Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (48 page)

“Is Farrell gay?” I asked, trying to sound as if my question had just oozed out of the walls.

“He prefers men, yes. You think—”

“I don’t think a thing.” I shook my head emphatically, to let him know how much I wasn’t thinking. Bill squeezed my fingers. Ouch.

The silence was tense until the teenage-looking vamp returned with a burly human, one I’d seen in Bethany’s memories. He didn’t look like Bethany saw him, though; through her eyes, he was more robust, less fat; more glamorous, less unkempt. But he was recognizable as Re-Bar.

It was apparent to me immediately that something was wrong with the man. He followed after the girl vamp readily enough, and he smiled at everyone in the room; but that was off, wasn’t it? Any human who sensed vampire trouble would be worried, no matter how clear his conscience. I got up and went over to him. He watched me approach with cheerful anticipation.

“Hi, buddy,” I said gently, and shook his hand. I dropped it as soon as I decently could. I took a couple of steps back. I wanted to take some Advil and lie down.

“Well,” I said to Stan, “he sure enough has a hole in his head.”

Stan examined Re-Bar’s skull with a skeptical eye. “Explain,” he said.

“How ya doin’, Mr. Stan?” Re-Bar asked. I was willing to bet no one had ever spoken to Stan Davis that way, at least not in the past five hundred years or so.

“I’m fine, Re-Bar. How are you?” I gave Stan credit for keeping it calm and level.

“You know, I just feel great,” Re-Bar said, shaking his head in wonderment. “I’m the luckiest sumbitch on earth—’scuse me, lady.”

“You’re excused.” I had to force the words out.

Bill said, “What has been done to him, Sookie?”

“He’s had a hole burned in his head,” I said. “I don’t know how else to explain it, exactly. I can’t tell how it was done, because I’ve never seen it before, but when I look in his thoughts, his memories, there’s just a big old ragged hole. It’s like Re-Bar needed a tiny tumor removed, but the surgeon took his spleen and maybe his appendix, too, just to be sure. You know when y’all take away someone’s memory, you replace it with another one?” I waved a hand to show I meant all vampires. “Well, someone took a chunk out of Re-Bar’s mind, and didn’t replace it with anything. Like a lobotomy,” I added, inspired. I read a lot. School was tough for me with my little problem, but reading by myself gave me a means of escape from my situation. I guess I’m self-educated.

“So whatever Re-Bar knew about Farrell’s disappearance is lost,” Stan said.

“Yep, along with a few components of Re-Bar’s personality and a lot of other memories.”

“Is he still functional?”

“Why, yeah, I guess so.” I’d never encountered anything like this, never even realized it was possible. “But I don’t know how effective a bouncer he’ll be,” I said, trying to be honest.

“He was hurt while he was working for us. We’ll take care of him. Maybe he can clean the club after it closes,” Stan said. I could tell from Stan’s voice that he wanted to be sure I was marking this down mentally; that vampires could be compassionate, or at least fair.

“Gosh, that would be great!” Re-Bar beamed at his boss. “Thanks, Mr. Stan.”

“Take him back home,” Mr. Stan told his minion. She departed directly, with the lobotomized man in tow.

“Who could’ve done such a crude job on him?” Stan wondered. Bill did not reply, since he wasn’t there to stick his neck out, but to guard me and do his own detecting when it was required. A tall red-haired female vampire came in, the one who’d been at the bar the night Farrell was taken.

“What did you notice the evening Farrell vanished?” I asked her, without thinking about protocol. She snarled at me, her white teeth standing out against her dark tongue and brilliant lipstick.

Stan said, “Cooperate.” At once her face smoothed out, all expression vanishing like wrinkles in a bedspread when you run your hand over it.

“I don’t remember,” she said finally. So Bill’s ability to recall what he’d seen in minute detail was a personal gift. “I don’t remember seeing Farrell more than a minute or two.”

“Can you do the same thing to Rachel that you did to the barmaid?” Stan asked.

“No,” I said immediately, my voice maybe a little too emphatic. “I can’t read vampire minds at all. Closed books.”

Bill said, “Can you remember a blond—one of us—who looks about sixteen years old? One with ancient blue tattooing on his arms and torso?”

“Oh, yes,” red-haired Rachel said instantly. “The tattoos were from the time of the Romans, I think. They were crude but interesting. I wondered about him, because I hadn’t seen him coming here to the house to ask Stan for hunting privileges.”

So vamps passing through someone else’s territory were required to sign in at the visitors’ center, so to speak. I filed that away for future reference.

“He was with a human, or at least had some conversation with him,” the red-haired vampire continued. She was wearing blue jeans and a green sweater that looked incredibly hot to me. But vamps don’t worry about the actual temperature. She looked at Stan, then Bill, who made a beckoning gesture to indicate he wanted whatever memories she had. “The human was dark-haired, and had a mustache, if I am recalling him correctly.” She made a gesture with her hands, an open-fingered sweep that seemed to say, “They’re all so much alike!”

After Rachel left, Bill asked if there was a computer in the house. Stan said there was, and looked at Bill with actual curiosity when Bill asked if he could use it for a moment, apologizing for not having his laptop. Stan nodded. Bill was about to leave the room when he hesitated and looked back at me. “Will you be all right, Sookie?” he asked.

“Sure.” I tried to sound confident.

Stan said, “She will be fine. There are more people for her to see.”

I nodded, and Bill left. I smiled at Stan, which is what I do when I’m strained. It’s not a happy smile, but it’s better than screaming.

“You and Bill have been together for how long?” Stan asked.

“For a few months.” The less Stan knew about us, the happier I’d be.

“You are content with him?”

“Yes.”

“You love him?” Stan sounded amused.

“None of your business,” I said, grinning. “Did you mention there were more people I needed to check?”

Following the same procedure I had with Bethany, I held a variety of hands and checked a boring bunch of brains. Bethany had definitely been the most observant person in the bar. These people—another barmaid, the human bartender, and a frequent patron (a fangbanger) who’d actually volunteered for this—had dull boring thoughts and limited powers of recollection. I did find out the bartender fenced stolen household goods on the side, and after the guy had left, I recommended to Stan that he get another employee behind the bar, or he’d be sucked into any police investigation. Stan seemed more impressed by this than I hoped he’d be. I didn’t want him to get too enamored of my services.

Bill returned as I finished up the last bar employee, and he looked just a little pleased, so I concluded he’d been successful. Bill had been spending most of his waking hours on the computer lately, which had not been too popular an idea with me.

“The tattooed vampire,” Bill said when Stan and I were the only two left in the room, “is named Godric, though for the past century he’s gone by Godfrey. He’s a renouncer.” I don’t know about Stan, but I was impressed. A few minutes on the computer, and Bill had done a neat piece of detective work.

Stan looked appalled, and I suppose I looked puzzled.

“He’s allied himself with radical humans. He plans to commit suicide,” Bill told me in a soft voice, since Stan was wrapped in thought. “This Godfrey plans to meet the sun. His existence has turned sour on him.”

“So he’s gonna take someone with him?” Godfrey would expose Farrell along with himself?

“He has betrayed us to the Fellowship,” Stan said.

Betrayed
is a word that packs a lot of melodrama, but I didn’t dream of smirking when Stan said it. I’d heard of the Fellowship, though I’d never met anyone who claimed to actually belong to it. What the Klan was to African Americans, the Fellowship of the Sun was to vampires. It was the fastest-growing cult in America.

Once again, I was in deeper waters than I could swim in.

T
HERE WERE LOTS of humans who hadn’t liked discovering they shared the planet with vampires. Despite the fact that they had always done so—without knowing it—once they believed that vampires were real, these people were bent on the vampires’ destruction. They weren’t any choosier about their methods of murder than a rogue vampire was about his.

Rogue vampires were the backward-looking undead; they hadn’t wanted to be made known to humans any more than the humans wanted to know about them. Rogues refused to drink the synthetic blood that was the mainstay of most vampires’ diets these days. Rogues believed the only future for vampires lay in a return to secrecy and invisibility. Rogue vampires would slaughter humans for the fun of it, now, because they actually welcomed a return of persecution of their own kind. Rogues saw it as a means of persuading mainstream vampires that secrecy was best for the future of their kind; and then, too, persecution was a form of population control.

Now I learned from Bill that there were vampires who became afflicted with terrible remorse, or perhaps ennui, after a long life. These renouncers planned to “meet the sun,” the vampire term for committing suicide by staying out past daybreak.

Once again, my choice of boyfriend had led me down paths I never would have trod otherwise. I wouldn’t have needed to know any of this, would never have even dreamed of dating someone definitely deceased, if I hadn’t been born with the disability of telepathy. I was kind of a pariah to human guys. You can imagine how impossible it is to date someone whose mind you can read. When I met Bill, I began the happiest time of my life. But I’d undoubtedly encountered more trouble in the months I’d known him than I had in my entire twenty-five years previously. “So, you’re thinking Farrell is already dead?” I asked, forcing myself to focus on the current crisis. I hated to ask, but I needed to know.

“Maybe,” Stan said after a long pause.

“Possibly they’re keeping him somewhere,” said Bill. “You know how they invite the press to these . . . ceremonies.”

Stan stared into space for a long moment. Then he stood. “The same man was in the bar and at the airport,” he said, almost to himself. Stan, the geeky head vampire of Dallas, was pacing now, up and down the room. It was making me nuts, though saying so was out of the question. This was Stan’s house, and his “brother” was missing. But I’m not one for long, brooding silences. I was tired, and I wanted to go to bed.

“So,” I said, doing my best to sound brisk, “how’d they know I was going to be there?”

If there’s anything worse than having a vampire stare at you, it’s having two vampires stare at you.

“To know you were coming ahead of time . . . there is a traitor,” Stan said. The air in the room began to tremble and crackle with the tension he was producing.

But I had a less dramatic idea. I picked up a notepad lying on the table and wrote, “MAYBE YOU’RE BUGGED.” They both glared at me as if I’d offered them a Big Mac. Vampires, who individually have incredible and various powers, are sometimes oblivious to the fact that humans have developed some powers of their own. The two men gave each other a look of speculation, but neither of them offered any practical suggestion.

Well, to heck with them. I’d only seen this done in movies, but I figured if someone had planted a bug in this room, they’d done it in a hurry and they’d been scared to death. So the bug would be close and not well hidden. I shrugged off the gray jacket and kicked off my shoes. Since I was a human and had no dignity to lose in Stan’s eyes, I dropped below the table and began crawling down its length, pushing the rolling chairs away as I went. For about the millionth time, I wished I’d worn slacks.

I’d gotten about two yards from Stan’s legs when I saw something odd. There was a dark bump adhering to the underside of the blond wood of the table. I looked at it as closely as I could without a flashlight. It was not old gum.

Having found the little mechanical device, I didn’t know what to do. I crawled out, somewhat dustier for the experience, and found myself right at Stan’s feet. He held out his hand and I took it reluctantly. Stan pulled gently, or it seemed gently, but suddenly I was on my feet facing him. He wasn’t very tall, and I looked more into his eyes than I really wanted. I held up my finger in front of my face to be sure he was paying attention. I pointed under the table.

Bill left the room in a flash. Stan’s face grew even whiter, and his eyes blazed. I looked anywhere but directly at him. I didn’t want to be the sight filling his eyes while he digested the fact that someone had planted a bug in his audience chamber. He had indeed been betrayed, just not in the fashion he’d expected.

I cast around in my mind for something to do that would help. I beamed at Stan. Reaching up automatically to straighten my ponytail, I realized my hair was still in its roll on the back of my head, though considerably less neat. Fiddling with it gave me a good excuse to look down.

I was considerably relieved when Bill reappeared with Isabel and the dishwashing man, who was carrying a bowl of water. “I’m sorry, Stan,” Bill said. “I’m afraid Farrell is already dead, if you go by what we have discovered this evening. Sookie and I will return to Louisiana tomorrow, unless you need us further.” Isabel pointed to the table, and the man set the bowl down.

“You might as well,” Stan replied, in a voice as cold as ice. “Send me your bill. Your master, Eric, was quite adamant about that. I will have to meet him someday.” His tone indicated the meeting would not be pleasant for Eric.