“Just what I’ve always wanted,” he said. “A tub full of snot.”
“It’s not . . .” she said. “It isn’t . . .” She faltered as she realized he was playing. Cavale suppressed a wince. The girl he’d left behind with Father Value had often been serious, but in the two years they’d been apart, Elly had become downright grim.
Even dead, Father Value gave Cavale reason to hate him.
“Ectoplasm,” he prompted gently, keeping the anger out of his voice lest she think it was directed at herself.
“Yeah. I collected this before it faded.” She showed him the underside of the lid, a ward neatly inked in marker in its center. “I thought maybe you could take a look and see if there’s anything left to learn.”
The viscous goo inside jiggled as he slid it closer. Elly’s exorcism ought to have banished the spirit completely and sent it back to whatever afterlife it had been torn away from. But there was always the chance that whoever else had been acting on the ghost—if there was anyone—might be traceable. Magic left a resonance, sometimes: not quite a fingerprint, more like a flavor. Even if it wouldn’t tell him who had done it, he might be able to glean how. “I’ll give it a whirl,” he said, replacing the cover. “But first, dinner?”
“I, uh.” She glanced at the grocery bags and the cookbook, at the pots and pans that had spent so long hanging untouched on their rack that they’d acquired a layer of dust. “I really do need to get into town.”
He didn’t blame her; he didn’t trust his cooking skills, either. A box of frozen taquitos lay in one of the bags, a testament to his self-doubt.
It was more than that, though. When they were little, Elly’d choked down plenty of his culinary abominations without complaint. With encouragement, even. Since their reunion, they’d eaten meals together, but always something microwaved, or brought home in take-out cartons, or glopped out of a can and heated in the one pot that wasn’t covered in cobwebs. Those were eaten here, but often with one or both of them studying a book liberated from the Clearwaters’ library while they ate. When they talked, it was academic: about the spells contained between the covers, how Justin’s training was going, mulling over the hierarchy of Ivanov’s Stregoi. They didn’t talk about each other. Cavale had a million questions he wanted to ask, but the how was your day? that sitcom families asked perfunctorily made her clam up. She rarely physically withdrew, but Cavale could see it happening all the same: the tightness in her eyes, the way she hunched her shoulders to make herself smaller than she already was.
So he didn’t ask, and she didn’t offer, and he was left without an answer to the one thing he wanted to know the most: Are you happy here?
He knew better than to push. This idea of the two of them sitting down to a meal he’d cooked—no matter how it turned out—wasn’t going to fly. Not yet. “All right,” he said. “If it doesn’t suck, I’ll leave it in the fridge. Maybe you can heat up a plate if you’re hungry when you get home.”
“I’ll do that.” She patted him on the shoulder as she passed. It was a compromise: I can’t give you that, so I’ll give you this.
He twisted around to watch her walk down the hallway. The stakes and other tools clattered as she scooped her backpack up from its place beside the front door. “Elly?”
She paused and turned, wary even though she had her keys in her hand and the door—escape—was two steps away. “Yeah?”
“Just . . . Be careful.”
“Always am.” She wavered there another moment, then turned abruptly and fled.
* * *
AN HOUR LATER, the kitchen table had been cleared of Elly’s books and notes. Cavale had wiped it clean as he could. He’d picked it up at a yard sale, more concerned that it could fulfill its function as a table than if it would be aesthetically pleasing. Its dark stained surface was scuffed and scarred. Lia said it had character; Lia was nice like that. What mattered was he could eat off it, which he’d just done. Like the table, the taquitos had done their job without being anything fancy—since they didn’t have to satisfy anyone but Cavale, it worked out fine.
They hadn’t been good, but they were fast. With his hunger sated, he could move on to his night’s work. Cooking for Beginners sat abandoned on the counter as Cavale laid his ritual tools out on the table. He’d cook for Elly after he had some answers; she’d be more interested in what he could tell her about the ghost than in eating a beef and cheese casserole.
He spread a square of linen in the center of the table and set the tub of ectoplasm atop it. The cardinal points were embroidered in the corners of the cloth; at each of them, he placed a stubby crimson candle. Sprigs of dried lavender and thyme hung in the window above the sink. Cavale clipped a few, twisting their stems together with a short length of black thread. He made three bunches and arranged them in a triangle around the container.
When all was to his satisfaction, he lit the candles and retrieved an old, well-worn pack of tarot cards from what in any mundane kitchen would be the junk drawer.
His work deck was fancier, the illustrations done by a local artist. His customers liked to examine the cards he drew, interpreting meaning from the artist’s flourishes whether their ideas had anything to do with the actual card or not. This deck, his home deck, was about as plain as you could get. It was the deck he’d learned on, the one Father Value had put in his hands ten, fifteen years gone, with a book on how to read them. Father Value didn’t do gifts, Cavale knew. The cards were yet another lesson, and a survival tool of sorts. And hadn’t he used them just that way? Hadn’t he put food in his and Elly’s mouths with money he earned from setting up a folding table at a flea market? Hadn’t his accuracy been uncanny enough to bring in tips that bought them warm coats from secondhand stores?
They were the one thing he’d taken with him when he walked out that he hadn’t paid for himself. He could have bought another deck—had bought others since he’d landed in Crow’s Neck—but he knew these best. His hands had been too small for them when he’d first shuffled them, spilling them across the floor as often as not. But he’d grown, until they’d fit perfectly in his long fingers, until shuffling them became second nature, the very act of it a meditation.
He flipped three cards now, a spread for the ghost. They told him little more than what Elly had relayed already: hints at upheaval in his past, which a gunshot wound certainly counted as; a feeling of lost control in his present; a return to contentment in the end. He passed his hands over the flame of the closest candle and crushed a bit of lavender between his fingers. Then he pinched off a piece of the ectoplasm and held it in his palm.
It lay there, cold and inert, drying as he watched. He’d been right: Elly had done a thorough job. Nothing left of the ghost for him to call forth, just the echoes of his end in the cards.
That was fine; he wasn’t finished yet.
He rubbed his hand clean on his jeans and took a piece of chalk from his pocket. He was good with tarot cards, but ritual work was where he excelled. He supposed there were more formal ways to do what he did; the few times he’d sat down and chatted with other practitioners, they’d been dubious of his methods. Most of them followed specific traditions: Norse mysticism, Kabbalah, Vodoun. Cavale’s training was informal and haphazard, pieced together from what Father Value had taught him and hours spent deep in library stacks. He pulled from wherever seemed appropriate, and it worked.
By the time he was done, the side of the table closest to him was covered in symbols, and half the ectoplasm Elly had collected was gone. All he needed to do now was activate the spell. He had half a jar of lamb’s blood in the fridge but dismissed it. Old, dead blood was usually perfectly good for cursory magic, but he had one shot at this. He needed something more potent.
The closest knife was atop the stove, where he’d set out the things he’d need for the casserole on a cutting board. He snatched it up and jabbed at the fleshy part of his pa
lm, at the base of his thumb. It wasn’t dramatic, as cuts went—he didn’t need more than a splash—but it stung something fierce all the same. He gritted his teeth as he squeezed drops out over each candle’s flame. Four hisses as his blood hit, filling the air with the smell of hot copper.
He reached into the container with his wounded hand, blood and ectoplasm mixing as he closed his fingers around what was left inside.
It was faint, this sensation of someone else’s magic. Like the whine of electricity beneath a television’s normal volume, it was hard to pick up beneath Cavale’s own workings. He closed his eyes and concentrated on that whine, chalking the sigil Elly had seen onto the table. He pulled his wounded hand out of the ectoplasm and slapped it down atop the rune.
Everything slick and oily and cold, footsteps in an empty room, a thready heartbeat pumping its last, a dying breath caught in cupped hands, owls screeching overhead and the cloying scent of lilies.
Then he was choking, something thick and grainy filling his mouth, closing off his airway. With no breath to blow out the candles, he swept his hand across the table, smearing the runes and symbols into nonsense as he fell to his knees. Tarot cards fluttered around him as the spell broke, the whine dissipating with the last of the ectoplasm. The blockage went away, leaving him gasping and sputtering as he dragged in breath after sweet, sweet breath.
Something coated the inside of his mouth, his tongue, his teeth. Cavale spat, and his saliva was dark with dirt. Grave dirt, he thought. That’s grave dirt. He pulled himself to his feet and poured a glass of water from the tap, desperate to get rid of the taste. He rinsed, spat, rinsed again, and gulped down two full glasses before he turned back to the mess he’d made.
All of his cards had landed facedown.
All but one, that was.
It showed a man sneaking away from an encampment, a bundle of swords clutched in his arms. He looked back furtively, as if checking to see if he’d been discovered, or if anyone was in pursuit.
The Seven of Swords.
Or, as Cavale sometimes described it to his customers, the Thief.
4
THE NICE THING about having a night-shift-type job in Boston was, Elly didn’t have to fight rush-hour traffic. She drove north at a decent speed, feeling only marginally bad for the people behind those miles and miles of headlights headed in the other direction. Still, she wasn’t entirely enamored with driving itself, despite the freedom the car represented. Strange, how the idea of flight kept her steady. She was doing okay in Crow’s Neck, living with Cavale. She didn’t want to go, but knowing she could if she had to kept her from hitching the first ride out of town some days.
It didn’t matter how much they said they wanted her around—Cavale, Justin, Sunny—something in her mind told her not to get attached. To get out. That staying in one place for so long was dangerous.
Those were things Father Value had taught her. She saw it in Cavale sometimes, too, and wondered if that was why he’d plunked down so much money on a house as fast as he had: it wasn’t so easy to walk away from something you were responsible for.
He walked away from me, didn’t he?
Guilt flooded in as soon as she thought it. She gripped the steering wheel, as if she could squeeze the ungrateful thoughts away.
That was different. He had to get out. It was the truth. Those last few months before Cavale left had been terrible. Constant fighting, fingers pointed, things said that you could never, ever unsay. Staying had been killing him just as sure as a Creep’s claws would, only slower. She understood that better than anyone else, maybe even better than Cavale himself did. She knew it wasn’t her fault, either, but that didn’t stop the hurt.
Maybe that was another problem with staying in one place: something was always rubbing up against that wound, keeping it from scabbing over.
It was why she kept him at arm’s length, why she deflected his attempts at conversations that were anything deeper than business and research. He wanted to know if she was happy, and she was, but if they went beyond that she might say the words that she sometimes screamed at him in her head: You left me.
One day she’d scream it out loud, and watch the guilt and regret etch itself on the angles of his face, and she wouldn’t be able to take it back.
That was why she kept working for Ivanov. Cavale didn’t like her job. He didn’t have to. It got her out of the house and away from poisonous thoughts like those. This way, she could stave off that confrontation a little longer. She could hit monsters that had it coming, rather than the brother who was only trying to make up for lost years and raw regret.
Once she turned off the highway, Southie’s occasionally narrow roads demanded her attention, as did the hunt for a parking space. Elly welcomed the distraction—she never liked going in angry, not when Katya might be there to pick up on her agitation and start needling.
Ivanov’s bar was on the edge of Southie’s gentrification project. The building above had been turned into luxury condos, but the downstairs retained its original narrow dimensions, the front section barely big enough for the bar itself, let alone the patrons. It opened up in the back, enough for a few pool tables and an ancient jukebox; down a short hallway, Ivanov’s office had been decorated to make the claustrophobic feel cozy.
A few people looked up as Elly entered, scowling at the sudden chill that followed her inside. It wasn’t winter-cold yet, but over the last few days the temperature had taken a dive. Most of the regulars lost the sour pusses once the door closed, turning back to their beers and the sports announcers on the television that hung above the bar. She couldn’t help but count the number of untouched drinks versus half-drained ones as she walked by, especially the ones whose heads had fizzled away. Some of the humans in the bar knew they were drinking with vampires, but not all of them did. It made sense—some of these guys were the bloodsuckers’ next meals. Katya had explained the arrangement to her, once: a few mouthfuls of blood every now and then in exchange for a limitless tab and even, for the favorites, a stipend. Elly knew there were other places like it around. Val fed in a club in Providence every few weeks. Justin had confessed it to her once, wide-eyed. He hadn’t quite gotten his head around the whole needing-to-drink-from-people thing.
One of the Stregoi she recognized nodded and raised his glass as Elly squeezed by. He was an older man, turned later in life than a lot of the other vampires she’d met, though when you tallied up the years he’d been on the planet compared to the others he was the baby of the lot. It had been jarring at first, watching a man in his late fifties deferring so meekly to people who appeared to be twenty or thirty years his junior.
She’d gotten past it until he’d started deferring to her, too. That was about when the reality of her place in Ivanov’s crew settled in.
Most of the vampires who served Ivanov had been turned decades ago. They remembered varying points from Russian history. She’d heard tales of the October Revolution enough times she felt like she’d been there, though she wasn’t sure she believed the woman who claimed to have served Catherine the Great as a girl. Elly’d always assumed Ivanov and Katya were the oldest; if the other woman remembered the latter half of the seventeen hundreds, that would put the other two at well over three hundred years old. For Elly, there were days she was shocked that her twenty-fifth birthday was only a few years away. Trying to imagine centuries upon centuries boggled her.
A handful of Renfields had commandeered the pool tables. None of them were really playing, at least, not by any rules Elly could figure. The game seemed mostly for show—no one came up to shoot in any particular order; no one seemed to care whether their team was solids or stripes; no one watched when someone did stand up to shoot. They were killing time, waiting for orders from their masters. These were the younger ones, closer to Elly’s age, all of them dressed a hair too nicely for a dive bar in Southie: designer jeans ripped just so, tee shirts that had
been distressed by machine, not wear. Fancy shoes where the regulars up front wore scuffed work boots. These were the apprentice minions, in a sense, people being trained up to take the place of others as they hit retirement age. Not everyone was rewarded with immortality for a lifetime of good service. In fact, only a handful ever got blooded.
Elly’d seen the process, once. The image of Val shoving her hand first into her own chest, then into Justin’s, wasn’t the sort of thing you forgot. Not that she’d been frightened by it (though, she admitted, she probably ought to have been)—in truth, she’d watched with almost clinical detachment. Knowing how monsters ticked was part of her job. Sure, Val and Justin had become her friends, but that didn’t change the part where they were monsters, too.
The baby Renfields paused in their fake game as she approached. The past month had given her a better idea of who was in service to whom, and she could tell who among the Stregoi was in the back with Ivanov by the half-dozen sullen faces out here. They didn’t like Elly very much, these bootlickers who saw the new kid getting respect they thought should be theirs. For her part, Elly didn’t care. She was here to do a job, not make nice with Ivanov’s groupies.
She stopped in the no-man’s-land between the end of the bar and the start of the tables. “Will you go let him know I’m here?”
“We’re not secretaries.” The one closest to the hallway detached himself from the wall and came to tower over her. He was her age, maybe a year or two older. Elly would have pegged him for a football star if they were back in Edgewood, but here, he was one of Katya’s pets. Ivanov’s right hand liked them solid and chisel-jawed, but she also liked them smart. Which meant this was him showing off for the others, not actually picking a fight.
Thing was, they couldn’t see her back down or they’d all start copping attitude. Elly might have been shit at most social interactions, but she and Cavale had spent enough time being the shabbily dressed new kids in school for her to recognize this particular dance. Only difference between a five-year-old bully and his twenty-five-year-old counterpart was size.
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