Home Improvement: Undead Edition

by Harris, Charlaine

  Even so, she laid it out for him. “He told me that the man who bought the building to turn it into condos stayed in this apartment and fixed the others, one at a time. He finished the one over there”—she tipped her head toward the door to the other third-floor apartment—“moved in and started on this one. Only odd things started happening. First it was tools and small stuff disappearing. Then”—as the destruction increased—“it was perfectly stable ladders falling over with people on them. Sent an electrical contractor to the hospital with that one. Saws that turned themselves on at the worst possible time—they managed to reattach that man’s finger, Josh said. Chicago is a big city, but contractors do talk to each other. He couldn’t get a crew in here to work the place.” Elyna gave him a big friendly smile. “Some of that I already knew. I read the article in the neighborhood paper before I called you.” That article was why she had called him.

  She could see him reevaluate her. Was she a kook who wanted a haunted house? Or was she just looking for a real bargain?

  “I’m older than I look,” she told him, to help him make up his mind. “And I’m not a fool. Haunted or not, anyone looking at this apartment is going to start by getting appraisals from contractors. You haven’t had an offer on this place in six months.”

  “A lot of bad luck doesn’t a haunted place make,” he said heartily, taking the bait. “All it takes is a few careless people. The man who lived here before my client, lived here for twenty years and never saw any ghost. I have his phone number and you can talk to him.”

  “It doesn’t matter if I’m convinced it’s not haunted,” she told him. “It matters what the contractors think.”

  He looked grim.

  “I’m willing to make an offer,” she said. “But I’m going to have to pay premium prices to get anyone in to do the work, and that affects my bottom line.”

  And they got down to business. Aubrey had the paperwork for the offer with him. They took care of signatures, she fed from him, and then both of them went their separate ways in the night. Aubrey, with a new affection for Elyna, would be determined to make a good bargain for her regardless of the effect it might have on his commission. She felt guilty—a little—but not as much as she would have if he hadn’t tried to take advantage of her supposed ignorance.

  ELYNA’S PHONE RANG while she was in the hotel shower. She answered it with her hair dripping onto the thick green carpeting. Only after she answered did she remember that she wouldn’t be punished for not answering the phone right away anymore.

  “Elyna,” said Sean, one of the vampires who’d belonged to Corona with her. Without waiting for her greeting, he continued, “You are being foolish. There are plenty of places without seethes where you could settle. Colbert doesn’t play nicely with others and you won’t be able to hide from him forever.”

  Pierre Colbert was the Master of Chicago, and a nasty piece of business he was. He’d driven the Mistress and what he’d left of her seethe out of Chicago about thirty years ago. Elyna had met him only once, and that was enough. He wouldn’t bother driving her out. He’d just destroy her—if he noticed she was in his territory.

  “Elyna,” coaxed Sean’s voice in her ear. “Come back to Madison. Take your rightful place here.”

  Never. That much Elyna was certain of. Sean had been her lover sometimes—two frightened people finding what solace they could. Usually they’d been friends, too, and more often allies. But Elyna wasn’t strong enough to hold the seethe—and Sean knew it. If she went back, he’d kill her to establish his power. Or maybe he was working for someone else, someone more powerful: There were several that came to mind.

  “What of Sybil?” Elyna asked him. Sybil wouldn’t need to kill Elyna to take power, but she’d enjoy doing it.

  “Sybil’s been dealt with,” Sean said with considerable satisfaction.

  “Good,” Elyna said, meaning it. If Corona had been brutal, Sybil, her lieutenant, was fiendish.

  Sybil had enjoyed hurting others: vampires or regular people, she didn’t care. She had a special hatred of men, and Sean had suffered under her hand as much as any in the seethe except maybe Fitz. Fitz was ash and gone, but he’d provided Sybil with months of entertainment. “That’s good. With her gone, Brad or Chris can take over as Master.”

  “Where are you staying?” said Sean.

  Elyna sighed, making sure he heard it. He was being too obvious. Ah, the joys of vampire politics. No one even made an attempt to hide the bodies.

  “I’m not really as dumb as I look,” she told him gently. “I would have thought that you, of all the seethe, would know that.”

  “Colbert will find you,” he told her. “That’s his talent, you know, finding vampires when he wants them. You’ll be dead anyway and we’ll be in the middle of a fucking civil war—”

  She ended the call while he was speaking—answering rudeness with rudeness. She didn’t approve of swearing. Or prolonging conversations with stupid people. She hadn’t thought Sean was one of the stupid people, and it hurt.

  She walked over to the mirror on the bathroom door and stared. Did she really look so gullible and helpless? She blinked at herself a few times. She could admit she looked harmless, but surely not stupid.

  Colbert could find vampires, any vampire. She’d known that when she’d come here.

  Still staring at herself, Elyna flexed her hands, then fisted them. All vampires had talents of one sort or another. There were some magics that almost all of them who’d survived past the first few months had to one degree or another, such as the ability to cloud minds. Vampires who had to kill everyone they fed from were eliminated as a threat to the rest of them. Too many dead bodies brought too much attention.

  There were rarer talents, like Colbert’s ability to track other vampires. Her former Mistress Corona’s ability with minds was rare only in how powerful she had been.

  Elyna had a rare talent, too. She could hide in plain sight. As long as she didn’t move, she was invisible in a room full of vampires. She’d kept that quiet, once she’d understood the implications. Finding the will to use it had taken a long, long time. A lifetime and more—because a vampire must obey her maker.

  That was the first thing she had learned. If her Mistress had taken control of her a day earlier, or if her Mistress had made more certain of the rope she’d tied Elyna’s dead body with, things would have been different. To Corona’s credit, most vampires take years of mutual feeding to change from human to vampire. She’d had Elyna only a couple of weeks when someone slipped up and drained her dry. As Corona told Elyna when she’d finally tracked her down, they had assumed that Elyna was as dead as she looked; the rope had been merely a precaution. Sometimes, the Mistress had told her, there were people who turned much easier than others. Who knew why?

  Stubborn Pole, Jack had called her when at his most exasperated. Fair enough; she’d called him a hot-headed Mick in return, and there had been more than a cup of truth in both epithets.

  So, stubborn Pole that she was, despite expectations, Elyna had awoken tied up in a shed in Corona’s backyard. The ropes had taken her a little while to break. Confused and dazed by the transformation from human to dead to vampire, she had run home, where Jack had been waiting.

  If she survived to be a thousand, she would never forget the joy on his face when she’d opened the door.

  But she hadn’t been Elyna O’Malley, Jack O’Malley’s wife, anymore, not then. She had been vampire, and she’d been hungry.

  She’d fed and then fallen comatose into their bed until Corona found her the following evening. By chance the bedroom’s thick curtains had been drawn and kept the sun at bay, or else Elyna would never have awoken again. It was a long time before she quit being bitter about those heavy curtains.

  Corona wouldn’t let her kill herself on purpose, so Elyna settled for second best. She couldn’t kill Jack’s murderer, so she decided instead to kill Corona, who’d made her and not made sure that Jack was safe from her. So she’
d learned to control the vampire, learned to be the best vampire she could, learned to be Elyna Gray instead of Jack O’Malley’s wife.

  Four weeks ago, the time had been right. The ties that kept her loyal to her Mistress broke at last. Elyna’s stubbornness had been rewarded and she was free.

  Elyna moved from the bathroom. Her hotel room was eleven stories to the ground and had a fine view of the Loop and the big lake beyond that.

  In contrast to the thirst for vengeance that had driven her since her death, hope seemed such a fragile thing.

  IN THE END, she paid a little too much for the apartment turned condo, but a lot less than she’d been willing to pay.

  She moved into a furnished efficiency apartment whose greatest assets were its location a few blocks from her home, its basement entrance where no one would see her comings and goings, and a storage room with no windows.

  She went shopping at a few thrift stores and then took her newly acquired laundry to the nearest Laundromat. Three middle-aged women eyed her as she sorted her laundry. When she put the first load in, a grandmotherly woman came up to her and explained the ins and outs of the neighborhood laundry.

  By the time she’d folded the last of her towels, Elyna had learned a nifty trick to get lipstick out of washable silk; that there was a scary-looking man who washed his clothes on Tuesdays who was a retired Marine, horribly shy, and a dear, sweet man, so she wasn’t to let him frighten her; and that there was a local man, someone’s cousin’s sister-in-law’s nephew, who was a contractor.

  PETER VANDERSTAAT WAS a neighborhood man, a police officer who ran remodel jobs with his partner and a half-dozen other people on the side. He’d agreed to meet Elyna at her condo and look at it, even though what she wanted wasn’t the kind of project they looked for. He usually bought a place, fixed it up, and sold it at a profit, but he was between projects.

  He looked to be in his midforties with tired, suspicious eyes. Short and squat, Jack would have said—built like a wrestler. Peter didn’t talk a lot, just grunted, until they came back to the living room.

  “Where is the money coming from?” he asked. “I don’t want to have my men put hours in and then not get paid.”

  Elyna had money. She’d started by stealing a little bit from her victims and continued with investments. Investments she’d successfully hidden from Corona.

  “My family has money,” she told him. “I can pay you.”

  She had been painfully honest when she had been human. Lying was one of those skills she’d had to learn to be a successful vampire.

  Vanderstaat bought her story, turning his attention back to the apartment. He frowned at the mismatched windows. “You want me to match the vinyl?”

  “Please, no,” she said, involuntary horror in her voice.

  He looked at her and lifted a shaggy eyebrow.

  “Vinyl is good. I’m sure that would look terrific in a modern place, but . . .” She let her voice trail off.

  “But,” he agreed. “What do you intend to do with the floors? Some of those boards can’t be saved, expensive to find replacement boards of the same quality. There are some very good laminates on the market; I can get you fair prices.”

  “Can’t you fix the floors?” she asked in a small voice.

  That time she got a grin. “A girl after my own heart,” he said. “Not the most profitable way to go—but we’re in it for fun, too. No fun slapping together crap no matter how much more money you make at it.”

  Peter and his men worked evenings, he told her, five days a week but not on Saturday or Sunday. They’d stop at ten every night for the neighbors’ sake, which made for a long remodel—the reason they usually didn’t take on a contract like this. They shook hands on it and agreed that he would start in two days to give him time to put together his crew.

  GHOSTS AND CATS don’t like vampires. Dogs, on the other hand, didn’t mind Elyna—which was good because more often than not, Peter brought his yellow Lab as one of the crew. Peter was initially dubious of Elyna’s need to help, but when she proved useful, he started ordering her around like he did the rest of his crew.

  The first job was finishing the demolition, clearing out the old for the new. They started with the bedrooms and moved forward. Some nights it was just Peter and Elyna; other nights they had as many as eight or ten men.

  “Hey, you guys,” said Simon, a twentysomething rookie cop and drywall man who had pulled down a chunk of plaster from the living room wall and held it up for everyone to see. “Look how this is stained. Do you think this is blood? My mom says that back in the late twenties a man was killed up here in this apartment. Or at least he left a lot of blood behind and disappeared.”

  No one was looking at Elyna, which was a good thing.

  “I remember that story,” agreed one of the other men. “Something to do with the gangsters, wasn’t it? And the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

  “The massacre was 1929,” commented Peter.

  “Yeah,” agreed Simon. “The guy who lived here was an architect just hired by John Scalise—one of Capone’s men. Story was that the architect’s wife went missing a few weeks before Valentine’s Day. Right after the massacre, the neighbor across the hall and several police officers broke down the door—”

  Everyone, even Elyna, looked at the front door, which showed all sorts of damage. If it wasn’t the door that had been there when she’d lived here, someone had found an exact match. And then aged it for eighty-plus years.

  “But”—Simon dropped his voice and whispered—“all they found was blood. Lots and lots of blood.”

  There was a crash in the kitchen.

  Peter whacked Simon upside the head. “Kid, Elyna’s going to be living here. You think she needs that in her head?” And then Peter tromped off to see what the noise in the kitchen had been.

  “Sorry, Elyna,” Simon told her sheepishly. “Boss is right. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “No worries,” Elyna said, straining her ears to listen for any more noises. “I’ve heard the story before. I did my research before I bought this place.”

  She must not have been convincing, because he followed her around like Peter’s dog for the rest of the evening, mistaking grief and guilt for fear. Peter couldn’t figure out what had made the noise, but they decided it was one of the tools falling off some precarious perch. Even so, Peter’s crew was jumpy for the rest of the night.

  Weeks passed without further incidents. They moved from tearing down to rebuilding the plumbing and electric. And Peter started to schedule times when he, his right-hand man Frankie, and Elyna would sit down with catalogs to choose what the apartment would look like when it was finished.

  As soon as the bathroom and most of the electric was finished, Elyna put up blackout curtains in the master bedroom and moved in. She didn’t have much more than would fit into a pair of suitcases.

  The first thing she bought after moving in was a twin bed. The second thing was a small bookcase, followed by a double handful of books. She kept the efficiency apartment for the coming summer days when the sun’s setting time meant Peter’s crew would be arriving in daylight. She encouraged Peter to assume that was where the rest of her things were, waiting for the floors to be finished so she wouldn’t have to move the stuff around. Peter, Frankie, and the rest of the guys had gotten quite protective of her.

  Other than something falling in the kitchen while Simon was telling his ghost story, there had been no sign that the apartment was haunted, let alone haunted by Elyna’s dead husband. Sometimes, sitting on her bed and reading a book, Elyna would pretend that Jack was just in another room.

  Reading was something they’d shared. It had started when he caught her reading E. M. Hull’s The Sheik. The scandalous book had left her blushing like a ninny and him rolling his eyes.

  “Bastard needed to be put down like a mad dog,” he’d told her. “Instead he gets to keep the girl he kidnapped and raped. Doesn’t sound right to me. Is that the kind of hero
you really want?”

  So he’d read Tarzan of the Apes to her, and she’d agreed that the ape man would be a much better choice than the sheik—and that had led to a merry few minutes with Jack jumping around on the furniture and her laughing her fool head off until the neighbors knocked on the walls.

  They read every odd thing: Charles Darwin, Zane Grey, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sometimes they read them separately, and sometimes they read them to each other.

  She hadn’t read in the seethe. She hadn’t wanted to give Corona even so much as a glimpse into her real thoughts—and Jack always had said you knew a person by the books they read . . . or didn’t read.

  When Elyna went shopping for books now, she was bewildered by the offerings. She found a copy of Tarzan, but the rest were all new to her.

  She’d been reading The Sackett Brand for about fifteen minutes before she realized it was something Jack would have liked. She turned back to the beginning and started over out loud, reading for hours. She read Tarzan next, commenting on some of the things that science had proven since it was written. But she also went out and got twelve more books by Louis L’Amour for Jack.

  As she read to him, she pictured her husband sitting in his favorite chair, eyes closed with that intent expression on his face that meant he was enjoying the book.

  Reading wasn’t the only pleasure she regained. It had been a long time since she’d had a friend. Inside Corona’s seethe, Elyna hadn’t been able to trust anyone. She could only show them the broken, fragile thing they all thought her to be. Someone to be discounted. She couldn’t afford to care too deeply. The lover who gave her solace one day would torture her the next, because no one disobeyed the Mistress. Even the few who could have done so successfully (because they were older, stronger, or not of the Mistress’s making) didn’t disobey her. At least not after the Mistress gave Fitz, who had been her favorite, to Sybil.