Home Improvement: Undead Edition (4 page)

The normally placid JB nudged Sam to make him move away from the grave. Sam’s jaw set in a way I knew meant he was barely holding on to his temper.

I didn’t trust any emotion I felt.

Tara was angry with me, which wasn’t normal. Sam and JB were glaring at each other. The anger in the air was affecting all of us. I made myself run into the house to find out why the babies were weeping. Tara should be doing this! I followed the sobs to their little room.

Quiana was sitting in the rocking chair crammed in beside the cribs, and she was crying, too.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “Snap out of it.”

Her tear-stained face looked at me with resentment written all over it. “I have a right to grieve for what I’ve lost. Only my brother knows the real me,” she said bitterly.

Uh-oh.

“Quiana,” I said, suddenly feeling a lot calmer and a lot more nervous, “you don’t have a brother.”

“Of course I do.” But she looked confused.

“You’re being haunted,” I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. I didn’t want to say the word
possessed
, but it was definitely hovering in the air.

“Sure, that’s right, blame me because I’m the one who’s different,” she snarled in a complete emotional about-face.

I flinched, but I had to pass her to get to the babies, whose cries had redoubled. I decided to take a chance. “You want to go outside?” I said. Then I made a guess. “You can see your bones.” I watched her carefully, since I had no idea what she’d do next.

There was someone else behind Quiana’s face, someone both anguished and angry. All I could think about was getting her out of the room.

And then Quiana got up and left the room, her face blank. She wasn’t even walking like herself.

I scooped up Sara, who was shrieking like a banshee.

“Sara,” I said. “Please stop crying.” To my amazement, she did. The baby looked up at me, her face red and tearful, panting with exhaustion. “Let’s get your brother,” I said, since Robbie’s wails continued unabated. “We’ll make him happy, too.” Robbie also responded to my touch, and in a moment I was walking slowly holding the two babies. It was awkward and terrifying.

What would have happened if Quiana had been utterly overrun by the ghost while she was here alone with the twins?

Now that the bones had been uncovered, the emotional miasma in the house was intensifying, without any doubt. It was a struggle to get out of the house, aside from the difficulty of carrying two children. Though I wanted to leave more than anything, I stopped in the kitchen to put them in their child seats. I opened the back door and passed Sara to JB. I went down the back steps with Robbie, moving very carefully. Sam, Tara, and Quiana were in the corner of the yard farthest from the bones, and JB and I joined them there.

In sharp contrast to the lighthearted meeting we’d had when we were planning the renovation, our conference in the backyard was grim. The late-afternoon sun slanted across the bricks of the patio, and the heat of them radiated upward. Even the heat was preferable to the haunted house.

We waited. Nothing happened. Finally, Tara sat in a lawn chair and started feeding Sara after JB fetched her nursing shawl. Robbie made squeaky noises until it was his turn. They, at least, were content.

Sam said, “I dug some more, and I think it’s a complete skeleton. We don’t know whose bones, whose ghost, or why it’s angry.”

An accurate and depressing summary.

“The only neat stories are the ones made up,” Tara said.

Quiana, who seemed to be herself at the moment, sat slumped forward, her elbows on her knees. She said, “There’s a reason all this is happening. There’s a reason the haunting started when the hammer came out of the wall. There’s a reason there’s a body buried in the backyard. We just have to figure it out. And I’m the psychic. And it’s trying to live through me. So I got to try to take care of this.”

I looked at Quiana with some respect. What she was saying made sense.

“It’s tied to the hammer,” Quiana said.

“So, okay, if we want to know what happened so we can fix it,” I said, “and since I can read minds, and since the ghost can get into Quiana’s mind . . . I’m wondering if maybe Quiana and I can do something with the bones and find out who the spirit—the ghost—is.”

Quiana nodded. “Let’s do it,” she said. “Let’s get this bitch settled.” She reached over to the old patio table and took the hammer.

We stood, full of purpose.

JB and Sam shot out of their chairs. Sam said, “You don’t need to do this, Sookie.”

Wild horses couldn’t have held me back from this experience. I stepped away from Sam and took Quiana’s left hand, bony and strong and cold. We went over to the excavated skeleton. Its skull gaped up at us from its grave. Quiana was holding the hammer in her free hand. Then she gasped and jerked, and suddenly I was holding the hand of someone completely different.

And I was seeing what Quiana saw, but not through Quiana’s eyes. I was seeing . . . faces. A round-faced woman working over a kitchen table. I recognized what she was doing; she was making piecrust. She was looking up, bewildered and sad.
Mama.
A burly man bending over something on a tool bench, with the same air of worry about him.
Father.
And looking at a boy—older than me, but still a boy with an open, honest, freckled face, a face that was serious and full of doubt.
Albert.
I would have done anything to remove the anxiety from their faces, anything to silence the cruel words that had caused that unhappiness.

Words spoken by that devil, Isaiah Wechsler.

Part of me could still be only Sookie, and that part felt the growing resolution, the horrible resolve, as the entity in Quiana played out his plan.

The night, the darkness, only streetlights in the distance where town lay. (That almost threw me out of Quiana’s mind. Since when had Magnolia Street been out of town?)
Running silently across the short distance between the windows, from my window to his, and his was open in the warm night . . . through it quietly enough not to wake him Father’s hammer in my hand and . . .
then he raised his hand, oh . . . oh, no. In the moonlight the blood looked black.

Back out the window, breathing hard, and over to the one
in my house, safe now, back home hide the hammer under the bed
but Albert woke up, Albert beloved brother, and Albert said
what did you do?
And I said
I shut his foul mouth
.

And there was more, but it was too much for me, Sookie. I had to pull Quiana out of this, but that was impossible until we saw the end.

Then we did. We saw the end.

I gasped and choked, and Quiana folded silently to the dirt as if her strings had been cut.

Sam caught me, braced me, as JB supported Quiana.

JB said, “What happened? Why were you all holding hands, Sookie?” Tara said, “They’ll tell us, honey. Wait a minute.” The twins were silent, and when I could see I realized they were back in their infant seats, at the base of the tree. The evening was closing in. The shadows had gotten so long they almost covered the yard. I could hear a car door closing next door. Andy had gotten home. Should I call out, get him to come look?

“Do you know who it is?” Sam asked, keeping his voice low, pointing at the open grave.

I went over to it. “This boy killed Isaiah Wechsler. This boy is Carter Summerlin.”

“But you said his folks sent him away,” Sam said.

“In a way, they did,” Quiana said weakly. Tara had propped her up against the fence and was giving her a bottle of water. Quiana looked as if she’d survived a death march. “This boy killed himself because he couldn’t stand what he did. He climbed through the window at night—the window of the house next door—with the hammer he took from his dad’s toolbox. Came back in his own bedroom window, blood all over.”

I shuddered. The others stared at us, their mouths open.

“But his big brother saw? Is that right, Sookie?” Quiana asked.

I nodded. “Albert took Carter’s nightshirt and burned it in the backyard in the middle of the night, and hid the hammer in the closet wall. Later on, he closed it in. The fight he’d had with the Wechsler boy, it was because—well, Isaiah had made fun of the, what he thought was the effeminate ways of Albert’s little brother. And to Carter it was so terrible, so unthinkable a slur, that he had to wipe out the one who’d voiced it. Albert believed he should have protected Carter better; he thought he should have shown Carter how to behave in a more manly way.”

“But I felt terrible about killing Isaiah. And about how people thought Albert was to blame. The next week, I killed myself,” Quiana said. She was unaware she was saying anything odd. “I hanged myself in that same closet, from a hook. I figured that would make things better for Albert. When they found me, Albert started crying. He told them what the fight had been about and how he’d helped cover up for me. They had one son dead, so to protect Albert and the family’s good name, my folks buried me in the yard in the dead of night and told everyone they’d sent me off to live with relatives.”

“And Carter haunted them?” I said, not liking how shaky my voice was.

“He haunted his parents, because they were ashamed of him.” Quiana said, and I welcomed her return to perspective with huge relief. “But not Albert. Albert had tried to keep faith with Carter, but he must have felt terribly guilty himself every time he saw the Wechslers.”

“So Carter started making his presence known again now because . . .”

“Of the hammer. When you found the hammer, that was the trigger for his . . . activation.” Quiana shrugged. “I don’t know much about ghosts, but I got that from him. He was full of anger—well, we all got that. He was confused, and agitated.”

“What can we do? To get rid of him? He can’t stay here,” JB said, his mouth set in an uncharacteristically hard line.

“We can call the police,” I said. “They’d come get the bones and take them away for evaluation and burial. They’ll take the hammer, too. The closet has been reconfigured, so it’s no longer the place where Carter died.” I wondered, if we sent the bones
and
the hammer to the police, would the ghost manifest at the police station? I tried to imagine Detective Andy Bellefleur’s face.

“Will that do it? End his presence?” Tara asked.

“Ought to.” Quiana looked at me.

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

There was a doubtful silence.

I cleared my throat. “Or we could just take everything, bones and hammer, and bury the whole kit ’n’ kaboodle in the cemetery. By ourselves. And no one would ever need to know, which was what the whole Summerlin family wanted.”

They all thought about my proposition for a few seconds.

“I’m for that,” JB said. “I don’t want people coming around to see where the body was buried. The babies wouldn’t like that. People might not let their kids come over to play with Robbie and Sara.”

Tara looked at her husband in surprise. “I didn’t think about that, JB. Sookie, since your house is right by the cemetery . . . can you and Sam . . . ?”

“This isn’t a usual best-friends job,” I said, maybe a little tartly. “But okay, I’ll do it. You got an old sheet?”

She vanished into the house and came back with a white percale double fitted. Quiana laid it out by the grave, and Sam and JB disinterred the bones. Wearing rubber dishwashing gloves, they transferred the remains of poor Carter Summerlin to the sheet. The ground was so shadowed by the side of the house, I needed the help of a flashlight to sift the earth, searching for anything they might have missed. I came up with two teeth and a few little finger bones. After a while, we were reasonably sure the entire skeleton had been harvested from the soil. Tara put the hammer on top of the bones, gathered up the sheet corners, and tied them in knots.

There was a pause when Sam picked up the grotesque bundle.

“Oh, all right, we’ll go, too,” Tara said angrily, as though I’d accused her of being callous.

There was a little car caravan out to my house: me, Sam in his pickup, JB and Tara and the twins in their car, and Quiana in her old Ford.

We tromped through my woods to the cemetery. The dark was closing in around us when we came to my family plot. I was going to be late for work—but somehow I didn’t think Sam would dock my pay for it. The space at the back of my family headstone was unusually large, and since it lay at the edge of the graveyard there wasn’t another family plot abutting it from the north. We took turns digging—again—by the light of the lantern-sized flashlights I’d snatched from my tool shed.

JB lowered the bundle of bones and hammer into the makeshift grave. We shoveled the dirt back in, a much quicker job, and the men stamped down the new patch with their boots so it wouldn’t look so raw. Maybe I’d come back tomorrow and stick a potted plant in the dirt to kind of explain the digging.

When that was done, there was an odd moment, when the night around us seemed to catch its breath.

Her dark head bowed, Quiana said, “The Lord is my shepherd . . .” and we all joined in.

“God bless this poor soul and send him on his way,” I said, when the prayer was finished.

Then the night exhaled, and the air was empty.

We trudged back to my house in silence, Quiana stumbling with exhaustion from time to time.

There was an awkward pause as everyone tried to figure out how to cap off the experience.

Finally, JB said, “Y’all gonna come help finish the closet tomorrow?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

“Sure,” Sam said. “We’ll be there, and we’ll finish.”

And tomorrow, it would just be us in the house. Us living people.

Wizard Home Security

VICTOR GISCHLER

“Did the burglar hit any other rooms?”

Broahm shook his head, standing in front of the nearly empty cupboard, absently stroking his beard, which was only just now starting to form some respectable gray streaks. Clients wanted wizards with a little experience. Nothing said experience and wisdom like a bit of gray. He’d even known some journeymen spellcasters who’d used minor glamours to make themselves look older.

Broahm blinked. His mind was wandering again.

He turned to the young mage who’d asked the question. “What?”

“Anything else stolen?”

“A silver mixing bowl from my workshop and a few other minor items,” Broahm said. “Mostly it was the supply cupboard. I’ll be a year replacing those ingredients. More.”

The mage
tsked
, shaking his head. Broahm found him infuriatingly handsome and trendy. He was clean shaven, a fancy gold earring in one ear, hair cut short and spiky in the way that was fashionable among the young gentry. Trendy breeches and a loose shirt open at the neck. Unlike Broahm in his conservative burgundy robes, this young mage—Sulton was his name, Broahm now remembered—didn’t have to conform to conventional wizard fashions, since his clientele were other wizards and not the public at large.

Broahm had sent a message to Wizard Home Security, and Sulton had shown up the next morning.

“What security did you have on the cupboard?” Sulton asked.

Broahm shuffled his feet. “Well, I’d rather not give away any secrets.”

“Come now, sir. We need to know every detail if we’re to provide the best possible service.”

A sigh. “A rather expensive padlock,” Broahm said. “And the usual wards.”

“There’s your problem,” Sulton said. “Not good enough. Not by a long shot.”

Broahm bristled. “That’s self-evident.”

Sulton smiled in a way Broahm was sure was meant to be disarming but only irritated him. “No disrespect intended. I feel sure you took the appropriate precautions against your run-of-the-mill thieves. But if run-of-the-mill thieves were all you had to deal with, you wouldn’t have needed to consult Wizard Home Security, eh?”

“Get on with it.”

“The cupboard was full of valuable items, and any decent thief could have pawned them around the city for a nice bit of silver,” Sulton said. “But ask yourself, who needs those items the most? Don’t bother, I’ll answer for you. Other wizards, that’s who. You’re in the Wizard’s Quarter. You can’t swing a dead weasel or toss a stone over your shoulder without hitting a pointy hat. And with so many wizards in one place, all of whom are vying for the same ingredients to concoct the same spells, well, a few bad eggs are bound to resort to pilfering from their neighbors rather than paying the inflated prices.”

Broahm sighed, then pinched the bridge of his nose. That just figured. Nine years ago, when he’d finished his apprenticeship with Hemley, his old master had given him some advice.
Try the edge of the Northern Waste. Ice City is the sort of place a young wizard can earn a good living.
Twenty years ago this had been true. On the edge of the Great Frozen Sea, a wizard could get rich guiding ships through the seasonal storms or spelling fire stones to warm a hearth when fuel was short. But word must have gotten out, because Ice City had become simply lousy with wizards over the next two decades, all looking to score some quick silver.

Ice City—the place had some long, multisyllable name in the Old Empire tongue—was a bitter, frozen, miserable place nine months out of the year, and Broahm could not believe he’d spent nine years of his life here. And now his fellow wizards were
robbing
him.

It had been just three days ago that his neighbor Bortz, a fellow wizard Broahm spent time with occasionally, had complained bitterly about so much competition for wizarding business in the city. Bortz had reported at least half a dozen young mages of his acquaintance who’d tossed it in, packed up, and left the city. Bortz and Broahm had begun their commiserations over tea and had ended deep into a bottle of tawny port.

Broahm wondered idly why the robbers hadn’t hit Bortz’s house. Maybe because of the house maiden, a sort of ghostly servant who wandered about the place. She wasn’t exactly equivalent to a security system, but she could at least shout at the first signs of an intruder.

“What do you suggest?” Broahm asked.

“What I always suggest in these situations,” Sulton said. “That you completely mageproof your household.”

“What will that cost me?”

“Sixty gold.”

Broahm admired the way Sulton said
Sixty gold
with a completely straight face. It took a lot of nerve and a lot of self-control.

“Please leave my home,” Broahm said.

Sulton lifted his hands, palms out, and attempted a soothing, placating gesture. “Your reaction is quite understandable.”

“I think you should be flogged.”

“Now let’s not get hostile.”

If Broahm worked hard all year, not taking any days off, he might—
might
—be able to accumulate sixty gold. It was a minor fortune. There were kitchen workers in middle-class homes who might slave over hot stoves all their lives and never
see
a single gold coin.

Relatively speaking, Broahm considered himself a moderately wealthy individual. He lived in a comfortable home at the better end of the Wizard’s Quarter. Hidden within the stone wall in his top room, guarded by his most powerful spells of warding and concealment, was a small locked chest. Inside were exactly one hundred sixty-nine gold pieces—his entire savings from nine years of work in this frozen city on the edge of the wasteland. He would have to pay much of that to replace his lost wizarding supplies. Another sixty to Sulton would put him almost back at square one.

“I see by your expression that you are displeased with the price,” Sulton said.

“How observant.”

“Consider how valuable this security could be to you,” Sulton said. “The ingredients you’ve lost surely cost more than sixty gold.”

Broahm opened his mouth to spit a curse at the young mage, then paused, tugging anxiously at the end of his beard. “Go on.”

“A single wise, albeit somewhat painful, investment now would keep your valuables safe for the entire time you remain at this residence. You are, without a doubt, a capable spellcaster in your own right. But how long would it take you to prepare such spells from scratch? And this is only after hours of painstaking research. We at Wizard Home Security have done this tedious preliminary work for you.”

Broahm opened his mouth to get a word in, but Sulton pressed on quickly with his sales pitch.

“And we can customize the tone of your package to enhance whatever sort of reputation you’ve been cultivating. A wizard’s public image is everything, after all.”

Broahm raised an eyebrow. It had not occurred to him to have any sort of public image other than professional wizard. “How do you mean?”

“For example, if you want to perpetuate a sort of kinder, gentler image, we can fix you up with a capture gem to take intruders prisoner. If you’d like your potential clientele to see you as a bit more sinister, we can incinerate intruders. No problem. Nothing tells the public better that a badass powerful wizard lives here than dumping a pile of bone ash into the gutter where everyone can see. Burglars will think twice.”

“Seems a bit harsh.”

“Consider your empty cupboard,” Sulton reminded him.

“Good point.”

“Others prefer a guardian option.”

“You mean like a vicious dog or something?”

Sulton shook his head. “Nothing so mundane.”

“A vicious bear?”

“You’d have to feed and take care of a bear,” Sulton said. “I usually suggest a zombie. Or a skeleton.”

“I’m not paying for a zombie.”

“A zombie will simply stand there until it’s activated,” Sulton said. “No fuss. No muss. Stick it in a closet. I know one guy, he makes the zombie stand in a corner holding a candle in each hand, makes a nice lamp while waiting to repel intruders.”

“I said I’m not paying to animate a zombie. Those can be tricky, expensive spells.”

“Ah, but that’s the beauty of the zombie, sir,” Sulton said. “We can get you one secondhand.”

“Oh, come on!”

“It’s true,” insisted Sulton. “A wizard or priest raises one to perform a task—usually murder some chap—and then when the task is complete there’s still this perfectly good zombie cluttering up the place. No extra charge to you, sir. All part of the service.”

Broahm tugged at his beard again. He’d already made up his mind and was just deciding how to begin the bargaining. “Well . . . sixty is outrageous. Thirty.”

Sulton
tsked
and shook his head. “Sir, for that price I’d have to cut too many corners, and I don’t dare risk my reputation on a shoddy job. But it is my slow season, so I’m willing to make you an incredible bargain at fifty.”

“I do need some additional protection,” Broahm admitted. “That much is obvious. But it’s not like the Titans of the Underworld are coming to knock down my door. Surely we could do it for forty.”

“Forty-five,” Sulton said.

“Deal.” Broahm grinned.

They shook hands and discussed the details.

THREE MONTHS WENT
by, and in the middle of a particularly bitter night, during a howling snowstorm, another intruder woke Broahm out of a deep sleep.

Technically, the house maiden had awoken Broahm, not the intruder himself.

“There is someone downstairs,” she said in a soft voice. The house maiden hovered over his bed, ghostly and glowing.

The maiden was a fake consciousness modeled to look like a house servant. She floated around Broahm’s five-story home, keeping an eye on things. Broahm had admired Bortz’s house maiden enough to add her as a supplement to the security measures Sulton had installed.

Broahm’s residence was an octagonal tower on the edge of the Wizard’s Quarter, a stone’s throw from the city wall. He’d picked it up for a reasonable price when the elderly former resident had decided to chuck it in and head for a warmer climate.

“What?” Broahm rubbed his eyes as he kicked off the multiple layers of quilts and furs. “Who is downstairs?”

“I’ve never seen him before, milord,” the house maiden said. “An intruder.”

“Go see what he’s doing, then come back.” In cold weather like this, Broahm slept in his robe and socks, so he had only to pull on his short boots to be dressed. “Hurry.”

“Yes, milord.” The house maiden disappeared through the floor.

Damn it! Broahm had scoured the town and the outlying areas, every little obscure market he could find, to replace the stolen wizarding ingredients in his cupboard, and now here was another burglar already—

In a flash, it came to him. Prying eyes and keen ears had been keeping tabs on Broahm, watching as he replenished his precious materials. Some sly villain
knew
he now had a full cupboard again and had been waiting to strike. And to add insult to injury, Broahm had not activated the security system.

In a mere two weeks, the security system had become a cumbersome nuisance. Clients coming and going during business hours meant he either had to go through the tedious ritual ten times a day, or leave the system off during business hours—which was what he eventually started doing. It didn’t take long for Broahm to become complacent, and it wasn’t long after that he started to forget to activate it after closing. Often, he would already be in bed, warm under the covers, when he would remember, and more often than not he was simply too cold and lazy to get out of bed again.

The house maiden, at least, was a part of the system that could be left in operation all the time. If not for her, Broahm would have slept right through the second burglary.

He grabbed the twelve-inch dagger from his bedside table and slipped it into his belt. No time to consult his spell book. He’d have to go into action with the half-dozen spells already clunking around in his brain.

The house maiden drifted up through the floor again. “He’s standing in the foyer, milord, looking at the hallway through a glass circle he’s holding up to his eye.”

A wizard’s loupe. Broahm muttered a curse. If the burglar had as rare an item as a wizard’s loupe, then that meant he was a spellcaster himself, or, at the very least, highly familiar with the ways of wizards. He would have to engage this prowler with caution.

Broahm felt like such a lazy fool. If only he’d taken the three minutes to perform the ritual over the small, silver wolf’s head nailed to the front doorframe downstairs. The wolf’s head was the size of a peach, with small garnets for eyes, a wide-open mouth, and sharp fangs within. In an emergency situation, Sulton had explained, Broahm could simply prick his finger on one of the wolf’s teeth to activate the magical protections. His blood would identify him as the rightful resident while all others would fall victim to the dwelling’s defenses.

It was too bad Broahm had cheaped out. For an additional fee, he could have had an identical wolf’s head affixed to the doorpost in his bedroom. But noooooooo. He had to save four gold pieces and was now screwing up his courage to do battle with an intruder.

He sighed. No time to cry about it now. He had to man up and deal with the problem. He mumbled the syllables to his first spell, and they flew out of his mouth as an unintelligible garble. He took an experimental step. No sound. No squeak of floorboards. Good, the silence spell was working perfectly. Too bad an invisibility spell was so complex and hard to memorize, but being able to move silently would be some advantage.

“Keep an eye on him,” he told the house maiden. “Tell me immediately if he moves beyond the first floor.”

“Yes, milord.” She dissolved back through the floor.

Broahm drew his dagger and eased down the stairs. The floor below his bedchamber was his workshop. He kept going to the floor below that—a sitting room, storage, a guest chamber. He passed by another floor—sitting room, dining room, places to entertain clients and guests—and started down the final flight of stairs to the first floor.