Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(38)

Everyone, even Elyna, looked at the front door, which showed all sorts of damage. If it wasn’t the door that had been there when she’d lived here, someone had found an exact match. And then aged it for eighty-plus years.

“But”—Simon dropped his voice and whispered—“all they found was blood. Lots and lots of blood.”

There was a crash in the kitchen.

Peter whacked Simon upside the head. “Kid, Elyna’s going to be living here. You think she needs that in her head?” And then Peter tromped off to see what the noise in the kitchen had been.

“Sorry, Elyna,” Simon told her sheepishly. “Boss is right. I wasn’t thinking.”

“No worries,” Elyna said, straining her ears to listen for any more noises. “I’ve heard the story before. I did my research before I bought this place.”

She must not have been convincing, because he followed her around like Peter’s dog for the rest of the evening, mistaking grief and guilt for fear. Peter couldn’t figure out what had made the noise, but they decided it was one of the tools falling off some precarious perch. Even so, Peter’s crew was jumpy for the rest of the night.

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.