Book Nine 16-18

Chapter 16
As I served beers and daiquiris and vodka collinses to the people stopping by on their way home from work, I stood back and eyed myself in amazement. I’d worked for hours, serving and smiling and hustling, and I’d never broken down at all. Sure, I’d had to ask four people to repeat their orders. And I’d walked past Sam twice, and he’d said something to me to which I hadn’t responded—I knew this because he’d stopped me to tell me so. But I’d gotten the right plates and drinks to the right tables, and my tips were running about average, which meant I’d been agreeable and hadn’t forgotten anything crucial.
You’re doing so good,I told myself. I’m so proud of you. You just have to get through this. You can go home in fifteen minutes .
I wondered how many women had given themselves the same lecture: the girl who’d held her head up at a dance where her date was paying attention to another classmate; the woman who’d been passed by for promotion at her job; the woman who had listened to a dire diagnosis and yet kept her face together. I knew men must have days like this, too.
Well, maybe not too many people had days exactly like this.
Naturally, I’d been turning over in my head Mel’s strange insistence that he was not responsible for Crystal’s crucifixion, during which she’d actually died. His thoughts had had the ring of truth. And really, there was no reason why he would’ve balked at confessing everything when he’d already confessed so much, found peace doing so. Why would someone steal the half-dead Crystal and the wood, and do a deed so disgusting? It would’ve had to have been someone who’d hated Crystal an awful lot, or maybe someone who had hated Mel or Jason. It was an inhuman act, yet I found myself believing in Mel’s dying assertion that he had not done it.
I was so glad to leave work that I began driving home on automatic pilot. When I’d gotten almost to the turnoff into my driveway, I remembered that I’d told Amelia hours before that I’d meet her at Tray’s house.
I’d completely forgotten.
I could forgive myself, considering the day I’d had—if Amelia was okay. But when I remembered Tray’s mean state and his ingestion of vampire blood, I felt a jolt of panic.
I looked at my watch and saw I was more than forty-five minutes late. Turning around in the next driveway, I drove back to town like a bat out of hell. I was trying to pretend to myself I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t doing a very good job.
There weren’t any cars in front of the small house. Its windows were dark. I could see the bumper of Tray’s truck peering out from the carport behind the house.
I drove right by and turned around on a county road about half a mile farther out. Confused and worried, I returned to park outside Tray’s. His house and the adjacent workshop were outside the Bon Temps city limits but not isolated. Tray had maybe a half-acre lot; his little home and the large metal building housing his repair business were right next to a similar setup owned by Brock and Chessie Johnson, who had an upholstery shop. Obviously, Brock and Chessie had retreated to their house for the night. The living room lights were on; as I watched, Chessie pulled the curtains shut, which most people out here didn’t bother to do.
The night was dark and quiet; the Johnsons’ dog was barking, but that was the only sound. It was too cold for the chorus of bugs that often made the night come alive.
I thought of several scenarios that could explain the dead look of the house.
One. The vampire blood still had hold over Tray, and he’d killed Amelia. Right now, he was in his house, in the dark, thinking of ways to kill himself. Or maybe he was waiting for me to come, so he could kill me, too.
Two. Tray had recovered from his ingestion of vamp blood, and when Amelia had appeared on his doorstep, they’d decided to treat their free afternoon as a honeymoon. They wouldn’t be at all happy if I interrupted them.
Three. Amelia had come by, found no one at home, and was now back at the house cooking supper for herself and me, because she expected me to drive up at any moment. At least that explanation accounted for the absence of Amelia’s car.
I tried to think of an even better series of events, but I couldn’t. I pulled out my cell phone and tried my home number. I heard my own voice on the answering machine. Next, I tried Amelia’s cell. It went to voice mail after three rings. I was running out of happy options. Figuring that a phone call would be less intrusive than a knock at the door, I tried Tray’s number next. I could hear the faint ring of the phone inside . . . but no one answered it.
I called Bill. I didn’t think about it for more than a second. I just did it.
“Bill Compton,” said the familiar cool voice.
“Bill,” I said, and then couldn’t finish.
“Where are you?”
“I’m sitting in my car outside of Tray Dawson’s house.”
“The Were who owns the motorcycle repair shop.”
“Right.”
“I’m coming.”
He was there in less than ten minutes. His car pulled up behind mine. I was pulled over on the shoulder, because I hadn’t wanted to drive up onto the gravel in front of the house.
“I’m weak,” I said, when he got in beside me. “I shouldn’t have called you. But I swear to God, I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You didn’t call Eric.” It was a simple observation.
“Take too long,” I said. I told him what I’d done. “I can’t believe I forgot Amelia,” I said, stricken by my self-centeredness.
“I think forgetting one thing after such a day is actually permissible, Sookie,” Bill said.
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “It’s just that . . . I can’t go in there and find them dead. I just can’t do it. My courage has just collapsed.”
He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “What’s one more dead person to me?” he said. And then he was out of the car and moving silently in the faint light peeking around the curtains of the house next door. He got to the front door, listened intently. He didn’t hear anything, I knew, because he opened the door and stepped inside.
Just as he vanished, my cell phone rang. I jumped so hard I almost hit my head on the roof. I dropped the phone and had to grope for it.
“Hello?” I said, full of fear.
“Hey, did you call? I was in the shower,” Amelia said, and I collapsed over the steering wheel, thinking, Thank you God thank you God thank you thank you .
“You okay?” Amelia asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m okay. Where is Tray? Is he there with you?”
“Nope. I went to his house, but he wasn’t there. I waited a while for you, but you didn’t show, so I figured he’d gone to the doctor, and I decided you must have been held up at work or something. I went back to the insurance agency, and I just got home about thirty minutes ago. What’s up?”
“I’ll be there soon,” I said. “Lock the doors and don’t let anyone in.”
“Doors are locked; no one’s knocking,” she said.
“Don’t let me in,” I said, “unless I give you the password.”
“Sure, Sookie,” she said, and I could tell she thought I’d gone over the edge. “What’s the password?”
“Fairypants,” I said, and how I came up with that I have no idea. It simply seemed super unlikely that anyone else in the world would say it.
“I got it,” Amelia said. “Fairypants.”
Bill was back at the car. “I’ve got to go,” I said, and hung up. When he opened the door, the dome light showed his face. It looked grim.
“He’s not there,” he said immediately. “But there’s been a fight.”
“Blood?”
“Yes.”
“Lots?”
“He could still be alive. From the way it smelled, I don’t think it was all his.”
My shoulders slumped. “I don’t know what to do,” I confessed, and it felt almost good to say it out loud. “I don’t know where to go to find him or how to help him. He’s supposed to be working as my bodyguard. But he went out in the woods last night and met up with a woman who said she was your new girlfriend. She gave him a drink. It was bad vampire blood, and it made him sick as the flu.” I looked over at Bill. “Maybe she got it from Bubba. I haven’t seen him to ask. I’m kind of worried about him.” I knew Bill could see me far more clearly than I could see him. I spread my hands in query. Did he know this woman?
Bill looked at me. His mouth curved up in a rather bitter little smile. “I’m not dating anyone,” he said.
I decided to completely ignore the emotional slant. I didn’t have the time or the energy tonight. I’d been right when I’d discounted the mysterious woman’s identity. “So this was someone who could pretend to be a fangbanger, someone convincing enough to overcome Tray’s good sense, someone who could put him under a spell so he’d drink the blood.”
“Bubba doesn’t have much good sense at all,” Bill said. “Even though some fairy magic doesn’t work on vampires, I don’t think he’d be hard to bespell.”
“Have you seen him tonight?”
“He came over to my place to put drinks in his cooler, but he seemed weak and disoriented. After he drank a couple of bottles of TrueBlood, he seemed to be better. The last I saw of him, he was walking across the cemetery toward your house.”
“I guess we better go there next.”
“I’ll follow you.” Bill went to his own car, and we set off to drive the short distance to my place. But Bill caught the light at the intersection of the highway and Hummingbird Road, and I was ahead of him by quite a few seconds. I pulled up in back of the house, which was well-lit. Amelia had never worried about an electric bill in her life; it just made me want to cry sometimes when I followed her around turning off switch after switch.
I got out of the car and hurried for the back steps, all ready to say, “Fairypants!” when Amelia came to the door. Bill would be there in less than a minute, and we could make a plan on how to find Tray. When Bill got there, he’d check on Bubba; I couldn’t go out in the woods. I was proud of myself for not rushing into the trees to find the vampire.
I had so much to think about that I didn’t think about the most obvious danger.
There’s no excuse for my lack of attention to detail.
A woman by herself always has to be alert, and a woman who’s had the experiences I’ve had has extra cause for alarm when blips are on her radar. The security light was still on at the house and and the backyard looked normal, it was true. I had even glimpsed Amelia in the kitchen through a window. I hurried to the back steps, my purse slung over my shoulder, my trowel and water guns inside it, my keys in my hand.
But anything can be hiding in the shadows, and it takes only a moment’s inattention for a trap to spring.
I heard a few words in a language I didn’t recognize, but for a second I thought,He’s mumbling , and I couldn’t imagine what a man behind me would be mumbling, and I was about to put my foot on the first step to the back porch.
And then I didn’t know a thing.
Chapter 17
I thought I was in a cave. It felt like a cave: cool, damp. And the sound was funny.
My thoughts were anything but speedy. However, the sense of wrongness rose to the top of my consciousness with a kind of dismaying certainty. I was not where I was supposed to be, and I shouldn’t be wherever I was. At the moment, these seemed like two separate and distinct thoughts.
Someone had bopped me on the head.
I thought about that. My head didn’t feel sore, exactly: it felt thick, as if I had a bad cold and had taken a serious decongestant on top of that. So, I concluded (with all the speed of a turtle), I had been knocked out magically rather than physically. The result was about the same. I felt like hell, and I was scared to open my eyes. At the same time, I very much wanted to know who was in this space with me. I braced myself and made my eyelids open. I caught a glimpse of a lovely and indifferent face, and then my eyelids clamped shut again. They seemed to be operating on their own timetable.
“She’s joining us,” said someone.
“Good; we can have some fun,” said another voice.
That didn’t sound promising at all. I didn’t think the fun was going to be anything I could enjoy, too.
I figured I could get rescued anytime now, and that would be just fine.
But the cavalry didn’t ride in. I sighed and forced my eyes open again. This time the lids stayed apart, and by the light of a torch—a real, honest-to-God flaming wood torch—I examined my captors. One was a male fairy. He was as lovely as Claudine’s brother Claude and just about as charming—which is to say, not at all. He had black hair, like Claude’s, and handsome features and a buff body, like Claude’s. But his face couldn’t even simulate interest in me. Claude was at least able to fake it when circumstances required that.
I looked at Kidnapper Number Two. She hardly seemed more promising. She was a fairy, too, and therefore lovely, but she didn’t appear to be any more lighthearted or fun-loving
than her companion. Plus, she was wearing a body stocking, or something very like one, and she looked good in it, which in and of itself was enough to make me hate her.
“We have the right woman,” Two said. “The vampire-loving whore. I think the one with short hair was a bit more attractive.”
“As if any human can truly be lovely,” said One.
It wasn’t enough to be kidnapped; I had to be insulted, too. Though their words were the last thing in the world I needed to be worrying about, a little spark of anger lit in my chest. Just keep that up, asshole, I thought. You just wait till my great-grandfather gets a hold of you .
I hoped they hadn’t hurt Amelia or Bubba.
I hoped Bill was all right.
I hoped he’d called Eric and my great-grandfather.
That was a lot of hoping. As long as I was in the wishful-thinking zone, I wished that Eric was tuned in to my very great distress and my very real fear. Could he track me by my emotions? That would be wonderful, because I was certainly full of them. This was the worst fix I’d ever been in. Years ago, when Bill and I had exchanged blood, he’d told me he’d be able to find me. I hoped he’d been telling the truth, and I hoped that ability hadn’t faded with time. I was willing to be saved by just about anybody. Soon.
Kidnapper One slid his hands under my armpits and yanked me to a sitting position. For the first time, I realized my hands were numb. I looked down to see they were tied with a strip of leather. Now I was propped up against a wall, and I could see I was not actually in a cave. We were in an abandoned house. There was a hole in the roof, and I could see stars through it. The smell of mildew was strong, almost choking, and under it trailed the scents of rotting wood and wallpaper. There was nothing in the room but my purse, which had been tossed into a corner, and an old framed photograph, which hung crookedly on the wall behind the two fairies. The picture had been taken outside, probably in the nineteen twenties or thirties, and it was of a black family dressed up for their picture-taking adventure. They looked like a farming family. At least I was still in my own world, I figured, though probably not for long.
While I could, I smiled at Thing One and Thing Two. “My great-grandfather is going to kill you,” I said. I even managed to sound pretty happy about that. “You just wait.”
One laughed, tossing his black hair behind him in a male modelly gesture. “He’ll never find us. He’ll yield and step down rather than see you killed in a slow and painful way. He loooooves humans.”
Two said, “He should have gone to the Summerland long ago. Consorting with humans will kill us off even faster than we are dying already. Breandan will seal us off. We’ll be safe. Niall is out of date.”
Like he’d expired on the shelves or something.
“Tell me you have a boss,” I said. “Tell me you’re not the brains of the operation.” I was sort of aware that I was seriously addled, probably as a result of the spell that had knocked me out, but knowing I wasn’t myself didn’t seem to stop me talking, which was a pity.
“We owe allegiance to Breandan,” One said proudly, as if that would make everything clear to me.
Instead of connecting their words with my great-grandfather’s archenemy, I pictured the Brandon I’d gone to high school with, who’d been a running back on the football team. He’d gone to Louisiana Tech and then into the air force. “He got out of the service?” I said.
They stared at me with a total lack of comprehension. I couldn’t really fault them for that. “Service of whom?” asked Two.
I was still blaming her for saying I was a skank, and I decided I wasn’t speaking to her. “So, what’s the program?” I asked One.
“We wait to hear from Niall, who will respond to Breandan’s demands,” he said. “Breandan will seal us all in Faery, and we will never have to deal with your like again.”
At the moment, that seemed like an excellent plan, and I was temporarily on Breandan’s side.
“So Niall doesn’t want that to happen?” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.
“No, he wants to visit the likes of you. While Fintan hid the knowledge of you and your brother, Niall behaved himself, but when we removed Fintan—”
“Bit by bit!” said Two, and laughed.
“He was able to find enough information to track you down. And so did we. We found your brother’s house one day, and there was a gift outside in a truck. We decided to have some fun with it. We followed your scent to where you work, and we left your brother’s wife and the abomination outside for all to see. Now we’re going to have some fun with you. Breandan has said we can do with you what we will, short of death.”
Maybe my slow wits were speeding up a little. I understood that they were enforcers for my great-grandfather’s enemy, and that they had killed my grandfather Fintan and crucified poor Crystal.
“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” I said, quite desperately. “Hurt me, that is. Because after all, what if this Brendan doesn’t get what he wants? What if Niall wins?”
“In the first place, that’s not likely,” Thing Two said. She smiled. “We plan to win, and we plan to have a lot of fun. Especially if Niall wants to see you; surely he’ll demand proof you’re alive before he surrenders. We have to leave you breathing . . . but the more terrible your plight, the faster the war will be over.” She had a mouthful of the longest, sharpest teeth I’d ever seen. Some of them were capped with gleaming silver points. It was a ghastly touch.
At the sight of those teeth, those awful shining teeth, I threw off the remnants of the magic they’d laid on me, which was a great pity.
I was completely and utterly lucid for the next hour, which was the longest of my life.
I found it bewildering—and utterly shocking—that I could feel such pain and not die of it.
I would have been glad to die.
I know a lot about humans, since I see into their minds every day, but I didn’t know a lot about fairy culture. I had to believe Thing One and Thing Two were in a league of their own. I couldn’t imagine that my great-grandfather would have laughed when I began to bleed. And I had to hope that he wouldn’t enjoy cutting a human with a knife, either, as One and Two did.
I’d read books where a person being tortured went “somewhere else” during the ordeal. I did my best to find somewhere else to go mentally, but I remained right there in the room. I focused on the strong faces of the farming family in the photograph, and I wished it wasn’t so dusty so I could see them clearly. I wished the picture was straight. I just knew that good family would have been horrifed at what they were witnessing now.
At moments when the fairy duo wasn’t hurting me, it was very hard to believe I was awake and that this was really happening. I kept hoping I was suffering through a particularly horrible dream, and I would wake from it . . . sooner, rather than later. I’d known from a very early age that there was cruelty in the world—believe me, I’d learned that—but I was still shocked that the Things were enjoying themselves . I had no personhood to them—no identity. They were completely indifferent to the plans I’d had for my life, the pleasures I’d hoped to enjoy. I might have been a stray puppy or a frog they’d caught by the creek.
I myself would have thought doing these things to a puppy or a frog was horrible.
“Isn’t this the daughter of the ones we killed?” One asked Two while I was screaming.
“Yes. They tried to drive through water during a flood,” Two said in a tone of happy reminiscence. “Water! When the man had sky blood! They thought the iron can would protect them.”
“The water spirits were glad to pull them under,” One said.
My parents hadn’t died in an accident. They’d been murdered. Even through my pain, I registered that, though at the moment it was beyond me to form a feeling about the knowledge.
I tried to talk to Eric in my head in the hope he could find me through our bond. I thought of the only other adult telepath I knew, Barry, and I sent him messages—though I knew damn good and well that we were too far away from each other to transmit our thoughts. To my everlasting shame, toward the end of that hour I even considered trying to contact my little cousin Hunter. I knew, though, that not only was Hunter too young to understand, but also . . . I really couldn’t do that to a child.
I gave up hope, and I waited for death.
While they were having sex, I thought of Sam and how happy it would make me if I could see him now. I wanted to say the name of someone who loved me, but my throat was too hoarse from screaming.
I thought about vengeance. I wanted One and Two to die with a craving that burned through my gut. I hoped someone, any one of my supe friends—Claude and Claudine, Niall, Alcide, Bill, Quinn, Tray, Pam, Eric, Calvin, Jason—would tear these two limb from limb. Perhaps the other fairies could take the same length of time with them that they were taking with me.
One and Two had said that Breandan wanted them to spare me, but it didn’t take a telepath to realize they weren’t going to be capable of holding off. They were going to get carried away with their fun, as they had with Fintan and Crystal, and there would be no repairing me.
I became sure I was going to die.
I began to hallucinate. I thought I saw Bill, which made no sense at all. He was in my backyard probably, wondering where I was. He was back in the world that made sense . But I could swear I saw him creeping up behind the creatures, who were enjoying working with a pair of razor blades. He had his finger over his mouth as if he were telling me to keep silent. Since he wasn’t there, and my throat was too raw to speak anyway (I couldn’t even produce a decent scream anymore), that was easy. There was a black shadow following him, a shadow topped with a pale flame.
Two jabbed me with a sharp knife she’d just pulled from her boot, a knife that shone like her teeth. They both leaned close to me to drink in my reaction. I could only make a raspy noise. My face was crusted with tears and blood.
“Little froggy croaking,” One said.
“Listen to her. Croak, froggy. Croak for us.”
I opened my eyes and looked into hers, meeting them squarely for the first time in many long minutes. I swallowed and summoned up all my remaining strength.
“You’re going to die,” I said with absolute certainty. But I’d said it before, and they didn’t pay any more attention now than they had the first time.
I made my lips move up in a smile.
The male had just enough time to look startled before something gleaming flashed between his head and his shoulders. Then, to my intense pleasure, he was in two pieces and I was covered in a wash of fresh red blood. It ran over me, drenching the blood already dried on my skin. But my eyes were clear, so I could see a white hand gripped Two’s neck, lifting her, spinning her around, and her shock was intensely gratifying as teeth almost as sharp as her own ripped into her long neck.
Chapter 18
I wasn’t in a hospital.
But I was in a bed, not my own. And I was a little cleaner than I had been, and bandaged, and in a lot of pain; in fact, a dreadful amount of pain. The part where I was cleaner and bandaged—oh, a wholly desirable state. The other part, the pain—well, that was expected, understandable, and finite. At least no one was trying to hurt me any worse than I’d already been hurt. So I decided I was excellent.
I had a few holes in my memory. I couldn’t remember what had happened between being in the decrepit shack and being here; I could recall flashes of action, the sound of voices, but I had no coherent narrative to connect them. I remembered One’s head becoming detached, and I knew someone had bitten Two. I hoped she was as dead as One. But I wasn’t sure. Had I really seen Bill? What about the shadow behind him?
I heard a click, click, click . I turned my head very slightly. Claudine, my fairy godmother, was sitting by the bed, knitting.
The sight of Claudine knitting was just as surrealistic as the sight of Bill appearing in the cave. I decided to go back to sleep—a cowardly retreat, but I thought I was entitled.
“She’s going to be all right,” Dr. Ludwig said. Her head came up past the side of my bed, which told me for sure that I wasn’t in a modern hospital bed.
Dr. Ludwig takes care of the cases who can’t go to the regular human hospital because the staff would flee screaming at the sight of them or the lab wouldn’t be able to analyze their blood. I could see Dr. Ludwig’s coarse brown hair as she walked around the bed to the door. Dr. Ludwig had a deep voice. I suspected she was a hobbit—not really, but she sure did look like one. Though she wore shoes, right? I spent some moments trying to remember if I’d ever caught a glimpse of Dr. Ludwig’s feet.
“Sookie,” she said, her eyes appearing at my elbow. “Is the medicine working?”
I didn’t know if this was a second visit of hers, or if I’d blanked out for a few moments. “I’m not hurting as much,” I said, and my voice was very rough and whispery. “I’m starting to feel a little numb. That’s just . . . excellent.”
She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Considering you’re human, you’re very lucky.”
Funny. I felt better than when I’d been in the shack, but I couldn’t say I felt lucky. I tried to scrape together some appreciation of my good fortune. There wasn’t any there to gather up. I was all out. My emotions were as crippled as my body.
“No,” I said. I tried to shake my head, but even the pain-killers couldn’t disguise the fact that my neck was too sore to twist. They’d choked me repeatedly.
“You’re not dead,” Dr. Ludwig pointed out.
But I’d come pretty damn close; I’d sort of stepped over the line. There’d been an optimum rescue time. If I’d been liberated before that time, I would have laughed all the way to the secret supernatural clinic, or wherever I was. But I’d looked at death too closely—close enough to see all the pores in Death’s face—and I’d suffered too much. I wouldn’t bounce back this time.
My emotional and physical state had been sliced and gouged and pinched and bitten to a rough, raw surface. I didn’t know if I could spackle myself back into my pre-kidnap smoothness. I said this, in much simpler words, to Dr. Ludwig.
“They’re dead, if that helps,” she said.
Yes indeedy, that helped quite a bit. I’d been hoping I hadn’t imagined that part; I’d been a little afraid their deaths had been a delightful fantasy.
“Your great-grandfather beheaded Lochlan,” she said. So he’d been One. “And the vampire Bill Compton tore the throat out of Lochlan’s sister, Neave.” She’d been Two.
“Where’s Niall now?” I said.
“Waging war,” she said grimly. “There’s no more negotiation, no more jockeying for advantage. There’s only killing now.”
“Bill?”
“He was badly hurt,” the little doctor said. “She got him with her blade before she bled to death. And she bit him back. There was silver in her knife and silver caps on her teeth. It’s in his system.”
“He’ll get better,” I said.
She shrugged.
I thought my heart was going to plunge down out of my chest, through the bed. I could not look this misery in the face.
I struggled to think of something besides Bill. “And Tray? He’s here?”
She regarded me silently for a moment. “Yes,” she said finally.
“I need to see him. And Bill.”
“No. You can’t move. Bill’s in his daytime sleep for now. Eric is coming tonight, actually in a couple of hours, and he’ll bring at least one other vampire with him. That’ll help. The Were is too badly wounded for you to disturb.”
I didn’t absorb that. My mind was racing ahead. It was a mighty slow race, but I was thinking a little more clearly. “Has someone told Sam, do you know?” How long had I been out? How much work had I missed?
Dr. Ludwig shrugged. “I don’t know. I imagine so. He seems to hear everything.”
“Good.” I tried to shift positions, gasped. “I’m going to have to get up to use the bathroom,” I warned her.
“Claudine,” Dr. Ludwig said, and my cousin put away her knitting and rose from the rocking chair. For the first time, I registered that my beautiful fairy godmother looked like someone had tried to push her through a wood chipper. Her arms were bare and covered with scratches, scrapes, and cuts. Her face was a mess. She smiled at me, but it was painful.
When she lifted me in her arms, I could feel her effort. Normally Claudine could heft a large calf without any trouble if she chose to.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can walk. I’m sure.”
“Don’t think of it,” Claudine said. “See, we’re already there.”
When our mission was accomplished, she scooped me up and took me back to bed.
“What happened to you?” I asked her. Dr. Ludwig had departed without another word.
“I got ambushed,” she said in her sweet voice. “Some stupid brownies and one fairy. Lee, his name was.”
“I guess they were allied with this Breandan?”
She nodded, fished out her bundle of knitting. The item she was working on appeared to be a tiny sweater. I wondered if it was for an elf. “They were,” she said. “They are bits of bone and flesh now.” She sounded quite pleased.
Claudine would never become an angel at this rate. I wasn’t quite sure how the progression worked, but reducing other beings to their component parts was probably not the route of choice. “Good,” I said. The more of Breandan’s followers who met their match, the better. “Have you seen Bill?”
“No,” Claudine said, clearly not interested.
“Where is Claude?” I asked. “Is he safe?”
“He’s with Grandfather,” she said, and for the first time, she looked worried. “They’re trying to find Breandan. Grandfather figures that if he takes out the source, Breandan’s followers will have no choice but to stop the war and pledge an oath to him.”
“Oh,” I said. “And you didn’t go, because . . . ?”
“I’m guarding you,” she said simply. “And lest you think I chose the path of least danger, I’m sure Breandan is trying to find this place. He must be very angry. He’s had to enter the human world, which he hates so much, now that his pet killers are dead. He loved Neave and Lochlan. They were with him for centuries, and both his lovers.”
“Yuck,” I said from the heart, or maybe from the pit of my stomach. “Oh, yuck .” I couldn’t even think about what kind of “love” they would make. What I’d seen hadn’t looked like love. “And I would never accuse you of taking the path of least danger,” I said after I’d gotten over being nauseated. “This whole world is dangerous.” Claudine gave me a sharp look. “What kind of name is Breandan?” I asked after a moment of watching her knitting needles flash with great speed and panache. I wasn’t sure how the fuzzy green sweater would turn out, but the effect was good.
“Irish,” she said. “All the oldest ones in this part of the world are Irish. Claude and I used to have Irish names. It seemed stupid to me. Why shouldn’t we please ourselves? No one can spell those names or pronounce them correctly. My former name sounds like a cat coughing up a fur ball.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes.
“Who’s the little sweater for? Are you going to have a bundle of joy?” I asked in my wheezy, whispery new voice. I was trying to sound teasing, but instead, I just sounded creepy.
“Yes,” she said, raising her head to look at me. Her eyes were glowing. “I’m going to have a baby. A pure fairy child.”
I was startled, but I tried to cover that with the biggest smile I could paste on my face. “Oh. That’s great!” I said. I wondered if it would be tacky to inquire as to the identity of the father. Probably.
“Yes,” she said seriously. “It’s wonderful. We’re not really a very fertile race, and the huge amount of iron in the world has reduced our birthrate. Our numbers decline every century. I am very lucky. It’s one of the reasons I never take humans to bed, though from time to time I would love to; they are so delicious, some of them. But I’d hate to waste a fertile cycle on a human.”
I’d always assumed it was her desired ascension to angel status that had kept Claudine from bedding any of her numerous admirers. “So, the dad’s a fairy,” I said, kind of pussyfooting around the topic of the paternal identity. “Did you date for a while?”
Claudine laughed. “I knew it was my fertile time. I knew he was a fertile male; we were not too closely related. We found each other desirable.”
“Will he help you raise the baby?”
“Oh, yes, he’ll be there to guard her during her early years.”
“Can I meet him?” I asked. I was really delighted at Claudine’s happiness, in an oddly remote way.
“Of course—if we win this war and passage between the worlds is still possible. He stays mostly in Faery,” Claudine said. “He is not much for human companionship.” She said this in much the same way she would say he was allergic to cats. “If Breandan has his way, Faery will be sealed off, and all we have built in this world will be gone. The wonderful things that humans have invented that we can use, the money we made to fund those inventions . . . that’ll all be gone. It’s so intoxicating being with humans. They give off so much energy, so much delicious emotion. They’re simply . . . fun.”
This new topic was a fine distraction, but my throat hurt, and when I couldn’t respond, Claudine lost interest in talking. Though she returned to her knitting, I was alarmed to
notice that after a few minutes she became increasingly tense and alert. I heard noises in the hall, as if people were moving around the building in a hurry. Claudine got up and went over to the room’s narrow door to look out. After the third time she did this, she shut the door and she locked it. I asked her what she was expecting.
“Trouble,” she said. “And Eric.”
One and the same, I thought. “Are there other patients here? Is this, like, a hospital?”
“Yes,” she said. “But Ludwig and her aide are evacuating the patients who can walk.”
I’d assumed I’d had as much fear as I could handle, but my exhausted emotions began to revive as I absorbed some of her tension.
About thirty minutes later, she raised her head and I could tell she was listening. “Eric is coming,” she said. “I’ll have to leave you with him. I can’t cover my scent like Grandfather can.” She rose and unlocked the door. She swung it open.
Eric came in very quietly; one moment I was looking at the door, and the next minute, he filled it. Claudine gathered up her paraphernalia and left the room, keeping as far from Eric as the room permitted. His nostrils flared at the delicious scent of fairy. Then she was gone, and Eric was by the bed, looking down at me. I didn’t feel happy or content, so I knew that even the bond was exhausted, at least temporarily. My face hurt so much when I changed expressions that I knew it was covered with bruises and cuts. The vision in my left eye was awfully blurry. I didn’t need a mirror to tell me how terrible I looked. At the moment, I simply couldn’t care.
Eric tried hard to keep the rage from his face, but it didn’t work.
“Fucking fairies ,” he said, and his lip curled in a snarl.
I couldn’t remember hearing Eric curse before.
“Dead now,” I whispered, trying to keep my words to a minimum.
“Yes. A fast death was too good for them.”
I nodded (as much as I could) in wholehearted agreement. In fact, it would almost be worth bringing them back to life just to kill them again more slowly.
“I’m going to look at your wounds,” Eric said. He didn’t want to startle me.
“Okay,” I whispered, but I knew the sight would be pretty gross. What I’d seen when I pulled up my gown in the bathroom had looked so awful I hadn’t had any desire to examine myself further.
With a clinical neatness, Eric folded down the sheets and the blanket. I was wearing a classic hospital gown—you’d think a hospital for supes would come up with something more exotic—and of course, it was scooted up above my knees. There were bite marks all over my legs—deep bite marks. Some of the flesh was missing. Looking at my legs made me think of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.
Ludwig had bandaged the worst ones, and I was sure there were stitches under the white gauze. Eric stood absolutely still for a long moment. “Pull up the gown,” he said, but when he realized that my hands and arms were too weak to cooperate, he did it.
They’d enjoyed the soft spots the most, so this was really unpleasant, actually disgusting. I couldn’t look after one quick glance. I kept my eyes shut, like a child who’s wandered into a horror film. No wonder the pain was so bad. I would never be the same person again, physically or mentally.
After a long time, Eric covered me and said, “I’ll be back in a minute,” and I heard him leave the room. He was back quickly with a couple of bottles of TrueBlood. He put them on the floor by the bed.
“Move over,” he said, and I glanced up at him, confused. “Move over,” he said again with impatience. Then he realized I couldn’t, and he put an arm behind my back and another under my knees and shifted me easily to the other side of the bed. Fortunately, it was much larger than a real hospital bed, and I didn’t have to turn on my side to make room for him.
Eric said, “I’m going to feed you.”
“What?”
“I’m going to give you blood. You’ll take weeks to heal otherwise. We don’t have that kind of time.”
He sounded so briskly matter-of-fact that I felt my shoulders finally relax. I hadn’t realized how tightly wound I’d been. Eric bit into his wrist and put it in front of my mouth. “Here,” he said, as if there was no question I’d take it.
He slid his free arm under my neck to raise my head. This was not going to be fun or erotic, like a nip during sex. And for a moment I wondered at my own unquestioning acquiescence. But he’d said we didn’t have time. On one level I knew what that meant, but on another I was too weak to do more than consider the time factor as a fleeting and nearly irrelevant fact.
I opened my mouth and swallowed. I was in so much pain and I was so appalled by the damage done to my body that I didn’t think more than once about the wisdom of what I was doing. I knew how quick the effects of ingesting vampire blood would be. His wrist healed once, and he reopened it.
“Are you sure you should do this?” I asked as he bit himself for the second time. My throat rippled with pain, and I regretted trying a whole sentence.
“Yes,” he said. “I know how much is too much. And I fed well before I came here. You need to be able to move.” He was behaving in such a practical way that I began to feel a little better. I couldn’t have stood pity.
“Move?” The idea filled me with anxiety.
“Yes. At any moment, Breandan’s followers may—will—find this place. They’ll be tracking you by scent now. You smell of the fairies who hurt you, and they know now Niall loves you enough to kill his own kind for you. Hunting you down would make them very, very happy.”
At the thought of any more trouble, I stopped drinking and began crying. Eric’s hand stroked my face gently, but he said, “Stop that now. You must be strong. I’m very proud of you, you hear me?”
“Why?” I put my mouth on his wrist and drank again.
“You are still together; you are still a person. Lochlan and Neave have left vampires and fairies in rags—literally, rags . . . but you survived and your personality and soul are intact.”
“I got rescued.” I took a deep breath and bent back to his wrist.
“You would have survived much more.” Eric leaned over to get the bottle of TrueBlood, and he drank it down quickly.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to.” I took another deep breath, aware that my throat was aching still but not as sharply. “I hardly wanted to live after . . .”
He kissed my forehead. “But you did live. And they died. And you are mine, and you will be mine. They will not get you.”
“You really think they’re coming?”
“Yes. Breandan’s remaining forces will find this place sooner or later, if not Breandan himself. He has nothing to lose, and his pride to retain. I’m afraid they’ll find us shortly. Ludwig has removed almost all the other patients.” He turned a little, as if he were listening. “Yes, most of them are gone.”
“Who else is here?”
“Bill is in the next room. He’s been getting blood from Clancy.”
“Were you not going to give him any?”
“If you were irreparable . . . no, I would have let him rot.”
“Why?” I asked. “He actually came to rescue me. Why get mad at him? Where were you?” Rage bubbled up my throat.
Eric flinched almost a half inch, a big reaction from a vampire his age. He looked away. I could not believe I was saying these things.
“It’s not like you were obliged to come find me,” I said, “but I hoped the whole time—I hoped you would come, I prayed you would come, I thought over and over you might hear me. . . .”
“You’re killing me,” he said. “You’re killing me.” He shuddered beside me, as if he could scarcely endure my words. “I’ll explain,” he said in a muted voice. “I will. You will understand. But now, we don’t have enough time. Are you healing yet?”
I thought about it. I didn’t feel as miserable as I had before the blood. The holes in my flesh were itching almost intolerably, which meant they were healing. “I’m beginning to feel like I’ll be better sometime,” I said carefully. “Oh, is Tray Dawson still here?”
He looked at me with a very serious expression. “Yes; he can’t be moved.”
“Why not? Why didn’t Dr. Ludwig take him?”
“He would not survive being moved.”
“No,” I said, shocked even after all that I’d been through.
“Bill told me about the vampire blood he ingested. They hoped he’d go crazy enough to hurt you, but his leaving you alone was good enough. Lochlan and Neave were delayed; a pair of Niall’s warriors found them, attacked them, and they had to fight. Afterward, they decided to stake out your house. They wanted to be sure Dawson wouldn’t come to help you. Bill called me to tell me that you and he went to Dawson’s house. By that time, they already had Dawson. They had fun with him before they had . . . before they caught you.”
“Dawson’s that hurt? I thought the effects of the bad vamp blood would wear off by now.” I couldn’t imagine the big man, the toughest Were I knew, being defeated.
“The vampire blood they used was just a vehicle for the poison. They’d never tried it on a Were, I suppose, because it took a long time to act. And then they practiced their arts on him. Can you rise?”
I tried to gather my muscles to make the effort. “Maybe not yet.”
“I’ll carry you.”
“Where?”
“Bill wants to talk to you. You have to be brave.”
“My purse,” I said. “I need something from it.”
Wordlessly Eric put the soft cloth purse, now spoiled and stained, on the bed beside me. With great concentration, I was able to open it and slide my hand inside. Eric raised his eyebrows when he saw what I’d pulled out of the purse, but he heard something outside that made him looked alarmed. Eric was up and sliding his arms under me, and then he straightened as easily as if I’d been a plate of spaghetti. At the door he paused, and I managed to turn the knob for him. He used his foot to push it open, and out we went into the corridor. I was able to see that we were in an old building, some kind of small business that had been converted to its present purpose. There were doors up and down the hall, and there was a glass-enclosed control room of some kind about midway down. Through the glass on its opposite side, I could see a gloomy warehouse. There were a few lights on in it, just enough to disclose that it was empty except for some discards, like dilapidated shelving and machine parts.
We turned right to enter the room at the end of the hall. Again, I performed the honors with the knob, and this time it wasn’t quite as agonizing to grip the knob and turn it.
There were two beds inside this room.
Bill was in the right-hand bed, and Clancy was sitting in a plastic chair pulled up right against the side. He was feeding Bill the same way Eric had fed me. Bill’s skin was gray. His cheeks had caved in. He looked like death.
Tray Dawson was in the next bed. If Bill looked like he was dying, Tray looked like he was already dead. His face was bruised blue. One of his ears had been bitten off. His eyes were swollen shut. There was crusted blood everywhere. And this was just what I could see of his face. His arms were lying on top of the sheet, and they were both splinted.
Eric laid me down beside Bill. Bill’s eyes opened, and at least they were the same: dark brown, fathomless. He stopped drinking from Clancy, but he didn’t move or look better.
“The silver is in his system,” Clancy said quietly. “Its poison has traveled to every part of his body. He’ll need more and more blood to drive it out.”
I wanted to say, “Will he get better?” But I couldn’t, not with Bill lying there. Clancy rose from beside the bed, and he and Eric began having a whispered conversation—a very unpleasant one, if Eric’s expression was any indication.
Bill said, “How are you, Sookie? Will you heal?” His voice faltered.
“Exactly what I want to ask you,” I said. Neither of us had the strength or energy to hedge our conversation.
“You will live,” he said, satisfied. “I can smell that Eric has given you blood. You would have healed anyway, but that will help the scarring. I’m sorry I didn’t get there faster.”
“You saved my life.”
“I saw them take you,” he said.
“What?”
“I saw them take you.”
“You . . .” I wanted to say, “You didn’t stop them?” But that seemed too horrendously cruel.
“I knew I couldn’t defeat the two of them together,” he said simply. “If I’d tried to take them on and they’d killed me, you would have been as good as dead. I know very little about fairies, but even I had heard of Neave and her brother.” These few sentences seemed to exhaust Bill. He tried to turn his head on the pillow so he could look directly into my face, but he managed to turn only an inch. His dark hair looked lank and lusterless, and his skin no longer had the shine that had seemed so beautiful to me when I’d seen it the first time.
“So you called Niall?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, his lips barely moving. “Or at least, I called Eric, told him what I’d seen, told him to call Niall.”
“Where was the old house?” I asked.
“North of here, in Arkansas,” he said. “It took a while to track you. If they’d gotten in a car . . . but they moved through the fae world, and with my sense of smell and Niall’s knowledge of fae magic, we were able to find you. Finally. At least your life was saved. I think it was too late for the Were.”
I hadn’t known Tray was in the shack. Not that the knowledge would have made any difference, but maybe I would have felt a little less lonely.
Of course, that was probably why the two fairies hadn’t let me see him. I was willing to bet there wasn’t much about the psychology of torture that Neave and Lochlan hadn’t known.
“Are you sure he’s . . .”
“Sweetheart, look at him.”
“I haven’t passed yet,” Tray mumbled.
I tried to get up, to go over to him. That was still a little out of my reach, but I turned on my side to face him. The beds were so close together that I could hear him easily. I think he could sort of see where I was.
“Tray,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”
He shook his head wordlessly. “My fault. I should have known . . . the woman in the woods . . . wasn’t right.”
“You did your best. If you had resisted her, you would have been killed.”
“Dying now,” he said. He made himself try to open his eyes. He almost managed to look right at me. “My own damn fault,” he said.
I couldn’t stop crying. He seemed to fall unconscious. I slowly rolled over to face Bill. His color was a little better.
“I would not, for anything, have had them hurt you,” he said. “Her dagger was silver, and she had silver caps on her teeth. . . . I managed to rip her throat out, but she didn’t die fast enough. . . . She fought to the end.”
“Clancy’s given you blood,” I said. “You’ll get better.”
“Maybe,” he said, and his voice was as cool and calm as it had always been. “I’m feeling some strength now. It will get me through the fight. That will be time enough.”
I was shocked almost beyond speech. Vampires died only from staking, decapitation, or from a rare severe case of Sino-AIDS. Silver poisoning?
“Bill,” I said urgently, thinking of so many things I wanted to say to him. He’d closed his eyes, but now he opened them to look at me.
“They’re coming,” Eric said, and all those words died in my throat.
“Breandan’s people?” I said.
“Yes,” Clancy said briefly. “They’ve found your scent.” He was scornful even now, as if I’d been weak in leaving a scent to track.
Eric drew a long, long knife from a sheath on his thigh. “Iron,” he said, smiling.
And Bill smiled, too, and it wasn’t a pleasant smile. “Kill as many as you can,” he said in a stronger voice. “Clancy, help me up.”
“No,” I said.
“Sweetheart,” Bill said, very formally, “I have always loved you, and I will be proud to die in your service. When I’m gone, say a prayer for me in a real church.”
Clancy bent to help Bill out of the bed, giving me a very unfriendly look while he did so. Bill swayed on his feet. He was as weak as a human. He threw off the hospital gown to stand there clad only in drawstring pajama pants.
I didn’t want to die in a hospital gown, either.
“Eric, have you a knife to spare for me?” Bill asked, and without turning from the door, Eric passed Bill a shorter version of his own knife, which was halfway to being a sword, according to me. Clancy was also armed.
No one said a word about trying to shift Tray. When I glanced over at him, I thought he might have already died.
Eric’s cell phone rang, which made me jump a couple of inches. He answered it with a curt, “Yes?” He listened and then clicked it shut. I almost laughed, the idea of the supes communicating by cell phones seemed so funny. But when I looked at Bill, gray in the face, leaning against the wall, I didn’t think anything in the world would ever be funny again.
“Niall and his fae are on the way,” Eric told us, his voice as calm and steady as if he were reading us a story about the stock market. “Breandan’s blocked all the other portals to the fae land. There is only one opening now. Whether they’ll come in time, I don’t know.”
“If I live through this,” Clancy said, “I’ll ask you to release me from my vow, Eric, and I’ll seek another master. I find the idea of dying in the defense of a human woman to be disgusting, no matter what her connection to you is.”
“If you die,” Eric said, “you’ll die because I, your sheriff, ordered you into battle. The reason is not pertinent.”
Clancy nodded. “Yes, my lord.”
“But I will release you, if you should live.”
“Thank you, Eric.”
Geez Louise. I hoped they were happy now they’d gotten that settled.
Bill was swaying on his feet, but neither Eric nor Clancy regarded him with anything but approval. I couldn’t hear what they were hearing, but the tension in the room mounted almost unbearably as our enemies came closer.
As I watched Bill, waiting with apparent calm for death to come to him, I had a flash of him as I’d known him: the first vampire I’d ever met, the first man I’d ever gone to bed with, the first suitor I’d ever loved. Everything that followed had tainted those memories, but for one moment I saw him clearly, and I loved him again.
Then the door splintered, and I saw the gleam of an ax blade, and I heard high-pitched shouts of encouragement from the other fairies to the ax wielder.
I resolved to get up myself, because I’d rather perish on my feet than in a bed. I had at least that much courage left in me. Maybe, since I’d had Eric’s blood, I was feeling the heat of his battle rage. Nothing got Eric going like the prospect of a good fight. I struggled to my feet. I found I could walk, at least a little bit. There were some wooden crutches leaning against the wall. I couldn’t remember ever seeing wooden crutches, but none of the equipment at this hospital was standard human-hospital issue.
I took a crutch by the bottom, hefted it a little to see if I could swing it. The answer was “Probably not.” There was a good chance I’d fall over when I did, but active was better than passive. In the meantime, I had the weapons in my hand that I’d retrieved from my purse, and at least the crutch would hold me up.
All this happened quicker than I can tell you about it. Then the door was splintering, and the fairies were yanking hanging bits of wood away. Finally the gap was large enough to admit one, a tall, thin male with gossamer hair, his green eyes glowing with the joy of the fight. He struck at Eric with a sword, and Eric parried and managed to slash his opponent’s abdomen. The fairy shrieked and doubled over, and Clancy’s blow caught him on the back of the neck and severed his head.
I pressed my back against the wall and tucked the crutch under one arm. I gripped my weapons, one in each hand. Bill and I were side by side, and then he slowly and deliberately stepped in front of me. Bill threw his knife at the next fairy through the door, and the point went right into the fairy’s throat. Bill reached back and took my grandmother’s trowel.
The door was almost demolished by now, and the assaulting fairies seemed to move back. Another male stepped in through the splinters and over the body of the first fae, and I knew this must be Breandan. His reddish hair was pulled back in a braid and his sword slung a spray of blood from its blade as he raised it to swing at Eric.
Eric was the taller, but Breandan had a longer sword. Breandan was already wounded, for his shirt was drenched with blood on one side. I saw something bright, a knitting needle, protruding from Breandan’s shoulder, and I was sure the blood on his sword was Claudine’s. A rage went through me, and that held me up when I would have collapsed.
Breandan leaped sideways, despite Eric’s attempts to keep him engaged, and a very tall female warrior jumped into the spot Breandan had occupied and swung a mace—a mace,
for God’s sake—at Eric. Eric ducked, and the mace continued its path and hit Clancy in the side of the head. Instantly his red hair was even redder, and he went down like a bag of sand. Breandan leaped over Clancy to face Bill, his sword slicing off Clancy’s head as he cleared the body. Breandan’s grin grew brighter. “You’re the one,” he said. “The one who killed Neave.”
“I took out her throat,” Bill said, and his voice seemed as strong as it ever had been. But he swayed on his feet.
“I see she’s killed you, too,” Breandan said, and smiled, his guard relaxing slightly. “I’ll only be the one to make you realize it.”
Behind him, forgotten on the corner bed, Tray Dawson made a superhuman effort and gripped the fairy’s shirt. With a negligent gesture, Breandan twisted slightly and brought the gleaming sword down on the defenseless Were, and when he pulled the sword back, it was freshly coated with red. But in the moment it took Breandan to do this, Bill thrust my trowel under Breandan’s raised arm. When Breandan turned back, his expression was startled. He looked down at the hilt as if he couldn’t imagine how it came to be sticking out of his side, and then blood ran from the corner of his mouth.
Bill began to fall.
Everything stood still for a moment, but only in my mind. The space in front of me was clear, and the woman abandoned her fight with Eric and leaped on top of the body of her prince. She screamed, long and loud, and since Bill was falling she aimed the thrust of her sword at me.
I squirted her with the lemon juice in my water pistol.
She screamed again, but this time in pain. The juice had fallen on her in a spray, across her chest and upper arms, and where the lemon had touched her smoke began to rise from her skin. A drop had hit her eyelid, I realized, because she used her free hand to rub at the burning eye. And while she did that, Eric swung his long knife and severed her arm, and then he stabbed her.
Then Niall filled the doorway of the room, and my eyes hurt to see him. He wasn’t wearing the black suit he wore when he met me in the human world but a sort of long tunic and loose pants tucked into boots. Everything about him was white, and he shone . . . except where he was splashed with blood.
Then there was a long silence. There was no one left to kill.
I slid to the floor, my legs as weak as Jell-O. I found myself slumped against the wall by Bill. I couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. I was too shocked to weep and too horrified to scream. Some of my cuts had reopened, and the scent of the blood and the reek of fairy lured Eric, pumped full of the excitement of battle. Before Niall could reach me, Eric was on his knees beside me, licking the blood from a slice on my cheek. I didn’t mind; he’d given me his. He was recycling.
“Off her, vampire,” said my great-grandfather in a very soft voice.
Eric raised his head, his eyes shut with pleasure, and shuddered all over. But then he collapsed beside me. He stared at Clancy’s body. All the exultation drained from his face and a red tear made its way down his cheek.
“Is Bill alive?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. He looked down at his arm. He’d been wounded, too: a bad slash on his left forearm. I hadn’t even seen it happen. Through the torn sleeve, I watched the cut begin to heal.
My great-grandfather squatted in front of me.
“Niall,” I said, my lips and mouth working with great effort. “Niall, I didn’t think you would come in time.”
Truthfully, I was so stunned I hardly knew what I was saying or even which crisis I was referring to. For the first time, keeping on living seemed so difficult I wasn’t sure it was worth the trouble.
My great-grandfather took me in his arms. “You are safe now,” he said. “I am the only living prince. No one can take that away from me. Almost all of my enemies are dead.”
“Look around,” I said, though I lay my head on his shoulder. “Niall, look at all that’s been taken.” Tray Dawson’s blood trickled slowly down the soaked sheet to patter on the floor. Bill was crumpled against my right thigh. As my great-grandfather held me close and stroked my hair, I looked past his arm at Bill. He’d lived for so many years, survived by hook or by crook. He’d been ready to die for me. There is no female—human, fairy, vamp, Were—who wouldn’t be affected by that. I thought of the nights we’d spent together, the times we’d talked lying together in bed—and I cried, though I felt almost too tired to produce tears.
My great-grandfather sat back on his heels and looked at me. “You need to go home,” he said.
“Claudine?”
“She’s in the Summerland.”
I couldn’t stand any more bad news.
“Fairy, I leave cleaning this place to you,” Eric said. “Your great-granddaughter is my woman, mine and mine alone. I’ll take her to her home.”
Niall glared at Eric. “Not all the bodies are fae,” Niall said with a pointed glance at Clancy. “And what must we do with that one?” He jerked his head toward Tray.
“That one needs to go back into his house,” I said. “He has to be given a proper burial. He can’t just vanish.” I had no idea what Tray would have wanted, but I couldn’t let the fairies shovel his body into a pit somewhere. He deserved far better than that. And there was Amelia to tell. Oh, God. I tried to pull my legs up preparatory to standing, but my stitches yanked and pain shot through me.“Ahh,” I said, and clenched my teeth.
I stared down at the floor while I got my breath back. And while I was staring, one of Bill’s fingers twitched.
“He’s alive, Eric,” I said, and though it hurt like the dickens, I could smile about that. “Bill’s alive.”
“That’s good,” Eric said, though he sounded too calm. He flipped open his cell phone and speed-dialed someone. “Pam,” he said. “Pam, Sookie lives. Yes, and Bill, too. Not Clancy. Bring the van.”
Though I lost a little time somewhere in there, eventually Pam arrived with a huge van. It had a mattress in the back, and Bill and I were loaded in by Pam and Maxwell Lee, a black businessman who just happened to be a vampire. At least, that was the impression Maxwell always gave. Even on this night of violence and conflict, Maxwell looked neat and unruffled. Though he was taller than Pam, they got us into the back with gentleness and grace, and I appreciated it very much. Pam even forewent making any jokes, which was a welcome change.
As we drove back to Bon Temps, I could hear the vampires talking quietly about the end of the fairy war.
“It will be too bad if they leave this world,” Pam said. “I love them so much. They’re so hard to catch.”
Maxwell Lee said, “I never had a fairy.”
“Yum,” Pam said, and it was the most eloquent “yum” I’ve ever heard.
“Be quiet,” Eric said, and they both shut up.
Bill’s fingers found mine, gripped them.
“Clancy lives on in Bill,” Eric told the other two.
They received this news in a silence that seemed respectful to me.
“As you live on in Sookie,” Pam said very quietly.
My great-grandfather came to see me two days later. After she let him in, Amelia went upstairs to cry some more. She knew the truth, of course, though the rest of our community was shocked that someone had broken into Tray’s house and tortured him. Popular opinion said that his assailants must have believed Tray was a drug dealer, though there was absolutely no drug paraphernalia found in an intensive search of his house and shop. Tray’s ex-wife and his son were making the funeral arrangements, and Tray would be buried at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church. I was going to try to go to support Amelia. I had another day to get better, but today I was content to lie on my bed, dressed in a nightgown. Eric couldn’t give me any more blood to complete my healing. For one thing, in the past few days he’d already given me blood twice, to say nothing of the nips we’d exchanged during lovemaking, and he said we were dangerously close to some undefined limit. For another thing, Eric needed all his blood to heal himself, and he took some of Pam’s, too. So I itched and healed, and saw that the vampire blood had filled in the bitten-out flesh of my legs.
That made my explanation of my injuries (a car accident; I’d been hit by a stranger who’d driven away) just feasible if not too many people examined the wounds. Of course, Sam had known right away that wasn’t the truth. I had ended up telling him what had happened the first time he came to see me. The patrons of Merlotte’s were very
sympathetic, he reported when he came the second time. He had brought me daisies and a chicken basket from Dairy Queen. When he’d thought I wasn’t watching, Sam had looked at me with grim eyes.
After Niall pulled a chair close to the bed, he took my hand. Maybe the events of the past few days had made the fine wrinkles in his skin a fraction deeper. Maybe he looked a little sad. But my royal great-grandfather was still beautiful, still regal, still strange, and now that I knew what his race could do . . . he looked frightening.
“Did you know Lochlan and Neave killed my parents?” I asked.
Niall nodded after a perceptible pause. “I suspected,” he said. “When you told me your parents had drowned, I had to consider it possible. They all had an affinity to water, Breandan’s people.”
“I’m glad they’re dead,” I said.
“Yes, I am, too,” he said simply. “And most of Breandan’s followers are dead, as well. I spared two females, since we need them so much, and though one of them was the mother of Breandan’s child, I let her live.”
He seemed to want my praise for that. “What about the child?” I asked.
Niall shook his head, and the sheet of pale hair moved with the gesture.
He loved me, but he was from a world even more savage than mine.
As if he had heard my thoughts, Niall said, “I’m going to finish blocking the passage to our land.”
“But that’s what the war was over,” I said, bewildered. “That was what Breandan wanted.”
“I have come to think that he was right, though for the wrong reason. It isn’t the fae who need to be protected from the human world. It’s the humans who need to be protected from us.”
“What will that mean? What are the consequences?”
“Those of us who’ve been living among the humans will have to choose.”
“Like Claude.”
“Yes. He’ll have to cut his ties with our secret land, if he wants to live out here.”
“And the rest? The ones who live there already?”
“We won’t be coming out anymore.” His face was luminous with grief.
“I won’t get to see you?”
“No, dear heart. It’s better not.”
I tried to summon up a protest, to tell him that it wasnot better, it was awful, since I had so few relatives, that I would not talk to him again. But I just couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth. “What about Dermot?” I said instead.
“We can’t find him,” Niall said. “If he’s dead, he went to ash somewhere we haven’t discovered. If he’s here, he’s being very clever and very quiet. We’ll keep trying until the door closes.”
I hoped devoutly that Dermot was on the fairy side of that door.
At that moment, Jason came in.
My great-grandfather—our great-grandfather—leaped to his feet. But after a moment, he relaxed. “You must be Jason,” he said.
My brother stared at him blankly. Jason had not been himself since the death of Mel. The same edition of our local paper that had carried the story about the awful discovery of the body of Tray Dawson had carried another story about the disappearance of Mel Hart. There was wide conjecture that maybe the two events were connected somehow.
I didn’t know how the werepanthers had covered up the scene in back of Jason’s house, and I didn’t want to know. I didn’t know where Mel’s body was, either. Maybe it had been eaten. Maybe it was at the bottom of Jason’s pond. Maybe it lay in the woods somewhere.
The last was what I suspected. Jason and Calvin had told the police that Mel had said he was going hunting by himself, and Mel’s truck was found parked at a hunting preserve where he had a share. There were some bloodstains discovered in the back of the truck that made police suspect Mel might know something about Crystal Stackhouse’s awful death, and now Andy Bellefleur had been heard to say he wouldn’t be surprised if old Mel hadn’t killed himself out in the woods.
“Yeah, I’m Jason,” my brother said heavily. “You must be . . . my great-grandfather?”
Niall inclined his head. “I am. I’ve come to bid your sister good-bye.”
“But not me, huh? I’m not good enough.”
“You are too much like Dermot.”
“Well, crap.” Jason threw himself down on the foot of the bed. “Dermot didn’t seem too bad to me, Great-grandfather . Least, he came to warn me about Mel, let me know that Mel had killed my wife.”
“Yes,” Niall said remotely. “Dermot may have been partial to you because of the resemblance. I suppose you know that he helped to kill your parents?”
We both stared at Niall.
“Yes, the water fae who followed Breandan had pulled the truck into the stream, as I hear it, but only Dermot was able to touch the door and pull your parents out. Then the water nymphs held them underwater.”
I shuddered.
“Ask me, I’m glad you’re saying good-bye,” Jason said. “I’m glad you’re leaving. I hope you never come back, not a one of you.”
Pain flitted over Niall’s face. “I can’t dispute your feeling,” he said. “I only wanted to know my great-granddaughter. But I’ve brought Sookie nothing but grief.”
I opened my mouth to protest, and then I realized he was telling the truth. Just not all the truth.
“You brought me the reassurance that I had family who loved me,” I said, and Jason made a choking sound. “You sent Claudine to save my life, and she did, more than once. I’ll miss you, Niall.”
“The vampire is not a bad man, and he loves you,” Niall said. He rose. “Good-bye.” He bent and kissed my cheek. There was power in his touch, and I suddenly felt better. Before Jason could gather himself to object, Niall kissed his forehead, and Jason’s tense muscles relaxed.
Then my great-grandfather was gone before I could ask him which vampire he meant.