Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson Page 11

  “Mine is the power of illness, of mortification of living flesh,” she said. “But I would keep my charge though I have no power over the dead.”

  “No more than I do,” he said gently. “I mean her no harm, guardian spirit. I killed those who did.”

  He’d killed them, her father’s betrayers, so that Margaret wouldn’t have to. They hadn’t expected it, and he’d been careful to take out the boy first. Then the big man who could—Thomas was pretty sure—pick and choose how much Margaret could say through his lips.

  He was a vampire, and these fae had believed he was their dog to do their bidding. They hadn’t expected a monster, despite knowing what he was. Killing them had not taken him long.

  Thomas had been raised in Butte, among the Irish, Finns, and all the other races who had come to pull the treasures of the Richest Hill on Earth. He might wear the face of a Chinese man, but he came from a family of scholars and lived among the people here for all of his childhood.

  A väki of whatever kind was a protector of the treasure it guarded. No one would set such a creature to keep a prisoner in. Only a fae would think that a vampire would assume a väki of the grave would be an evil thing. Her father or perhaps the Finnish fae who had first warned the Flanagan of the dragon must have sent it to protect her. If they meant his Margaret no harm, the väki would not have prevented them from reaching her.

  If Margaret had remained powerless in the heart of the earth, they would have left her there to rot. When her father’s power came to her—or whatever had happened that she could tell their thoughts and return her own—she could finally take action against them; they had decided they had to kill her.

  Somehow they’d discovered that she’d called him for help—perhaps she’d taunted them with it—that she had someone she could call for help. It didn’t matter. What do you send against the spirit of the dead? A vampire. They had the weapon they needed; they just had to point it in the right direction. Once Thomas had dealt with the väki, they would have killed Thomas and Margaret both.

  But Margaret hadn’t told them everything about him. They assumed she could summon him because of the wish she’d granted him, that it had given her some sort of magical power over him. But it had been the blood. If she had trusted them—as they implied—she would have told them about that part. Telling him about the väki had been their first mistake. Not knowing that he’d bitten her and taken her blood had been the second.

  Nick, who had served her father almost all his life, would have known a vampire saved her. But neither Margaret nor her father had told Nick the whole story.

  The final, and greatest, mistake had been implying that Margaret had been driven insane, imprisoned in the earth. What was it Nick had said? “She’s quite mad.” A subtle word was mad. Nick had used it to imply one thing without a lie crossing his lips. Thomas would have been angry, too, imprisoned by his enemies. The earth was her element; it nurtured her and sustained her.

  If he was wrong, if they had been innocent of all he suspected . . . ? Well, then, he was a vampire, after all—and they were fae. He would not regret their deaths.

  But he had not been wrong, because he could feel the guardian move out of his path, satisfied by his answer. He slipped by it and found the fragile thing he searched for, little more than bones in chains.

  “Please,” she said, her voice as quiet as the whisper of the spring wind.

  He broke the iron shackles first, throwing them as far from her as the confines of the tunnel allowed. He pulled a blanket out of the pack he carried and carefully, gently put her upon it.

  “What would you do for me in return?” he said, raising her up and touching a damp cloth to her face. She pressed her face against it, sucking on the moisture. It would take her a long time to get water that way—and it would be slow enough not to make her sick from it.

  When he pulled the cloth away and soaked it in water from his canteen again, she said, her voice hoarse, “Anything. My gratitude you have.”

  “Yes?” he said, pressing the cloth against her face again. “You gave me such a gift last time. Gratitude is a poor substitute. Perhaps I should give your gift back to you, shall I?” He picked her up, and she was such a light burden, lighter even than she’d been the first time he’d carried her out of the mine tunnels.

  “Oh, yes,” she sighed, understanding what he didn’t say, as she had before. “I should love to see the sun again.”

  GRAY

  This story, as some of my other stories have, started as an assignment from my writers’ group. Take a color and a holiday and make a story out of it. As it was February, I chose Valentine’s Day—but red would have been too obvious.

  We lived in Chicago (a good long time ago now), and it remains one of my favorite big cities. It, like my hometown, has a colorful past and terrific people. Anyone who has been in Chicago in February, however, knows about those gray days, when everything is wet and cold and nasty, when it feels like it has been cold forever and spring will never come. Like those winter days, our heroine, Elyna, has been feeling cold and gray for a very long time.

  The events in this story take place before Moon Called.

  It was raining, a desultory, reluctant, angry rain forced unwillingly from the gray clouds overhead. It dribbled with the fiendish rhythm of a Chinese water torture. Drip. Drip. Drip.

  Elyna’s windshield wipers squeaked until she turned them off. But the drops still came down to obscure her sight. From old habit, she pulled into the space that had been hers.

  She’d first parked there a couple of times because the space had been open. When she’d moved in with Jack, a lifetime ago, it was seldom open again because her car was in it. After a while if it wasn’t available for her little Ford, she’d curse the visitor who’d stolen it and find some other, less convenient parking place. When that happened, she’d go out to check before bedtime to see if it was open. If it was, she’d repark her car where it would be happy.

  “Cars just are, darlin’,” Jack would tell her with a grin as he escorted her out of the apartment to keep watch as she moved the Ford. “They aren’t happy or sad.”

  Jack had been in love with her, though, and was patient with her little ways. He’d loved her and she’d loved him in that wholehearted eager fashion that only the young and innocent have—secure in the knowledge that there was nothing so terrible it could tear them apart. Having successfully overcome her Polish and his Irish parents’ objections to their match had only given her more confidence.

  She was less innocent now.

  Much, much less innocent.

  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 boxes 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?”

  “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.