Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel

by Lauren M. Roy

  She stepped in to him, so close he had to either press his chin to his chest to stare down at her or back off. “We can do this, if you’ve got a real pressing need to prove something,” she said, letting her voice carry. “But all that’s gonna happen is I’ll knock out some of your teeth, then Katya will pull out the rest and add them to that bracelet of hers.” The Stregoi woman wore her enemies’ fangs as jewelry. Elly held up her wrist and shook an imaginary charm bracelet.

  Maybe the kid imagined the click of his own teeth amongst Katya’s morbid collection. He gave Elly her space and, with a glare toward his compatriots, beckoned her to follow him down the hallway.

  Katya’s lackey didn’t even get to finish announcing Elly properly. From inside the office, Katya snapped, “Send her in,” and the kid got the hell out of the way.

  Ivanov’s office was just big enough for himself, his massive desk, and two guest chairs. Both of those were occupied, and Katya had claimed the only empty corner of the desk to perch on. The Stregoi leader could have been at home in a boardroom on Wall Street: a young up-and-comer, the sharp angles of his face set for dealing, his dark eyes shrewd and calculating. Katya’s eyes flicked among all of them. Though she sat casually, twirling a lock of chestnut-colored hair around her finger, Elly recognized the tensed muscles of a bodyguard on alert. The fangs adorning her bracelet—taken from the mouths of those she’d defeated—rattled softly.

  Elly edged her way into a corner, between a bookshelf and a thin bar cabinet whose contents, she suspected, didn’t actually include liquor.

  “Good,” said Ivanov. “We’ve only just started. Theo, would you be so kind?”

  Where Ivanov wore one of his signature tailored suits, and Katya an even more upscale version of what the Renfields outside wore, this Theo actually looked like he belonged bellied up to the bar. He had a few days’ growth of beard and dark hair that was about a quarter inch shy of being comically fluffy if he didn’t get it cut soon. His jeans were covered in paint splatters, likewise his tan construction worker’s boots. His Red Sox sweatshirt might have been a crisp navy when he bought it, but the color had faded with years of washing. An equally aged ball cap sat on his knee, removed respectfully in Ivanov’s presence.

  Like the older gentleman out front, Theo was one of the rarities—a Stregoi not only turned here in the New World, but turned within the last ten years. And he’d been raised from the ranks of the bootlickers. Elly wondered what he’d done to be granted such a privilege.

  “They say they just want to talk, but they’re up to something,” Theo said. “They asked for a meeting on neutral ground, over at Babe Ruth Park.” Yet another jarring thing about Theo—most of the Stregoi, even if they tried to dampen it, held a hint of Russia in their accents. Theo’s was pure Boston: for became fawr, Babe Ruth Park became Babe Root Pahk.

  “Who’s ‘they’?” asked Elly.

  “The Irish,” said the woman beside Theo. She didn’t bother turning around to address Elly directly. The most Elly could make out was the pointed tip of her nose past a fall of straight blond hair. “They’re organizing.” The way she’d said it, the Irish might have been walking around pantsless.

  “Against you?” Elly noticed the fleeting frown that turned down Katya’s already pouty lips at her choice of you. It might have made Ivanov and Katya happy if she amended it to us, but the minions’ earlier demonstration had made it quite clear she wasn’t part of the club yet. Elly wasn’t going to pretend.

  The blonde still didn’t turn around. “Because they want what we have. They’ve made a passel of greenlings, and they think that makes them deserving. Proles,” she said, the word dripping with contempt.

  A shadow flickered across Ivanov’s handsome features, there and gone so fast Elly wondered if she’d imagined it. He waved a hand. “We’ll give them their meeting.”

  “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.

  * * *

  ELLY 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. De
irdre 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

  SO 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.