Home Improvement: Undead Edition

Gray PATRICIA BRIGGS

It was raining, a desultory, reluctant angry rain forced unwillingly from the gray clouds overhead. It dribbled with the fiendish rhythm of a Chinese water torture. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Elyna’s windshield wipers squeaked until she turned them off. But the drops still came down to obscure her sight. From old habit, she pulled into the space that had been hers.

She’d first parked there a couple of times because the space had been open. When she’d moved in with Jack, a lifetime ago, it was seldom open again because her car was in it. After a while if it wasn’t available for her little Ford, she’d curse the visitor who’d stolen it and find some other, less convenient parking place. When that happened, she’d go out to check before bedtime to see if it was open. If it was, she’d repark her car where it would be happy.

“Cars just are, darlin’,” Jack would tell her with a grin as he escorted her out of the apartment to keep watch as she moved the Ford. “They aren’t happy or sad.”

Jack had been in love with her, though, and was patient with her little ways. He’d loved her and she’d loved him in that wholehearted eager fashion that only the young and innocent have—secure in the knowledge that there was nothing so terrible it could tear them apart. Having successfully overcome her Polish and his Irish parents’ objections to their match had only given her more confidence.

She was less innocent now.

Much, much less innocent.

Parking in that old spot had been habit, but it sat in her belly like a meal too cold. This was a bad idea. She knew it, but she couldn’t give it up without trying to mend what she had . . . lost was the wrong word. Destroyed might have been a more apt one.

She rubbed her cold arms with colder hands, then turned off the motor. Without its warm hum, it was very quiet in the car.

She got out at last, locked the doors with the key fob, and left her car in the parking place that probably belonged to someone else now. Blinking back the aimless raindrops, she tromped through the slush from what must have been last week’s snow on the sidewalk.

Only then did she look at the gray stone apartment building ahead. Did they still call it an apartment building when all of the apartments were being sold as condominiums?

It wasn’t a particularly large building, three floors, six apartments, surrounded by a small front parklike area that had always managed to insert a little color in the summer without requiring maintenance or inviting anyone to linger. This evening, with winter still reigning despite the rain that fell instead of snow, there was no color to be had.

The cut granite edges of the steps were familiar and alien at the same time, worn in a way they hadn’t been when this had been their home—and that strangeness hurt.

Next to the door, blown into the corner of the building, lay a little Valentine’s Day card with a heart on it. The ink had run, fading out the BE MINE to a grayish semidecipherable mush. Only the name Jack scribed in black crayon was still clear. It was both irony and a sign, she thought, but she didn’t know if a child’s wet card was a good portent or not.

She looked up to the topmost windows with longing eyes and murmured, “Be mine, Jack?”

She rang the bell on the side of the door, a new plastic button surrounded by stainless steel, and a buzz released the door lock. The real estate agent must have beaten her here.

She wiped her tennis shoes off on the mat in front of the door and stepped into a small foyer. At first glance, she thought the room hadn’t changed at all. Then she realized that the names written in Sharpie below the numbers on the box were different from the names she had known, and the wooden handrail next to the stairs had been replaced with the same polished steel as the doorbell.

“Our place, Elyna, just think of it!” Jack’s voice rang in sudden memory, full of eagerness and life.

The wooden handrail had had a notch in it from when they’d hit it, she and Jack, with the sharp edge of her metal typist desk, carrying it up to their new home. She hadn’t realized she had been looking forward to seeing that stupid notch until it wasn’t there.

She looked down and saw that the new handrail was dented a little, too. She knew better than to do something like that; she had better control. But that notch had been a memory of laughter and . . . poor Jack had hated that desk, its industrial ugliness an affront to his artistic eye. Still, he’d helped her carry it all the way up the stairs to their third-floor apartment.

She’d paid him back, on top of the desk wearing (at least at first) a cream-colored lace teddy her mother had given her in a small, tastefully wrapped package with instructions to open it in private. Jack hadn’t minded the desk so much after that.

And those kinds of thoughts weren’t going to help Elyna tonight.

She continued up the stairs, trailing her hand over the new metal handrail, hard-won control keeping her hands open and light as they skimmed over the cold surface. On the third floor the real estate agent awaited her in a peacoat with damp shoulders. He had a closed rain-dampened umbrella in one hand.

“Ms. Gray,” he said, taking a step forward and reaching out with his free hand. “I’m Aubrey Tailor.”

“Yes,” she said, shaking his hand gravely. “Thank you for making time to meet me here. When I saw the ad, I just knew that this was the place.”

“You’re cold,” he said, sounding concerned. Delicately built and pretty, she tended to arouse protective instincts in some men. “There’s no heat in the condo right now.”

“It is February in Chicago,” Elyna told him. “Don’t worry, my hands are always a little cold.”

“Cold hands, warm heart,” he said, then flushed, because it was a little too personal when addressed to a single woman who was his client. He shook his head and gave her a sheepish smile. “At least that’s what my mother always said.”

“Mine, too,” she agreed. She liked him better for losing the slick salesman front—which might have been his intention all along. He let her go into the apartment first, closing the door between them. He’d wait outside, he’d told her, while she looked her fill.

Here was change that made that handrail pale in comparison.

The old oak floors Elyna had polished and cursed, because keeping them looking good was an ongoing war, were scarred and bedecked with stains that she hadn’t put on them. Her lips twisted in a snarl that made her grateful that the real estate agent had stayed outside.

Vampires are territorial and this was her home, the home of her heart.

One of the pretty leaded-glass windows that looked out on the street had been replaced with plain glass framed in white vinyl, giving the living room a lopsided look. Someone had started to tear down the plastered walls—messy work that had stopped about halfway. A piece of wallpaper showed where someone had broken through layers and layers of paper, plaster, and paint to a familiar scrap.

She pulled the chunk of plaster displaying that paper off the wall and sat down on the floor with the plaster in her lap. Was it her imagination or was there a rusty stain on the paper?

“Jack?” she said plaintively. “Jack?”

But, other than the normal sounds of a building with six apartments . . . condos . . . in it, five of them occupied, she heard nothing. She looked at the rest of the apartment—most of which she could see from where she sat—the gutted kitchen without the white cabinets, just odd-colored spots on the walls to show where they used to be. Bare pipes stuck out of the floor where the sink should have been, and wires dripped from the ceilings where once lights had illuminated her life.

Unable to look anymore, she put her forehead on her knees.

After a while she said, “Oh, Jack.” Then she took a deep breath and worked at getting herself put back into some kind of public-ready shape. She’d fed before she drove over, but emotional distress makes the Hunger worse, and her teeth ached and her nose insisted on remembering how good Mr. Aubrey Tailor had smelled when he’d blushed.

Something made a sighing noise in the empty apartment and she jerked her head up, all thoughts of hunger put aside. But nothing moved and there were no more sounds.

What had she expected? Time hadn’t stopped for her, why would it have stopped for this apartment? Since seeing that first newspaper article about it, she’d done her research. She’d walked in here knowing that the stripping of the old had already been begun, awaiting replacement by the new. The in-progress remodel hadn’t even bothered her until she saw it with her own eyes.

What was she doing here? The past was the past. She should strip it away just as the old plaster had been stripped from the living room wall. She should wash herself clean.

Outside, the rain slid down the windowpanes.

WHEN SHE HAD the vampire within tamped down until it would take another vampire to see what she was, she opened the apartment door.

“As you can see,” the real estate agent said heartily—without looking at her—“it won’t take much to get it ready to become whatever you’d like. It’s good solid construction, built in 1911. You can put new flooring in, or strip the oak. It’s three-quarter-inch oak; you don’t see that in new construction. My client’s price is very good.”

“You had it sold twice this year,” Elyna said, keeping the anxiety and need out of her voice. She had money. Enough. But not so much that bargaining wouldn’t be a help.

“Ah.” He looked disconcerted. No one expected someone who looked as young and frivolous as she did to have half a brain. He cleared his throat. “Yes. Twice.”

“They both backed out before the papers were signed.”

He frowned at her. “I thought you didn’t have your own agent?”

“I took the downstairs neighbor, Josh, out to dinner yesterday.” He was a nice man about ten years older than she looked. She’d treated him, despite his argument. It had been only fair that she pay for his dinner since she’d intended he should serve as hers afterward. He’d not remember the dinner clearly or what they’d discussed. Nor would he see that it was a problem that he didn’t.

Elyna’s Mistress had had a talent for beguilement. She could have given him a whole set of memories clearer than what had actually happened. Elyna, whose talents lay in other places, made use of the more common vampire ability to cloud minds and calm potential meals.

“I see.” Elyna could tell from Aubrey’s tone that he knew the story that Josh had related to her.

Even so, she laid it out for him. “He told me that the man who bought the building to turn it into condos stayed in this apartment and fixed the others, one at a time. He finished the one over there”—she tipped her head toward the door to the other third-floor apartment—“moved in and started on this one. Only odd things started happening. First it was tools and small stuff disappearing. Then”—as the destruction increased—“it was perfectly stable ladders falling over with people on them. Sent an electrical contractor to the hospital with that one. Saws that turned themselves on at the worst possible time—they managed to reattach that man’s finger, Josh said. Chicago is a big city, but contractors do talk to each other. He couldn’t get a crew in here to work the place.” Elyna gave him a big friendly smile. “Some of that I already knew. I read the article in the neighborhood paper before I called you.” That article was why she had called him.

She could see him reevaluate her. Was she a kook who wanted a haunted house? Or was she just looking for a real bargain?

“I’m older than I look,” she told him, to help him make up his mind. “And I’m not a fool. Haunted or not, anyone looking at this apartment is going to start by getting appraisals from contractors. You haven’t had an offer on this place in six months.”

“A lot of bad luck doesn’t a haunted place make,” he said heartily, taking the bait. “All it takes is a few careless people. The man who lived here before my client, lived here for twenty years and never saw any ghost. I have his phone number and you can talk to him.”

“It doesn’t matter if I’m convinced it’s not haunted,” she told him. “It matters what the contractors think.”

He looked grim.

“I’m willing to make an offer,” she said. “But I’m going to have to pay premium prices to get anyone in to do the work, and that affects my bottom line.”

And they got down to business. Aubrey had the paperwork for the offer with him. They took care of signatures, she fed from him, and then both of them went their separate ways in the night. Aubrey, with a new affection for Elyna, would be determined to make a good bargain for her regardless of the effect it might have on his commission. She felt guilty—a little—but not as much as she would have if he hadn’t tried to take advantage of her supposed ignorance.

ELYNA’S PHONE RANG while she was in the hotel shower. She answered it with her hair dripping onto the thick green carpeting. Only after she answered did she remember that she wouldn’t be punished for not answering the phone right away anymore.

“Elyna,” said Sean, one of the vampires who’d belonged to Corona with her. Without waiting for her greeting, he continued, “You are being foolish. There are plenty of places without seethes where you could settle. Colbert doesn’t play nicely with others and you won’t be able to hide from him forever.”

Pierre Colbert was the Master of Chicago, and a nasty piece of business he was. He’d driven the Mistress and what he’d left of her seethe out of Chicago about thirty years ago. Elyna had met him only once, and that was enough. He wouldn’t bother driving her out. He’d just destroy her—if he noticed she was in his territory.

“Elyna,” coaxed Sean’s voice in her ear. “Come back to Madison. Take your rightful place here.”

Never. That much Elyna was certain of. Sean had been her lover sometimes—two frightened people finding what solace they could. Usually they’d been friends, too, and more often allies. But Elyna wasn’t strong enough to hold the seethe—and Sean knew it. If she went back, he’d kill her to establish his power. Or maybe he was working for someone else, someone more powerful: There were several that came to mind.

“What of Sybil?” Elyna asked him. Sybil wouldn’t need to kill Elyna to take power, but she’d enjoy doing it.

“Sybil’s been dealt with,” Sean said with considerable satisfaction.

“Good,” Elyna said, meaning it. If Corona had been brutal, Sybil, her lieutenant, was fiendish.

Sybil had enjoyed hurting others: vampires or regular people, she didn’t care. She had a special hatred of men, and Sean had suffered under her hand as much as any in the seethe except maybe Fitz. Fitz was ash and gone, but he’d provided Sybil with months of entertainment. “That’s good. With her gone, Brad or Chris can take over as Master.”

“Where are you staying?” said Sean.

Elyna sighed, making sure he heard it. He was being too obvious. Ah, the joys of vampire politics. No one even made an attempt to hide the bodies.

“I’m not really as dumb as I look,” she told him gently. “I would have thought that you, of all the seethe, would know that.”

“Colbert will find you,” he told her. “That’s his talent, you know, finding vampires when he wants them. You’ll be dead anyway and we’ll be in the middle of a fucking civil war—”

She ended the call while he was speaking—answering rudeness with rudeness. She didn’t approve of swearing. Or prolonging conversations with stupid people. She hadn’t thought Sean was one of the stupid people, and it hurt.

She walked over to the mirror on the bathroom door and stared. Did she really look so gullible and helpless? She blinked at herself a few times. She could admit she looked harmless, but surely not stupid.

Colbert could find vampires, any vampire. She’d known that when she’d come here.

Still staring at herself, Elyna flexed her hands, then fisted them. All vampires had talents of one sort or another. There were some magics that almost all of them who’d survived past the first few months had to one degree or another, such as the ability to cloud minds. Vampires who had to kill everyone they fed from were eliminated as a threat to the rest of them. Too many dead bodies brought too much attention.

There were rarer talents, like Colbert’s ability to track other vampires. Her former Mistress Corona’s ability with minds was rare only in how powerful she had been.

Elyna had a rare talent, too. She could hide in plain sight. As long as she didn’t move, she was invisible in a room full of vampires. She’d kept that quiet, once she’d understood the implications. Finding the will to use it had taken a long, long time. A lifetime and more—because a vampire must obey her maker.

That was the first thing she had learned. If her Mistress had taken control of her a day earlier, or if her Mistress had made more certain of the rope she’d tied Elyna’s dead body with, things would have been different. To Corona’s credit, most vampires take years of mutual feeding to change from human to vampire. She’d had Elyna only a couple of weeks when someone slipped up and drained her dry. As Corona told Elyna when she’d finally tracked her down, they had assumed that Elyna was as dead as she looked; the rope had been merely a precaution. Sometimes, the Mistress had told her, there were people who turned much easier than others. Who knew why?

Stubborn Pole, Jack had called her when at his most exasperated. Fair enough; she’d called him a hot-headed Mick in return, and there had been more than a cup of truth in both epithets.

So, stubborn Pole that she was, despite expectations, Elyna had awoken tied up in a shed in Corona’s backyard. The ropes had taken her a little while to break. Confused and dazed by the transformation from human to dead to vampire, she had run home, where Jack had been waiting.

If she survived to be a thousand, she would never forget the joy on his face when she’d opened the door.

But she hadn’t been Elyna O’Malley, Jack O’Malley’s wife, anymore, not then. She had been vampire, and she’d been hungry.

She’d fed and then fallen comatose into their bed until Corona found her the following evening. By chance the bedroom’s thick curtains had been drawn and kept the sun at bay, or else Elyna would never have awoken again. It was a long time before she quit being bitter about those heavy curtains.

Corona wouldn’t let her kill herself on purpose, so Elyna settled for second best. She couldn’t kill Jack’s murderer, so she decided instead to kill Corona, who’d made her and not made sure that Jack was safe from her. So she’d learned to control the vampire, learned to be the best vampire she could, learned to be Elyna Gray instead of Jack O’Malley’s wife.

Four weeks ago, the time had been right. The ties that kept her loyal to her Mistress broke at last. Elyna’s stubbornness had been rewarded and she was free.

Elyna moved from the bathroom. Her hotel room was eleven stories to the ground and had a fine view of the Loop and the big lake beyond that.

In contrast to the thirst for vengeance that had driven her since her death, hope seemed such a fragile thing.

IN THE END, she paid a little too much for the apartment turned condo, but a lot less than she’d been willing to pay.

She moved into a furnished efficiency apartment whose greatest assets were its location a few blocks from her home, its basement entrance where no one would see her comings and goings, and a storage room with no windows.

She went shopping at a few thrift stores and then took her newly acquired laundry to the nearest Laundromat. Three middle-aged women eyed her as she sorted her laundry. When she put the first load in, a grandmotherly woman came up to her and explained the ins and outs of the neighborhood laundry.

By the time she’d folded the last of her towels, Elyna had learned a nifty trick to get lipstick out of washable silk; that there was a scary-looking man who washed his clothes on Tuesdays who was a retired Marine, horribly shy, and a dear, sweet man, so she wasn’t to let him frighten her; and that there was a local man, someone’s cousin’s sister-in-law’s nephew, who was a contractor.

PETER VANDERSTAAT WAS a neighborhood man, a police officer who ran remodel jobs with his partner and a half-dozen other people on the side. He’d agreed to meet Elyna at her condo and look at it, even though what she wanted wasn’t the kind of project they looked for. He usually bought a place, fixed it up, and sold it at a profit, but he was between projects.

He looked to be in his midforties with tired, suspicious eyes. Short and squat, Jack would have said—built like a wrestler. Peter didn’t talk a lot, just grunted, until they came back to the living room.

“Where is the money coming from?” he asked. “I don’t want to have my men put hours in and then not get paid.”

Elyna had money. She’d started by stealing a little bit from her victims and continued with investments. Investments she’d successfully hidden from Corona.

“My family has money,” she told him. “I can pay you.”

She had been painfully honest when she had been human. Lying was one of those skills she’d had to learn to be a successful vampire.

Vanderstaat bought her story, turning his attention back to the apartment. He frowned at the mismatched windows. “You want me to match the vinyl?”

“Please, no,” she said, involuntary horror in her voice.

He looked at her and lifted a shaggy eyebrow.

“Vinyl is good. I’m sure that would look terrific in a modern place, but . . .” She let her voice trail off.

“But,” he agreed. “What do you intend to do with the floors? Some of those boards can’t be saved, expensive to find replacement boards of the same quality. There are some very good laminates on the market; I can get you fair prices.”

“Can’t you fix the floors?” she asked in a small voice.

That time she got a grin. “A girl after my own heart,” he said. “Not the most profitable way to go—but we’re in it for fun, too. No fun slapping together crap no matter how much more money you make at it.”

Peter and his men worked evenings, he told her, five days a week but not on Saturday or Sunday. They’d stop at ten every night for the neighbors’ sake, which made for a long remodel—the reason they usually didn’t take on a contract like this. They shook hands on it and agreed that he would start in two days to give him time to put together his crew.

GHOSTS AND CATS don’t like vampires. Dogs, on the other hand, didn’t mind Elyna—which was good because more often than not, Peter brought his yellow Lab as one of the crew. Peter was initially dubious of Elyna’s need to help, but when she proved useful, he started ordering her around like he did the rest of his crew.

The first job was finishing the demolition, clearing out the old for the new. They started with the bedrooms and moved forward. Some nights it was just Peter and Elyna; other nights they had as many as eight or ten men.

“Hey, you guys,” said Simon, a twentysomething rookie cop and drywall man who had pulled down a chunk of plaster from the living room wall and held it up for everyone to see. “Look how this is stained. Do you think this is blood? My mom says that back in the late twenties a man was killed up here in this apartment. Or at least he left a lot of blood behind and disappeared.”

No one was looking at Elyna, which was a good thing.

“I remember that story,” agreed one of the other men. “Something to do with the gangsters, wasn’t it? And the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

“The massacre was 1929,” commented Peter.

“Yeah,” agreed Simon. “The guy who lived here was an architect just hired by John Scalise—one of Capone’s men. Story was that the architect’s wife went missing a few weeks before Valentine’s Day. Right after the massacre, the neighbor across the hall and several police officers broke down the door—”

Everyone, even Elyna, looked at the front door, which showed all sorts of damage. If it wasn’t the door that had been there when she’d lived here, someone had found an exact match. And then aged it for eighty-plus years.

“But”—Simon dropped his voice and whispered—“all they found was blood. Lots and lots of blood.”

There was a crash in the kitchen.

Peter whacked Simon upside the head. “Kid, Elyna’s going to be living here. You think she needs that in her head?” And then Peter tromped off to see what the noise in the kitchen had been.

“Sorry, Elyna,” Simon told her sheepishly. “Boss is right. I wasn’t thinking.”

“No worries,” Elyna said, straining her ears to listen for any more noises. “I’ve heard the story before. I did my research before I bought this place.”

She must not have been convincing, because he followed her around like Peter’s dog for the rest of the evening, mistaking grief and guilt for fear. Peter couldn’t figure out what had made the noise, but they decided it was one of the tools falling off some precarious perch. Even so, Peter’s crew was jumpy for the rest of the night.

Weeks passed without further incidents. They moved from tearing down to rebuilding the plumbing and electric. And Peter started to schedule times when he, his right-hand man Frankie, and Elyna would sit down with catalogs to choose what the apartment would look like when it was finished.

As soon as the bathroom and most of the electric was finished, Elyna put up blackout curtains in the master bedroom and moved in. She didn’t have much more than would fit into a pair of suitcases.

The first thing she bought after moving in was a twin bed. The second thing was a small bookcase, followed by a double handful of books. She kept the efficiency apartment for the coming summer days when the sun’s setting time meant Peter’s crew would be arriving in daylight. She encouraged Peter to assume that was where the rest of her things were, waiting for the floors to be finished so she wouldn’t have to move the stuff around. Peter, Frankie, and the rest of the guys had gotten quite protective of her.

Other than something falling in the kitchen while Simon was telling his ghost story, there had been no sign that the apartment was haunted, let alone haunted by Elyna’s dead husband. Sometimes, sitting on her bed and reading a book, Elyna would pretend that Jack was just in another room.

Reading was something they’d shared. It had started when he caught her reading E. M. Hull’s The Sheik. The scandalous book had left her blushing like a ninny and him rolling his eyes.

“Bastard needed to be put down like a mad dog,” he’d told her. “Instead he gets to keep the girl he kidnapped and raped. Doesn’t sound right to me. Is that the kind of hero you really want?”

So he’d read Tarzan of the Apes to her, and she’d agreed that the ape man would be a much better choice than the sheik—and that had led to a merry few minutes with Jack jumping around on the furniture and her laughing her fool head off until the neighbors knocked on the walls.

They read every odd thing: Charles Darwin, Zane Grey, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sometimes they read them separately, and sometimes they read them to each other.

She hadn’t read in the seethe. She hadn’t wanted to give Corona even so much as a glimpse into her real thoughts—and Jack always had said you knew a person by the books they read . . . or didn’t read.

When Elyna went shopping for books now, she was bewildered by the offerings. She found a copy of Tarzan, but the rest were all new to her.

She’d been reading The Sackett Brand for about fifteen minutes before she realized it was something Jack would have liked. She turned back to the beginning and started over out loud, reading for hours. She read Tarzan next, commenting on some of the things that science had proven since it was written. But she also went out and got twelve more books by Louis L’Amour for Jack.

As she read to him, she pictured her husband sitting in his favorite chair, eyes closed with that intent expression on his face that meant he was enjoying the book.

Reading wasn’t the only pleasure she regained. It had been a long time since she’d had a friend. Inside Corona’s seethe, Elyna hadn’t been able to trust anyone. She could only show them the broken, fragile thing they all thought her to be. Someone to be discounted. She couldn’t afford to care too deeply. The lover who gave her solace one day would torture her the next, because no one disobeyed the Mistress. Even the few who could have done so successfully (because they were older, stronger, or not of the Mistress’s making) didn’t disobey her. At least not after the Mistress gave Fitz, who had been her favorite, to Sybil.

To Elyna’s lonely heart, Peter and his moonlighting friends were like a warm blanket on a cold night. She knew she couldn’t afford friends, not if she was a stray living surreptitiously under the radar in Colbert’s territory. More accurately, her friends could not afford her. But she couldn’t help the affection she felt for them.

Between the books and work on the apartment, Elyna’s time fell into a pleasant order that was so much better than anything that had happened to her in a very long time. One evening she woke up and realized she was happy. It was a very disconcerting feeling.

ELYNA LISTENED TO the irregular rhythm of the jazz guitar and breathed in the scent of sixty or so humans crowded together in the dark drinking mixed drinks and listening to the music.

A smart vampire doesn’t feed in her own backyard if she can help it. Elyna had been hunting in a small club district several miles away from her home. Unfortunately, even a big city is composed of dozens of smaller places. When the bartender of the Irish pub that she’d been going to nodded at her and set a screwdriver on the bar in front of Elyna without asking, she knew she had to move on.

That was why she was sitting in a popular jazz club in the Loop. The Loop attracted tourists, and it was easier to blend in. At least that was her working theory. She’d come to this club four times in the last week; not feeding, just getting the lay of the land.

Anywhere she thought to be good hunting ground was going to appeal to Colbert, too, but she’d seen no sign of any other vampires. So tonight she’d come dressed to kill. She’d picked up the white sheath dress at a thrift store, but it was real silk and suited her flat stomach. When she’d been human she’d always carried an extra few pounds, but keeping the weight off was not a problem anymore.

She closed her eyes and let a soft smile stretch her lips as she nodded her head to the music. Come here, she announced without saying anything at all, come here and I might be yours. She didn’t use any magic yet, just human mating rituals.

Corona had been bitterly envious of Elyna’s ability to attract men this way—Corona had been in her seventies when she died. Though she had once been beautiful—stunning, Elyna suspected—she continued her life-after-death as an old woman. Corona lured her prey by vampire magic, which meant she had to feed more often and more deeply than Elyna, who could usually find someone willing to follow her to a dark corner without use of coercion or power. She wasn’t beautiful the way Corona once had been, but she was attractive enough.

“Hey, doll,” said a rough tenor voice next to her. “You look like you’re having a good time.”

She hated this. Making connection, making small talk, getting a glimpse inside someone she’d never see again. She understood the vampires who kept menageries of sheep: humans no one would miss. Menageries reduced the risk of being found out, of having to go hunting, of feeding from strangers, and they served as a sort of crèche from which new vampires were born. After a while, the sheep could be made to forget who they had been, and most of them learned to love their vampire, who slowly killed them. Maybe that had been the problem. Elyna hadn’t been a sheep for long enough to learn to love the monsters. Sure as God made little fishies, she couldn’t be made to keep humans as sheep just to save herself from a little risk and distaste.

“I am now,” she said to the man sitting next to her.

He told her his name was Hal, and she had no trouble coaxing him out into the dark outside the club despite the gold ring on his finger. He had no qualms about following her around the back to a small, dark space of privacy that had made her finally determine that this was the club where she would hunt. Hal would have hesitated to follow a man, but she was half his weight and a foot shorter: he didn’t find her threatening.

He laughed when she nuzzled his neck.

When she finished feeding and blurring his memory, she eased him down on the ground. Crouched beside him, one knee on the ground to brace herself against his weight, she felt them.

Vampires.

Elyna moved as fast as she could into the little bit of half-alley trap, no bigger than ten feet by twenty, then froze against the outside wall as flat as she could, thinking, No one here, no one here. Power flickered over her and she felt the drain touch her faintly. An hour was the longest she’d ever held this magic to her, and it had left her weak and violently hungry.

She heard their footsteps stop when they spotted her victim. It was dark here, but vampires can see in the dark.

“Not from our seethe,” said the woman, her vowels a little rich with the same accent that had colored Elyna’s Polish mother’s voice.

“None of ours would feed from anyone in Colbert’s favorite club,” agreed the man. “He’s not been here more than a few minutes.”

They did a meticulous search of her hiding place. Elyna stood with the stillness of the dead, all of her attention focused on her high-heeled raspberry sandals—not the easiest thing to do when deadly enemies are less than a handspan away. Vampires can feel people who look at them too hard or pay too close attention to them. It means survival in a world that would destroy them if possible.

After far too long the female vampire turned to her comrade. “Not here anymore. Damn. I could have sworn I saw something move in here, just before we found this guy.”

“I’ve heard some of the old ones can fly,” said the second vampire.

“Don’t be stupider than you have to be,” the woman said. “If a vampire that old and powerful had come to town, Colbert would know it. He’ll find this one, too. Time to go inside and let him know.”

Chicago was huge, but that wouldn’t save Elyna, not once he knew she was there.

“Life is what you do next,” she whispered to herself as soon as the other vampires had left. It was one of Jack’s favorite sayings. She walked quickly toward the L. She’d left her car at her condo because it was hard to make a quick getaway in a parking garage when monsters were after you.

Safely on the train, she shivered and tried not to look at the other passengers—in short, acting just like everyone else. She got off one stop early and walked through alleys and side streets until she made it home.

Home.

She locked the door behind her and sat down on the floor with her back to it. Vampires could not cross the threshold of a home—unless it was their home, which was why she had been able to get in to kill Jack all those years ago. Thresholds were made of life and love—all those things that turn a dwelling place into a home. She hoped that her threshold would hold them out.

But even if it did, it would not be enough. Once Colbert knew where she lived, he had only to wait until she left to feed. She was under no illusions. If he knew she was here, it was only a matter of time until he caught her: her death warrant was signed. Her only escape was to leave.

She could do that. Find some place that had no seethes. They were out there; vampires were not so common as fae or the weres. But it would mean leaving Jack again.

Jack was probably not here anyway.

She looked through the living room entranceway and stared out the window, where the sun was just beginning to lighten the sky. She had a third choice. Perhaps it would be enough penance for her crime if she died here, too. Popular knowledge was that vampires had no souls. Popular knowledge also said that ghosts were not souls of the dead, just leftover bits and pieces that remembered what they had been once. Maybe if she died here, her leftover bits could find Jack’s leftover bits as well.

Gold touched the edges of the rooftops across the road from her and washed over the now-matching windows in her front room. She smiled and took one last deep breath as the pain from the sunlight reached her at last.

She had to close her eyes against the light.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” she said. “I love you.”

Because her eyes were closed, she didn’t see the living room blackout curtains snap shut—just heard them the instant before her body died for the day.

SHE AWOKE IN a crumpled heap in front of the door. The skin on her face was tight from the sunburn, but the bathroom mirror assured her that the curtains had shut before the sun had done much damage.

Staring at her wide-eyed reflection in the mirror, she said, “Jack?”

He didn’t answer, not then.

But when she and Peter were deciding which of several designs were closest to her original cabinets, a stray breeze fingered through the pages of a catalog they’d set aside and left it opened to a sleek modern style in hickory. She liked those, she thought, pulling the catalog in front of her. But she was trying to recreate her old home, not build a new one.

Maybe she could do both.

“What do you think of this one?” she asked Peter.

“Not very vintage,” he told her. “But they would look fine with the countertops you picked out. Good wood goes with almost anything.”

A FEW NIGHTS later she finished the book she’d been reading to Jack and replaced it in the bookshelf. The next night there was a book sitting on her chair, ready for her to begin: an Ellery Queen mystery.

The next evening, Jack rearranged the cardboard cutouts that Peter had made to let Elyna see how her kitchen would come together. She put them back as she’d had them, but he was relentless. He never moved them while she was in the kitchen, but if she left for more than a few minutes they were back the way he wanted them.

“And you called me stubborn,” she sputtered at him finally, standing in the empty room. “I’m a vampire, Jack. I don’t care where the stove is. Why should you?”

Something fluttered lightly on her lips, like a butterfly’s kiss. She froze. “Jack?”

But there was no further sign that she wasn’t alone in the room. She touched her lips with light fingers.

PETER ROLLED HIS eyes when she told him that she’d changed her mind on the kitchen layout. Frankie just laughed, a great big booming laugh that filled the air.

“Hah,” he said. “Told Peter it wasn’t natural the way you just let him dictate your kitchen. Never was a woman yet who let a man arrange her kitchen.”

“Hmm,” said Elyna.

The kitchen progressed rapidly after that. Stainless steel sinks, marble countertop, and all. Elyna bought a teddy bear for Simon’s new son and told Frankie what to buy his wife for their anniversary.

When the men came in to lay the kitchen flooring, they were grimfaced and unhappy. Elyna, as she had done before, coaxed the story out of them. Being police officers in Chicago was not for the faint of heart. Vampires are territorial, and somehow this group of hardworking men had become hers just as the home they’d helped her put together was hers. Her mother had taught her to take care of what was hers. She had to use a touch of persuasion to get a name and address.

“Sorry to invite this in here,” Peter murmured to her as they were getting ready to leave for the night. “Evil belongs out in the street, not in your home.”

Elyna looked down at her hands. “Evil exists everywhere,” she told him.

That night she broke the neck of a murderer who had gotten free on a technicality, just as she had killed the drug dealer who’d handed a ten-year-old the heroin to overdose on and the lawyer who liked to kill prostitutes.

THEN CAME THE evening that Peter didn’t come.

“You get a call, Elyna?” Frankie asked her. “He told me he was going to be coming here after his shift.”

She shook her head. Everyone became increasingly worried as an hour crept by without word. Peter didn’t answer his cell phone, and as he was ten years divorced, no one was home to answer the phone. They called the station and were told that Peter had left at his usual time.

Finally Frankie stood up and stretched, cracking his spine. “We’re getting nothing done here, sweetie,” he told Elyna. “We need to go out and look for him. He has a few mates and some places he goes to for a bite or glass.”

“Call me when you find him.”

“As long as it’s not too late,” Frankie promised, and he and the rest left Elyna alone in her home.

There were all sorts of reasons why Peter might not have made it over tonight. But the one she believed was that she had made him hers—and Colbert had noticed.

She remembered quite clearly how easily Colbert had ousted Corona and her seethe from this city. Half her seethe, anyway; the other half was gone to ashes and sunlight, never to rise again.

She pulled out her cell phone and dialed. “Sean,” she said, “get me Colbert’s phone number, would you?”

She felt his hesitation through the phone lines. He was angry with her—and would happily have sacrificed her on his road into power. But she had killed his Mistress, and for a while more the urge to obey would stay strong, even with the physical distance between them. She snapped her phone closed, confident that Sean could get the information and would call her back.

She walked into the living room, where Jack had died at her hands, and touched the floor where the wood was just a little darker than the boards around it, despite sanding and staining.

“My fault, Jack. I was mad because you were late again. Jealous, maybe. You were the newest rising star among the architects of Chicago, and I was a housewife. There was a new singer at that speakeasy we used to go to, and you’d promised to take me there. When you couldn’t, I decided to go by myself.”

The air in the apartment was still and hot despite the new HVAC system. Waiting.

“My fault. I knew it was stupid when I did it.” Her eyes burned, but no tears fell. “The new singer was an old woman with a voice like a lark. She came to my table and said, ‘You’re all alone here, aren’t you? I think I’ll take you home with me tonight.’ If I’d waited until you could go with me, she’d have left us both alone.”

Elyna bowed her head. “She and her fellow vampires fed on me for a couple of weeks. I don’t remember a lot about that time. Someone got careless and I died. It’s unusual for someone to turn after such a short time; mostly they just die.”

Stubborn Pole.

Elyna turned slowly, unsure whether her mind had supplied that voice or she’d really heard it.

“When vampires rise the first time, we are nearly mindless, and hungry. Scared.” She remembered that most of all. She’d been so scared. “I ran home and you were waiting for me.” She swallowed. “Thing is, Jack, I don’t think I’ll be coming back here after tonight. The local vampires have taken Peter.” Peter might already be dead, though certainly they’d have toyed with him while they were waiting for her to figure out what had happened. “I just . . . wanted you to know that my death wasn’t your fault. I wish . . . I wish you’d had a chance to marry again, to grow old and watch over your grandchildren, never knowing what had become of me.”

In the silence, her phone’s ring was very harsh.

“Elyna,” she answered.

“Elyna,” said a man’s voice, “I heard that you wanted to call me.”

When she was through talking to Colbert, she slipped the phone back into her pocket. It was traditional for vampires to dress up when they treated with each other, a convention that traced back to older times. Elyna didn’t bother changing out of her work clothes.

She opened the door to leave, paused, and said, “I love you, Jack.”

THE JAZZ CLUB wasn’t the same one where she’d run into Colbert’s vampires. This one had a CLOSED FOR REMODELING sign on the door and wasn’t in nearly as nice a neighborhood. Elyna got out of the cab and paid the driver.

“You sure you want off here?” he asked, a fatherly man who’d entertained her all the way here with stories of his daughter’s almost-disastrous dance recital. “It’s late and there’s no one here.”

She smiled at him. “I’ll be fine.”

The cab waited, though, until she opened the club door before driving off.

She took a step into the dark room, and with a click someone turned a spotlight on her. With the light in her face, she couldn’t see them, but the vampires could see her just fine.

“Such a lot of trouble for such a little girl,” purred a man’s voice. Over the years, he’d lost most of the French accent she remembered. Colbert sounded a lot more like a TV newscaster than the eighteenth-century vintner he had once been.

“You have someone who belongs to me,” she said, tired of playing games. Corona had liked games, too. “Show me that he is alive or this ends now.”

Something heavy was tossed onto the floor in front of her, a body.

She went down to one knee and felt the body in front of her. She still couldn’t see, but one hand touched something wet. She brought her fingers up to her mouth and licked the moisture away. It was Peter’s blood. The body it had come from still breathed. She petted him gently and stood up.

“What do you want?” she asked. “And would you turn off the stupid light? You can’t possibly be that afraid of me.”

He laughed. The spotlight was turned off, and others were turned on.

Elyna found herself in a large room full of tarps, sawhorses, and tools. The walls had been newly painted a burnt orange. She didn’t allow herself to look down and see how much damage they’d done to Peter, just stared at the vampires.

Colbert didn’t look imposing. He was only a little taller than she was, wiry rather than bulky. His face looked as if he’d been turned as a teenager, though his dark hair was thinning on top. Only the expense of his attire hinted at his power.

Two vampires stood with him—a woman who was taller than he by four or five inches and a black man with the eyes of a poet and the body of a Chippendale dancer. Both of them were pretty enough to be models.

Arm candy, she thought. There were others here, on the other side of the wall to her right. Sheetrock was not much of a barrier to vampires, but it hid them from sight and made them easy to forget about. Not that it mattered. Doubtless either of his arm candy guards could wipe the floor with her, if Colbert didn’t choose to do it himself.

“I am Pierre Colbert,” he said.

The way he said it, it rhymed.

“You find something funny?” Colbert asked coolly.

She waved her hands around the building, leaving her right hand pointing at the wall behind which he had more of his people waiting, so he’d know that she understood they were there.

“All of this,” she said, “for me.”

“Elyna Gray,” he said. “Who killed Corona and refused to take her seethe.”

“I struck her from behind,” Elyna said. “If I’d faced her in a proper fight I’d be ash. If I’d tried to take over the seethe, I’d have been dead in two days.”

“Still,” said Pierre, “you killed your Mistress and then came into my territory.”

“I killed the monster who made me, and then I ran home,” Elyna told him. “I admit it is a subtle difference, but significant to this conversation.”

“Ah, yes,” he purred. “Now that wasn’t smart, Elyna Gray who was Elyna O’Malley. If you’d found somewhere else to live, it might have taken me longer to find you—you’ve been very discreet in your hunting habits other than coming into my favorite club a few weeks ago. I thought perhaps you had a menagerie, but that sheep”—he indicated Peter—“was a virgin pure.”

His words accomplished what she’d tried avoiding by not looking at Peter. Rage rushed in and she felt her skin tighten and her eyes burn with fire. Someone looking at her would know that they were in the presence of Vampire.

“Mine,” she said, barely recognizing her own voice. “He was one of mine and you harmed him.”

“He tasted mmm so good,” said the woman. “Bitch.”

Behind Elyna something fell to the ground with a sharp crack. She took a quick look behind her to where a sawhorse lay on the floor, two legs on one side broken off.

“Now,” said Colbert in an interested voice, “how did you manage that?”

Elyna had thought it was someone on his side. She shrugged.

The pretty man turned in a slow circle. “Master,” he said, biting out the word as if he found it distasteful. “Master, there is a ghost in this room, can you feel it?”

“Elyna.” Colbert looked at her. “You are just full of surprises. But the ability to control ghosts is not uncommon; why do you think they hide from us? And, as it happens, I am very good at it.” He looked around the room. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

Familiar big hands landed on Elyna’s shoulders.

“Jack,” she said horrified. “Jack, you have to get out of here.”

“Too late,” said Colbert, smiling. “Jack is it? Break her neck.”

No.

The pretty black man looked from Elyna to the ghost behind her and started to smile.

“Jack, come here.” The Master of Chicago’s voice cracked with power. His pretty pet woman took a step forward and so did Elyna.

Jack patted her shoulder and then moved around her. His hands had been so solid, she thought that the rest of him would look that way, too. Instead, he looked more like a mist of light, a shimmering presence mostly human-sized but not human-shaped.

She’d done this to Jack, brought him to be enslaved by this vampire. She had to do something about it. Everyone in the room was paying attention to Jack and to Colbert. No one was looking at her.

You aren’t interested in me, she thought, calling on all the power she had to fade out of notice in this fully lit room full of vampires.

Colbert extended his hand until it touched the cloud of light that was Jack. “Mine,” he said in a voice of power.

But vampires can move fast, and Elyna had already crossed the room and found a weapon.

“You”—Elyna hit the Master vampire across the back with a piece of the broken sawhorse and knocked him away from her husband—“leave him alone.”

Colbert turned on her—and there was nothing human left of him. “You dare—” He would have said more, but another piece of the wooden sawhorse emerged from his chest. He looked down, opened his mouth, then collapsed.

It took Elyna a moment to realize that Jack had used the other leg.

Beside Elyna, the black man threw back his head and laughed in utter delight. When he stopped laughing, it cut off abruptly, leaving echoing silence behind. His face free of emotion, he turned his attention to Elyna. He gave her such an empty look that she took two steps away from him until she hit the solid, feeling bulk that had been Jack O’Malley.

“He forgot,” said the man who had been Colbert’s. “Evil has no power over love.” He smiled, his fangs big and white against his ebony skin. “And we are evil, aren’t we, Elyna Gray?”

She didn’t say anything.

“What now?” he asked her. “Do you want this seethe, Elyna? Do you want to be Mistress of Chicago?”

“No.” Her response was so fast and heartfelt that it caused him to laugh again. His laugh was horrible, so much joy and beauty coming out of a man with such empty eyes.

“Then what?”

Elyna looked at the woman, Colbert’s other minion, who had fallen to the ground in that utter obeisance sometimes demanded of them by their Mistress or Master.

“Who is the strongest vampire in your seethe?” she asked.

“Steven Harper,” he told her. “That would be me.”

Jack’s reassuring presence behind her, she smiled carefully. “Steven Harper, I would seek your permission to live in your city, keeping the laws and rules of the old ones and bearing neither you nor yours any ill will. Separate and apart with harm to none. Yours to you and mine to me—and this human”—she tilted her head to indicate Peter, who was lying very still just where he had been dropped—“is mine.”

The new Master of the Chicago seethe looked at Peter, then over Elyna’s shoulder at Jack, and finally to the floor, where a splintered piece of wood stuck out of Colbert’s limp body. “You have done me a great favor,” he said. “I swore never to call anyone Master again, and now I no longer have to. Come and be welcome in my city—with harm to none.”

Elyna bowed, keeping her eyes on him. “Thank you, sir.” She took a step back, paused, and said, “The really old ones turn to dust when they are dead and gone.”

He looked down at Colbert’s body. “I guess he lied about how old he was.”

“Or he is not, quite, gone.” Elyna had made a point of finding out things like that. Corona had been ash before she touched the floor.

“Ah,” Steven said, pushing the corpse with his toe. “My thanks.”

A pair of Steven Harper’s vampires drove her to her apartment building and helped her negotiate the way into her apartment while she carried Peter, unwilling to trust him to anyone else. She could no longer see Jack, but she knew he was with her by the occasional light touches of his hands.

Harper’s vampires didn’t try to come in, nor did they speak to her. She set Peter down on her bed, since she didn’t have anywhere else to put him. Then she went back out and locked the door. When she returned to the bedroom Peter was sitting up. She’d been pretty sure that he was more awake than it had appeared, because a smart man knows when to lie low.

Without a word, she cut the ropes and helped peel off the duct tape that covered his mouth. Then she got a wet hand towel and brought it to him.

“There’s blood on your face and neck,” she told him.

He took it from her, stared at it a moment, and then wiped himself clean. The wounds had closed, she noticed, as vampire bites do. They hadn’t actually hurt him very badly—not physically, anyway.

They stared at each other a while.

“Vampire,” he said.

She nodded. “If you tell anyone, they’ll think you’re crazy.”

“Could you stop me? Make me not remember? Isn’t that what vampires are supposed to be able to do?”

She shrugged, but chose, for his sake, not to give him the whole truth. He’d sleep better at night without it. “Hollywood vampires can do lots of things we can’t,” she told him, instead. “You don’t have to worry about Harper coming after you, though. He agreed that you are one of mine, and he won’t hurt you. We vampires take vows like that very seriously.”

“You don’t look like a vampire,” he said.

“I know,” she agreed. A stray breeze brushed a strand of hair off her cheek. “We’re like serial killers; we look just like everyone else.”

Peter grunted, looked down at his hands, and then made another sound—something she couldn’t interpret.

Then he said, “That man who killed his girlfriend’s baby, the one where the evidence got bungled and the charges were dismissed a few weeks ago. The one who turned up dead in a place full of people who never were sure who killed him. That was you?”

Elyna nodded. He eyed her thoughtfully, then nodded.

He cleared his throat. “There were others after that, just a couple. The ones we talked about while we worked. Like the well-connected lawyer who liked to pick up hookers and beat them to death. Fell down his stairs and died a month or so back. That was you, too?”

She ducked her head. “Vampires don’t have to kill people,” she told him. “Especially once we are older, more in control of ourselves. I try not to. But . . . it doesn’t bother me very much, not when they are”—she looked him in the eye and gave him an ironic smile—“evil.”

“In my business,” Peter said slowly, “you come into the job seeing the world in black and white. Most of us who survive, the good cops, learn to work in shades of gray.” He smiled slowly at her. “So, Ms. Gray. What have you decided about the lighting fixtures in the kitchen?”

The brass lights are nice, but I think the bronze will look better, Jack whispered, his lips brushing the edge of her ear.

“I think I like the bronze,” she told Peter.