“I took the downstairs neighbor, Josh, out to dinner yesterday.” He was a nice man about ten years older than she looked. She’d treated him, despite his argument. It had been only fair that she pay for his dinner since she’d intended he should serve as hers afterward. He’d not remember the dinner clearly or what they’d discussed. Nor would he see that it was a problem that he didn’t.
Elyna’s Mistress had had a talent for beguilement. She could have given him a whole set of memories clearer than what had actually happened. Elyna, whose talents lay in other places, made use of the more common vampire ability to cloud minds and calm potential meals.
“I see.” Elyna could tell from Aubrey’s tone that he knew the story that Josh had related to her.
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.
