Book Nine 4-6

Chapter 4
I spent a restless night. I would think of Eric and feel the warm rush of joy, and then think of Eric and want to punch him in the face. I thought of Bill, the first man I’d ever dated more than once, the first man I’d ever gone to bed with; when I remembered his cool voice and body, his contained calm, and contrasted it with Eric, I couldn’t believe I had fallen for two such different males, especially when my all-too-brief episode with Quinn was factored in. Quinn had been warm-blooded in every respect, and impulsive, and kind to me, and yet so scarred by his past, he hadn’t shared it with me—which, in my view, had led to our relationship being ruined. I’d dated Alcide Herveaux, pack leader, too, but it had never gone further.
Sookie Stackhouse’s All-Male Revue.
Don’t you just hate nights like that, when you think over every mistake you’ve made, every hurt you’ve received, every bit of meanness you’ve dealt out? There’s no profit in it, no point to it, and you need sleep. But that night, men were on my mind, and not in a happy way.
When I’d exhausted the topic of my problems with the male sex, I launched into worrying about the responsibility of the bar. I finally got three hours’ sleep after I made myself admit that there was no way I could run Sam’s business into the ground in a few days.
Sam called the next morning while I was still at home to tell me his mother was better and was definitely going to recover. His brother and sister were now dealing with the family revelations in a much calmer way. Don, of course, was still in jail.
“If she keeps improving, I may be able to start back in a couple of days,” he said. “Or even sooner. Of course, the doctors keep telling us they can’t believe how fast she’s healing.” He sighed. “At least we don’t have to conceal that now.”
“How’s your mom handling the emotional part?” I asked.
“She’s quit insisting they should release him. And since she had a frank talk with the three of us, she’s admitting she and Don might have to get a divorce,” he said. “She’s not happy about the idea, but I don’t know if you can completely reconcile with someone who’s shot you.”
Though I’d answered the phone by my bed and was still comfortably prone, I found it impossible to go back to sleep after we’d hung up. I’d hated to hear the pain in Sam’s voice. Sam had enough to fret about without troubling him with my problems, so I hadn’t even seriously considered bringing up the knife incident, though I would have been relieved to share my worries with Sam.
I was up and dressed by eight o’clock, early for me. Though I was moving and thinking, I felt as rumpled and wrinkled as my bedsheets. I wished someone could yank me smooth and orderly, the way I yanked the sheets. Amelia was home (I checked to see if her car was parked out back when I made the coffee) and I’d glimpsed Octavia shuffling into the hall bathroom, so it was shaping up to be a typical morning, as mornings went nowadays at my house.
The pattern was broken by a knocking at the front door. Usually I’m warned by the crunching of the gravel driveway, but in my heavier-than-usual morning fog, I’d missed it.
I looked through the peephole to see a man and a woman, both dressed in proper business suits. They didn’t look like Jehovah’s Witnesses or home invaders. I reached out to them mentally and found no hostility or anger, only curiosity.
I opened the door. I smiled brilliantly. “Can I help you?” I said. The cold air gusted around my bare feet.
The woman, who was probably in her early forties, smiled back. Her brown hair had a little gray in it and was cut in a simple chin-length style. She’d parted it very precisely. Her pantsuit was charcoal with a black sweater underneath, and her shoes were black. She carried a black bag, which wasn’t exactly like a purse, more like a laptop case.
She held out her hand to shake, and when I touched her, I knew more. It was hard to keep the shock off my face. “I’m from the New Orleans office of the FBI,” she said, which is a bombshell of an opener for your average conversation. “I’m Agent Sara Weiss. This is Special Agent Tom Lattesta from our Rhodes office.”
“You’re here about . . . ?” I kept my face pleasantly blank.
“May we come in? Tom’s come all the way from Rhodes to talk to you, and we’re letting all your warm air out.”
“Sure,” I said, though I was far from sure. I was trying hard to get a fix on their intent, but it wasn’t easy. I could only tell they weren’t there to arrest me or anything drastic like that.
“Is this a convenient time?” Agent Weiss asked. She implied she’d be delighted to come back later, though I knew that wasn’t true.
“This is as good as any,” I said. My grandmother would have given me a sharp look for my ungraciousness, but then, Gran had never been questioned by the FBI. This was not exactly a social call. “I do have to leave for work pretty soon,” I added to give myself an escape hatch.
“That’s bad news, about your boss’s mother,” Lattesta said. “Did the big announcement go well at your bar?” From his accent, I could tell he’d been born north of the Mason-Dixon Line, and from his knowledge of Sam’s whereabouts and identity, he’d done his homework, down to investigating the place I worked.
The sick feeling that had started up in my stomach intensified. I had a moment of wanting Eric there so badly it made me a little dizzy, and then I looked out the window at the sunshine and felt only anger at my own longing. This is what you get, I told myself.
“Having werewolves around makes the world more interesting, doesn’t it?” I said. The smile popped onto my face, the smile that said I was really strained. “I’ll take your coats. Please, have a seat.” I indicated the couch, and they settled on it. “Can I get you some coffee or some iced tea?” I said, thanking Gran’s training for keeping the words flowing.
“Oh,” Weiss said. “Some iced tea would be wonderful. I know it’s cold outside, but I drink it year-round. I’m a southern woman born and bred.”
And laying it on a little too thick, in my opinion. I didn’t think Weiss would become my best friend, and I didn’t plan to swap any recipes. “You?” I looked at Lattesta.
“Sure, great,” he said.
“Sweet or unsweet?” Lattesta thought it would be fun to have the famous southern sweet tea, and Weiss accepted sweet as a matter of bonding. “Let me tell my roommates we have company,” I said, and I called up the stairs, “Amelia! The FBI is here!”
“I’ll be down in a minute,” she called back, not sounding surprised at all. I knew she’d been standing at the top of the stairs listening to every word.
And here came Octavia in her favorite green pants and striped long-sleeved shirt, looking as dignified and sweet as an elderly white-haired black woman can look. Ruby Dee has nothing on Octavia.
“Hello,” she said, beaming. Though she looked like everyone’s favorite granny, Octavia was a powerful witch who could cast spells with almost surgical precision. She’d had a lifetime of practice in concealing her ability. “Sookie didn’t tell us she was expecting company, or we would have cleaned up the house.” Octavia beamed some more. She swept a hand to indicate the spotless living room. It would never be featured in Southern Living , but it was clean, by golly.
“Looks great to me,” Weiss said respectfully. “I wish my house looked this neat.” She was telling the truth. Weiss had two teenagers and a husband and three dogs. I felt a lot of sympathy—and maybe some envy—for Agent Weiss.
“Sookie, I’ll bring tea for your guests while you talk,” Octavia said in her sweetest voice. “You just sit down and visit a spell.” The agents were settled on the couch and looking around the shabby living room with interest when she returned with napkins and two glasses of sweet tea, ice rattling in a pleasant way. I rose from the chair opposite the couch to put napkins in front of them, and Octavia placed the glasses on the napkins. Lattesta took a large swallow. The corner of Octavia’s mouth twitched just a little when he made a startled face and then did his best to amend his expression to pleased surprise.
“What did you-all want to ask me?” Time to get down to brass tacks. I smiled at them brightly, my hands folded in my lap, my feet parallel, and my knees clamped together.
Lattesta had brought in a briefcase, and now he put it on the coffee table and opened it. He extracted a picture and handed it to me. It had been taken in the middle of the afternoon in the city of Rhodes a few months before. The picture was clear enough, though the air around the people in it was blighted with the clouds of dust that had billowed up from the collapsed Pyramid of Gizeh.
I kept my eyes on the picture, I kept my face smiling, but I couldn’t stop my heart from sinking into my feet.
In the picture, Barry the Bellboy and I were standing together in the rubble of the Pyramid, the vampire hotel that a splinter Fellowship group had blown up the previous October. I was somewhat more recognizable than my companion, because Barry was standing in profile. I was facing the camera, unaware of it, my eyes on Barry’s face. We were both covered in dirt and blood, ash and dust.
“That’s you, Miss Stackhouse,” Lattesta said.
“Yes, it is.” Pointless to deny the woman in the picture was me, but I sure would have loved to have done so. Looking at the picture made me feel sick because it forced me to remember that day all too clearly.
“So you were staying at the Pyramid at the time of the explosion?”
“Yes, I was.”
“You were there in the employ of Sophie-Anne Leclerq, a vampire businesswoman. The so-called Queen of Louisiana.”
I started to tell him there had been no “so-called” about it, but discretion blocked those words. “I flew up there with her,” I said instead.
“And Sophie-Anne Leclerq sustained severe injuries in the blast?”
“I understand she did.”
“You didn’t see her after the explosion?”
“No.”
“Who is this man standing with you in the picture?”
Lattesta hadn’t identified Barry. I had to keep my shoulders stiff so they wouldn’t sag with relief. I shrugged. “He came up to me after the blast,” I said. “We were in better shape than most, so we helped search for survivors.” Truth, but not the whole truth. I’d known Barry for months before I’d encountered him at the convention at the Pyramid. He’d been there in the service of the King of Texas. I wondered how much about the vamp hierarchy the FBI actually knew.
“How did the two of you search for survivors?” Lattesta asked.
That was a very tricky question. At that time, Barry was the only other telepath I’d ever met. We’d experimented by holding hands to increase our “wattage,” and we’d looked for brain signatures in the piles of debris. I took a deep breath. “I’m good at finding things,” I said. “It seemed important to help. So many people hurt so bad.”
“The fire chief on-site said you seemed to have some psychic ability,” Lattesta said. Weiss looked down at her tea glass to hide her expression.
“I’m not a psychic,” I said truthfully, and Weiss immediately felt disappointed. She felt she could be in the presence of a poseur or a nut job, but she had hoped I’d admit I was the real thing.
“Chief Trochek said you told them where to find survivors. He said you actually steered the rescue crews to the living.”
Amelia came down the stairs then, looking very respectable in a bright red sweater and designer jeans. I met her eyes, hoping she’d see I was silently asking for help. I hadn’t been able to turn my back on a situation where I could actually save lives. When I’d realized I could find people—that teaming up with Barry would result in saving lives—I couldn’t turn away from the task, though I was scared of being exposed to the world as a freak.
It’s hard to explain what I see. I guess it’s like looking through infrared goggles or something. I see the heat of the brain; I can count the living people in a building, if I have time. Vampire brains leave a hole, a negative spot; I can usually count those, too. Plain old dead people don’t register with me at all. That day when Barry and I had held hands, the joining had magnified our abilities. We could find the living, and we could hear the last thoughts of the dying. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. And I didn’t want to experience it again, ever.
“We just had good luck,” I said. That wouldn’t convince a toad to hop.
Amelia came forward with her hand extended. “I’m Amelia Broadway,” she said, as if she expected them to know who she was.
They did.
“You’re Copley’s daughter, right?” Weiss asked. “I met him a couple of weeks ago in connection with a community program.”
“He’s so involved in the city,” Amelia said with a dazzling smile. “He’s got his fingers in a dozen pies, I guess. Dad’s real fond of the Sook, here.” Not so subtle, but hopefully effective. Leave my roommate alone. My father’s powerful .
Weiss nodded pleasantly. “How’d you end up here in Bon Temps, Ms. Broadway?” she asked. “It must seem real quiet here, after New Orleans.”What’s a rich bitch like you doing in this backwater? By the way, your dad’s not around to run interference for you .
“My house got damaged during Katrina,” Amelia said. She left it at that. She didn’t tell them that she’d been in Bon Temps already when Katrina happened.
“And you, Ms. Fant?” Lattesta asked. “Were you an evacuee also?” He’d by no means abandoned the subject of my ability, but he was willing to go along with the social flow.
“Yes,” Octavia said. “I was living with my niece under cramped circumstances, and Sookie very kindly offered me her spare bedroom.”
“How’d you know each other?” Weiss asked, as if she was expecting to hear a delightful story.
“Through Amelia,” I said, smiling just as happily back at her.
“And you and Amelia met—?”
“In New Orleans,” Amelia said, firmly cutting off that line of questioning.
“Did you want some more iced tea?” Octavia asked Lattesta.
“No, thank you,” he said, almost shuddering. It had been Octavia’s turn to make the tea, and she did have a heavy hand with the sugar. “Ms. Stackhouse, you don’t have any idea how to contact this young man?” He indicated the picture.
I shrugged. “We both helped to look for bodies,” I said. “It was a terrible day. I don’t remember what name he gave.”
“That seems strange,” Lattesta said, and I thought, Oh, shit . “Since someone answering your description and a young man answering his description checked into a motel some distance from the explosion that night and shared a room.”
“Well, you don’t have to know someone’s name to spend the night with them,” Amelia said reasonably.
I shrugged and tried to look embarrassed, which wasn’t too hard. I’d rather they think me sexually easy than decide I was worthy of more attention. “We’d shared a horrible, stressful event. Afterward, we felt really close. That’s the way we reacted.” Actually, Barry had collapsed in sleep almost instantly, and I had followed soon afterward. Hanky-panky had been the furthest thing from our minds.
The two agents stared at me doubtfully. Weiss was thinking I was lying for sure, and Lattesta suspected it. He thought I knew Barry very well.
The phone rang, and Amelia hurried to the kitchen to answer it. She came back looking green.
“Sookie, that was Antoine on his cell phone. They need you at the bar,” she said. And then she turned to the FBI agents. “Probably you should go with her.”
“Why?” Weiss asked. “What’s up?” She was already on her feet. Lattesta was stuffing the picture back into his briefcase.
“A body,” Amelia said. “A woman’s been crucified behind the bar.”
Chapter 5
The agents followed me to Merlotte’s. There were five or six cars parked across the spot where the front parking lot ended and the back parking began, effectively blocking access to the back. But I leaped out of my car and picked a path between them, and the FBI agents were right on my heels.
I had hardly been able to believe it, but it was true. There was a traditional cross erected in the employee parking lot, back by the trees where the gravel gave way to dirt. A body was nailed to it. My eyes scanned it, took in the distorted body, the streaks of dried blood, came back up to the face.
“Oh, no,” I said, and my knees folded.
Antoine, the cook, and D’Eriq, the busboy, were suddenly on either side of me, pulling me up. D’Eriq’s face was tearstained, and Antoine looked grim, but the cook had his head together. He’d been in Iraq and in New Orleans during Katrina. He’d seen things that were worse.
“I’m sorry, Sookie,” he said.
Andy Bellefleur was there, and Sheriff Dearborn. They walked over to me, looking bigger and bulkier in their waterproof quilted coats. Their faces were hard with suppressed shock.
“Sorry about your sister-in-law,” Bud Dearborn said, but I could barely pay attention to the words.
“She was pregnant,” I said. “She was pregnant.” That was all I could think about. I wasn’t amazed that someone would want to kill Crystal, but I was really horrified about the baby.
I took a deep breath and managed to look again. Crystal’s bloody hands were panther paws. The lower part of her legs had changed, too. The effect was even more shocking and grotesque than the crucifixion of a regular human woman and, if possible, more pitiful.
Thoughts raced through my head with no logical sequence. I thought of who needed to know that Crystal had died. Calvin, not only head of her clan but also her uncle. Crystal’s husband, my brother. Why was Crystal left here, of all places? Who could have done this?
“Have you called Jason yet?” I said through numb lips. I tried to blame that on the cold, but I knew it was shock. “He would be at work this time of day.”
Bud Dearborn said, “We called him.”
“Please don’t make him look at her,” I said. There was a bloody mess trailing down the wood of the cross to the ground at its base. I gagged, got myself under control.
“I understand she cheated on him, and that their breakup was pretty public.” Bud was trying to be dispassionate, but the effort was costing him. Rage was in the back of his eyes.
“You can ask Dove Beck about that,” I said, instantly on the defensive. Alcee Beck was a detective for the Bon Temps police department, and the man Crystal had chosen to cheat with was Alcee’s cousin Dove. “Yeah, Crystal and Jason had separated. But he would never do anything to his baby.” I knew Jason would not have done such a horrific thing to Crystal no matter what the provocation, but I didn’t expect anyone else to believe me.
Lattesta walked over to us, Agent Weiss following close behind. She looked a little white around the mouth, but her voice was steady. “From the condition of the body, I believe this woman was a . . . werepanther.” She said the word as if it was hard to get it through her lips.
I nodded. “Yes, ma’am, she was.” I was still fighting to gain control of my stomach.
“Then this could be a hate crime,” Lattesta said. His face was locked down tight, and his thoughts were orderly. He was composing a mental list of phone calls he should make, and he was trying to figure out if there was any way he could take charge of the case. If the murder had been a hate crime, he had a good shot at being in on the investigation.
“And who might you be?” Bud Dearborn asked. He had his hands on his belt, and he was looking at Weiss and Lattesta as if they were pre-need burial plot salesmen.
While the law enforcement types were all introducing themselves and saying profound things about the crime scene, Antoine said, “I’m sorry, Sookie. We had to call ’em. But we called your house right after.”
“Of course you had to call them,” I said. “I just wish Sam was here.” Oh, gosh. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and pressed his speed-dial number.
“Sam,” I said when he picked up. “Can you talk?”
“Yes,” he said, sounding apprehensive. He could already tell something was wrong.
“Where are you?”
“I’m in my car.”
“I have bad news.”
“What’s happened? Did the bar burn down?”
“No, but Crystal’s been murdered in the parking lot. Out back by your trailer.”
“Oh, shit. Where’s Jason?”
“He’s on his way here, near as I can find out.”
“I’m sorry, Sookie.” He sounded exhausted. “This is going to be bad.”
“The FBI is here. They’re thinking it might be a hate crime.” I skipped the explanation of why they’d happened to be in Bon Temps.
“Well, a lot of people didn’t like Crystal,” Sam said cautiously, surprise in his voice.
“She was crucified.”
“Dammit to hell .” A long pause. “Sook, if my mom is still stable and nothing’s happening legally with my stepfather, I’ll start back later today or early tomorrow.”
“Good.” I couldn’t begin to pack enough relief into that one word. And it was no use pretending I had everything under control.
“I’m sorry, cher ,” he said again. “Sorry you’re having to handle it, sorry Jason will be suspected, sorry about the whole thing. Sorry for Crystal, too.”
“I’ll be glad to see you,” I said, and my voice was shaky with incipient tears.
“I’ll be there.” And he hung up.
Lattesta said, “Ms. Stackhouse, are these men other bar employees?”
I introduced Antoine and D’Eriq to Lattesta. Antoine’s expression didn’t change, but D’Eriq was completely impressed that he’d met an FBI agent.
“Both of you knew this Crystal Norris, right?” Lattesta said mildly.
Antoine said, “Just by sight. She come in the bar some.”
D’Eriq nodded.
“Crystal Norris Stackhouse,” I said. “She’s my sister-in-law. The sheriff’s called my brother. But you need to call her uncle, Calvin Norris. He works at Norcross.”
“He her nearest living relative? Besides the husband?”
“She’s got a sister. But Calvin’s the leader of—” I stopped, not sure if Calvin had endorsed the Great Reveal. “He raised her,” I said. Close enough.
Lattesta and Weiss huddled with Bud Dearborn. They were deep in conversation, probably about Calvin and the tiny community out at the bleak crossroads. Hotshot was a group of small houses containing lots of secrets. Crystal had wanted to escape from Hotshot, but she also felt most secure there.
My eyes returned to the tortured figure on the cross. Crystal was dressed, but her clothes had ripped when her arms and legs had changed to panther limbs, and there was blood everywhere. Her hands and feet, impaled with nails, were crusted with it. Ropes did the work of holding her to the crossbar, kept the flesh from ripping free of the nails.
I’d seen a lot of awful things, but this was maybe the most pathetic. “Poor Crystal,” I said, and found tears were rolling down my cheeks.
“You didn’t like her,” Andy Bellefleur said. I wondered how long he’d been out here, looking at the ruin of what had once been a living, breathing, healthy woman. Andy’s cheeks were patched with stubble, and his nose was red. Andy had a cold. He sneezed and excused himself to use a handkerchief.
D’Eriq and Antoine were talking to Alcee Beck. Alcee was the other Bon Temps police detective, and that didn’t make the investigation look too promising. He wouldn’t be too regretful about Crystal’s death.
Andy faced me again after he’d stuffed his handkerchief in his pocket. I looked at his weary, broad face. I knew he’d do his best to find out who’d done this. I trusted Andy. Square-built Andy, some years my senior, had never been a smiley kind of guy. He was
serious and suspicious. I didn’t know if he’d chosen his occupation because it suited him, or if his character had altered in response to his occupation.
“I hear she and Jason had split,” he said.
“Yes. She cheated on him.” This was common knowledge. I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.
“Pregnant and all, like she was?” Andy shook his head.
“Yeah.” I spread my hands. That was the way she was .
“That’s sick,” Andy said.
“Yeah, it is. Cheating with your husband’s baby in your stomach between you . . . that’s just specially icky.” It was a thought I’d had but never voiced.
“So, who was the other man?” Andy asked casually. “Or men?”
“You’re the only guy in Bon Temps who doesn’t know she was screwing Dove Beck,” I said.
This time it registered. Andy glanced over at Alcee Beck and back to me. “I know now,” he said. “Who hated her that much, Sookie?”
“If you’re thinking Jason, you can just think again. He would never do that to his baby.”
“If she was so free with herself, maybe it wasn’t his baby,” Andy said. “Maybe he found that out.”
“It was his,” I said with a firmness I wasn’t sure I felt. “But even if it wasn’t, if some blood test says it wasn’t, he wouldn’t kill anybody’s baby. Anyway, they weren’t living together. She’d moved back in with her sister. Why would he even go to the trouble?”
“Why were the FBI at your house?”
Okay, so this questioning thing was going to go one way. “Some questions about the explosion in Rhodes,” I said. “I found out about Crystal while they were there. They came along out of professional curiosity, I guess. Lattesta, the guy, thinks this might be a hate crime.”
“That’s an interesting idea,” he said. “This is undoubtedly a hate crime, but whether or not it’s the kind of thing they should investigate, I don’t know yet.” He strode off to talk to
Weiss. Lattesta was looking up at the body, shaking his head, as if he was noting a level of awfulness he’d thought couldn’t be reached.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was in charge of the bar, and the crime scene was on bar property, so I was determined to stay.
Alcee Beck called, “All people on the scene who are not police officers, leave the area! All police officers who are nones sential to the crime scene, step into the front parking lot!” His gaze fell on me, and he jabbed a finger toward the front. So I went back to lean against my car. Though it was cold enough, it was lucky for all of us that the day was bright and the wind wasn’t blowing. I pulled my coat collar up around my ears and reached into the car to get my black gloves. I tugged them on and waited.
Time passed. I watched various police officers come and go. When Holly showed up for her shift, I explained what had happened and sent her home, telling her I’d call when I’d gotten permission to reopen. I couldn’t think of any other course of action. Antoine and D’Eriq had left long ago, after I’d entered their cell numbers on my phone.
Jason’s truck screeched to a halt beside my car, and he leaped out to stand in front of me. We hadn’t spoken in weeks, but this was no time to talk about our differences. “Is it true?” my brother asked.
“I’m sorry. It’s true.”
“The baby, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Alcee come out to the job site,” he said numbly. “He come asking how long it had been since I’d seen her. I haven’t talked to her in four or five weeks, except to send her some money for the doctor visits and her vitamins. I saw her once at Dairy Queen.”
“Who was she with?”
“Her sister.” He took a long, shuddering breath. “You think . . . was it bad?”
No point beating around the bush. “Yes,” I said.
“Then I’m sorry she had to go that way,” he said. He wasn’t used to expressing complex emotions, and it sat awkwardly on him, this combination of grief and regret and loss. He looked five years older. “I was so hurt by her and mad at her, but I wouldn’t want her to
suffer and be afraid. God knows we probably wouldn’t have been good as parents, but we didn’t get a chance to try.”
I agreed with every part of what he’d said.
“Did you have company last night?” I said finally.
“Yeah, I took Michele Schubert home from the Bayou,” he said. The Bayou was a bar in Clarice, only a few miles away.
“She stay all night?”
“I made her scrambled eggs this morning.”
“Good.” For once my brother’s promiscuity paid off—Michele was a single divorcée without children and forthright to boot. If anyone would be willing to tell the police exactly where she’d been and what she’d done, Michele was the woman. I said as much.
“The police have already talked to her,” Jason told me.
“That was fast.”
“Bud was in the Bayou last night.”
So the sheriff would have seen Jason leave and would have noted whom he’d left with. Bud hadn’t kept the job of sheriff this long without being shrewd. “Well, that’s good,” I said, and couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“You think maybe she was killed because she was a panther?” Jason asked hesitantly.
“Maybe. She was partially changed when she was killed.”
“Poor Crystal,” he said. “She would have hated anyone to see her like that.” And to my amazement, tears ran down his face.
I didn’t have the slightest idea how to react. All I could do was fetch a Kleenex from the box in my car and shove it in his hand. I hadn’t seen Jason cry in years. Had he even cried when Gran had died? Maybe he really had loved Crystal. Maybe it hadn’t been solely wounded pride that had caused him to set up her exposure as an adulteress. He’d fixed it so both her uncle Calvin and I would catch her in the act. I’d been so disgusted and furious with being forced to be a witness—and with the consequences—that I’d avoided Jason for weeks. Crystal’s death had shunted aside that anger, at least for the moment.
“She’s beyond that now,” I said.
Calvin’s battered truck pulled up on the other side of my car. Quicker than my eye could track, he stood in front of me, while Tanya Grissom scrambled out the other side. A stranger looked out of Calvin’s eyes. Normally a peculiar yellowish color, those eyes were now almost golden, and the irises were so large that there was almost no visible white. His pupils had elongated. He was not even wearing a light jacket. It made me cold to look at him in more ways than one.
I held up my hands. “I’m so sorry, Calvin,” I said. “You need to know Jason didnot do this.” I looked up, not too far, to meet his eerie eyes. Calvin was a little grayer now than he’d been when I’d first met him several years ago, and a little stockier. He still looked solid and dependable and tough.
“I need to smell her,” he said, ignoring my words. “They have to let me back there to smell her. I’ll know.”
“Come on then; we’ll go tell them that,” I said, because not only was that a good idea, but also I wanted to keep him away from Jason. At least Jason was smart enough to stay on the far side of my car. I took Calvin’s arm and we began to walk around the building, only to be stopped by the crime scene tape.
Bud Dearborn moved over to the other side of the tape when he saw us. “Calvin, I know you’re rattled, and I’m real sorry about your niece,” he began, and with a flash of claw Calvin ripped down the tape and began walking over to the cross.
Before he’d gotten three steps, the two FBI agents moved to intercept him. Suddenly they were on the ground. There was a lot of shouting and tumult, and then Calvin was being held back by Bud, Andy, and Alcee, with Lattesta and Weiss trying to assist from their undignified positions.
“Calvin,” Bud Dearborn wheezed. Bud was not a young man, and it was clear that holding Calvin back was taking every bit of strength he possessed. “You gotta stay away, Calvin. Any evidence we collect is gonna be tainted if you don’t stay away from the body.” I was astonished at Bud’s restraint. I would have expected him to crack Calvin in the head with his baton or a flashlight. Instead, he seemed as sympathetic as a strained and taxed man could be. For the first time, I understood that I wasn’t the only one who’d known about the secret of the Hotshot community. Bud’s wrinkled hand patted Calvin’s arm in a gesture of consolation. Bud took care to avoid touching Calvin’s claws. Special Agent
Lattesta noticed them, and he drew in a harsh breath, making an incoherent warning noise.
“Bud,” Calvin said, and his voice came out in a growl, “if you can’t let me over there now, I have to smell her when they take her down. I’m trying to catch the scent of the ones who did this.”
“I’ll see if you can do that,” Bud said steadily. “For right now, buddy, we got to get you out of here because they gotta pick up all this evidence around here, evidence that’ll stand up in court. You got to stay away from her. Okay?”
Bud had never cared for me, nor I for him, but at that moment I sure thought well of him.
After a long moment, Calvin nodded. Some of the tension went out of his shoulders. Everyone who was holding on to him eased up on their grip.
Bud said, “You stay out front; we’ll call you. You got my word.”
“All right,” Calvin said. The law enforcement crowd let go. Calvin let me put my arm around him. Together, we turned to make for the front parking lot. Tanya was waiting for him, tension in every line of her body. She’d had the same expectations I’d had: that Calvin was going to get a good beating.
“Jason didn’t do this,” I said again.
“I don’t care about your brother,” he said, turning those strange eyes on me. “He doesn’t matter to me. I don’t think he killed her.”
It was clear that he thought my anxiety about Jason was blocking my concern about the real problem, the death of his niece. It was clear he didn’t appreciate that. I had to respect his feelings, so I shut my mouth.
Tanya took his hands, claws and all. “Will they let you go over her?” she asked. Her eyes never left Calvin’s face. I might as well not have been there.
“When they take the body down,” he said.
It would be so great if Calvin could identify the culprit. Thank God the werecreatures had come out. But . . . that might have been why Crystal had been killed.
“You think you’ll be able to get a scent?” Tanya said. Her voice was quiet, intent. She was more serious than I’d ever seen her in our spotty acquaintance. She put her arms around
Calvin, and though he was not a tall man, she only reached his upper sternum. She looked up at him.
“I’ll get a score of scents after all these folks have touched her. I can only try to match them all. I wish I’d been here first.” He held Tanya as if he needed to lean on someone.
Jason was standing a yard away, waiting for Calvin to notice him. His back was stiff, his face frozen. There was an awful moment of silence when Calvin looked over Tanya’s shoulder and noted Jason’s presence.
I don’t know how Tanya reacted, but every muscle in my body twanged from the tension. Slowly Calvin held out a hand to Jason. Though it was a human hand again, it was obviously battered. The skin was freshly scarred and one of the fingers was slightly bent.
I had done that. I’d stood up for Jason at his wedding, and Calvin had stood up for Crystal. After Jason had made us witness Crystal’s infidelity, we’d had to stand in for them when the penalty had been pronounced: the maiming of a hand or paw. I’d had to bring a brick down on my friend’s hand. I hadn’t felt the same about Jason since then.
Jason bent and licked the back of the hand, emphasizing how subservient he was. He did it awkwardly, because he was still new to the ritual. I held my breath. Jason’s eyes were rolled up to keep Calvin’s face in sight. When Calvin nodded, we all relaxed. Calvin accepted Jason’s obeisance.
“You’ll be in at the kill,” Calvin said, as if Jason had asked him something.
“Thanks,” Jason said, and then backed away. He stopped when he’d gone a couple of feet. “I want to bury her,” he said.
“We’ll all bury her,” Calvin said. “When they let us have her back.” There was not a particle of concession in his voice.
Jason hesitated a moment and then nodded.
Calvin and Tanya got back in Calvin’s truck. They settled in. Clearly they planned to wait there until the body was brought down from the cross. Jason said, “I’m going home. I can’t stay here.” He seemed almost dazed.
“Okay,” I said.
“Are you . . . do you plan on staying here?”
“Yes, I’m in charge of the bar while Sam is gone.”
“That’s a lot of trust he has in you,” Jason said.
I nodded. I should feel honored. I did feel honored.
“Is it true his stepdad shot his mom? That’s what I heard at the Bayou last night.”
“Yes,” I said. “He didn’t know that Sam’s mom was, you know, a shapeshifter.”
Jason shook his head. “This coming-out thing,” he said. “I don’t know that’s it been such a good idea after all. Sam’s mom got shot. Crystal is dead. Someone who knew what she was put her up there, Sookie. Maybe they’ll come after me next. Or Calvin. Or Tray Dawson. Or Alcide. Maybe they’ll try to kill us all.”
I started to say that couldn’t happen, that the people I knew wouldn’t turn on their friends and neighbors because of an accident of birth. But in the end, I didn’t say that, because I wondered if it was the truth.
“Maybe they will,” I said, feeling an icy tingle run down my back. I took a deep breath. “But since they didn’t go after the vampires—for the most part—I’m thinking they’ll be able to accept weres of all sorts. At least, I hope so.”
Mel, wearing the slacks and sports shirt he wore daily at the auto parts place, got out of his car and walked over. I noticed that he was carefully not looking at Calvin, though Jason was still standing right beside the panther’s pickup. “It’s true, then,” Mel said.
Jason said, “She’s dead, Mel.”
Mel patted Jason’s shoulder in the awkward way men have when they have to comfort other men. “Come on, Jason. You don’t need to be around here. Let’s go to your house. We’ll have a drink, buddy.”
Jason nodded, looking dazed. “Okay, let’s go.” After Jason left for home with Mel following right behind, I climbed back in my own vehicle and fished the newspapers for the past few days from the backseat. I often picked them up from the driveway when I came out to go to work, tossed them in the back, and tried to read at least the front page within a reasonable length of time. What with Sam leaving and my business with the bar, I hadn’t caught a glimpse of the news since the weres went public.
I arranged the papers in order and began to read.
The public reaction had ranged from the panicked to the calm. Many people claimed they’d had a suspicion that the world contained more than humans and vampires. The vampires themselves were 100 percent behind their furry brethren, at least in public. In my experience, the two major supernatural groups had had a very bumpy relationship. The shifters and Weres mocked the vampires, and the vampires jeered right back. But it looked like the supernaturals had agreed to present a united front, at least for a while.
The reactions of governments varied wildly. I think the U.S. policy had been formed by werewolves in place within the system, because it was overwhelmingly favorable. There was a huge tendency to accept the weres as if they were completely human, to keep their rights as Americans exactly on a par with their previous status when no one knew they were two-natured. The vampires couldn’t be too pleased about that, because they hadn’t yet obtained full rights and privileges under the law. Legal marriage and inheritance of property were still forbidden in a few states, and vampires were barred from owning certain businesses. The human casino lobby had been successful in banning the vamps from direct ownership of gambling establishments, which I still couldn’t understand, and though vampires could be police officers and firefighters, vampire doctors were not accepted in any field that included treating patients with open wounds. Vampires weren’t allowed in competition sports, either. That I could understand; they were too strong. But there were already lots of athletes whose ancestry included full- and part-weres, because sports were a natural bent for them. The military ranks, too, were filled with men and women whose grandparents had bayed under the full moon. There were even some full-blooded Weres in the armed services, though it was a very tricky occupation for people who had to find somewhere private to be three nights a month.
The sports pages were full of pictures of some part- and whole-weres who’d become famous. A running back for the New England Patriots, a fielder for the Cardinals, a marathon runner . . . they’d all confessed to being wereanimals of one kind or another. An Olympic champion swimmer had just discovered that his dad was a wereseal, and the number-one ranked women’s tennis player in Britain had gone on record as saying that her mother was a wereleopard. The sports world hadn’t been in such a tumult since the last drug scandal. Did these athletes’ heritage give them an unfair advantage over other players? Should their trophies be taken away from them? Should their records be allowed to stand? Another day, I might enjoy debating this with someone, but right now I just didn’t care.
I began to see an overall picture. The outing of the two-natured was a much different revelation than the vampires’ announcement. The vampires had been completely off the human grid, except in legend and lore. They’d lived apart. Since they could subsist on the
Japanese synthetic blood, they had presented themselves as absolutely nonthreatening. But wereanimals had been living among us all the time, integrated into our society yet maintaining their secret lives and alliances. Sometimes even their children (those who weren’t firstborn and therefore not weres) didn’t know what their parents were, especially if they were not wolves.
“I feel betrayed,” one woman was quoted as saying. “My granddad turns into a lynx every month. He runs around and kills things. My beautician, I’ve been going to her for fifteen years, and she’s a coyote. I didn’t know! I feel I’ve been deceived in an ugly way.”
Some people thought it was fascinating. “Our principal is a werewolf,” said a kid in Springfield, Missouri. “How cool is that?”
The very fact of the existence of wereanimals frightened some people. “I’m scared I’ll shoot my neighbor by accident if I see him trotting down the road,” said a farmer in Kansas. “What if he gets after my chickens?”
Various churches were thrashing out their policy on weres. “We don’t know what to think,” a Vatican official confessed. “They’re alive, they’re among us, they must have souls. Even some priests are wereanimals.” The fundamentalists were equally stymied. “We were worried about Adam and Steve,” a Baptist minister said. “Should we have been more worried about Rover and Fluffy?”
While my head had been in the sand, all hell had broken loose.
Suddenly it was easier to see how my werepanther sister-in-law had ended up on a cross at a bar owned by a shifter.
Chapter 6
The moment the nails came out of her hands and feet, Crystal’s body reverted to looking completely human. I watched from behind the crime scene tape. This process drew the horrified attention of everyone on the site. Even Alcee Beck flinched back. I’d been waiting for hours by then; I’d read all the newspapers twice, found a paperback in the glove compartment and gotten about a third of the way through it, and had a limp conversation with Tanya about Sam’s mother. After we’d rehashed that news, she mostly talked about Calvin. I gathered that she had moved in with him. She’d gotten a part-time job at Norcross in the main office, doing something clerical. She loved the regular hours. “And I don’t have to stand up all day,” she said.
“Sounds good,” I said politely, though I’d hate that kind of job. Working with the same people every day? I’d get to know them all too well. I wouldn’t be able to stay out of their thoughts, and I’d reach the point of wanting to get away from them because I knew too much about them. At the bar, there were always different people coming in to keep me distracted.
“How’d the Great Reveal go for you?” I asked.
“I told ’em at Norcross the next day,” she said. “When they found out I was a werefox, they thought that was funny.” She looked disgusted. “Why do the big animals get all the press? Calvin got huge respect out in the plant from his crew. I get jokes about bushy tails.”
“Not fair,” I agreed, trying not to smile.
“Calvin is completely wiped out about Crystal,” Tanya said abruptly. “She was his favorite niece. He felt awful bad for her when it turned out she was such a poor shifter. And about the babies.” Crystal, the product of a lot of inbreeding, had taken forever to change into her panther form and had had a hard time reversing the process when she wanted to become a human again. She’d miscarried several times, too. The only reason she’d been allowed to marry Jason was that it had become obvious she would probably never carry a pureblood baby to term.
“Could be this baby was lost before the murder, or she aborted during the murder,” I said. “Maybe the—whoever did this—didn’t know.”
“She was showing, but not a whole lot,” Tanya said, nodding. “She was real picky about her food, ’cause she was determined to keep her figure.” She shook her head, her face bitter. “But really, Sookie, does it really make any difference if the killer knew or not? The end is the same. The baby is dead, and so is Crystal, and she died afraid and alone.”
Tanya was absolutely right.
“Do you think Calvin can track whoever did this from the smell?” I asked.
Tanya looked uneasy. “There were lots of scents,” she said. “I don’t know how he can tell which one’s the scent. And look, they’re all touching her. Some of ’em are wearing rubber gloves, but those have an odor, you know. See, there’s Mitch Norris helping take her down, and he’s one of us. So how will Calvin know?”
“Besides, it might be one of them,” I said, nodding toward the group gathered around the dead woman. Tanya looked at me sharply.
“You mean law enforcement might be in on it?” she said. “Do you know something?”
“No,” I said, sorry I’d opened my big mouth. “It’s just . . . we don’t know anything for sure. I guess I was thinking about Dove Beck.”
“He’s the one she was in bed with that day?”
I nodded. “That big guy, there—the black guy in the suit? That’s his cousin Alcee.”
“Think he might have had something to do with it?”
“Not really,” I said. “I was just . . . speculating.”
“I’ll bet Calvin’s thought of that, too,” she said. “Calvin’s very sharp.”
I nodded. There was nothing flashy about Calvin, and he hadn’t managed to go to college (I hadn’t either), but there was nothing wrong with his brain.
Bud beckoned to Calvin then, and he got out of his truck and went over to the body, which had been laid on a gurney spread with an open body bag. Calvin approached the body carefully, his hands behind his back so he wouldn’t touch Crystal.
We all watched, some with loathing and distaste, some with indifference or interest, until he’d finished.
He straightened, turned, and walked back in the direction of his truck. Tanya got out of my car to meet him. She put her arms around him and looked up at him. He shook his head. I’d lowered my window so I could hear. “I couldn’t make out much on the rest of her,” he said. “Too many other smells. She just smelled like a dead panther.”
“Let’s go home, Calvin,” Tanya said.
“Okay.” They each raised a hand to me to let me know they were leaving, and then I was by myself in the front parking lot, still waiting. Bud asked me to open the employee entrance to the bar. I handed him the keys. He returned after a few minutes to tell me that the door had been securely locked and that there was no sign anyone had been inside the bar since it had closed. He handed the keys to me.
“So we can open up?” I asked. A few police vehicles had left, the body was gone, and it seemed to me that the whole process was winding down. I was willing to wait there if I could get into the building soon.
But after Bud told me it might be two or three more hours, I decided I’d go home. I’d spoken to every employee I could reach, and any customers could clearly see from the tape put across the parking lot that the bar was closed. I was wasting my time. My FBI agents, who’d spent hours with their cell phones clamped to their ears, seemed now to be more concerned about this crime than about me, which was great. Maybe they’d forget all about me.
Since no one seemed to be watching me or to care what I was doing, I started my car up and left. I didn’t have the heart to run any errands. I went straight back to the house.
Amelia had long ago left for work at the insurance agency, but Octavia was home. She had set up the ironing board in her room. She was pressing the hem on a pair of pants she’d just shortened, and she had a pile of her blouses ready to iron. I guess there wasn’t any magic spell to get the wrinkles out. I offered to drive her into town, but she said her trip with Amelia the day before had taken care of all her needs. She invited me to sit on the wooden chair by the bed while she worked. “Ironing goes faster when you have someone to talk to,” she said, and she sounded so lonely I felt guilty.
I told her about the morning I’d had, about the circumstances of Crystal’s death. Octavia had seen some bad stuff in her time, so she didn’t freak out. She made the appropriate
answers and expressed the shock almost anyone would feel, but she hadn’t really known Crystal. I could tell there was something on her mind.
Octavia put down the iron and moved to face me directly. “Sookie,” she said, “I need to get a job. I know I’m a burden to you and Amelia. I used to borrow my niece’s car during the day when she was working the night shift, but since I’ve moved out here, I’ve been having to ask you-all for rides. I know that gets old. I cleaned my niece’s house and cooked and helped to watch the kids to pay her for my room and board, but you and Amelia are such cleaners that my two cents wouldn’t really be a help.”
“I’m glad to have you, Octavia,” I said, not entirely truthfully. “You’ve helped me in a lot of ways. Remember that you got Tanya off my back? And now she seems to be in love with Calvin. So she won’t be pestering me anymore. I know you’d feel better if you could get a job, and maybe something will come up. In the meantime, you’re fine here. We’ll think of something.”
“I called my brother in New Orleans,” she said to my astonishment. I hadn’t even known she had a living brother. “He says the insurance company has decided to give me a payment. It’s not much, considering I lost almost everything, but it’ll be enough to buy a good secondhand car. There won’t be anything there for me to go back to, though. I’m not going to rebuild, and there aren’t too many places I could afford on my own.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish there was something I could do about it, Octavia. Make things better for you.”
“You’ve already made things better for me,” she said. “I’m grateful.”
“Oh, please,” I said miserably. “Don’t. Thank Amelia.”
“All I know how to do is magic,” Octavia said. “I was so glad to help you out with Tanya. Does she seem to remember?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think she remembers anything about Calvin bringing her over here, or the spell casting. I’ll never be her favorite person, but at least she’s not trying to make my life miserable anymore.”
Tanya had been sent to sabotage me by a woman named Sandra Pelt, who bore me a grudge. Since Calvin had clearly taken a shine to Tanya, Amelia and Octavia had worked a little magic on her to cut her free from Sandra’s influence. Tanya still seemed abrasive, but that was just her nature, I figured.
“Do you think we should do a reconstruction to find out who Crystal’s killer was?” Octavia offered.
I thought it over. I tried to imagine staging an ectoplasmic reconstruction in the parking lot of Merlotte’s. We’d have to find at least one more witch, I thought, because that was a large area, and I wasn’t sure Octavia and Amelia could handle it by themselves. They’d probably think they could, though.
“I’m afraid we’d be seen,” I said finally. “And that would be bad for you and Amelia. Besides, we don’t know where the actual death took place. And you have to have that, right? The death site?”
Octavia said, “Yes. If she didn’t die there in the parking lot, it wouldn’t do a bit of good.” She sounded a bit relieved.
“I guess we won’t know until the autopsy if she died there or before they put up the cross.” I didn’t think I could stand to witness another ectoplasmic reconstruction, anyway. I’d seen two. Watching the dead—in a watery but recognizable form—reenact the last minutes of their lives was an indescribably eerie and depressing experience.
Octavia went back to her ironing, and I wandered into the kitchen and heated up some soup. I had to eat something, and opening a can was about as much effort as I could expend.
The dragging hours were absolutely negative. I didn’t hear from Sam. I didn’t hear from the police about opening Merlotte’s. The FBI agents didn’t return to ask me more questions. Finally I decided to drive to Shreveport. Amelia had returned from work, and she and Octavia were cooking supper together when I left the house. It was a homey scene; I was simply too restless to join in.
For the second time in as many days, I found myself on the way to Fangtasia. I didn’t let myself think. I listened to a black gospel station all the way over, and the preaching helped me feel better about the awful events of the day.
By the time I arrived, it was full night, though it was too early for the bar to be crowded. Eric was sitting at one of the tables in the main room, his back to me. He was drinking some TrueBlood and talking to Clancy, who ranked under Pam, I thought. Clancy was facing me, and he sneered when he saw me walking toward the table. Clancy was no Sookie Stackhouse fan. Since he was a vampire, I couldn’t discover why, but I thought he simply didn’t like me.
Eric turned to see me approaching, and his eyebrows rose. He said something to Clancy, who got up and stalked back to the office. Eric waited for me to sit down at his table. “Hello, Sookie,” he said. “Are you here to tell me how angry you are at me about our pledging? Or are you ready to have that long talk we must have sooner or later?”
“No,” I said. We sat for a while in silence. I felt exhausted but oddly peaceful. I should be giving Eric hell about his high-handed handling of Quinn’s request and the knife presentation. I should be asking him all kinds of questions . . . but I couldn’t summon up the necessary fire.
I just wanted to sit beside him.
There was music playing; someone had turned on the all-vampire radio station, KDED. The Animals were singing “The Night.” After he finished his drink and there was only a red residue staining the sides of the bottle, Eric lay his cold white hand on top of mine. “What happened today?” he asked, his voice calm.
I began to tell him, starting with the FBI visit. He didn’t interrupt to exclaim or to ask questions. Even when I ended my tale with the removal of Crystal’s body, he didn’t speak for a while. “Even for you, that’s a busy day, Sookie,” he said finally. “As for Crystal, I don’t think I ever met her, but she sounds worthless.”
Eric never waffled around to be polite. Though I actually enjoyed that, I was also glad it wasn’t a widely held trait. “I don’t know that anyone is worthless,” I said. “Though I have to admit, if I had to pick one person to get in a lifeboat with me, she wouldn’t have made even my long list.”
Eric’s mouth quirked up in a smile.
“But,” I added, “she was pregnant, that’s the thing, and the baby was my brother’s.”
“Pregnant women were worth twice as much if they were killed in my time,” Eric said.
He’d never volunteered much information about his life before he’d been turned. “What do you mean, worth?” I asked.
“In war, or with foreigners, we could kill whom we pleased,” he said. “But in disputes between our own people, we had to pay silver when we killed one of our own.” He looked like he was dredging up the memory with an effort. “If the person killed was a woman with child, the price was double.”
“How old were you when you got married? Did you have children?” I knew Eric had been married, but I didn’t know anything else about his life.
“I was counted a man at twelve,” he said. “I married at sixteen. My wife’s name was Aude. Aude had . . . we had . . . six children.”
I held my breath. I could tell he was looking down the immense swell of time that had passed between his present—a bar in Shreveport, Louisiana—and his past—a woman dead for a thousand years.
“Did they live?” I asked very quietly.
“Three lived,” he said, and he smiled. “Two boys and a girl. Two died at birth. And with the sixth child, Aude died, too.”
“Of what?”
He shrugged. “She and the baby caught a fever. I suppose it was from some sort of an infection. Then, if people got sick, they mostly died. Aude and the baby perished within hours of each other. I buried them in a beautiful tomb,” he said proudly. “My wife had her best broach on her dress, and I laid the baby on her breast.”
He had never sounded less like a modern man. “How old were you?”
He considered. “I was in my early twenties,” he said. “Perhaps twenty-three. Aude was older. She had been my elder brother’s wife, and when he was killed in battle, it fell to me to marry her so our families would still be bonded. But I’d always liked her, and she was willing. She wasn’t a silly girl; she’d lost two babies of my brother’s, and she was glad to have more that lived.”
“What happened to your children?”
“When I became a vampire?”
I nodded. “They can’t have been very old.”
“No, they were small. It happened not long after Aude’s death,” he said. “I missed her, you see, and I needed someone to raise the children. No such thing as a househusband then.” He laughed. “I had to go raiding. I had to be sure the slaves were doing what they ought in the fields. So I needed another wife. One night I went to visit the family of a young woman I hoped would marry me. She lived a mile or two away. I had some worldly goods, and my father was a chief, and I was thought a handsome man and was a noted
fighter, so I was a good prospect. Her brothers and her father were glad to greet me, and she seemed . . . agreeable. I was trying to get to know her a bit. It was a good evening. I had high hopes. But I had a lot to drink there, and on my way home that night . . .” Eric paused, and I saw his chest move. In remembering his last moments as a human, he had actually taken a deep breath. “It was the full moon. I saw a man lying hurt by the side of the road. Ordinarily I would have looked around to find those who had attacked him, but I was drunk. I went over to help him; you can probably guess what happened after that.”
“He wasn’t really hurt.”
“No. But I was, soon after. He was very hungry. His name was Appius Livius Ocella.” Eric actually smiled, though without much humor. “He taught me many things, and the first was not to call him Appius. He said I didn’t know him well enough.”
“The second thing?”
“How to get to know him.”
“Oh.” I figured I understood what that meant.
Eric shrugged. “It was not so bad . . . once we left the area I knew. In time, I stopped pining after my children and my home. I had never been away from my people. My father and mother were still alive. I knew my brothers and my sisters would make sure the children were brought up to be as they ought, and I had left enough to keep them from being a burden. I worried, of course, but there was no helping it. I had to stay away. In those days, in small villages, any stranger was instantly noticed, and if I ventured anywhere close to where I’d lived, I’d be recognized and hunted. They would know what I was, or at least know I was . . . wrong.”
“Where did you and Appius go?”
“We went to the biggest cities we could find, which were few enough then. We traveled all the time, parallel to the roads so we could prey on travelers.”
I shuddered. It was painful to imagine Eric, so flamboyant and quick-witted, skulking through the woods in search of easy blood. It was awful to think of the unfortunates he’d ambushed.
“There were not so many people,” he said. “Villagers would miss their neighbors immediately. We had to keep moving. Young vampires are so hungry; at first, I killed even when I didn’t mean to.”
I took a deep breath. This was what vampires did; when they were young, they killed. There had been no substitute for fresh blood then. It was kill, or die. “Was he good to you? Appius Livius Ocella?” How much worse could you have it than to be the constant companion of the man who had murdered you?
“He taught me all he knew. He had been in the legions, and he was a fighter, as I was, so we had that in common. He liked men, of course, and that took some getting used to. I had never done that. But when you’re a new vampire, anything sexual seems exciting, so even that I enjoyed . . . eventually.”
“You had to comply,” I said.
“Oh, he was much stronger . . . though I was a bigger man than him—taller, longer arms. He had been vampire for so many centuries, he’d lost count. And of course, he was my sire. I had to obey.” Eric shrugged.
“Is that a mystical thing or a made-up rule?” I asked, curiosity finally getting the better of me.
“It’s both,” Eric said. “It’s a compulsion. It’s impossible to resist, even when you want to . . . even when you’re desperate to get away.” His white face was closed and brooding.
I couldn’t imagine Eric doing something he didn’t want to do, being in a subservient position. Of course, he had a boss now; he wasn’t autonomous. But he didn’t have to bow and scrape, and he made most of his own decisions.
“I can’t imagine it,” I said.
“I wouldn’t want you to.” His mouth pulled down at one corner, a wry expression. Just when I began to ponder the irony of that, since he’d perhaps married me vampire-style without asking me, Eric changed the subject, slamming shut the door on his past. “The world has changed a great deal since I was human. The past hundred years have been especially exciting. And now the Weres are out, and all the other two-natured. Who knows? Maybe the witches or the fae will step forward next.” He smiled at me, though it was a little stiff.
His idea gave me a happy fantasy of seeing my great-grandfather Niall every day. I’d only learned of his existence a few months before, and we hadn’t spent much time together, but learning I had a living ancestor had been very important to me. I had so few blood kin. “That would be wonderful,” I said wistfully.
“My lover, it will never happen,” Eric said. “The creatures that make up the fae are the most secret of all the supernatural beings. There are not many remaining in this country. In fact, there are not so many remaining in the world. The number of their females, and the fertility of those females, is dropping every year. Your great-grandfather is one of the few survivors with royal blood. He would never condescend to treat with humans.”
“He talks to me,” I said, because I wasn’t sure what “treat” meant.
“You share his blood.” Eric waved his free hand. “If you didn’t, you would never have seen him.”
Well, no, Niall wasn’t going to stop in at Merlotte’s for a brew and a chicken basket and shake hands all around. I looked at Eric unhappily. “I wish he’d help Jason out,” I said, “and I never thought I’d say that. Niall doesn’t seem to like Jason at all, but Jason’s going to be in a lot of trouble about Crystal’s death.”
“Sookie, if you’re asking for my thoughts, I have no idea why Crystal was killed.” And he really didn’t care much. At least with Eric, you could tell where you stood.
In the background the KDED DJ said, “Next, Thom Yorke’s ‘And It Rained All Night.’” While Eric and I had been having our one-on-one, the bar sounds had seemed muted, far-away. Now they came back with a rush.
“The police and the werepanthers, they’ll track whoever did it,” he said. “I’m more concerned about these FBI agents. What is their goal? Do they want to take you away? Can they do that in this country?”
“They wanted to identify Barry. Then they wanted to find out what Barry and I could do, and how we could do it. Maybe they were supposed to ask if we’d work for them, and Crystal’s death interrupted our conversation before they could say anything.”
“And you don’t want to work for them.” Eric’s bright blue eyes were intent on my face. “You don’t want to leave.”
I pulled my hand out from under his. I watched my hands clasp each other, twist. “I don’t want people to die because I wouldn’t help them,” I said. I felt my eyes brim with tears. “But I’m selfish enough that I don’t want to go wherever they send me, trying to find dying people. I couldn’t stand the wear and tear of seeing disaster every day. I don’t want to leave home. I’ve been trying to imagine what it would be like, what they might have me do. And it scares me to death.”
“You want to own your own life,” Eric said.
“As much as anyone can.”
“Just when I think you’re very simple, you say something complex,” Eric said.
“Are you complaining?” I tried to smile, failed.
“No.”
A heavy girl with a big jaw came up and thrust an autograph book in front of Eric. “Could you please sign this?” she said. Eric gave her a blinding smile and scribbled on the blank page. “Thank you,” she said breathlessly, and went back to her table. Her friends, all women just old enough to be in the bar, were exclaiming at her courage, and she leaned forward, telling them all about her encounter with the vampire. As she finished, one of the human waitresses drifted up to their table and took another order for drinks. The staff here was well-trained.
“What was she thinking?” Eric asked me.
“Oh, she was very nervous and she thought you were lovely, but . . .” I struggled to put it into words. “Not handsome in a way that was very real to her, because she would never think she would actually get to have you. She’s very . . . she doesn’t think much of herself.”
I had one of those flashes of fantasy. Eric would walk over to her, bow to her, give her a reverent kiss on the cheek, ignore her prettier friends. This gesture would make every man in the bar wonder what the vampire saw in her that they couldn’t see. Suddenly the plain girl would be overwhelmed with attention from the men who’d witnessed the interchange. Her friends would give her respect because Eric had. Her life would change .
But none of that happened, of course. Eric forgot about the girl as soon as I’d finished speaking. I didn’t think it would work out like my fantasy, even if he did approach her. I felt a flash of disappointment that fairy tales didn’t come true. I wondered if my fairy great-grandfather had ever heard one of what we thought of as a fairy tale. Did fairy parents tell fairy children human tales? I was willing to bet they didn’t.
I felt a moment of disconnect, as if I were standing back from my own life and viewing it from afar. The vampires owed me money and favors for my services to them. The Weres had declared me a friend of the pack for my help during the just-completed war. I was pledged to Eric, which seemed to mean I was engaged or even married. My brother was a
werepanther. My great-grandfather was a fairy. It took me a moment to pull myself back into my own skin. My life was too weird. I had that out-of-control feeling again, as if I were spinning too fast to stop.
“Don’t talk to the FBI people alone,” Eric was saying. “Call me if it’s at night. Call Bobby Burnham if they come in the day.”
“But he hates me!” I said, dragged back into reality and thus not too cautious. “Why would I call him?”
“What?”
“Bobby hates me,” I said. “He’d love it if the feds carted me off to some underground bunker in Nevada for the rest of my life.”
Eric’s face looked frozen. “He said this?”
“He didn’t have to. I can tell when someone thinks I’m slime.”
“I’ll have a talk with Bobby.”
“Eric, it’s not against the law for someone to dislike me,” I said, remembering how dangerous it could be to complain to a vampire.
He laughed. “Maybe I’ll make it against the law,” he said teasingly, his accent more apparent than usual. “If you can’t reach Bobby—and I am absolutely sure he will help you—you should call Mr. Cataliades, though he’s down in New Orleans.”
“He’s doing well?” I hadn’t seen or heard from the half-demon lawyer since the collapse of the vampire hotel in Rhodes.
Eric nodded. “Never better. He is now representing Felipe de Castro’s interests in Louisiana. He would help if you asked him. He’s quite fond of you.”
I stored that piece of information away to ponder. “Did his niece survive?” I asked. “Diantha?”
“Yes,” Eric said. “She was buried for twelve hours, and the rescuers knew she was there. But there were beams wedged over the place where she was trapped, and it took time to remove them. They finally dug her out.”
I was glad to hear Diantha was alive. “And the lawyer, Johan Glassport?” I asked. “He had a few bruises, Mr. Cataliades said.”
“He recovered fully. He collected his fee and then he vanished into the depths of Mexico.”
“Mexico’s gain is Mexico’s loss,” I said. I shrugged. “I guess it takes a lawyer to get your money when the hirer is dead. I never got mine. Maybe Sophie-Anne thought Glassport did more for her, or he had the wits to ask even though she’d lost her legs.”
“I didn’t know you weren’t paid.” Eric looked displeased all over again. “I’ll talk to Victor. If Glassport collected for his services to Sophie, you certainly should. Sophie left a large estate, and no children. Victor’s king owes you a debt. He’ll listen.”
“That would be great,” I said. I may have sounded a little too relieved.
Eric eyed me sharply. “You know,” he said, “if you need money, you have only to ask. I will not have you going without anything you need, and I know you enough to be sure you wouldn’t ask for money for something frivolous.”
He almost didn’t sound like that was such an admirable attribute. “I appreciate the thought,” I said, and I could hear my voice get all stiff. “I just want what’s due me.”
There was a long silence between us, though the bar was at its usual noise level around Eric’s table.
“Tell me the truth,” Eric said. “Is it possible you came here simply to spend time with me? You haven’t yet told me how angry you are with me that I tricked you over the knife. Apparently you’re not going to, at least not tonight. I haven’t yet discussed with you all my memories of the time we spent together when you were hiding me at your house. Do you know why I ended up so close to your home, running down that road in the freezing cold?”
His question was so unexpected that I was struck silent. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. But finally I said, “No, I don’t.”
“The curse contained within the witch, the curse that activated when Clancy killed her . . . it was that I would be close to my heart’s desire without ever realizing it. A terrible curse and one that Hallow must have constructed with great subtlety. We found it dog-eared in her spell book.”
There was nothing for me to say. I’d think about that, though.
It was the first time I’d come to Fangtasia simply to talk, without having been called there for some vampire reason. Blood bond or something much more natural? “I think . . . I just wanted some company,” I said. “No soul-shaking revelations.”
He smiled. “This is good.”
I didn’t know if it was or not.
“You know we’re not really married, right?” I said. I had to say something, as much as I wanted to forget the whole thing had ever happened. “I know vamps and humans can get married now, but that wasn’t a ceremony I recognize, nor does the State of Louisiana.”
“I know that if I hadn’t done it, you’d be sitting in a little room in Nevada right now, listening to Felipe de Castro while he does business with humans.”
I hate it when my suspicions are correct. “But I saved him,” I said, trying not to whine. “I saved his life, and he promised I had his friendship. Which means his protection, I thought.”
“He wants to protect you right by his side now that he knows what you can do. He wants the leverage having you would give him over me.”
“Some gratitude. I should have let Sigebert kill him.” I closed my eyes. “Dammit, I just can’t come out ahead.”
“He can’t have you now,” Eric said. “We are wed.”
“But, Eric . . .” I thought of so many objections to this arrangement I couldn’t even begin to voice them. I had promised myself I wouldn’t start arguing about this tonight, but the issue was like the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. It simply couldn’t be ignored. “What if I meet someone else? What if you . . . Hey, what are the ground rules of being officially married? Just tell me.”
“You’re too upset and tired tonight for a rational conversation,” Eric said.
He shook his hair back over his shoulders, and a woman at the next table said, “Oooooooooh .”
“Understand that he can’t touch you now, that no one can unless they petition me first. This is under penalty of final death. And this is where my ruthlessness will be of service to both of us.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay. You’re right. But this isn’t the end of the subject. I want to know everything about our new situation, and I want to know I can get out of this if I can’t stand it.”
His eyes looked as blue as a clear autumn sky, and as guileless. “You will know everything when you want to know,” he said.
“Hey, does the new king know about my great-grandfather?”
Eric’s face settled into lines of stone. “I can’t predict Felipe’s reaction if he finds out, my lover. Bill and I are the only ones who have that knowledge now. It has to stay that way.”
He reached over to take my hand again. I could feel each muscle, each bone, through the cool flesh. It was like holding hands with a statue, a very beautiful statue. Again, I felt oddly peaceful for a few minutes.
“I have to go, Eric,” I said, sorry but not sorry to be leaving. He leaned over to me and kissed me lightly on the lips. When I pushed back my chair, he rose to walk me to the door. I felt the wannabes hammer me with looks of envy all the way out of Fangtasia. Pam was at her station, and she looked at us with a chilly smile.
Lest we part on too lovey-dovey a note, I said, “Eric, when I’m back to being myself, I’m going to nail your ass for putting me in this position of being pledged to you.”
“Darling, you can nail my ass anytime,” he said charmingly, and turned to go back to his table.
Pam rolled her eyes. “You two,” she said.
“Hey, this isn’t any of my doing,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true. But it was a good exit line, and I took advantage of it to leave the bar.