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  A reluctant vampire hunter, stalking New York City as only a scorned bride can.

  Elle Dupree has her life all figured out: first a wedding, then her Ph.D., then swank faculty parties where she’ll serve wine and cheese and introduce people to her husband the lawyer.

  But those plans disintegrate when she walks in on a vampire sucking the blood from her fiancé, Greg. Horrified, she screams and runs—not away from the vampire, but toward it, brandishing a wooden letter opener.

  As she slams the improvised stake into the vampire’s heart, a team of black-clad men bursts into the apartment. Turning to face them, Elle realizes Greg’s body is gone—and her perfect life falls apart.

  LEGALLY UNDEAD

  Vampirarchy, Book One

  Margo Bond Collins

  World Weaver Press

  Copyright Notice

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of World Weaver Press.

  LEGALLY UNDEAD

  Copyright © 2014 Margo Bond Collins

  Published by World Weaver Press

  Alpena, Michigan

  www.WorldWeaverPress.com

  Editor: Eileen Wiedbrauk

  Cover designed by World Weaver Press

  Also available in paperback - ISBN-13: 978-0692211496

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  This is a work of fiction; characters and events are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

  Please respect the rights of the author and the hard work she’s put into writing and editing this novel: Do not copy. Do not distribute. Do not post or share online. If you like this book and want to share it with a friend, please consider buying an additional copy.

  For Isabel, first and always

  Legally Undead

  Prologue

  The worst thing about vampires is that they’re dead. That whole wanting to suck your blood business runs a close second, but for sheer creepiness, it’s the dead bit that gets me every time. They’re up and walking around and talking and sucking blood, but they’re dead. And then there’s the whole terminology problem—how can you kill something that’s already dead? It’s just wrong.

  I was twenty-four the first time I… destroyed? dispatched?… a vampire. That’s when I found out that all the books and movies are wrong. When you stick a wooden stake into their hearts, vampires don’t disintegrate into dust. They don’t explode. They don’t spew blood everywhere. They just look surprised, groan, and collapse into a pile of corpse. But at least they lie still then, like corpses are supposed to.

  Since that first kill (I might as well use the word—there really isn’t a better one), I’ve discovered that only if you’re lucky, do vampires look surprised before they groan and fall down. If you’re unlucky and miss the heart, they look angry. And then they fight.

  There are the other usual ways to kill vampires, of course, but these other ways can get a bit complicated. Vampires are notoriously difficult to trick into sunlight. They have an uncanny ability to sense when there’s any sunlight within miles of them, and they’re awfully good at hiding from it. Holy water doesn’t kill them; it just distracts them for a while, and then they get that angry look again. And it takes a pretty big blade to cut off someone’s head—even an already dead someone—and carrying a great big knife around New York City, even the Bronx, is a sure way to get arrested. Nope, pointy sticks are the best way to go, all around.

  My own pointy stick is actually more of a little knife with wood inlay on the blade—the metal makes it slide in easier. I had the knife specially made by an old Italian guy in just about the only ratty part of Westchester, north of the city. I tried to order one off the internet, but it turns out that while it’s easy to find wood-inlay handles, the blades themselves tend to be metal. Fat lot those people know.

  But I wasn’t thinking any of this when I pulled the knife out of the body on the ground. I was thinking something more along the lines of “Oh, bloody hell. Not again.”

  The problem with killing a vampire, of course, is that then you’ve got a corpse on your hands. A corpse with a hole in its heart. Coroners tend to describe it as a “post-mortem wound.” Usually coroners don’t know quite how post-mortem, of course—all they have to go on are things like rigor mortis and the rate of decomposition, and corpses that are up and walking around and talking simply don’t decompose all that quickly. At least, not on the outside. Apparently the insides can get pretty rotten. Whatever it is about sucking blood that keeps them going, it works on the heart, the blood vessels, and the brain, but not much else. The liver turns to something kind of like paté, all mushy and spreadable. And you don’t even want to think about the stomach. At least, I don’t.

  I didn’t even want to think about the outside of the vampire in the middle of the cement playground right next to Middle School 45 in the Bronx. What I wanted to do was gather up my groceries, currently scattered across the sidewalk on the other side of the chain-link fence behind me, and go home to my brand new satellite TV. A Law and Order re-run was sure to be on. It was always on some channel. I wanted to open a can of Pringles, curl up on the couch with my cat, and stare blankly at the screen while television cops solved big problems in less than an hour. But my apartment, and thus my television, were right across the street from the school. I really didn’t want to listen to the fuss outside my window when someone found the corpse with the post-mortem wound in the heart. The Bronx is loud enough without adding hysterical screaming.

  So instead, I pulled my cell phone out of my jacket pocket and scrolled for Nick’s number.

  That’s when I realized that my hands were shaking. And covered with blood—they left little streaks across the screen.

  I managed to find the right number anyway and waited while the line on the other end rang.

  “Nick here.”

  “Nick?” My voice was shaking almost as much as my hands. “It’s Elle.”

  “Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “I’ve got a… another problem. I need help again.”

  “The usual? Where?”

  I hated to think that dead vampires were becoming “the usual” in any sense of the term, but I told him where I was and he said he’d be there in half an hour.

  “And Elle?” he said. “See what you can do to hide the body until we get there.”

  Hiding a dead body in the middle of a concrete slab of playground is not easy, even in the Bronx, even after dark. The fight had taken place in the darkest corner of the block, at least, so I decided to go for camouflage. I hooked my hands under the body’s armpits and hauled it upright, leaning it against the chain-link fence. I tried to loop one of its arms through the fence to keep it upright, but I couldn’t get more than the forearm through the gaps in the fence chain-links. That looked totally wrong. Finally I used a broken piece of wire hanging off the fence to punch a hole in its shirt collar. Then I twisted the wire through the collar and back through the fence. It wasn’t perfect, but it did keep the top half of the body from slumping over.

  Its head kept flopping over in a suspiciously dead way, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that at the moment, so I crossed its legs at the ankles and hoped it looked more passed-out-drunk than propped-up-dead.

  By that time I was breathing hard from the exertion of moving around a 200-pound dead guy—it’s called “dead weight” for a reason—but at least my hands had stopped shaking. I gathered up my scattered groceries and pulled an unbroken glass bottle of root beer
out of the plastic bag. I wrapped the vampire’s free hand around it, hoping it looked like a regular beer (I’d stopped drinking alcohol after that first kill—these days, it scares me to think of having my judgment hindered in any way). Then I settled down onto the ground next to the big dead vampire corpse to wait for Nick and his squad of vampire killers to come clean up this mess for me.

  Chapter 1

  I met Nick for the first time the same night I met—and killed—my first vampire. It was the night my whole life fell apart.

  It started out as a perfectly normal Monday: I went to class, I did a little research in the library, and finally, I sorted through the mail as I walked into our shoebox-sized apartment. I dropped most of the envelopes onto the table in our tiny entryway and pulled one of them out to open. It was one of those mail circulars you get when you sign up at any bridal dress store—a “buy your dress here and get a veil for free” kind of deal. I’d gotten about a million of them, but I was still excited every time. This one was in a white envelope with pink clip-art all over it: pink champagne glasses and hearts and bubbles and doves. Funny the things you remember.

  I opened the envelope with Gregory’s letter opener, a pointy teakwood thing his grandmother had sent him as part of a college graduation “desk set” designed to make studying for law school a more organized and aesthetically pleasing task. Greg never used it, but I did—it made me feel somehow more professorial to open my letters with an implement designed for just such a task.

  I was looking down at the envelope, talking to Greg, saying something about would he prefer to have people blow bubbles or throw birdseed at us as we left the church, when I heard a gurgle and looked up.

  “Gurgle” doesn’t really convey it, though. A gurgle can be the last glug of a soda bottle or a bubble in plumbing pipes settling down for the night. This was neither of those things. I think that as I looked up I knew it was the kind of gurgle that has blood in it, that comes from a throat, that goes along with “last gasp” and “dying breath.”

  *

  I was finishing my fourth year as a graduate student in history at Fordham University in the Bronx, studying the Early Modern period in England (which covers pretty much everything up through the Renaissance), and planning to get a Ph.D. I had my life mapped out: I wanted to teach college history courses, maybe write a few history books, host swank college faculty parties where I would serve wine and cheese and introduce people to my husband the lawyer. My fiancé Gregory Parham and I had met as undergrads in New Orleans and had chosen to move to New York because he got into Fordham Law School and I got into the Fordham history program. We lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment near Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan, where Greg attended classes. Every day I took the Ram Van, Fordham’s shuttle service, to the Rose Hill campus in the Bronx. We had considered moving, but decided it made sense to stay in Manhattan; Greg had finished law school and was in his first year as a junior member of a law firm on Park Avenue—Forster, Pearson and Sims. The job wasn’t as posh as it sounded, but after years of living on student loans, scholarships, and grants, his salary seemed astronomical, so we were excitedly planning the small wedding we’d been waiting to have.

  All of those plans were destroyed when I looked up to see a tall, thin man dressed in a gray suit who stood in the middle of our living room holding Greg, really dangling Greg, by the back of the neck. Greg’s eyes were open, but not seeing anything. There was blood everywhere—on the front of the man’s suit, smeared across his face, trickling down Greg’s side, dripping onto the carpet below the spot where Greg’s feet barely brushed back and forth as he swung from the man’s grip. The man’s face had been buried in one side of Greg’s neck, and as he looked up his eyes cleared slowly—they were full of a kind of sleepy predatory pleasure, like a cat that’s been drinking from a saucer of cream and has to refocus its attention on the mouse that’s just wandered into its path.

  It was like time both sped up and slowed down, all at once. The man dropped Greg, who crumpled into a pile on the coffee table, then slid to the floor. The vampire (I had seen enough crappy horror movies to figure that much out) leapt across the room at me just as I dropped all the mail in my hand and ran screaming wordlessly, not away from him, as a sane person would do, but toward him.

  I don’t think of myself as brave. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I’m not even sure I knew I had a weapon in my hand. But I didn’t drop the teakwood letter opener. Instead, I rammed it into the vampire’s heart. Over and over. Even after he looked surprised, groaned, and fell over dead.

  I was still slamming the letter opener into the dead man’s heart moments later, when Nick Calvani and his Band of Merry Men came bursting through the door.

  When I looked around at them, I realized that Greg’s body was gone.

  *

  Nick and his guys said things like “nice job” and “good instincts” and “clean kill,” and I think they would have liked to say “welcome aboard,” but I was too busy vomiting into the kitchen sink to listen to them.

  At moments like that, you realize that there are things you just don’t want to know. At the top of my list right then were vampires are real and your boyfriend was just eaten by one. Closely followed by when in danger, you go for the heart. With a pointy stick.

  But all of those things were pretty quickly shoved down to the bottom of the list by what Nick had to say.

  “The fact that he’s gone probably means that he was turned.”

  My eyes widened. “Turned as in ‘turned into a vampire’?”

  Nick nodded curtly.

  Oh, ye gods. My beloved is now a bloodsucking fiend from hell. Go straight to agony, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

  “Who are you guys?” My brain was cloudy and my mouth tasted sour, but the fact that four enormous, muscle-bound guys dressed all in black had just come bursting into my home and interrupted me in a killing frenzy wasn’t entirely lost on me. The lead guy, who looked disconcertingly like a bad cross between Stephen King and Sylvester Stallone, all heavy jaw and protruding brow ridge and muscular torso, was popping out orders while he talked to me.

  “John, you check the perimeter.” He turned back to me. “Whose name is on the lease for this apartment?”

  I dragged the back of my hand across my mouth. “No. You answer me first.”

  “The rest of you, clean up in here.” He pointed out several places where blood had splattered across the couch. Suddenly, the Merry Men became the Merry Maids, pulling equipment out of black canvas bags and snapping together a portable vacuum cleaner, for chrissakes. It roared to life and the man wielding it dragged it across the deepest pool of blood, one that had been under the body, as the other two men zipped the dead vampire into a body bag. The vacuum cleaner made a wet sucking sound, and I felt my stomach heave again. Leader-guy turned back to me.

  “If only your name is on the lease, we can probably keep lover-boy from coming back in. But if his name is on it, it’s his home and you need to leave.”

  The news just got better and better, and my list of Things Not to Know got longer and longer. And anyway— “Lover-boy? No. Never mind. Just please. Tell me who you are. And what the hell just happened.”

  It turned out that Nick and his guys did contract “clean-up work” for the same law firm that Greg worked for. They’d gotten a call from their contact at the firm and he’d told them that there was likely to be a vampire attack that night. He’d told them when and where and that the “incident” needed to be stopped, if possible, and covered up otherwise. No, they hadn’t been told to expect me. And no, Nick and his guys were not about to “cover up” my presence.

  “Geez, lady. We’re not murderers. We’re not the bad guys here.” He paused. “But listen. I wouldn’t go around telling anybody about this, either. Not that anyone would believe you.”

  And that’s really the problem, isn’t it? If you’ve just killed a vampire, there isn’t anyone yo
u can talk to about it. Not even a therapist. You can’t very well say “My former fiancé is a walking, talking member of the undead.” Not if you want to stay out of mental institutions. And I was sure that I did want to stay out of the psych wards, even though I was equally certain that I needed massive doses of therapy.

  That’s when I started to cry. Not ladylike sniffles, but great, huge, heaving, gulping, snorting sobs. Nick’s guys looked nervous and wandered off to the far corners of the apartment, studiously examining the floors and walls for any spots of blood they might have missed. Nick himself looked uncomfortable and patted me on the shoulder awkwardly. He tried to distract me.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Elle,” I said. “Elle Dupree.”

  When the weeping storm had passed, he handed me a wad of toilet paper one of his minions brought from the bathroom. He also handed me a bottle of Benadryl allergy pills—from my own bathroom—and said, “Here. Take one of these. It’ll help you… um… sleep.” What he meant was “calm down,” but I swallowed the pill anyway. I wanted me to calm down, too.

  Of course Greg’s name was on the lease—he was the one with the real job, after all—so Nick told me he would take me someplace safe.

  “I have to take my cat,” I said, after Nick outlined his plan to me.

  “Okay,” he said, and waited patiently while I gathered up my pet carrier and supplies, then coaxed Millie out from under the top corner of the bed where she was hiding. Then he helped me get her into the carrier and carried it himself.

  We drove to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and Nick checked me in. He stayed at the hotel just long enough to see me up to my room and tell me he’d be back in the morning. I still don’t know who paid for it, but now that I’ve spent more time around Nick, I suspect that he got Greg’s law firm to cover the costs. If I hadn’t been so miserable, I would have been overawed at the elegant surroundings. Or perhaps humiliated to be whisked up an elevator and out of sight. I’m sure I didn’t do much for the hotel’s image; my jeans and gray t-shirt had suspicious-looking brownish-red stains splattered across them and my face was streaked with tears and snot. I was also yawning hugely as the allergy pill took effect. As it was, I didn’t even register the horrified stares of the other hotel guests until much later, after I’d run a hot bath full of rich-smelling bubbles and climbed in. After a second’s thought, I pulled my clothes in after me and scrubbed at them furiously.