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

Author:Lauren M. Roy [Roy, Lauren M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

13

SUNNY AND LIA loved Halloween. The first year he met them, Chaz had expressed surprise they weren’t out on the town doing . . . demon-y things the night monsters were supposed to run amok. They’d laughed at him. Sunny’d handed him a mug of hot, bourbon-spiked apple cider and told him the most evil thing they did was slip the shyest trick-or-treaters an extra piece of candy.

His first year with Val, she’d given him all kinds of warnings leading up to the end of October, lessons on what to expect from the supernatural side. The veil between worlds was thin on Halloween, she said, and described any number of weird-ass things she’d witnessed since her turning. Then they’d spent the night at the bookstore, handing out candy to Edgewood kids in their costumes, and gone back to Val’s house after closing to watch slasher flicks.

Chaz had long suspected that the weird shit Val saw on Halloweens past was more about her being turned in the seventies than anything else. Probably drank the blood of someone who’d dropped acid.

The succubi had about the same level of mundane going at the parties he’d been to, but at least theirs involved booze and good music. They held a bash every year, one that had a mandatory costume rule. Anyone who showed up in their everyday clothes claiming they were a banker or a professor or a person who forgot their costume was handed a basket full of accessories: bunny ears, pig noses, fox tails you clipped to the back of your pants. There wasn’t a room downstairs in their house without cobwebs, or orange and black fairy lights, or candles shaped like black cats and ghosts and pumpkins. Lia made a killer blood orange sangria; Sunny spent weeks planning the menu.

The guests were always interesting—Sunny’s colleagues from her practice, Lia’s cohorts from the college’s phys ed department—and the women knew who to introduce to whom, which ones to steer apart, the likeliest candidates to get up and do the Time Warp with them. They were also utterly, completely, human. Val and the ladies, supernatural population: three. Chaz got why they hadn’t ever invited the Stregoi down from Boston. Those guys were dicks. But no other succubi mixing and mingling with the mortals? No low-level demons? Not even someone with vague claims to demon blood six generations back on their mom’s side?

Nope, nope, and nope.

Like he’d done the last couple of years, Chaz had wrangled the schedule so he and Val could cut out of Night Owls early. They were on hand for the little kids, the munchkins whose parents brought them storefront to storefront on Main Street (or, quite often, who gossiped over mulled cider in Hill O’Beans while their children were set free to swarm the clerks). After nine thirty, though, the younger kids had been herded home to collapse into sugar-crash sleep. By ten, the teens who showed up with pillowcases and hastily done costumes had come and gone.

By ten thirty, the store was deserted.

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