Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel by Lauren M. Roy Read Free Book Online Page B

Uncle Ralph from resting and relay that to the family. There were older ghosts around here, too. The towns around Crow’s Neck went back to the country’s founding—you didn’t get through centuries of history without some unquiet dead. But for the most part, when you told them to lie down, they did. “Did the girl know him?”
    “No. I looked around the house and the yard a bit when we were done, but I didn’t see anything that screamed, ‘Someone dumped a body here.’ But I brought you something, figured maybe you’d be able to get a read on it.” She unburied a Food Stop bag from beneath the books and fished out a plastic container. It was one of those fast-food ones, the kind you got if you ordered your soup to go. He could almost make out the chain’s logo from the faded gold stamp on the side. Elly set it down between them and pried off the lid.
    “Just what I’ve always wanted,” he said. “A tub full of snot.”
    “It’s not . . .” she said. “It isn’t . . .” She faltered as she realized he was playing. Cavale suppressed a wince. The girl he’d left behind with Father Value had often been serious, but in the two years they’d been apart, Elly had become downright grim.
    Even dead, Father Value gave Cavale reason to hate him.
    “Ectoplasm,” he prompted gently, keeping the anger out of his voice lest she think it was directed at herself.
    “Yeah. I collected this before it faded.” She showed him the underside of the lid, a ward neatly inked in marker in its center. “I thought maybe you could take a look and see if there’s anything left to learn.”
    The viscous goo inside jiggled as he slid it closer. Elly’s exorcism ought to have banished the spirit completely and sent it back to whatever afterlife it had been torn away from. But there was always the chance that whoever else had been acting on the ghost—if there was anyone—might be traceable. Magic left a resonance, sometimes: not quite a fingerprint, more like a flavor. Even if it wouldn’t tell him
who
had done it, he might be able to glean
how
. “I’ll give it a whirl,” he said, replacing the cover. “But first, dinner?”
    “I, uh.” She glanced at the grocery bags and the cookbook, at the pots and pans that had spent so long hanging untouched on their rack that they’d acquired a layer of dust. “I really do need to get into town.”
    He didn’t blame her; he didn’t trust his cooking skills, either. A box of frozen taquitos lay in one of the bags, a testament to his self-doubt.
    It was more than that, though. When they were little, Elly’d choked down plenty of his culinary abominations without complaint. With encouragement, even. Since their reunion, they’d eaten meals together, but always something microwaved, or brought home in take-out cartons, or glopped out of a can and heated in the one pot that wasn’t covered in cobwebs. Those were eaten here, but often with one or both of them studying a book liberated from the Clearwaters’ library while they ate. When they talked, it was academic: about the spells contained between the covers, how Justin’s training was going, mulling over the hierarchy of Ivanov’s
Stregoi
. They didn’t talk about each other. Cavale had a million questions he wanted to ask, but the
how was your day?
that sitcom families asked perfunctorily made her clam up. She rarely physically withdrew, but Cavale could see it happening all the same: the tightness in her eyes, the way she hunched her shoulders to make herself smaller than she already was.
    So he didn’t ask, and she didn’t offer, and he was left without an answer to the one thing he wanted to know the most:
Are you happy here?
    He knew better than to push. This idea of the two of them sitting down to a meal he’d cooked—no matter how it turned out—wasn’t going to fly. Not yet. “All right,” he said. “If it doesn’t suck, I’ll leave it in the fridge. Maybe you can heat up a plate if you’re