Home Improvement: Undead Edition (9 page)

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
dar
e—” 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?”