Home Improvement: Undead Edition

Parking in that old spot had been habit, but it sat in her belly like a meal too cold. This was a bad idea. She knew it, but she couldn’t give it up without trying to mend what she had . . . lost was the wrong word. Destroyed might have been a more apt one.

She rubbed her cold arms with colder hands, then turned off the motor. Without its warm hum, it was very quiet in the car.

She got out at last, locked the doors with the key fob, and left her car in the parking place that probably belonged to someone else now. Blinking back the aimless raindrops, she tromped through the slush from what must have been last week’s snow on the sidewalk.

Only then did she look at the gray stone apartment building ahead. Did they still call it an apartment building when all of the apartments were being sold as condominiums?

It wasn’t a particularly large building, three floors, six apartments, surrounded by a small front parklike area that had always managed to insert a little color in the summer without requiring maintenance or inviting anyone to linger. This evening, with winter still reigning despite the rain that fell instead of snow, there was no color to be had.

The cut granite edges of the steps were familiar and alien at the same time, worn in a way they hadn’t been when this had been their home—and that strangeness hurt.

Next to the door, blown into the corner of the building, lay a little Valentine’s Day card with a heart on it. The ink had run, fading out the BE MINE to a grayish semidecipherable mush. Only the name Jack scribed in black crayon was still clear. It was both irony and a sign, she thought, but she didn’t know if a child’s wet card was a good portent or not.

She looked up to the topmost windows with longing eyes and murmured, “Be mine, Jack?”

She rang the bell on the side of the door, a new plastic button surrounded by stainless steel, and a buzz released the door lock. The real estate agent must have beaten her here.

She wiped her tennis shoes off on the mat in front of the door and stepped into a small foyer. At first glance, she thought the room hadn’t changed at all. Then she realized that the names written in Sharpie below the numbers on the box were different from the names she had known, and the wooden handrail next to the stairs had been replaced with the same polished steel as the doorbell.

“Our place, Elyna, just think of it!” Jack’s voice rang in sudden memory, full of eagerness and life.

The wooden handrail had had a notch in it from when they’d hit it, she and Jack, with the sharp edge of her metal typist desk, carrying it up to their new home. She hadn’t realized she had been looking forward to seeing that stupid notch until it wasn’t there.

She looked down and saw that the new handrail was dented a little, too. She knew better than to do something like that; she had better control. But that notch had been a memory of laughter and . . . poor Jack had hated that desk, its industrial ugliness an affront to his artistic eye. Still, he’d helped her carry it all the way up the stairs to their third-floor apartment.

She’d paid him back, on top of the desk wearing (at least at first) a cream-colored lace teddy her mother had given her in a small, tastefully wrapped package with instructions to open it in private. Jack hadn’t minded the desk so much after that.

And those kinds of thoughts weren’t going to help Elyna tonight.

She continued up the stairs, trailing her hand over the new metal handrail, hard-won control keeping her hands open and light as they skimmed over the cold surface. On the third floor the real estate agent awaited her in a peacoat with damp shoulders. He had a closed rain-dampened umbrella in one hand.

“Ms. Gray,” he said, taking a step forward and reaching out with his free hand. “I’m Aubrey Tailor.”

“Yes,” she said, shaking his hand gravely. “Thank you for making time to meet me here. When I saw the ad, I just knew that this was the place.”

“You’re cold,” he said, sounding concerned. Delicately built and pretty, she tended to arouse protective instincts in some men. “There’s no heat in the condo right now.”

“It is February in Chicago,” Elyna told him. “Don’t worry, my hands are always a little cold.”

“Cold hands, warm heart,” he said, then flushed, because it was a little too personal when addressed to a single woman who was his client. He shook his head and gave her a sheepish smile. “At least that’s what my mother always said.”

“Mine, too,” she agreed. She liked him better for losing the slick salesman front—which might have been his intention all along. He let her go into the apartment first, closing the door between them. He’d wait outside, he’d told her, while she looked her fill.

Here was change that made that handrail pale in comparison.

The old oak floors Elyna had polished and cursed, because keeping them looking good was an ongoing war, were scarred and bedecked with stains that she hadn’t put on them. Her lips twisted in a snarl that made her grateful that the real estate agent had stayed outside.

Vampires are territorial and this was her home, the home of her heart.

One of the pretty leaded-glass windows that looked out on the street had been replaced with plain glass framed in white vinyl, giving the living room a lopsided look. Someone had started to tear down the plastered walls—messy work that had stopped about halfway. A piece of wallpaper showed where someone had broken through layers and layers of paper, plaster, and paint to a familiar scrap.

She pulled the chunk of plaster displaying that paper off the wall and sat down on the floor with the plaster in her lap. Was it her imagination or was there a rusty stain on the paper?

“Jack?” she said plaintively. “Jack?”

But, other than the normal sounds of a building with six apartments . . . condos . . . in it, five of them occupied, she heard nothing. She looked at the rest of the apartment—most of which she could see from where she sat—the gutted kitchen without the white cabinets, just odd-colored spots on the walls to show where they used to be. Bare pipes stuck out of the floor where the sink should have been, and wires dripped from the ceilings where once lights had illuminated her life.

Unable to look anymore, she put her forehead on her knees.

After a while she said, “Oh, Jack.” Then she took a deep breath and worked at getting herself put back into some kind of public-ready shape. She’d fed before she drove over, but emotional distress makes the Hunger worse, and her teeth ached and her nose insisted on remembering how good Mr. Aubrey Tailor had smelled when he’d blushed.

Something made a sighing noise in the empty apartment and she jerked her head up, all thoughts of hunger put aside. But nothing moved and there were no more sounds.

What had she expected? Time hadn’t stopped for her, why would it have stopped for this apartment? Since seeing that first newspaper article about it, she’d done her research. She’d walked in here knowing that the stripping of the old had already been begun, awaiting replacement by the new. The in-progress remodel hadn’t even bothered her until she saw it with her own eyes.

What was she doing here? The past was the past. She should strip it away just as the old plaster had been stripped from the living room wall. She should wash herself clean.

Outside, the rain slid down the windowpanes.

WHEN SHE HAD the vampire within tamped down until it would take another vampire to see what she was, she opened the apartment door.

“As you can see,” the real estate agent said heartily—without looking at her—“it won’t take much to get it ready to become whatever you’d like. It’s good solid construction, built in 1911. You can put new flooring in, or strip the oak. It’s three-quarter-inch oak; you don’t see that in new construction. My client’s price is very good.”

“You had it sold twice this year,” Elyna said, keeping the anxiety and need out of her voice. She had money. Enough. But not so much that bargaining wouldn’t be a help.

“Ah.” He looked disconcerted. No one expected someone who looked as young and frivolous as she did to have half a brain. He cleared his throat. “Yes. Twice.”

“They both backed out before the papers were signed.”

He frowned at her. “I thought you didn’t have your own agent?”