Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(40)

Home.

She locked the door behind her and sat down on the floor with her back to it. Vampires could not cross the threshold of a home—unless it was their home, which was why she had been able to get in to kill Jack all those years ago. Thresholds were made of life and love—all those things that turn a dwelling place into a home. She hoped that her threshold would hold them out.

But even if it did, it would not be enough. Once Colbert knew where she lived, he had only to wait until she left to feed. She was under no illusions. If he knew she was here, it was only a matter of time until he caught her: her death warrant was signed. Her only escape was to leave.

She could do that. Find some place that had no seethes. They were out there; vampires were not so common as fae or the weres. But it would mean leaving Jack again.

Jack was probably not here anyway.

She looked through the living room entranceway and stared out the window, where the sun was just beginning to lighten the sky. She had a third choice. Perhaps it would be enough penance for her crime if she died here, too. Popular knowledge was that vampires had no souls. Popular knowledge also said that ghosts were not souls of the dead, just leftover bits and pieces that remembered what they had been once. Maybe if she died here, her leftover bits could find Jack’s leftover bits as well.

Gold touched the edges of the rooftops across the road from her and washed over the now-matching windows in her front room. She smiled and took one last deep breath as the pain from the sunlight reached her at last.

She had to close her eyes against the light.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” she said. “I love you.”

Because her eyes were closed, she didn’t see the living room blackout curtains snap shut—just heard them the instant before her body died for the day.

•   •   •

She awoke in a crumpled heap in front of the door. The skin on her face was tight from the sunburn, but the bathroom mirror assured her that the curtains had shut before the sun had done much damage.

Staring at her wide-eyed reflection in the mirror, she said, “Jack?”

He didn’t answer, not then.

But when she and Peter were deciding which of several designs were closest to her original cabinets, a stray breeze fingered through the pages of a catalog they’d set aside and left it opened to a sleek modern style in hickory. She liked those, she thought, pulling the catalog in front of her. But she was trying to recreate her old home, not build a new one.

Maybe she could do both.

“What do you think of this one?” she asked Peter.

“Not very vintage,” he told her. “But they would look fine with the countertops you picked out. Good wood goes with almost anything.”

•   •   •

A few nights later she finished the book she’d been reading to Jack and replaced it in the bookshelf. The next night there was a book sitting on her chair, ready for her to begin: an Ellery Queen mystery.

The next evening, Jack rearranged the cardboard cutouts that Peter had made to let Elyna see how her kitchen would come together. She put them back as she’d had them, but he was relentless. He never moved them while she was in the kitchen, but if she left for more than a few minutes they were back the way he wanted them.

“And you called me stubborn,” she sputtered at him finally, standing in the empty room. “I’m a vampire, Jack. I don’t care where the stove is. Why should you?”

Something fluttered lightly on her lips, like a butterfly’s kiss. She froze. “Jack?”

But there was no further sign that she wasn’t alone in the room. She touched her lips with light fingers.

•   •   •

Peter rolled his eyes when she told him that she’d changed her mind on the kitchen layout. Frankie just laughed, a great big booming laugh that filled the air.

“Hah,” he said. “Told Peter it wasn’t natural the way you just let him dictate your kitchen. Never was a woman yet who let a man arrange her kitchen.”

“Hmm,” said Elyna.

The kitchen progressed rapidly after that. Stainless steel sinks, marble countertop, and all. Elyna bought a teddy bear for Simon’s new son and told Frankie what to buy his wife for their anniversary.

When the men came in to lay the kitchen flooring, they were grim-faced and unhappy. Elyna, as she had done before, coaxed the story out of them. Being police officers in Chicago was not for the faint of heart. Vampires are territorial, and somehow this group of hardworking men had become hers just as the home they’d helped her put together was hers. Her mother had taught her to take care of what was hers. She had to use a touch of persuasion to get a name and address.

“Sorry to invite this in here,” Peter murmured to her as they were getting ready to leave for the night. “Evil belongs out in the street, not in your home.”

Elyna looked down at her hands. “Evil exists everywhere,” she told him.

That night she broke the neck of a murderer who had gotten free on a technicality, just as she had killed the drug dealer who’d handed a ten-year-old the he**in to overdose on and the lawyer who liked to kill prostitutes.

•   •   •

Then came the evening that Peter didn’t come.

“You get a call, Elyna?” Frankie asked her. “He told me he was going to be coming here after his shift.”