Definitely Dead

Hadley,” she said, and I couldn’t decide by her tone if she thought that was a good thing or a bad thing.
    “I’m not at all like Hadley, all the way through,” I said flatly.
    “Well, that’s good. Hadley was pretty awful,” Amelia said unexpectedly. “Whoops. Sorry, I’m not tactful.”
    “Really?” I tried to keep my voice level, but a trace of sarcasm may have leaked through. “So if you know where the coffee is, can you point me in that direction?” I was looking at the kitchen area for the first time in the daylight. It had exposed brick and copper, a stainless steel food preparation area and a matching refrigerator, and a sink with a faucet that cost more than my clothes. Small, but fancy, like the rest of the place.
    All this, for a vampire who didn’t really need a kitchen in the first place.
    “Hadley’s coffeepot is right there,” Amelia said, and I spotted it. It was black and it kind of blended in. Hadley had always been a coffee freak, so I’d figured that even as a vampire she’d kept a supply of her favorite beverage. I opened the cabinet above the pot, and behold—two cans of Community Coffee and some filters. The silvery seal was intact on the first one I opened, but the second can was open and half full. I inhaled the wonderful coffee smell with quiet pleasure. It seemed amazingly fresh.
    After I fixed the pot and punched a button to set it perking, I found two mugs and set them beside it. The sugar bowl was right by the pot, but when I opened it, I found only a hardened residue. I pitched the contents into the trash can, which was lined but empty. It had been cleaned out after Hadley’s death. Maybe Hadley had had some powdered creamer in the refrigerator? In the South, people who don’t use it constantly often keep it there.
    But when I opened the gleaming stainless steel refrigerator, I found nothing but five bottles of TrueBlood.
    Nothing had brought home to me so strongly the fact that my cousin Hadley had died a vamp. I’d never known anyone before and after. It was a shock. I had so many memories of Hadley, some of them happy and some of them unpleasant—but in all of those memories, my cousin was breathing and her heart was beating. I stood with my lips compressed, staring at the red bottles, until I’d recovered enough to shut the door very gently.
    After a vain search in the cabinets for Cremora, I told Amelia I hoped she took her coffee black.
    “Yes, that’ll be fine,” Amelia said primly. She was obviously trying to be on her better behavior, and I could only be grateful for that. Hadley’s landlady was perched on one of Hadley’s spindle-legged armchairs. The upholstery was really pretty, a yellow silky material printed with dark red and blue flowers, but I disliked the fragile style of the furniture. I like chairs that look as though they could hold big people, heavy people, without a creak or a groan. I like furniture that looks as though it won’t be ruined if you spill a Coke on it, or if your dog hops up on it to take a nap. I tried to settle myself on the loveseat opposite the landlady’s. Pretty, yes. Comfortable, no. Suspicion confirmed.
    “So what are you, Amelia?”
    “Beg pardon?”
    “What are you?”
    “Oh, a witch.”
    “Figured.” I hadn’t caught the sense of the supernatural that I get from creatures whose very cells have been changed by the nature of their being. Amelia had acquired her “otherness.” “Did you do the spells to seal off the apartment?”
    “Yes,” she said rather proudly. She gave me a look of sheer evaluation. I had known the apartment was warded with spells; I had known she was a member of the other world, the hidden world. I might be a regular human, but I was in the know. I read all these thoughts as easily as if Amelia had spoken them to me. She was an exceptional broadcaster, as clear and clean as her complexion. “The night Hadley died, the queen’s lawyer phoned me. Of course, I was asleep. He told me to shut this sucker up, that Hadley wouldn’t be coming back, but the queen wanted her place kept intact for her heir. I came up and began cleaning early the next morning.” She’d worn rubber gloves, too; I could see that in her mental picture of herself the morning after Hadley had died.
    “You emptied the trash and made the bed?”
    She looked embarrassed. “Yes, I did. I didn’t realize ‘in tact’ meant ‘untouched.’ Cataliades got here and let me have it. But I’m glad I got the