Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (69 page)

The United States vampire community had let the Japanese vampire clans come forth first. Then, simultaneously, in most of the nations of the world that had television—and who doesn’t these days?—the announcement had been made in hundreds of different languages, by hundreds of carefully picked personable vampires.

That night, two and half years ago, we regular old live people learned that we had always lived with monsters among us.

“But”—the burden of this announcement had been—“now we can come forward and join with you in harmony. You are in no danger from us anymore. We don’t need to drink from you to live.”

As you can imagine, this was a night of high ratings and tremendous uproar. Reaction varied sharply, depending on the nation.

The vampires in the predominantly Islamic nations had fared the worst. You don’t even want to know what happened to the undead spokesman in Syria, though perhaps the female vamp in Afghanistan died an even more horrible—and final—death. (What were they thinking, selecting a female for that particular job? Vampires could be so smart, but they sometimes didn’t seem quite in touch with the present world.)

Some nations—France, Italy, and Germany were the most notable—refused to accept vampires as equal citizens. Many—like Bosnia, Argentina, and most of the African nations—denied any status to the vampires, and declared them fair game for any bounty hunter. But America, England, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries adopted a more tolerant attitude.

It was hard to determine if this reaction was what the vampires had expected or not. Since they were still struggling to maintain a foothold in the stream of the living, the vampires remained very secretive about their organization and government, and what Bill was telling me now was the most I’d ever heard on the subject.

“So, the Louisiana queen of the vampires has you working on a secret project,” I said, trying to sound neutral. “And this is why you have lived at your computer every waking hour for the past few weeks.”

“Yes,” Bill said. He picked up the bottle of TrueBlood and tipped it up, but there were only a couple of drops left. He went down the hall into the small kitchen area (when he’d remodeled his old family home, he’d pretty much left out the kitchen, since he didn’t need one) and extracted another bottle from the refrigerator. I was tracking him by sound as he opened the bottle and popped it into the microwave. The microwave went off, and he reentered, shaking the bottle with his thumb over the top so there wouldn’t be any hot spots.

“So, how much more time do you have to spend on this project?” I asked—reasonably, I thought.

“As long as it takes,” he said, less reasonably. Actually, Bill sounded downright irritable.

Hmmm. Could our honeymoon be over? Of course I mean figurative honeymoon, since Bill’s a vampire and we can’t be legally married, practically anywhere in the world.

Not that he’s asked me.

“Well, if you’re so absorbed in your project, I’ll just stay away until it’s over,” I said slowly.

“That might be best,” Bill said, after a perceptible pause, and I felt like he’d socked me in the stomach. In a flash, I was on my feet and pulling my coat back over my cold-weather waitress outfit—black slacks, white boat-neck long-sleeved tee with “Merlotte’s” embroidered over the left breast. I turned my back to Bill to hide my face.

I was trying not to cry, so I didn’t look at him even after I felt Bill’s hand touch my shoulder.

“I have to tell you something,” Bill said in his cold, smooth voice. I stopped in the middle of pulling on my gloves, but I didn’t think I could stand to see him. He could tell my backside.

“If anything happens to me,” he continued (and here’s where I should have begun worrying), “you must look in the hiding place I built at your house. My computer should be in it, and some disks. Don’t tell anyone. If the computer isn’t in the hiding place, come over to my house and see if it’s here. Come in the daytime, and come armed. Get the computer and any disks you can find, and hide them in my hidey-hole, as you call it.”

I nodded. He could see that from the back. I didn’t trust my voice.

“If I’m not back, or if you don’t get word from me, in say . . . eight weeks—yes, eight weeks, then tell Eric everything I said to you today. And place yourself under his protection.”

I didn’t speak. I was too miserable to be furious, but it wouldn’t be long before I reached meltdown. I acknowledged his words with a jerk of my head. I could feel my ponytail switch against my neck.

“I am going to . . . Seattle soon,” Bill said. I could feel his cool lips touch the place my ponytail had brushed.

He was lying.

“When I come back, we’ll talk.”

Somehow, that didn’t sound like an entrancing prospect. Somehow, that sounded ominous.

Again I inclined my head, not risking speech because I was actually crying now. I would rather have died than let him see the tears.

And that was how I left him, that cold December night.

 

THE NEXT DAY, on my way to work, I took an unwise detour. I was in that kind of mood where I was rolling in how awful everything was. Despite a nearly sleepless night, something inside me told me I could probably make my mood a little worse if I drove along Magnolia Creek Road: so sure enough, that’s what I did.

The old Bellefleur mansion, Belle Rive, was a beehive of activity, even on a cold and ugly day. There were vans from the pest control company, a kitchen design firm, and a siding contractor parked at the kitchen entrance to the antebellum home. Life was just humming for Caroline Holliday Bellefleur, the ancient lady who had ruled Belle Rive and (at least in part) Bon Temps for the past eighty years. I wondered how Portia, a lawyer, and Andy, a detective, were enjoying all the changes at Belle Rive. They had lived with their grandmother (as I had lived with mine) for all their adult lives. At the very least, they had to be enjoying her pleasure in the mansion’s renovation.

My own grandmother had been murdered a few months ago.

The Bellefleurs hadn’t had anything to do with it, of course. And there was no reason Portia and Andy would share the pleasure of this new affluence with me. In fact, they both avoided me like the plague. They owed me, and they couldn’t stand it. They just didn’t know how
much
they owed me.

The Bellefleurs had received a mysterious legacy from a relative who had “died mysteriously over in Europe somewhere,” I’d heard Andy tell a fellow cop while they were drinking at Merlotte’s. When she dropped off some raffle tickets for Gethsemane Baptist Church’s Ladies’ Quilt, Maxine Fortenberry told me Miss Caroline had combed every family record she could unearth to identify their benefactor, and she was still mystified at the family’s good fortune.

She didn’t seem to have any qualms about spending the money, though.

Even Terry Bellefleur, Portia and Andy’s cousin, had a new pickup sitting in the packed dirt yard of his double-wide. I liked Terry, a scarred Viet Nam vet who didn’t have a lot of friends, and I didn’t grudge him a new set of wheels.

But I thought about the carburetor I’d just been forced to replace in my old car. I’d paid for the work in full, though I’d considered asking Jim Downey if I could just pay half and get the rest together over the next two months. But Jim had a wife and three kids. Just this morning I’d been thinking of asking my boss, Sam Merlotte, if he could add to my hours at the bar. Especially with Bill gone to “Seattle,” I could just about live at Merlotte’s, if Sam could use me. I sure needed the money.

I tried real hard not to be bitter as I drove away from Belle Rive. I went south out of town and then turned left onto Hummingbird Road on my way to Merlotte’s. I tried to pretend that all was well; that on his return from Seattle—or wherever—Bill would be a passionate lover again, and Bill would treasure me and make me feel valuable once more. I would again have that feeling of belonging with someone, instead of being alone.

Of course, I had my brother, Jason. Though as far as intimacy and companionship goes, I had to admit that he hardly counted.

But the pain in my middle was the unmistakable pain of rejection. I knew the feeling so well, it was like a second skin.

I sure hated to crawl back inside it.

I
TESTED THE doorknob to make sure I’d locked it, turned around, and out of the corner of my eye glimpsed a figure sitting in the swing on my front porch. I stifled a shriek as he rose. Then I recognized him.

I was wearing a heavy coat, but he was in a tank top; that didn’t surprise me, really.

“El—” Uh-oh, close call. “Bubba, how are you?” I was trying to sound casual, carefree. I failed, but Bubba wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. The vampires admitted that bringing him over, when he’d been so very close to death and so saturated with drugs, had been a big mistake. The night he’d been brought in, one of the morgue attendants happened to be one of the undead, and also happened to be a huge fan. With a hastily constructed and elaborate plot involving a murder or two, the attendant had “brought him over”—made Bubba a vampire. But the process doesn’t always go right, you know. Since then, he’s been passed around like idiot royalty. Louisiana had been hosting him for the past year.

“Miss Sookie, how you doin’?” His accent was still thick and his face still handsome, in a jowly kind of way. The dark hair tumbled over his forehead in a carefully careless style. The heavy sideburns were brushed. Some undead fan had groomed him for the evening.

“I’m just fine, thank you,” I said politely, grinning from ear to ear. I do that when I’m nervous. “I was just fixing to go to work,” I added, wondering if it was possible I would be able to simply get in my car and drive away. I thought not.

“Well, Miss Sookie, I been sent to guard you tonight.”

“You have? By who?”

“By Eric,” he said proudly. “I was the only one in the office when he got a phone call. He tole me to get my ass over here.”

“What’s the danger?” I peered around the clearing in the woods in which my old house stood. Bubba’s news made me very nervous.

“I don’t know, Miss Sookie. Eric, he tole me to watch you tonight till one of them from Fangtasia gets here—Eric, or Chow, or Miss Pam, or even Clancy. So if you go to work, I go with you. And I take care of anyone who bothers you.”

There was no point in questioning Bubba further, putting strain on that fragile brain. He’d just get upset, and you didn’t want to see that happen. That was why you had to remember not to call him by his former name . . . though every now and then he would sing, and that was a moment to remember.

“You can’t come in the bar,” I said bluntly. That would be a disaster. The clientele of Merlotte’s is used to the occasional vampire, sure, but I couldn’t warn
everyone
not to say his name. Eric must have been desperate; the vampire community kept mistakes like Bubba out of sight, though from time to time he’d take it in his head to wander off on his own. Then you got a “sighting,” and the tabloids went crazy.

“Maybe you could sit in my car while I work?” The cold wouldn’t affect Bubba.

“I got to be closer than that,” he said, and he sounded immovable.

“Okay, then, how about my boss’s office? It’s right off the bar, and you can hear me if I yell.”

Bubba still didn’t look satisfied, but finally, he nodded. I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. It would be easiest for me to stay home, call in sick. However, not only did Sam expect me to show up, but also, I needed the paycheck.

The car felt a little small with Bubba in the front seat beside me. As we bumped off my property, through the woods and out to the parish road, I made a mental note to get the gravel company to come dump some more gravel on my long, meandering driveway. Then I canceled that order, also mentally. I couldn’t afford that right now. It’d have to wait until spring. Or summer.

We turned right to drive the few miles to Merlotte’s, the bar where I work as a waitress when I’m not doing Heap Big Secret Stuff for the vampires. It occurred to me when we were about halfway there that I hadn’t seen a car Bubba could’ve used to drive to my house. Maybe he’d flown? Some vamps could. Though Bubba was the least talented vampire I’d met, maybe he had a flair for it.

A year ago I would’ve asked him, but not now. I’m used to hanging around with the undead now. Not that I’m a vampire. I’m a telepath. My life was hell on wheels until I met a man whose mind I couldn’t read. Unfortunately, I couldn’t read his mind because he was dead. But Bill and I had been together for several months now, and until recently, our relationship had been real good. And the other vampires need me, so I’m safe—to a certain extent. Mostly. Sometimes.

Merlotte’s didn’t look too busy, judging from the half-empty parking lot. Sam had bought the bar about five years ago. It had been failing—maybe because it had been cut out of the forest, which loomed all around the parking lot. Or maybe the former owner just hadn’t found the right combination of drinks, food, and service.

Somehow, after he renamed the place and renovated it, Sam had turned balance sheets around. He made a nice living off it now. But tonight was a Monday night, not a big drinking night in our neck of the woods, which happened to be in northern Louisiana. I pulled around to the employee parking lot, which was right in front of Sam Merlotte’s trailer, which itself is behind and at right angles to the employee entrance to the bar. I hopped out of the driver’s seat, trotted through the storeroom, and peeked through the glass pane in the door to check the short hall with its doors to the rest rooms and Sam’s office. Empty. Good. And when I knocked on Sam’s door, he was behind his desk, which was even better.

Sam is not a big man, but he’s very strong. He’s a strawberry blond with blue eyes, and he’s maybe three years older than my twenty-six. I’ve worked for him for about that many years. I’m fond of Sam, and he’s starred in some of my favorite fantasies; but since he dated a beautiful but homicidal creature a couple of months before, my enthusiasm has somewhat faded. He’s for sure my friend, though.