Weeks passed without further incidents. They moved from tearing down to rebuilding the plumbing and electric. And Peter started to schedule times when he, his right-hand man Frankie, and Elyna would sit down with catalogs to choose what the apartment would look like when it was finished.
As soon as the bathroom and most of the electric was finished, Elyna put up blackout curtains in the master bedroom and moved in. She didn’t have much more than would fit into a pair of suitcases.
The first thing she bought after moving in was a twin bed. The second thing was a small bookcase, followed by a double handful of books. She kept the efficiency apartment for the coming summer days when the sun’s setting time meant Peter’s crew would be arriving in daylight. She encouraged Peter to assume that was where the rest of her things were, waiting for the floors to be finished so she wouldn’t have to move the stuff around. Peter, Frankie, and the rest of the guys had gotten quite protective of her.
Other than something falling in the kitchen while Simon was telling his ghost story, there had been no sign that the apartment was haunted, let alone haunted by Elyna’s dead husband. Sometimes, sitting on her bed and reading a book, Elyna would pretend that Jack was just in another room.
Reading was something they’d shared. It had started when he caught her reading E. M. Hull’s The Sheik. The scandalous book had left her blushing like a ninny and him rolling his eyes.
“Bastard needed to be put down like a mad dog,” he’d told her. “Instead he gets to keep the girl he kidnapped and raped. Doesn’t sound right to me. Is that the kind of hero you really want?”
So he’d read Tarzan of the Apes to her, and she’d agreed that the ape man would be a much better choice than the sheik—and that had led to a merry few minutes with Jack jumping around on the furniture and her laughing her fool head off until the neighbors knocked on the walls.
They read every odd thing: Charles Darwin, Zane Grey, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sometimes they read them separately, and sometimes they read them to each other.
She hadn’t read in the seethe. She hadn’t wanted to give Corona even so much as a glimpse into her real thoughts—and Jack always had said you knew a person by the books they read . . . or didn’t read.
When Elyna went shopping for books now, she was bewildered by the offerings. She found a copy of Tarzan, but the rest were all new to her.
She’d been reading The Sackett Brand for about fifteen minutes before she realized it was something Jack would have liked. She turned back to the beginning and started over out loud, reading for hours. She read Tarzan next, commenting on some of the things that science had proven since it was written. But she also went out and got twelve more books by Louis L’Amour for Jack.
As she read to him, she pictured her husband sitting in his favorite chair, eyes closed with that intent expression on his face that meant he was enjoying the book.
Reading wasn’t the only pleasure she regained. It had been a long time since she’d had a friend. Inside Corona’s seethe, Elyna hadn’t been able to trust anyone. She could only show them the broken, fragile thing they all thought her to be. Someone to be discounted. She couldn’t afford to care too deeply. The lover who gave her solace one day would torture her the next, because no one disobeyed the Mistress. Even the few who could have done so successfully (because they were older, stronger, or not of the Mistress’s making) didn’t disobey her. At least not after the Mistress gave Fitz, who had been her favorite, to Sybil.
To Elyna’s lonely heart, Peter and his moonlighting friends were like a warm blanket on a cold night. She knew she couldn’t afford friends, not if she was a stray living surreptitiously under the radar in Colbert’s territory. More accurately, her friends could not afford her. But she couldn’t help the affection she felt for them.
Between the books and work on the apartment, Elyna’s time fell into a pleasant order that was so much better than anything that had happened to her in a very long time. One evening she woke up and realized she was happy. It was a very disconcerting feeling.
• • •
Elyna listened to the irregular rhythm of the jazz guitar and breathed in the scent of sixty or so humans crowded together in the dark drinking mixed drinks and listening to the music.
A smart vampire doesn’t feed in her own backyard if she can help it. Elyna had been hunting in a small club district several miles away from her home. Unfortunately, even a big city is composed of dozens of smaller places. When the bartender of the Irish pub that she’d been going to nodded at her and set a screwdriver on the bar in front of Elyna without asking, she knew she had to move on.
That was why she was sitting in a popular jazz club in the Loop. The Loop attracted tourists, and it was easier to blend in. At least that was her working theory. She’d come to this club four times in the last week; not feeding, just getting the lay of the land.
Anywhere she thought to be good hunting ground was going to appeal to Colbert, too, but she’d seen no sign of any other vampires. So tonight she’d come dressed to kill. She’d picked up the white sheath dress at a thrift store, but it was real silk and suited her flat stomach. When she’d been human she’d always carried an extra few pounds, but keeping the weight off was not a problem anymore.
She closed her eyes and let a soft smile stretch her lips as she nodded her head to the music. Come here, she announced without saying anything at all, come here and I might be yours. She didn’t use any magic yet, just human mating rituals.
Corona had been bitterly envious of Elyna’s ability to attract men this way—Corona had been in her seventies when she died. Though she had once been beautiful—stunning, Elyna suspected—she continued her life-after-death as an old woman. Corona lured her prey by vampire magic, which meant she had to feed more often and more deeply than Elyna, who could usually find someone willing to follow her to a dark corner without use of coercion or power. She wasn’t beautiful the way Corona once had been, but she was attractive enough.
“Hey, doll,” said a rough tenor voice next to her. “You look like you’re having a good time.”
She hated this. Making connection, making small talk, getting a glimpse inside someone she’d never see again. She understood the vampires who kept menageries of sheep: humans no one would miss. Menageries reduced the risk of being found out, of having to go hunting, of feeding from strangers, and they served as a sort of crèche from which new vampires were born. After a while, the sheep could be made to forget who they had been, and most of them learned to love their vampire, who slowly killed them. Maybe that had been the problem. Elyna hadn’t been a sheep for long enough to learn to love the monsters. Sure as God made little fishies, she couldn’t be made to keep humans as sheep just to save herself from a little risk and distaste.