Home Improvement: Undead Edition

by Harris, Charlaine

  “It leads directly to the City,” she said, ducking as a candlestick flew past. “Look. It’s mistletoe.”

  “I thought that was illegal.” The second the words were out of his mouth he regretted them. Duh, asshole.

  She must have seen his thoughts reflected on his face, because she didn’t point out his stupidity. “It opens the gate between here and the City, see? That’s why. Especially in a mistletoe wreath. The Church destroyed every one they could find right after Haunted Week.”

  “Right.” Another ghost was forming in the center of the wreath. “So what do we do? I mean, what do you do?”

  “I think I can try banishing them all, just sending them right back through without a psychopomp. Then we burn the wreath.”

  He nodded, just as if he understood what she’d said, which he didn’t. He knew the words, knew that a psychopomp was an animal that carried spirits from this world to the City and that banishing was the act of summoning a psychopomp to do that job. But he had no idea what it actually entailed. It wasn’t exactly something people got to watch. “Just tell me what to do.”

  “Keep collecting debris,” she said. “And tell Terrible to watch out. When I send them all back it will probably create a vacuum in here. So, um, when I give the word, grab on to something, okay?”

  His stomach lurched. Was she serious?

  Stupid question; he should stop asking it. Yes, she was serious, and yes, Terrible might kill him if the ghosts didn’t manage it first, and yes, this whole thing was a big mistake, and yes, if he made it out of there alive he was going to punch his brother-in-law in the mouth.

  She touched his arm, gave him a sort of soft quiet smile. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”

  He nodded.

  Over the sound of his own footsteps as he half-ran, half-limped around the attic collecting more potential weapons, he heard her voice, low and smooth like music playing in another room. The blood leaking from his thigh excited the ghosts, just as Chess had said it would. They swarmed him, followed him, spun around him in a dizzying pattern of light. The cold wouldn’t go away, even for a second. The feeling of them passing through him, as if he were one of them, or as though he didn’t really even exist, wasn’t really there, grew more and more unpleasant.

  But not as unpleasant as the sound of the wardrobe scraping across the floor again.

  He looked in that direction. Not just a few ghosts behind it now. At least a dozen or so of them, pushing the heavy piece of furniture. Pushing it right toward Chess. They must have figured out what she was doing.

  As they picked up speed, more ghosts joined them. Within seconds, it seemed, he stood almost alone, watching the wardrobe slide across the floor.

  “Chess! Chess, look out!”

  Instantly he heard Terrible roaring her name from below. No time to try to shout back, and Rick supposed it didn’t matter anyway. With a feeling rather like jumping in front of a loaded gun, he ran to the corner where she was, trying to catch the wardrobe before it hit her.

  He’d just reached her side when her voice rose. Not in fear; it wasn’t a scream. It was simply her saying those words, those itchy-sounding, tumbly words.

  Light flashed from the center of the wreath, a second of bright bluewhite light, and then—the space grew. He didn’t understand how it could happen, but the wreath widened until the doorway or portal or whatever stretched from floor to ceiling.

  That was when his feet started sliding across the floor.

  Grabbing the wardrobe was instinct. So was grabbing Chess’s hand.

  Ghosts flew back through the portal, slowly at first, then faster as the vacuum increased. They, too, tried to catch the wardrobe, to hold on to him and Chess, but they couldn’t seem to solidify enough to do so.

  Chess started walking toward him, going hand-over-hand up his arm, until she, too, could clutch the wardrobe. The vacuum sucked at him, sucked in some odd way he didn’t really understand. It wasn’t a physical pull—well, it was physical, obviously, but the sensation seemed to come from inside him rather than outside.

  “It feels weird,” he managed. Holding the wardrobe with both hands necessitated pressing Chess between himself and the wood, almost spooning against her. She didn’t seem to mind, which was nice.

  “It’s your soul.”

  “What?” Damn it, there it was again.

  “It’s your soul. The portal is trying to pull spirits back into itself, and it can’t differentiate very well between disembodied ones and living people. Just hang on. Do you see any more ghosts in here?”

  He craned his neck to the left. Was that glow a ghost or—

  He lost his grip on the wardrobe.

  As if in slow motion he felt himself falling backward, his head hitting the floor with a painful thud. Felt the rough wood floor beneath him scraping his back as he slid across it.

  Chess grabbed his feet. He managed to force his head off the ground long enough to see her feet hooked on the edge of the wardrobe.

  And long enough to turn around and see the portal only inches from his face, to see the cold darkness within, the black silhouettes and torch flames. Faces appeared in it and then disappeared, greedy eyes focusing on him, bony fingers trying to reach out and grab him.

  He could practically see saliva dripping from their dead lips as they waited for him, ready to steal his life, to try to feed on that power. He had no idea what exactly they would do to him, but he bet it would be painful.

  Chess shifted her grip, crooking her elbow around his feet and reaching into her bag. A second or two later she threw something at the portal, shouted something that sounded like “Belium dishwasher!”

  The portal closed.

  HE DIDN’T THINK he’d ever been so grateful for a beer in his life. Beneath all of the bottles of water in the cooler were a dozen or so of them, chilled to perfection, and he wished he could suck every one back at once.

  Not only did he think he deserved a damn drink, he thought it would help a bit with the pain as Chess dug the glass shard out of his thigh.

  He was wrong about that one. He just barely managed to stay silent. But at least it didn’t take long, and when her hands touched his skin as she applied butterfly closures and some kind of ointment, covering it all with a bandage . . . well, that was nice, even though he felt shaky and weak from the loss of adrenaline.

  Terrible stood in the corner, watching the wreath reduce to ash. Rick looked at him for a second, then turned back to Chess.

  “So, um . . . maybe you’d like to go out to dinner with me or something, sometime?”

  Terrible snorted.

  Chess smiled, the kind of smile Rick knew meant no even before she opened her mouth, and started cleaning his scraped fingers with a baby wipe. “Sorry. I’m with someone.”

  “Oh. Oh, um . . . is it serious?”

  She squeezed more ointment onto the place where the splinters had been, slowly like she was trying to gather her thoughts. She glanced at Terrible, a quick little eye-dart before looking down again; Rick figured she didn’t want him to overhear. “He’s my family,” she said finally. Quietly. “He’s everything.”

  “Oh,” he said again, rummaging in his tired mind for a new topic of conversation. “So that thing I saw through the portal, was that the City of Eternity? Like, for real?”

  Chess smoothed a Band-Aid over his finger. “Not really. Well, it is, but it’s actually more like a tunnel into the City.”

  He took his hand back, took another swallow of his beer.

  “All burned out here,” Terrible said.

  Chess looked over at him. “Good. Can you scoop up the ashes? We’ll dump them down the sink later.”

  “You can’t just leave them here?” Rick asked.

  She shrugged. “Probably. But I’d rather be safe. You never know what can happen with stuff like that. Mistletoe is very powerful—as you saw—and there are a couple of spells that use mistletoe ash, so . . . better to just dump them.”

  “B
ecause whoever set that thing up might come back and try again?”

  “What? No, nobody set that up. That was your fault.”

  He jerked upright. “My fault? How did I—”

  A heavy hand slammed down on his shoulder. How the hell had Terrible gotten there so fast? Rick hadn’t even heard his footsteps.

  “Oh, calm down. Both of you. Nobody deliberately set that thing off. It was you being here that attracted them.”

  Rick must have looked confused, because she sighed. “Think of it this way. All these years that wreath has been up there, but the house was empty. There was no energy inside it, you know? No life. But then you guys came in here tonight, and your energy activated the mistletoe and made a portal.”

  Terrible let go of Rick, shifted his weight. “Shit.”

  “Yes, shit. This is why you’re supposed to let me look through these places first, right? Please? Next time?”

  Terrible nodded.

  “Good.” She slapped her palms down onto her thighs and stood up. “Okay, are we all ready to go now?”

  “Aye, guessing so.”

  Rick stood up, too. “Hey, do you need me back tomorrow night? Or . . .’

  Terrible’s eyebrows rose. “You wanna come back?”

  “Well . . .” Did he? No, not really. But he still needed the money, and he didn’t think he’d actually earned anything yet.

  Terrible reached into the heavy pack against the wall and pulled out a wad of cash. “Here. You take this, aye? An’ you ain’t needing to come back. Thinkin’ you done enough.”

  He held out his hand. Or rather, he held out a bunch of money, what had to be at least three or four grand.

  “Oh, hey, no, I mean, I hardly did anything, the floorboards aren’t even up at all.”

  Terrible glanced at Chess, then back. “Take it.”

  “But I—”

  “Take it.”

  So he did, shoving it into his pocket without counting it. At least he knew not to do that.

  He slung his backpack over his still-sore shoulder, and the three of them clattered back down the stairs and out the front door.

  Down the street a gang of kids were giggling and playing with firecrackers. On the corner a couple of hookers leaned against the lamppost, their skin glistening with sweat. The sound of breaking glass echoed over the other noises, the car engines and shouts and music.

  “Well, okay, I guess,” Rick said. He held out his hand to Chess, who shook it, then he did the same with Terrible. “It was nice meeting you guys and everything.”

  “You, too,” Chess replied. “Take care.”

  Terrible grunted.

  “Oh, and thanks,” she said. “You were a big help . . . you were really brave.”

  Brave. Was he? He didn’t feel like he was, hadn’t felt it at the time, but when he looked back at what he’d done . . . yeah, maybe he was. His chest inflated.

  But he didn’t let on how that made him feel. Instead he just said, “Bye,” and walked to his car, aware of their eyes on him, aware of the dark sky above and the city of ghosts beneath the earth. He’d seen it. He’d actually seen the City, he’d actually seen ghosts, been injured by them and watched them be defeated.

  He was Rick the Brave, Rick the ghost killer. Rick the guy any girl would want to be with, and he was four grand or so richer, and life was pretty damn good, after all.

  Full-Scale Demolition

  SUZANNE MCLEOD

  “The client’s got a pixie portal in her swimming pool?” I groaned and shot a frustrated look down at the four Warded cat carriers I’d tucked into the shade of Nelson’s Column. There were two sleeping pixies in each and it had taken me since dawn to catch the little monsters. It was now midday. The last thing I wanted was another pixie job. “Toni, please, ple-ease, tell me this is one of your windups?”

  Toni, our office manager, laughed in my phone’s earpiece. “Sorry, not this time, Genny. And it’s an emergency job—” The trilling of the other line interrupted her. “Hang on, hon,” she said, and I heard her faint, “Spellcrackers.com, making magic safe, guaranteed. How may I help you?” before I tuned her out.

  Catching pixies was so not my favorite job. It made me feel like the wicked faerie who didn’t get invited to the christening, but who turned up anyway. And catching pixies in Trafalgar Square on Easter Saturday, in an early heat wave, with a full complement of tourists, schoolkids, and al fresco sandwich-snackers happily pointing their digital cameras and video phones my way . . .

  Well, you get the picture.

  I raked fingers through the ends of my hair where it stuck to my nape and contemplated the last pixie. It was squatting on the flank of one of the four bronze lions that guarded the base of Nelson’s Column, swishing its barbed tail like an angry cat. Its blue-gray scales shimmered in the sunlight, and its lipless snout was stretched in a taunting grin. No way was it going to make this easy. Then, as if to hammer that thought home, the pixie flapped its vestigial batlike wings, cartwheeled along the lion’s broad back, and jumped up to perch on the statue’s huge head.

  The impromptu audience gathered below laughed and clapped and whooped. The two heritage wardens, who were doing crowd control around the column’s base, exchanged a long-suffering look. And in the background the ever-present rumble of traffic rose and fell like the murmur of the sea. Which was where the pixie was going back to after I’d caught it in my hot sticky fingers.

  Despite the fascinated audience, pixies in Trafalgar Square were nothing new. The first one appeared back in 1845 as soon as they’d begun pumping water into the newly built fountains—the fountains had opened a portal straight to the Cornish sea—and the pixies had been slipping through ever since. A cautionary lesson to anyone thinking about digging a new garden pond. Get a witch to do a magical survey first, or you never know where you might be connecting to—or what might live there.

  “Genny Taylor!”

  At my shouted name, I looked down to find a petite girl of about my own age—twenty-four—at the front of the crowd. She had spiky black hair, a silver dumbbell through her left eyebrow, and a tattoo of red and black triangles on the side of her throat, and she was overdressed for the heat wave in Goth-style camo gear. She grinned, lifted the huge professional camera hanging round her neck, and snapped off a couple of shots. Damn, my persistent paparazzo was back. She’d been stalking me for a good couple of months (one of the joys of being the only sidhe fae in London), though only the gods knew why, as I sincerely doubted the media needed any more photos of me chasing pixies. YouTube already had half a dozen videos, from what I’d heard.

  I shifted, giving her my back.

  “Hi, hon.” Toni’s voice returned in my earpiece.

  “What’s the story with the swimming pool anyway?” I asked.

  “The client’s doing renovations,” Toni said. “One of the builders put an iron spike through the Ground Ward and fritzed it, and then some idiot left a hose running.”

  “Great.” Repairing a Ground Ward added another hour to the job.

  “Oh, wait till you hear the rest,” Toni said. “The husband’s an antiquities dealer, so the house is full of statues. Very old and very expensive statues. Hubby’s on a buying trip just now, and the client’s having forty fits in case something ends up broken.”

  Pixies love statues. It’s what makes them dangerous.

  A few years ago, a pack of about thirty-odd pixies, high on candies filched from a coachload of schoolkids (sugar works wonders for amping up magic), managed to partially animate the exact same bronze lion I was looking at. The lion shook its head, roared, and snapped its jaws at the crowd for over an hour before the pixies’ magic finally wore off. So the Greater London Authority declared the pixies a health hazard, and Spellcrackers. com had won the contract to keep the pixie numbers down to acceptable levels.

  “Thing is,” Toni said, breaking into my musings, “you’ll need to do the job on your own; everyone else is either down at Old Scotland Yard—” She
paused, and we shared a moment’s silence about the tragedy, currently absorbing the media, of the two eleven-year-old boys who’d gone missing from an amusement arcade a week ago. Any witch with a touch of scrying ability was helping the police right now. So far no one had gotten lucky. “Or they’re off to the Spring Fertility Rite,” Toni finished. Easter is the witches’ big jamboree.

  “No probs. Does the client know I’m doing the job?” Some humans didn’t want a fae in their home—either too scared or too bigoted—and while I can pass for human if I hide my catlike pupils, it’s never good business to fool the clients. Of course, I get other job requests that have nothing to do with cracking magic and everything to do with some jerk’s sexual fantasy, so I find it pays to check.

  “She asked for our pixie specialist.” Which was my “star billing” on the company website. “Plus I told her, but she’s worried enough that the Wicked Witch of the West could turn up on her doorstep and it wouldn’t be an issue.”

  “Love you, too, Toni,” I said drily, digging the Pixnap—my favorite pixie-sedating cream—from my backpack.

  She laughed. “Oh, and stay out of my stationery cupboard until you’ve gotten rid of all that pixie dust.”

  “Hey, that was an accident,” I said in mock affront, rubbing the honeyscented cream into my hands and forearms. “And I tidied all your pens after they’d finished doing the tango.”

  “Pixing my face wasn’t an accident.” Toni didn’t mean her face, but the Green Man plaque hanging behind our reception desk. I’d been experimenting with pixie dust, and animated him. Trouble was, he’d been carved from a dryad’s tree, and the pixie magic was taking its time wearing off. “He still winks every time I walk by,” she said in disgust.

  “Sorry.” I stifled a chuckle. “At least he’s stopped telling everyone to come back tomorrow.”

  She huffed, told me that she’d e-mail me the client’s details, and we said our good-byes.

  I turned my attention back to the pixie, who was doing a furious jig on the lion’s head, and hauled myself up onto the bronze lion. Its metal back was scorching from the sun, and gritty from all the pixie dust. It really was way too hot for this. My Lycra running shorts and bra top had seemed a good idea at dawn, but now the black material was absorbing heat like a vamp sucking up blood, while the yellow plastic of the Hi-Vis waistcoat had welded itself to my spine. I sighed and shimmied along the lion’s back until I crouched on its shoulders.