Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (92 page)

“Flag of truce?” I suggested. I cleared my throat. “Do the vampires have such a thing?”

Eric looked thoughtful. “Of course, then I’d have to explain who I am,” he said.

Happiness had made Alcide a lot easier to read. He was thinking about how soon he could call Debbie.

I opened my mouth, reconsidered, shut it, opened it again. What the hell. “Know who pushed me in the trunk and slammed it shut?” I asked Alcide. His green eyes locked onto me. His face became still, contained, as if he was afraid emotion would leak out. He turned and left the room, pulling the door shut behind him. For the first time, I registered that I was back in the guest bedroom in his apartment.

“So, who did the deed, Sookie?” Eric asked.

“His ex-girlfriend. Not so ex, after last night.”

“Why would she do that?” Bill asked.

There was another significant silence. “Sookie was represented as Alcide’s new girlfriend to gain entrée to the club,” Eric said delicately.

“Oh,” Bill said. “Why did you need to go to the club?”

“You must have gotten hit on the head a few times, Bill,” Eric said coldly. “She was trying to ‘hear’ where they had taken you.”

This was getting too close to things Bill and I had to talk about alone.

“It’s dumb to go back in there,” I said. “What about a phone call?”

They both stared at me like I was turning into a frog.

“Well, what a good idea,” Eric said.

 

T
HE PHONE, AS it turned out, was just listed under Russell Edgington’s name; not “Mansion of Doom,” or “Vampires R Us.” I worked on getting my story straight as I downed the contents of a big opaque plastic mug. I hated the taste of the synthetic blood Bill insisted I drink, so he’d mixed it with apple juice, and I was trying not to look as I gulped it down.

They’d made me drink it straight when they’d gotten up to Alcide’s apartment that evening; and I didn’t ask them how. At least I knew why the clothes I’d borrowed from Bernard were really horrible now. I looked like I’d had my throat cut, instead of mangled by Bill’s painful bite. It was still very sore, but it was better.

Of course I had been picked to make the call. I never met a man yet, above the age of sixteen, who liked to talk on the phone.

“Betty Joe Pickard, please,” I said to the male voice that answered the phone.

“She’s busy,” he said promptly.

“I need to talk to her right now.”

“She’s otherwise engaged. May I take your number?”

“This is the woman who saved her life last night.” No point beating around the bush. “I need to talk to her, right now. Tout de suite.”

“I’ll see.”

There was a long pause. I could hear people walking by the phone from time to time, and I heard a lot of cheering that sounded as if it was coming from a distance. I didn’t want to think about that too much. Eric, Bill, and Alcide—who had finally stomped back into the room when Bill had asked him if we could borrow his phone—were standing there making all kinds of faces at me, and I just shrugged back.

Finally, there was the click, click, click of heels on tile.

“I’m grateful, but you can’t bank on this forever,” Betty Jo Pickard said briskly. “We arranged for your healing, you had a place to stay to recuperate. We didn’t erase your memory,” she added, as if that was a little detail that had escaped her until just this moment. “What have you called to ask?”

“You have a vampire there, an Elvis impersonator?”

“So?” Suddenly she sounded very wary. “We caught an intruder within our walls last night, yes.”

“This morning, after I left your place, I was stopped again,” I said. We had figured this would sound convincing because I sounded so hoarse and weak.

There was a long silence while she thought through the implications. “You have a habit of being in the wrong place,” she said, as if she were remotely sorry for me.

“They are getting me to call you now,” I said carefully. “I am supposed to tell you that the vampire you have there, he’s the real thing.”

She laughed a little. “Oh, but . . .” she began. Then she fell silent. “You’re shitting me, right?” Mamie Eisenhower would never have said
that,
I was willing to swear.

“Absolutely not. There was a vamp working in the morgue that night,” I croaked. Betty Jo made a sound that came out between a gasp and a choke. “Don’t call him by his real name. Call him ‘Bubba.’ And for goodness’ sake, don’t hurt him.”

“But we’ve already . . . hold on!”

She ran. I could hear the urgent sound die away.

I sighed, and waited. After a few seconds, I was completely nuts with the two guys standing around looking down at me. I was strong enough to sit up, I figured.

Bill gently held me up, while Eric propped pillows behind my back. I was glad to see one of them had had the presence of mind to spread the yellow blanket over the bed so I wouldn’t stain the bedspread. All this while, I’d held the phone clamped to my ear, and when it squawked, I was actually startled.

“We got him down in time,” Betty Joe said brightly.

“The call came in time,” I told Eric. He closed his eyes and seemed to be offering up a prayer. I wondered to whom Eric prayed. I waited for further instructions.

“Tell them,” he said, “to just let him go, and he will take himself home. Tell them that we apologize for letting him stray.”

I relayed that message from my “abductors.”

Betty Jo was quick to dismiss the directions. “Would you ask if he could stay and sing to us a little? He’s in pretty good shape,” she said.

So I relayed
that
. Eric rolled his eyes. “She can ask him, but if he says no, she must take it to heart and not ask him anymore,” he said. “It just upsets him, if he’s not in the mood. And sometimes when he does sing, it brings back memories, and he gets, ah, obstreperous.”

“All right,” she said, after I’d explained. “We’ll do our best. If he doesn’t want to sing, we’ll let him go right away.” From the sound of it, she turned to someone by her. “He can sing, if he’ll consent,” she said, and the someone said, “Yippee!” Two big nights in a row for the crowd at the king of Mississippi’s mansion, I guess.

Betty Joe said into the telephone, “I hope you get out of your difficulties. I don’t know how whoever’s got you got lucky enough to have the care of the greatest star in the world. Would he consider negotiating?”

She didn’t know yet about the troubles that entailed. “Bubba” had an unfortunate predilection for cat blood, and he was addlepated, and he could only follow the simplest directions; though every now and then, he exhibited a streak of shrewdness. He followed directions quite literally.

“She wants permission to keep him,” I told Eric. I was tired of being the go-between. But Betty Joe couldn’t meet with Eric, or she’d know he was the supposed friend of Alcide’s who’d helped me get to the mansion the night before.

This was all too complicated for me.

“Yes?” Eric said into the telephone. Suddenly he had an English accent. Mr. Master of Disguise. Soon he was saying things like, “He’s a sacred trust,” and, “You don’t know what you’re biting off,” into the phone. (If I’d had any sense of humor that night, I would have thought the last statement was pretty funny.) After a little more conversation, he hung up, with a pleased air.

I was thinking how strange it was that Betty Joe hadn’t indicated that anything else was amiss at the compound. She hadn’t accused Bubba of taking their prisoner, and she hadn’t commented on finding the body of Lorena. Not that she’d necessarily mention these things in a phone conversation with a human stranger; and, for that matter, not that there’d be much to find; vampires disintegrate pretty quickly. But the silver chains would still be in the pool, and maybe enough sludge to identify as the corpse of a vampire. Of course, why would anyone look under the pool cover? But surely someone had noticed their star prisoner was gone?

Maybe they were assuming Bubba had freed Bill while he was roaming the compound. We’d told him not to say anything, and he would follow that directive to the letter.

Maybe I was off the hook. Maybe Lorena would be completely dissolved by the time they started to clean the pool in the spring.

The topic of corpses reminded me of the body we’d found stuffed in the closet of this apartment. Someone sure knew where we were, and someone sure didn’t like us. Leaving the body there was an attempt to tie us to the crime of murder, which, actually, I had committed. I just hadn’t done that particular murder. I wondered if the body of Jerry Falcon had been discovered yet. The chance seemed remote. I opened my mouth to ask Alcide if it had been on the news, and then I closed it again. I lacked the energy to frame the sentence.

My life was spinning out of control. In the space of two days I’d hidden one corpse and created another one. And all because I’d fallen in love with a vampire. I gave Bill an unloving glance. I was so absorbed in my thoughts, I hardly heard the telephone. Alcide, who had gone into the kitchen, must have answered it on the first ring.

Alcide appeared in the door of the bedroom. “Move,” he said, “you all have to move next door into the empty apartment. Quick, quick!”

Bill scooped me up, blanket and all. We were out the door and Eric was breaking the lock on the apartment next to Alcide’s before you could say “Jack Daniels.” I heard the slow grumble of the elevator arriving on the fifth floor as Bill closed the door behind us.

We stood stock-still in the empty cold living room of the barren apartment. The vampires were listening intently to what was going on next door. I began to shiver in Bill’s arms.

To tell the truth, it felt great to be held by him, no matter how angry I had been at him, no matter how many issues we had to settle. To tell the truth, I had a dismayingly wonderful sense of homecoming. To tell the truth, no matter how battered my body was—and battered at his hands, or rather, his fangs—that body could hardly wait to meet up with his body again, buck naked, despite the terrible incident in the trunk. I sighed. I was disappointed in myself. I would have to stand up for my psyche, because my body was ready to betray me, big time. It seemed to be blacking out Bill’s mindless attack.

Bill laid me on the floor in the smaller guest bedroom of this apartment as carefully as if I’d cost him a million dollars, and he swaddled me securely in the blanket. He and Eric listened at the wall, which was shared with Alcide’s bedroom.

“What a bitch,” Eric murmured. Oh. Debbie was back.

I closed my eyes. Eric made a little noise of surprise and I opened them again. He was looking at me, and there was that disconcerting amusement in his face again.

“Debbie stopped by his sister’s house last night to grill her about you. Alcide’s sister likes you very much,” Eric said in a tiny whisper. “This angers the shape-shifter Debbie. She is insulting his sister in front of him.”

Bill’s face showed he was not so thrilled.

Suddenly every line in Bill’s body became tense, as if someone had jammed Bill’s finger in an electric socket. Eric’s jaw dropped and he looked at me with an unreadable expression.

There was the unmistakable sound of a slap—even I could hear it—from the next room.

“Leave us for a moment,” Bill said to Eric. I didn’t like the sound of his voice.

I closed my eyes. I didn’t think I was up to whatever would come next. I didn’t want to argue with Bill, or upbraid him for his unfaithfulness. I didn’t want to listen to explanations and excuses.

I heard the whisper of movement as Bill knelt beside me on the carpet. Bill stretched out beside me, turned on his side, and laid his arm across me.

“He just told this woman how good you are in bed,” Bill murmured gently.

I came up from my prone position so fast that it tore my healing neck and gave me a twinge in my nearly healed side.

I clapped my hand to my neck and gritted my teeth so I wouldn’t moan. When I could talk, I could only say, “He what? He
what
?” I was almost incoherent with anger. Bill gave me a piercing look, put his finger over his lips to remind me to be quiet.

“I
never
did,” I whispered furiously. “But even if I had, you know what? It would serve you right, you betraying son of a bitch.” I caught his eyes with mine and stared right into them. Okay, we were going to do this now.

“You’re right,” he murmured. “Lie down, Sookie. You are hurting.”

“Of course I’m hurting,” I whispered, and burst into tears. “And to have the others tell me, to hear that you were just going to pension me off and go live with her without even having the courage to talk to me about it yourself! Bill, how could you be capable of such a thing! I was idiot enough to think you really loved me!” With a savagery I could scarcely believe was coming from inside me, I tossed off the blanket and threw myself on him, my fingers scrabbling for his throat.

And to hell with the pain.

My hands could not circle his neck, but I dug in as hard as I could and I felt a red rage carry me away. I wanted to kill him.

If Bill had fought back, I could have kept it up, but the longer I squeezed, the more the fine rage ebbed away, leaving me cold and empty. I was straddling Bill, and he was prone on the floor, lying passively with his hands at his sides. My hands eased off of his neck and I used them to cover my face.

“I hope that hurt like hell,” I said, my voice choking but clear enough.

“Yes,” he said. “It hurt like hell.”

Bill pulled me down to the floor by him, covered us both with the blanket. He gently pushed my head into the notch of his neck and shoulder.

We lay there in silence for what seemed like a long time, though maybe it was only minutes. My body nestled into his out of habit and out of a deep need; though I didn’t know if the need was for Bill specifically, or the intimacy I’d only shared with him. I hated him. I loved him.