Home Improvement: Undead Edition

by Harris, Charlaine

  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.