Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (195 page)

Hadley turned back and forth in front of her full-length mirror, appeared satisfied with what she saw, then burst into tears.

“Oh, my dear,” the queen said quietly. “I am so sorry.”

I knew
exactly
how Hadley felt, and for the first time I felt the kinship with my cousin I’d lost through the years of separation. In this reconstruction, it was the night before the queen’s wedding, and Hadley was going to have to go to a party and watch the queen and her fiancé be a couple. And the next night she would have to attend their wedding; or so she thought. She didn’t know that she’d be dead by then; finally, definitely dead.

“Someone coming up,” called Bob the witch. His voice wafted through the open French windows onto the gallery. In the phantom, ghostly world, the doorbell must have rung, because Hadley stiffened, gave herself a last look in the mirror (right through us, since we were standing in front of it) and visibly braced herself. When Hadley walked down the hall, she had a familiar sway to her hips and her watery face was set in a cold half smile.

She pulled open the door. Since the witch Patsy had left the actual door open after Waldo had “arrived,” we could see this happening. Jake Purifoy was dressed in a tux, and he looked very good, as Amelia had said. I glanced at Amelia when he stepped into the apartment, and she was eyeing the phantasm regretfully.

He didn’t care for being sent to pick up the queen’s honeybun, you could tell, but he was too politic and too courteous to take that out on Hadley. He stood patiently while she got a tiny purse and gave her hair a final combing, and then the two were out the door.

“Coming down out there,” Bob called, and we went out the door and across the gallery to look over the railing. The two phantoms were getting into a glistening car and driving out of the courtyard. That was where the area affected by the spell came to an end. As the ghost car passed through the gate area, it winked out of existence right by the group of vampires who were clustered by the opening. Sigebert and Wybert were wide-eyed and solemn, Jade Flower appeared disgruntled, and Rasul looked faintly amused, as if he were thinking of the good stories he’d have to tell in the guards’ mess hall.

“Time to fast-forward,” Amelia called. She was looking tired now, and I wondered how great a strain coordinating this act of witchcraft was placing on the young witch.

Patsy, Terry, Bob, and Amelia began to say another spell in unison. If there was a weak link in this team effort, it was Terry. The round-faced little witch was sweating profusely and shaking with the effort of keeping her magical end up. I felt a little worried as I saw the strain on her face.

“Take it easy, easy!” Amelia exhorted her team, having read the same signs. Then they all resumed chanting, and Terry seemed to be pacing herself a bit better; she didn’t look so desperate.

Amelia said, “Slow . . . down . . . now,” and the chanting eased its pace.

The car appeared again in the gate, this time running right through Sigebert, who’d taken a step forward, the better to watch Terry, I suspected. It lurched to an abrupt stop half-in, half-out of the aperture.

Hadley threw herself out of the car. She was weeping, and from the looks of her face, she’d been weeping for some time. Jake Purifoy emerged from his side and stood there, his hands on the top of his door, talking across the roof of the car at Hadley.

For the first time, the queen’s personal bodyguard spoke. Andre said, “Hadley, you have to cut this out. People will notice, and the new king will do something about it. He’s the jealous kind, you know? He doesn’t care about—” Here Andre lost the thread, and shook his head. “He cares about keeping face.”

We all stared at him. Was he channeling?

The queen’s bodyguard switched his gaze to the ectoplasmic Hadley. Andre said, “But Jake, I can’t stand it. I know she has to do this politically, but she’s sending me away! I can’t take it.”

Andre could read lips. Even ectoplasmic lips. He began speaking again.

“Hadley, go up and sleep on it. You can’t go to the wedding if you’re going to create a scene. You know that would embarrass the queen, and it would ruin the ceremony. My boss will kill me if that happens. This is the biggest event we’ve ever worked.”

He was talking about Quinn, I realized. Jake Purifoy
was
the employee Quinn had told me was missing.

“I can’t stand it,” Hadley repeated. She was shrieking, I could tell from the way her mouth moved, but luckily Andre saw no need to imitate that. It was eerie enough hearing the words come out of his mouth. “I’ve done something terrible!” The melodramatic words sounded very strange in Andre’s monotone.

Hadley ran up the stairs, and Terry automatically moved out of the way to let her pass. Hadley unlocked the (already open) door and stormed into her apartment. We turned to watch Jake. Jake sighed, straightened up, and stepped away from the car, which vanished. He flipped open a cell phone and punched in a number. He spoke into the phone for less than a minute, with no pause for an answer, so it was safe to assume he’d gotten voice mail.

Andre said, “Boss, I have to tell you I think there’s going to be trouble. The girlfriend won’t be able to control herself on the day.”

Oh my God, tell me Quinn didn’t have Hadley killed!
I thought, feeling absolutely sick at the thought. But even as the idea formed fully, Jake wandered over to the rear of the car, which appeared again as he brushed against it. He ran his hand lovingly along the line of the trunk, stepping closer and closer to the area outside the gate, and suddenly a hand reached out and grabbed him. The witches’ area did not extend beyond the walls, so the rest of the body was absent, and the effect of a hand materializing from nowhere and seizing the unsuspecting Were was as scary as anything in a horror movie.

This was exactly like one of those dreams where you see danger approaching, but you can’t speak. No warnings on our part could alter what had already happened. But we were all shocked. The brothers Bert cried out, Jade Flower drew her sword without my even seeing her hand move, and the queen’s mouth fell open.

We could see only Jake’s feet, thrashing. Then they lay still.

We all stood and looked at each other, even the witches, their concentration wavering until the courtyard began to fill with mist.

“Witches!” Amelia called harshly. “Back to work!” In a moment, everything had cleared up. But Jake’s feet were still, and in a moment, their outline grew still more faint; he was fading out of sight like all the other lifeless objects. In a few seconds, though, my cousin appeared on the gallery above, looking down. Her expression was cautious and worried. She’d heard something. We registered the moment when she saw the body, and she came down the stairs with vampiric speed. She leaped through the gate and was lost to sight, but in a moment she was back in, dragging the body by the feet. As long as she was touching it, the body was visible as a table or chair would have been. Then she bent over the corpse, and now we could see that Jake had a huge wound in his neck. The wound was sickening, though I have to say that the vamps watching did not look sickened, but enthralled.

Ectoplasmic Hadley looked around her, hoping for help that didn’t come. She looked desperately uncertain. Her fingers never left Jake’s neck as she felt for his pulse.

Finally she bent over him and said something to him.

“It’s the only way,” Andre translated. “You may hate me, but it’s the only way.” We watched Hadley tear at her wrist with her own fangs and then put her bleeding wrist to Jake’s mouth, watched the blood trickle inside, watched him revive enough to grip her arms and pull her down to him. When Hadley made Jake let go of her, she looked exhausted, and he looked as if he were having convulsions.

“The Were does not make a good vampire,” Sigebert said in a whisper. “I’ve never before seen a Were brought over.”

It was sure hard for poor Jake Purifoy. I began to forgive him the horror of the evening before, seeing his suffering. My cousin Hadley gathered him up and carried him up the stairs, pausing every now and then to look around her. I followed her up one more time, the queen right behind me. We watched Hadley pull off Jake’s ripped clothes, wrap a towel around his neck until the bleeding stopped, and stow him in the closet, carefully covering him and closing the door so the morning sun wouldn’t burn the new vampire, who would have to lie in the dark for three days. Hadley crammed the bloody towel into her hamper. Then she stuffed another towel into the open space at the bottom of the door, to make sure Jake was safe.

Then she sat in the hall and thought. Finally she got her cell phone and called a number.

“She asks for Waldo,” Andre said. When Hadley’s lips began moving again, Andre said, “She makes the appointment for the next night. She says she must talk to the ghost of Marie Laveau, if the ghost will really come. She needs advice, she says.” After a little more conversation, Hadley shut her phone and got up. She gathered up the former Were’s torn and bloody clothing and sealed it in a bag.

“You should get the towel, too,” I advised, in a whisper, but my cousin left it in the hamper for me to find when I arrived. Hadley got the car keys out of the trouser pockets, and when she went down the stairs, she got into the car and drove away with the garbage bag.

Y
OUR MAJESTY, WE HAVE TO STOP,” AMELIA SAID, and the queen gave a flick of her hand that might have been agreement.

Terry was so exhausted she was leaning heavily against the railing of the stairs, and Patsy was looking almost as haggard out on the gallery. The nerdy Bob seemed unchanged, but then he’d wisely seated himself in a chair to start with. At Amelia’s wordless signal, they began undoing the spell they’d cast, and gradually the eerie atmosphere lessened. We became an ill-assorted bunch of weird people in a courtyard in New Orleans, rather than helpless witnesses to a magical reenactment.

Amelia went to the corner storage shed and pulled out some folding chairs. Sigebert and Wybert did not understand the mechanism, so Amelia and Bob set the chairs out. After the queen and the witches sat, there was one remaining seat, and I took it after a silent to and fro between me and the four vampires.

“So we know what happened the next night,” I said wearily. I was feeling a little silly in my fancy dress and high-heeled sandals. It would be nice to put on my regular clothes.

“Uh, ’scuse me, you might, but the rest of us don’t, and we want to know,” Bob said. He seemed oblivious to the fact that he ought to be shaking in his sandals in the queen’s presence.

There was something kind of likable about the geeky witch. And all four had worked so hard; if they wanted to know the rest of the story, there wasn’t any reason they couldn’t hear it. The queen raised no objection. Even Jade Flower, who had resheathed her sword, looked faintly interested.

“The next night, Waldo lured Hadley to the cemetery with the story of the Marie Laveau grave and the vampire tradition that the dead can raise the dead—in this case, the voodoo priestess Marie Laveau. Hadley wanted Marie Laveau to answer her questions, which Waldo had told Hadley the ghost could, if the correct ritual was followed. Though Waldo gave me a reason Hadley agreed to do this on the night I met him, now I know he was lying. But I can think of several other reasons she might have agreed to go with Waldo to St. Louis Cemetery,” I said. The queen nodded silently. “I think she wanted to find out what Jake would be like when he rose,” I said. “I think she wanted to find out what to do with him. She couldn’t let him die, you saw that, but she didn’t want to admit to anyone that she had created a vampire, especially one that had been a Were.”

I had quite an audience. Sigebert and Wybert were squatting on either side of the queen, and they were wrapped up in the story. This must be like going to the movies, for them. All the witches were interested in hearing the backstory on the events they’d just witnessed. Jade Flower had her eyes fixed on me. Only Andre seemed immune, and he was busy doing his bodyguard job, constantly scanning the courtyard and the sky for attack.

“It’s possible, too, that Hadley might have believed the ghost could give her advice on how to regain the queen’s affections. No offense, ma’am,” I added, remembering too late that the queen was sitting three feet away from me in a folding lawn chair with the Wal-Mart price label still hanging on a plastic loop.

The queen waved her hand in a negligent gesture. She was sunk in thought, so deeply that I wasn’t even sure she heard me.

“It wasn’t Waldo who drained Jake Purifoy,” the queen said, to my amazement. “Waldo could not have imagined that when he succeeded in killing Hadley and reported it to me, blaming it on the Fellowship of the Sun, this clever witch would obey the order to seal the apartment very literally, including a stasis spell. Waldo already had a plan. Whoever killed Jake had a separate plan—perhaps to blame Hadley for Jake’s death and his rebirth . . . which would condemn her to jail in a vampire cell. Perhaps the killer thought that Jake would kill Hadley when he rose in three days . . . and possibly, he would have.”

Amelia tried to look modest, but it was an uphill battle. It should have been easy, since the only reason she’d cast the spell was to prevent the apartment from smelling like garbage when it finally was reopened. She knew it, and I knew it. But it had been a pretty piece of witchcraft, and I wasn’t about to burst her bubble.

Amelia burst it all by herself.

“Or maybe,” she said blithely, “someone paid Waldo to get Hadley out of the picture, by one means or another.”

I had to shut down my shields immediately, because all the witches began broadcasting such strong panic signals that being around them was unbearable. They knew that what Amelia had said would upset the queen, and when the Queen of Louisiana was agitated, those around her tended to be even more agitated.