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

his new strength meant he had to hold back when she trained him, but he was no match for Val, who’d been around a few decades. Maybe if she got to see Theo in action, she could formulate a theory on how quickly their powers ramped up with age.
    Theo shook his head. “Nah, not like that. I can do a couple things, but next to her, my training wheels are still on. Anyway, it’d be rude to make you get there by yourself.” He smiled. “Unless you don’t want the company?”
    “Company’s fine,” she said, though her reasons were more about intel-gathering than friend-making. Just because he was being nicer than the Renfields
now
didn’t mean it would last.
    It was a fifteen-minute walk from the bar to the park. They could have taken Elly’s car, but this let them get a better lay of the land. That, and at this time of night, finding a spot near Ivanov’s again after would be a pain in the ass.
    Southie’s streets were familiar to Elly by now, although few of the patrols she’d been sent on since she’d been hired had yielded even a little trouble. Ivanov had brought her on board in case the Creeps started trouble in Boston. There’d been a few nests of them, clustered together like rats in places they could live unnoticed, but since the night they’d attacked Night Owls, they’d gone
extremely
unnoticed. As in vanished completely, which Elly didn’t believe for a second.
    Ivanov had also wanted Elly as a bargaining chip, should the Brotherhood ever give the
Stregoi
trouble, but they hadn’t been around, either. Not that she’d know any of them on sight—the only people from the Brotherhood she knew were dead. Father Value had never even told her about its existence, and Henry Clearwater had only enough time to give her the basics before the Creeps killed him. She could ask Val, maybe, but Elly had the sense asking Val about her time as a Hunter would go over about as well as asking Cavale anything about his years with Father Value.
    Tonight was the first time something might actually
happen
, and while wishing for confrontation was generally a bad idea, Elly couldn’t help but hope for some fisticuffs. Fighting the ghost in Cinda’s house that afternoon had gotten her blood up.
    They passed a boarded-up storefront. Graffiti covered every inch of the plywood, most of it tags from local street artists or wobbly attempts at genitalia. It was the
Stregoi
symbol that caught Elly’s eye, and the fresh ogham script that had been scrawled over it. “Wait,” she said. Her first week on the job, Katya had provided her with a phone. Elly didn’t love how it tethered her to the
Stregoi
, but it came in handy now. She couldn’t read ogham script, but Cavale would know what it said. She snapped a picture, the flash making the drips of red spray paint look even more like blood. “Okay, let’s go.”
    “They keep doing that,” said Theo. “We thought it was kids, you know? Then, a couple months ago, these little shits started showing themselves. Picked a few fights, flashed their fangs.”
    “What happened to them?”
    “They got the shit kicked out of them. Went running home to Mama.”
    “Do you we know who Mama is? Where she sleeps?” They were well out of the gentrified section now, headed into an older part of Southie. The cars lining the streets here were older models, in varying degrees of repair. The houses were packed tightly together, some of them seemingly held up only by the buildings to either side. It was the kind of neighborhood the people living in the million-dollar condos would wrinkle their noses at. Or would buy out from under the residents, knock down their old homes, and price them out of the new ones.
    “No to both of those. My maker thinks they have to be close, though. Too many of them appearing too fast. Someone’s churning out newbies quicker than you can breed rabbits.”
    “Your maker. Was that the blond woman? Dunyasha?”
    Theo winced. “Yeah. But you don’t want to call