Home Improvement: Undead Edition (24 page)

Her ears pricked up as I touched her nose. In Wales and Ireland the legends say that the horses fear us; that’s why they run so hard while we’re astride. The truth is our scent excites them as much as their sweat pleases us.

I led her out, grasped two handfuls of thick mane, and swung up onto the beast’s back. Muscles quivered between my thighs as I removed the tight restraining tie from my hair. I kicked her on. The mare galloped off into the night, accepted the challenge of the three-rail fence, and we were in the dark, free and away at last.

The pounding hooves soothed me and the fresh night air cleared my head, even if it came at the price of a swallowed bug or two. I’d return the mare, sweaty and trembling, by morning. A steamy mystery for whoever came first into the barn. For now, I’d give her the ride of her life.

THE NEXT MORNING
I forced Mastiff to show me his surprise for the weekend.

I found him in his office. Megha had arrived early, or perhaps had never left, and was sorting bills into three piles: Delay, Delay Some More, and Final Notice.

“You’ve been hinting at some special cuisine for this weekend. I was hoping for some input on preparation,” I said.

He winked and took me down to the kitchen. The zombies were taking turns working the mop back and forth—Buck would hand it to Tooth, who’d wring it out and hand it back to Buck, who’d wring it again and pass it back, without mop head coming into contact with the floor—as the golem slumbered in a corner, gently ticking and shifting like a refuse pile with a rat exploring within.

We passed through what served as an office and into the old dairy storage tank room. He’d converted the two tanks into cells, after a fashion, by installing reinforcing-rod grills over the cleaning hatches.

A white-painted dungeon. It smelled faintly of bleach and mice.

“Only one’s occupied. Take a look.”

“HELP ME! OH GOD, HELP MEEE!” a voice pleaded from within.

I hazarded a look. An attractive, tan, college-age human with bruises up and down her forearms and fists shot toward the hatch like an electrified cat.

“Help . . . out . . . please,” she burbled.

It came to me. I’d seen the face on the airport news. The Stensgaard disappearance. The girl had vanished from the U.S. Virgin Islands while on spring break from her college in Syracuse.

She fit the profile for a missing woman the cable media would obsess over: upper middle class, attractive, a white girl-next-door with just enough body to warrant a second look—perhaps a third if she was in her swimsuit.

“Oh, this one was expensive,” Mastiff said. “Very expensive indeed.”

Idiot. He’d probably paid two or three hundred dollars a pound, plus finder’s fees. He could have snatched a local Iowa high-school dropout for a tenth of that price.

Beyond cost, there was the danger that always came with a big media case. If word got out, it wouldn’t be just a quiet little Templar raid—they’d call in Shaolin monks and Aborigine animist spirit men. One of the rules of the long war since the rift was to keep humanity only vaguely aware of the translife world. Rouse the superstitious, ignorant masses and you get inquisitions and jihads and pogroms that hurt both sides.

“This guy’s crazy, you’ve got to listen!” she cried, white fingers gripping the bars.

“I’m inclined to agree with you,” I told her, storming out of the storage room.

We returned to the office and I asked Megha to give us a moment.

“Are you mad? A big media kidnapping victim?” I asked.

“I thought it would create a buzz. I was in Europe last fall for the yearly declarations of the Secret Eyes, and no one had even heard of the Skyline.”

“You’re not just playing with your own safety, it’s everyone who works for you. Me, too, while I’m here.”

“Oh, come come, my dear. What’s she going to do, chew through wrought iron or riveted tanks built to hold a thousand gallons of milk? Once she’s on the table and surrounded by parsnips, your worries will be over—and at the plate cost I’m charging, I’ll have a chance to put this month in the black.”

“You’re straining at a camel and can’t even swallow a fly, Mastiff. You’ve got a six-armed demon on payroll who isn’t being used to near her capacity, pouring with one hand, working her cell with another, and picking her bum with the other four.”

“I will admit Megha’s been a disappointment. Cold fish, my dear.”

“Arse-over, more like. Quit looking at the two really great tits and think about those six arms and the creativity in the brain behind, right? You should put her in the kitchen, instead of that slow-motion junkyard.”

“Then I’d have to find another bartender. I’d rather spend what cash I have left for a dazzling display of fresh food. That’ll get them over from Europe.”

Last person to try to blow this much smoke up my ass was a loquacious demon in San Juan.

“Fresh food! You’re taking the piss, aren’t you? Serving up one truly high-end dish surrounded by lashings of garbage that would choke a hellhound. Customers know a dodge when they see one. You’re from here, Mason, yet your mindset’s with those knobs in Marseilles and Prague who won’t see beyond the tip of their cardamom-dusted noses. Your locals deserve better. Let’s start with giving them your respect, right?”

“The locals! Depressed St. Louis vampires and Minneapolis ghouls. That’s not why I went into this business.”

Well, so Wisconsin grows a few snobs, too. Interesting. Still, I had to talk sense into him, or at least try.

“Forget about the fancy, high-concept menu items. You have great local sourcing, if you just think about it. In the summer, there’s enough prospects on the waterways to keep three translife restaurants going. Drunken ski-boaters, sclerotic fishermen, college girls looking for a secluded stretch of beach where they can take their tops off without getting leered at, backpackers. In the fall, you have hunting season. Talk about a buffet! There are hundreds of different ways a couple of beered-up rednecks hunting out of their camouflage-painted truck might disappear. In the winter, just snatch someone off their snowmobile and then sink it in one of the lakes, or wait for a storm and go knocking on isolated ice-shack doors. In the spring, you have teens jaunting off into the woods for the first outdoor shag of the season. And all the bird-watchers. Bird-watchers are hardly ever missed by anyone.”

“Have you ever eaten one of these good-ol’-boy deer hunters? They wouldn’t be caught serving one of them in Paris.”

“Listen, Mastiff, in Paris I could get twenty servings out of a fat old Normandy fisherman, skin salt-tanned right into a boot heel. Twenty servings at three hundred a diner, maybe thirty euros to find and haul him.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“It’s in the cooking, mate, it’s not the quality of the cut. Your infatuation with college girls—Pilates classes and whole-wheat biscuits don’t give you much flesh or any marbling. Your average Wisconsin plumber makes better grilling. Give me a braising pan and I’ll make the most leathery old stream fisherman taste like sea turtle. Besides, local sourcing saves you a bunch of money and the potential for subcontractor mistakes. You can afford to cut prices, add variety, and these days even translife are on a budget.”

“No! Tonight I’m putting on a show that’ll impress even you, Sean Woolsley. You can help me by thinking up some side dishes to go with the Stensgaard girl.”

Ahh, that’s his bollocked-up plan. He thought he’d have me in, update the menu, then put on a show with his expensive little menu item every twenty-four-hour news channel had the hots for. Get a buzz about the old barn. Takes more than one pretty little dinner to turn around a restaurant, fleshie, believe you me.

I THOUGHT ABOUT
climbing into my rented van and raising gravel. I could eat Oreos all the way back to London.

In the end, I stayed. For Megha and Ravelston, even for those two idiot zombies in the kitchen. Even those two deserved better than Cecil B. DeRanged putting their translives at risk. Mason Mastiff had bitten off a good deal more than he could chew, and someone had to be there if he choked.

I took out some of my frustrations on a horse stolen from a riding club. I left it tied out back, knowing that I’d need another ride after seeing Mastiff’s little show with the Stensgaard menu.

He’d been right about one thing. He’d generated a buzz. The old barn was very nearly packed. I even recognized a few diners from the translife foodie circuit from as far away as Memphis. Then I saw another familiar half-face.

Leave it to Mastiff to toss a turd into his own punch bowl. He’d invited yellow-skinned Charles Lasseur, a writer for the Nightcraft Roundtable, a one-stop Internet shop for all things translife. Some mix of ghoul and vampire and lich, he had an occasional column on restaurants, cafés, and nightspots, draining the life energy from would-be restaurateurs more thoroughly than a starving vampire. The old bastard had a scarred-up face minus the nose that might have been the inspiration for Lon Chaney’s Phantom.

He had a peculiar sideways gait and sidled up to me as though we were old friends.

“I heard you were orchestrating another culinary triumph,” Lasseur said, looking down his nonexistent nose.

“I’m still evaluating matters here,” I said. “After tonight, I’m sure I’ll know what sort of changes need to be made.”

“Beyond the décor, I hope,” Lasseur said. “Please tell me you’ll do something about the décor.”

I wouldn’t give Lasseur the satisfaction of agreeing with him, so I just grunted.

For the featured dinner tonight, Mastiff wore a metallic suit and top hat, sort of a cross between Willy Wonka and Liberace, with a tiny brown wig the size of a sleeping bat atop his head.

The Frankenstein platform rose. The poor Stensgaard girl stood on it, attached to the rigging arms like Fay Wray awaiting her rendezvous with King Kong.

She had a stout leather ball gag in her mouth but otherwise looked wide awake and thrashing.

I’ve heard of a few translife clubs in Amsterdam, Southeast Asia, and the Mideast making such a production out of food preparation, but I don’t agree with such spectacles. I’d warned and rewarned Mastiff not to attempt his plan, and here he was going ahead anyway. Tonight would be my last night at the Skyline. He could spend his way into bankruptcy without attaching my name to the fiasco.

“The world has gone mad today. And good’s bad today. And black’s white today. And day’s night today,” sang his stickpin.

“Ladies and gentlemen, mesdames and monsieurs,
meine Damen und Herren
,” Mastiff began to an audience of English-speaking, Upper Midwestern translife, “let me introduce you to our fabulous main course, on special tonight for only nine ninety-nine a plate. That’s nine hundred ninety-nine dollars, for the privilege of tasting the most talked-about woman in America today, Lisa Stensgaard. That price includes, of course, fresh blood to accompany your meal.

“She’s exclusive to the discriminating clientele of the Skyline. Only you will be able to answer the question on everyone’s lips: What happened to Lisa Stensgaard?”

Don’t play with your food.
First lesson old One-Eyed Jack ever taught me. Leave it to a human to go for sexy presentation. Sparkle might fill movie theaters, but it doesn’t do much for cuisine. Hollywood gives the humans such lame ideas about translife.

Both zombies were pulling hard on her arms, forcing her down into the guttered autopsy table. Fresh jugs waited under the drain to collect every precious drop of blood, and Ravelston stood ready with wineglasses.

As the golem bent over her, chef’s knife at the ready, she suddenly threw herself toward Buck. Or perhaps it was Tooth. One zombie plus one desperate woman plus the tipping platform managed to yank Tooth (if that was who it was) off his feet and impale him on the golem’s outstretched knife and sent Buck backward off the platform.

Both zombies grunted in outrage as they bounced bloodily into the kitchen pit.

Stensgaard scooted backward as the golem mechanically wiped the knife and struck again.

“Chef! Stop her!” Mastiff shouted.

Breathing hot and hard, Stensgaard jumped off the platform and among the diners. She sprinted between the widely spaced tables, upending a busboy cart that one of the guests had pushed into her way. Otherwise the rest were satisfied with just watching the escape attempt.

Perhaps they thought it was dinner theater.

“Stop her,” shouted Mastiff, waving his shiny top hat in frustration from the balcony.

The skeletons went about their business of mechanically filling knocked-over water glasses and picking up dropped forks.
You get what you pay for, Mastiff.

Stensgaard didn’t bother with the door. Instead she grabbed the busboy cart and followed it through one of the great river-facing windows and down onto the patio.

All I could do was shake my head. If she got away, the Templars would be investigating all of southwest Wisconsin and the surrounding states inside twenty-four hours.

“Looks like the special’s off . . . and running,” Lasseur said. “I can’t wait to see what’s planned for dessert. A heroin addict launched from a cannon, perhaps?”

Someone had to set this mess to rights, and for the sake of the staff of the Skyline, I’d undertake it. I grabbed Ravelston by the arm and pulled him toward the hole in the glass.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it seems . . .” Mastiff said. “It seems . . .”

“Starting here, starting now, honey, everything’s coming up roses!” sang the stickpin.

“THIS NEVER WAS
my kind of show,” Ravelston said, his arms tight across my back as the horse trotted through the cloudy Wisconsin night. The tall quarterhorse was deeply unhappy about carrying a vampire. “Running down food in the dead of night.”

I’d had to bring him. I could ride quickly, but I couldn’t track a bus driven through a glass blower’s.

“How do you keep yourself fed? Just the restaurant?”