Night Owls (13 page)

They got up, the legs of their chairs scraping along the linoleum. Elly wanted to tag along, but she hadn’t been invited. Once they’d left, the kitchen seemed cavernous. Except for the table, where Elly and Justin still sat with their elbows almost touching. Their close proximity must’ve dawned on Justin at the same time; he shifted a couple of inches to his right while Elly scooted her butt a little to the left.

They shared an embarrassed laugh. “I’ll, uh.” Elly glanced around, looking for something useful to say. “Do you want more coffee while you write?”

“Oh God, yes please. I’ve been up since six o’clock this morning. Er. Yesterday morning now, I guess.”

Elly smiled and stood, glad for an excuse not to have to make conversation. After a moment, she heard the pen scratching away again. Once the coffeemaker was burbling, she dared a glance at the table. Justin had his head down, his arm curled around the pad of paper like a kid afraid someone the next row over might try copying his answers.

It wasn’t his writing she craned her neck to see; she already knew what Creepscrawl looked like. Instead, Elly squinted at the things Cavale had chalked onto the tabletop. He’d told Justin the truth about there being no wards or tracers on the book. The checks for those were in the first three quadrants of his circle. But he’d neglected to mention the last bit.

The fourth quadrant should have flared bright purple if any
power
was left in the book. Father Value had drawn the same sigils the day after they’d stolen the book from the church, and they’d stayed lit up for the better part of an hour. If the book was dead, logic said the power had to have gone into Justin. Writing the words out on a crappy dime store notepad wouldn’t draw out the energy behind the spell, and the energy mattered as much as—or more than—the words. Cavale had to know that.

So why hadn’t he said it?

13

V
AL FLOPPED ONTO
Cavale’s tattered couch. The blood loss had made her woozy, and it had been several days since she’d last fed. The wound would close over time—a day’s sleep would do wonders—but in the meantime, blood kept seeping out of the hole in her torso, and the skin around it itched from contact with the silver spike.

Chaz and Cavale took one look at her sprawling form and ashen face and, without a word, sat on either side of her and rolled up their sleeves.

“Oh no.
No.
You two stop that.” Val struggled to sit up straight, digging her elbows into the back of the couch and heaving her upper body forward. “I’m not drinking from either of you. Or
anyone
in this house,” she said, as Cavale’s eyes flicked toward the kitchen.

“Val, you have to.” Chaz sounded like he was speaking to a child reluctant to take her medicine. “We need you sharp for this.”

“No you don’t. Sun’s up in an hour or so. You won’t need me until tomorrow night, and by then this will have closed.”

Cavale piped up from her other side. “But you’ll still be weak.”

“So I’ll feed when I wake up. I’m not drinking from either of you. Now put your sleeves back down.” The gesture was noble and even sweet, but much like some people had a policy never to sleep with friends, Val refused to drink from them. Especially these two.
Especially Chaz.

Some vampires did drink from their servants. Matter of fact, a lot of Renfields considered it a point of pride to provide a meal for their masters. They didn’t get any special benefit from it. Being fed from worked a lot like giving blood: you sometimes ended up dizzy and dehydrated. You weren’t supposed to lift heavy objects for twenty-four hours in case you reopened the bites. Some of the more well-to-do vampires kept several Renfields, and watched them jockey for favorite status. They’d drink from whoever had pleased them best as a kind of reward.

If the minions lived long enough and didn’t fall out of their master’s good graces, the most loyal were first in line to be turned. What better way to prove your worth—and your future subservience—than exposing your throat to your superiors and granting them sustenance?

While the endless maneuvering made Val vaguely uncomfortable, it outright disgusted Chaz. To him, the human servants were not only being treated like pets, they were
enjoying
it. He’d told Val that he suspected some serious mind-fuckery there as well—he didn’t talk about his three-day nightmare with the
Stregoi
, but Val thought whatever had happened, he’d gotten all the proof he needed.

Maybe it was different in some of the newer communities; she certainly hadn’t seen debauchery to that extreme in California, though it still existed. But here in the Northeast the old blood ran strong. Which meant the old ways were kept—if occasionally bastardized—and used to claim superiority over the New World vampires. In New England, every colony had at least one person claiming that a sire’s sire had come over on the
Mayflower
. Val only knew of two who actually
had
, neither of whom were on the passenger manifests you could look at up in Plimoth Plantation. Others came later, after the Revolutionary War, and brought with them the bloodsucking traditions of Eastern Europe, the British Isles, and any number of ancient rules and practices.

Val herself was relatively young, as vampires went. Born in the late nineteen forties, she’d come of age at a time when the country’s youth was busy questioning authority and demanding change. So, too, did the newer brood of vampires start chafing against the draconian practices of their elders. Some of them even insisted on existing without any thralls.

Val wasn’t
that
good, or at least, not for the kind of life she wanted. If you owned a business, you needed someone who could be there during the day. She and Chaz worked well together, and though he
was
her Renfield, he was first and foremost her friend. He’d had a taste of how others like him lived when the
Stregoi
woman had taken him. Val had sat with him through weeks of nightmares after she’d brought him home. Sometimes, even three years later, the paranoia still crept in. And yet, here he was, offering her his wrist because he trusted her not to go that far.

She pushed both of their arms away and plucked at their cuffs, trying to smooth them down. “Guys, please. Don’t make me
make
you.”

They exchanged one last, hesitant glance, then Chaz shook his head and rolled his sleeve back down. “Fine. But if you’re not a thousand percent better tomorrow . . .”

“I will be.” She waited until he dipped his head in acquiescence, then turned to Cavale. “Is this why you wanted us out here, or did you have something about Justin for me?”

“I have something. But it’s not good.” Cavale finished buttoning his sleeve before he continued. “We can hand over whatever he writes to them.”

“But?”

“But all it’s going to do is buy some time, and that’s assuming they don’t test it for themselves before they leave, or worse, know just by looking at it that it’s useless.”

Chaz leaned forward, hands on his knees. “How can it be useless? He’s writing out the stuff that went missing, isn’t that what they wanted?”

“Not quite. I—mmph. Watch.” Cavale dragged the coffee table closer and produced his chalk again. He drew a simple rune on it. Then he pulled out a pin, pricked his thumb, and squeezed a few drops into the middle of the rune. It lit up for a few seconds, then subsided. “Most magic needs a source. I can draw runes all day, but if nothing powers them, they’re just pictures.”

“But there were things all over the Clearwaters’ house. There’s no way they ran around jabbing themselves to power them all.” Chaz jerked his thumb toward the back of the house. “If that were the case, shouldn’t your friend look like a pincushion?”

“Not when you can go buy a tub of animal blood at your local butcher shop.”

“You can
do
that?” Chaz’ jaw dropped. His idea of going food shopping was browsing the aisles at the gas station quickie mart when he filled his tank.

“Sure. People cook with it.”

“Fuck this. I’m going vegan.”

“
Anyway.
Those runes I drew over the book should’ve lit up like a Christmas tree if there was any magic left in it. But they stayed dormant.” He wiped the chalk lines from the tabletop with his hand, avoiding Val’s eyes. “I think if I’d drawn them on Justin, they’d have activated. That spell and its source are in him now. And it’s not the sort of thing where you can substitute, I don’t know, chicken blood and call it good. Something like that, in a book that old, it was imbued with a specific kind of energy. They’ll need that, too. Not just the words.”

“So how do we get it out of him?”

He looked up at her. Worry drew down the corners of his mouth. “I don’t know yet. You’re going to have to buy me some time. I have some ideas on how, if you want them.”

 • • • 

J
USTIN WROTE FOR
ten minutes or so, pausing only to sip at his refilled coffee. At last, he put his pen down and massaged his hand. “Do you think this looks like it’s repeating?”

Elly pushed herself off the counter and took the seat formerly occupied by Chaz. Creepscrawl filled six pages’ worth of notepaper, the letters jagged and rough. A shudder ran through her as she looked at it. Memories from the previous night threatened, but she forced herself to stay calm. She flipped back and forth, from the first line to the last and back again. “Yeah. That looks the same to me.”

He stared at the page. “You’d think since I’m writing it, I’d be able to read it, too.”

“That’s not how these things work.”

“No, I know. Okay, well, I
don’t
know, but . . .” The silence stretched as he scrutinized the marks.

Elly shifted in her seat, more aware with each passing minute how close they were sitting. They were separated by a good foot or two, but her perception of the kitchen had done another dimensional flop. Gone was the cavernous feel of twenty minutes ago. Now that she was within arm’s length of Justin, with no idea what kind of small talk was even appropriate, the walls had started closing in on her again. The low murmur of conversation drifted through the door to the living room. Elly inwardly cursed Cavale for not feeling her distress.

Stop it. He’s not psychic.

Maybe he thought she’d developed social skills in the two plus years since he’d seen her. She hadn’t. If anything, her only companion being fifty years her senior might have made the few skills she’d had deteriorate. Badly.

Father Value had sent them to school, sometimes, when they were somewhere he thought they could settle down for a while. He’d have his contacts draw up fake transcripts and send Elly and Cavale off to whatever grade was appropriate. They never stayed more than a few months at a time, though, usually just long enough for the other kids to move from
pick on the new kids
to
hey the new kids are kind of weird
. The days they came home to find their stuff boxed up and ready to go to the next place felt like how she imagined most children felt the day school let out for the summer.

That wasn’t to say either of them were uneducated, though. When they weren’t enrolled anywhere, Father Value insisted they learn on their own. Sometimes they had textbooks as guidelines; sometimes he’d even know someone who could come tutor them. Most of their schooling, though, came from Father Value himself and each other. “We’re book smart,” Cavale used to say to her, in those days when they were watching each other’s backs against new classmates, “but I wouldn’t say we’re people-smart.”

What she wouldn’t give for some people-smarts right now.

The salt from Cavale’s runework was still on the table. Elly gathered it up in front of her, smoothing it out into a thin layer along the tabletop. With one finger, she drew patterns in it: spirals and squares, tic-tac-toe grids, whatever came to mind and helped her pretend she could
totally handle
sitting next to someone.

When Justin looked up from the notepad and spoke, Elly bit back a yelp.

Justin didn’t seem to notice. “Do those, um. Do something?” He pointed at the salt symbols, careful not to actually make contact with them.

“No. They’re just, y’know, doodles.” A blush crawled up her neck; the tips of her ears felt like they were burning.

“The thing is, I
don’t
know.” He tapped the notepad, then, tentatively, the edge of the salt pile. “Before today, I’d’ve thought these were just about the same thing.”

The edge of the circle she was tracing wobbled. “How could you think
Creepscrawl
was a doodle?”

“You ever sat through a lecture on the metaphysical poets?”

Elly blinked. She had no idea what he was getting at. And she’d never even sat through a lecture, unless you counted Father Value’s. She was pretty sure Justin’s version of a lecture was vastly different. “No. But it sounds interesting. Metaphysics?”

He chuckled. “Not that kind of metaphysics.”

“Oh.”
Great. Now I sound like an idiot.
She wanted to crawl under the table and die.

“Hey, no.” He reached over and touched her wrist; she jerked it away. To his credit, he didn’t make a big deal of it. He placed both hands on the table in front of him, right where she could see them. “I just meant, your kind would probably be kind of neat to hear about. But unless you’re a huge nerd”—he dipped his head to indicate that yes, he was one—“those classes can sort of drag. I watch people who are just taking them for filler credits, and they’ve zoned out five minutes in. The girl who sat beside me last semester doodled the whole time. Never took a single note as far as I could tell. It looked a lot like that.”

Elly stared. “But . . . but Creeps can’t go out during the day.”

“Believe me, there are plenty of creeps at Edgewood. They’re out at all hours.”

“Not that kind of Creep.”

“Oh.”

Now it was Elly’s turn to reassure him. She couldn’t bring herself to touch him, though, so instead she refilled his coffee cup.

He murmured his thanks and loaded more sugar into the mug. “So, okay. Are your Creeps the same as Val’s Jackals? She gave me a rundown, but I don’t remember her calling them Creeps.”