Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel

by Lauren M. Roy

  Elly stalked toward her. No time to grab some salt from the kitchen (probably ridiculously fancy sea salt, judging by the ridiculously fancy water they’d had to work with); she dug into her pocket and pulled out the crystal she’d used at Cinda’s house a few days back. The words of an exorcism formed on her lips; she was shouting them, screaming them as she got in close.

  Close enough to make out the banshee’s words.

  Close enough to smell the myrrh.

  Close enough to see her face beneath the cowl.

  She’s not a banshee. She’s Brotherhood.

  “Who are you?” Elly whispered.

  The woman shook her head, brown eyes wide with surprise. Her fingers flickered in a pattern Elly knew: a rune of command drawn in the air. The Renfields shouted profanity-laced warnings as, out of the corner of her eye, one of the two vampires standing broke away. He came shambling at her. They’d gotten the ski mask off, and his face was covered in burns from the holy water. Strips of charred flesh showed through holes in his shirt, where they’d grazed him with the silver but hadn’t managed to stake.

  Elly turned, smoothly, easily, and drove her spike into his heart.

  When she turned back toward the door, the Sister was gone.

  16

  CHAZ HALF EXPECTED to find both of the Clearwaters’ libraries ransacked, books on the floor, whole sections missing. Or that he’d come whistling around a corner and find himself nose to nose with the ghoul from the other night, ready for round two. Even though Val said they’d put him utterly out of commission. He hadn’t gotten around to asking for details on that one, and didn’t plan to.

  His ribs certainly weren’t ready for another go. Learning throws from Lia hadn’t helped in that regard, but at least if an unauthorized visitor were there, he could be a smidge more useful this time. Get them on the ground, then run like hell.

  He strolled around the perimeter before he went in. Far as he could tell, the house was undisturbed. He paused at the front door, key in lock, ear to fiberglass. Only silence from within.

  Once inside, he took the house in baby steps. Move a few feet, stop to listen. Crouch low before peering into the next room. He started feeling a bit like a burglar himself. Soon enough, he was convinced he was alone, at least enough to walk upright again and stop trying to soften his footsteps. Either the ghouls hadn’t been back, or Cavale’s wards had repelled them.

  Even in the aftermath of violence, certain parts of the Clearwaters’ home had retained their coziness. Places the relatives and estate lawyers had picked up but not picked over, like Helen’s pantry, stocked with flour and sugar and more kinds of chocolate for baking than Chaz had thought possible. Or the nook in the downstairs sitting room with its jumble of coin-collecting magazines and clippings from the alumni newsletter highlighting the achievements of Henry’s former students.

  Justin would have been one of those clippings someday.

  Cozy and homey, sure, but then those sad reminders kicked you in the teeth. He could stand in the pantry and inhale the smells, run his fingers over pans that Helen had inherited from her mother, her grandmother, but she’d never again send Henry into Night Owls with a tin of fudge and a cheery note. Justin could still graduate—would, if Chaz had any say in it—and might go on to write the definitive work on Donne or Milton or Herbert. But Henry wouldn’t get to read it, wouldn’t be cutting the publication announcement out of Edgewood Achieves! and tacking it to his wall of pride.

  It should have been comforting here, with the November sun shining in, warming the chair where, Justin said, Henry liked to nap on Sunday afternoons.

  He left the first floor behind, moving cautiously up to the second. Still alone, still undisturbed. It was less cozy up here, what with the smell of bleach and missing swaths of carpet. And of course, the knowledge that this was where most of it had happened. But it was also his work area, and in the daylight it was much easier to put himself into that mind-set: sort and catalog, find what’s useful.

  Chaz pulled his notebook from his pocket and flipped pages. Henry’s sorting system was still a mystery to Chaz, even after working with it for a month. Some books were grouped together logically—by author, by year of publication, by subject—but not always, and not in any order Chaz had been able to suss out. He was good with puzzles, too, which frustrated him to all hell. Put one of those brainbuster activity books in front of him and he’d plow right through it. Those ones where you got a sequence of numbers or letters or words and had to figure out which came next, or which was missing? He was a fucking pro at those.

  There was a pattern here, to these books. He just couldn’t see it. For a moment he debated calling Cavale, to see if he could whip up a spell that’d make the right book . . . glow or slide forward or levitate over to him. Something. Anything. But the dude was likely asleep, or off on a research mission of his own, or pacing the floor waiting for Elly to call. Best to leave him be.

  And not give him the satisfaction of figuring out a puzzle Chaz couldn’t.

  He found the shelf that, far as he could tell, was dedicated to world mythology. Mesopotamia had its own neat section. Best place to start.

  Index after index failed to mention Udrai. Chaz sat amid a pile of books most scholars would sell a limb to even hold, turning onionskin pages with his cotton-gloved fingers, and had to resist the urge to pitch the books across the room like the ghoul had. Instead he forced himself to start again, with Udrai’s patron, Ereshkigal. The information on her was overwhelming—major part of the pantheon, one of the chief deities, scads of adventures, all with variations.

  Now and then he found notes in the margins in Henry’s tiny print. He found page numbers referenced, would turn to it within the work to find another, and another. Chaz followed Clearwater down his own rabbit hole, until he came to what seemed like a dead end: cf. Blumenthal, DD p. 78.

  “Well, that does me fuck-all,” he muttered. But, no, wait. There was a Blumenthal; he’d seen it recently. It was . . . it was . . . “Right fucking there.” He stood, leaving a Chaz-sized hole in the middle of the book pile. Being so lanky, he could step over them without kicking down the stacks he’d made. The Blumenthal was in the section he’d labeled tricksters on his cheat sheet.

  Jonathan Blumenthal, The Devil’s Dice. That explained the DD in the annotation. It was a skinny volume, more like a published thesis paper than a textbook. In fact, the cover page named it as such, written for the school of archaeology at Oxford in 1946.

  Chaz didn’t bother with the table of contents, opening straight to page seventy-eight.

  He almost dropped the book.

  There, sandwiched between blocks of text, was the sigil Elly and Cavale had shown them the night before. The label beneath read Udrai’s dagger. Chaz mouthed a thank you toward whatever flavor of god might be listening, and hoped they’d take the message to the old man himself. He paged back to the start of the section.

  Among Ereshkigal’s servants was a priest by the name of Udrai. Stories suggest he gained favor with the goddess by bargaining with her, though what he promised in exchange for his godhood remains unclear. Once his position was confirmed, Ereshkigal presented him with a ceremonial dagger that became his calling card.

  Udrai had the power to prolong the life of someone doomed to die, or to trade one man’s death for another’s, provided the petitioner made the right offering. The dagger sealed the bargain once it had been struck, but if the indebted failed to pay when their reckoning was due or otherwise betrayed Udrai, that same dagger brought them a swift death.

  Sources also suggest that Udrai did battle with an incarnation of the demon-goddess Lamashtu (Sumerian: Dimme). Lamashtu was known as a slayer of children and the unborn, a drinker of blood, a devourer of flesh, and a bringer of plague. As Lamashtu stole life from men and women, so Udrai stole from her, robbing her of her free will for a time and compelling her (in her g
uise as one of seven witches) to do his bidding.

  Mentions of Udrai are few and far between, and are found not at all after 2500 B.C. Whether he displeased Ereshkigal at last and was removed from the pantheon, or whether he—like the devil in Baudelaire’s poem—convinced the world he did not exist is a question for another thesis.

  This page was the end of the line, far as Chaz could tell. Still, Clearwater hadn’t left it completely unmarked. In the margin beside the paragraph on Lamashtu, the professor had drawn an arrow to the word. Beside it, he’d written Jackals?

  “Well, fuck,” said Chaz.

  * * *

  SHOULD’VE GONE WITH her. Should’ve insisted.

  The mantra repeated itself for hours after Cavale left Sunny and Lia’s house without Elly. He’d dozed off on the couch with his phone in his hand, volume all the way up, every notification set to vibrate so he wouldn’t miss her call if he fell into actual, deep, useful sleep.

  He didn’t.

  By nine o’clock he couldn’t stay cooped up inside anymore. The people who lived on the other side of the hill, the ones who had day jobs, had long since passed by Cavale’s on the way to the bus stop. Others would be asleep still, clustered together against the morning cold. Didn’t matter much; the houses he wanted a look inside were likely still empty.

  He shrugged on his jacket and gloves and headed back to where he’d explored a couple nights back. The scrap of silk and the scrying pendulum were still in his pocket, but he didn’t think he’d need them. He remembered which houses they’d led him toward.

  Memory, it turned out, served him perfectly well. He found the houses again easily, without having to retrace the steps of his mad dashing about. In daylight, they all appeared ordinary. Bland, even: beige or off-white siding, brown shutters where the windows weren’t boarded up.

  The first house had a real estate agent’s lock on the front door, the kind where if you pushed in the right three numbers, it’d spring open. Only, it had been on the door so long, the whole damned thing had rusted shut. He had more luck around the back: ordinary key lock. In the inside pocket of his jacket, where the manufacturer had meant for you to stash your wallet or your sunglasses, Cavale had a set of lockpicking tools.

  Father Value had taught them not to steal, had drilled it into them how wrong it was to take things that weren’t yours. It hadn’t stopped clerks and shopkeepers from giving him and Elly the hairy eyeball, but they’d never gone for the five-finger discount. That didn’t mean, however, that Father Value hadn’t taught them the theory of it. Sleight of hand was important in their line of work. Being flashy with your left hand so the Creeps didn’t see the silver in your right, say, or bypassing a lock so you could get to the nest full of Creeps sleeping on the other side. Cavale had taken to lockpicking quickly, the challenge of it, the way the tumblers felt as he wiggled one into place.

  He felt the familiar rush as the doorknob turned now, mixed with old residual guilt. Technically, this was breaking and entering; Father Value wouldn’t approve. But I’m going in after the necromancer. I’m not stealing. I’m not exploring out of my own curiosity. I’m not . . .

  I’m not his ward anymore.

  He tamped it all down and crept inside, switching on the flashlight he kept on his keychain. Kitchen, emptied of appliances, light fixtures gone, cabinets left open by whoever had last gone through, looking for anything left behind. Off to the left was the laundry room. The only evidence there’d been a washer and dryer here before was the silver worm of duct pipe, a fluff of lint stuck in its mouth. In the living room, he smelled wood shavings. It was the boards: they were newer on the wall that faced the side yard. Had the necromancer taken the old ones down to let light in?

  And why would he bother putting them back up when he left?

  The answer was on the boards themselves. Cavale almost didn’t see them, peering through the dusty windows—marks scratched lightly in pencil, the words of a spell. He didn’t know all the letters, not enough for a smooth translation, but his rusty Sumerian recognized the basic form of a misdirection spell. Not the same nothing to see here he and Elly knew, but the same principle. That’s what sent me running the other direction, then. And there, on the other window, the ones that had drawn his pendulum in the first place.

  After a walk-through that yielded no other clues, he moved on to the next house, and the next, and the next. Each one told the same story: no sign of the necromancer besides the new boards and the spells written on them. He’d been so sure he’d find something, some small thing left out of carelessness that would help him find the guy, get them a few steps closer to figuring out what the hell his game was.

  Cavale snuck outside the last house, contemplating a return to the swingset to see if he could summon the ghost of the girl again, when he saw a familiar car parked across the street. It wasn’t a fancy car—only a couple years old, on the low end of the price scale—but for this neighborhood it might as well have been a Ferrari. And if the car was out of place, so was its driver.

  “Trina?”

  “Cavale?” His client from Hecate’s Cabinet looked a million times better than when she’d left his station the other day. Probably because she wasn’t coming down from a possession. “What are you doing here? You’re not . . . you’re not here for a viewing too, are you?”

  “No. I live up the hill. I was just”—doing some light breaking and entering—“out for a walk. What do you mean, a viewing?”

  Trina blushed and twisted the wedding ring on her finger. “It’s probably stupid. But there was this guy, outside the shop. He said he could tell I’d lost someone, and he could help. He could arrange for me to see James again. To talk to him. And after that last reading I thought . . . I thought . . .”

  You motherfucker. Cavale glanced around at the houses surrounding them. Where are you? The few windows that weren’t boarded up were empty. The rest, he’d never be able to see someone peering out from a gap in the plywood. “Trina, that’s not how this works. Remember that Thief card that came up? Whatever this guy told you, he’s a liar. You need to let James be at rest. It’s the only way you two can both move on.”

  But she shook her head. “I’d do anything to be able to see him again, Cavale. You know that. It’s . . . it’s not fair.” Her shoulders hitched as she fought a sob.

  Cavale moved toward her carefully, reached for her. A few years ago he’d have stood there, not knowing what to do, let her handle her grief by herself. Since leaving Father Value, he’d at least figured this much out. Trina pressed her face into his jacket and cried. He stroked her hair and held her, all the while scanning up and down the street for any movement that might be the necromancer.

  When she pulled away from him a moment later, he asked, “What did he look like, this guy? Do you remember?”

  “He was shorter than you. Shorter than me, even. I couldn’t really see his face, though. He was dressed more for January than October.”

  He remembered the man outside the shop, handing out cards. “Sounded like he smokes a few packs a day, had the cough to go with it?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Trina, you don’t want to get tangled up with that guy, okay? He’s bad news. He’ll only—”

  But Trina wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. She looked past Cavale, up the hill. He turned to follow her gaze.

  On the sidewalk, wearing shorts and a tee shirt advertising a restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard, stood James. Cavale had seen him in pictures Trina brought in: brown hair in the same buzz cut he’d had since his army days, tall and muscled, his teeth white and straight and even. He waved at her and blew her a kiss, mouthed I love you, and faded away.

  “James!” she cried. “James, no, come back! Please!” She ran up to where he’d been, passed her hands through empty air. She turned back to Cavale, tears streaming. “You saw him, didn’t you? You saw James?”

/>   He nodded.

  “You said he was a liar, that man. But James was here. Right where I’m standing. You saw him.”

  “I did. But that man . . .” He wasn’t, he realized, going to be able to convince her. Not after a spectacle like that. Best he could do was get more information before the necromancer could move on to his next stage. Cavale felt his stomach twist at the idea. “Did you visit James’ grave recently?”

  “Only every night,” she said. “He was cremated. The urn’s in our house until I can figure out where to scatter his ashes. Why?”

  “No reason. Look, you should go. This neighborhood isn’t the safest.” He’d bet James’ urn was a handful lighter than it had been, if anyone had a pool going. Trina came back to him and let him walk her to her car. “What did the man say was next, after this?”

  “He said he’d show James to me, to prove he could bring him back. Then he’ll bring us face-to-face, for a talk. He said I’ll be able to touch him, Cavale. How is that possible? I know what I saw just now, but . . . Can this man really do that?”

  “Not in the way you think. Trina, he’s going to ask you for money next. Promise me you won’t give it to him.”

  “But if he can . . .”

  “I could tell you ten ways he might have projected that image. You were far away, enough that if there were any flaws, you wouldn’t have seen them.” He felt awful telling her this, especially knowing that it had been James. And that the necromancer, in all likelihood, could bring him back to hold Trina one more time. But it was wrong, the way he was doing it. What he was doing. “Trina, do you trust me?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “You know I believe in this stuff? That I know a little about it?”

  “Yes. Of course.” She gave him a watery smile. “It’s why I keep coming back to you. You’re the real deal.”

  “Okay. I’m telling you I don’t think this guy is. Just . . . if he gets in touch with you again, see if you can get some information out of him for me. His name, his phone number, where he lives. I want to check him out. And if I think he can really do what he says, I’ll tell you. But if he’s full of shit, I’m going to tell you that, too. Sound good?”