Grave Matters

by Lauren M. Roy

  He got the drop on her, once, barreling into her and sending them both sprawling. When they stopped moving, Justin was on top, his hands forcing Val’s shoulders to the ground. “Ha,” he said, then, “Wait, shit. If I let go on either side . . .”

  “. . . I’ll have an arm free, yeah. That’ll cost you an eye, at least. Do you want to try again?”

  But he was looking away, focused on something behind her head. “Do you see that?”

  She bent her head back as far as it could go, but all she managed to do was tangle more leaves into her unbound hair. “I’d look, but you sort of have me pinned.”

  Over the last month, he’d grown markedly more self-assured, though whether that came from his newfound vampire abilities or Elly’s training, Val wasn’t sure. He walked straighter, moved less timidly.

  One thing he hadn’t lost was the ability to turn crimson at a moment’s notice.

  He clambered off her now, muttering apologies as he offered a hand up. Val took it and let him lead her over to see what he’d spotted.

  They were near the far edge of the cemetery, where only the old cast-iron fence kept the woods from encroaching. The gravestones back here were weathered, some of them little more than stubs sticking out of the earth like uneven baby teeth. Most of the names and dates on these ones had been worn away by three centuries of New England weather. An undisturbed blanket of grass and moss covered the ground.

  Except in one spot, where the earth was freshly turned.

  They approached quietly, even though Val still didn’t smell anyone nearby. No one but she and Justin had been here for hours, at least, but it seemed suddenly disrespectful to tromp over to an open grave. As though we haven’t been using the place as a playground all night long.

  “Did someone dig this guy up?” Justin bent and ran his fingers over the stone. The letters had mostly eroded, but he found the faint grooves after a moment. Webb, they read.

  Val picked up a handful of dirt and let it fall through her fingers. “I don’t think so. The hole’s not big enough for someone trying to get to the coffin.” The hole was maybe two feet all around and looked more like something had exploded up out of the ground than dug down into it.

  “Look there.” She pointed at the edge of the churned earth, where five long, raking lines led into the middle. “I think it’s supposed to look like Mr. or Mrs. Webb climbed out themselves.” She straightened and paced around the grave in a widening circle. “There.” She showed him a bony handprint pressed into the dirt, and some footprints beyond it.

  Justin came to stand beside her, eyes wide. “Are you about to tell me this guy’s a zombie? Because Elly hasn’t taught me the first thing about fighting zombies.”

  Val snickered. “No, since I’ve never met one. I’m pretty sure what we’re looking at here is someone’s idea of a hilarious prank. Doesn’t one of the fraternities scare the shit out of their pledges every Halloween?”

  “Beta Epsilon, yeah.” Justin had rushed them, Val knew, but he never made it past the first couple of weeks. Justin didn’t talk about it, but by the growl in his voice, he was still pissed about whatever had happened. “Ugh, fuck those guys. Can we get out of here before they come back and finish setting up? They’ll probably want to put buckets of pigs’ blood in the trees or something.”

  “All right,” said Val. “Let’s go.”

  “Assholes.”

  “When we get you feeding on real people, maybe I’ll let you bite one.”

  He made an even more grossed-out face than when he’d been drinking the lambs’ blood. “Did you ever notice the smell when they come into Night Owls to buy their CliffsNotes? Those guys bathe in so much of that body spray shit it’s probably seeped into their bloodstreams by now. I’m not eating that.”

  3

  ELLY LAY ON her back on a plank spread across two ladders, painting runes of warding on the ceiling plaster with a toothpick. She’d found herself restless after leaving Cinda’s house, her mind abuzz with too many questions about the ghoul, who controlled him, how they were doing it. Runework calmed her, the more complex the better. It came to Cavale easy as breathing; Elly needed practice. So she’d driven into Edgewood, presumably to work on runes and calm her spinning mind. Not at all—at all!—for companionship.

  The smell of chocolate chip cookies drifted in from the kitchen. They were being baked by a succubus, which didn’t move the needle on Elly’s strange-o-meter, but the succubus was making them specifically for her, which sent the needle well into the red. She wasn’t used to people doing nice things for her.

  A clatter and a squeal almost made her botch the letter she was working on. Sunny ducked into the living room, and when Elly peered down at her from her plank, the short, dark-haired woman stood beneath, stretching up on her toes to offer a spoonful of pilfered cookie dough. The handle of another spoon protruded from Sunny’s mouth; she grinned around it.

  “Raw cookie dough can kill you!” Lia called.

  “Nah,” said Sunny. “I’m not human.” Or at least, that was what it sounded like. The spoon garbled her words a bit.

  Lia poked her head through the doorway. Her blond hair was swept back in a bun, which was a good thing, the way she waved her dough-covered wooden spoon in admonishment. “You’re not, but Elly is.”

  Elly reached for the spoonful of dough Sunny still held up to her. “I’ll take the risk.” The sweet combination of brown sugar and butter and chocolate chips exploded on her tongue, made her mmmm in appreciation.

  Lia shook her head and heaved a dramatic sigh that was undermined by her smile. “Fine. Second batch is down two cookies thanks to you two, though.”

  “Three,” said Sunny.

  “What?”

  “I caught you sneaking your own taste when I came to steal ours.”

  Lia went completely poker-faced and said, with all the calm of a politician under siege, “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Then she disappeared back into the kitchen.

  “Come on down,” said Sunny. “You’ve earned a break.” She held the ladders steady while Elly climbed down. “We really appreciate you doing this.”

  Elly paused at the bottom and eyed her handiwork. From down here, the runes would look like irregularities in the plaster to the untrained eye, especially when the paint dried. Which was how Sunny and Lia wanted it, considering they entertained normal human beings from time to time. Both women held day jobs—Sunny as a counselor, Lia as a gym coach at the local college—and as far as their colleagues knew, they were just a happy suburban couple with a nice home.

  Which, until Elly had arrived in town last month, had pretty much been true. Elly’d come to Edgewood full of grief and vengeance, and she’d brought monsters on her heels. They’d made a stand here, in Sunny and Lia’s living room, and Elly still felt a pang of guilt when she caught sight of a claw mark gouging the wood or a fresh patch of spackle to hide a dent in the wall from someone’s fist. They’d done a fantastic repair job in a short amount of time, but Elly knew where to look, what corners they hadn’t quite finished fixing yet.

  They probably ought to have asked her never to come back, thanks, don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out, but they hadn’t. That wasn’t how they operated. Even asking her to help refresh the house’s wards wasn’t done out of punishment or repayment—Elly and her brother Cavale were good with wards, different kinds from the demonic ones the ladies had already put up on their own, and they’d insisted on paying her for the work she did.

  The cookies were a bonus.

  Sunny led her over to the couch—another new delivery—and they sat quietly, licking the last of the dough off their spoons. Elly appreciated the tasty distraction; she was terrible at small talk.

  Lia joined them a few minutes later, peeling off her apron (which read Hell’s Kitchen) and plopping down in the chair near Sunny. �
�First batch is cooling, you vultures, so you can spoil your dinners.” She scanned the ceiling much as Sunny had, nodding in satisfaction. “Those look good.”

  “I’m almost done,” said Elly. “The basic ones are down, and most of what I needed to tailor to you two specifically. The rest, I’ll need to know, uh, who to protect you from. Or what.”

  Elly couldn’t read the look they exchanged. It held a lot of things: anxiety, a guardedness Elly herself was familiar with, other emotions she couldn’t parse from their faces.

  “The underworld,” said Lia at last. She plucked Sunny’s hand from the armrest, ran her thumb over her partner’s knuckles.

  “That’s . . .” Elly paused, not quite sure how to answer. “That’s kind of a tall order.”

  “I know. We don’t know who might be looking for us. Or if anyone even is.”

  “Someone always is.” Sunny’s good humor had fled. “We’d fetch a handsome reward for whoever dragged us back there.” A shiver went through her. She edged closer to Lia, though Elly wasn’t sure she was aware she was doing it.

  “I’m guessing it was a bad situation?”

  Lia nodded. “Bad then, exponentially worse if we’re brought back to face punishment for running away.”

  “How’d you get out in the first place?”

  “Easy enough to get lost in the chaos of a battle,” said Lia. “We waited until our master’s attention was elsewhere, took our knives, and fled.” She was referring to the keris knives they kept in a mahogany box upstairs. The serpentine blades had come out when they’d fought the jackal-headed Creeps, their silver lengths smoking with each kill. Elly knew they were sacred, maybe even imbued with some kind of spirits. She would have loved to try them out, feel their weight in her own hands, but she got twitchy if anyone else handled the silver spike that was her own preferred weapon; she could only imagine how wrong it would feel to Sunny and Lia if someone else touched their knives.

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Years and years,” said Lia, with a significance Elly thought might mean centuries instead. Millennia, maybe. In the kitchen, the timer beeped. “Oops. Second batch is done, excuse me a moment.” She headed for the kitchen, looking relieved at the interruption.

  Sunny gave Elly a wan smile. “I’m going to see if she needs help,” she said, and hurried along in Lia’s wake.

  Elly watched them go, then returned to her makeshift scaffold. Sunny and Lia had welcomed her as family this last month. She didn’t know what she’d done to deserve that, but she knew one thing: you defended family with your life.

  * * *

  ELLY’S CAR WAS in the driveway when Cavale got home from work. They’d realized pretty quickly, with him having a day job and her spending a few nights a week prowling the streets of South Boston for Ivanov, that they needed to be a two-car family after all. He’d taken a couple thousand dollars of his savings and (over Elly’s insistence that she’d take the bus until she could save up on her own) bought her something used but sturdy.

  Chaz had taken one look at it and named it a shitbox, but from the way he whistled through his teeth and spent the next weekend with his head stuck under its hood, it was a good shitbox. Most days, Cavale couldn’t get a read on Val’s Renfield; that was a prime example. For a twig of a guy, Chaz loved to let his mouth run. Sometimes it seemed like he wanted Cavale to take a swing, even, and one of these days, Cavale just might. But the day they’d bought it, Cavale had mentioned the car in front of him and he’d volunteered to take a look. No prompting from Val, not an eyelash batted by Sunny. Not even a trace of his usual smarminess when he showed up at their house.

  Probably because it was for Elly. If it’d been my car, he’d have filled the vents with spider eggs.

  Chaz had gone over every inch of that vehicle and made the damned thing not just run but purr. Elly’d been driving it ever since without a problem, which Cavale had to sheepishly admit made him feel the tiniest bit better about her taking the job with the Stregoi. He hadn’t been able to talk her out of taking it, and he wasn’t there to watch her back while she wandered Boston looking for trouble of the bloodsucker variety, but at least he knew she wasn’t going to break down somewhere along 95.

  He lugged the groceries inside, Cooking for Beginners tucked under his arm. He’d dog-eared a page that looked promising and stopped on the way home for ingredients, determined to have something ready for her when she got back from Southie. Full dark had fallen while he agonized over whether there was a noticeable difference between yellow onions and Spanish ones; he’d expected Elly would be on the road by now, but catching her here was a nice surprise. Maybe he’d be able to feed her before she left, if he could figure this stuff out.

  “Elly? El?” he called as he bumped his way through the front hall.

  “In the kitchen.” She sat at the table, head bent over one of the half-dozen books open in front of her. A legal pad with a sigil of some sort drawn on it lay atop one of them, notes in Elly’s cramped handwriting surrounding it. Her dark hair was getting longer, he noticed, as she tucked a lock behind her ear and looked up at him. The ragged edges were softening as they grew past her chin. A smear of paint had dried on the back of her hand; she must have spent part of the afternoon at Sunny and Lia’s.

  It was still a surprise, seeing her here in his house. He kept expecting to wake up one morning to a letter of farewell, the idea of staying in one place too much for her after all. Or maybe not even a letter, just a call from somewhere on the road, her breathing Sorry into the receiver before hanging up.

  He hadn’t even done that much for her, when he’d left her with Father Value.

  “What’s that?” He pointed at her research.

  She eyed the shopping bags warily. “You first.”

  “I, uh. Heh.” He cast about for a place to put the bags down. The table was out: the counters were covered in drying herbs, spell components, and an assortment of stakes in various stages of sharpening. The chairs were draped with drying laundry. He settled the bags on the floor and showed her the cookbook. “I figured you’d have been on your way in to Boston. I was going to perfect one of these and have it ready when you got home. But I can make it now, if you’re hungry.”

  She shifted one of the books over to reveal the open box of Girl Scout cookies it had been hiding. “I’ve sort of eaten.”

  “That’s not dinner.”

  “Says the man who considers Pop-Tarts a food group.”

  “Fair point.” He abandoned the groceries for the time being, plunking down in a chair beside her. He perched on the edge of it, so his back wouldn’t get soaked from the wet jeans behind him. “So what is all this? And where did you get a box of those at this time of year? I didn’t think they came out until the spring.”

  “I know a guy.” She passed him a cookie and watched him nibble around its minty chocolate edge. It was a practice they’d both picked up with Father Value. Treats were few and far between; you ate them slowly, so they lasted as long as possible. Elly’s quirked brow told him she’d noticed it without her calling him on it. Conversations about their childhood were full of land mines. “Actually, I know a girl. Do you know the Palmers? They live a couple doors over, down the hill.”

  The name was familiar, but he didn’t make a habit of talking to his neighbors. “Should I?”

  “Probably not. But I met their daughter today. Cinda. She came here looking to hire us.”

  He stopped nibbling. “Hire us to . . . ?”

  “She had a ghost in her house. I got rid of it for her, no charge, but she insisted I take a box of those from her freezer.” She passed him the legal pad with its blue-inked sigil. “I saw this on the ghost’s arm. I don’t think that it was a tattoo he had when he died, but I can’t prove that it was fresh. I don’t know.” She sighed, squinching up her face, looking for the right words. “It seemed like the most real thing a
bout him. Besides the gunshot wound that kept opening up and leaking all over the place, that is. But this was newer.”

  Cavale spun it around to get a better look. He was good with runes, was familiar with enough languages to recognize their characters on sight even if he couldn’t translate them. This one had the wedge-shaped style of cuneiform, but it wasn’t a symbol he recognized. It reminded him of a dagger, with its dominant line sweeping down into a point, and the shorter line at the top cutting through it like a quillon. But then, in his line of work, what didn’t remind him of weapons?

  Elly kept talking as he studied it. “Not that knocking stuff over and blaming it on the kid wasn’t real. Just . . . I think someone put it there, after his death. When I tried exorcising him, it felt like something was fighting me. Not the ghost. Someone else. I tried sending him off easy, but . . . obsidian dust hurt him. Have you ever seen that happen?”

  “Not that I can remember.” Most of the exorcisms he’d performed had been fairly routine: purify the area where the ghost most often appeared, set wards against its return, collect a paycheck. Now and again he’d had to figure out what was keeping crotchety Uncle Ralph from resting and relay that to the family. There were older ghosts around here, too. The towns around Crow’s Neck went back to the country’s founding—you didn’t get through centuries of history without some unquiet dead. But for the most part, when you told them to lie down, they did. “Did the girl know him?”

  “No. I looked around the house and the yard a bit when we were done, but I didn’t see anything that screamed, ‘Someone dumped a body here.’ But I brought you something, figured maybe you’d be able to get a read on it.” She unburied a Food Stop bag from beneath the books and fished out a plastic container. It was one of those fast-food ones, the kind you got if you ordered your soup to go. He could almost make out the chain’s logo from the faded gold stamp on the side. Elly set it down between them and pried off the lid.