Book Nine 7-9

Chapter 7
The next morning, Andy Bellefleur called to give me the green light to reopen.
By the time the crime scene tape was down, Sam had returned to Bon Temps. I was so glad to see my boss that my eyes got weepy. Managing Merlotte’s was a lot harder than I’d ever realized. There were decisions to make every day and a huge crowd of people who needed to be kept happy: the customers, the workers, the distributors, the deliverymen. Sam’s tax guy had called with questions I couldn’t answer. The utility bill was due in three days, and I didn’t have check-writing privileges. There was a lot of money that needed to be deposited into the bank. It was almost payroll time.
Though I felt like blurting out all these problems the minute Sam walked in the back door of the bar, I drew in a calming breath and asked about his mother.
After giving me a half hug, Sam had thrown himself into his creaking chair behind his desk. He swiveled to face me directly. He propped his feet up on the edge of the desk with an air of relief. “She’s talking, walking, and mending,” he said. “For the first time, we don’t have to make up a story to cover how fast she can heal. We took her home this morning, and she’s already trying to do stuff around the house. My brother and sister are asking her a million questions now that they’ve gotten used to the idea. They even seem kind of envious I’m the one who inherited the trait.”
I was tempted to ask about his stepfather’s legal situation, but Sam seemed awful anxious to get back into his normal routine. I waited a moment to see if he would bring it up. He didn’t. Instead, he asked about the utility bill, and with a sigh of relief I was able to refer him to the list of things that needed his attention. I’d left it on his desk in my neatest handwriting.
First on the list was the fact that I’d hired Tanya and Amelia to come in some evenings to make up for Arlene’s defection.
Sam looked sad. “Arlene’s worked for me since I bought the bar,” he said. “It’s going to be strange, her not being here. She’s been a pain in the butt in the past few months, but I figured she’d swing around to being her old self sooner or later. You think she’ll reconsider?”
“Maybe, now that you’re back,” I said, though I had severe doubts. “But she’s gotten to be so intolerant. I don’t think she can work for a shifter. I’m sorry, Sam.”
He shook his head. His dark mood was no big surprise, considering his mom’s situation and the not-completely-ecstatic reaction of the American populace to the weird side of the world.
It amazed me that, once upon a time, I hadn’t known, either. I hadn’t realized some of the people I knew were werewolves because I didn’t comprehend there was such a thing. You can misinterpret every mental cue you get if you don’t understand where it’s coming from. I’d always wondered why some people were so hard to read, why their brains gave me a different image from others. It simply hadn’t occurred to me it was because those brains belonged to people who literally turned into animals.
“You think business’ll slack off because I’m a shapeshifter or because of the murder?” Sam asked. Then he shook himself and said, “Sorry, Sook. I wasn’t thinking about Crystal being your in-law.”
“I wasn’t ever nuts about her, as you well know,” I said, as matter-of-factly as I could. “But I think it’s awful what was done to her, no matter what she was like.”
Sam nodded. I’d never seen his face so gloomy and serious. Sam was a creature of sunshine.
“Oh,” I said, getting up to leave, and then I stopped, shifting from foot to foot. I took a deep breath. “By the way, Eric and I are married now.” If I’d hoped I’d get to make my exit on a light note, my judgment was way, way off. Sam leaped to his feet and grabbed me by the shoulders.
“What have you done?” he asked. He was deadly serious.
“I haven’t done anything,” I said, startled by his vehemence. “It was Eric’s doing.” I told Sam about the knife.
“Didn’t you realize there was some significance to the knife?”
“I didn’t know it was a knife,” I said, beginning to feel pretty pissed but still maintaining my reasonable voice. “Bobby didn’t tell me. I guess he didn’t know himself, so I couldn’t very well pick it up from his brain.”
“Where was your sense? Sookie, that was an idiotic thing to do.”
This was not exactly the reaction I had anticipated from a man I’d been worried about, a man on whose behalf I’d been working my butt off for days. I gathered my hurt and pride around me like a jacket. “Then let me just take my idiotic self home, so you won’t have to put up with my idiocy any longer,” I said, my voice even enough to support a level. “I guess I’ll go home now that you’re back and I don’t have to be here every single minute of my day to make sure things are running okay.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, but it was too late. I was on my high horse, and I was riding it out of Merlotte’s.
I was out the back door before our heaviest drinker could have counted to five, and then I was in my car and on the way home. I was mad, and I was sad, and I suspected that Sam was right. That’s when you get the angriest, isn’t it? When you know you’ve done something stupid? Eric’s explanation hadn’t exactly erased my concerns.
I was scheduled to work that evening, so I had until then to get my act together. There was no question of my not showing up. Whether or not Sam and I were on the outs, I had to work.
I wasn’t ready to be at home, where I’d have to think about my own confused feelings.
Instead of going home, I turned and went to Tara’s Togs. I hadn’t seen a lot of my friend Tara since she’d eloped with JB du Rone. But my inner compass was pointing in her direction. To my relief, Tara was in the store alone. McKenna, her “helper,” was not a full-time employee. Tara came out of the back when the bell on the door rang. She looked a little surprised to see me at first, but then she smiled. Our friendship has had its ups and downs, but it looked like we were okay now. Great.
“What’s up?” Tara asked. She looked attractive and snuggly in a teal sweater. Tara is taller than I am, and real pretty, and a real good businesswoman.
“I’ve done a stupid thing, and I don’t know how I feel about it,” I said.
“Tell me,” she commanded, and we went to sit at the table where the wedding catalogs were kept. She shoved the box of Kleenex over to me. Tara knows when I’m going to cry.
So I told her the long story, beginning with the incident in Rhodes where I’d exchanged blood with Eric for what turned out to be one too many times. I told her about the weird bond we had as a result.
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “He offered to take your blood so an even worse vamp wouldn’t bite you?”
I nodded, dabbing at my eyes.
“Wow, such self-sacrifice.” Tara had had some bad experiences with vampires. I wasn’t surprised at her sarcastic summation.
“Believe me, Eric doing it was by far the lesser of two evils,” I assured her.
Suddenly, I realized I’d be free now if Andre had taken my blood that night . Andre had died at the bombing site. I considered that for a second and moved on. That hadn’t happened and I wasn’t free, but the chains I wore now were a lot prettier.
“So how are you feeling about Eric?” Tara asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “There are things I almost love about him, and things about him that scare the hell out of me. And I really . . . you know . . .want him. But he pulls tricks for what he says is my own good. I believe he cares about me. But he cares about himself mostly.” I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, I’m babbling.”
“This is why I married JB,” she said. “So I wouldn’t have to worry about shit like this.” She nodded, confirming her own good decision.
“Well, you’ve taken him, so I can’t do that,” I said. I tried to smile. Marriage to someone as simple as JB sounded really relaxing. But was marriage supposed to be like settling back in a La-Z-Boy? At least spending time with Eric is never boring, I thought. Sweet as he was, JB had a finite capacity for entertaining conversation.
Plus, Tara was always going to have to be in charge. Tara was no fool, and she’d never be blinded by love. Other things, maybe, but not love. I knew Tara clearly understood the rules of her marriage to JB, and she didn’t seem to mind. For her, being the navigator/captain was a comforting and empowering role. I definitely liked to be in charge of my own life—I didn’t want anyone owning me—but my concept of marriage was more in the nature of a democratic partnership.
“So, let me summarize,” Tara said in a good imitation of one of our high school teachers. “You and Eric have done the nasty in the past.”
I nodded. Boy howdy, had we.
“Now the whole vampire organization owes you for some service you performed. I don’t want to know what it was, and I don’t want to know why you did it.”
I nodded again.
“Also, Eric more or less owns a piece of you because of this blood-bond thing. Which he didn’t necessarily plan out in advance, to give him credit.”
“Yep.”
“And now he’s maneuvered you into the position of being his fiancée? His wife? But you didn’t know what you were doing.”
“Right.”
“And Sam called you idiotic because you obeyed Eric.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, he did.”
Tara had to help a customer then, but only for a couple of minutes. (Riki Cunningham wanted to pay on a prom dress she’d put on layaway for her daughter.) When Tara resumed her seat, she was ready to give me feedback. “Sookie, at least Eric does care about you some, and he’s never hurt you. You could’ve been smarter. I don’t know if you weren’t because of this bond thing you have with him or because you’re so gone on him that you don’t ask enough questions. Only you can figure that out. But it could be worse. No humans need to know about this knife thing. And Eric can’t be around during the day, so you’ll have Eric-free time to think. Also, he’s got his own business to run, so he’s not going to be following you around. And the new vampire execs have to leave you alone because they want to keep Eric happy. Not so bad, right?” She smiled at me, and after a second, I smiled back.
I began to perk up. “Thanks, Tara,” I said. “You think Sam will stop being mad?”
“I wouldn’t exactly expect him to apologize for saying you acted like an idiot,” Tara warned me. “A, it’s true, and B, he’s a man. He’s got that chromosome. But you two have always gotten along great, and he owes you for you taking care of the bar. So he’ll come around.”
I pitched my used Kleenex into the little trash can by the table. I smiled, though it probably wasn’t my best effort.
“Meanwhile,” Tara said, “I have some news for you, too.” She took a deep breath.
“What is it?” I asked, delighted that we were back on best-friend footing.
“I’m going to have a baby,” Tara said, and her face froze in a grimace.
Ah-oh. Dangerous footing. “You don’t look super-happy,” I said, cautiously.
“I hadn’t planned on having children at all,” she said. “Which was okay with JB.”
“So . . . ?”
“Well, even multiple birth control methods don’t always work,” Tara said, looking down at her hands, which were folded on top of a bridal magazine. “And I just can’t have it taken care of. It’s ours. So.”
“Might . . . might you come around to being glad about this?”
She tried to smile. “JB is really happy. It’s hard for him to keep it a secret. But I wanted to wait for the first three months to pass. You’re the first one I’ve told.”
“I swear,” I said, reaching over to pat her shoulder, “you’ll be a good mother.”
“You really think so?” She looked, and felt, terrified. Tara’s folks had been the kind of parents who occasionally get shot-gunned by their offspring. Tara’s abhorrence of violence had prevented her from taking that path, but I don’t think anyone would have been surprised if the older Thorntons had vanished one night. A few people would have applauded.
“Yeah, I really think so.” I meant it. I could hear , directly from her head, Tara’s determination to wipe out everything her own mother had done to her by being the best mother she could be to her own child. In Tara’s case, that meant she would be sober, gentle-handed, clean of speech, and full of praise.
“I’ll show up at every classroom open house and teacher conference,” she said, now in a voice that was almost frightening in its intensity. “I’ll bake brownies. My child will have new clothes. Her shoes will fit. She’ll get her shots, and she’ll get her braces. We’ll start a college fund next week. I’ll tell her I love her every damn day.”
If that wasn’t a great plan for being a good mother, I couldn’t imagine what a better one could be.
We hugged each other when I got up to leave. This is the way it’s supposed to be, I thought.
I went home, ate a belated lunch, and changed into my work clothes.
When the phone rang, I hoped it was Sam calling to smooth things over, but the voice on the other end was an older man’s and unfamiliar.
“Hello? Is Octavia Fant there, please?”
“No, sir, she’s out. May I take a message?”
“If you would.”
“Sure.” I’d answered the phone in the kitchen, so there was a pad and pencil handy.
“Please tell her Louis Chambers called. Here’s my number.” He gave it to me slowly and carefully, and I repeated it to make sure I’d put it down correctly. “Ask her to call me, please. I’ll be glad to take a collect call.”
“I’ll make sure she gets your message.”
“Thank you.”
Hmmm. I couldn’t read thoughts over the phone, which normally I considered a great relief. But I would have enjoyed learning a little more about Mr. Chambers.
When Amelia came home a little after five, Octavia was in the car. I gathered Octavia had been walking around downtown Bon Temps filling out job applications, while Amelia had put in an afternoon at the insurance agency. It was Amelia’s evening to cook, and though I had to leave for Merlotte’s in a few minutes, I enjoyed watching her leap into action, creating spaghetti sauce. I handed Octavia her message while Amelia was chopping onions and a bell pepper.
Octavia made a choked sound and grew so still that Amelia stopped chopping and joined me in waiting for the older woman to look up from the piece of paper and give us a little backstory. That didn’t happen.
After a moment, I realized Octavia was crying, and I hurried to my bedroom and got a tissue. I tried to slip it to Octavia tactfully, like I hadn’t noticed anything amiss but just happened to have an extra Kleenex in my hand.
Amelia carefully looked down at the cutting board and resumed chopping while I glanced at the clock and began fishing around in my purse for my car keys, taking lots of unnecessary time to do it.
“Did he sound well?” Octavia asked, her voice choked.
“Yes,” I said. There was only so much I could get from a voice on the other end of a phone line. “He sounded anxious to talk to you.”
“Oh, I have to call him back,” she said, and her voice was wild.
“Sure,” I said. “Just punch in the number. Don’t worry about calling collect or anything; the phone bill’ll tell us how much it was.” I glanced over at Amelia, cocking an eyebrow. She shook her head. She didn’t know what the hell was going on, either.
Octavia placed the call with shaking fingers. She pressed the phone to her ear after the first ring. I could tell when Louis Chambers answered. Her eyes shut tight, and her hand clenched the phone so hard the muscles stood out.
“Oh, Louis,” she said, her voice full of raw relief and amazement. “Oh, thank God. Are you all right?”
Amelia and I shuffled out of the kitchen at that point. Amelia walked to my car with me. “You ever heard of this Louis guy?” I asked.
“She never talked about her private life when she was working with me. But other witches told me Octavia had a steady boyfriend. She hasn’t mentioned him since she’s been here. It looks like she hasn’t heard from him since Katrina.”
“She might not have thought he survived,” I said, and we widened our eyes at each other.
“That’s big stuff,” Amelia said. “Well. We may be losing Octavia.” She tried to stifle her relief, but of course, I could read it. As fond as Amelia was of her magical mentor, I’d realized that for Amelia, living with Octavia was like living with one of your junior high teachers.
“I got to go,” I said. “Keep me posted. Text me if there’s any big news.” Texting was one of my new Amelia-taught skills.
Despite the chilly air, Amelia sat on one of the lawn chairs that we’d recently hauled out of the storage shed to encourage ourselves to anticipate spring. “The minute I know something,” she agreed. “I’ll wait here a few minutes, then go check on her.”
I got in my car and hoped the heater would warm up soon. In the gathering dusk, I drove to Merlotte’s. I saw a coyote on the way. Usually they were too clever to be seen, but this one was trotting along the side of the road as if he had an appointment in town. Maybe it
was really a coyote, or maybe it was a person in another form. When I considered the possums and coons and the occasional armadillo I saw squashed by the road every morning, I wondered how many werecreatures had gotten killed in their animal forms in such careless ways. Maybe some of the bodies the police labeled murder victims were actually people killed by accident in their alternate form. I remembered all animal traces had vanished from Crystal’s body when she’d been taken down from the cross, after the nails had been removed. I was willing to bet those nails had been silver. There was so much I didn’t know.
When I came in Merlotte’s back door, full of plans to reconcile with Sam, I found my boss having an argument with Bobby Burnham. It was almost dark now, and Bobby should be off the clock. Instead, he was standing in the hall outside of Sam’s office. He was red in the face and fit to be tied.
“What’s up?” I said. “Bobby, did you need to talk to me?”
“Yeah. This guy wouldn’t tell me when you were going to get here,” Bobby said.
“This guy is my boss, and he isn’t obliged to tell you anything,” I said. “Here I am. What do you need to say to me?”
“Eric sent you this card, and he ordered me to tell you I’m at your disposal whenever you need me. I’m supposed to wash your car if you want me to.” Bobby’s face went even redder as he said this.
If Eric had thought Bobby would be made humble and compliant after a public humiliation, he was nuts. Now Bobby would hate me for a hundred years, if he lived that long. I took the card Bobby handed me and said, “Thanks, Bobby. Go back to Shreveport.”
Before the last syllable left my mouth, Bobby was out the back door. I examined the plain white envelope and then stuck it in my purse. I looked up to meet Sam’s eyes.
“Like you needed another enemy,” he said, and stomped into his office.
Like I needed another friend acting like an asshole, I thought. So much for us having a good laugh over our disagreement. I followed Sam in to drop my purse in the drawer he kept empty for the barmaids. We didn’t say a word to each other. I went to the storeroom to get an apron. Antoine was changing his stained apron for a clean one.
“D’Eriq bumped into me with a jar full of jalapeños, and the juice slopped out,” he said. “I can’t stand the smell of ’em.”
“Whoo,” I said, catching a whiff. “I don’t blame you.”
“Sam’s mama doing okay?”
“Yeah, she’s out of the hospital,” I said.
“Good news.”
As I tied the strings around my waist, I thought Antoine was about to say something else, but if he was, he changed his mind. He crossed the hall to knock on the kitchen door, and D’Eriq opened it from the inside and let him in. People had wandered into the kitchen by mistake too often, and the door was kept locked all the time. There was another door from the kitchen that led directly out back, and the Dumpster was right outside.
I walked past Sam’s office without looking in. He didn’t want to talk to me; okay, I wouldn’t talk to him. I realized I was being childish.
The FBI agents were still in Bon Temps, which shouldn’t have surprised me. Tonight, they came into the bar. Weiss and Lattesta were sitting opposite each another in a booth, a pitcher of beer and a basket of French-fried pickles between them, and they were talking intently. And at a table close to them, looking regal and beautiful and remote, was my great-grandfather Niall Brigant.
This day was going to win a prize for most peculiar. I blew out a puff of air and went to wait on my great-grandfather first. He stood as I approached. His pale straight hair was tied back at the nape of his neck. He was wearing a black suit and a white shirt, as he always did. Tonight, instead of the solid black tie he usually wore, he had on a tie I’d given him for Christmas. It was red, gold, and black striped, and he looked spectacular. Everything about him gleamed and shone. The shirt wasn’t simply white—it was snowy and starched; and his coat wasn’t just black—it was spotlessly inky. His shoes showed not a speck of dust, and the myriad of fine, fine wrinkles in his handsome face only set off its perfection and his brilliant green eyes. His age enhanced rather than diminished his looks. It almost hurt to look at him. Niall put his arms around me and kissed my cheek.
“Blood of my blood,” he said, and I smiled into his chest. He was so dramatic. And he had such a hard time looking human. I’d had one glimpse of him in his true form, and it had been nearly blinding. Since no one else in the bar was gasping at the sight of him, I knew they weren’t seeing him the same way I did.
“Niall,” I said. “I’m so happy to see you.” I always felt pleased and flattered when he visited. Being Niall’s great-granddaughter was like being kin to a rock star; he lived a life I
couldn’t imagine, went places I would never go, and had power I couldn’t fathom. But every now and then he spent time with me, and that time was always like Christmas.
He said very quietly, “These people opposite me, they do nothing but talk of you.”
“Do you know what the FBI is?” Niall’s fund of knowledge was incredible, since he was so old he’d stopped counting at a thousand and sometimes missed accurate dates by more than a century, but I didn’t know how specific his information about the modern day might be.
“Yes,” he said. “FBI. A government agency that collects data about law breakers and terrorists inside the United States.”
I nodded.
“But you’re such a good person. You’re not a killer or terrorist,” Niall said, though he didn’t sound as if he believed my innocence would protect me.
“Thank you,” I said. “But I don’t think they want to arrest me. I suspect they want to find out how I get results with my little mental condition, and if they decide I’m not nuts, they probably want me to work for them. That’s why they came to Bon Temps . . . but they got sidetracked.” And that brought me to the painful subject. “Do you know what happened to Crystal?”
But some other customers called me then, and it was a while before I got back to Niall, who was waiting patiently. He somehow made the scarred chair look like a throne. He picked the conversation up right where we’d left off.
“Yes, I know what happened to her.” His face didn’t seem to change, but I felt the chill rolling off of him. If I’d had anything to do with Crystal’s death, I would have felt very afraid.
“How come you care?” I asked. He’d never paid any attention to Jason; in fact, Niall seemed to dislike my brother.
Niall said, “I’m always interested in finding out why someone connected to me has died.” Niall had sounded totally impersonal when he spoke of Crystal’s death, but if he was interested, maybe he would help. You’d think he’d want to clear Jason, since Jason was his great-grandson just as surely as I was his great-granddaughter, but Niall had never shown any sign of wanting to meet Jason, much less get to know him.
Antoine rang the bell in the kitchen to tell me one of my orders was up, and I scurried off to serve Sid Matt Lancaster and Bud Dearborn their cheesy chili bacon fries. The recently widowed Sid Matt was so old I guess he figured his arteries couldn’t harden much more than they already had, and Bud had never been one for health food.
When I could return to Niall, I said, “Do you have any idea who did it? The werepanthers are searching, too.” I put down an extra napkin on the table in front of him so I’d look busy.
Niall didn’t disdain the panthers. In fact, though fairies seemed to consider themselves apart and superior to all other species of supernaturals, Niall (at least) had respect for all shapechangers, unlike the vampires, who regarded them as second-rate citizens. “I’ll look a little. I’ve been preoccupied, and that is why I haven’t visited. There is trouble.” I saw that Niall’s expression was even more serious than usual.
Oh, shit. More trouble.
“But you need not concern yourself,” he added regally. “I will take care of it.”
Did I mention Niall is a little proud? But I couldn’t help but feel concerned. In a minute I’d have to go get someone else another drink, and I wanted to be sure I understood him. Niall didn’t come around often, and when he did, he seldom dallied. I might not get another chance to talk to him. “What’s up, Niall?” I asked directly.
“I want you to take special care of yourself. If you see any fairies other than myself or Claude and Claudine, call me at once.”
“Why would I worry about other fairies?” The other shoe dropped. “Why would other fairies want to hurt me?”
“Because you are my great-granddaughter.” He stood, and I knew I’d get no more explanation than that.
Niall hugged me again, kissed me again (fairies are very touchy-feely), and left the bar, his cane in his hand. I’d never seen him use it as an aid to walking, but he always had it with him. As I stared after him, I wondered if it had a knife concealed inside. Or maybe it might be an extra-long magic wand. Or both. I wished he could’ve stuck around for a while, or at least issued a more specific danger bulletin.
“Ms. Stackhouse,” said a polite male voice, “could you bring us another pitcher of beer and another basket of pickles?”
I turned to Special Agent Lattesta. “Sure, be glad to,” I said, smiling automatically.
“That was a very handsome man,” Sara Weiss said. Sara was feeling the effects of the two glasses of beer she’d already had. “He sure looked different. Is he from Europe?”
“He does look foreign,” I agreed, and took the empty pitcher and fetched them a full one, smiling all the while. Then Catfish, my brother’s boss, knocked over a rum and Coke with his elbow, and I had to call D’Eriq to come with a washcloth for the table and a mop for the floor.
After that, two idiots who’d been in my high school class got into a fight about whose hunting dog was better. Sam had to break that up. They were actually quicker to come to their senses now that they knew what Sam was, which was an unexpected bonus.
A lot of the discussion in the bar that evening dealt with Crystal’s death, naturally. The fact that she’d been a werepanther had seeped into the town’s consciousness. About half of the bar patrons believed she’d been killed by someone who hated the newly revealed underworld. The other half wasn’t so sure that she’d been killed because she was a werepanther. That half thought her promiscuity was enough motivation. Most of them assumed Jason was guilty. Some of them felt sympathy for him. Some of them had known Crystal or her reputation, and they felt Jason’s actions were justifiable. Almost all of these people thought of Crystal only in terms of Jason’s guilt or innocence. I found it real sad that most people would only remember her for the manner of her death.
I should go see Jason or call him, but I couldn’t find it in my heart. Jason’s actions over the past few months had killed something in me. Though Jason was my brother, and I loved him, and he was showing signs of finally growing up, I no longer felt that I had to support him through all the trials his life had brought him. That made me a bad Christian, I realized. Though I knew I wasn’t a deep theological thinker, I sometimes wondered if crisis moments in my life hadn’t come down to two choices: be a bad Christian or die.
I’d chosen life every time.
Was I looking at this right? Was there another point of view that would enlighten me? I couldn’t think of anyone to ask. I tried to imagine the Methodist minister’s face if I asked him, “Would it be better to stab someone to keep yourself safe, or let them go on and kill you? Would it be better to break a vow I made in front of God, or refuse to break my friend’s hand to bits?” These were choices I had faced. Maybe I owed God a big debt. Or maybe I was protecting myself like he wanted me to. I just didn’t know, and I couldn’t think deep enough to figure out the Ultimate Right Answer.
Would the people I was serving laugh, if they knew what I was thinking? Would my anxiety over the state of my soul amuse them? Lots of them would probably tell me that all situations are covered in the Bible, and that if I read the Book more, I’d find my answers there.
That hadn’t worked for me so far, but I wasn’t giving up. I abandoned my circular thoughts and listened in on the people around me to give my brain a rest.
Sara Weiss thought that I seemed like a simple young woman, and she decided I was incredibly lucky to have been given a gift, as she considered it. She believed everything Lattesta had told her about what had happened at the Pyramid, because underneath her practical approach to life there was a streak of mysticism. Lattesta, too, thought it was almost possible I was psychic; he’d listened to accounts of the Rhodes first responders with great interest, and now that he’d met me, he’d come to think they were speaking the truth. He wanted to know what I could do for my country and his career. He wondered if he’d get a promotion if he could get me to trust him enough to be my handler throughout my time of helping the FBI. If he could acquire my male accomplice, as well, his upward trajectory would be assured. He would be stationed at FBI headquarters in Washington. He would be launched up the ladder.
I considered asking Amelia to lay a spell on the FBI agents, but that seemed like cheating somehow. They weren’t supes. They were just doing what they’d been told to do. They didn’t bear me any ill will; in fact, Lattesta believed he was doing me a favor, because he could get me out of this parish backwater and into the national limelight, or at least high in the esteem of the FBI.
As if that mattered to me.
As I went about my duties, smiling and exchanging chitchat with the regular customers, I tried to imagine leaving Bon Temps with Lattesta. They’d devise some test to measure my accuracy. They’d finally believe I wasn’t psychic but telepathic. When they found out what the limits of my talent were, they’d take me places where awful things had happened so I could find survivors. They’d put me in rooms with the intelligence agents of other countries or with Americans they suspected of awful things. I’d have to tell the FBI whether or not those people were guilty of whatever crime the FBI imagined they might have committed. I’d have to be close to mass murderers, maybe. I imagined what I might see in the mind of such a person, and I felt sick.
But wouldn’t the knowledge I gained be a great help to the living? Maybe I’d learn about plots far enough in advance to prevent deaths.
I shook my head. My mind was wandering too far afield. All that might happen. A serial killer might be thinking of where his victims were buried just at the moment I was listening to his thoughts. But in my extensive experience, people seldom thought, “Yes, I buried that body at 1218 Clover Drive under the rosebush,” or, “That money I stole sure is safe in my bank account numbered 12345 in the Switzerland National Bank.” Much less, “I’m plotting to blow up the XYZ building on May 4, and my six confederates are . . .”
Yes, there would be some good I could do. But whatever I could achieve would never reach the expectations of the government. And I’d never be free again. I didn’t think they’d hold me in a cell or anything—I’m not that paranoid. But I didn’t think I’d ever get to live my own life as I wanted.
So once again, I decided that maybe I was being a bad Christian, or at least a bad American. But I knew that unless I was forced to do so, I wasn’t going to leave Bon Temps with Agent Weiss or Special Agent Lattesta. Being married to a vampire was way better.
Chapter 8
I was mad at almost everybody when I drove home that night. Every now and then, I had spells like that; maybe everyone does. It’s hormonal or cyclical in some other way. Or maybe it’s just the chance alignment of the stars.
I was angry with Jason because I’d been angry with him for months. I was angry with Sam in a kind of hurt way. I was pissed at the FBI agents because they were here to put pressure on me—though in truth they hadn’t done that yet. I was outraged at Eric’s stunt with the knife and his high-handed banishment of Quinn, though I had to admit Eric had spoken the truth when he said I’d given Quinn the heave-ho first. That didn’t mean I never wanted to see him again. (Or did it?) It sure didn’t mean that Eric could dictate to me who I saw and who I didn’t.
And maybe I was angry with myself, because when I’d had the chance to confront Eric about all kinds of stuff, I’d gone all goopy and listened to his reminiscences. Like the flashbacks on Lost , Eric’s Viking memories had broken into the flow of the current story.
To make me even angrier, there was a car I didn’t recognize parked at the front door, where only visitors parked. I went to the back door and up the porch steps, frowning and feeling totally contrary. I didn’t want company. All I wanted to do was put on my pajamas, wash my face, and get into bed with a book.
Octavia was sitting at the kitchen table with a man I’d never met. He was one of the blackest men I’d ever seen, and his face was tattooed with circles around the eyes. Despite his fearsome decorations, he looked calm and agreeable. He rose to his feet when I came in.
“Sookie,” Octavia said in a trembling voice, “this is my friend Louis.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, and extended my hand for him to shake. He gave mine a carefully gentle grip, and I sat down so he would. Then I noticed the suitcases sitting in the hall. “Octavia?” I said, pointing at them.
“Well, Sookie, even us old ladies have some romance in our lives,” Octavia said, smiling. “Louis and I were close friends before Katrina. He lived about ten minutes’ drive away from me in New Orleans. After it happened, I looked for him. I gave up, finally.”
“I spent a lot of time trying to find Octavia,” Louis said, his eyes on her face. “I finally tracked down her niece two days ago, and her niece had the phone number here. I couldn’t believe I’d finally found her.”
“Did your house survive the . . . ?” Incident, catastrophe, disaster, apocalypse; pick your word, they all would serve.
“Yes, praise the gods, it did. And I have electricity. There’s a lot to do, but I have light and heat. I can cook again. My refrigerator’s humming and my street’s almost clean. I put my own roof back on. Now Octavia can come home with me to a place fit for her.”
“Sookie,” she said very gently, “you’ve been so kind, letting me stay with you. But I want to be with Louis, and I need to be back in New Orleans. There’ll be something I can do to help rebuild the city. It’s home to me.”
Octavia obviously felt she was delivering a heavy blow. I tried to look chagrined. “You have to do what’s best for you, Octavia. I’ve loved having you in my house.” I was so grateful Octavia wasn’t telepathic. “Is Amelia here?”
“Yes, she’s upstairs getting something for me. Bless her heart, she got me a good-bye present somehow.”
“Awww,” I said, trying not to overdo it. I got a sharp look from Louis, but Octavia beamed at me. I’d never seen Octavia beam before, and I liked the look on her.
“I’m just glad I was able to be a help to you,” she said, nodding wisely.
It was a little trouble to maintain my slightly-sad-but-brave smile, but I managed. Thank goodness Amelia clattered down the stairs at that moment with a wrapped package in her hands, a thin, flimsy red scarf tied around it and secured with a big bow. Without looking at me, Amelia said, “Here’s a little something from Sookie and me. I hope you enjoy it.”
“Oh, you’re so sweet. I’m sorry I ever doubted your skill, Amelia. You’re one heck of a witch.”
“Octavia, it means so much to me to hear you say that!” Amelia was genuinely touched and tearful.
Thank goodness Louis and Octavia got up then. Though I liked and respected the older witch, she had provided a series of speed bumps in the smooth running of the household Amelia and I had formed.
I actually found myself breathing a profound sigh of relief when the front door shut on her and her partner. We’d all said good-bye to one another over and over, and Octavia had thanked both of us for various things repeatedly, and she’d also found ways to remind us of all sorts of mysterious things she’d done for us that we were having a hard time recalling.
“Heavens be praised,” said Amelia, collapsing on the stairs. Amelia was not a religious woman, or at least she wasn’t a conventional Christian religious woman, so this was a quite a demonstration from her.
I sat on the edge of the couch. “I hope they’re very happy,” I said.
“You don’t think we should have checked up on him somehow?”
“A witch as strong as Octavia can’t take care of herself?”
“Good point. But did you see those tattoos?”
“They were something, weren’t they? I guess he’s some kind of sorcerer.”
Amelia nodded. “Yeah, I’m sure he practices some form of African magic,” she said. “I don’t think we need to worry about the high crime rate in New Orleans affecting Octavia and Louis. I don’t think anyone’s going to be mugging them.”
“What was the present we gave her?”
“I called my dad, and he faxed me a gift certificate to his home supplies store.”
“Hey, good idea. What do I owe you?”
“Not a dime. He insisted it be on him.”
At least this happy incident took the edge off my generalized anger. I felt more companionable with Amelia, too, now that I no longer harbored a vague resentment for her bringing Octavia into my house. We sat in the kitchen and chatted for about an hour before I turned in, though I was too exhausted to try to explain the saga of what had been happening lately. We went to bed better friends than we’d been in weeks.
As I was getting ready for bed, I was thinking about our practical gift to Octavia, and that reminded me of the card Bobby Burnham had handed me. I got it out of my purse and slit the envelope with my nail file. I pulled out the card inside. Enclosed in it was a picture I’d never seen, clearly taken during Eric’s photo shoot for the calendar you could buy in the
gift shop at Fangtasia. In the calendar shot, Eric (Mr. January) stood by a huge bed made up all in white. The background was gray, with glittering snowflakes hanging down all around. Eric had one foot on the floor, the other knee bent and resting on the bed. He was holding a white fur robe in a strategic position. In the picture Eric had given me today, he was in somewhat the same pose, but he was holding a hand out to the camera as if he was inviting the viewer to come join him on the bed. And the white fur wasn’t covering quite everything. “I wait for the night you join me,” he’d written on the otherwise blank card in his crabbed handwriting.
Faintly cheesy? Yes. Gulp inducing? Oh, you betcha. I could practically feel my blood heat up. I was sorry I’d opened it right before I climbed in the bed. It definitely took me a long time to drift off to sleep.
It felt funny not to hear Octavia buzzing around the house when I woke up the next morning. She’d vanished from my life as quickly as she’d entered it. I hoped that in some of their time together, Octavia and Amelia had discussed Amelia’s status with what remained of her New Orleans coven. It was hard to believe Amelia could turn a young man into a cat (during the course of some very adventurous sex), I thought, as I watched my roommate hurry out the back door to get to the insurance office. Amelia, dressed in navy pants and a tan and navy sweater, looked like she was ready to sell Girl Scout cookies. When the door slammed behind her, I drew a long breath. I was alone in the house for the first morning in ages.
The solitude didn’t last long. I was drinking a second cup of coffee and eating a toasted biscuit when Andy Bellefleur and Special Agent Lattesta came to the front door. I hastily pulled on some jeans and a T-shirt to answer the door.
“Andy, Special Agent Lattesta,” I said. “Come on in.” I led the way back to the kitchen. I wasn’t going to let them keep me away from my coffeepot. “Do you want a cup?” I asked them, but they both shook their heads.
“Sookie,” Andy said, his face serious, “we’re here about Crystal.”
“Sure.” I bit off some biscuit, chewed, and swallowed. I wondered if Lattesta was on a diet or something. He followed my every move. I dipped into his brain. He wasn’t happy that I wasn’t wearing a bra, because my boobs distracted him. He was thinking I was a bit too curvy for his taste. He was thinking he’d better not think about me that way anymore. He was missing his wife. “I figured that would take priority over the other thing,” I said, forcing my attention back to Andy.
I couldn’t tell how much Andy knew—how much Lattesta had shared—about what had happened in Rhodes, but Andy nodded. “We think,” he said, after glancing from me to Lattesta, “that Crystal died three nights ago, sometime between one a.m. and three or four a.m.”
“Sure,” I said again.
“You knew that?” Lattesta went practically on point, like a bird dog.
“It stands to reason. There’s always someone around the bar until one or two, and then normally Terry comes in to clean the floors sometime between six and eight a.m. Terry wasn’t coming so early that day because he’d been tending bar and needed to sleep late, but most people wouldn’t think of that, right?”
“Right,” Andy said after an appreciable pause.
“So,” I said, my point made, and poured myself some more coffee.
“How well do you know Tray Dawson?” Andy asked.
That was a loaded question. The accurate answer was, “Not as well as you think.” I’d once been caught in an alley with Tray Dawson and he’d been naked, but it wasn’t what people thought. (I’d been aware they’d thought quite a bit.) “He’s been dating Amelia,” I said, which was pretty safe to say. “She’s my roommate,” I reminded Lattesta, who was looking a little blank. “You met her two days ago. She’s at work right now. And of course, Tray’s a werewolf.”
Lattesta blinked. It would take a while for him to get used to people saying that with straight faces. Andy’s own expression didn’t change.
“Right,” Andy said. “Was Amelia out with Tray the night Crystal died?”
“I don’t remember. Ask her.”
“We will. Has Tray ever said anything to you about your sister-in-law?”
“I don’t recall anything. Of course, they knew each other, at least a little bit, since they were both wereanimals.”
“How long have you known about . . . werewolves? And the other wereanimals?” Andy asked, as though he just couldn’t help himself.
“Oh, for a while,” I said. “Sam first, and then others.”
“And you didn’t tell anyone?” Andy asked incredulously.
“Of course not,” I said. “People think I’m weird enough as it is. Besides, it wasn’t my secret to tell.” It was my turn to give him a look. “Andy, you knew, too.” After that night in the alley when we’d been attacked by a were-hater, Andy had at least heard Tray in his animal form and then seen him as a naked human. Any basic connect-the-dots would draw a picture of a werewolf.
Andy looked down at the notepad he’d taken out of his pocket. He didn’t write anything down. He took a deep breath. “So that time I saw Tray in the alley, he had just changed back? I’m kind of glad. I never figured you for the kind of woman who’d have sex in public places with someone she scarcely knew.” (That surprised me; I’d always thought Andy believed just about anything bad about me.) “What about that blood-hound that was with you?”
“That was Sam,” I said, rising to rinse out my coffee cup.
“But at the bar he changed into a collie.”
“Collies are cute,” I said. “He figured more people would relate. It’s his usual form.”
Lattesta’s eyes were bugging out. He was one tightly wound guy. “Let’s get back on topic,” he said.
“Your brother’s alibi seems to be true,” Andy said. “We’ve talked to Jason two or three times, and we’ve talked to Michele twice, and she’s adamant that she was with him the whole time. She told us everything that happened that night in detail.” Andy half smiled. “Too much detail.”
That was Michele. She was forthright and downright. Her mom was the same way. I’d gone to vacation Bible school one summer when Mrs. Schubert was teaching my age group. “Tell the truth and shame the devil,” she’d advised us. Michele had taken that adage to heart, though maybe not in the way her mother had intended it.
“I’m glad you believe her,” I said.
“We also talked to Calvin.” Andy leaned on his elbows. “He gave us the background on Dove and Crystal. According to him, Jason knew all about their affair.”
“He did.” I shut my mouth tight. I wasn’t going to talk about that incident if I could help it.
“And we talked to Dove.”
“Of course.”
“Dove Beck,” Lattesta said, reading from his own notes. “He’s twenty-six, married, two kids.”
Since I knew all that, I had nothing to say.
“His cousin Alcee insisted on being there when we talked to him,” Lattesta said. “Dove says he was home all that night, and his wife corroborates that.”
“I don’t think Dove did it,” I said, and they both looked surprised.
“But you gave us the lead that she and Dove had had an affair,” Andy said.
I flushed with mortification. “I’m sorry I did. I hated it when everyone looked at Jason like they were sure he’d done it, when I knew he hadn’t. I don’t think Dove murdered Crystal. I don’t think he cared enough about her to do that to her.”
“But maybe she ruined his marriage.”
“Still, he wouldn’t do that. Dove would be mad at himself, not at her. And she was pregnant. Dove wouldn’t kill a pregnant woman.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Because I can read his mind and see his innocence, I thought. But the vampires and Weres had come out, not me. I was hardly a supernatural creature. I was just a variation on human. “I don’t think that’s in Dove,” I said. “I don’t see it.”
“And we’re supposed to accept that as proof?” Lattesta said.
“I don’t care what you do with it,” I said, stopping short of offering a suggestion as to exactly what he might try. “You asked me; I answered you.”
“So you do think this was a hate crime?”
It was my turn to look down at the table. I didn’t have a notepad to scribble on, but I wanted to consider what I was about to say. “Yes,” I told them finally. “I think it was a hate crime. But I don’t know if it was personal hate, because Crystal was a slut . . . or racial hate, because she was a werepanther.” I shrugged. “If I hear anything, I’ll tell you. I want this solved.”
“Hear anything? In the bar?” Lattesta’s expression was avid. Finally, a human man saw me as intensely valuable. Just my luck he was happily married and thought I was a freak.
“Yes,” I said. “I might hear something in the bar.”
They left after that, and I was glad to see them go. It was my day off. I felt I should do something special today to celebrate, since I was coming off such a difficult time, but I couldn’t think of anything to do. I looked at the Weather Channel and saw the high for today was supposed to be in the sixties. I decided winter was officially over, even though it was still January. It would get cold again, but I was going to enjoy the day.
I got my old chaise longue out of the storage shed and set it up in the backyard. I slicked my hair up in a ponytail and doubled it over so it wouldn’t hang down. I put on my smallest bikini, which was bright orange and turquoise. I covered myself in tanning lotion. I took a radio and the book I was reading and a towel, and went out to the yard. Yep, it was cool. Yep, I got goose bumps when a breeze came up. But this was always a happy day on my calendar, the first day I got to sun-bathe. I was going to enjoy it. I needed it.
Every year I thought of all the reasons I shouldn’t lie out in the sun. Every year I added up my virtues: I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, and I very seldom had sex, though I was willing to change that. But I loved my sun, and it was bright in the sky today. Sooner or later I’d pay for it, but it remained my weakness. I wondered if maybe my fairy blood would give me a pass on the possibility of skin cancer. Nope: my aunt Linda had died of cancer, and she’d had more fairy blood than I had. Well . . . dammit.
I lay on my back, my eyes closed, dark glasses keeping the glare to a minimum. I sighed blissfully, ignoring the fact that I was a little on the cold side. I carefully didn’t think about many things: Crystal, mysterious ill-wishing fairies, the FBI. After fifteen minutes, I switched to my stomach, listening to the country-and-western station from Shreveport, singing along from time to time since no one was around to hear me. I have an awful voice.
“Whatchadoing?” asked a voice right by my ear.
I’d never levitated before, but I think I did then, rising about six inches off the low folding chaise. I squawked, too.
“Jesus Christ, Shepherd of Judea,” I wheezed when I finally realized that the voice belonged to Diantha, part-demon niece of the half-demon lawyer Mr. Cataliades. “Diantha, you scared me so bad I almost jumped out of my skin.”
Diantha was laughing silently, her lean, flat body bobbing up and down. She was sitting cross-legged on the ground, and she was wearing red Lycra running shorts and a black-and-green patterned T-shirt. Red Converses with yellow socks completed her ensemble. She had a new scar, a long red puckered one that ran down her left calf.
“Explosion,” she said when she saw I was looking at it. Diantha had changed her hair color, too; it was a gleaming platinum. But the scar was bad enough to recapture my attention.
“You okay?” I asked. It was easy to adopt a terse style when you were talking to Diantha, whose conversation was like reading a telegram.
“Better,” she said, looking down at the scar herself. Then her strange green eyes met mine. “My uncle sent me.” This was the prelude to the message she had come to deliver, I understood, because she said it so slowly and distinctly.
“What does your uncle want to tell me?” I was still on my stomach, propped on my elbows. My breathing was back to normal.
“He says the fairies are moving around in this world. He says to be careful. He says they’ll take you if they can, and they’ll hurt you.” Diantha blinked at me.
“Why?” I asked, all my pleasure in the sun evaporating as if it had never been. I felt cold. I cast a nervous glance around the yard.
“Your great-grandfather has many enemies,” Diantha said slowly and carefully.
“Diantha, do you know why he has so many enemies?” That was a question I couldn’t ask my great-grandfather himself, or at least I hadn’t worked up the courage to do so.
Diantha looked at me quizzically. “They’re on one side; he’s on the other,” she said as if I were slow. “Theygotyergrandfather.”
“They . . . these other fairies killed my grandfather Fintan?”
She nodded vigorously. “Hedidn’ttellya,” she said.
“Niall? He just said his son had died.”
Diantha broke into a hoot of shrill laughter. “Youcouldsay- that,” she said, and doubled over, still laughing. “Choppedinta pieces!” She slapped me on the arm in her excess of amusement. I winced.
“Sorry,” she said. “Sorrysorrysorry.”
“Okay,” I said. “Just give me a minute.” I rubbed the arm vigorously to restore the feeling. How did you protect yourself if marauding fairies were after you?
“Who exactly am I supposed to be scared of?” I asked.
“Breandan,” she said. “Itmeanssomething; Iforgot.”
“Oh. What does ‘Niall’ mean?” Easily sidetracked, that was me.
“Cloud,” Diantha said. “All Niall’s people got sky names.”
“Okay. So Breandan is after me. Who is he?”
Diantha blinked. This was a very long conversation for her. “Your great-grandfather’s enemy,” she explained carefully, as if I were very dense. “The only other fairy prince.”
“Why did Mr. Cataliades send you?”
“Didyerbest,” she said in one breath. Her unblinking bright eyes latched onto mine, and she nodded and very gently patted my hand.
I had done my best to get everyone out of the Pyramid alive. But it hadn’t worked. It was kind of gratifying to know that the lawyer appreciated my efforts. I’d spent a week being angry at myself because I hadn’t uncovered the whole bombing plot more quickly. If I’d paid more attention, hadn’t let myself get so distracted by the other stuff going on around me . . .
“Also, yercheck’llcome.”
“Oh, good!” I could feel myself brighten, despite the worry caused by the rest of Diantha’s message. “Did you bring a letter for me, or anything like that?” I asked, hoping for a little more enlightenment.
Diantha shook her head, and the gelled spikes of her bright platinum hair trembled all over her head, making her look like an agitated porcupine. “Uncle has to stay neutral,” she said clearly. “Nopapernophonecallsnoemails. That’s why he sent me.”
Cataliades had really stuck his neck out for me. No, he’d stuck Diantha’s neck out. “What if they capture you, Diantha?” I said.
She shrugged a bony shoulder. “Godownfightin’,” she said. Her face grew sad. Though I can’t read demon minds in the same way I can read human ones, any fool could tell Diantha was thinking about her sister, Gladiola, who had died from the sweep of a vampire’s sword. But after a second, Diantha looked simply lethal. “Burn’em,” Diantha said. I sat up and raised my eyebrows to show I didn’t understand.
Diantha turned her hand up and looked at the palm. A tiny flicker of flame hovered right above it.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” I said. I was not a little impressed. I reminded myself to always stay on Diantha’s good side.
“Little,” she said, shrugging. I deduced from that that Diantha could make only a small flame, not a large one. Gladiola must have been taken completely by surprise by the vampire who’d killed her, because vampires were flammable, much more so than humans.
“Do fairies burn like vamps?”
She shook her head. “Buteverything’llburn,” she said, her voice certain and serious. “Sooner, later.”
I suppressed a shiver. “Do you want a drink or something to eat?” I asked.
“Naw.” She got up from the ground, dusted off her brilliant outfit. “Igottago.” She patted me on the head and turned, and then she was gone, running faster than any deer.
I lay back down on the chaise to think about all this. Now Niall had warned me, Mr. Cataliades had warned me, and I felt well and truly scared.
But the warnings, though timely, didn’t give me any practical information about how to guard against this threat. It might materialize at any time or in any place, as far as I could tell. I could assume the enemy fairies wouldn’t storm Merlotte’s and haul me out of there, since the fae were so secretive; but other than that, I didn’t have a clue about what form the attack would take or how to defend myself. Would locked doors keep fairies out? Did they have to be granted entry, like vampires? No, I couldn’t recall having to tell Niall he could come in, and he’d been to the house.
I knew fairies weren’t limited to the night, as the vamps were. I knew they were very strong, as strong as vampires. I knew the fae who were actual fairies (as opposed to the fae who were brownies or goblins or elves) were beautiful and ruthless; that even vampires respected the ferocity of the fairies. The oldest fairies didn’t always live in this
world, as Claudine and Claude did; there was somewhere else they could go, a shrinking and secret world they found vastly preferable to this one: a world without iron. If they could limit their exposure to iron, fairies lived so long that they couldn’t keep track of the years. Niall, for example, tossed around hundreds of years in his conversational chronology in a very inconsistent way. He might describe some event as being five hundred years ago, when another event that predated it was earmarked two hundred years ago. He simply couldn’t keep track of the passage of time, maybe partly because he didn’t spend most of that time in our world.
I wracked my brain for any other information. I did know one other thing, and I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it even momentarily. If iron is bad for fairies, lemon juice is even worse. Claude and Claudine’s sister had been murdered with lemon juice.
Now that I thought of them, I thought it might be helpful for me to talk to Claude and Claudine. Not only were they my cousins, but Claudine was my fairy godmother, and she was supposed to help me. She’d be at work at the department store where she handled complaints and wrapped packages and took layaway payments. Claude would be at the male strip club he now owned and managed. He’d be easier to reach. I went inside to look up the number. Claude actually answered the phone himself.
“Yes,” he said, managing to convey indifference, contempt, and boredom in the one word.
“Hi, sweetie!” I said brightly. “I need to talk to you face-to-face. Can I run over there, or are you busy?”
“No, don’t come here!” Claude sounded almost alarmed at the idea. “I’ll meet you at the mall.”
The twins lived in Monroe, which boasted a nice mall.
“Okay,” I said. “Where and when?”
There was a moment of silence. “Claudine can get off late for lunch. We’ll meet you in an hour and a half in the food court, around Chick-fil-A.”
“See you there,” I said, and Claude hung up. Mr. Charm. I hustled into my favorite jeans and a green and white T-shirt. I brushed my hair vigorously. It had gotten so long I found it a lot of trouble to deal with, but I couldn’t bring myself to cut it.
Since I’d exchanged blood with Eric several times, not only had I not caught so much as a cold, but I didn’t even have split ends. Plus, my hair was shinier and actually looked thicker.
I wasn’t surprised that people bought vampire blood on the black market. It did surprise me that people were foolish enough to trust the sellers when they said that the red stuff was actually genuine vampire blood. Often the vials contained TrueBlood, or pig’s blood, or even the Drainer’s own blood. If the purchaser did get genuine vampire blood, it was aged and might easily drive the consumer mad. I would never have gone to a Drainer to buy vampire blood. But now that I’d had it several times (and very fresh), I didn’t even need to use makeup base. My skin was flawless. Thanks, Eric!
I don’t know why I bothered with being proud of myself, because no one was going to look at me twice when I was with Claude. He’s close to six feet tall, with rippling black hair and brown eyes, the physique of a stripper (six-pack abs and all), and the jaw and cheekbones of a Renaissance statue. Unfortunately, he has the personality of a statue, too.
Today Claude was wearing khakis and a tight tank top under an open green silk shirt. He was playing with a pair of dark glasses. Though Claude’s facial expressions when he wasn’t “on” ranged from blank to sullen, today he actually seemed nervous. He scanned the food court area as if he suspected that someone had followed me, and he didn’t relax when I dropped into a chair at his table. He had a Chick-fil-A cup in front of him, but he hadn’t gotten anything to eat, so I didn’t, either.
“Cousin,” he said, “are you well?” He didn’t even try to sound sincere, but at least he said the right words. Claude had gotten marginally more polite when I’d discovered my great-grandfather was his grandfather, but he’d never forget I was (mostly) human. Claude had as much contempt for humans as most fairies did, but he was definitely fond of bedding humans—as long as they had beard stubble.
“Yes, thank you, Claude. It’s been a while.”
“Since we met? Yes.” And that was just fine with him. “How can I help you? Oh, here comes Claudine.” He looked relieved.
Claudine was wearing a brown suit with big gold buttons and a brown, cream, and tan striped blouse. She dressed very conservatively for work, and though the outfit was becoming, something about the cut made her look somewhat less slim, I noticed. She was Claude’s twin; there had been another sister, their triplet Claudette, but Claudette had been murdered. I guess if there are two remaining out of three, you call the living two
“twins”? Claudine was as tall as Claude, and as she bent to kiss him on the cheek, their hair (exactly the same shade) mingled in a cascade of dark ripples. She kissed me, too. I wondered if all the fae are as into physical contact as the fairies are. My cousin had a trayful of food: French fries, chicken nuggets, some kind of dessert, a big sugary drink.
“What kind of trouble is Niall in?” I asked, going directly to the point. “What kind of enemies does he have? Are they all actual fairies? Or are they some other kind of fae?”
There was a moment of silence while Claudine and Claude noted my brisk mood. They weren’t at all surprised at my questions, which I thought was significant.
“Our enemies are fairies,” Claudine said. “The other fae don’t mix in our politics, as a rule, though we’re all variations on the same theme—like pygmies, Caucasians, and Asians are variations on human beings.” She looked sad. “All of us are less than we used to be.” She tore open a ketchup package and squirted it all over her fries. She stuck three fries in her mouth at one time. Wow, hungry.
“It would take hours to explain our whole lineage,” Claude said, but he wasn’t dismissing me. He was simply stating a fact. “We come from the line of fairies that claims kinship to the sky. Our grandfather, your great-grandfather, is one of the few surviving members of our royal family.”
“He’s a prince,” I said, because that was one of the few facts I knew. Prince Charming. Prince Valiant. Prince of the City . The title carried a lot of weight.
“Yes. There is another prince, Breandan.” Claude pronounced it “Bren-DAWN.” Diantha had mentioned Breandan. “He is the son of Niall’s older brother, Rogan. Rogan claimed kinship to the sea, and from there his influence spread to all bodies of water. Rogan recently has gone to the Summerlands.”
“Dead,” Claudine translated before she took a bite of her chicken.
Claude shrugged. “Yes, Rogan’s dead. He was the only one who could rein in Breandan. And you should know, Breandan’s the one who—” But Claude stopped in midsentence, because his sister had her hand clamped down on his arm. A woman who was feeding a little boy French fries looked over at us curiously, her attention attracted by Claudine’s sudden gesture. Claudine gave Claude a look that could blister paint. He nodded, removed his arm from her grip, and began to speak again. “Breandan disagrees very strongly with Niall about policy. He . . .”
The twins looked at each other. Finally Claudine nodded.
“Breandan believes all the humans with fairy blood should be eradicated. He believes every time one of us mates with a human, we lose some of our magic.”
I cleared my throat, trying to get rid of the lump of fear that had risen to block it. “So Breandan’s an enemy. Any more royalty on Niall’s side?” I asked in a choked voice.
“A less-than-prince. His title doesn’t translate,” Claude said. “Our father, Dillon son of Niall, and his first wife, Branna. Our mother is Binne. If Niall goes to the Summerlands, Dillon will replace him as prince. But of course he must wait.”
The names were unfamiliar. The first one sounded almost like Dylan, the second sounded like BEE-nah. “Spell those, please,” I said, and Claudine said, “B-I-N-N-E. D-I-L-L-O-N. Niall didn’t live happily with Branna, and it took him a long time to love our father, Dillon. Niall preferred his half-human sons.” She smiled at me to reassure me that humans were okay with her, I guess.
Niall had told me once I was his only living relative. But that wasn’t true. Niall was definitely swayed by emotion, not facts. I needed to remember that. Claude and Claudine didn’t seem to blame Niall’s partiality on me, to my huge relief.
“So who’s on Breandan’s side?” I asked.
“Dermot,” said Claudine. She looked at me expectantly.
I knew that name. I struggled to remember where I’d heard it.
“He’s my grandfather Fintan’s brother,” I said slowly. “Niall’s other son by Einin. But he’s half human.” Einin had been a human woman seduced by Niall centuries ago. (She’d thought he was an angel, which gives you some idea how good fairies can look when they don’t need to look human.) My half-human great-uncle was trying to kill his dad?
“Did Niall tell you that Fintan and Dermot were twins?” Claude asked.
“No,” I said, astonished.
“Dermot was the younger by a few minutes. The twins were not identical, you understand,” he said. He was enjoying my ignorance. “They were . . .” He paused, looked baffled. “I don’t know the right term,” he said.
“Fraternal. Okay, interesting, but so?”
“Actually,” Claudine said, looking down intently at her chicken, “your brother, Jason, is the spitting image of Dermot.”
“Are you suggesting that . . . What are you suggesting?” I was ready to be indignant, once I knew why.
“We’re only telling you that this is why Niall has been naturally inclined to favor you over your brother,” Claude said. “Niall loved Fintan, but Dermot defied Niall at every turn. He openly rebelled against our grandfather and pledged his loyalty to Breandan, though Breandan despises him. In addition to Dermot’s resemblance to Jason, which is only a quirk of genes, Dermot is an asshole like Jason. You can see why Niall doesn’t claim kinship with your brother.”
I felt a moment’s pity for Jason until my common sense woke me up. “So Niall has enemies besides Breandan and Dermot?”
“They have their own followers and associates, including a few assassins.”
“But your dad and your mom are on Niall’s side?”
“Yes. Others are, too, of course. All of us sky people.”
“So I have to watch out for any approaching fairies, and they might attack me at any time because I’m Niall’s blood.”
“Yes. The fae world is too dangerous. Especially now. That’s one reason we live in the human world.” Claude glanced at Claudine, who was wolfing chicken nuggets like she’d been starving.
Claudine swallowed, patted her mouth with the paper napkin, and said, “Here’s the most important point.” She popped in another nugget and glanced at Claude, signaling him to take over.
“If you see someone who looks like your brother, but isn’t . . .” Claude said.
Claudine swallowed. “Run like hell,” she advised.
Chapter 9
I drove home more confused than ever. Though I loved my great-grandfather as much as I could on our short acquaintance . . . and I was absolutely ready to love him even more, and I was willing to back him up to the limit because we were kin . . . I still didn’t know how to fight this war, or how to dodge it, either. Fairies did not want to be known to the human world, and they never would. They weren’t like the wereanimals or the vampires, who wanted to share in the planet with us. There was much less reason for the fairies to keep in line with human policies and rules. They could do anything they wished and vanish back into their secret place.
For about the millionth time, I wished I had a normal great-grandfather instead of this improbable, glorious, and inconvenient fairy prince version.
Then I was ashamed of myself. I should be happy for what I’d been given. I hoped God hadn’t noticed my lapse of appreciation.
I’d already had a busy day, and it was only two o’clock. This wasn’t shaping up to be my normal day off. Usually I did laundry, cleaned house, went to the store, read, paid bills. . . . But today was so pretty I wanted to stay outside. I wanted to work on something that would allow me to think at the same time. There sure was plenty to mull over.
I looked at the flower beds around the house and decided to weed. This was my least-favorite chore, maybe because it was the one I’d often been assigned as a child. Gran had believed we should be brought up to work. It was in her honor that I tried to keep the flower beds looking nice, and now I sighed and made up my mind to get the job done. I’d start with the bed by the driveway, on the south side of the house.
I went over to our metal toolshed, the latest in a series of toolsheds that had served the Stackhouse family over the generations we’d lived on this spot. I opened the door with the familiar mingled feelings of pleasure and horror, because someday I was going to have to put in some serious work cleaning out the interior. I still had my grandmother’s old trowel; there was no telling who’d used it before her. It was ancient but so well taken care of that it was better than any modern substitute. I stepped into the shadowy shed and found my gardening gloves and the trowel.
I knew from watching Antiques Roadshow that there were people who collected old farm implements. This toolshed would be an Aladdin’s cave to such a collector. My family didn’t believe in letting things go if they still worked. Though chock-full, the shed was orderly, because that had been my grandfather’s way. When we’d come to live with him and Gran, he’d drawn an outline for every commonly used tool. That was where he’d wanted that tool to be replaced every time it was used, and that was where it was still kept now. I could reach unerringly for the trowel, which was maybe the oldest tool in the shed. It was heavy, sharper, and narrower than its modern counterparts, but its shape was familiar to my hand.
If it had been really, truly spring, I’d have changed back into my bikini to combine business with pleasure. But though the sun was still shining, I wasn’t in a carefree mood any longer. I pulled my gardening gloves on, because I didn’t want to ruin my fingernails. Some of these weeds seemed to fight back. One grew on a thick, fleshy stalk, and it had sharp points on its leaves. If you let it grow long enough, it blossomed. It was really ugly and prickly, and it had to be removed by its roots. There were quite a few of them springing up among the emerging cannas.
Gran would have had a fit.
I crouched and set to work. With my right hand, I sank the trowel in the soft dirt of the flower bed, loosening the roots of the nasty weed, and pulled it up with my left hand. I shook the stalk to get the dirt off the roots and then tossed it aside. Before I’d started I’d put a radio out on the back porch. In no time at all, I was singing along with LeAnn Rimes. I began to feel less troubled. In a few minutes, I had a respectable pile of uprooted weeds and a glow of virtue.
If he hadn’t spoken, it would have ended differently. But since he was full of himself, he had to open his mouth. His pride saved my life.
Also, he picked some unwise words. Saying, “I’ll enjoy killing you for my lord,” is just not the way to make my acquaintance.
I have good reflexes, and I erupted from my squatting position with the trowel in my hand and I drove it upward into his stomach. It slid right in, as if it were designed to be a fairy-killing weapon.
And that was exactly what it turned out to be, because the trowel was iron and he was a fairy.
I leaped back and dropped into a half crouch, still gripping the bloody trowel, and waited to see what he’d do. He was looking down at the blood seeping through his fingers with an expression of absolute amazement, as if he couldn’t believe I’d ruined his ensemble. Then he looked at me, his eyes pale blue and huge, and there was a big question on his face, as if he were asking me if I’d really done that to him, if it wasn’t some kind of mistake.
I began backing up to the porch steps, never taking my eyes from him, but he wasn’t a threat any longer. As I reached behind me to open the screen door, my would-be murderer crumpled to the ground, still looking surprised.
I retreated into the house and locked the door. Then I walked on trembling legs over to the window above the kitchen sink and peered out, leaning as far over the sink as I could. From this angle I could see only a bit of the crumpled body. “Okay,” I said out loud.“Okay.” He was dead, looked like. It had been so quick .
I started to pick up the wall phone, noticed how my hands were shaking, and spotted my cell phone on the counter where I’d been charging it. Since this was a crisis that definitely called for the head honcho, I speed-dialed my great-grandfather’s big, secret emergency number. I thought the situation qualified. A male voice, not Niall’s, answered. “Yes?” the voice said with a cautious tone.
“Ah, is Niall there?”
“I can reach him. Can I help you?”
Steady ,I told myself. Steady . “Would you please tell him I’ve killed a fairy and he’s laid out in my yard and I don’t know what to do with the body?”
There was a moment of silence.
“Yes, I’ll tell him that.”
“Pretty soon, you think? Because I’m alone and I’m kind of freaked out.”
“Yes. Quite soon.”
“And someone will come?” Geez Louise, I sounded whiny. I made my spine stiffen. “I mean, I can load him in my car trunk, I guess, or I could call the sheriff.” I wanted to impress this unknown with the fact that I wasn’t completely needy and helpless. “But
there’s the whole thing with you guys being secret, and he didn’t seem to have a weapon, and obviously I can’t prove this guy said he’d enjoy killing me.”
“You . . . have killed a fairy.”
“I said that. Way back.” Mr. Slow-on-the-Uptake. I peered out the window again. “Yeah, he’s still not moving. Dead and gone.”
This time the silence lasted so long that I thought I must have blanked out and missed something. I said, “I’m sorry?”
“Are you really? We’ll be there very soon.” And he hung up.
I couldn’t not look, and I couldn’t bear to look. I’d seen the dead before, both human and nonhuman. And since the night I’d met Bill Compton in Merlotte’s, I’d seen more than my share of bodies. Not that that was Bill’s fault, of course.
I had goose pimples all over.
In about five minutes, Niall and another fairy walked out of the woods. There must be some kind of portal out there. Maybe Scotty had beamed them up. Or down. And maybe I wasn’t thinking too clearly.
The two fairies stopped when they saw the body and then exchanged a few words. They seemed astonished. But they weren’t scared, and they weren’t acting like they expected the guy to get up and fight, so I crept across the back porch and out the screen door.
They knew I was there, but they continued their eyeballing of the body.
My great-grandfather raised his arm and I crept under it. He held me to him, and I glanced up to see that he was smiling.
Okay, that was unexpected.
“You’re a credit to our family. You’ve killed my enemy,” he said. “I was so right about humans.” He looked proud as punch.
“This is a good thing?”
The other fairy laughed and looked at me for the first time. He had hair the color of butterscotch, and his eyes matched his hair, which to me was so weird that it was really
off-putting—though like all the fairies I’d met, he was gorgeous. I had to suppress a sigh. Between the vampires and the fairies, I was doomed to be a plain Jane.
“I’m Dillon,” he said.
“Oh, Claudine’s dad. Nice to meet you. I guess your name means something, too?” I said.
“Lightning,” he said, and gave me a particularly winsome smile.
“Who is this?” I said, jerking my head at the body.
“He was Murry,” Niall said. “He was a close friend of my nephew Breandan.”
Murry looked very young; to the human eye, he’d been perhaps eighteen. “He said he was looking forward to killing me,” I told them.
“But instead, you killed him. How did you do it?” Dillon asked, as if he was asking how I rolled out a flaky piecrust.
“With my grandmother’s trowel,” I said. “Actually, it’s been in my family for a long time. Not like we make a fetish of gardening tools or anything; it just works and it’s there and there’s no need to buy another one.” Babbling.
They both looked at me. I couldn’t tell if they thought I was nuts or what.
“Could you show us this gardening tool?” Niall said.
“Sure. Do you-all want some tea or something? I think we’ve got some Pepsi and some lemonade.” No, no, not lemonade! They’d die! “Sorry, cancel the lemonade. Tea?”
“No,” said Niall quite gently. “I think not now.”
I’d dropped the bloody trowel in among the cannas. When I picked it up and approached them, Dillon flinched. “Iron!” he said.
“You don’t have the gloves on,” Niall said to his son chidingly, and took the trowel from me. His hands were covered with the clear flexible coating developed in fairy-owned chemical factories. Coated with this substance, fairies were able to go out in the human world with some degree of assurance that they wouldn’t get poisoned in the process.
Dillon looked chastened. “No, sorry, Father.”
Niall shook his head as if he were disappointed in Dillon, but his attention was really on the trowel. He might have been prepared to handle something poisonous to him, but I noticed he still handled it very carefully.
“It went into him really easily,” I said, and had to repress a sudden wave of nausea. “I don’t know why. It’s sharp, but it’s not that sharp.”
“Iron can part our flesh like a hot knife in butter,” Niall said.
“Ugh.” Well, at least I knew I hadn’t suddenly gotten superstrong.
“He surprised you?” Dillon asked. Though he didn’t have the fine, fine wrinkles that made my great-grandfather even more beautiful, Dillon looked only a little younger than Niall, which made their relationship all the more disorienting. But when I looked down at the corpse once more, I was completely back in the present.
“He sure did surprise me. I was just working away weeding the flower bed, and the next thing you know, he was standing right there telling me how much he was looking forward to killing me. I’d never done a thing to him. And he scared me, so I kind of came up in a rush with the trowel, and I got him in the stomach.” Again, I wrestled with my own stomach’s tendency to heave.
“Did he speak any more?” My great-grandfather was trying to ask me casually, but he seemed pretty interested in my answer.
“No, sir,” I said. “He kind of looked surprised, and then he . . . he died.” I walked over to the steps and sat down rather suddenly and heavily.
“It’s not exactly like I feel guilty,” I said in a rush of words. “It’s just that he was trying to kill me and he was happy about it and I never did a thing to him. I didn’t know anything about him, and now he’s dead.”
Dillon knelt in front of me. He looked into my face. He didn’t exactly look kind, but he looked less detached. “He was your enemy, and now he is dead,” he said. “This is cause for rejoicing.”
“Not exactly,” I said. I didn’t know how to explain.
“You’re a Christian ,” he said, as if he’d discovered I was a hermaphrodite or a fruitarian.
“I’m a real bad one,” I said hurriedly. His lips compressed, and I could see he was trying hard not to laugh. I’d never felt less like mirth, with the man I’d killed lying a few feet
away. I wondered how many years Murry had walked this earth, and now he was crumpled in a lifeless heap, his blood staining my gravel. Wait a minute! He wasn’t anymore. He was turning to . . . dust. It wasn’t anything like the gradual flaking away of a vampire; it was more like someone was erasing Murry.
“Are you cold?” Niall asked. He didn’t seem to think the disappearance of bits of the body was anything unusual.
“No, sir. I’m just all upset. I mean, I was sunbathing and then I went to see Claude and Claudine, and now here I am.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the body’s incremental disappearance.
“You’ve been lying in the sun and gardening. We like the sun and sky,” he said, as if that was proof positive I had a special relationship with the fairy branch of my family. He smiled at me. He was so beautiful. I felt like an adolescent when I was around him, an adolescent with acne and baby fat. Now I felt like a murderous adolescent.
“Are you going to gather up his . . . ashes?” I asked. I rose, trying to look brisk and purposeful. Action would make me feel less miserable.
Two pairs of alien eyes stared at me blankly.
“Why?” Dillon asked.
“To bury them.”
They looked horrified.
“No, not in the ground ,” Niall said, trying to sound less revolted than he was. “That isn’t our way.”
“Then what are you going to do with them?” There was quite a heap of glittering powder on my driveway and in my flower bed, and there was still his torso remaining. “I don’t mean to be pushy, but Amelia might come home anytime. I don’t get a lot of other visitors, but there’s the odd UPS delivery person and the meter reader.”
Dillon looked at my great-grandfather as if I’d suddenly begun speaking Japanese. Niall said, “Sookie shares her house with another woman, and this woman may return at any moment.”
“Is anyone else going to come after me?” I asked, diverted from my question.
“Possibly,” Niall said. “Fintan did a better job of protecting you than I am doing, Sookie. He even protected you from me, and I only want to love you. But he wouldn’t tell me where you were.” Niall looked sad, and harried, and tired for the first time since I’d met him. “I’ve tried to keep you out of it. I imagined I only wanted to meet you before they succeeded in killing me, and I arranged it through the vampire to make my movements less noticeable, but in arranging that meeting I’ve drawn you into danger. You can trust my son Dillon.” He put his hand on the younger fairy’s shoulder. “If he brings you a message, it’s really from me.” Dillon smiled charmingly, displaying super-naturally white and sharp teeth. Okay, he was scary, even if he was Claude and Claudine’s dad.
“I’ll talk to you soon,” Niall said, bending over to give me a kiss. The fine, gleaming pale hair fell against my cheek. He smelled so good; fairies do. “I’m sorry, Sookie,” he said. “I thought I could force them all to accept . . . Well, I couldn’t.” His green eyes glowed with intensity and regret. “Do you have—yes, a garden hose! We could gather up most of the dust, but I think it more practical if you simply . . . distribute it.”
He put his arms around me and hugged me, and Dillon gave me a mocking salute. The two took a few steps to the trees, and then they simply vanished into the undergrowth as deer do when you encounter them in the woods.
So that was that. I was left in my sunny yard, all by myself, with a sizeable pile of glittering powdery dust in a body-shaped heap on the gravel.
I added to my mental list of the odd things I’d done that day. I’d entertained the police, sunbathed, visited at a mall with some fairies, weeded, and killed someone. Now it was powdered corpse removal time. And the day wasn’t over yet.
I turned on the faucet, unwound the hose enough so the flow would reach the right area, and compressed the spray head to aim the water at the fairy dust.
I had a weird, out-of-body feeling. “You’d think I’d be getting used to it,” I said out loud, startling myself even more. I didn’t want to add up the people I’d killed, though technically most of them weren’t people. Before the past two years (maybe even less if I counted down the months), I’d never laid a finger on another person in anger, aside from hitting Jason in the stomach with my plastic baseball bat when he tore my Barbie’s hair out.
I pulled myself up sharply. The deed was done now. No going back.
I released the spray head and turned the hose off at the faucet.
In the fading sunlight, it was a little hard to tell, but I thought I’d dispersed the dust pretty thoroughly.
“But not from my memory,” I said seriously. Then I had to laugh, and it sounded a little crazy. I was standing out in my backyard hosing down fairy blood and making melodramatic statements all to myself. Next I’d be doing the Hamlet soliloquy that I’d had to memorize in high school.
This afternoon had brought me down hard, to a real bad place.
I bit down on my bottom lip. Now that I was definitely over the intoxication of having a living relative, I had to face the fact that Niall’s behavior was charming (mostly) but unpredictable. By his own admission, he’d inadvertently put me at great risk. Maybe I should have wondered before this what my grandfather Fintan had been like. Niall had told me he’d watched over me without ever making himself known, an image that seemed creepy but touching. Niall was creepy and touching, too. Great-uncle Dillon just seemed creepy.
The temperature was dropping with the creeping darkness, and I was shivering by the time I went in the house. The hose might freeze tonight, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. There were clothes in the dryer, and I had to eat since I’d missed eating lunch at the mall. It was getting closer to suppertime. I had to concentrate on small things.
Amelia phoned while I was folding the laundry. She told me she was about to leave work and was going to meet Tray for dinner and a movie. She asked me if I wanted to come along, but I said I was busy. Amelia and Tray didn’t need a third wheel, and I didn’t need to feel like one.
It would have been nice to have some company. But what would I have done for social chitchat? Wow, that trowel slid into his stomach like it was Jell-O .
I shuddered and tried to think of what to do next. An uncritical companion, that was who I needed. I missed the cat we’d called Bob (though he hadn’t been born a cat and wasn’t one now). Maybe I could get another cat a real one. It wasn’t the first time I’d considered going to the animal shelter. I’d better wait until this fairy crisis was over before I did that. There wasn’t any point in picking out a pet if I was liable to be abducted or killed at any moment, right? Wouldn’t be fair to the animal. I caught myself giggling, and I knew that couldn’t be good.
Time to stop brooding; time to get something done. First, I’d clean off the trowel and put it away. I carried it to the kitchen sink, and I scrubbed it and rinsed it. The dull iron seemed
to have a new gloss on it, like a bush that had gotten watered after a drought. I held it to the light and stared at the old tool. I shook myself.
Okay, that had really been an unpleasant simile. I banished the idea and scrubbed. When I thought the trowel looked spotless, I washed it and dried it all over again. Then I walked quickly out the back door and through the dark to hang the damn thing back in the toolshed on its designated hook.
I wondered if I might not get a cheap new trowel at Wal-Mart after all. I wasn’t sure I could use the iron one the next time I wanted to move some jonquil bulbs. It would feel like using a gun to pry out nails. I hesitated, the trowel poised to hang from its designated hook. Then I made up my mind and carried it back to the house. I paused on the back steps, admiring the last streak of light for a few moments until my stomach growled.
What a long day it had been. I was ready to settle in front of the television with a plate of something bad for me, watching some show that wouldn’t improve my mind at all.
I heard the crunching of a car coming up the driveway as I was opening the screen door. I waited outside to see who my caller might be. Whoever it was, they knew me a little, because the car proceeded around to the back.
In a day full of shocks, here was another: my caller was Quinn, who was not supposed to stick his big toe into Area Five. He was driving a Ford Taurus, a rental car.
“Oh,great ,” I said. I’d wanted company earlier, but not this company. As much as I’d liked and admired Quinn, this conversation promised to be just as upsetting as the day had been.
He got out of his car and strode over to me, his walk graceful, as always. Quinn is a very large shaved-bald man with pansy purple eyes. He is one of the few remaining weretigers in the world and probably the only male weretiger on the North American continent. We’d broken up the last time I’d seen him. I wasn’t proud of how I’d told him or why I’d done it, but I thought I’d been pretty clear about us not being a couple.
Yet here he was, and his big warm hands were resting on my shoulders. Any pleasure I might have felt at seeing him again was drowned by the wave of anxiety that swept over me. I felt trouble in the air.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I said. “Eric turned down your request; he told me so.”
“Did he ask you first? Did you know I wanted to see you?” The darkness was now intense enough to trigger the outside security light. Quinn’s face had harsh lines in the yellow glare. His gaze locked with mine.
“No, but that’s not the point,” I said. I felt rage on the wind. It wasn’t my rage.
“I think it is.”
It was sunset. There simply wasn’t time to get into an extended argument. “Didn’t we say it all last time?” I didn’t want to go through another scene, no matter how fond I was of this man.
“You said what you thought was all, babe. I disagree.”
Oh, great. Just what I needed! But since I really do know that not everything is about me, I counted to ten and said, “I know I didn’t give you any slack when I told you we shouldn’t see each other anymore, Quinn, but I did mean what I said. What’s changed in your personal situation? Is your mom able to take care of herself now? Or has Frannie grown up enough to be able to manage your mom if she escapes?” Quinn’s mom had been through an awful time, and she’d come out of it more or less nuts. Actually, more. His sister, Frannie, was still a teenager.
He bowed his head for a moment, as if he were gathering himself. Then he looked directly into my eyes again. “Why are you harder on me than on anyone else?” he asked.
“I am not,” I said instantly. But then I thought, Am I?
“Have you asked Eric to give up Fangtasia? Have you asked Bill to give up his computer enterprise? Have you asked Sam to turn his back on his family?”
“What . . . ?” I began, trying to work out the connection.
“You’re asking me to give up other people I love—my mother and my sister—if I want to have you,” he said.
“I’m not asking you to do anything ,” I said, feeling the tension inside me ratchet up to an almost intolerable level. “I told you that I wanted to be first with the guy in my life. And I figured—I still figure—that your family has got to come first with you because your mom and your sister are not exactly stand-on-their-own-two-feet kind of women. I haven’t asked Eric to give up Fangtasia! Why would I do that? And where does Sam come into it?” I couldn’t even think of a reason to mention Bill. I was so over him.
“Bill loves his status in the human and vampire worlds, and Eric loves his little piece of Louisiana more than he’ll ever love you,” Quinn said, and he sounded almost sorry for me. That was ridiculous.
“Where did all the hating come from?” I asked, holding my hands spread in front of me. “I didn’t quit dating you because of any feelings I had for someone else. I quit dating you because I thought your plate was full already.”
“He’s trying to wall you off from everyone else who cares for you,” Quinn said, focusing on me with unnerving intensity. “And look at all the dependent she has.”
“You’re talking about Eric?” All Eric’s “dependents” were vampires who could damn well take care of themselves.
“He’ll never dump his little area for you. He’d never let his little pack of sworn vamps serve someone else. He’ll never—”
I couldn’t stand this anymore. I gave a scream of sheer frustration. I actually stomped my foot like a three-year-old. “I haven’t asked him to!” I yelled. “What are you talking about? Did you show up to tell me no else will ever love me? What’s wrong with you?”
“Yes, Quinn,” said a familiar, cold voice. “What’s wrong with you?”
I swear I jumped at least six inches. I’d let my quarrel with Quinn absorb my attention, and I hadn’t felt Bill’s arrival.
“You’re frightening Sookie,” Bill said from a yard behind me, and my spine shivered at the menace in his voice. “That won’t happen, tiger.”
Quinn snarled. His teeth began growing longer, sharper, before my eyes. Bill stood at my side in the next second. His eyes were glowing an eerie silvery brown.
Not only was I afraid they’d kill each other, I realized that I was really tired of people popping on and off of my property like it was a train station on the supernatural railroad.
Quinn’s hands became clawed. A growl rumbled deep in his chest.
“No!” I said, willing them to listen to me. This was the day from hell.
“You’re not even on the list, vampire,” Quinn said, and his voice wasn’t really his any longer. “You’re the past.”
“I will make you a rug on my floor,” Bill said, and his voice was colder and smoother than ever, like ice on glass.
The two idiots launched themselves at each other.
I started to jump in to stop them, but the functioning part of my brain told me that would be suicidal. I thought, My grass is going to get sprinkled by a little more blood this evening . What I should have been thinking was, I need to get the hell out of the way . In fact, I should have run inside and locked the door and left them to it.
But that was hindsight. Actually, what I did was stand there for a moment, hands fluttering uselessly, trying to figure out how to separate them . . . and then the two grappling figures lurched and staggered. Quinn threw Bill away from him with all his strength. Bill cannoned into me with such force that I actually went up in the air an inch or two—and then, very decisively, down I came.