Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(43)

It took Elyna a moment to realize that Jack had used the other leg.

Beside Elyna, the black man threw back his head and laughed in utter delight. When he stopped laughing, it cut off abruptly, leaving echoing silence behind. His face free of emotion, he turned his attention to Elyna. He gave her such an empty look that she took two steps away from him until she hit the solid-feeling bulk that had been Jack O’Malley.

“He forgot,” said the man who had been Colbert’s. “Evil has no power over love.” He smiled, his fangs big and white against his ebony skin. “And we are evil, aren’t we, Elyna Gray?”

She didn’t say anything.

“What now?” he asked her. “Do you want this seethe, Elyna? Do you want to be Mistress of Chicago?”

“No.” Her response was so fast and heartfelt that it caused him to laugh again. His laugh was horrible, so much joy and beauty coming out of a man with such empty eyes.

“Then what?”

Elyna looked at the woman, Colbert’s other minion, who had fallen to the ground in that utter obeisance sometimes demanded of them by their Mistress or Master.

“Who is the strongest vampire in your seethe?” she asked.

“Steven Harper,” he told her. “That would be me.”

Jack’s reassuring presence behind her, she smiled carefully. “Steven Harper, I would seek your permission to live in your city, keeping the laws and rules of the old ones and bearing neither you nor yours any ill will. Separate and apart with harm to none. Yours to you and mine to me—and this human”—she tilted her head to indicate Peter, who was lying very still just where he had been dropped—“is mine.”

The new Master of the Chicago seethe looked at Peter, then over Elyna’s shoulder at Jack, and finally to the floor, where a splintered piece of wood stuck out of Colbert’s limp body. “You have done me a great favor,” he said. “I swore never to call anyone Master again, and now I no longer have to. Come and be welcome in my city—with harm to none.”

Elyna bowed, keeping her eyes on him. “Thank you, sir.” She took a step back, paused, and said, “The really old ones turn to dust when they are dead and gone.”

He looked down at Colbert’s body. “I guess he lied about how old he was.”

“Or he is not, quite, gone.” Elyna had made a point of finding out things like that. Corona had been ash before she touched the floor.

“Ah,” Steven said, pushing the corpse with his toe. “My thanks.”

A pair of Steven Harper’s vampires drove her to her apartment building and helped her negotiate the way into her apartment while she carried Peter, unwilling to trust him to anyone else. She could no longer see Jack, but she knew he was with her by the occasional light touches of his hands.

Harper’s vampires didn’t try to come in, nor did they speak to her. She set Peter down on her bed, since she didn’t have anywhere else to put him. Then she went back out and locked the door. When she returned to the bedroom Peter was sitting up. She’d been pretty sure that he was more awake than it had appeared, because a smart man knows when to lie low.

Without a word, she cut the ropes and helped peel off the duct tape that covered his mouth. Then she got a wet hand towel and brought it to him.

“There’s blood on your face and neck,” she told him.

He took it from her, stared at it a moment, and then wiped himself clean. The wounds had closed, she noticed, as vampire bites do. They hadn’t actually hurt him very badly—not physically, anyway.

They stared at each other awhile.

“Vampire,” he said.

She nodded. “If you tell anyone, they’ll think you’re crazy.”

“Could you stop me? Make me not remember? Isn’t that what vampires are supposed to be able to do?”

She shrugged, but chose, for his sake, not to give him the whole truth. He’d sleep better at night without it. “Hollywood vampires can do lots of things we can’t,” she told him instead. “You don’t have to worry about Harper coming after you, though. He agreed that you are one of mine, and he won’t hurt you. We vampires take vows like that very seriously.”

“You don’t look like a vampire,” he said.

“I know,” she agreed. A stray breeze brushed a strand of hair off her cheek. “We’re like serial killers; we look just like everyone else.”

Peter grunted, looked down at his hands, and then made another sound—something she couldn’t interpret.

Then he said, “That man who killed his girlfriend’s baby, the one where the evidence got bungled and the charges were dismissed a few weeks ago. The one who turned up dead in a place full of people who never were sure who killed him. That was you?”

Elyna nodded. He eyed her thoughtfully, then nodded.

He cleared his throat. “There were others after that, just a couple. The ones we talked about while we worked. Like the well-connected lawyer who liked to pick up hookers and beat them to death. Fell down his stairs and died a month or so back. That was you, too?”

She ducked her head. “Vampires don’t have to kill people,” she told him. “Especially once we are older, more in control of ourselves. I try not to. But . . . it doesn’t bother me very much, not when they are”—she looked him in the eye and gave him an ironic smile—“evil.”