Book Seven 17-19

17
MY EYES SNAPPED OPEN LIKE SHADES THAT WEREwound too tight.
Wake up, wake up, wake up! Sookie, something’s wrong.
Barry, where are you?
Standing at the elevators on the human floor.
I’m coming.I pulled on last night’s outfit, but without the heels. Instead, I slid my feet into
my rubber-soled slippers. I grabbed the slim wallet that held my room key, driver’s license,
and credit card, and stuffed it in one pocket, jammed my cell phone into the other, and
hurried out of the room. The door slammed behind me with an ominous thud. The hotel felt
empty and silent, but my clock had read 9:50.
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
I had to run down a long corridor and turn right to get to the elevators. I didn’t meet a soul.
A moment’s thought told me that was not so strange. Most humans on the floor would still
be asleep, because they kept vampire hours. But there weren’t even any hotel employees
cleaning the halls.
All the little tracks of disquiet that had crawled through my brain, like slug tracks on your
back doorstep, had coalesced into a huge throbbing mass of uneasiness.
I felt like I was on theTitanic, and I’d just heard the hull scrape against the iceberg.
I finally spotted someone, lying on the floor. I’d been woken so suddenly and sharply that
everything I did had a dreamlike quality to it, so finding a body in the hall was not such a
jolt.
I let out a cry, and Barry came bounding around the corner. He crouched down with me. I
rolled over the body. It was Jake Purifoy, and he couldn’t be roused.
Why isn’t he in his room? What was he doing out so late?Even Barry’s mental voice
sounded panicked.
Look, Barry, he’s lying sort of pointing toward my room. Do you think he was coming to
see me?
Yes, and he didn’t make it.
What could have been so important that Jake wasn’t prepared for his day’s sleep? I stood
up, thinking furiously. I’d never, ever heard of a vampire who didn’t know instinctively that
the dawn was coming. I thought of the conversations I’d had with Jake, and the two men
I’d seen leaving his room.
“Youbastard ,” I hissed through my teeth, and I kicked him as hard as I could.
“Jesus, Sookie!” Barry grabbed my arm, horrified. But then he got the picture from my
brain.
“We need to find Mr. Cataliades and Diantha,” I said. “They can get up; they’re not
vamps.”
“I’ll get Cecile. She’s human, my roommate,” Barry said, and we both went off in different
directions, leaving Jake to lie where he was. It was all we could do.
We were back together in five minutes. It had been surprisingly easy to raise Mr.
Cataliades, and Diantha had been sharing his room. Cecile proved to be a young woman
with a no-nonsense haircut and a competent way about her, and I wasn’t surprised when
Barry introduced her as the king’s new executive assistant.
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
I’d been a fool to discount, even for a minute, the warning that Clovache had passed along.
I was so angry at myself I could hardly stand to be inside my own skin. But I had to shove
that aside and we had to act now.
“Listen to what I think,” I said. I’d been putting things together in my head. “Some of the
waiters have been avoiding Barry and me over the past couple of days, as soon as they
found out what we were.”
Barry nodded. He’d noticed, too. He looked oddly guilty, but that had to wait.
“They know what we are. They didn’t want us to know what they’re about to do, I’m
assuming. So I’m also assuming it must be something really, really bad. And Jake Purifoy
was in on it.”
Mr. Cataliades had been looking faintly bored, but now he began to look seriously alarmed.
Diantha’s big eyes went from face to face.
“What shall we do?” Cecile asked, which earned her high marks in my book.
“It’s the extra coffins,” I said. “And the blue suitcase in the queen’s suite. Barry, you were
asked to bring up a suitcase, too, right? And it didn’t belong to anyone?”
Barry said, “Right. It’s still sitting in the foyer of the king’s suite, since everyone passes
through there. We thought someone would claim it. I was going to take it back to the
luggage department today.”
I said, “The one I went down for is sitting in the living room of the queen’s suite. I think
the guy who was in on it was Joe, the manager down in the luggage and delivery area. He’s
the one who called me down to get the suitcase. No one else seemed to know anything
about it.”
“The suitcases will blow up?” Diantha said in her shrill voice. “The unclaimed coffins in
the basement, too? If the basement goes, the building will collapse!” I’d never heard
Diantha sound so human.
“We have to wake them up,” I said. “We have to get them out.”
“The building’s going to blow,” said Barry, trying to process the idea.
“The vamps won’t wake up.” Cecile the practical. “They can’t.”
“Quinn!” I said. I was thinking of so many things at once that I was standing rooted in
place. Fishing my phone from my pocket, I punched his number on speed dial and heard his
mumble at the other end. “Get out,” I said. “Quinn, get your sister and get out. There’s
going to be an explosion.” I only waited to hear him sound more alert before I shut the
phone.
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“We have to save ourselves, too,” Barry was saying.
Brilliantly, Cecile ran down the hall to a red fixture and flipped the fire alarm. The clamor
almost split our eardrums, but the effect was wonderful on the sleeping humans on this
floor. Within seconds, they began to come out of the rooms.
“Take the stairs,” Cecile directed them in a bellow, and obediently, they did. I was glad to
see Carla’s dark head among them. But I didn’t see Quinn, and he was always easy to spot.
“The queen is high up,” said Mr. Cataliades.
“Can those glass panels be busted from the inside?” I asked.
“They did it onFear Factor ,” Barry said.
“We could try sliding the coffins down.”
“They’d break on impact,” Cecile said.
“But the vamps would survive the explosion,” I pointed out.
“To be burned up by the sun,” Mr. Cataliades said. “Diantha and I will go up and try to get
out the queen’s party, wrapped up in blankets. We’ll take them…” He looked at me
desperately.
“Ambulances! Call 911 now! They can figure out where to take them!”
Diantha called 911 and was incoherent and desperate enough to get ambulances started to
an explosion that had not happened yet. “The building’s on fire,” she said, which was like a
future truth.
“Go,” I told Mr. Cataliades, actually shoving the demon, and off he sped to the queen’s
suite.
“Go try to get your party out,” I said to Barry, and he and Cecile ran for the elevator,
though at any minute it might be unworkable.
I’d done everything about getting humans out that I could. Cataliades and Diantha could
take care of the queen and Andre. Eric and Pam! I knew where Eric’s room was, thank God.
I took the stairs. As I ran up, I met a party coming down: the two Britlingens, both with
large packs on their backs, carrying a wrapped bundle. Clovache had the feet, Batanya the
head. I had no doubt that the bundle was the King of Kentucky, and that they were doing
their duty. They both nodded as I hugged the wall to let them by. If they weren’t as calm as
if they were out for a stroll, they were close to it.
“You set off the fire alarm?” Batanya said. “Whatever the Fellowship is doing, it’s today?”
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“Yes,” I said.
“Thanks. We’re getting out now, and you should, too,” Clovache said.
“We’ll go back to our place after we deposit him,” Batanya said. “Good-bye.”
“Good luck,” I told them stupidly, and then I was running upstairs as if I’d trained for this.
As a result, I was huffing like a bellows when I flung open the door to the ninth floor. I saw
a lone maid pushing a cart down a long corridor. I ran up to her, frightening her even more
than the fire alarm already had.
“Give me your master key,” I said.
“No!” She was middle-aged and Hispanic, and she wasn’t about to give in to such a crazy
demand. “I’ll get fired.”
“Then open this door”—I pointed to Eric’s—“and get out of here.” I’m sure I looked like a
desperate woman, and I was. “This building is going to blow up any minute.”
She flung the key at me and made tracks down the hallway to the elevators. Dammit.
And then the explosions began. There was a deep, resounding quiver and a boom from way
below my feet, as if some gargantuan sea creature were making its way to the surface. I
staggered over to Eric’s room, thrusting the plastic key into the slot and shoving open the
door in a moment of utter silence. The room was in complete darkness.
“Eric, Pam!” I yelled. I fumbled for a light switch in the pitch-black room, felt the building
sway. At least one of the upper charges had gone off. Oh, shit! Oh, shit! But the light came
on, and I saw that Eric and Pam had gotten in the beds, not the coffins.
“Wake up!” I said, shaking Pam since she was closest. She didn’t stir at all. It was exactly
like shaking a doll stuffed with sawdust. “Eric!” I screamed right in his ear.
This got a bit of a reaction; he was much older than Pam. His eyes opened a slit and tried
to focus. “What?” he said.
“You have to get up! You have to! You have to go out!”
“Daytime,” he whispered. He began to flop over on his side.
I slapped him harder than I’ve ever hit anyone in my life. I screamed, “Get up!” until my
voice would hardly work. Finally Eric stirred and managed to sit up. He was wearing black
silk pajama bottoms, thank God, and I spied the ceremonial black cloak tossed over his
coffin. He hadn’t returned it to Quinn, which was huge luck. I arranged it over him and
fastened it at the neck. I pulled the hood over his face. “Cover your head!” I yelled, and I
heard a burst of noise above my head: shattering glass, followed by shrieks.
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
Eric would drop back to sleep if I didn’t keep him awake. At least he was trying. I
remembered that Bill had managed to stagger, under dire circumstances, at least for a few
minutes. But Pam, though roughly the same age as Bill, simply could not be roused. I even
pulled her long pale hair.
“You have to help me get Pam out,” I said finally, despairing. “Eric, you just have to.”
There was another roar and a lurch in the floor. I screamed, and Eric’s eyes went wide. He
staggered to his feet. As if we’d shared thoughts like Barry and I could, we both shoved his
coffin off its trestle and onto the carpet. Then we slid it over to the opaque slanting glass
panel forming the side of the building.
Everything around us trembled and shook. Eric’s eyes were a little wider now, and he was
concentrating so heavily on keeping himself moving that his strength was pulling on mine.
“Pam,” I said, trying to push him into more action. I opened the coffin, after some
desperate fumbling. Eric went over to his sleeping child, walking like his feet were sticking
to the floor with each step. He took Pam’s shoulders and I took her feet, and we picked her
up, blanket and all. The floor shook again, more violently this time, and we lurched over to
the coffin and tossed Pam into it. I shut the lid and latched it, though a corner of Pam’s
nightgown was sticking out.
I thought about Bill, and Rasul flashed across my mind, but there was nothing I could do,
and there wasn’t any time left. “We have to break the glass!” I shrieked at Eric. He nodded
very slowly. We knelt to brace ourselves against the end of the coffin and we pushed as
hard as we could till it slammed into the glass, which cracked into about a thousand pieces.
They hung together, amazingly—the miracle of safety glass. I could have screamed from
frustration. We needed ahole , not a curtain of glass. Crouching lower, digging our toes into
the carpet, trying to ignore the rumbling noises in the building below us, Eric and I shoved
with all our strength.
Finally! We punched the coffin all the way through. The window let go of its frame and
cascaded down the side of the building.
And Eric saw sunlight for the first time in a thousand years. He screamed, a terrible, gutwrenching
noise. But in the next instant, he pulled the cloak tight around him. He grabbed
me and hopped astride the coffin, and we pushed off with our feet. For just a fraction of a
minute, we hung in the balance, and then we tilted forward. In the most awful moment of
my life, we went out the window and began tobogganing down the building on the coffin.
We would crash unless—
Suddenly we were off the coffin and kind of staggering through the air, Eric holding me to
him with dogged persistence.
I exhaled with profound relief. Of course, Eric could fly.
In his light-stunned stupor, he couldn’t fly very well. This was not the smooth progress I’d
experienced before; we had more of a zigzag, bobbing descent.
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
But it was better than a free fall.
Eric could delay our descent enough to keep me from being dashed to my death on the
street outside the hotel. However, the coffin with Pam inside had a bad landing, and Pam
came catapulting out of the remains of the wood and into the sunlight where she lay
motionless. Without making a sound, she began to burn. Eric landed on top of her and used
the blanket to cover both of them. One of Pam’s feet was exposed, and the flesh was
smoking. I covered it up.
I also heard the sound of sirens. I flagged down the first ambulance I saw, and the medics
leaped out.
I pointed to the blanketed heap. “Two vampires—get them out of the sun!” I said.
The pair of EMTs, both young women, exchanged an incredulous glance. “What do we do
with them?” asked the dark one.
“You take them to a nice basement somewhere, one without any windows, and you tell the
owners to keep that basement open, because there are gonna be more.”
High up, a smaller explosion blew out one of the suites. A suitcase bomb, I thought,
wondering how many Joe had talked us into carrying up into the rooms. A fine shower of
glass sparkled in the sun as we looked up, but darker things were following the glass out of
the window, and the EMTs began to move like the trained team they were. They didn’t
panic, but they definitely moved with haste, and they were already debating which building
close at hand had a large basement.
“We’ll tell everyone,” said the dark woman. Pam was now in the ambulance and Eric
halfway there. His face was bright red and steam was rising from his lips. Oh, my God.
“What you going to do?”
“I have to go back in there,” I said.
“Fool,” she said, and then threw herself in the ambulance, which took off.
There was more glass raining down, and part of the bottom floor appeared to be collapsing.
That would be due to some of the larger explosive-packed coffin bombs in the shipping and
receiving area. Another explosion came from about the sixth floor, but on the other side of
the pyramid. My senses were so dulled by the sound and the sight that I wasn’t surprised
when I saw a blue suitcase flying through the air. Mr. Cataliades had succeeded in breaking
the queen’s window. Suddenly I realized the suitcase was intact, had not exploded, and was
hurtling straight at me.
I began to run, flashing back to my softball days when I had sprinted from third to home
and had to slide in. I aimed for the park across the street, where traffic had come to a stop
because of the emergency vehicles: cop cars, ambulances, fire engines. There was a cop just
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ahead of me who was facing away, pointing something out to another cop. “Down!” I
yelled. “Bomb!” and she swung around to face me and I tackled her, taking her down to the
ground with me. Something hit me in the middle of the back, whoosh, and the air was
shoved out of my lungs. We lay there for a long minute, until I pushed myself off of her and
climbed unsteadily to my feet. It was wonderful to inhale, though the air was acrid with
flames and dust. She might have said something to me, but I couldn’t hear her.
I turned around to face the Pyramid of Gizeh.
Parts of the structure were crumbling, folding in and down, all the glass and concrete and
steel and wood separating from the whole into discrete parts, while most of the walls that
had created the spaces—of rooms and bathrooms and halls—collapsed. That collapse
trapped many of the bodies that had occupied these arbitrarily divided areas. They were all
one now: the structure, its parts, its inhabitants.
Here and there were still bits that had held together. The human floor, the mezzanine, and
the lobby level were partially intact, though the area around the registration desk was
destroyed.
I saw a shape I recognized, a coffin. The lid had popped clean off with the impact of its
fall. As the sun hit the creature inside, it let out a wail, and I rushed over. There was a hunk
of drywall by it, and I hauled that over the coffin. There was silence as soon as the sun was
blocked from touching the vampire inside.
“Help!” I yelled. “Help!”
A few policemen moved toward me.
“There are people and vamps still alive,” I said. “The vamps have to be covered.”
“People first,” said one beefy veteran.
“Sure,” I agreed automatically, though even as I said it, I thought,Vampires didn’t set these
bombs. “But if you can cover the vamps, they can last until ambulances can take them to a
safe place.”
There was a chunk of hotel still standing, a bit of the south part. Looking up, I saw Mr.
Cataliades standing at an empty frame where the glass had fallen away. Somehow, he had
worked his way down to the human floor. He was holding a bundle wrapped in a bedspread,
clutching it to his chest.
“Look!” I called, to get a fireman’s attention. “Look!”
They leaped into action at seeing a live person to rescue. They were far more enthusiastic
about that than about rescuing vamps who were possibly smoldering to death in the sunlight
and could easily be saved by being covered. I tried to blame them, but I couldn’t.
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
For the first time I noticed that there was a crowd of regular people who had stopped their
cars and gotten out to help—or gawk. There were also people who were screaming, “Let
them burn!”
I watched the firemen go up in a bucket to fetch the demon and his burden, and then I
turned back to working my way through the rubble.
After a time, I was flagging. The screams of the human survivors, the smoke, the sunlight
muted by the huge cloud of dust, the noise of the groaning structure settling, the hectic
noise of the rescue workers and the machinery that was arriving and being employed…I
was overwhelmed.
By that time, since I’d stolen one of the yellow jackets and one of the hard hats all the
rescuers were wearing, I’d gotten close enough to find two vampires, one of whom I knew,
in the ruins of the check-in area, heavily overlaid by debris from the floors above. A big
piece of wood survived to identify the reception desk. One of the vampires was very
burned, and I had no idea if he’d survive it or not. The other vamp had hidden beneath the
largest piece of wood, and only his feet and hands had been singed and blackened. Once I
yelled for help, the vamps were covered with blankets. “We got a building two blocks
away; we’re using it for the vampire repository,” said the dark-skinned ambulance driver
who took the more seriously injured one, and I realized it was the same woman who’d
taken Eric and Pam.
In addition to the vampires, I uncovered a barely alive Todd Donati. I spent a few moments
with him until a stretcher got there. And I found, near to him, a dead maid. She’d been
crushed.
I had a smell in my nose that just wouldn’t go away, and I hated it. It was coating my lungs
inside, I thought, and I’d spend the rest of my life breathing it in and breathing it out. The
odor was composed of burning building materials, scorched bodies, and disintegrating
vampires. It was the smell of hatred.
I saw some things so awful I couldn’t even think about them then.
Suddenly, I didn’t feel I could search anymore. I had to sit down. I was drawn to a pile
created by the chance arrangement of a large pipe and some drywall. I perched on it and
wept. Then the whole pile shifted sideways, and I landed on the ground, still weeping.
I looked into the opening revealed by the shifted debris.
Bill was crouched inside, half his face burned away. He was wearing the clothes I’d last
seen him in the night before. I arched myself over him to keep the sun off, and he said,
“Thanks,” through cracked and bloody lips. He kept slipping in and out of his comatose
daytime sleep.
“Jesus God,” I said. “Come help!” I called, and saw two men start toward me with a
blanket.
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“I knew you’d find me,” Bill said, or did I imagine that?
I stayed hunched in the awkward position. There just wasn’t anything near enough to grab
that would cover as much of him as I did. The smell was making me gag, but I stayed. He’d
lasted this long only because he’d been covered by accident.
Though one fireman threw up, they covered him and took him away.
Then I saw another yellow-jacketed figure tear off across the debris field toward the
ambulances as fast as anyone could move without breaking a leg. I got the impression of a
live brain, and I recognized it at once. I scrambled over piles of rubble, following the
signature of the brain of the man I wanted most to find. Quinn and Frannie lay half-buried
under a pile of loose rubble. Frannie was unconscious, and she’d been bleeding from the
head, but it had dried. Quinn was dazed but coming to full awareness. I could see that fresh
water had cut a path in the dust on his face, and I realized the man who’d just dashed away
had given Quinn some water to drink and was returning with stretchers for the two.
He tried to smile at me. I fell to my knees beside him. “We might have to change our plans,
babe,” he said. “I may have to take care of Frannie for a week or two. Our mom’s not
exactly Florence Nightingale.”
I tried not to cry, but it was like, once turned to “on,” I couldn’t tell my tear ducts to switch
off. I wasn’t sobbing anymore, but I was trickling steadily. Stupid. “You do what you have
to do,” I said. “You call me when you can. Okay?” I hated people who said “Okay?” all the
time, like they were getting permission, but I couldn’t help that, either. “You’re alive; that’s
all that matters.”
“Thanks to you,” he said. “If you hadn’t called, we’d be dead. Even the fire alarm might
not have gotten us out of the room in time.”
I heard a groan from a few feet away, a breath on the air. Quinn heard it, too. I crawled
away from him, pushing aside a large chunk of toilet and sink. There, covered with dust and
debris, under several large bits of drywall, lay Andre, completely out of it. A quick glance
told me he had several serious injuries. But none of them was bleeding. He would heal
them all. Dammit.
“It’s Andre,” I told Quinn. “Hurt, but alive.” If my voice was grim, I felt grim. There was a
nice, long wood splinter right by his leg, and I was so tempted. Andre was a threat to my
freedom of will, to everything I enjoyed about my life. But I’d seen so much death that day
already.
I crouched there beside him, hating him, but after all…I knew him. That should have made
it easier, but it didn’t.
I duckwalked out of the little alcove where he lay, scuttled back to Quinn.
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“Those guys are coming back to get us,” he told me, sounding stronger every minute. “You
can leave now.”
“You want me to leave?”
His eyes were telling me something. I wasn’t reading it.
“Okay,” I said hesitantly. “I’ll go.”
“I’ve got help coming,” he said gently. “You could be finding someone else.”
“All right,” I said, not knowing how to take this, and pushed to my feet. I’d gone maybe
two yards when I heard him begin to move. But after a moment of stillness, I kept walking.
I returned to a big van that had been brought in and parked close to the rescue command
center. This yellow jacket had been a magic pass, but it might run out any minute. Someone
would notice I was wearing bedroom slippers, and they were ripping up, since they’d
hardly been intended for ruin-scrambling. A woman handed me a bottle of water from the
van, and I opened it with unsteady hands. I drank and drank, and poured the rest of the
water over my face and hands. Despite the chill in the air, it felt wonderful.
By then, two (or four, or six) hours must have passed since the first explosion. There were
now scores of rescuers there who had equipment, machinery, blankets. I was casting around
for someone who looked authoritative, intending to find out where the other human
survivors had been taken, when a voice spoke in my head.
Sookie?
Barry!
What kind of shape are you in?
Pretty rocky, but not much hurt. You?
Same. Cecile died.
I’m so sorry.I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
I’ve thought of something we can do.
What?I probably didn’t sound very interested.
We can find living people. We’ll be better, together.
That’s what I’ve been doing,I told him.But you’re right, together we’ll be stronger. At the
same time, I was so tired that something inside of me cringed at the thought of making
further effort.Of course we can, I said.
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
If this pile of debris had been as horrifyingly huge as the Twin Towers, we couldn’t have
done it. But this site was smaller and more contained, and if we could get anyone to believe
us, we had a chance.
I found Barry close to the command center, and I took his grimy hand. He was younger
than me, but now he didn’t look it, and I didn’t think he’d ever act it again. When I scanned
the line of bodies on the grass of the little park, I saw Cecile, and I saw what might have
been the maid I’d accosted in the hallway. There were a few flaking, vaguely manlike
shapes that were disintegrating vampires. I could have known any of them, but it was
impossible to tell.
Any humiliation would be a small thing to pay if we could save someone. So Barry and I
prepared to be humiliated and mocked.
At first, it was hard to get anyone to listen. The professionals kept referring us to the
casualty center or to one of the ambulances parked nearby ready to take survivors to one of
Rhodes’s hospitals.
Finally, I was face-to-face with a thin, gray-haired man who listened to me without any
expression on his face at all.
“I never thought I’d be rescuing vampires, either,” he said, as though that explained his
decision, and maybe it did. “So, take these two men with you, and show ’em what you can
do. You have fifteen minutes of these men’s valuable time. If you waste it, you might be
killing someone.”
Barry had had the idea, but now he seemed to want me to speak for us. His face was
blackened with smears of soot. We had a silent conference about the best way to go about
our task, and at the end of it, I turned to the firemen and said, “Put us up in one of those
bucket things.”
For a wonder, they did, without further argument. We were lifted out over the debris, and
yes, we knew it was dangerous, and yes, we were prepared to take the consequences. Still
holding hands, Barry and I shut our eyes andsearched , flinging our minds open and
outward.
“Move us left,” I said, and the fireman in the bucket with us gestured to the man in the cab
of the machine. “Watch me,” I said, and he looked back. “Stop,” I said, and the bucket
stopped. We searched again. “Directly below,” I said. “Right below here. It’s a woman
named something Santiago.”
After a few minutes, a roar went up. They’d found her alive.
We were popular after that, and there were no more questions about how we did it, as long
as we kept it up. Rescue people are all about rescuing. They were bringing dogs, and they
were inserting microphones, but Barry and I were quicker and more articulate than the
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
dogs, and more precise than the microphones. We found four more live people, and we
found a man who died before they could get to him, a waiter named Art who loved his wife
and suffered terribly right up until the end. Art was especially heartbreaking, because they
were trying like hell to dig the guy out, and I had to tell them it was no good. Of course,
they didn’t take my word for it; they kept excavating, but he had passed. By that time, the
searchers were really excited about our ability and wanted us to work through the night, but
Barry was failing and I wasn’t much better. Worse, dark was closing in.
“The vampires’ll be rising,” I reminded the fire chief. He nodded and looked at me for
further explanation. “They’ll be hurt bad,” I said. He still didn’t get it. “They’ll need blood
instantly, and they won’t have any control. I wouldn’t send any rescue workers out on the
debris alone,” I said, and his face went blank with thought.
“You don’t think they’re all dead? Can’t you find them?”
“Well, actually, no. We can’t find vamps. Humans, yes. But not undead. Their brains don’t
give off any, ah, waves. We’ve got to go now. Where are the survivors?”
“They’re all in the Thorne Building, right down there,” he said, pointing. “In the
basement.” We turned to walk away. By this time, Barry had slung his arm around my
shoulders, and not because he was feeling affectionate. He needed the support.
“Let me get your names and addresses, so the mayor can thank you,” the gray-haired man
said, holding a pen and clipboard at the ready.
No!Barry said, and my mouth snapped shut.
I shook my head. “We’re going to pass on that,” I said. I’d had a quick look in his head,
and he was greedy for more of our help. Suddenly I understood why Barry had stopped me
so abruptly, though my fellow telepath was so tired he couldn’t tell me himself. My refusal
didn’t go over big.
“You’ll work for vamps, but you don’t want to stand and be counted as someone who
helped on this terrible day?”
“Yes,” I answered. “That’s just about right.”
He wasn’t happy with me, and I thought for a minute he was going to force the issue: grab
my wallet out of my pants, send me to jail, or something. But he reluctantly nodded his
head and jerked it in the direction of the Thorne Building.
Someone will try to find out,Barry said.Someone will want to use us.
I sighed, and I hardly had the energy to take in more air. I nodded.Yeah, someone will. If
we go to the shelter, someone will be watching for us there, and they’ll ask for our names
from someone who recognizes us, and after that, it’s only a matter of time.
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
I couldn’t think of a way to dodge going in there. We had to have help, we had to find our
parties and discover how and when we could leave the city, and we had to find out who had
lived and who hadn’t.
I patted my back pocket, and to my amazement, my cell phone was still in it and still had
bars. I called Mr. Cataliades. If anyone besides me had come out of the Pyramid of Gizeh
with a cell phone, the lawyer would be the one.
“Yes,” he said cautiously. “Miss St—”
“Shhh,” I said. “Don’t say my name out loud.” It was sheer paranoia talking.
“Very well.”
“We helped them out down here, and now they really want to get to know us better,” I said,
feeling very clever for talking so guardedly. I was very tired. “Barry and I are outside the
building where you are. We need to stay somewhere else. Too many people making lists in
there, right?”
“That is a popular activity,” he said.
“You and Diantha okay?”
“She has not been found. We were separated.”
I didn’t speak for a few seconds. “I’m so sorry. Who were you holding when I saw them
rescue you?”
“The queen. She is here, though badly injured. We can’t find Andre.”
He paused, and because I couldn’t help it, I said, “Who else?”
“Gervaise is dead. Eric, Pam, Bill…burned, but here. Cleo Babbitt is here. I haven’t seen
Rasul.”
“Is Jake Purifoy there?”
“I haven’t seen him, either.”
“Because you might want to know he’s at least partially responsible if you do see him. He
was in on the Fellowship plot.”
“Ah.” Mr. Cataliades registered that. “Oh, yes, I certainly did want to know that. Johan
Glassport will be especially interested, since he has several broken ribs and a broken
collarbone. He’s very, very angry.” It said something about Johan Glassport’s viciousness,
that Mr. Cataliades thought him capable of exacting as much vengeance as a vampire
would. “How did you come to know there was a plot at all, Miss Sookie?”
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
I told the lawyer the story Clovache had told me; I figured now that she and Batanya had
gone back to wherever they came from, that would be okay.
“Hiring them proved to be worth the money for King Isaiah.” Cataliades sounded
thoughtful rather than envious. “Isaiah is here and completely uninjured.”
“We need to go find somewhere to sleep. Can you tell Barry’s king that he’s with me?” I
asked, knowing I needed to get off the phone and make a plan.
“He is too injured to care. He is not aware.”
“All right. Just someone from the Texas party.”
“I see Joseph Velasquez. Rachel is dead.” Mr. Cataliades couldn’t help himself; he had to
tell me all the bad news.
“Cecile, Stan’s assistant, is dead,” I told him.
“Where are you going to go?” Cataliades asked.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said. I felt exhausted and hopeless, and I’d had too much bad
news and gotten too battered to rally one more time.
“I will send a cab for you,” Mr. Cataliades offered. “I can get a number from one of the
nice volunteers. Tell the driver you are rescue workers and you need a ride to the nearest
inexpensive hotel. Do you have a credit card?”
“Yeah, and my debit card,” I said, blessing the impulse that had led me to stuff the little
wallet in my pocket.
“No, wait, they’ll track you very easily if you use it. Cash?”
I checked. Thanks largely to Barry, we had a hundred ninety dollars between us. I told Mr.
Cataliades we could swing it.
“Then spend the night in a hotel, and tomorrow call me again,” he said, sounding
unutterably weary.
“Thanks for the plan.”
“Thanks for your warning,” the courtly demon said. “We would all be dead if you and the
Bellboy hadn’t wakened us.”
I ditched the yellow jacket and the hard hat. Barry and I tottered along, more or less
holding each other up. We found a concrete barricade to lean against, our arms around each
other. I tried to tell Barry why we were doing this, but he didn’t care. I was worried that at
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
any minute some firefighter or cop from the scene would spot us and stop to find out what
we were doing, where we were going, who we were. I was so relieved that I felt sick when I
spied a cab cruising slowly, the driver peering out the window. Had to be for us. I waved
my free arm frantically. I had never hailed a cab before in my life. It was just like the
movies.
The cab driver, a wire-thin guy from Guyana, wasn’t too excited about letting filthy
creatures like us get into his cab, but he couldn’t turn down people as pitiful as we were.
The nearest “inexpensive” hotel was a mile back into the city, away from the water. If we’d
had the energy, we could have walked it. At least the cab ride wasn’t too pricey.
Even at the mid-range hotel, the desk clerks were less than thrilled with our appearance;
but after all, it was a day for charity to people who were involved in the blast. We got a
room at a price that would have made me gasp if I hadn’t seen the room rates at the
Pyramid. The room itself wasn’t much, but we didn’t need much. A maid knocked on the
door right after we got in and said she’d like to wash our clothes for us, since we didn’t
have any more. She looked down when she said that, so she wouldn’t embarrass me. Trying
not to choke up at her kindness, I looked down at my shirt and slacks and agreed. I turned
to Barry to find he was absolutely out cold. I maneuvered him into the bed. It was
unpleasantly like handling one of the vampires, and I held my lips pressed together in a
tight line the whole time I undressed his limp body. Then I shucked my own clothes, found
a plastic bag in the closet to hold them, and handed the soiled clothes out to her. I got a
washcloth and wiped off Barry’s face and hands and feet, and then I covered him up.
I had to shower, and I thanked God for the complimentary shampoo and soap and cream
rinse and skin lotion. I also thanked God for hot and cold running water, particularly hot.
The kind maid had even handed me two toothbrushes and a little packet of toothpaste, and I
scrubbed my mouth clean of the flavor of ashes. I washed my panties and bra in the sink
and rolled them up in a towel before I hung them up to dry. I’d given the lady every stitch
of Barry’s clothes.
Finally, there was nothing else to do, and I crawled into the bed beside Barry. Now that I
smelled so good, I noticed that he didn’t, but that was just tough for me, right? I wouldn’t
have woken him for anything. I turned on my side away from him, thought about how
frightening that long, empty corridor had been—isn’t it funny that that was what I picked
out as scary, after such a horrific day?
The hotel room was so very quiet after the tumult of the scene of the explosions, and the
bed was so very comfortable, and I smelled so much better and hardly hurt at all.
I slept and didn’t dream.
18
IKNOW THERE ARE MANY WORSE THINGS THAN WAKINGup naked in a bed with
someone you don’t know very well. But when my eyes fluttered open the next day, I
couldn’t think of any, for five long minutes. I knew Barry was awake. You can tell when a
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
brain pops into awareness. To my relief, he slipped out of the bed and into the bathroom
without speaking, and I heard the drumming of the water in the shower stall soon after.
Our clean clothes were in a bag hanging on our inside doorknob, and there was aUSA
Today , too. After hastily donning my clothes, I spread the newspaper out on the small table
while I brewed a pot of the free coffee. I also extended the bag with Barry’s clothes in it
into the bathroom and dropped it on the floor, waving it a little first to attract his attention.
I’d looked at the room service menu, and we didn’t have enough cash to get anything on it.
We had to reserve some of our funds for a cab, because I didn’t know what our next move
would be. Barry came out, looking as refreshed as I’d been last night. To my surprise, he
kissed me on the cheek, and then sat opposite me with his own insulated cup that contained
something that bore a faint relationship to brewed coffee.
“I don’t remember much about last night,” he said. “Fill me in on why we’re here.”
I did.
“That was good thinking on my part,” he said. “I’m in awe of myself.”
I laughed. He might be feeling a little male chagrin that he had wilted before I did, but at
least he could make fun of himself.
“So, I guess we need to call your demon lawyer?”
I nodded. It was eleven by then, so I called.
He answered right away. “There are many ears here,” he said without preamble. “And I
understand these phones aren’t too secure. Cell phones.”
“All right.”
“So I will come to you in a while, bringing some things you’ll need. You are where?”
With a twinge of misgiving, since the demon was a guy people would notice, I told him the
name of the hotel and our room number, and he told me to be patient. I’d been feeling fine
until Mr. Cataliades said that, and all of a sudden I began to twitch inwardly. I felt like we
were on the run now, when we in no way deserved to be. I’d read the newspaper, and the
story about the Pyramid said the catastrophe was due to “a series of explosions” that Dan
Brewer, head of the state terrorist task force, attributed to several bombs. The fire chief was
less committal: “An investigation is underway.” I should damn well hope so.
Barry said, “We could have sex while we wait.”
“I liked you better unconscious,” I said. I knew Barry was only trying not to think about
stuff, but still.
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“You undress me last night?” he said with a leer.
“Yeah, that was me, lucky me,” I said. I smiled at him, surprising myself.
A knock at the door had us both staring at it like startled deer.
“Your demon guy,” said Barry after a second of mental checking.
“Yep,” I said, and got up to answer it.
Mr. Cataliades hadn’t had the kindness of a maid, so he was still in the soiled clothes of the
day before. But he managed to look dignified, anyway, and his hands and face were clean.
“Please, how is everyone?” I asked.
“Sophie-Anne has lost her legs, and I don’t know if they’ll come back,” he said.
“Oh, geez,” I said, wincing.
“Sigebert fought free of the debris after dark,” he continued. “He’d hidden in a safe pocket
in the parking garage, where he landed after the explosions. I suspect he found someone to
feed off, because he was healthier than he ought to have been. But if that’s the case, he
shoved the body into one of the fires, because we would have heard if a drained body had
been found.”
I hoped the donor had been one of the Fellowship guys.
“Your king,” Mr. Cataliades said to Barry, “is so injured it may take him a decade to
recover. Until the situation is clear, Joseph leads, though he’ll be challenged soon. The
king’s child Rachel is dead; perhaps Sookie told you?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I just had too much bad news to finish getting through it all.”
“And Sookie has told me the human Cecile perished.”
“What about Diantha?” I asked, hesitating to do so. It had to be significant that
Mr.Cataliades hadn’t mentioned his niece.
“Missing,” he said briefly “And yet that piece of filth, Glassport, has only bruises.”
“I’m sorry for both things,” I said.
Barry seemed numb. All traces of his flippant mood had vanished. He looked smaller,
sitting on the edge of the bed. The cocky sharp dresser I’d met in the lobby of the Pyramid
had gone underground, at least for a while.
“I told you about Gervaise,” Mr. Cataliades said. “I identified his woman’s body this
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
morning. What was her name?”
“Carla. I can’t remember her last name. It’ll come to me.”
“The first name will probably be enough for them to identify her. One of the corpses in
hotel uniform had a computer list in his pocket.”
“They weren’t all in on it,” I said with some certainty.
“No, of course not,” Barry said. “Only a few.”
We looked at him.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I overheard them.”
“When?”
“The night before.”
I bit the inside of my mouth, hard.
“What did you hear?” Mr. Cataliades asked in a level voice.
“I was with Stan in the, you know, the buy-and-sell thing. I had noticed the waiters and so
on were dodging me, and then I watched to see if they were avoiding Sookie as well. So I
thought, ‘They know what you are, Barry, and there’s something they don’t want you to
know. You better check it out.’ I found a good place to sort of skulk behind some of those
fake palm trees, close by the service door, and I could get a reading on what they were
thinking inside. They didn’t spell it out or anything, okay?” He had gotten an accurate
reading on our thoughts, too. “It was just, like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna get those vamps, damn
them, and if we take some of their human slaves, well, that’s just too bad, we’ll live with it.
Damned by association.’”
I could only sit there and look at him.
“No, I didn’t know when or what they were going to do! I went to bed finally kind of
worrying about them, what the plan was, and when I couldn’t settle into a good sleep, I
finally quit trying and called you. And we tried to get everyone out,” he said, and began
crying.
I sat beside him and put my arm around him. I didn’t know what to say. Of course, he
could tell what I was thinking.
“Yes, I wish I’d said something before I did,” he said in a choked voice. “Yes, I did the
wrong thing. But I thought if I spoke up before I knew something for sure, the vamps
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
would fall on them and drain them. Or they’d want me to point out who knew and who
didn’t. And I couldn’t do that.”
There was a long silence.
“Mr. Cataliades, have you seen Quinn?” I asked to break the silence.
“He’s at the human hospital. He couldn’t stop them from taking him.”
“I have to go see him.”
“How serious is your fear that the authorities will try to coerce you into doing their
bidding?”
Barry raised his head and looked at me. “Pretty serious,” we said simultaneously.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever shown anyone, aside from local people, what I can do,” I said.
“Me, too.” Barry wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “You should have seen that
guy’s face when he finally believed that we could find people. He thought we were
psychics or something, and he couldn’t understand that what we were doing was registering
a live brain signature. Nothing mystical about it.”
“He was all over the idea once he believed us,” I said. “You could hear in his head that he
was thinking of the hundred different ways we could be of use to rescue operations, to the
government at conferences, police interrogations.”
Mr. Cataliades looked at us. I couldn’t pick out all his snarly demon thoughts, but he was
having a lot of them.
“We’d lose control over our lives,” Barry said. “I like my life.”
“I guess I could be saving a lot of people,” I said. I’d just never thought about it before. I’d
never been faced with a situation like the one we’d faced the previous day. I hoped I never
was again. How likely was it I would ever be on-site again at a disaster? Was I obligated to
give up a job I liked, among people I cared about, to work for strangers in far away places?
I shivered when I thought of it. I felt something harden within me when I realized that the
advantage Andre had taken of me would only be the beginning, in situations like that. Like
Andre, everyone would want to own me.
“No,” I said. “I won’t do it. Maybe I’m just being selfish and I’m damning myself, but I
won’t do it. I don’t think we’re exaggerating how bad that would be for us, not a bit.”
“Then going to the hospital is not a good idea,” Cataliades said.
“I know, but I have to, anyway.”
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“Then you can stop by on your way to the airport.”
We sat up straighter.
“There’s an Anubis plane flying out in three hours. It’ll go to Dallas first, then Shreveport.
The queen and Stan are paying for it jointly. It’ll have all the survivors of both parties on it.
The citizens of Rhodes have donated used coffins for the trip.” Mr. Cataliades made a face,
and honestly, I couldn’t blame him. “Here’s all the cash we can spare,” he continued,
handing me a short stack of bills. “Make it to the Anubis terminal in time, and you’ll both
go home with us. If you don’t make it, I’ll assume something happened to stop you and
you’ll have to call to make some other arrangement. We know we owe you a great debt, but
we have wounded to get home ourselves, and the queen’s credit cards and so on were lost in
the fire. I’ll have to call her credit company for emergency service, but that won’t take
much time.”
This seemed a little cold, but after all, he wasn’t our best friend, and as the daytime guy for
the queen, he had a lot to do and many more problems to solve.
“Okay,” I said. “Hey, listen, is Christian Baruch at the shelter?”
His face sharpened. “Yes. Though somewhat burned, he’s hanging around the queen in
Andre’s absence as if he would take Andre’s place.”
“He wants to, you know. He wants to be the next Mr. Queen of Louisiana.”
“Baruch?” Cataliades could not have been more scornful if a goblin had applied for the
job.
“No, he’s gone to extreme lengths.” I already told Andre about this. Now I had to explain
again. “That’s why he planted that Dr Pepper bomb,” I said about five minutes later.
“How do you know this?” Mr. Cataliades asked.
“I figured it out, from this and that,” I said modestly. I sighed. Here came the yucky part. “I
found him yesterday, hiding underneath the registration desk. There was another vampire
with him, badly burned. I don’t even know who that one was. And in the same area was
Todd Donati, the security guy, alive but hurt, and a dead maid.” I felt the exhaustion all
over again, smelled the awful smell, tried to breathe the thick air. “Baruch was out of it, of
course.”
I was not exactly proud of this, and I looked down at my hands. “Anyway, I was trying to
read Todd Donati’s mind, to find out how hurt he was, and he was just hating Baruch and
blaming him, too. He was willing to be frank, this time. No more job to worry about. Todd
told me he’d watched all the security tapes over and over again, and he’d finally figured out
what he was seeing. His boss was leaping up to block the camera with gum so he could
plant the bomb. Once he’d figured that out, Donati knew that Baruch had wanted to alarm
the queen, make her insecure, so she’d take a new husband. And that would be Christian
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
Baruch. But guess why he wants to marry her?”
“I can’t imagine,” said Mr. Cataliades, thoroughly shocked.
“Because he wants to open a new vampire hotel in New Orleans. Blood in the Quarter got
flooded and closed, and Baruch thought he could rebuild and reopen.”
“But Baruch didn’t have anything to do with the other bombs?”
“I sure don’t think so, Mr. Cataliades. I think that was the Fellowship, just like I said
yesterday.”
“Then who killed the vampires from Arkansas?” Barry asked. “I guess the Fellowship did
that, too? No, wait…why would they? Not that they’d quibble at killing some vampires, but
they’d know the vampires would probably get killed in the big explosion.”
“We have an overload of villains,” I said. “Mr. Cataliades, you got any ideas about who
might have taken out the Arkansas vampires?” I gave Mr. Cataliades a straight-in-the-eyes
stare.
“No,” Mr. Cataliades said. “If I did, I wouldnever say those ideas out loud. I think you
should be concentrating on your man’s injuries and getting back to your little town, not
worrying about three deaths among so many.”
I wasn’t exactly worried about the deaths of the three Arkansas vampires, and it seemed
like a really good idea to take Mr. Cataliades’s advice to heart. I’d had the odd moment to
think about the murders, and I’d decided that the simplest answer was often the best.
Who’d thought she had a good chance of skipping a trial altogether, if Jennifer Cater was
silenced?
Who’d prepared the way to be admitted to Jennifer’s room, by the simple means of a
phone call?
Who’d had a good long moment of telepathic communication with her underlings before
she began the artificial flurry of primping for the impromptu visit?
Whose bodyguard had been coming out of the stairway door just as we were exiting the
suite?
I knew, just as Mr. Cataliades knew, that Sophie-Anne had ensured Sigebert would be
admitted to Jennifer Cater’s room by calling down ahead and telling Jennifer she herself
was on her way. Jennifer would look out the peephole, recognize Sigebert, and assume the
queen was right behind him. Once inside, Sigebert would unsheath his sword and kill
everyone in the place.
Then he would hurry back up the stairs to appear in time to escort the queen right back
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
down to the seventh floor. He’d enter the room again so there’d be a reason for his scent to
be on the air.
And at the time I’d suspected absolutely nothing.
What a shock it must have been to Sophie-Anne when Henrik Feith had popped up alive;
but then the problem had been solved when he accepted her protection.
The problem reasserted itself when someone talked him into accusing her anyway.
And then, amazingly, problem solved again: the nervous little vampire had been
assassinated in front of the court.
“I do wonder how Kyle Perkins was hired,” I said. “He must have known he was on a
suicide mission.”
“Perhaps,” Mr. Cataliades said carefully, “he had decided to meet the sun anyway. Perhaps
he was looking for a spectacular and interesting way to go, earning a monetary legacy for
his human descendants.”
“It seems strange that I was sent looking for information about him by a member of our
very own party,” I said, my voice neutral.
“Ah, not everyone needs to know everything,” Mr. Cataliades said, his voice just as
neutral.
Barry could hear my thoughts, of course, but he wasn’t getting what Mr. Cataliades was
saying, which was just as well. It was stupid that it made me feel better, Eric and Bill not
knowing the queen’s deep game. Not that they weren’t capable of playing deep games
themselves, but I didn’t think Eric would have sent me on the wild goose chase for the
archery range where Kyle Perkins had trained if Eric had known the queen herself had
hired Perkins.
The poor woman behind the counter had died because the queen hadn’t told her left hand
what her right hand was doing. And I wondered what had happened to the human, the one
who’d thrown up on the murder scene, the one who’d been hired to drive Sigebert or Andre
to the range…after I’d so thoughtfully left a message to tell them when Barry and I were
going back to collect the evidence. I’d sealed the woman’s fate myself by leaving that
phone message.
Mr. Cataliades took his departure, shaking our hands with his beaming smile, almost
normal. He urged us once again to get to the airport.
“Sookie?” said Barry.
“Yeah.”
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“I really want to be on that plane.”
“I know.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t think I can do it. Sit on the same plane with them.”
“They all got hurt,” Barry said.
“Yeah, but that isn’t payback.”
“You took care of that, didn’t you?”
I didn’t ask him what he meant. I knew what he could pick up out of my head.
“As much as I could,” I said.
“Maybe I don’t want to be on the same plane withyou ,” Barry said.
Of course it hurt, but I guess I deserved it.
I shrugged. “You gotta decide that on your own. All of us have different things we can live
with.”
Barry considered that. “Yeah,” he said. “I know. But for right now, it’s better that we go
our separate ways, here. I’m leaving for the airport to hang around until I can leave. Are
you going to the hospital?”
I was too wary now to tell him. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m finding a car or a bus to
take me home.”
He hugged me, no matter how upset he was about the choices I’d made. I could feel the
affection and regret in his heart. I hugged him back. He’d made his own choices.
I left the maid ten dollars when I departed on foot about five minutes after Barry got in a
cab. I waited until I got two blocks from the hotel, and then I asked a passerby how to get to
St. Cosmas. It was a long ten-block hike, but the day was beautiful, cool and crisp with a
bright sun. It felt good to be by myself. I might be wearing rubber-soled slippers, but I was
dressed nicely enough, and I was clean. I ate a hot dog on my way to the hospital, a hot dog
I’d bought from a street vendor, and that was something else I’d never done before. I
bought a shapeless hat from a street vender, too, and stuffed all my hair up under it. The
same guy had some dark glasses for sale. With the sky being so bright and the wind
blowing in off the lake, the combination didn’t look too odd.
St. Cosmas was an old edifice, with lots of ornate architectural embellishment on the
outside. It was huge, too. I asked about Quinn’s condition, and one of the women stationed
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
at the busy visitors’ desk said she couldn’t give out that information. But to see if he was
registered at the hospital, she’d had to look up his records, and I plucked his room number
from her thoughts. I waited until all three of the women were occupied with other queries,
and I slipped into the elevator and rode up.
Quinn was on the tenth floor. I’d never seen a hospital so large, and I’d never seen one so
bustling. It was easy to stride around like I had a purpose and knew where I was going.
There was no one on guard outside his room.
I knocked lightly, and there wasn’t a sound from inside. I pushed open the door very gently
and stepped inside. Quinn was asleep in the bed, and he was attached to machines and
tubes. And he was a fast-healing shifter, so his injuries must have been grievous. His sister
was by his side. Her bandaged head, which had been propped on her hand, jerked up as she
became aware of my presence. I pulled off the sunglasses and the hat.
“You,” she said.
“Yeah, me, Sookie. What’s Frannie short for, anyway?”
“It’s really Francine, but everyone calls me Frannie.” She looked younger as she said it.
Though I was pleased at the decreased hostility, I decided I’d better stay on my side of the
room. “How is he?” I asked, jerking my chin at the sleeping man.
“He fades in and out.” There was a moment of silence while she took a drink from a white
plastic cup on the bedside table. “When you woke him up, he got me up,” she said abruptly.
“We started down the stairs. But a big piece of ceiling fell on him, and the floor went out
from beneath us, and the next thing I knew, some firemen are telling me some crazy woman
found me while I was still alive, and they’re giving me all kinds of tests, and Quinn’s
telling me he was going to take care of me until I was well. Then they told me he had two
broken legs.”
There was an extra chair, and I collapsed onto it. My legs just wouldn’t hold me. “What
does the doctor say?”
“Which one?” Frannie said bleakly.
“Any. All.” I took one of Quinn’s hands. Frannie almost reached out as if she thought I’d
hurt him, but then she subsided. I had the hand that was free of tubes, and I held it for a
while.
“They can’t believe how much better he is already,” Frannie said just when I’d decided she
wasn’t going to answer. “In fact, they think it’s something of a miracle. Now we’re gonna
have to pay someone to get his records out of the system.” Her dark-rooted hair was in
clumps, and she was still filthy from the blast site.
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“Go buy some clothes and come back and have a shower,” I said. “I’ll sit with him.”
“Are you really his girlfriend?”
“Yes, I am.”
“He said you had some conflicts.”
“I do, but not with him.”
“So, okay. I will. You got any money?”
“Not a lot, but here’s what I can spare.”
I handed her seventy-five dollars of Mr. Cataliades’s money.
“Okay, I can stretch it,” she said. “Thanks.” She said it without enthusiasm, but she said it.
I sat in the quiet room and held Quinn’s hand for almost an hour. In that time, his eyes had
flickered open once, registered my presence, and closed again. A very faint smile curved his
lips for a moment. I knew that while he was sleeping, his body was healing, and when he
woke, he might be able to walk again. I would have found it very comforting to climb on
that bed and snuggle with Quinn for a while, but it might be bad for him if I did that; I
might jostle him or something.
After a while, I began talking to him. I told him why I thought the crude bomb had been
left outside the queen’s door, and I told him my theory about the deaths of the three
Arkansas vampires. “You gotta agree, it makes sense,” I said, and then I told him what I
thought about the death of Henrik Feith and the execution of his murderer. I told him about
the dead woman in the shop. I told him about my suspicions about the explosion.
“I’m sorry it was Jake that was in with them,” I told him. “I know you used to like him.
But he just couldn’t stand being a vamp. I don’t know if he approached the Fellowship or
the Fellowship approached him. They had the guy at the computer, the one who was so rude
to me. I think he called a delegate from each party to have them come pick up a suitcase.
Some of them were too smart or too lazy to pick them up, and some of them returned the
suitcases when no one claimed them. But not me, oh no, I put it in the queen’s effing living
room.” I shook my head. “I guess not too many of the staff were in on it, because otherwise
Barry or I would’ve picked up on something way before Barry did.”
Then I slept for a few minutes, I think, because Frannie was there when I looked around,
and she was eating from a McDonald’s bag. She was clean, and her hair was wet.
“You love him?” she asked, sucking up some Coke through a straw.
“Too soon to tell.”
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“I’m going to have to take him home to Memphis,” she said.
“Yeah, I know. I may not get to see him for a while. I’ve got to get home, too, somehow.”
“The Greyhound station is two blocks away.”
I shuddered. A long, long bus ride was not a prospect that I could look forward to.
“Or you could take my car,” Frannie said.
“What?”
“Well, we got here separately. He drove here with all the props and a trailer, and I left out
of my mama’s in a hurry in my little sports car. So there are two cars here, and we only
need one. I’m going to have to go home with him and stay for a while. You have to get back
to work, right?”
“Right.”
“So, drive my car home, and we’ll pick it up when we’re able.”
“That’s very nice of you,” I said. I was surprised by her generosity, because I’d definitely
had the impression she wasn’t keen on Quinn having a girlfriend, and she wasn’t keen on
me, specifically.
“You seem okay. You tried to get us out of there in time. And he really cares about you.”
“And you know this how?”
“He told me so.”
She’d gotten part of the family directness, I could tell.
“Okay,” I said. “Where are you parked?”
19
I’D BEEN TERRIFIED THE WHOLE TWO-DAY DRIVE:that I’d be stopped and they
wouldn’t believe I’d gotten permission to use the car, that Frannie would change her mind
and tell the police I’d stolen it, that I’d have an accident and have to repay Quinn’s sister
for the vehicle. Frannie had an old red Mustang, and it was fun to drive. No one stopped
me. The weather was good all the way back to Louisiana. I thought I’d see a slice of
America, but along the interstate, everything looks the same. I imagined that in any small
town I passed through, there was another Merlotte’s, and maybe another Sookie.
I didn’t sleep well on the trip, either, because I dreamed of the floor shaking under my feet
and the dreadful moment we went out the hole in the glass. Or I saw Pam burning. Or other
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
things, things I’d done and seen during the hours we patrolled the debris, looking for
bodies.
When I turned into my driveway, having been gone a week, my heart began to pound as if
the house was waiting for me. Amelia was sitting on the front porch with a bright blue
ribbon in her hand, and Bob was sitting in front of her, batting at the dangling ribbon with a
black paw. She looked up to see who it was, and when she recognized me behind the wheel,
she leaped to her feet. I didn’t pull around back; I stopped right there and jumped out of the
driver’s seat. Amelia’s arms wrapped around me like vines, and she shrieked, “You’re back!
Oh, blessed Virgin, you’re back!”
We danced around and hopped up and down like teenagers, whooping with sheer
happiness.
“The paper listed you as a survivor,” she said. “But no one could find you the day after.
Until you called, I wasn’t sure you were alive.”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “A long, long story.”
“Is it the right time to tell it to me?”
“Maybe after a few days,” I said.
“Do you have anything to carry in?”
“Not a thing. All my stuff went up in smoke when the building went down.”
“Oh, my God! Your new clothes!”
“Well, at least I have my driver’s license and my credit card and my cell phone, though the
battery’s flat and I don’t have the charger.”
“And a new car?” She glanced back at the Mustang.
“A borrowed car.”
“I don’t think I have a single friend who would loan me a whole car.”
“Half a car?” I asked, and she laughed.
“Guess what?” Amelia said. “Your friends got married.”
I stopped dead. “Which friends?” Surely she couldn’t mean the Bellefleur double wedding;
surely they hadn’t changed the date yet again.
“Oh, I shouldn’t have said anything,” Amelia said, looking guilty. “Well, speak of the
devil!” There was another car coming to a stop right by the red Mustang.
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
Tara scrambled out. “I saw you driving by the shop,” she called. “I almost didn’t recognize
you in the new car.”
“Borrowed it from a friend,” I said, looking at her askance.
“You didnot tell her, Amelia Broadway!” Tara was righteously indignant.
“I didn’t,” Amelia said. “I started to, but I stopped in time!”
“Tell me what?”
“Sookie, I know this is going to sound crazy,” Tara said, and I felt my brows draw together.
“While you were gone, everything just clicked in a strange way, like something I’d known
should happen, you know?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know.
“JB and I got married!” Tara said, and the expression on her face was full of so many
things: anxiety, hopefulness, guilt, wonder.
I ran that incredible sentence through my head several times before I was sure I understood
the meaning of it. “You and JB? Husband and wife?” I said.
“I know, I know, it seems maybe a little strange…”
“It seems perfect,” I said with all the sincerity I could scrape together. I wasn’t really sure
how I felt, but I owed my friend the happy face and cheerful voice I offered her. At the
moment, this was the true stuff, and vampire fangs and blood under the bright searchlights
seemed like the dream, or a scene from a movie I hadn’t much enjoyed. “I’m so happy for
you. What do you need for a wedding present?”
“Just your blessing, we put the announcement in the paper yesterday,” she said, burbling
away like a happy brook. “And the phone just hasn’t stopped ringing off the wall since
then. People are so nice!”
She truly believed she’d swept all her bad memories into a corner. She was in the mood to
credit the world with benevolence.
I would try that, too. I would do my best to smother the memory of that moment when I’d
glanced back to see Quinn pulling himself along by his elbows. He’d reached Andre, who
lay mute and stricken. Quinn had propped himself on one elbow, reached out with his other
hand, grabbed the piece of wood lying by Andre’s leg and jammed it into Andre’s chest.
And, just like that, Andre’s long life was over.
He’d done it for me.
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
How could I be the same person? I wondered. How could I be happy that Tara had gotten
married and yet remember such a thing—not with horror, but with a savage sense of
pleasure? I had wanted Andre to die, as much as I had wanted Tara to find someone to live
with who would never tease her for her awful past, someone who would care for her and be
sweet to her. And JB would do that. He might not be much on intellectual conversation, but
Tara seemed to have made her peace with that.
Theoretically, then, I was delighted and hopeful for my two friends. But I couldn’t feel it.
I’d seen awful things, and I’d felt awful things. Now I felt like two different people trying
to exist inside the same space.
If I just stay away from the vampires for a while, I told myself, smiling and nodding the
whole time as Tara talked on and Amelia patted my shoulder or my arm.If I pray every
night, and hang around with humans, and leave the Weres alone, I’ll be okay.
I hugged Tara, squeezing her until she squeaked.
“What do JB’s parents say?” I asked. “Where’d you get the license? Up in Arkansas?”
As Tara began to tell me all about it, I winked at Amelia, who winked back and bent down
to scoop up Bob in her arms. Bob blinked when he looked into my face, and he rubbed his
head against my offered fingers and purred. We went inside with the sun bright on our
backs and our shadows preceding us into the old house.