Obnoxious, how being in the presence of a pair of succubi could make you cut right to the chase.
“Look, before either of you start in on how Val picked me for a reason, and how much she appreciates what I do for her, I know, okay? She and I have had that conversation a few times now.”
Sunny closed her mouth, biting off whatever comment she’d been about to make. Lia remained poker faced.
Chaz slurped his coffee. He contemplated asking for a slug of whiskey for it—it’s five o’clock somewhere—but refrained. It was more to shut up his own shame than any worry that they were judging him. That wasn’t their MO. “I get all that happy wishy-washy We love you for you shit. But none of that helps me when some big nasty is slavering all over me and none of you are in arm’s reach. Which, since it’s happened at least twice now? Kind of a concern of mine.”
The women exchanged a look, the kind that can substitute for a whole conversation when it’s between two people who know each other inside and out.
Lia turned to him, her full lips bowing down. A dab of chocolate clung to the corner of her mouth. “What are you asking from us?”
“I’ve seen you two fight,” he said. “I know you can’t teach me the part where you get all seven feet tall and scary looking, but some basic self-defense would be nice. Or tactics of some sort. How to kill some paranormal motherfuckers.”
“Why not ask Elly?” They knew better than to suggest Cavale to him as a teacher.
“Because she’s got her hands full with Justin. And that job for Ivanov. Poor kid needs a break.”
Neither spoke. Lia’s eyes bored into him. The moment dragged on.
Chaz sighed. “And I don’t want them to see me more vulnerable than I already am. It’s bad enough they’ve watched me get my ass kicked. Do they really need to see me fight and think Oh, no wonder why?”
“And Val?” asked Sunny. “Out of everyone, she’d be my first choice.”
“I’ve asked her before, a few times. She shuts that shit down stupid fast.” She’d lost her last Renfield out in Sacramento, hunting Jackals. It was a touchy subject.
“So what makes you think she’d be all right with us teaching you, if she doesn’t want to teach you herself?”
That made him boil over. All the goddamned coddling, it was bad enough from Val, but for Sunny and Lia to defer to her, too? Fuck that. “She’s my master, not my mother. I know she thinks she’s got all kinds of wisdom on me because she’s in her seventies and all, and you two are in your . . .” He peered at them. At a guess, he’d say midthirties, but no way in hell was that right. “How old are you, anyway?”
“That’s not a question you ask a lady,” Lia said, prim as an Elizabethan spinster. Her lips quirked, giving away her amusement, but she didn’t offer him an answer.
“Right, sorry. My point is, I don’t care about wisdom coming with age. I need to know how to fight because if I did, maybe I could’ve avoided this shit.” He pointed at his black eye and the bruise that flowed down his cheek, along his jaw. “Don’t make me sign up for classes at the community center. I’m sure everyone there is smart and competent. None of them are you.” He thought about that night at Night Owls. The way they’d danced and spun and made it all look so easy. He wasn’t dumb enough to think he’d ever be that good, but his ribs wanted a fucking break.
“Give us a minute?” Sunny plucked at Lia’s sleeve. They retreated into the living room. Chaz tried his best to eavesdrop, but all that came back was the gentle murmurs of their voices, no actual words he could make out. Probably doing it on purpose. He felt like there ought to have been some other sound blocking them out—radio static, maybe, or waves lapping at a beach.
They came back in like the world’s smallest jury. Neither met his eyes until they sat. Sunny acted the part of the foreman, only instead of reading from a brief, she stared at her coffee cup. “We’ll do it. We’ll teach you. But you need to understand why Val feels the way she does about keeping you out of the fray when she can.”
“If you don’t want to hear us out on that,” Lia said, “I can hook you up with someone in the athletics department at Edgewood. Someone who isn’t me.” She was a phys ed teacher there, and the women’s track coach.
For a moment, Chaz toyed with asking her for lessons in how to run the fuck away, if nothing else, but he thought better of it, and went with a nod. “Fine. I’m all ears.”
“It’s going to take more than listening.” One minute it was Lia sitting there—pretty blond Lia, with her angular face and pouty mouth—and the next it was Val, red hair spilling over her shoulders, her face softer, more oval, a smattering of freckles across her cheeks. Val, there in that bright kitchen, the sun setting gold highlights in her hair aflame. It was still Lia, inside, but the illusion was otherwise so perfect it hurt. “I’m sorry,” she said, thankfully in her own voice rather than Val’s. “This makes it easier to show you.”
Sunny reached for his hand before he could pull away. “You need to know what she felt that night.” She waited for his nod of consent before placing her free hand over Lia’s.
The kitchen dissolved around them. Day darkened into night. The smell of fresh coffee faded away and became the stench of blood and ichor and the smell of the Jackals: pencil shavings, wet dog, rotting meat. Light came back slowly, revealing the ruined living room. Shadows moved within, the impressions of all the others. He couldn’t see their faces, but he could feel them there: Elly, determined, exhilarated, in triage mode as she attended to Justin; Justin, confused and frightened and wanting to climb out of his own skin; Cavale, calm and methodical. Sunny and Lia were present, but their feelings were inscrutable. Whether it was because they were in their warrior forms or because they chose to block themselves out now, he didn’t know.
The beacon here was Val. She was the only solid shade among them, clear as though he’d been standing there with them. Her mouth was covered with black Jackal blood, her hands gnarled and twisted into claws. She held a stake loosely in one of them, but most of the gore was caked beneath those talonlike nails. Her emotions pitched and yawed like a plane out of control, and Chaz felt every bit of it because the succubi had, and were relaying it to him. Through him. One second Val’s bloodlust sang in her; the next she was ashamed of it. She felt the thrill of the fight, that adrenaline rush as everything comes down, and hated herself for liking it.
In the kitchen, in reality, Sunny’s hand was still warm on Chaz’ wrist, even though he couldn’t see her. He couldn’t even see himself, but thinking about that would lead to freaking the fuck out, so he didn’t. In the vision, Val shone. Every line of her face was limned with worry, even as she upheld her end of the conversation.
Then her cell phone rang.
Chaz? Where the hell are you? He heard it twice over, as Lia donned Val’s voice and said the words with her. The relief that had coursed through her as she answered the phone turned to cold dread. Chaz felt it in the pit of his own stomach. Thank you, Mrs. Hagerty, I’ll come move it, she said. This was the call from her neighbor, the one who found Chaz’ car running without him inside.
Anger as she hung up, boiling quickly into fury.
What is it? The ghost of Lia’s voice, muffled as if she were talking through a thick quilt.
He never even left my street. Katya took him.
Val had been wrong about that, but it was a logical enough guess at the time—Katya and Ivanov had been there when Cavale called to say the Jackals were coming. What better time for the woman who’d taken him once before to try stealing him away from Val again?
The other shadows in the room got moving—Elly and Cavale springing up to flank her, offering themselves up for the rescue mission. Justin tried to stand, but Sunny wouldn’t let him leave the couch. Lia strode over to Val, a hand out to offer comfort, but Val shook it off. Lia’s shadow snatched her hand back as if she’d touched a hot pan.
Sunny let him go. The vision faded. When Chaz’ sight came back to him, the world settling back into its rightful place, he was relieved to see that Lia had reverted to her usual self.
He didn’t think he could handle Val—even a fake Val—looking back at him right now.
“She’s afraid for me.”
“She’s terrified for you,” said Lia. “It was an awful thing to feel.” Sunny scooted her chair over so she could put an arm around her partner. Chaz realized Lia was shaking.
He felt bad that she had to experience it not once, but twice, but it only served to prove his point. “If I can fight, she won’t have to be that scared anymore. I’d be harder to catch, harder to hurt.”
“And you’d be right out on whatever passes for the front lines. So you’d be a million times easier to kill than if you weren’t in the fight at all.”
“I wasn’t in the fight that happened here, was I? And this?” He pointed at his cheek. “Last night? I was cataloging books. It’s not like I went to the local monster bar and told some vampire its mother was a remora. She can’t protect me from everything. I’m sorry, but she can’t. And that’s a conversation Val and I need to have. But in the meantime, I need this. Please?”
“We said we would,” said Sunny. “Just . . . we want to make sure you know she’s not doing it because she thinks you’re incapable. She’s protecting herself as much as she’s protecting you.” Sunny let out a sigh and twisted a lock of Lia’s hair around her finger. “I can’t say I blame her.”
They gave each other one of those looks that had Chaz thinking they might want a few minutes’ privacy, but Lia settled for catching Sunny’s hand and brushing her lips across her knuckles. “All right,” she said, thumping the table a tad too heartily. “Come help me move furniture in the living room. Sunny’s patient isn’t due for a couple hours. I figure I can teach you some throws to start.”
* * *
IT WAS WHEN he was lying on his back an hour later, staring up at the ceiling and pretending he wasn’t utterly fucking winded, that he saw the new wards. Usually, he never even noticed them in Sunny and Lia’s house—Val had explained that they were demonic in origin, so most of them weren’t even visible to human eyes. In some places, they’d added more mundane ones, if there even was such a thing. Cavale had come by and added more when he first met them, to keep them off monster hunters’ radar.
Others, they’d worked into the decor—the pretty pattern on that vase? Actually a protection spell. The swirling design on the border Lia had painted in the bathroom? A big ol’ nothing to see here. He suspected there were others, things he had no idea to even look for, but this one was definitely there and hadn’t been before.
They’d repainted the ceiling after the attack, using some kind of paint effects to make it look all stuccoed. They weren’t so obvious as to write the whole thing large with the paint brush or scraper or whatever-the-fuck tool you used to do fancy shit to your ceiling, but in between the lines, in those vinyl-record-looking grooves, he saw the characters.
He couldn’t read them, of course. Chaz could dredge high school French up from memory if he had to, and knew the good swears in a couple other languages (he always ordered new titles in the Go **** Yourself series for the store—how could he resist guide books that taught you how to mouth off in foreign countries?). But these, he was pretty sure, were written in a tongue that had been dead for millennia, if they’d ever made an appearance on this plane at all.
“What do those ones do?” he asked as Lia loomed above him, offering a hand up.
“Those are my boobs, Chaz. I think you know the answer to that one.”
“No, I . . . Damn it.” He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t ever taken a gander at the girls, but he liked to think he was more subtle about it than that.
She snickered and hauled him to his feet. “What does what do?”
“The stuff on the ceiling. I don’t remember those from before.”
“Because you spend so much time looking up there.” Something about the way she folded her arms and hunched her shoulders in gave him pause. The woman who’d spent the last sixty minutes tossing him around like a rag doll was suddenly defensive.
“Look, uh, if it’s a Thing, no big deal. Pretend I never asked.”
“No, it’s fine. It’s . . .”
“Just a few extra protection wards,” said Sunny. She delivered the line smoothly enough that Chaz almost bought it, except for the way her eyes flicked to Lia.
Which meant Chaz couldn’t leave it alone. “Is something threatening you guys? Someone?”
“No.” For a tiny woman, Sunny could sound stern as a drill sergeant with one syllable. She softened immediately, though, as if she’d bruised Chaz’ ego. “We figured, with all that went down here last month, people might come sniffing around. Been there, done that, you know?”
He did. They’d met Cavale through the succubi, when some asshole came into Edgewood looking for demon trophies to stick on his mantelpiece. The dude hadn’t been a capital-H Hunter like Val used to be, but there were people out there who styled themselves as modern-day Van Helsings and went looking for trouble. That guy could have ruined the life Sunny and Lia had built so carefully. With Jackals causing a ruckus—and brawling with vampires on Edgewood’s main street—it made sense for the ladies to be extra cautious. Far as any of them knew, that fight hadn’t had any witnesses. But you never could be too careful.
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Makes sense.” He dropped it for the time being, but something tweaked at the back of his mind. It was the way Sunny’d hesitated when she said “people,” as though whoever might come looking didn’t actually deserve the term. He tucked it away to ask Val about later, and got ready for another one of Lia’s throws.
9
EVEN THOUGH HE’D been awake for nearly a day, Cavale found himself too keyed up to sleep. After they’d ghoul-proofed the Clearwater house, he and Elly had headed home. He’d told her about his strange results with her ghost’s ectoplasm, and they’d compared and rehashed notes for a while before the last of Elly’s caffeine kick wore off. When she couldn’t hold the yawns in any longer, he’d sent her off to bed and got back to researching.
He’d built up a modest library since striking off on his own. With Father Value, books were precious, fleeting possessions. They were bulky and heavy, hard to carry too many with you if you had to pack up and go in a hurry. When a new one fell into his lap, he’d pore over it and mark the places he wanted Elly and Cavale to pay close attention to. They memorized entries in arcane encyclopedias the way kids at Sunday school learned Bible verses. Except, for Father Value’s children, every day was Sunday. Once they could parrot passages back to his satisfaction, the book would soon disappear. Cavale wondered where they’d gone, sometimes; he’d found none of them at the Clearwaters’, though Henry often had similar editions. In all likelihood Value had sold them off to collectors. Cavale didn’t have the eye for rare books that Val and Chaz did, but he was fairly certain at least a few of them would have brought in some decent coin.
Much as he hated looking back on those years or that man with anything but contempt, Cavale had to admit that Father Value had never let himself and Elly go cold or hungry if he could help it. Selling those books probably put food in their mouths.
The bookshelf in the corner of Cavale’s living room held more books than he’d once thought it possible to own. He’d found the shelves aband
oned a couple blocks over, left behind by a family who couldn’t afford to stay even in this broken-down neighborhood, and spent the better part of an afternoon pushing it carefully end over end back to his house. The dings and scratches it had incurred along the way were covered up with wood putty and a coat of paint. The moment the piece was in its final spot, when he’d finally placed his then-meager armload of books on the middle shelf, it was as though a floodgate had opened. He had shelves. He could fill them. He could get more shelves when he filled the first.
His collection was decent now—certainly nothing near as broad as the Clearwaters’, nor even on the level of Night Owls’ rare books room—but it was his. He drank most of a pot of coffee leafing through books of sigils and symbolism, rune dictionaries and the published memoirs of (legitimate) mediums and psychics. He had no patience for charlatans.
The sun was streaming through the windows by the time he found it. It was a last-resort book, one of the few purchases he’d made on a whim. He’d been drawn in by the scuffed leather cover, maybe, or the way its weight felt good in his hand. Or he’d found something useful on a casual flip-through and since forgotten what exactly that was. Perhaps he’d liked the title: The Book of Forgotten Names. Or it could have been the occasional illustrations, pen-and-ink sketches that gave faces to the unknown. He’d bought it and brought it home, and there it had sat, unused, unread, ever since.
Cavale almost didn’t see it. He was drowsing more and more, his eyes finally slipping closed after a day without sleep. In fact, his hand kept turning pages while his brain caught up and suggested that maybe, if he took another look, he hadn’t dreamed what he’d seen.
He snapped awake and paged back, scanning frantically as if the ink might twist itself into another shape if he didn’t find it fast enough.
There.
The dagger Elly had drawn for him, the one he’d seen raised on the flesh of the younger, more recently dead ghoul, drawn alongside an entry midway down the page. Udrai, it read. In service to Ereshkigal.
Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel Page 11