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 hotheaded 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.”