Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (244 page)

“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?”

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 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.

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 did
not
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.

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.

 

The Sookie Stackhouse Novels
DEAD UNTIL DARK
LIVING DEAD IN DALLAS
CLUB DEAD
DEAD TO THE WORLD
DEAD AS A DOORNAIL
DEFINITELY DEAD
ALL TOGETHER DEAD
FROM DEAD TO WORSE

 

MANY BLOODY RETURNS
edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner

 

 

 

The Harper Connelly Mysteries
GRAVE SIGHT
GRAVE SURPRISE
AN ICE COLD GRAVE

 

SHAKESPEARE’S LANDLORD
SHAKESPEARE’S CHAMPION
SHAKESPEARE’S TROLLOP
SHAKESPEARE’S COUNSELOR

 

REAL MURDERS
A BONE TO PICK
THREE BEDROOMS, ONE CORPSE

 

SWEET AND DEADLY
A SECRET RAGE

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

Copyright © 2008 by Charlaine Harris, Inc. Text design by Kristin del Rosario.

 

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Harris, Charlaine.

From dead to worse / Charlaine Harris.—1st ed. p. cm.

ISBN: 1-4362-0451 -8

1. Vampires—Fiction. 2. Supernatural—Fiction. 3. Louisiana—Fiction. I. Title. PS3558.A6427F76 2008 813’.54—dc22

2008002396

 

Though she can’t walk or see quite as well as she used to, my mother, Jean Harris, remains the most complete person I have ever met. She’s been the bulwark of my existence, the foundation I was built on, and the best mother a woman could have.

A tip of the hat to Anastasia Luettecke, who was a perfectionist in supplying me with Octavia’s Latin. And thanks to Murv Sellars for being the go-between. As always, I owe a great debt of thanks to Toni L. P. Kelner and Dana Cameron for their valuable comments and the gift of their time. My one and only minion, Debi Murray, assisted me with her encyclopedic knowledge of the Sookie universe. The group of enthusiastic readers known as Charlaine’s Charlatans gave me moral (and morale) support, and I hope this book will serve as their reward.

If this was The Lord of the Rings and I had a smart British
voice like Cate Blanchett, I could tell you the background of the events of that fall in a really suspenseful way. And you’d be straining to hear the rest.

But what happened in my little corner of northwest Louisiana wasn’t an epic story. The vampire war was more of the nature of a small-country takeover, and the Were war was like a border skirmish. Even in the annals of supernatural America—I guess they exist somewhere—they were minor chapters . . . unless you were actively involved in the takeovers and skirmishes.

Then they became pretty damn major.

And everything was due to Katrina, the disaster that just kept on spreading grief, woe, and permanent change in its wake.

Before Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana had a flourishing vampire community. In fact, the vampire population of New Orleans had burgeoned, making it the place to go if you wanted to see vampires; and lots of Americans did. The undead jazz clubs, featuring musicians no one had seen playing in public in decades, were special draws. Vamp strip clubs, vamp psychics, vamp sex acts; secret and not-so-secret places where you could get bitten and have an orgasm on the spot: all this was available in southern Louisiana.

In the northern part of the state . . . not so much. I live in the northern part in a small town called Bon Temps. But even in my area, where vamps are relatively thin on the ground, the undead were making economic and social strides.

All in all, vampire business in the Pelican State was booming. But then came the death of the King of Arkansas while his wife, the Queen of Louisiana, was entertaining him soon after their wedding. Since the corpse vanished and all the witnesses—except me—were supernaturals, human law took no notice. But the other vampires did, and the queen, Sophie-Anne Leclerq, landed in a very dicey legal position. Then came Katrina, which wiped out the financial base of Sophie-Anne’s empire. Still, the queen was floundering back from those disasters, when another one followed hard on their heels. Sophie-Anne and some of her strongest adherents—and me, Sookie Stackhouse, telepath and human—were caught in a terrible explosion in Rhodes, the destruction of the vampire hotel called the Pyramid of Gizeh. A splinter group of the Fellowship of the Sun claimed responsibility, and while the leaders of that anti-vampire “church” decried the hate crime, everyone knew that the Fellowship was hardly agonizing over those who were terribly wounded in the blast, much less over the (finally, absolutely) dead vampires or the humans who served them.