stay and send them all to rest, he knew running was the right call. The necromancer had touched off a storm in this house, and God only knew how many other spirits were lining up for a shot at them. “Stay close.” He dug out the baggie of salt and obsidian dust and scattered it ahead of them like chicken feed. Lia held on to his belt loop so she could watch their backs. She muttered under her breath as they went; it sounded like a prayer. Cavale knew banishing spells in a dozen languages, but this one was new to him.

  Ask her to repeat it later. Get out alive first.

  Then they were at the door, and outside, and he spread the last of his salt and dust across the threshold to keep any of the ghosts from following.

  The farther across the lawn they got, the harder she leaned on him. Out on the sidewalk, Lia stopped and sat down, hard.

  “Lia? Jesus, are you all right?”

  She smiled wanly. “Need a minute. Forgot how to fight without . . .”

  Without being a seven-foot-tall demon. He nodded. Voices tended to carry in the quiet before dawn. He wondered if any of the neighbors had heard the fight itself, but no curtains twitched, no frightened faces peeked out from gaps in the boarded-up windows. Bet he’s got it warded for sound. They’d put similar ones up at Sunny and Lia’s when the Creeps were coming, to keep the humans next door from getting involved. From getting themselves or the police hurt if they called.

  “Tell me when you’re ready. We’ll get you back to my house and I’ll break out Elly’s medic kit. Fix you up so Sunny doesn’t have a heart attack when she sees you.”

  Lia was looking past him, up the hill. Her face had slowly been returning to its normal color from the strangled purple she’d turned, but now she went past that, straight to deathly pale.

  “I can carry you piggyback if it’s too much,” he said, keeping his voice casual as he could as he turned. He knew it couldn’t be the climb freaking her out.

  A man was coming down the sidewalk toward them. His hands were shoved deep in the pockets of a down coat. He had light brown skin and a full beard, the coarse dark hair shot through with grey, though the hair on his head was all pepper, no salt. He had to have noticed them, but he swivelled his head from side to side to peer into the houses as he walked, a man on a pleasant morning stroll.

  Cavale pulled Lia to her feet. She stayed slightly behind him, not quite hiding, but allowing him to protect her. He felt the cold metal of the knife as she pressed it into his hand.

  The man stopped before them and tipped a hat that wasn’t there. “Mornin’.”

  He wasn’t part of the working crowd, or if he was, he was headed the wrong direction. “Good morning,” said Cavale. “You look a little lost.”

  He studied the house they’d fled moments before. “Nope. I think I just found what I was looking for.”

  Another customer? “I’m sorry. The person who was staying here . . . left.”

  The man’s liquid brown eyes reminded Cavale of Sunny, how she never missed a trick, whether she called you on it or not. He couldn’t place the man’s age, aside from older than me. “That’s . . . inconvenient. I was hoping to speak with him. Do you know where he went?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t.”

  He looked past Cavale, to Lia. “And you, lady? Did you see—” He paused, and against Cavale, Lia began to tremble. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

  “N-no sir. I don’t think so.”

  “No, maybe not.” He tipped his nonexistent hat again. “Well. If you see him again, will you tell him an old friend was looking for him? He has something of mine, and I was hoping to get it back.”

  Cavale nodded, though if he caught West again, setting up a meeting with this man was at the bottom of the priority list. “Who should I tell him is looking for him? And how can he find you?”

  The man had started walking again, past Cavale and Lia, past the house full of ghosts. He turned and said, “Tell him Udrai is looking for him. And that I’ll come to him.”

  Lia’s nails bit into Cavale’s wrist.

  20

  VAMPIRES RARELY, AS far as Elly knew, were so crass as to fight out in the streets. The Stregoi had done it in Edgewood a month ago, sure, but that was because the Creeps were that uncouth. When it came to bloodsucker versus bloodsucker, they preferred venues that discouraged spectators. Val had talked about brawls out in the deep desert, or in subway tunnels late at night, after the trains stopped running.

  In the Old World, she’d said, one of the wealthy old vampires had a castle in the mountains where, once every ten years, anyone with a grudge was welcome to come and stay. At dark the Renfields closed the gates, and the fighting raged through the halls all night. The villagers down below closed their shutters and hunkered down and said it was the wind. Whoever won, the next morning their Renfields dragged the losers into the sun.

  Seemed they’d carried on some form of the tradition here in the New World, only Boston wasn’t exactly rife with abandoned castles. Near the water, though, were acres of warehouses and buildings that had fallen into disuse. The address Katya had given her led to what once, in its golden days, had been a firehouse. The building was a slab of concrete three stories high. Black paint blocked out the windows; chains secured the garage doors.

  As she walked around to the back entrance, spike and stakes and holy water at the ready, she smelled the seawater and motor oil scent of the harbor. Beneath that, blood.

  “Oh, fuck me,” she muttered.

  Elly slipped through the unlocked door. The reception area was frozen in the mid–nineteen seventies, the yellowed calendar declaring it May 1976. A thick layer of dust covered everything except the path from the entrance to the door that led to the garage. As she crossed the threshold, the sounds of fighting hit her like a wave. She turned and looked, saw the spells drawn in the dust on the wall. Brotherhood spells again. The banshee woman must be here. The Sister, that was, from yesterday. She almost wished she’d called Chaz back after all.

  She remembered those moments after the fight outside Night Owls, when Chaz had talked about the woman the Creeps were forcing to help them: “I met a woman today who looked enough like you to be your mom.”

  “She hasn’t given a shit about me for twenty years. Why should I go running off to the rescue?”

  If it was her, she was helping the Creeps then and the Oisín now. All it does is make my job harder. That’s all.

  Despite those nights outside that house in Dorchester?

  She took the flutter of hope in her heart, shoved it in a box marked later, and threw away the key.

  Then Elly entered into the abattoir of Ivanov’s turf war.

  When it came to inter-vampire conflict, they weren’t fond of staking their own kind. Bit too easy to realize you were only a pointy stab away from dust yourself. They favored claws and fangs, and for all Ivanov demanded civility of the Stregoi in public, what Elly saw when she skirted around the doorway wa
s nothing short of animal.

  She hugged the wall, keeping out of sight the best she could. It was hard to tell who was dead from which side, because so many of them had been reduced to little more than meat. Someone had started a corpse pile in the corner, a tangle of arms and legs and torsos, all of whose necks ended in bloody stumps. They’d fall to ash eventually, if some poor Renfield wasn’t already tasked with dragging them into the sun in the morning.

  Others, who hadn’t received the swift death of decapitation but who were effectively out of the fight, lay writhing on the cracked concrete floor. At least, it was probably concrete. Enough blood had been shed to cover it like a coat of varnish.

  Ivanov had never been forthcoming about the number of Stregoi in the colony. Val had guessed it at about fifty, once, and from Elly’s attempt at a tally over the last month, it had seemed about right. They were moving too fast now for her to get a count of who was left, but it couldn’t be more than a couple dozen altogether.

  This isn’t right. The numbers, the layout, the whole damned situation. Opposing instincts set to war within her. Father Value’s oft-decreed Get out, run, live to fight another day was strong enough to make her twitch back toward the door. But if I can find out what Ivanov’s planning . . .

  Just a peek. She’d do her recon and go, and figure out how to explain her absence to Katya and Ivanov later. Maybe she’d even bring Cavale with her as backup when she did.

  First thing to do was get the numbers. Had both sides sent all their people here? No, she decided. There weren’t enough vampires here for all of Ivanov’s to be present. Maybe a third of them, all told. She craned her neck, looking for familiar faces in the fray, but the ones she caught sight of in the dim light were too gore-streaked for her to make out features.

  A hand landed heavy on her shoulder. Elly spun, stake raised. “Katya.” Shit.

  “So glad you could join us, myshka.” Her mouth was streaked with red; the tips of her chestnut hair looked like they’d been dipped in crimson paint. The outlines of what Elly was sure must be teeth bulged from the front pockets of her jeans.

  Her chance at getting out of here without fighting evaporated. I’m going to have to see this through. “Where do you want me?”

  “With Ivanov. Come.” As Katya led her around the perimeter of the garage, it struck Elly once again that this whole setup was too clean, too contained. She tried catching up to Katya to express this, though she had no idea what she could possibly say to convince the Stregoi woman of her misgivings. But she didn’t get the chance. Twice on the way, one of the Oisín scuttled close. Katya bared her fangs, and both times the new vampires found somewhere else to be. They kept on until they came to a set of stairs, and Katya sent Elly up first. At the top was a balcony overlooking the bays where the fire engines used to be housed. Ivanov stood in the middle, alone, observing the fight.

  “You want me up here?”

  He glanced at her briefly, a smile playing about his lips. He might as well have been a rich man watching a pack of dogs fighting, for all the concern he showed about his people dying down below. His fangs weren’t even out. “Yes.” He nodded at Katya. “Go on back to your collecting, now. I am in good hands.”

  Katya didn’t wait to be told a second time. She hopped up on the railing, found herself a target down below, and leapt down atop one of the Oisín.

  Elly scanned the roving mass of violence, partly to make sure no one was coming up to attack Ivanov, partly trying to find the woman from the Brotherhood. If she was down there, she was no longer clad in grey. How did it get to this point? They were supposed to talk. She ought not ask. She should keep her mouth shut and do her damned job, and, when the sun rose, help drag the dead and dying into the light. Then she could go home, shower, sleep, make up with her brother. And when the sun set, she could go find Justin.

  But this all seemed so wrong, and her mouth was open before she could stop herself. “What happened after I left? You were going to talk to them.”

  “We tried, Eleanor. I had two of mine bring word to them, requesting a talk, and offered to give the girl Deirdre back to them if they met me peacefully. An hour later, they sent their answer. My people’s heads were delivered to the bar in a trash bag.” He shook his head. “I am glad my bartender was smart enough not to open it where there were paying customers.

  “So I let Katya take the girl’s fangs and sent her back to her people. With the message to come meet us here, so we don’t call attention to ourselves on the streets.” He shrugged. “They came. And here we are.”

  “I think you’re being played,” she said. “Both of you.” Fuck, why didn’t I call Chaz? “There’s a necromancer. He was controlling Theo, and he was controlling the ones who attacked yesterday morning. Either he wants you to take each other out, or—”

  Ivanov leaned over the railing suddenly, showing the first signs of concern she’d seen him display in weeks. Elly stepped forward, looking to see what had alarmed him.

  Katya had taken a pair of Stregoi with her into the thick of things, facing off against a cluster of Oisín. From the looks of it, the Stregoi were winning, except . . .

  The Stregoi’s movements slowed, the way the vamps had in the daylight yesterday. Katya was too intent on the enemy she was trading blows with to notice her companions’ sudden change, or the way the other Oisín stopped paying attention to them and turned their focus on Katya. Elly was too far away to recognize them, but she saw the mark appear on one of them, the necromancer’s sigil appearing on his neck as if drawn by a ghostly hand.

  “They’ll kill her. She can’t fight all of them.”

  “Go to her,” said Ivanov.

  That’s suicide. I’m good, but not that good. “I’m not enough. Come with me. The three of us—”

  “Go.”

  There was no more arguing. Elly was down the stairs and sprinting across the floor before her brain could catch up. He Commanded me.

  Cold fury washed over her as her limbs propelled her toward Katya. It wasn’t like she’d signed a contract with Ivanov promising he’d never Command her, but Elly had assumed it anyway. Professional courtesy and all. Shame on me.

  There was a pack of vampires between herself and Katya—would she be able to stop and defend herself if they noticed her? Or would the Command make her push straight through, leaving her exposed and vulnerable? She braced for it, but thankfully, she didn’t get to find out. The vampires were too busy tearing one another apart to come after Elly.

  She reached the cluster of fighting around Ivanov’s second and staked the first of the Stregoi puppets with the silver spike. She gave it a shove away from Katya and heard the sucking sound as the spike pulled out of the wound she’d made. One down. The order took away her ability to stay up there and question Ivanov, it seemed, but didn’t hinder her fighting skills.

  Katya stared at her, incredulous. “I told you to stay with Ivanov.”

  “And he sent me to you.” She turned so she and Katya were back-to-back, afraid if she maintained eye contact the woman might try to Command her right back up the stairs. How would that work? How badly would it scramble her brains, to have the two of them sending her back and forth? “The necromancer has control of Stregoi, too, Katya,” she said, as the vampires began to circle around them. She tucked the spike into a sheath at her waist, trading it for a cedar stake. “If you see the mark on them like Deirdre had, cut it. It should break his hold.”

  “Turning our own against us. I’ll find him and tear his throat out myself.”

  “Have to survive tonight first.”

  Katya laughed, the peals carrying over the snarls and screams and sounds of maiming. “Oh, myshka, I plan to.”

  They attacked then, four of them at once. Elly threw herself to the left, toward a vampire who looked no older than seventeen. His shirt might have been white once, but several gashes had been torn in it, the
wounds staining the fabric dark with his blood. He didn’t expect her to come at him, or for her to use his own momentum against him. She caught his arm at the wrist and dropped, sending him ass over teakettle to the floor. He oofed as he hit, but was scrambling back up even as Elly spun with her stake in hand.

  She missed his heart, but the wood plunged deep into his abdomen. He made a soft noise—hhhhh—and clutched at his belly. It wasn’t the kind of wound that emptied your guts onto the floor. Wasn’t like he needed the use of his digestive tract even if she had—at least, not the way humans did. But she’d stabbed him with cedar, and that meant the flesh was already dying all around it. It might heal, given time and a healthy infusion of blood, but that wasn’t going to happen here in this fire station turned charnel house. He staggered away, either taking himself out of the fight to die quietly in a corner or heading out onto the streets in search of blood.

  Elly hoped he wouldn’t eat anyone, but she had more pressing matters at the moment.

  The other one was on her now. A woman, Elly’s height and build, but several times her strength. She grabbed Elly’s hand, squeezing until it felt as if Elly’d reached into a wasps’ nest and swatted. All the tiny bones bending, crushing, on the edge of fracture.

  Elly cried out and dropped the stake.

  The woman spun her around, her teeth on Elly’s throat. She felt the twin pinpricks of her fangs, but the vamp didn’t bite, not yet. She’s waiting for me to be afraid. She wants to taste my fear.

  “Go ahead, you bitch,” Elly hissed. “Do it. I bless my water before I drink it. See how that agrees with you.”