Night Owls (19 page)

“You sure?”

“Think about this,” he said, and bent his head closer to Justin, so no one could hear the crazy coming from his mouth. “Two things I know for sure about Jackals: they can’t step on holy ground, which depending on your religion, this technically is.”

“Okay,” he said, but his eyes darted to the roads that wound their way through the cemetery.

Chaz could guess what he was thinking, since it was on his mind, too: Did the roads count as consecrated, too, or just the plots that had, like the Clearwaters’ five minutes ago, been officially blessed? Was the whole cemetery off-limits, or were the graves some kind of macabre hopscotch board?
Doesn’t matter. There’s still Thing Two.
“Thing two: it’s daytime. They can’t come out and play right now.”

That seemed to make him relax again. “Yeah. Okay, yeah.” Only a handful of people were still by the graves now, family members talking quietly. “I’m . . . I’m going to go say good-bye.” From the way Justin’s eyes lingered on the caskets, Chaz didn’t think he was talking about the living.

“Go ahead. I’m going to grab some flowers for Val. You want to meet me at the car when you’re ready?”

“Yeah. I won’t be long.”

“Take your time.” Chaz stepped forward and plucked a pair of irises from their basket. Their stems were intertwined, the buds still closed. As he headed back to the Mustang, he found himself peering around, looking for anything that seemed off. He couldn’t shake the feeling he was being watched.

When he slid into the front seat, he made sure he had a line of sight on Justin. The tire iron that Cavale had given him earlier was in the backseat. Chaz retrieved it without taking his eyes off the knot of people at the Clearwaters’ grave, and held it across his knees until Justin returned to the car.

Just in case.

19

E
LLY WOKE TO
Cavale moving furniture around.

She understood why, of course. Some rituals needed plenty of space, and if he was trying to yank the Creepscrawl out of Justin, well. It was a good idea to have a lot of room. There might be thrashing.

Still, she’d been fast asleep, and it had been . . . Elly frowned. She wasn’t a deep sleeper, as a rule. Living with Father Value pretty much killed that possibility—too much likelihood of having to get up and go if Creeps or cops came sniffing around. But here she was, in a cocoon made of down comforters and feather pillows, feeling positively languid. Sunlight streamed in through the window, warming her even further. She felt like a cat, curled up in the toastiest spot and not wanting to move.

If she’d ever been this comfortable in her life, she didn’t remember it. She lay there awhile longer, marveling at how strange it was to feel so . . . so . . .

What?

Safe.

Sure, she’d felt safe with Father Value, but that came from knowing they could get away from almost any dangers. She’d never felt this way about a
place
before, aside from churches. That was a short-lived kind of safety, though. Eventually a priest would come along and kick you out. Sanctuary was kind of a bullshit concept, she’d learned.

She’d only been at Cavale’s house a couple of days. She’d made sure to learn the best escape routes the first morning she’d crashed here. If she had to go out the window, she was fairly certain she could get to the ground without breaking her legs, provided she could make the jump across to the garage roof. Cavale’s presence was a comfort, but the awkwardness of separation still hung between them. It wasn’t that she thought he wouldn’t have her back in a fight. After the confrontation with the Creeps last night, she knew he was just as good as he’d been two years ago. Better, even. But he still wasn’t Father Value, and Cavale had left her once. Father Value never had.

Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that things were okay here. Solid. Sturdy. The frightening thought that maybe she could cobble together some semblance of a
life
if she stayed niggled at her. They could patch things up the rest of the way, conversation closing the wounds better than myrrh.

If she stayed.

Which, she wasn’t going to, was she? She’d promised Cavale she only wanted a day or two, and she was only breaking that to finish what she’d started with the Creeps. Then she’d go. No more bothering him, no more forcing him to remember what he’d left behind. “Take all the time you need,” he’d said, but she’d been sobbing when he said it.

A particularly loud
thud
and an even louder curse from downstairs propelled her out of bed. She told herself it was guilt at letting Cavale do all the work, but getting away from the tangle of her thoughts was a nice bonus.

She found Cavale in the kitchen putting iodine on a cut. “I should probably save this.” He was referring to the blood, not the ointment.

“You think we’ll need a lot?”

“Hopefully not, but Chaz called. He said he thinks Justin can smell the Creeps now. Which means whatever’s in his head is making itself at home. We’ll see how the watered-down stuff works first.” He jerked his head toward the sink. A half-gallon plastic tub sat within, a layer of frost on the outside from the warmth of the room. “You want breakfast? There’s, uh. Coffee, and we could toast some hamburger buns.”

Elly grinned. He’d never been good at shopping. Well, at shopping
lists
. Between the two of them, Cavale had always done far better with actually going into stores and buying the food, but left to his own devices, he’d come out with cans of Chef Boyardee, a box of Pop-Tarts, and some exotic fruit that neither of them knew how to break into, “To prevent scurvy.”

“What are you smiling at?”

“Just the time you found the sale on maraschino cherries. You came back with ten jars of them and a loaf of bread, remember? And we made sandwiches out of them.”

He snickered. “We pressed the edges together and called them cherry pies.”

“And we drank the syrup straight from the jars like it was juice. We got it everywhere, turned everything bright red.” Even as she said it, though, her smile faded. The warm feeling shrank and shriveled, like a cherry left out to dry.

“Then
he
came home.” Cavale said it quietly, looking away.

Father Value had found them both sprawled out on the floor, clutching their bellies and groaning from fullness. He hadn’t interpreted the sounds as happy ones, though, since the first thing he’d seen was all the red. He’d thought it was blood. The first few moments were filled with panic, then relief as they explained their unconventional dinner and offered to make him a pie with the last jar of cherries and the heels of the bread.

That was about when he’d started yelling at Cavale. How he was older, and how he ought to know better. How he had to set a good example for Elly. How he was in charge during the day and had to be more responsible. How that had been the last of their money for the next few days, and now what would they eat.

Cavale had been all of nine; Elly, six.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “He was hard on you.”

“It was what, sixteen years ago? He never raised a hand to me. To either of us. There’s that, at least.” He struggled briefly with something else, on the edge of saying more. Emotions flickered across his face: hurt, hesitation,
calculation
. The last reminded her of Father Value, when he was about to say something neither of them would like. Elly tucked that away—it would be entirely the wrong thing to say right now. Then they all disappeared, and whatever he’d been thinking went unsaid.

“Anyway. Toast, if you want it. I’m going to finish up in there. Chaz is bringing Justin by in a half hour.” He ducked out of the kitchen. The thumping and scraping started anew. To Elly’s ears, it sounded more aggressive than it had when she was lazing about upstairs.

Way to go, Elly. Brilliant.

 • • • 

C
HAZ AND
J
USTIN
arrived a little after two. They were still dressed in their funeral clothes, though if they’d worn ties for the ceremony, they must have taken them off and left them in the car. Justin looked more composed than he had the other night; still sad, his eyes red rimmed, but she had to admit he looked good all dressed up.

The living room had been transformed. The other night it had been cozy enough, with Cavale’s mismatched, yard sale furniture making a fairly large room look just shy of cramped. Now, with the couches shoved against one wall, the smaller chairs and end tables relocated to the kitchen, and the rug rolled up and tucked away, the room seemed huge.

Once they’d finished clearing it out and swept the floor, Cavale had truly set to work. The circle was a work of art: six feet in diameter, it had a ring of tiny Norse runes along the inside edge. Coming in from those, Cavale had drawn from several other traditions, tying the symbols together as if their ancient creators had lived a few miles away from one another and shared a language rather than being half a world away. Sumerian cozied up to Pictish, which flowed into Japanese hiragana.

Elly understood most of it, but something like this would have taken her hours. Cavale had done it in twenty minutes, while Elly stood by and handed him new pieces of chalk when he wore his down to a nub. She’d also gone and heated up the pigs’ blood for him. It hadn’t had time to thaw, so she’d stuck it in the microwave. A bit unorthodox, but it worked. The only drawback was the smell of burnt copper that permeated the house. The kitchen windows were open, but in here, the curtains were drawn, the windows closed.

Justin took it all in, wide-eyed. He pointed at a particular hieroglyph that repeated throughout the circle. Inside a cartouche were a feather, a box beneath a squiggly line, a bird, and a dog. “What does that one do?”

Cavale wiped his hands on his jeans, leaving blue-chalk palm prints on his thighs. “It’s the symbol for Anubis.”

“Is that . . . is that who they worship? Or who gives them their, um, power?” Another thought dawned and he paled even further. “I’m not possessed by him, am I?”

Chaz snorted. Cavale shot him a glare, his jaw setting in what Elly thought of as his argument face.
Better cut this off before it starts.

“It’s just a symbol, this time. Anubis was jackal-headed, so his name can stand in for the Creeps. The circle’s all wrong for actually summoning Anubis himself.” She thought back to the colorful jumble of chalks and paints that made up Cavale’s junk drawer. “Plus, I didn’t see any lapis in with the supplies.”

Justin’s eyes bulged at her casual mention of summoning a god. He didn’t ask any more questions.

Cavale made a few final adjustments to the runes, then stepped back, satisfied. “Okay. Take your shirt off.”

“What?”

He retrieved the tub of pigs’ blood from the only small piece of furniture left in the room. It was a plain brown stool, the finish on its seat worn pale by countless bottoms. Set beside the tub like an artist had left them behind were several paintbrushes. They varied in length and width, from hair fine to a half-inch thick. Cavale selected a medium one and eyed Justin. “You can leave it on if you want, but that’s an awfully nice shirt, and this stuff’ll stain.”

Justin looked at the blood, then at Elly, Chaz, and back to Cavale. “This is getting
really
weird. You guys all know that, right?”

Considering what he’d been through the last few days, Elly probably shouldn’t have blamed Justin for feeling that way. It
was
weird, all of it. Especially to a kid who’d never believed in this kind of thing. But that meant he thought
she
was weird, too. In this room, standing there with herself and Cavale and Chaz,
Justin’s
normal life was the abnormality here, and yet she felt like the freak.

And it pissed her off.

“You know what?” she said, advancing on him. “Maybe it is. But when it’s done you can go back to your boring little Creep-free life and leave the real work to the rest of us. Until then? Shut up and do what he says.”

Regret set in as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Justin went bright red and mumbled an apology. He shrugged out of his suit jacket and handed it off to Chaz without further argument. His fingers drifted up to the top button on his shirt, but paused there. After a moment, Elly realized he was looking at her, the blush deepening. “Um, do you think you could . . . ?”

Oh, for fuck’s sake.
She turned to Cavale. “Let me know when you’re starting. I should be in here for this.”

Chaz followed her into the kitchen. Getting to the table meant picking their way through the maze of displaced end tables and plant stands, but they managed it without knocking anything over. He sat down across from her and offered her a friendly grin. “Hey, go easy on him, okay? I know he touched a nerve there, but he means well. He’s just . . . new to this.”

Another twinge of guilt. She picked at the chipped Formica. “I know. I’ll apologize to him. It’s been a long morning.”

“You kids fighting? You and Cavale?”

She blinked. “No. I mean, not really.” After she’d had her toasted hamburger bun—dry, since Cavale was out of butter, too—she’d ventured in to help him with the rearranging. The first few minutes were tense and awkward, but then he’d started talking about how the ritual would go, and the mood had cleared. Cavale wasn’t much of a grudge holder, but she still felt awful.

Chaz wasn’t buying it, either. “‘Not really’ implies that there was
something
. My mom used to say my sister and I bickered like magpies. It’s just what siblings do.” He broke off, his gaze flicking to the open window and back to her, almost too quick to notice.

But Elly had grown up learning that people ought to trust their instincts: if you thought you heard a noise or saw a shadow move, Father Value had said you probably did. She glanced outside, studying the overgrown backyard. Afternoon sunlight played on the dead brown grass. A breeze sent leaves skittering. Nothing else moved. “Did you see something out there?”