Legally Undead (Vampirarchy Book 1)

by Margo Bond Collins

Of course, Greg’s name was on the lease—he was the one with the real job, after all—so Nick told me he would take me someplace safe.

  “I have to take my cat,” I said after Nick outlined his plan to me.

  “Okay.” He waited patiently while I gathered up my pet carrier and supplies, then coaxed Millie out from under the top corner of the bed where she was hiding. Then he helped me get her into the carrier and carried it himself.

  We drove to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and Nick checked me in. He stayed at the hotel just long enough to see me up to my room and tell me he’d be back in the morning. I still don’t know who paid for it, but now that I’ve spent more time around Nick, I suspect that he got Greg’s law firm to cover the costs. If I hadn’t been so miserable, I would have been overawed at the elegant surroundings. Or perhaps humiliated to be whisked up an elevator and out of sight. I’m sure I didn’t do much for the hotel’s image; my jeans and gray t-shirt had suspicious-looking brownish-red stains splattered across them and my face was streaked with tears and snot. I was also yawning hugely as the allergy pill took effect. As it was, I didn’t even register the horrified stares of the other hotel guests until much later, after I’d run a hot bath full of rich-smelling bubbles and climbed in. After a second’s thought, I pulled my clothes in after me and scrubbed at them furiously.

  I don’t know how long I sat there with my head on my knees and my clothes floating around me.

  By the time I crawled out of the water, the bubbles had all but disappeared and the water was almost cold. I didn’t even dry off before I got into the king-size bed and pulled the Egyptian cotton sheets over me. I pulled a black and gold bolster pillow up to me and wrapped my arms around it. Millie, having thoroughly examined the room, jumped onto the bed and curled up on the pillow next to me.

  Sleepily, I thought, Greg would love this, but then my mind skittered away from that subject. Better never to think of Greg again.

  But I dreamed of him that night, of the day he’d asked me to marry him. The dream started off just like the day had in reality. We were walking through Corona Park in Flushing Meadows, out in Queens, on a picnic Greg had planned. It was one of those beautiful warm autumn days we sometimes got in New York, bright and sunny and all too rare. We had eaten our lunch near the pavilion, staring up at the spaceship-like towers.

  He had laughed and pulled me around the Unisphere, the giant metal globe in the park; the spray from the fountains surrounding it misted across my face.

  “There,” he said, pointing at Europe. “I think that’s where we should go.” He grinned at me.

  “What is that?” I asked. “France? Why France?”

  Greg shrugged. “Or maybe Italy.”

  I laughed and shoved at his shoulder. “Fine. Why Italy.”

  “Because,” he fished in his pocket, then dropped to one knee. “I think we should go there on our honeymoon. I know I can’t give you the world right now, but someday I will. Elle Dupree, will you marry me?”

  When it really happened, I gasped and reached down to kiss him and we had ended up in a laughing, sprawling heap while he put the ring on my finger.

  In my dream, though, I couldn’t reach him. I held out my hand and his figure retreated while the sun faded out, and I was left circling the Unisphere, calling his name.

  I WOKE UP THE NEXT morning groping across the other side of the bed, wondering where Greg was. My engagement ring sparkled on my finger. I stared at it for a moment, then took it off and set it on the bedside table.

  I managed to haul myself out of bed and stagger to the bathroom. One look in the mirror told me that although I was cleaner, I didn’t look any better than I had the night before. My chin-length blonde hair was plastered to one side of my head and stuck straight up on the other. My face was puffy. And my clothes were a sodden heap at the bottom of the bathtub; I hadn’t bothered to take them out the night before.

  Luckily, the hotel provided those fluffy white bathrobes—I’m pretty sure most hotels that far out of my price range do, though of course, I don’t know for certain because I hardly ever stay in them—so I wrapped one around me and sank down into the deep chair beside the bed, wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

  When in doubt, eat.

  I picked up the phone, dialed room service, and ordered everything I could think of: coffee, orange juice, pancakes, an omelet, bacon, toast.

  I suppose that eating should have been the last thing on my mind. The love of my life had been gnawed on by a monster out of a horror movie, I was stuck in a fancy hotel with no dry clothes, and I had no idea how I was going to deal with the next few hours, much less even begin to ever have a normal life again.

  But I was absolutely certain that I was alive. And that no matter what, I wanted to stay that way.

  For me, that translated to eating. Everything. Every last bit of it.

  Nick showed up just as I was finishing the last bite of pancakes dripping with sugar-laden maple syrup poured from a tiny silver pitcher. I was still chewing when I opened the door. Standing in the open doorway, he peered past me at the jumble of dishes on the small table by the chair.

  “Hungry?”

  “Not anymore.” I gestured for him to come in. He handed me a small plastic grocery store bag.

  Inside were some of my clothes—a clean pair of jeans and a red t-shirt, a bra, underwear, socks.

  “I thought you might like to have these.”

  “You’ve been back to my apartment?”

  “Yeah. When you’re ready, we can go back over there so you can pick up some stuff.”

  I had been trying not to think about my life, the one waiting for me outside this lovely hotel room. I gathered up my clothes and moved into the bathroom to change.

  Nick talked to me through the door. “You’re not from New York, are you?” he asked.

  “Somewhere down south, right?”

  I finished zipping up the jeans and opened the bathroom door. “Louisiana,” I said. “Mandeville.

  Across the lake from New Orleans.”

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Do you think Greg’s going to come back to the apartment?”

  “I think he already has.”

  I picked up my ring from the bedside table and tucked it into my pocket before we left.

  Greg had indeed been back—or at least, someone or some thing with a ragingly violent temper had been. The apartment was trashed. The couch was slashed, stuffing spilling out of the cushions.

  Books had been pulled out of the bookcases and lay ripped and scattered across the floor. Pieces of broken pottery from the cabinets crunched underfoot. Computer components lay on their sides, the covers ripped off and their electronic innards exposed. A framed picture of the two of us smiling and waving after Greg’s law school graduation rested beneath the coffee table. The glass had shattered, and the picture was torn into two pieces.

  “Greg didn’t do this,” I whispered.

  Nick took my hand gently in his. “He did, Elle. I’m certain of it.”

  “No. That’s not what I mean.” I pulled my hand away and sat down on the ripped-up couch cushion. “I mean that whatever did this isn’t Greg anymore.”

  I picked up the photograph and shook the glass off the two halves, fitting them back together and pulling them apart again as I spoke.

  “Greg’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. Whatever he is now, he’s not the person you knew. That person is gone.”

  I took a deep breath. No more crying, I vowed silently. “Okay, then. What’s next?”

  Nick nodded—I assumed in approval. “Today you’re going to pack up everything that’s yours.

  We’ll find you a new place to live and get you moved in. Then you get on with your life.”

  I focused on the only part I could deal with at that moment. “What kind of new place?”

  “I’ve got Tony on it right now; he’ll find another apartment for you.”

  “Why
are you doing this?” I asked.

  “Because...” Nick paused and looked around at the debris in the living room. “Because no one should have to try to deal with this alone. And because my job is to clean up. Leaving you here could be... messy.”

  Anything else he might have said was interrupted by one of the guys from the previous night—the biggest of the three—coming in through the front door carrying a stack of boxes folded flat.

  “Thanks, John,” said Nick, taking the boxes and dropping them on the couch next to me. “Elle, you start sorting through this stuff and figuring out what to take. We’ll clean up as you go.”

  So that’s what we did. I didn’t have class that day—I was supposed to spend Tuesdays and Thursdays in the library working on my dissertation proposal. Instead, I spent the day sorting through what remained of my apartment and my life. Nick and John rolled in an enormous plastic garbage can and began tossing in everything that was obviously trash: broken dishes, torn books, lamps with the cords ripped out, cracked music CDs. I started in the bedroom. At least half of my clothes had been shredded, so I tossed them into a pile in the hall. What was left I folded into my one undamaged suitcase. I went through Greg’s closet, too, taking what I liked—I figured that even if Vampire-Greg wanted the clothes, he’d lost his claim to them by ruining mine. Then I decided that under the circumstances I didn’t need to justify taking them, even to myself. I took all my favorite soft t-shirts (the ones that Greg always complained about me wearing), two pairs of sweatpants, and a bathrobe to replace the one he’d wrecked. I took all my undestroyed books and DVDs and CDs and most of his, too. I packed up my jewelry, picking earrings out of the carpet. And at the last minute, I grabbed the ripped picture out of the living room and tossed it into a box, as well.

  I’d left my purse behind the night before, too rattled to remember to take it. It was in the living room, undamaged. Just about everything in it, however, from my powder compact to my cell phone, had been smashed or ripped. I salvaged my surprisingly intact driver’s license and took the credit cards—I guess I need to have Greg taken off them, I thought.

  I even managed to save the couch by super-gluing the edges of the torn fabric back together and flipping the cushions to the other side.

  Millie spent her time jumping in and out of boxes, meowing loudly to announce her displeasure at the disruption in her life. “Yeah, well, you’re not the only one,” I told her, taking her out of a box and dropping her onto the floor.

  In the middle of all this, Tony showed up and announced that he’d found an apartment near the Rose Hill campus of Fordham, deep in the Bronx. At least I would no longer have to ride the Ram Van every day just to get to school.

  The rest of the team was cleaning the new apartment, and it would be ready by two o’clock.

  When we finished salvaging what we could, Nick and his guys loaded up all my stuff into a white van.

  Nick drove and I rode in the front seat. Neither of us spoke on the way to my new place, a pre-WWI era building with cracked marble in the entryway and faded red carpeting in the hallway.

  It turned out that it was a good thing that most of my furniture had been destroyed. The apartment was one room with a small kitchen off to the side in what had probably once been a large closet. The bathroom was tiny, even by New York standards. And there was only one miniature closet. But I could see the entire place from anywhere in the apartment, and that felt oddly comforting.

  By the time Nick’s team had helped me unpack, it was nearly dark. The last thing Nick did before he left was hand me a new cell phone and a large wooden crucifix.

  “You might want to keep this by your bed.”

  “Which one?”

  Nick laughed—a short, barking laugh of surprise. “Both of them, I guess. My number’s already programmed into the phone. Seriously, Elle, I don’t think Greg knows where you are. And I don’t know if he’d even care if he did know. I don’t know what vampires care about besides feeding and killing, and I don’t know if they care who they kill.” He paused for a moment. “But after what I saw last night, I do know that you’re tough and that you can handle yourself in a fight against one of these things. You’re a survivor. I like that. So you just call me if anything else comes up. Okay?”

  I nodded, and Nick and his men filed out of the apartment. I took my engagement ring out of my pocket and stared at it for a long time, turning it from side to side to watch it sparkle.

  Then I put it away in a shoebox in the closet.

  I flopped onto the mattress on the floor—my bedframe was in pieces, probably on its way to the New York City dump—and stared at the ceiling high above me, contemplating the strange new shape of my life as it stretched out before me.

  What I didn’t know then, of course, was exactly how strange that life was going to be.

  Chapter 2

  I woke up the next morning determined to find out everything I could about vampires. I called the number Nick had given me, but no one answered, so I left a message.

  No Nick today. Okay, then. I’m a researcher, I reasoned. Surely I could learn enough to keep myself safe.

  I got up, showered, got dressed, slipped the teak letter opener into my purse, and marched over to the library, making mental plans to skip all my classes for the next few days while I learned everything possible about vampires.

  It didn’t take a few days. It took one day.

  I had considered starting with the older fiction—Dracula, Carmilla, The Vampyre—the classics of vampire literature. But I didn’t want to know about fictional vampires. I wanted to know about real ones. Turns out that everyone thinks vampires are a myth.

  I did discover that Fordham had a copy of an eighteenth-century text about vampires written by a Benedictine monk who actually believed in vampires. So I made my way up to the rare book room and spent some time skimming it. It didn’t tell me anything new—just that vampires were inhabited by the “spirits of the devil.” Great. My ex was a devil spirit.

  And at the end of my research, I knew hardly any more than when I started. The few sources I’d found made conflicting claims about vampires’ habits.

  So in a way, I was right where I’d been that morning. I knew that vampires existed. I knew that they drank blood because I’d seen one doing it. I’d killed one, so I knew that a stake through the heart was fatal. But I didn’t know why one had picked Greg. I didn’t know how a vampire had “turned” him, or for that matter, if it even really had. For all I knew, another vampire altogether had come back and trashed our apartment because he was irritated with me for killing the first one.

  At least, that’s what I told myself. I knew in my heart of hearts that Vampire-Greg existed. I knew he was the one who had torn that picture of the two of us in half. And, no matter what Nick had said, I knew that he was out there somewhere looking for me.

  So in some ways, the attack on my way home from the library that night was my own fault. I had planned to get home long before dark. But back in the stacks, far from any windows, I’d lost track of the time. When I came out of the building it was dusk.

  I stood just outside the library doors and checked my phone. No messages. And Nick still wasn’t answering.

  New York has long twilights in the spring, but this one was ending—the sun was almost completely over the horizon. Although it had been warm that morning, the temperature was dropping along with the sun, and I wished I’d brought a sweater. Shivering with cold, and perhaps more than a touch of fear, I scurried across the lawn to the campus exit, waving to the security guard as I swung out onto Fordham Road. People crowded around the Metro North train station, but the crowd thinned as I headed east along the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the university.

  Across the street from me, the ground-level offices had all closed for the day, their doorways cast in shadows. On my side of the road, streetlamps cast pools of light separated by long stretches of shadows. Trees overhung the fence for two blocks until the campus gave way to a
uto supply stores.

  But the shadows were clear and seemed unlikely to hide any vampiresque lurkers. I scrabbled in the bottom of my purse for the letter opener, gripped it tightly, and made the decision to stay on the university side of the road.

  It was the wrong choice.

  I was so busy scanning the shadows and peering behind the tree trunks on the other side of the fence that I forgot to look up.

  I thought I was ready for any sort of attack. But I don’t know that you’re ever ready for someone to pluck you up off your feet and haul you into a tree. And that’s what happened. I never even saw it coming. He just reached down from above as I passed and lifted me by the back of my shirt as if I didn’t weigh an ounce, pulling me up over the fence and into the tree with my back against his chest and my legs swinging beneath me.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” Greg’s voice whispered into my ear. But it wasn’t exactly Greg’s voice, either. It had more sibilance to it, almost a lisp. Like maybe he was still learning to talk around fangs.

  I shuddered.

  You know those dreams where you’re running from something horrible and you can’t even scream? It felt like that. All the air had left my lungs and the only sound I could make was a sort of breathless squeak. My legs flailed and I scraped my knees on tree bark, but I couldn’t find any purchase for my feet.

  I flashed back to the image of Greg dangling from the first vampire’s grip.

  I remembered the letter opener in my hand and stabbed wildly behind me. I felt the tip of it penetrate the skin, but then it scraped up against something—probably a rib—and stopped.

  That’s when I found out that if you miss the heart, vampires get angry.

  He hissed.

  That doesn’t really describe it, of course. Humans can hiss, but not like a vampire hisses. This hiss was like a cross between the sounds made by cats and snakes, with a low growl thrown in for good effect. Human throats can’t make that sound. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and my skin try to crawl off my body.