Night Owls

25

CHAZ WOKE UP feeling like he’d been kicked in the head. Come to think of it, maybe he had been. He remembered driving down Val’s street, planning to roll through the stop sign then gun it onto the main road, when his headlights picked a person out of the early evening gloom. He’d jammed on the brakes, swearing. Then he’d seen the face peering in his window.

Bitch.

The last thing he could recall was her yanking him out of the car by his left arm. When he moved it now, the muscles twinged. Now I know how taffy feels after it’s been pulled.

He sat up to squint at his surroundings. A bolt of pain shot through his skull as he did so, a headache settling in on its heels. Do I have a concussion? Shit. He peeled his eyes open again, trying not to look at the sunlight coming in around the raggedy, yellowed window shade.

The room was mostly bare. A bed with a lumpy, stained mattress took up one corner. Even with the crick in his neck and general achiness from spending the night on the floor, he was glad they hadn’t deposited him on the bed. God only knew how many different kinds of bugs were living in it. Against the wall beside the door were the busted-up remnants of a dresser. He couldn’t be certain that someone had been thrown into it—no, through it—but there was a rust-colored dent in the wall behind it at about head height.

Dust covered the floorboards. When Chaz brushed some away with the side of his hand, he uncovered an unpleasant-looking stain. Whether it was blood or Jackal ichor, he didn’t know. Still, he didn’t feel like sitting in a puddle of it anymore, no matter how old it was.

He got creakily to his feet, taking longer to stand up than an arthritic old man. The headache pulsed a warning at his being completely upright. He closed his eyes again and just stood there, taking slow, deep breaths until the pounding eased a bit. He could smell dust and old paint, stale bacon grease and body odor. There was the musty smell of a house that’s been shut up for a while, and beneath it, something animal and rancid, like the rodents had moved in and made themselves at home while the owners were away.

Not rodents. Jackals.

Val might have been able to pick up their rotten meat smell a mile away, but Chaz had learned they exuded it when you were close to them, too. Rotten meat and pencil shavings, that was, and he could smell both.

This is their nest, then. I’ll have a fuck of a time getting out. Unless. He shuffled over to the window, flinging an arm across his eyes as he lifted the shade. When he was relatively certain he could open his eyes without the brightness stabbing into his brain, he peeked.

Damn.

Crudely welded bars crisscrossed the window frame. From what he could see, even if he could pry them off, it was a hell of a drop to the ground. He was three stories up with no convenient trees or garage roofs for him to drop down onto.

But . . . it was daylight. It had to be nine, maybe ten o’clock. If there had been any Jackals standing guard last night, they were down for the count. He’d be like Sylvester in one of those old cartoons, tiptoeing past the sleeping, snoring bulldog.

Chaz grinned as he crossed the room to try the handle of the rickety-looking door. Even if they had him locked in, he could probably kick it open or see if it would give way with a few good shoulder blows. If they slept anything like Val did during the day, you could set a bomb off beside them and they wouldn’t notice.

Still, better to be armed. He picked through the rubble that had been a dresser and found a good two-foot-long section he could use as a bat if need be. The end was pointed, but probably not sharp enough to use as a stake. Plus, it wasn’t very likely the dresser had been made from rowan wood. Even if he could impale a Jackal with it, he’d probably only piss it off.

To his surprise, the doorknob turned easily. The hinges groaned as he opened the door enough to peek out into the hallway. Across from him was another closed door. To his left were more bedrooms. To the right he could see the newel post at the top of the stairs. Right. Down and out, here we go. One slow step at a time, he slipped out of the room, shifting his weight from one foot to the other only when he was sure the floor wouldn’t creak beneath him. Halfway there, and no interruptions. Three-quarters and still safe.

Then, as he neared the stairs, a toilet flushed behind the door to his right. Chaz scuttled away, so his back was against the wall opposite. He didn’t have time to run back to the bedroom, and if he broke for the stairs he risked being shoved down them. He held his makeshift stave up like Babe Ruth about to swing for the fences and waited for the door to open.

The kid came out, zipping his fly and adjusting his package. He was tall and scraggly looking, the kind of chunky where you couldn’t tell if it was fat or muscle underneath until either you hit him or he hit you. His Slayer tee shirt and jeans had both been black, once upon a time, but now they were a dingy grey. His eyes were bright blue and wide with surprise.

They’re not yellow. This dude’s not a Jackal. He almost checked his swing until he realized, Jackal or not, Slayer here had been taking a piss three doors down from where Chaz had been shut up. Which meant he was in on it, somehow.

Fuck this guy.

The stave made a satisfying low whoosh as it arced at Slayer’s head, but unfortunately for Chaz, the other man got his hand off his junk fast enough to bring his arm up and block the blow. His forearm took the impact, then he twisted his hand around and got a grip on it, wrenching the stave out of Chaz’ grasp. He tossed it aside and sent it skittering down the hall. Then, bellowing, he charged forward.

Yeah, there was muscle under the flab.

Chaz hit the wall with a dull thud and felt the breath whuff out of his lungs. The headache flared again, reminding him that yes, it was still there, matter of fact, have some stars to go with that head crack. Getting oxygen back was a struggle, made all the harder by Slayer keeping him pinned in place with that thick forearm against his chest. Over his agonized air sucking, Chaz heard footsteps pounding up the stairs. Slayer was holding a shouted conversation with someone, but Chaz figured it was more important to devote his energy to staying conscious than anything else.

The stars receded, and by the time he was able to draw a shaky kind of breath, Slayer had been joined by two others: a skinny girl of seventeen or so, wearing a flannel shirt about six sizes too big, and an Irish-looking kid whose nose crooked to the right, probably the product of several bar fights. All three of them watched him, waiting for him to compose himself. The girl looked bored, picking at a loose thread on her shirt. The Irish kid kept his eyes on Chaz’ hands, as if he expected him to pull a knife or a gun out of thin air. Slayer reminded Chaz of his junior high guidance counselor—the kind of person who could ask you a question and sit in unnerving silence waiting for an answer. And apparently the kind who wasn’t afraid to slam kids into lockers when they got out of line.

Just like Mr. Baker.

Slayer spoke first, his voice surprisingly gentle for such a bruiser. “If I let you go, can you stand?”

Chaz bobbed his head, though he wasn’t a hundred percent sure he could actually stay standing. His head throbbed like some kind of gremlin had been shoved inside and decided it wanted out.

“More importantly, if I let you go, will you promise not to try anything stupid?”

“Define stupid.”

Slayer sighed. “If you’re going to hit any of us, or try to run, you’re gonna be in a world of hurt. I’d rather you be reasonable about this.”

Reasonable? “Fuck you, buddy. Your people kidnapped me, and you’re helping them keep me here. You want me to be reasonable? Suck my dick.” He wished he could muster up the spit for a good bit of dramatic punctuation, but his mouth was dry. The last thing he could remember drinking had been a can of soda on the way to Val’s last night.

“We can always tie you to the bed in there until sunset. Doesn’t matter to me, really. You guys?” His companions shook their heads. “Or we can be nice about it. Beth can make some breakfast for you, and Sean and I will help you get down the stairs. How’s that sound instead?”

Chaz thought about the stained mattress back in the other room. He could risk bedbugs or be cooperative and maybe get another chance at escaping. His stomach growled, making the decision for him. “Okay, fine. I’ll behave.” He wobbled a moment when Slayer eased him back to the ground, but he didn’t keel over.

Beth headed down ahead of them. When she reached the first landing, Slayer and Sean each took one of Chaz’ elbows and guided him along. He thought about trying to shrug them off and make a break for it, but now that he was moving at a normal clip, wooziness and nausea were setting in. He’d be lucky to make it to the kitchen without hurling.

That, and when Sean had moved forward to take hold of him, Chaz had caught a glimpse of the gun tucked into his waistband. Useful to know for later, maybe, when he wasn’t seeing double.

The good news was, he made it all the way downstairs without puking on anyone’s shoes. Once they lowered him onto a chair, his stomach stopped flip-flopping and went back to growling. The kitchen wasn’t any improvement on the rest of the place: paint peeled from the cabinets, water stains trailed down the walls, a film of grease covered everything in the room, and Chaz could smell the mold rotting out the floor beneath the sink.

“Breakfast” turned out to be toast and cereal. The bread was stale, the butter just shy of rancid. He choked that down, then turned to the Lucky Charms Beth had set in front of him. Good news: they were in one of those individual-serving cups, sealed away from the squalor in this place. Bad news: he didn’t have the option of eating them dry. Beth had opened them for him and drowned them in reconstituted milk. It might not have been so bad if the tap water she’d used to mix it didn’t taste like rust.

Still, it was food, and he’d probably—probably—eaten worse in his college days. He didn’t know how long he’d be here if he didn’t get a chance to attempt an escape, so it seemed prudent to eat now and build up some strength.

Slayer, whose name it turned out was Tom, produced a bottle of aspirin. “I’m sorry about knocking you against the wall up there, man,” he said. “Just, you know. You were kind of trying to take my head off with a—what was that? A bed slat?”

“Part of a dresser.” Chaz shook three pills out into his palm, thought about it, then added a fourth. He knocked them back with a swallow of rusty water from his glass. He tried finding a spot that didn’t have grimy fingerprints on it, but had to settle for wiping the lip with his sleeve and praying no one had anything contagious. “So, uh.” He looked around. Beth slouched against the counter. Her cigarette more interesting than her hostage. Sean had disappeared off into another part of the house as soon as he realized Chaz wasn’t going to go all secret badass on them. “I guess this is the nest?”

Slayer—Tom, gotta remember since I seem to be my own hostage negotiator—nodded. “It is for now.”

“It’s awfully bright for . . . oh. There we go.” He pointed to a door next to the one they’d brought him through. Someone had scrawled “Do Not Open” on the back of a flyer and tacked it up there. “I guess there’s something nasty in the basement, huh?”

“A lot of something nasties.”

He heard the threat behind it, but didn’t react. A basement full of Jackals would only be a problem when night fell. He’d revisit it in six or seven hours if he was still here. For now, Tom, Beth, and Sean were his main concerns. “So what keeps you guys here?”

Tom frowned, puzzled. “How do you mean?”

“I mean, look around.” Chaz waved his hand around the dirty kitchen. “This place is falling apart. I’m guessing you scrape together whatever you can to feed yourselves, or maybe you have to live off whatever’s in their victims’ wallets. How is this any kind of life?”

Up until now Beth had been staring off into space, so zoned out Chaz wondered what she was on. At his question she finally came alive. And she was pissed. She launched herself away from the counter to come stick a finger in his face. Dirt was caked under her nail; the edges of it were ragged, bitten. “They’re going to make us what they are! We would’ve been like them two days ago, if it weren’t for you and your people stealing it from us.”

Chaz backed up, not wanting to get nicked by those filthy nails. “Why the hell would you want to be like them? Kiddo, from what I understand, they’re bottom-feeders. You turn into one of them, and you’re going to be eating other people for the rest of your life.”

“Says the guy who fetches and carries for a vampire.”

“Okay. Uh. Point. But all I mean is, you can do better than this. For yourselves.” He didn’t know how, exactly, and wasn’t about to suggest they go throw themselves on the mercy of the Boston vampires. Ivanov and Katya might wear fancy clothes and arrive in fancy cars, but all that money and they were just as big a bunch of assholes as the Jackals.

“Do better? Fuck you. The world’s been shitting on me—on all of us—for long enough. We’re going to be part of something bigger. Stronger. A family.”

“You don’t . . . You don’t have a family to go back to? A human one?”

Beth spat in his cereal. Bull’s-eye. So much for breakfast. “Fuck them, too. These guys accept us for who we are. They need us, and we need them.” Her voice took on the slightest singsong at this point, like something she’d learned by heart and recited often. The glaze crept back into her eyes.

It’s like Val’s Command. He glanced at Slayer-Tom, and saw the same look on his face. They’ve got these kids convinced it’ll actually get better for them. Those motherfuckers.

Beth was still talking. “We’ll live forever, and we can do anything we want. All we have to do is be patient a little longer. And be loyal. Like good packmates should be.” She drew breath to say something else, but a moan from another room distracted her, snapped her out of it.

“Is someone hurt?” From the glare she threw his way, he thought maybe he’d done some damage on his way in last night, but he didn’t feel like he’d been in a fight. Just like he’d been dragged behind a stampeding elephant.

Beth didn’t answer him. She spun away and strode out of the room, swiping the aspirin bottle and a pair of spoons on her way.

Tom watched her go. He didn’t resume the conversation, and Chaz got the sense that it would be bad form to keep prodding.

So the Jackals have promised to turn them, and Justin stymied that one when he read the book. Or Elly and Father Whatever fucked it up when they stole it. Either way, same thing. Val had said they were carrion creatures, picking off the low and weak, scavenging and stealing. This house, even, probably belonged to someone else. These kids and the Jackals had to be squatters. And no matter what the kids believed, they were still the Jackals’ victims. It was just a different kind of preying going on here.

Tom’s gaze kept cutting toward the door. The moaning grew louder, punctuated by weak, hitching cries.

Chaz kept his voice low, trying not to provoke the big man. “If you want to go check on whoever that is. I’ll come with you and keep my mouth shut. I won’t . . .” He sighed. “I won’t try to run.”

It was a stupid offer. He knew it. But Tom was a kid who was clearly worrying about his friend. Chaz sympathized with that. Out of all of them, in fact, Tom seemed the most normal, or at least not as fucked-up as the others. Chaz tucked that away, too. Maybe he could use it.

Tom took his measure for another minute. “Okay. Come on, hands where I can see them and all that.”

“Yeah, I’ve watched cop shows, too. I know the drill.”

They headed deeper into the house. Beyond the kitchen, a short hallway led to what might once have been the dining room. The table was missing, but the chairs remained. The last room was the family room. It had been converted into a cramped, filthy infirmary.

The smell hit Chaz like he’d walked face-first into a wall: burnt flesh, blood, ash. Four people lay on mattresses that had been dragged out of bedrooms. The fifth was sprawled out on a table, surrounded by candles. As Chaz got closer, he realized this was the missing dining room table. They’d painted sigils all over it, surrounding the girl who lay atop it. Her skin was an alarming shade of red.

Beth was tending to one of the figures on the floor. She sprang to her feet as Chaz and Tom entered, throwing herself between Chaz and the girl on the table. “Don’t you touch her! Don’t you touch anything.”

Chaz held up his hands and backed off a step, but he couldn’t stifle the question. “The fuck’s going on in here?” He realized that, as bad as the girl on the table looked, the burnt-flesh smell wasn’t coming from her.

That particular stench belonged to the four on the floor, their faces marred like someone had splashed them with acid. The skin had boiled and bubbled; in places, the wounds were still weeping through the salve Beth had been applying.

Chaz struggled for something to say, but he could only repeat his first question: “The fuck?”

“Those ones are your friends’ fault,” said Beth. She hadn’t moved away from the girl on the table. “They used holy water last night.”

“I don’t understand. These are humans, not Jackals. Holy water shouldn’t hurt them.” He left off the And what the fuck were they doing attacking my friends, anyway? This wasn’t the time for a round of Serves You Right.

“They weren’t there,” she said, as if it were obvious. “They take on the wounds so the pack can keep fighting.”

He gaped. “You’re saying the Jackals get hit and these poor sons of bitches get their faces burnt off. Do I have that right?”

“They’ll be okay,” said Beth. “Marian will make them better.”

“Who’s Marian?”

“A friend. She fixes people.” She gestured to the girl on the table. “It doesn’t hurt us as bad as it hurts them. Caleb would burn up if he walked in the sun without a link to Ashley.” A look passed between her and Tom, one Chaz couldn’t decipher. Beth stepped to the side. “You can look,” she said. “But if you try to touch the runes, I’ll cut your fingers off.” She pulled a jackknife from her pocket and folded out the blade. It was pockmarked with rust. If she did go to hacking at his fingers, it’d take several chops, and he’d probably get tetanus.

“Nooooot going to risk that, thanks.” He peered at the runework from a good five feet away, well out of his reach. The markings were nothing like the circle Cavale had made for Justin yesterday, though Chaz thought he recognized the same style of eye-bending writing from the book. At last he stepped back, joining Tom back near the door. “So tell me something. You guys get the book back from my friends, let’s say. That will let you guys become Jackals, too?”

Beth paused in the middle of crushing up aspirin between her spoons. “Yes?”

“What about these five? Do they get to be Jackals?”

“Everyone who’s loyal does. They promised us.”

“Hmm.” Chaz scratched his chin. “So who will do the pain bearing for you guys? Or for the current pack?”

“What are you talking about?” She looked to Tom for help, but he was intent on Chaz, his expression troubled.

“I’m saying, if everyone in this house becomes a Jackal, there won’t be any more humans to take on injuries when you fight. No more going outside during the day while someone else lies here looking like they fell asleep at the beach in the middle of July.”

“There will be others. We’ll find people willing to serve.” She made it sound like it was a prestigious role.

“For what? What will you offer them? A lifetime supply of powdered milk? And who’d even pick this life? You’d have to have it pretty shitty to call this living . . . Oh.” There went his tongue again, full steam ahead of his brain.

These kids looked hungry. Not just haven’t-had-a-good-meal-in-a-month hungry, but broken down and weary, kicked in the teeth by life. Often. He thought about what Beth had said in the kitchen, about the world shitting on them. Maybe this was the good life, compared to whatever they’d been through before the Jackals found them. “Um,” he said, backpedaling furiously. “Do I get to meet this Marian?”

Sean came in just in time to hear the question. He dumped an armload of tattered blankets near Beth before turning to Chaz. “Maybe. If we don’t have to shoot you.” He paused, considering, and a sly, eager grin broke out. “Actually, wait. Probably definitely if we have to shoot you. Want to make a run for it?”