Home Improvement: Undead Edition

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 dare—” He