Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel Read Online Free

instinct kicking in. There was something written on his forearm, a sigil scrawled in black marker. It looked . . . new. Fresh.
    It wasn’t one Elly recognized, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t just an ill-advised tattoo. “Someone’s tagged you,” she said.
    Another one of those staticky hisses. He clawed at his face, dragging bloody furrows down his cheeks. His thrashing now had nothing to do with Elly; he didn’t so much as swipe at her as he staggered past, hiss-howling in agony.
    But obsidian dust shouldn’t hurt.
    It was a cleanser, a purifier, like all the other tools she’d brought.
    The dust should have stopped him and calmed him, given her time to light the smudge sticks and send him on his way. This . . . You’d have thought she’d hit him with acid.
    Books and games cascaded to the floor as he careened off the shelves. The flickering came more rapidly—some of his flails knocked things over; other times his hands passed through whatever he tried to send flying. The wound in his chest seeped faster, leaving a spoor trail along the stick-on laminate tiles. Elly took up a smudge stick and sparked her lighter. The thick scent of lavender and sage filled the air as the dried herbs caught.
    She picked up the ketchup bottle filled with holy water and crept toward the ghost. He’d stumbled into a corner, near the door that would lead to the bulkhead and outside. If he saw her coming, he paid no heed. Pieces of obsidian dust stuck to his face, held there by his own blood.
    “I’m sorry,” Elly said as she squeezed out a curve of holy water, trapping him against the walls. “I don’t know what’s wrong.” Two brightly colored cereal bowls had been left on an end table, the potato chip crumbs inside the evidence of Cinda’s and Leila’s last afternoon snack. Elly snatched them up and shook them out. She lit the second smudge stick off the first and set them down in the bowls to either side of the ghost’s new prison.
    He slammed himself from one wall to the other and back again. Wisps of smoke drifted off his forearm, where the sigil had gone from ink black to molten red.
    “I grant thee rest,” Elly intoned, her voice steady despite the strange spectacle before her. She squirted another line of holy water and waved the smoke from the smudge sticks toward him. “I grant thee forgiveness. I grant thee closure.”
    He backed into the corner and slid down the wall, leaving a streak of blood like a paint smear.
    “Your debts are paid. Your journey ended.” She held up a piece of white string, snapped it. “What tied you to this earth binds you no longer.”
    He threw his head back and screamed. An actual human scream this time, not the hiss of an untuned radio. When it ended, he turned his arm to show Elly: the sigil was gone.
    “What bound you?” she asked, then thought of the better question: “Who did it?”
    But Elly was good at what she did. Damned good. Even as he held the arm up, he was fading, fading, gone.
    She stood alone in the semitrashed basement in a spreading puddle of holy water, ringed by smoke.
Mission accomplished and all, but I could have used another few seconds. Damn it.
    The creak of the door upstairs. “Elly?”
    “I thought I told you to sit tight.”
    “It got quiet,” said Cinda, ignoring the question. “Is he gone?”
    “Yeah, he is. You can come down now.”
    Cinda gasped when she got to the bottom of the stairs, but not at the state of the room. Instead, she pointed at Elly herself. “You’re . . . That’s . . . That’s a lot of blood. Are you okay?”
    Elly glanced down at herself and saw the mess for the first time. “It’s his, not mine. He got a little, uh. Leaky.”
    Now
Cinda took in the room, including the trail the ghost had left. She paled. “I don’t think I can clean all that up before my mom gets home.”
    “It’ll go away,” said Elly. “It’s ectoplasm.”
    “Like from that movie? With the slime ghost?”
    “Yeah. Well.