Page 53 of The Undead

I drove with all four windows down, enjoying the city-scented air more than the musty fetid odor of the car. There was a certain visceral joy in driving; it was such an old skill, something that tied me to a life I’d had when I still breathed. God, only days ago? Impossible.

I kept an eye out for Foster or another tail, then decided it was pointless; William knew where Adam lived, Foster knew about me; between the two of them they’d be able to come up with my old address. Whether they followed me there or not was immaterial. I cranked the little car up to a happy sixty-five and rolled with the night traffic. One advantage to being a vampire—no rush hour. Everything about the evening seemed so normal, so weirdly ordinary, that I put myself in a white-line trance and let my instincts take me—home. Home for real. Instinct led me to the exit, the street, the block.

I put the brake on and pulled in three houses away. My house. Dear God, dear sweet Jesus, please let me have my life again, the life I never appreciated all those years, let me have my wife and lover in my arms again …

I shut the engine off and stepped out of the car, keeping to the shadows in case any neighbors decided to go for a late-night ill-fated walk. No problem, really; with my enhanced senses I’d have plenty warning of their approach. Although the extended senses weren’t much of a bargain just now, considering that tomorrow was trash day and the bundles and cans of garbage on the curb melded into a smelly symphony.

I caught the cool scent of magnolia as I approached the house—thehouse, the only one that mattered. Maggie’s Bronco wasn’t there, of course, and my car was missing; there were two cars pulled up in the drive, both with rental-agency stickers in the back windows. Out-of-town guests.

It hit me in a sickening flash what had brought the unexpected guests. My funeral, of course. My mom would have flown in, and my sister Connie—maybe a couple of aunts and uncles, if it wasn’t deer season or they hadn’t already had tickets to a football game.

I edged around the house to a side window, feeling like a thief and a peeping tom, and yet oddly excited. The sound of voices came to me clearly, and brought a surge of feeling I can only compare to the racing of a mortal heart—even though I had no heartbeat and no rush of blood. It sounded like I was right in the room with them.

“—plain stupid, Connie. Have you talked to her?”

“Of course I talked to her, but she’s real firm on it. Closed casket. Don’t know where she got the idea, but she swears she and Mike decided on it years ago.” Connie’s voice was softer than I remembered, maybe because she wasn’t screaming at me at the top of her lungs. I pushed aside the strange and distracting heaviness I felt and searched my memory for any conversations I’d had with Maggie on the subject of caskets, closed or open, but nothing came up. “I think she’s just in shock, Larry, that’s all. Don’t push her.”

“Push? Would I push?” That was Larry, my first and thoroughly unpleasant cousin. Oh, yes, Larry, you’d push your own mom off a ledge for a buck twenty-five and a good laugh. I’d never been able to stand his nasal whine. The idea of him attending my funeral was hilarious and nauseating. “Look, what about the rest of us who haven’t seen him in years? Don’t we deserve some consideration?”

Connie’s voice filtered back, distant and cool, and it pleased me to note that she didn’t much care for Larry either. I took in a breath, not for the oxygen, but to draw in the scents of Connie and Larry’s warm rushing blood, mingling with night breeze and magnolia. I stopped. The smell made me feel faint and increasingly disoriented.

“Not as much as Maggie. Look, Larry, you never liked Mike while he was alive, I don’t understand why you’re so all-fired hot to weep over his body.” My God. Her voice actually cracked. I pressed my hands against the cold brick and edged up until I could see over the edge of the window.

Larry was sitting at my kitchen table, staring murderously at Connie’s back as she washed a set of coffee cups. He’d put on some weight, which cheered me; he looked as fat and bad-tempered as a rabid beagle, and he still wore that stupid, pinched, disapproving expression he’d been born with. His heartbeat was loud and angry, a drumbeat pounding the blue vein at his throat and my ears.

Connie rattled the cups in the sink with unnecessary force. It took me a minute before I caught a glimpse of the side of her face and saw the tears trickling down her cheek. She wiped at it viciously with the back of a sudsy hand. I froze, staring, and felt something knot up inside. I’d never seen Connie cry, not since she was ten years old. She’d never even cried at Dad’s funeral, not where I could see her. It probably made her furious to be weeping over me.

God, Connie, I’m sorry.

All of that was wiped out of my mind by a white storm of agony as Maggie walked through the doorway and set a load of plates down on the counter next to Connie’s elbow. She looked worn. Her eyes were shadowed as if she hadn’t slept much, and the cut on her forehead looked angry and inflamed. She’d knotted her hair up carelessly at the back of her head, and it looked as if she hadn’t found the time or energy to wash it in days. Ghastly pallor, nervous gestures; she knocked one of the plates to the floor and flinched violently when it broke. Connie bent to pick it up, but Maggie got there first and gathered up the pieces with shaking fingers. She moved like a half-broken mechanical toy rather than the graceful woman I remembered and loved.

Her eyes swept past the window, unseeing. I felt my heart rip loose at the darkness in them, the haunted emptiness. She dumped the dish fragments in the garbage and left the room without a word. I smelled the remembered scent of her, perfume and sweet warmth, the dark undercurrent of her life running beneath it … I wanted her, worse now than I had in my mortal life, I wanted to hold her and put my lips to hers and draw her into my body …

“God, she ought to do something with her face, she looks like shit,” Larry said. Ripped out of the seductive power of my own lust, I focused on him in a wrench of fury; I felt my fingers dig into the brick on either side of the window, and it powdered and crumbled under the pressure. Connie turned and pointed one wet, soap-suds-coated finger at him like a loaded gun.

“Get out. Go watch TV or something. Just stay the hell away from me.”

Larry evidently knew when to call it quits. He got up and ambled out, leaving Connie alone with the dishes. She bent her head and braced herself with stiffened arms on the counter, fighting back tears.

My tension faded, replaced with aching grief. Sylvia had been right, after all. I could do no good here, not for Maggie, not even for myself. All I could do was lurk like a ghost, watching without speaking, wanting without touching. The realization was harder to take than I’d expected.

Connie turned and looked … right … at … me. A cup fell from her nerveless hands and smashed loudly on the tile; she braced herself with one arm on the countertop and stared, eyes wide and so blank they looked like the shallow glass eyes of a doll. The stare seemed to stretch on forever. I could see every fleck of color in her light brown eyes, the pupils expanding at an alarming rate in shock—

Drop, asshole, drop out of sight—move—

I threw myself to the cold brittle grass and crawled like a singed beetle into the shadows of the bushes. God damn it, how could I have been so stupid? She’d looked right at me. She couldn’t havemissedme.

The blinds went up in a hiss of metal slats. She stared out at the brick wall of the Aaronsons’ house next door, tears streaming down her pale cheeks, and pressed one shaking hand flat against the glass. After a long, long time, she backed away. The blinds came back down and rolled firmly closed.

I dropped my forehead to my crossed arms and felt a wave of hot hunger cascade through me, triggered by Connie’s nearness and distress. Jesus. Jesus, God, don’t let this happen to me, not now—

“Having fun?” a voice asked, very close to my right ear. I rolled away, a panicked convulsive thrash that was instantly stopped by Adam’s hands. He pinned me to the ground in the shadows; I couldn’t see much of him at all but the glint of his glasses and the humorless slice of his smile. “You idiot, what if I’d been William? You’re lucky.”

Enraged, I struck at him. It was like batting at the wind; Adam stepped gracefully back out of the way without loosening his grip on me in the slightest. “Let me up, you bastard. Now!”

“Not until you listen to me. Do you know why you came here, Mike? Do you?” He emphasized it with a shake of my shoulders that would have snapped a bone or two if I’d still been mortal. His eyes behind the glasses were wide and, though it was hard to see in the Him reflected light, crimson.

“I get the feeling you’re going to tell me,” I grated. He smiled, using all of his teeth.

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