Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel Read Free

on the couch, most of them open to pages that were varying degrees of disturbing if you didn’t live a life steeped in magic.
    Elly’s eye fell on one particular spread, depicting a demon eating a woman’s heart.
Okay, maybe even if you did.
    She took a ketchup bottle filled with holy water, a pair of smudge sticks, a vial of lavender oil, a handful of crystals, a few other odds and ends, and shoved them into a plastic shopping bag. She debated strapping the silver spike to her wrist but decided against it—if Mom came home and found a strange woman doing all sorts of woo-woo shit in her house, with her sixth-grade daughter watching, well, Elly’d be in enough trouble. Best not to be armed, too.
    Besides, silver didn’t do much of anything to ghosts and wraiths, whichever this might be.
    Cinda leaned on the railing, staring down the hill at her house as Elly came outside. She eyed the plastic bag, clearly disappointed. “Is that, uh, your kit?”
    “Yup.”
    “In a bag from Food Stop.”
    “Yup.”
    “What are you going to do, throw a can of soup at it?”
    “If that’s what it takes.” She held the bag open so Cinda could see what was inside. “If I walk down the street with a bag covered in runes, or some ancient carved box, anyone who sees will be curious, won’t they?”
    “I . . . guess?”
    “This draws less attention. You don’t want people knocking while I’m down in your basement getting rid of a ghost, now, do you?”
    “No, I guess not.” Cinda’s mouth twisted in a bitter line. “No one really bothers with anyone else, anyway, though. It’s not that kind of neighborhood.”
    Elly had no response to that—Cinda was right. The girl shrugged and led her down the hill.
    *   *   *
    H OUSES IN GENERAL were a new concept for Elly, “normal” houses even more so. Father Value would find an apartment for them to squat in from time to time, but they rarely had furniture beyond pallet beds and secondhand tables and chairs. No pictures on the walls, no magnets on the fridge—if the places even
had
a fridge.
    She’d mostly gotten used to Cavale’s house; the biggest shock these days was that he still seemed to want her in it. The furniture was secondhand, refurbished to the best of Cavale’s ability. Some nights she’d come home to find him asleep on the couch, book spread across his chest. Of course, the book was often some obscure occult tome he’d taken from Val’s collection at the bookstore, Night Owls, but it was almost, almost an image from a normal life.
    Val’s house was the next step up, on a pretty, tree-lined street in quaint, sleepy Edgewood, not a paint peel anywhere on the outside. Inside, you’d even think it was the home of a businesswoman doing moderately well for herself: furniture being slowly upgraded from the original cheap discount-store stuff to the real thing. (The bookcases must have been the first to get replaced, Elly suspected. Not a piece of particleboard in sight, there.) It looked normal until you realized there was no food in the cupboards, never a dish in the drainer, and the only time there might be food in the fridge was when Chaz had come over, ordered dinner for himself, and forgotten to bring home his leftovers.
    That, and when you noticed the blackout curtains hanging on all the upstairs windows so Val and Justin didn’t have to sleep on the cold, packed dirt floor of the basement.
    Sunny and Lia pulled it off the best: beautiful home, happy, well-to-do couple, and home-cooked meals every Sunday if anyone wanted to come by. Except they were succubi, and Elly knew it, and that made her less twitchy than if it were someone normal when she sat at their kitchen table and tore into a piece of roasted chicken.
    Cinda’s house, then, set Elly’s nerves jangling. They entered through the side door into a cluttered kitchen. Most of the surfaces had things on them: mail piled on the counter, last night’s dishes in the sink, schoolbooks and craft