Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel

by Lauren M. Roy

  “And you are right. We have avenues that must be explored. Questions in need of answers. But tonight it is too late.” He nodded toward the windows, where the few visible stars had faded and the sky—never completely black here, with Boston’s lights staving off full dark—had taken on the grey tinge of predawn. “We can’t find them in time, not soon enough to make them listen to reason.

  “Keep us safe while we sleep. Shed as little of their blood as you can. In the evening we’ll sue for peace once more. Yes?”

  She didn’t need Katya’s encouraging nod to agree. He had a point. “All right. You two ought to go turn in for the day, then. I’ll handle things out here.”

  “They are yours to command,” said Ivanov. He rose from the chair and took Katya’s proffered hand. As they glided away, toward a steel-doored room in the back, Elly couldn’t help but wonder if Katya knew her liege was a liar. And if she didn’t, whether Elly dared bring it up to the woman at all. Katya wasn’t her ally; she likely thought of Elly the way a cat thinks of a mouse. Called her a mouse, in fact, in her native Russian. She’s too loyal to risk it. Their talk in the cafe, the way Katya looked at him, their long history . . . No, even if Elly could suss out what he was keeping back, Katya would kill her rather than expose Ivanov.

  Get the job done, Eleanor, whispered Father Value in her memory.

  Get the job done and get out, replied Cavale.

  * * *

  MOST DAYS, ELLY suspected, the minions set to lounging about after their masters went to sleep. The five assembled before her were by no means slouches, but they seemed tired. Two of them kept casting longing glances at the plush couches surrounding a massive flat-screen television.

  “I’m sorry to keep you from your cooking shows,” said Elly. It snapped their attention back to her. Their indignant gasps were heartening: it meant they gave at least a partial shit. Whether that shit was for having her respect or not getting into trouble with Ivanov didn’t much matter. She could use either.

  One of them was Katya’s chisel-jawed jock from the other night, the one who’d gotten in her face when she’d told him to go announce her presence to his master. “Do you actually have a plan?” he asked. “Or are you just going to berate us for a while?”

  She considered putting his ass on the ground for that. It wouldn’t take much—couple steps, a grab, a sweep, she doubted he’d even see it coming. But, no, they had to be together on this. It’d be five against one, and much as she’d rather do this by herself, if the Oisín crew were anything other than human, she might need this lot. “I have one,” she said, “but you guys know this place better than I do. I’m going to need your help refining it. What’s your name?”

  “Trent. You’ve been working for Ivanov for a month. Haven’t bothered learning it?”

  “I haven’t needed to.” They hadn’t done anything interesting enough to warrant it, really. Far as she saw, they fetched and carried for the vampires in the hopes that someday they’d be turned. Elly had no time for bootlickers. But they didn’t need to know that. “It’s not like any of you were going to invite me to hang out, were you?”

  Trent glanced at the others, all of whom avoided meeting Elly’s eyes. “No,” he said. “I guess not.”

  “Good. Because we’re not friends. This isn’t a bonding experience. If you all go out for victory drinks after this or whatever, you don’t have to invite me along. Okay?” She didn’t wait for their assent, warming up to her speech. “The next few hours, though? I. Am. In. Charge. If you don’t like it, suck it up or go the fuck home. I don’t really care.” As pep talks went, it wasn’t terribly uplifting, but Elly never saw much point to the rousing addresses they gave in the movies. Battle sucks, do your best not to die, the end.

  Her words at least had some effect. The Renfields were never going to carry her around on their shoulders, but they lost the mulish expressions. Trent backed off, too. “What do we need to do?”

  She set them to work, rearranging furniture, keeping watch, assisting her in laying down extra wards or reinforcing the ones that were already there. That struck her as curious, too—they were professionally done, so much so that if she hadn’t known better, she’d have said they were hers, or Cavale’s, or Father Value’s. Which meant the Brotherhood had been here . . . except Ivanov had no dealings with their Boston contingent. When he’d hired Elly, he’d said he wanted her on staff in case they came around.

  The wards were oldish, though, settled so deep the walls practically sang with them. Elly’d been in places where the magic had had centuries to soak in, where you could feel it as soon as you crossed the threshold. Ivanov’s condo was a relatively new construction, less than a decade old. Plenty of time for the original wards to make themselves at home, but young enough for Elly to be able to make improvements. Change a character here, tweak a rune there, take the basic structure the Brotherhood taught and add her own flourishes. The Brotherhood’s protections were good; of course they were. They simply needed a little . . . updating.

  As the sun rose and natural light filled the space, Elly took time to gauge their fighting skills. Katya was true to her word—they were all competent at minimum. Vampires were born fighters—ideally a servant wouldn’t ever need to see combat. Val had told her it used to be mark of shame for a Renfield to have to defend their master. Times had changed, though. Advances in technology, weaponry, body armor, all those things made it easier for a vampire’s enemies to strike during the day . . . and win.

  Which meant that while the Stregoi weren’t going to hire trained assassins out of pride, neither were they stupid enough to hamstring themselves when it came to their staff’s survivability.

  At nine o’clock, she called a halt. “You have an hour and a half,” she said. “Get some rest. Nap if you can fall asleep, sit quietly if you can’t. Meditate, watch TV, whatever.”

  “What about you?” asked one of the women. Holly. She was one of Ivanov’s. Stocky, plain, not fashion-catalog pretty like Katya’s Renfields were. Everything about her seemed . . . blunt. Her nose, her haircut, the way she spoke.

  “I’ll keep watch.”

  “That’s not relaxing.”

  “It is for me.”

  They drifted away without further argument. Elly folded herself onto the window seat and kept one eye on the street below, the other on Ivanov’s tablet. It was hooked into the cameras placed around the building—she wasn’t sure if he’d had one of his people hack into the feed, or whether he’d simply bribed the security company to grant him access. She switched between those cameras, watching for anyone suspicious, though she didn’t expect visitors yet. If the Oisín were going to infiltrate early, they’d have been here by now. Her gut told her they’d come at eleven, like their threat had said.

  At ten thirty, she roused the Renfields. Only Trent had stayed awake, reclining on the couch Elly had occupied earlier and keeping his own watch.

  The last half hour was interminable. Elly had long ago learned to wait it out, to ride the wave of anxiety and adrenaline and turn it into something useful: check your weapons, check your supplies, do it over and over until all hell finally broke loose. The Renfields paced; they watched the clock; they watched the doors. Elly let it happen; she was neither their master nor their mother. She wasn’t even really their mentor, though she did stop them now and again, get this one to breathe, that one to count the bottles of holy water she’d filled just in case.

  Elly checked the point of her spike, then gave her box of healing materials one final inventory. She kept a kit at the bar—nowhere near as good as the one she kept at Cavale’s, but really, very little of what she used on humans would apply to vampires. And the Stregoi would be reluctant to let her tend to their Renfields’ cuts and bruises if they weren’t life-threatening. Still, she was glad Katya or Ivanov had thought to have it brought here. With no vampires around, her skills as a medic might be needed before the
sun set.

  At eleven o’clock, the wards tripped. All of them, flashing so bright Elly had to shield her eyes. She felt them singing all through her body, the cheat sheet of runes she’d scribbled on her arm burning like a brand as every single one of them went off at once.

  They’re everywhere.

  “Hold tight,” she said. “They’re coming.”

  The building’s alarms were silent, though. The security guard downstairs was dealing another round of solitaire; the cameras were empty.

  Then the bay window—the one Elly had been perched in half an hour before—shattered inward. Holly cried out as shards of glass sliced ribbons in her exposed flesh. They all turned toward the sound, to see what was coming through. Rushing to meet it.

  Mistake.

  Elly spun back toward the entrance, cursing as she did. One by one the locks rusted, corroded, fell thunking to the ground. The door shuddered as whoever was on the other side delivered three booming kicks. Then it opened, swung inward to crash against the wall.

  The Oisín’s people poured through, half a dozen of them, some in ski masks and gloves, others with hoods or hats pulled low. Those ones reminded Elly of the Creeps, who kept their faces in shadow when they walked among the living, seeking out their victims, hiding their snouts and their fangs and their yellow, yellow eyes.

  But these were humans, not Creeps. No stink of rotting meat and pencil shavings rolling off them, only sweat and cold fall air.

  And in their midst, the banshee.

  * * *

  SHE WAS CLAD all in grey, from the top of her cowl to the dusty boots peeking out from beneath her . . . dress? Robes? Fabric swathed her, layers and layers of it, so much that Elly wasn’t sure where one piece ended and the next began. They billowed in the crosswind between the smashed window and the open door.

  Elly braced for the earsplitting wail, ducked her head to get a glimpse of the face beneath the cowl, but all she could see was brown hair shot through with grey. Shadows hid the woman’s face.

  “Stop,” said Elly. She held her silver spike loosely—she wasn’t foolish enough to let it go, but it was as close to a placating gesture as she’d get. “This is wrong. Go back and tell your masters you’re all being set up. Ivanov will send someone tonight and you can talk. Work together to figure out who’s doing it. Please. You don’t have to—”

  She trailed off as she realized how still they were, how puppetlike. It wasn’t that they were ignoring her words; they weren’t even hearing them, at least not to comprehend. Only the banshee had any life to her, ironic for the one ghost in the room. She tilted that grey head as if in faint recognition. “Are you in charge of them?” Elly asked her. “Call them off. If he’s not controlling you, too, call them off. If he has you bound, we can set you free.” Did she understand? Could she? If the necromancer was listening through her, Elly’d tipped him off that they knew about his involvement with the vampires.

  Doesn’t matter. He knew Cavale was after him, too.

  “Udrai? Is it Udrai doing this? Or—”

  At his name, one of the others let out a strangled moan. Dark curls spilled out from beneath her ski mask, and Elly saw her blue eyes widen in terror. She’d seen those eyes before, at the meeting with Theo, and again the next night, when he’d killed her friends. “Deirdre?”

  The moan grew into a wail, and Elly saw the woman’s fangs unsheathe.

  Then the Oisín surged forward, and she was shouting at the Renfields. “On me, God damn it. They’re vamps! They’re all vamps!”

  Whether it came from their fighters’ instincts or from having to jump to every time their masters snapped their fingers, the Renfields responded fast. Even Holly, whose left arm was a mess of blood and ragged flesh. Glass shards sparkled like diamonds in her hair as she made for the stock of holy water.

  We’re fucked, we’re fucked, we’re fucked.

  They’d have been in trouble with three vampires, but six plus the banshee? Didn’t matter that they were only one up on Elly’s team—undeath granted the Oisín advantages her people couldn’t make up for. The other woman among the Stregoi Renfields—Ji-hye—went tearing past Elly. She caught one of the bottles Holly lobbed her way, unscrewed the cap, and doused the nearest vamp with twenty-four ounces of blessed sparkling water.

  Interesting, what sanctified expensive fizzy water did when it hit. And fizzed. And burned.

  The vampire clutched at his soaking wet mask and tore it away, exposing the smoking skin beneath. Curling up from the collar of his shirt was the tip of a now-familiar sigil. The necromancer’s mark. Before she could get a better look, Ji-hye lashed out with a kick to his knee. Elly heard the snap as the bone broke and he went down.

  In the time it took for Ji-hye to get him on the ground, all the vampires should have been on them, should have torn through them. Instead Elly saw the other Renfields—Trent at the front, Yuri and Sam flanking him—meet the vampires halfway. Deirdre alone got past them, making straight for Elly. In the back, the banshee spread her arms and chanted words Elly almost knew.

  I need to get to her. But she couldn’t, not yet, because Deirdre was coming at her at a run.

  A run.

  She should be a blur. Realization dawned, as sharp as the snap of the Oisín’s bone: They weren’t invited in. It’s daytime, and they weren’t invited in.

  And they’re not in control of themselves.

  She knew from sparring with Justin that his abilities waned as dawn grew near. And if they entered a house they hadn’t been invited into, their powers were lessened even more. There was no way to know how deeply the necromancer was controlling them—every move? A general order to fight? Were they in there at all, resisting him, or had their minds fled with the sun, and he worked with empty shells? She thought of Justin, the time he’d let her watch what happened as the sun rose. How fast he collapsed, how utterly dead he appeared.

  Elly caught Deirdre’s raised fist on her arm, let the taller woman’s momentum stagger them both backward. She got close enough to grab a fistful of Deirdre’s hair, wrapping the locks around her left wrist like a rope. The ski mask lifted up, exposing Deirdre’s chin. With her other hand, Elly brought up the spike and dragged it across the curve of her jaw.

  The skin smoked and cracked beneath the silver. Deirdre hissed in pain.

  Holly, God bless her, was watching. She pitched a few more bottles of holy water to Trent, then ducked beneath the counter. A huge racket went up in the kitchen as she tore drawers off their rails and dumped the contents on the floor. She came up a few seconds later, fiddling with the catch on a mahogany box. More clattering as it opened and she upturned it into the sink. She fished around with her good hand, plucking out knives, serving forks, anything with an edge.

  Then she came around and slid them across the floor toward her friends.

  “Cut the sigils!” Elly shouted, scrabbling to keep Deirdre from clawing at her face. “It should drop them off to sleep!”

  There was a moment where it might have ended well. Where they could have done as she said, sent them all back to vampire dreamland, dealt with the banshee, and put the Oisín somewhere safe until sunset. There could have been a grand ol’ bloodsucker parlay, everyone hugging it out over blood packs or willing donors or whatever it was vampires did to seal a deal. That was how it was supposed to go, in Elly’s head. They’d come out of it with only Holly in need of stitches, and hooray, good guys win.

  But Sam was slow in picking up the serving fork. He looked away from the vampire in front of him a second too long, and that was all the time the vamp needed to swipe down with his claws and tear out Sam’s throat.

  Ji-hye screamed as her friend’s blood coursed out on the cold marble floor. The vampire she’d kneecapped was still writhing in pain at her feet, closer than the one that had taken out Sam. Ji-hye stared down at him for a heartbeat, her face contorted in grief
and shock and hate. The vampire stared up at her with empty eyes as the girl hauled him up by the back of his shirt and yanked him along.

  Not toward the others.

  Toward the patch of sunlight streaming in through the broken windows.

  She shoved him into it, but didn’t stick around to watch him burn. She turned back to where Trent and Yuri faced the other four, scooping up a carving knife on her way.

  Elly’s nose filled with the scent of burning flesh and scorched cotton as the vampire tried dragging himself away from the sunlight. He got one hand out, but it didn’t matter. The rest of him caught, and he went up as fast as if he’d been staked with cedar. Clothing didn’t protect them—not completely. Not enough. Val had said it bought them time, maybe, if they were old enough. But the Oisín were young, in the scheme of things. He had no chance.

  So how did they get over here in the first place?

  Deirdre didn’t give her time to chew on that. She lashed out again, forcing Elly to scamper back out of her reach. Trent and Yuri and Ji-hye were driving the other four into a corner. Holly’d come out from the kitchen to help them, a bread basket full of wicked implements cradled in her injured arm.

  Still the banshee chanted.

  This time when Deirdre struck, Elly snatched at the collar of her shirt. The tip of the spike tore into the cotton and Elly ripped it wide. Udrai’s mark stood out on the woman’s pale neck. Elly switched her grip on the spike, holding it like a child first learning how to hold a pencil, with the tip just barely poking out from her fist. She scribbled over the sigil, felt Deirdre’s flesh bubble where silver brushed skin.

  Deirdre’s eyes rolled up in her head and she dropped to the floor, literally dead weight.

  In the corner, it had gone from four on four to four on two, in the Renfields’ favor. One of the fallen Oisín was nothing more than a heap of ash-streaked clothing. The other was quickly joining him, the filigreed handle of a knife protruding from his chest.

  The banshee was unguarded.