Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(36)

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 f**king 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 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.