Home Improvement: Undead Edition

by Harris, Charlaine

  “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.

  Squatters’ Rights

  ROCHELLE KRICH

  In the beginning she heard them inside the bedroom wall.

  The sounds originated above Eve’s head and had kept her awake for countless hours every night since she and Joe had moved into the house three weeks ago.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch . . .

  Mice, Eve had thought the first night, but she hadn’t found droppings in the bedroom or anywhere else in the house, where speckled beige tarps had formed hills over their furniture and the stacks upon stacks of boxes filled with their belongings.

  Joe hadn’t heard a thing.

  “It’s all in your head, babe,” he told her, his sympathy thinned the third time she woke him—at two in the morning, so she couldn’t blame him. “The house was just fumigated, right? Even if something was in the walls, it isn’t there now.”

  Unless it was a ghost.

  The thought was ridiculous, and Eve was pretty sure believing in ghosts didn’t fit with Judaism, although hadn’t King Saul asked a witch to summon the spirit of the prophet Samuel?

  Eve wouldn’t have thought about ghosts at all if the broker hadn’t told them the previous owner had killed her husband and herself, in the house.

  “By law I have to inform you,” the broker had said, his shrug and rolling of eyes inviting Eve and Joe to share his opinion of said law. He was a tall, wiry man with silver hair and a restless habit of bouncing from foot to foot that made Eve think of a Slinky. “It’s morbid, I’ll give you that, but a lucky break for you guys. This place is selling way below what it’s worth. I’m sure you’ve seen the comps, so you know.”

  Bad mazel, both sets of parents had said. Eve and Joe had dismissed their forebodings, swayed by the potential in the three-bedroom, two-bath fixer-upper on Bellaire Avenue in Valley Village, and by the price. They had the down payment, most of it money Eve had inherited from her grandmother, but even with two incomes—Joe was a nursing home administrator, and Eve taught kindergarten at a private Jewish school—it was unlikely that they could afford another house in the foreseeable future, if ever, unless they were willing to leave Los Angeles, which they weren’t. Their jobs were here, their friends, family. Eve’s parents lived in Beverlywood, a thirty-minute drive from Valley Village. Joe’s parents lived in San Francisco, where housing was even more out of reach.

  To save rent, Eve and Joe planned to renovate the house after they took occupancy. It had made sense to have the hardwood floors refinished while the house was empty, and they painted the master bedroom themselves the Sunday before they moved in.

  That first evening, while Joe and his cousin Marty were returning the U-Haul in the city, Eve stood inside the bedroom. It looked just as she had imagined—beautiful, serene, a haven where she and Joe could retreat during the many months the house would be undergoing work. She would have placed the full-size beds on the wider east wall, but two closet doors made that impossible. So the beds were on the south wall. Eve had chosen the bed near the windows that looked out on the yard even though it was farther from the closets and connecting bathroom.

  The bathroom was their first project. The chipped porcelain finish on the tub and sink was ringed with rusty Rorschachs, and a leaking shower pan had caused dry rot in the floor joists and mud sill. Earlier that day Eve had yanked off half a panel of blistered, peeling wallpaper but stopped when she saw ominous Technicolor patches of mold and an accompanying cloud of dust.

  Eve made numerous trips hauling armfuls of clothing to the bedroom closets, dresser, and armoire, the furniture’s matte espresso stain rich against the Benjamin Moore Kennebunkport Green, which looked gray in the fading light. She considered moving some of the dry and canned goods into the kitchen, but she didn’t have the energy to line the pantry and cabinet shelves. She took a box of Raisin Bran for Joe and instant oatmeal packets for herself. She gave up looking for the coffeemaker. She’d ask Joe to do it.

  Even with the windows open, the house was warm. Eve felt sticky and grimy. Project number two, she decided: air-conditioning. After a quick shower in the guest bathroom (she made a mental note to tell the plumber about the weak water pressure), she put on coral capri pants and a white tank top and unearthed a tablecloth and two place settings, including goblets for the wine chilling in the fridge next to a bottle of Fresca and lunch leftovers from a nearby kosher pizza shop. Humming Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Our House,” she arranged everything on the small drop-leaf faux butcher block table in the dark ocher breakfast nook, which would look cheery and cozy when it was painted, maybe a buttery yellow.

  Joe surprised her with sunflowers.

  “You are so, so sweet,” Eve said, standing on tiptoe to kiss his lips and nuzzle his cheeks, a little rough and darkened by two days’ growth of beard and smudges of dirt, but she didn’t care.

  “You smell great,” he said, his strong hands on her hips. “You look great, too.” His smile was intimate, inviting. “You showered, huh? Guess I’ll do the same.”

  Before Joe, Eve had felt self-conscious about her body, which fluctuated between a size ten and twelve, huge by L.A. standards. Joe made her feel beautiful, sexy. He loved her curves, he told her, and wide hips were great for having babies.

  “How was the shower, by the way?” he asked.

  She told him about the water pressure. “It’s fine for now.”

  While Joe showered, she found a vase, a wedding gift from her best friend Gina, who had posted Eve’s profile on J-Date. Eve had sworn off J-Date and other Jewish online dating sites after thirty-plus dates ranging from painfully boring to disastrous. She had initially declined to answer Joe’s post, but she didn’t want him to think she was rude, and (she hadn’t admitted this to Gina) she was taken by his humor and his photo, even though photos usually lied. She and Joe, as it turned out, had much in common. They were twenty-nine years old, both only children committed to modern Orthodoxy, family, and sushi. They enjoyed hiking, word games, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. From their phone calls she discerned that he was smart and funny and self-deprecating. He had been married briefly at twenty-two—“We were both too young,” he’d told Eve—and was ready for a serious relationship. Two weeks after t
heir first post they met in the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Larchmont. She caught her breath when she saw him coming toward her, six foot three and good-looking with wavy thick dark brown hair and okay, a small paunch, but his smile! His smile made her palms sweat and her stomach muscles curl. Pilates for the heart, she thought.

  The sunflowers brightened the ocher walls. Over dinner, salmon fillets and tomato-and-basil angel hair pasta that Joe had picked up from the Fish Grill on Ventura, Joe uncorked the Asti. They toasted Gina and their good fortune in having found each other and the house. They drank a second glass of wine. They joked about the house’s many defects and, after a third glass that made them giddy, about its macabre history. Joe said, “Promise you won’t kill me, babe?” and Eve said, “Not tonight, I have a headache,” and they groaned with laughter until tears streamed from their eyes. When the meal was over and the bottle empty, they were suddenly mellow. They held hands across the table. Joe fingered her wedding band and said, “I can’t imagine life without you,” and Eve was so happy she almost cried.

  Later, when Joe was asleep, she stood in front of the window, the newly varnished dark walnut floors cool and smooth under her feet. The moon was kinder than daylight to the yard, a field of shaggy yellowed grass and weeds and bald patches of parched earth. She envisioned a dark velvety green lawn, tall trees hiding the cinder block wall, perennial shrubs and annuals—petunias, lobelia, pansies in the fall. Maybe a hammock where she could stretch her legs and brush her fingers against the blades of sweet-smelling grass while she read a book and, God willing, one day soon, would stroke the downy hair of a baby in the jasmine-perfumed air.

  The noises started as soon as she slipped back into bed.

  JOE HAD TO prepare for a health department inspection at work, so he was long gone when the contractor, Ken Brasso, arrived at seven thirty in the morning with two Latino workers, Fernando and William. Eve would have offered coffee and had a cup herself—God knew she needed caffeine after having had almost no sleep—but Joe had forgotten to dig up the coffeemaker and the fresh-ground dark roast she’d bought last Friday at Whole Foods, was that too much to ask? She apologized about the coffee, finishing with a little laugh that left her feeling awkward. She did have the Fresca, which all three men politely declined.