Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (184 page)

Hadley had been one of the few remaining members of my family, and I felt her loss; at the same time, I had to admit that Hadley, in her teenage years, had been the cause of much grief to her mother and much pain to my grandmother. If she’d lived, maybe she’d have tried to make up for that—or maybe she wouldn’t. She hadn’t had the chance.

I took a deep breath. I opened the door. “Mr. Cataliades,” I said, feeling my anxious smile stretch my lips unconvincingly. The queen’s lawyer was a man composed of circles, his face round and his belly rounder, his eyes beady and circular and dark. I didn’t think he was human—or perhaps not wholly human—but I wasn’t sure what he could be. Not a vampire; here he was, in broad daylight. Not Were, or shifter; no red buzz surrounding his brain.

“Miss Stackhouse,” he said, beaming at me. “What a pleasure to see you again.”

“And you also,” I said, lying through my teeth. I hesitated, suddenly feeling achy and jumpy. I was sure Cataliades, like all the other supes I encountered, would know I was having my time of the month. Just great. “Won’t you come in?”

“Thank you, my dear,” he said, and I stepped aside, filled with misgivings, to let this creature enter my home.

“Please, have a seat,” I said, determined to be polite. “Would you care for a drink?”

“No, thank you. You seem to be on your way somewhere.” He was frowning at the purse I’d tossed on my chair on my way to the door.

Okay, something I wasn’t understanding, here. “Yes,” I said, raising my eyebrows in query. “I had planned on going to the grocery store, but I can put that off for an hour or so.”

“You’re not packed to return to New Orleans with me?”

“What?”

“You received my message?”

“What message?”

We stared at each other, mutually dismayed.

“I sent a messenger to you with a letter from my law office,” Mr. Cataliades said. “She should have arrived here four nights ago. The letter was sealed with magic. No one but you could open it.”

I shook my head, my blank expression telling him what I needed to say.

“You are saying that Gladiola didn’t get here? I expected her to arrive here Wednesday night, at the latest. She wouldn’t have come in a car. She likes to run.” He smiled indulgently for just a second. But then the smile vanished. If I’d blinked, I would have missed it. “Wednesday night,” he prompted me.

“That was the night I heard someone outside the house,” I said. I shivered, remembering how tense I’d been that night. “No one came to the door. No one tried to break in. No one called to me. There was only the sense of something moving, and all the animals fell silent.”

It was impossible for someone as powerful as the supernatural lawyer to look bewildered, but he did look very thoughtful. After a moment he rose ponderously and bowed to me, gesturing toward the door. We went back outside. On the front porch, he turned to the car and beckoned.

A very lean woman slid from behind the wheel. She was younger than me, maybe in her very early twenties. Like Mr. Cataliades, she was only partly human. Her dark red hair was spiked, her makeup laid on with a trowel. Even the striking outfit of the girl in the Hair of the Dog paled in comparison to this young woman’s. She wore striped stockings, alternating bands of shocking pink and black, and her ankle boots were black and extremely high-heeled. Her skirt was transparent, black, and ruffled, and her pink tank top was her sole upper garment.

She just about took my breath away.

“Hi, howareya?” she said brightly, her smile revealing very sharp white teeth a dentist would fall in love with, right before he lost a finger.

“Hello,” I said. I held out my hand. “I’m Sookie Stackhouse.”

She covered the ground between us very speedily, even in the ridiculous heels. Her hand was tiny and bony. “Pleasedtameetya,” she said. “Diantha.”

“Pretty name,” I said, after I figured out it wasn’t another run-on sentence.

“Thankya.”

“Diantha,” Mr. Cataliades said, “I need to you to conduct a search for me.” ’

“To find?”

“I’m very afraid we are looking for Glad’s remains.”

The smile fell from the girl’s face.

“No shit,” she said quite clearly.

“No, Diantha,” the lawyer said. “No shit.”

Diantha sat on the steps and pulled off her shoes and her striped tights. It didn’t seem to bother her at all that without the tights, her transparent skirt left nothing to the imagination. Since Mr. Cataliades’s expression didn’t change in the least, I decided I could be worldly enough to ignore it, too.

As soon as she’d disencumbered herself, the girl was off, moving low to the ground, sniffing in a way that told me she was even less human than I’d estimated. But she didn’t move like the Weres I’d observed, or the shape-shifting panthers. Her body seemed to bend and turn in a way that simply wasn’t mammalian.

Mr. Cataliades watched her, his hands folded in front of him. He was silent, so I was, too. The girl darted around the yard like a demented hummingbird, vibrating almost visibly with an unearthly energy.

For all that movement, I couldn’t hear her make a sound.

It wasn’t long before she stopped at a clump of bushes at the very edge of the woods. She was bent over looking at the ground, absolutely still. Then, not looking up, she raised her hand like a schoolchild who’d discovered the correct answer.

“Let us go see,” Mr. Cataliades suggested, and in his deliberate way he strode across the driveway, then the grass, to a clump of wax myrtles at the edge of the woods. Diantha didn’t look up as we neared, but remained focused on something on the ground behind the bushes. Her face was streaked with tears. I took a deep breath and looked down at what held her attention.

This girl had been a little younger than Diantha, but she too was thin and slight. Her hair had been dyed bright gold, in sharp contrast with her milk chocolate skin. Her lips had drawn back in death, giving her a snarl that revealed teeth as white and sharp as Diantha’s. Oddly enough, she didn’t seem as worse for wear as I would have expected, given the fact that she might have been out here for several days. There were only a few ants walking over her, not at all the usual insect activity . . . and she didn’t look bad at all for a person who’d been cut in two at the waist.

My head buzzed for a minute, and I was little scared I would go down on one knee. I’d seen some bad stuff, including two massacres, but I’d never seen anyone divided like this girl had been. I could see her insides. They didn’t look like human insides. And it appeared the two halves had been separately seared shut. There was very little leakage.

“Cut with a steel sword,” Mr. Cataliades said. “A very good sword.”

“What shall we do with her remains?” I asked. “I can get an old blanket.” I knew without even asking that we would not be calling the police.

“We have to burn her,” Mr. Cataliades said. “Over there, on the gravel of your parking area, Miss Stackhouse, would be safest. You’re not expecting any company?”

“No,” I said, shocked on many levels. “I’m sorry, why must she be . . . burned?”

“No one will eat a demon, or even a half demon like Glad or Diantha,” he said, as if explaining that the sun rises in the east. “Not even the bugs, as you see. The ground will not digest her, as it does humans.”

“You don’t want to take her home? To her people?”

“Diantha and I are her people. It’s not our custom to take the dead back to the place where they were living.”

“But what killed her?”

Mr. Cataliades raised an eyebrow.

“No, of course she was killed by something cutting through her middle, I’m seeing that! But what wielded the blade?”

“Diantha, what do you think?” Mr. Cataliades said, as if he were conducting a class.

“Something real, real strong and sneaky,” Diantha said. “It got close to Gladiola, and she weren’t no fool. We’re not easy to kill.”

“I have seen no sign of the letter she was carrying, either.” Mr. Cataliades leaned over and peered at the ground. Then he straightened. “Have you got firewood, Miss Stackhouse?”

“Yessir, there’s a good bit of split oak in the back by the toolshed.” Jason had cut up some trees the last ice storm had downed.

“Do you need to pack, my dear?”

“Yes,” I said, almost too overwhelmed to answer. “What? What for?”

“The trip to New Orleans. You can go now, can’t you?”

“I . . . I guess so. I’ll have to ask my boss.”

“Then Diantha and I will take care of this while you are getting permission and packing,” Mr. Cataliades said, and I blinked.

“All right,” I said. I didn’t seem to be able to think very clearly.

“Then we need to leave for New Orleans,” he said. “I’d thought I’d find you ready. I thought that Glad had stayed to help you.”

I wrenched my gaze from the body to stare up at the lawyer. “I’m just not understanding this,” I said. But I remembered something. “My friend Bill wanted to go to New Orleans when I went to clean out Hadley’s apartment,” I said. “If he can, if he can arrange it, would that be all right with you?”

“You want Bill to go,” he said, and there was a tinge of surprise in his voice. “Bill is in favor with the queen, so I wouldn’t mind if he went.”

“Okay, I’ll have to get in touch with him when it’s full dark,” I said. “I hope he’s in town.”

I could have called Sam, but I wanted to go somewhere away from the strange funeral on my driveway. When I drove off, Mr. Cataliades was carrying the limp small body out of the woods. He had the bottom half.

A silent Diantha was filling a wheelbarrow with wood.

S
AM,” I SAID, KEEPING MY VOICE LOW, “I NEED A FEW days off.” When I’d knocked on his trailer door, I’d been surprised to find he had guests, though I’d seen the other vehicles parked by Sam’s truck. JB du Rone and Andy Bellefleur were perched on Sam’s couch, beer and potato chips set handily on the coffee table. Sam was engaging in a male bonding ritual. “Watching sports?” I added, trying not to sound astonished. I waved over Sam’s shoulder to JB and Andy, and they waved back: JB enthusiastically, and Andy less happily. If you can be said to wave ambivalently, that was what he did.

“Uh, yeah, basketball. LSU’s playing . . . oh, well. You need the time off right now?”

“Yes,” I said. “There’s kind of an emergency.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

“I have to go to New Orleans to clean out my cousin Hadley’s apartment,” I said.

“And that has to be right now? You know Tanya is still new, and Charlsie just quit, she says for good. Arlene’s not as reliable as she used to be, and Holly and Danielle are still pretty shaky since the school incident.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “If you want to let me go and get someone else, I’ll understand.” It broke my heart to say that, but in fairness to Sam, I had to.

Sam shut the trailer door behind him and stepped out on the porch. He looked hurt. “Sookie,” he said, after a second, “you’ve been completely reliable for at least five years. You’ve only asked for time off maybe two or three times total. I’m not going to fire you because you need a few days.”

“Oh. Well, good.” I could feel my face redden. I wasn’t used to praise. “Liz’s daughter might be able to come help.”

“I’ll call down the list,” he said mildly. “How are you getting to New Orleans?”

“I have a ride.”

“Who with?” he asked, his voice gentle. He didn’t want me to get mad at his minding my business. (I could tell that much.)

“The queen’s lawyer,” I said, in an even quieter voice. Though tolerant of vampires in general, the citizens of Bon Temps might get a little excitable if they knew that their state had a vampire queen, and that her secret government affected them in many ways. On the other hand, given the disrepute of Louisiana politics, they might just think it was business as usual.

“You’re going to clean out Hadley’s apartment?”

I’d told Sam about my cousin’s second, and final, death.

“Yes. And I need to find out about whatever she left me.”

“This seems real sudden.” Sam looked troubled. He ran a hand over his curly red-gold hair until it stood out from his head in a wild halo. He needed a haircut.

“Yes, to me, too. Mr. Cataliades tried to tell me earlier, but the messenger was killed.”

I heard Andy yelling at the television as some big play roused his excitement. Strange, I’d never thought of Andy as a sports guy, or JB either, for that matter. I’d never added up all the time I’d heard men thinking about assists and three-pointers when the women with them were talking about the need for new kitchen drapes or Rudy’s bad grade in algebra. When I did add it up, I wondered if the purpose of sports wasn’t to give guys a safe alternative to thornier issues.

“You shouldn’t go,” Sam said instantly. “It sounds like it could be dangerous.”

I shrugged. “I have to,” I said. “Hadley left it to me; I have to do it.” I was far from as calm as I was trying to look, but it didn’t seem to me like it would do any good to kick and scream about it.

Sam began to speak, then reconsidered. Finally, he said, “Is this about money, Sook? Do you need the money she left you?”

“Sam, I don’t know if Hadley had a penny to her name. She was my cousin, and I have to do this for her. Besides . . .” I was on the verge of telling him the trip to New Orleans had to be important in some way, since someone was trying so hard to keep me from going.

But Sam tended to be a worrier, especially if I was involved, and I didn’t want to get him all worked up when nothing he could say would dissuade me from going. I don’t think of myself as a stubborn person, but I figured this was the last service I could perform for my cousin.

“What about taking Jason?” Sam suggested, taking my hand. “He was Hadley’s cousin, too.”

“Evidently, he and Hadley were on the outs toward the end,” I said. “That’s why she left her stuff to me. Besides, Jason’s got a lot on his plate right now.”