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

older man, turned later in life than a lot of the other vampires she’d met, though when you tallied up the years he’d been on the planet compared to the others he was the baby of the lot. It had been jarring at first, watching a man in his late fifties deferring so meekly to people who appeared to be twenty or thirty years his junior.
    She’d gotten past it until he’d started deferring to her, too. That was about when the reality of her place in Ivanov’s crew settled in.
    Most of the vampires who served Ivanov had been turned decades ago. They remembered varying points from Russian history. She’d heard tales of the October Revolution enough times she felt like she’d been there, though she wasn’t sure she believed the woman who claimed to have served Catherine the Great as a girl. Elly’d always assumed Ivanov and Katya were the oldest; if the other woman remembered the latter half of the seventeen hundreds, that would put the other two at well over three hundred years old. For Elly, there were days she was shocked that her twenty-fifth birthday was only a few years away. Trying to imagine centuries upon centuries boggled her.
    A handful of Renfields had commandeered the pool tables. None of them were really playing, at least, not by any rules Elly could figure. The game seemed mostly for show—no one came up to shoot in any particular order; no one seemed to care whether their team was solids or stripes; no one watched when someone
did
stand up to shoot. They were killing time, waiting for orders from their masters. These were the younger ones, closer to Elly’s age, all of them dressed a hair too nicely for a dive bar in Southie: designer jeans ripped just so, tee shirts that had been distressed by machine, not wear. Fancy shoes where the regulars up front wore scuffed work boots. These were the apprentice minions, in a sense, people being trained up to take the place of others as they hit retirement age. Not everyone was rewarded with immortality for a lifetime of good service. In fact, only a handful ever got blooded.
    Elly’d seen the process, once. The image of Val shoving her hand first into her own chest, then into Justin’s, wasn’t the sort of thing you forgot. Not that she’d been frightened by it (though, she admitted, she probably ought to have been)—in truth, she’d watched with almost clinical detachment. Knowing how monsters ticked was part of her job. Sure, Val and Justin had become her friends, but that didn’t change the part where they were monsters, too.
    The baby Renfields paused in their fake game as she approached. The past month had given her a better idea of who was in service to whom, and she could tell who among the
Stregoi
was in the back with Ivanov by the half-dozen sullen faces out here. They didn’t like Elly very much, these bootlickers who saw the new kid getting respect they thought should be theirs. For her part, Elly didn’t care. She was here to do a job, not make nice with Ivanov’s groupies.
    She stopped in the no-man’s-land between the end of the bar and the start of the tables. “Will you go let him know I’m here?”
    “We’re not secretaries.” The one closest to the hallway detached himself from the wall and came to tower over her. He was her age, maybe a year or two older. Elly would have pegged him for a football star if they were back in Edgewood, but here, he was one of Katya’s pets. Ivanov’s right hand liked them solid and chisel-jawed, but she also liked them smart. Which meant this was him showing off for the others, not actually picking a fight.
    Thing was, they couldn’t see her back down or they’d all start copping attitude. Elly might have been shit at most social interactions, but she and Cavale had spent enough time being the shabbily dressed new kids in school for her to recognize
this
particular dance. Only difference between a five-year-old bully and his twenty-five-year-old counterpart was size.
    She stepped in to him, so