Home Improvement: Undead Edition

by Harris, Charlaine

  Don’t play with your food. First lesson old One-Eyed Jack ever taught me. Leave it to a human to go for sexy presentation. Sparkle might fill movie theaters, but it doesn’t do much for cuisine. Hollywood gives the humans such lame ideas about translife.

  Both zombies were pulling hard on her arms, forcing her down into the guttered autopsy table. Fresh jugs waited under the drain to collect every precious drop of blood, and Ravelston stood ready with wineglasses.

  As the golem bent over her, chef’s knife at the ready, she suddenly threw herself toward Buck. Or perhaps it was Tooth. One zombie plus one desperate woman plus the tipping platform managed to yank Tooth (if that was who it was) off his feet and impale him on the golem’s outstretched knife and sent Buck backward off the platform.

  Both zombies grunted in outrage as they bounced bloodily into the kitchen pit.

  Stensgaard scooted backward as the golem mechanically wiped the knife and struck again.

  “Chef! Stop her!” Mastiff shouted.

  Breathing hot and hard, Stensgaard jumped off the platform and among the diners. She sprinted between the widely spaced tables, upending a busboy cart that one of the guests had pushed into her way. Otherwise the rest were satisfied with just watching the escape attempt.

  Perhaps they thought it was dinner theater.

  “Stop her,” shouted Mastiff, waving his shiny top hat in frustration from the balcony.

  The skeletons went about their business of mechanically filling knocked-over water glasses and picking up dropped forks. You get what you pay for, Mastiff.

  Stensgaard didn’t bother with the door. Instead she grabbed the busboy cart and followed it through one of the great river-facing windows and down onto the patio.

  All I could do was shake my head. If she got away, the Templars would be investigating all of southwest Wisconsin and the surrounding states inside twenty-four hours.

  “Looks like the special’s off . . . and running,” Lasseur said. “I can’t wait to see what’s planned for dessert. A heroin addict launched from a cannon, perhaps?”

  Someone had to set this mess to rights, and for the sake of the staff of the Skyline, I’d undertake it. I grabbed Ravelston by the arm and pulled him toward the hole in the glass.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, it seems . . .” Mastiff said. “It seems . . .”

  “Starting here, starting now, honey, everything’s coming up roses!” sang the stickpin.

  “THIS NEVER WAS my kind of show,” Ravelston said, his arms tight across my back as the horse trotted through the cloudy Wisconsin night. The tall quarterhorse was deeply unhappy about carrying a vampire. “Running down food in the dead of night.”

  I’d had to bring him. I could ride quickly, but I couldn’t track a bus driven through a glass blower’s.

  “How do you keep yourself fed? Just the restaurant?”

  I couldn’t see his face much out of the corner of my eye, but it looked like a cheek muscle twitched.

  “Tweed suit,” he said.

  Wasn’t sure I heard him right so I yelled over the hoofbeats. “Come again, please?”

  “She WENT downhill here, sir. TURN to the right, if you please. A tweed suit. Just put on a tweed suit. Especially if it’s a few decades out of date. No one suspects you of anything. I tell you, if you ever need to lie low somewhere, find yourself a secondhand tweed suit. When I must eat, I visit the hospitals and nursing homes. Someone like me, smelling like mothballs, wool hat in hand wandering around a nursing home peeking into doors—no one gives me a second look. I look for those on their last legs. Dementia, pain . . . not much vitality in their blood, of course, but I feel as if I’m doing them a service.”

  “Was it always like that, or did you change over time?” I’d known a vampire or two who’d quietly starved themselves to death because the routine got to them. Talky old bloke would probably go that way.

  “It was my daughter, poor creature. She’d had it all, smarts, looks. WANTED, NEEDED to keep it. Best turn left here, I think she’s down this gully.”

  “Your own daughter.”

  “We lost my wife early on, so it was just the two of us. I think the possibility she wouldn’t have to outlive me got in her head. She’d been away years, just a postcard here and there from various spots in Mexico or Rio. Then she came back. I SHOULD have known something was odd about her, years traipsing around Puerto Vallarta and the Caribbean, but pale as moonlight. Still, who wouldn’t hug their daughter even if there was rather too much white about the pupils.”

  “How did she get into it?”

  “Some young hotshot. Hardly KNEW the art himself, and here he was building a posse. That’s what he called my daughter. Part of his posse. Nothing so dignified as bride, or mate, or with the implied responsibility of sister. She was in his posse. The world and its young hotshots. Those are just the kind of customers Mason wishes to cultivate. As if they are going to be touring the Mississippi Valley, antiquing for old farm implements and rare beer bottles.”

  “What ever happened to her?”

  “The Templars, I think. She called me, once, said some men were after her and I MUST move and change my name. She loved the game, the game she called it, and played it risky. Just here—I can hear panting from those trees.”

  I thought about asking if she’d ever tried his tweed suit, but even the horses I exhaust don’t deserve that much cruelty. In any case, we were almost on top of Lisa Stensgaard.

  “Shall you take care of her, or shall I?” I asked.

  “Must we?” Ravelston asked. He stared at the copse of hillside poplars. I couldn’t hear anything but the wind and the horse stomping, but his instincts were intact with the night at its zenith.

  “It’s that, or the Templars will be burning you all out by noon the day after tomorrow.”

  “Perhaps—Oh, I suppose you’re right. She’s just about the age of my daughter. Funny how the bits of human existence linger on. Like a nursery rhyme from childhood.”

  “Along came a spider,” I muttered.

  Wait a tick—

  “Come out, my dear,” Ravelston said. “I’ll make it quick, and I GUARANTEE it’s pain free and rather pleasant. I went through it myself not so many years ago, you see.”

  “No. Let me go, please. Please!” she said, stepping from the copse. Her legs were scratched by thorns, and they shook.

  “Lisa,” I called. “Lisa, I know you didn’t ask for this. You didn’t ask for anything but a holiday in the sun. The only thing you did was talk to the wrong guy in a bar, I suppose. Bad break for you. But I think I can give you a choice. You can just accept that you’re a casualty of an ancient battle, or you can help us out. Maybe even get revenge against the man who imprisoned you in that tank.”

  “Is this a trick?” she asked.

  “More of a treat,” I said. “For us, at least.”

  A WEEK LATER the Skyline had been cleaned of the dreadful décor and refurnished with some simple Arts and Crafts chairs and tables Ravelston had found at an Amish furniture roadside shop. A new bar was on order.

  Megha, working the kitchen, had the zombies in thick rubber gloves and surgical suits washing dishes and polishing glassware. The golem was chopping vegetables, working methodically from the bins.

  I’d loaned her a substantial sum to pay off the Skyline’s debts. She’d proven herself an eager pupil and looked forward to her new role as chef.

  The relaunch was a stunning success. Not a soul recognized pale, newly dyed-and-shorn Lisa Stensgaard as the new waitress. A delicate black choker hid the healing bite marks in her neck, and her nice eyes and cheekbones drew attention upward in any case.

  Ravelston was behind the bar, pouring out aquavit—a local favorite—and anecdotes.

  The menu, designed by me and executed by Megha, was a success. The special tonight was a juicehead fricassee in a New Ulm winery sauce. Some drunken college jocks had overturned their canoe on the Wisconsin River—with a bit of a nudge from Buck—and the poli
ce had managed to dredge up only one of the victims.

  Even Charles Lasseur was impressed. I issued an invitation for a revisit personally, and he’d called Megha to his table to compliment her on the second-string Badger linebacker. “You’ve brought expertise back to fine dining here in the Midwest. I expect you’ll find a grateful and loyal clientele,” he said.

  “Thank you,” we said in unison.

  “I look forward to trying you again tomorrow. Can I assume the new management has a fresh surprise to delight the tooth?”

  “You can count on it. As our guest, of course,” Megha said.

  Megha knew how to stay on the old ghoul’s good side. Counting her tongue, she was making at least four obscene gestures. Five if the lascivious wink was included.

  Lasseur’s lips had long since shriveled and pulled away from his gumline, but he licked where they’d once been. “Give me a hint?”

  “Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, tomorrow night we’re serving the old management.”

  Through This House

  SEANAN MCGUIRE

  Now until the break of day,

  Through this house each fairy stray.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

  “So this is Goldengreen.” May stared around herself with undisguised curiosity, taking in the high weeds choking the footpaths and the brambles that did their best to conceal the drop-off to the Pacific Ocean waiting a hundred yards or so below the cliff. Not one of California’s finer views, although at least it wasn’t raining. “It’s a fixer-upper, that’s for sure.”

  “Shut up,” I snapped. I kept circling the rusted-out old shed that used to link the field behind the San Francisco Art Museum to the knowe of Goldengreen, Seat of the County it was named for. The door connecting the mortal world and the knowe had been created and maintained by the former Countess, Evening Winterrose.

  Trouble was, Evening had been dead for nearly two years, and few enchantments are strong enough to last that long in the mortal world without maintenance. Goldengreen was sealed when she died. No one maintained the connections, figuring, I guess, that someday there would be a new regent, and it would be their problem.

  Guess who the new Countess of Goldengreen was?

  Good guess.

  I gave the shed an experimental kick. It shook slightly, but that was all. No magical sparks leaped out to char my shoe, no lingering wards activated—whatever magic Evening had used here, it was long gone. I sighed, stepping back. “Come on, May. We’re going to need to try one of the other doors.”

  “Awesome.” May walked over to me, beaming. “It’s an adventure.”

  “Yeah,” I said dryly, and started walking toward the edge of the cliff. “That.”

  A LITTLE BACKGROUND, before this gets too confusing: My name is October Daye. I’m a changeling, which means my father was human and my mother was fae. I’m less human than I used to be, also thanks to my mother, who used blood magic to push me more toward fae in order to save my life. I’m still not sure whether to be pissed off about that.

  About two years ago, Countess Evening Winterrose was murdered by my former mentor. I was the one who proved he’d done it. In the process the Queen of the Mists—current regent of Northern California—wound up in my debt. It was a position neither of us found particularly comfortable, since she thinks I’m changeling scum and I think she’s dangerously insane. As soon as she had the opportunity to discharge that debt, she did . . . by giving me the title to Goldengreen. Yippee.

  I never wanted to be a Countess, and I definitely didn’t want the responsibility of reclaiming an entire fallow knowe. Faerie hills get weird when they’re untended for too long, and Goldengreen had been empty since Evening died. Unfortunately, I also had a few dozen new subjects to worry about—the former denizens of the Japanese Tea Gardens, who were left homeless when their regent, my friend Lily, was murdered. They’d been camping in the entry hall, a huge, empty space that offered neither warmth nor comfort. It was the only place in the knowe close enough to the mortal world for us to access without actually prying a door open.

  Reclaiming Goldengreen wasn’t something I could afford to put off. We just had to find a way to get inside.

  May stopped at the edge of the cliff, teetering on her tiptoes as she looked down to the rocks far below. “Whoa. That first step’s a doozy, huh?”

  “Something like that. Can you take a step to the left?”

  “Huh? Oh, sure.” May took an exaggerated step sideways, offering me a bright smile at the same time. “How’s that?”

  “Good. Good.” To the mortal world, May’s my sister. Faerie knows her for what she really is: my Fetch, a death omen summoned into existence by my impending demise.

  That was several impending demises ago. May’s been living with me since the first time I failed to die, and she makes a pretty good roommate. Best of all, being a Fetch, she possesses one trait that was about to come in extremely handy.

  Fetches are indestructible.

  While she was peering down at the waves beating themselves against the base of the cliff, I positioned myself behind her, checked my footing, stepped forward, and shoved. May screamed as she fell—more with surprise than actual fear—but the sound was cut off after only a few feet, when she vanished into thin air.

  “I thought this was the back entrance,” I said, and jumped after her.

  MY FALL ONLY lasted a few seconds. Reality did a dizzying dip-and-whirl of transition as I passed from the mortal world into the Summerlands, and my feet hit the solid stone floor of Goldengreen’s main hall. May’s palm hit my cheek about five seconds later.

  “A little warning next time?” she demanded.

  I’m not fond of being slapped, but I had to allow that she’d been justified. “Would you have let me push you if I’d warned you?”

  “What? No!”

  “Well, that’s why you didn’t get a warning.” I waved a hand to indicate the hall around us. It was twilight-dim, saved from absolute darkness only by fae vision and the traces of a distant glow from somewhere up ahead. “We’re here. That was the goal. And what’s the worst that could have happened?”

  “I could have been eaten by a giant shark swept out of its natural habitat by freak ocean currents caused by global warming.”

  I let my hand drop back to my side, eyeing her. “That’s it. No more late-night horror movies for you. Come on. Let’s see if we can’t find the light switch.”

  May fell into step beside me, sticking a little closer than was strictly necessary as we walked along the darkened hall. I couldn’t exactly blame her. The air had a sepulchral quality to it, like we were walking into a tomb that had been sealed since time began. Even our footsteps failed to echo, dampened and deadened by the shadows pressing in around us. In Faerie, the regent is the land. By leaving Goldengreen untended, the Queen had left the land without a regent . . . and that’s never good.

  “It’s like we’re in a big zombie movie,” said May.

  I glared. “I was trying really hard not to have that thought.”

  Her smile was visible even through the gloom. “That’s what I’m here for.”

  I started walking a little faster, making May hurry to keep up. She snickered as she quickened her pace.

  “Oh, c’mon, Toby. If you just watched a few more horror movies—” The hall shifted around us.

  It wasn’t a big shift—just enough to knock me off balance, sending me stumbling into May, who caught me easily. She looks like a changeling, but she’s a pureblooded Fetch, and her balance is much better than mine.

  “What was that?” she demanded.

  “Oh, now you’re not making jokes?” I straightened, tilting my head toward the join of wall and ceiling as I snapped, “Cut that out! I am the new Countess of Goldengreen, and I’m here by right of Crown and Claiming.”

  Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.

  The hall shuddered, for all the world like a dog trying to shake something
off its back. This time, May and I both staggered backward, stopping only when we hit the wall. Doors were slamming deeper in the knowe, and dust and cobwebs were beginning to rain down from the rafters. Unlike the first shift, this one showed no sign of stopping—although it did show signs of getting worse. If we didn’t move, the knowe was going to bring itself down around our ears.

  Being buried alive didn’t sound like a great idea, and with Lily’s subjects camped in the entry hall, I couldn’t take the risk that the entire knowe would fall in. The Queen might approve—it would take out a lot of troublesome riffraff in one “regrettable accident”—but I certainly wouldn’t. I didn’t know why the knowe was objecting to us and not to them. That was something to worry about later.

  I grabbed May’s arm. “I’ve learned something from horror movies, too.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard above the shaking.

  “When the house tells you to get out, you get out!” I took off running, hauling her in my wake and banking on the exits being easier to find than the entrances were. The knowe continued to shake around us, more and more detritus showering down from the ceiling, the few remaining furnishings and ornaments toppling to the floor. Then a door was in front of us, and I hit it shoulder first, sending us both into the cool night air of the mortal world. We went sprawling, May in a patch of ornamental ground cover, me into a sign that identified our location as the San Francisco Art Museum garden.

  The door swung shut behind us, but not before I saw the knowe stop shaking.

  May sat up, beaming as she brushed her hair away from her face. “That was awesome! What now?”

  I groaned, sagging backward against the sign. “I have no idea.”

  MY ALLIES ARE a motley bunch, defined more by their stubborn refusal to stand back and let the professionals deal with things than any other characteristic. Danny showed up half an hour after I called, his cab roaring into the parking lot at a speed that would have been suicidal for most people. With Danny behind the wheel, it was just stupid.