Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

Clearwaters’ deaths as an excuse, but there weren’t many other ways to keep him matriculated without exposing his newfound immortality. Justin had asked about practicing Command with them, but she’d shot that one down. She suspected he was too newly made for the ability—somewhere between hypnotic suggestion and flat-out mind control—to have any real effect, but if she was wrong, the last thing any of them needed was him accidentally turning his professors’ brains to mush over the phone.
    They’d moved most of his things from his dorm room to Val’s house, where he’d taken over one of her spare bedrooms. He hadn’t quite made himself at home yet, insisting he’d figure something out, get an apartment of his own as soon as he could. Val found it unlikely unless he hit the lottery, but it was sweet that he didn’t want her to think he was freeloading off her.
    “Morning. Uh. Evening,” he said, shuffling into the kitchen. He opened the fridge and stared into it ponderously: an old habit dying hard. His choices amounted to lamb’s blood, lamb’s blood, or lamb’s blood, since Chaz’ leftover meatball sub wasn’t something Justin could digest anymore. He opted for the lamb’s blood, pouring it from its plastic deli tub into a pint glass. He made a face as he drank it down, and Val couldn’t blame him. Cold, dead blood would get you through, but that didn’t mean it was enjoyable.
Like cram
, he’d said to Elly once, before he gave up trying to get her to read Tolkien.
    “How’d you sleep?”
    Justin eyed her over his breakfast. “If I say ‘like the dead,’ are you going to throw something at me?”
    Val groaned. “No, but I’ll tell Chaz he’s being a terrible influence on you.”
    “Then I won’t get him in trouble. I slept fine. No dreams, no . . . anything, really. I closed my eyes when the sun came up, and next thing I knew I was awake sometime after it went down. That’s normal, right? I mean, for us?”
    Val resisted the urge to pat his hand. “Yeah, it is. Most of us sleep like that. I can probably count on one hand the times I’ve dreamed since I was turned.” She didn’t know why that was, what changed between life and death that would affect the capacity to dream. Of the vampires Val had met, only a few of them dreamed regularly, and those ones . . . they were a little fucked-up, as Chaz would say.
    He drained the rest of his glass in one long, grimacing gulp and asked, “What’s the plan for tonight?”
    “Get your running shoes on,” she said. “We’re going out.”
    Elly was in charge of most of Justin’s training—he’d asked Elly specifically to teach him to Hunt: how to track down the Jackals, how to kill them, how to survive the fight. She’d taken the request seriously. A couple nights a week, she would lead Justin out into the abandoned streets that made up half of Crow’s Neck, run him through drills, and teach him what she knew about the Creeps, as she and Cavale called the Jackals.
    But Elly could only show him how to do things at human speed. There were things he needed to know about being a vampire, too, and since Val was his maker, it fell to her to teach him.
    It wasn’t like she was friends with many other bloodsuckers, as a rule.
    They walked along Edgewood’s darkened streets, leaves crunching under their feet. It was too early in the evening for them to run at full speed out here—too many students walking home from classes, too many cars cruising past. They could have run through backyards and woods and side streets to get where they were going, but Val took the opportunity to test Justin’s other senses instead. She asked him to sniff the air and tell her what he smelled. They strolled behind a group of Delta Mus, and Justin relayed their conversation to Val in hushed tones. They continued on this way past the college, out toward Edgewood’s outskirts, until they reached the graveyard.
    It wasn’t the sprawling modern cemetery the