Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel by Lauren M. Roy

her hostess gift had been death. She’d been barricaded in the second-floor library with Henry and Helen, listening as the Creeps barreled around the house, making their way to where the humans had hidden. They’d dispatched the first few to make it past their wards, but for Helen Clearwater, whose only experience with the Creeps had been the stories her husband told, it was too much.
    She broke and ran. Henry had followed after her.
    They didn’t make it far before they were driven back into the library.
    When Val and Chaz had come to the house the night after the murder, Chaz had gotten an eyeful of a real crime scene—something he’d never wanted to have. Blood everywhere, books and debris strewn about, ash and ichor from the Jackals they’d managed to take out covering it all like a film.
    Now you could point out where they’d died by the missing sections of carpet, the heavy bleach smell in the doorway, and the places where chemicals had leached the color from the spattered wallpaper.
    It was a terrible thought, and Chaz hated himself a little every time he thought it, but Helen’s last act had probably saved some of the books. The cleaning process wasn’t kind to sturdier materials, like walls and baseboards and flooring; it would wreak unspeakable havoc on books. Chances were, it would have destroyed some of the older tomes Henry had collected, the ones he stored on the shelves far in the back of the room that spanned half the house. Chaz never let himself think too far beyond that, about
what
and
why
, but there it was. Dying just inside the library’s entryway meant Val, Elly, and Cavale (and, he supposed, himself and Justin) had access to all kinds of obscure occult stuff.
    Justin was with him tonight. He’d done the same as he had the first couple times he’d come with Chaz, refusing to look anywhere but straight in front of him until they got to the library—“straight in front of him” coinciding with “the back of Chaz’ head.” There was missing carpet leading deeper into the library, too, but only fifteen feet or so. One of the detectives thought Henry might have dragged himself away from the fighting for some reason, judging from the blood trail. Pulling himself out of the fray to rest by the shelves, then back to where Helen lay, to expire with his wife in his arms.
    Chaz had pored over the books near that spot a hundred times, had brought them back to Val’s house and set them up in the exact order he’d found them, but neither of them had been able to find what the significance might have been. If there even
was
any. Maybe the old man had simply tried getting to the phone to call nine-one-one and realized it wasn’t going to happen. They could speculate for the rest of their lives and never know.
    Justin had set himself down in the far corner, working on a stack of books Chaz had set aside the day before. He’d been quiet the last few minutes, none of the usual
scritch
of pen on notepad as he marked down the books’ conditions and subject matter, or the soft
thunk
as another one went into a box marked
Edgewood
,
Resell
, or
Store
. “Store,” to outsiders, might indicate the book would end up at Night Owls. In truth, those were the ones headed for Val’s.
    “How are you doing over there, man?” Chaz turned around from his own stack to see Justin hunched over a particularly fat tome. It took up most of his lap, making him look like a kid reading an oversized book of fairy tales.
    “This one’s annotated,” Justin said, not looking up.
    “Anything interesting?”
    “Probably only to me.” He tried to hide it as Chaz came over for a closer look, but then he relented. “It’s poetry. John Donne.” He passed the leather-bound edition to Chaz as though he were handing over the Holy Grail.
    Chaz had never had much of a head for poetry, unless you counted the lyrics to eighties hair band songs as such. Tortured artists from the seventeen hundreds just didn’t do it for him.