“Okay, I respect that,” she said. “Why are you here?”
“What’s it to you?”
“I just saved your ass.”
She had a point, a good point. “Okay. I am a telepath, and I was hired by your vampire area leader to find out what had become of a missing vampire.”
“That’s better. But it ain’tmy area leader. I’m a supe, but I ain’t no freaking vampire. What vamp did you deal with?”
“I don’t need to tell you that.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“I don’t.”
She opened her mouth as if to yell.
“Yell away. There’re some things I just won’t tell. What’s a supe?”
“A supernatural being. Now, you listen to me,” Luna said. We were walking through the parking lot now, and cars were beginning to pull in regularly from the road. She did a lot of smiling and waving, and I tried to at least look happy. But the limp was no longer concealable, and my face was swelling like a bitch, as Arlene would say.
Gosh, I was homesick all of a sudden. But I thrust that feeling away to pay attention to Luna, who clearly had things to tell me.
“You tell the vampireswe have this place under surveillance—”
“ ‘We’ being who?”
“ ‘We’ being the shapeshifters of the greater Dallas area.”
“You guys are organized? Hey, that’s great! I’ll have to tell . . . my friend.”
She rolled her eyes, clearly not impressed with my intellect. “Listen here, missy, you tell the vampires that as soon as the Fellowship figures out about us, they will be on us, too. And we aren’t going to mainstream. We’re underground for good. Stupid freakin’ vampires. So we’re keeping an eye on the Fellowship.”
“If you’re keeping such a good eye, how come you didn’t call the vampires and tell them about Farrell being in the basement? And about Godfrey?”
“Hey, Godfrey wants to kill himself, no skin off our teeth. He came to the Fellowship; they didn’t go to him. They about peed their pants, they were so glad to have him, after they got over the shock of sitting in the same room with one of the damned.”
“What about Farrell?”
“I didn’t know who was down there,” Luna admitted. “I knew they’d captured someone, but I’m not exactly in the inner circle yet, and I couldn’t find out who. I even tried buttering up that asshole Gabe, but that didn’t help.”
“You’ll be pleased to know that Gabe is dead.”
“Hey!” She smiled genuinely for the first time. “Thatis good news.”
“Here’s the rest. As soon as I get in touch with the vampires, they’re going to be here to get Farrell. So if I were you, I wouldn’t go back to the Fellowship tonight.”
She chewed on her lower lip for a minute. We were at the far end of the parking lot.
“In fact,” I said, “it would be perfect if you would give me a lift to the hotel.”
“Well, I’m not in the business of making your life perfect,” she snarled, recalled to her tough cookie persona. “I got to get back in that church before the shit hits the fan, and get some papers out. Think about this, girl. What are the vampires gonna do with Godfrey? Can they let him live? He’s a child molester and a serial killer; so many times over you couldn’t even count. He can’t stop, and he knows it.”
So there was a good side to the church . . . it gave vampires like Godfrey a venue to commit suicide while being watched?
“Maybe they should just put it on pay-per-view,” I said.
“They would if they could.” Luna was serious. “Those vampires trying to mainstream, they’re pretty harsh to anyone who might upset their plan. Godfrey’s no poster boy.”
“I can’t solve every problem, Luna. By the way, my real name is Sookie. Sookie Stackhouse. Anyway, I’ve done what I could. I did the job I was hired to do, and now I have to get back and report. Godfrey lives or Godfrey dies. I think Godfrey will die.”
“You better be right,” she said ominously.
I couldn’t figure out why it was my fault if Godfrey changed his mind. I had just questioned his chosen venue. But maybe she was right. I might have some responsibility, here.
It was all just too much for me.
“Good-bye,” I said, and began limping along the back of the parking lot to the road. I hadn’t gotten far when I heard a hue and cry arise from the church, and all the outside lights popped on. The sudden glare was blinding.
“Maybe I won’t go back in the Fellowship Center after all. Not a good idea,” Luna said from the window of a Subaru Outback. I scrambled into the passenger’s seat, and we sped toward the nearest exit onto the four-lane road. I fastened my seat belt automatically.
But as swiftly as we had moved, others had moved even more swiftly. Various family vehicles were being positioned to block the exits from the parking lot.
“Crap,” said Luna.
We sat idling for a minute while she thought.
“They’ll never let me out, even if we hide you somehow. I can’t get you back into the church. They can search the parking lot too easily.” Luna chewed on her lip some more.
“Oh, freak this job, anyway,” she said, and threw the Outback into gear. She drove conservatively at first, trying to attract as little attention as possible. “These people wouldn’t know what religion was if it bit them in the ass,” she said. Up by the church, Luna drove over the curb separating the parking lot from the lawn. Then we were flooring it over the lawn, circling the fenced play area, and I discovered I was grinning from ear to ear, though it hurt to do so.
“Yee-hah!” I yelled, as we hit a sprinkler head on the lawn watering system. We flew across the front yard of the church, and, out of sheer shock, no one was pursuing us. They’d organize themselves in a minute, though, the die-hards. Those people who didn’t espouse the more extreme measures of this Fellowship were going to get a real wake-up call tonight.
Sure enough, Luna looked in her rearview mirror and said, “They’ve unblocked the exits, and someone’s coming after us.” We pulled out into traffic on the road running in front of the church, another major four-lane road, and horns honked all around at our sudden entry into the traffic flow.
“Holy shit,” Luna said. She slowed down to a reasonable speed and kept looking in her rearview mirror. “It’s too dark now, I can’t tell which headlights are them.”
I wondered if Barry had alerted Bill.
“You got a cell phone?” I asked her.
“It’s in my purse, along with my driver’s license, which is still sitting in my office in the church. That’s how I knew you were loose. I went in my office, smelled your scent. Knew you’d been hurt. So I went outside and scouted around, and when I couldn’t find you, I came back in. We’re damn lucky I had my keys in my pocket.”
God bless shapeshifters. I felt wistful about the phone, but it couldn’t be helped. I suddenly wondered where my purse was. Probably back in the Fellowship of the Sun office. At least I’d taken all my i.d. out of it.
“Should we stop at a pay phone, or the police station?”
“If you call the police, what are they going to do?” asked Luna, in the encouraging voice of someone leading a small child to wisdom.
“Go to the church?”
“And what will happen then, girl?”
“Ah, they’ll ask Steve why he was holding a human prisoner?”
“Yep. And what will he say?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’ll say, ‘We never held her prisoner. She got into some kind of argument with our employee Gabe, and he ended up dead. Arrest her!’ ”
“Oh. You think?”
“Yeah, I think.”
“What about Farrell?”
“If the police start coming in, you can better believe they’ve got someone detailed to hustle down to the basement and stake him. By the time the cops get there, no more Farrell. They could do the same to Godfrey, if he wouldn’t back them up. He would pro
bably stand still for it. He wants to die, that Godfrey.”
“Well, what about Hugo?”
“You think Hugo is going to explain how come he got locked in a basement there? I don’t know what that jerk would say, but he won’t tell the truth. He’s led a double life for months now, and he can’t say whether his head is on straight or not.”
“So we can’t call the police. Who can we call?”
“I got to get you with your people. You don’t need to meet mine. They don’t want to be known, you understand?”
“Sure.”
“You have to be something weird yourself, huh? To recognize us.”
“Yes.”
“So what are you? Not a vamp, for sure. Not one of us, either.”
“I’m a telepath.”
“You are! No shit! Well, woooo woooo,” Luna said, imitating the traditional ghost sound.
“No more woo woo than you are,” I said, feeling I could be pardoned for sounding a bit testy.
“Sorry,” she said, not meaning it. “Okay, here’s the plan—”
But I didn’t get to hear what the plan was, because at that moment we were hit from the rear.
THE NEXT THINGI knew, I was hanging upside down in my seat belt. A hand was reaching in to pull me out. I recognized the fingernails; it was Sarah. I bit her.
With a shriek, the hand withdrew. “She’s obviously out of it,” I heard Sarah’s sweet voice gabbling to someone else, someone unconnected with the church, I realized, and knew I had to act.
“Don’t you listen to her. It was her car that hit us,” I called. “Don’t you let her touch me.”
I looked over at Luna, whose hair now touched the ceiling. She was awake but not talking. She was wriggling around, and I figured she was trying to undo her seat belt.
There was lots of conversation outside the window, most of it contentious.
“I tell you, I am her sister, and she is just drunk,” Polly was telling someone.
“I am not. I demand to have a sobriety test right now,” I said, in as dignified a voice as I could manage, considering that I was shocked silly and hanging upside down. “Call the police immediately, please, and an ambulance.”
Though Sarah began spluttering, a heavy male voice said, “Lady, doesn’t sound like she wants you around. Sounds like she’s got some good points.”
A man’s face appeared in the window. He was kneeling and bent sideways to see in. “I’ve called nine-one-one,” the heavy voice said. He was disheveled and stubbly and I thought he was beautiful.
“Please stay here till they come,” I begged.
“I will,” he promised, and his face vanished.
There were more voices now. Sarah and Polly were getting shrill. They’d hit our car. Several people had witnessed it. Them claiming to be sisters or whatever didn’t go over well with this crowd. Also, I gathered, they had two Fellowship males with them who were being less than endearing.
“Then we’ll just go,” Polly said, fury in her voice.
“No, you won’t,” said my wonderful belligerent male. “You gotta trade insurance with them, anyway.”
“That’s right,” said a much younger male voice. “You just don’t want to pay for getting their car fixed. And what if they’re hurt? Don’t you have to pay their hospital?”
Luna had managed to unbuckle herself, and she twisted when she fell to the roof that was now the floor of the car. With a suppleness I could only envy, she worked her head out of the open window, and then began to brace her feet against whatever purchase she could find. Gradually, she began to wriggle her way out of the window. One of the purchases happened to be my shoulder, but I didn’t even peep. One of us needed to be free.
There were exclamations outside as Luna made her appearance, and then I heard her say, “Okay, which one of you was driving?”
Various voices chimed in, some saying one, some saying another, but they all knew Sarah and Polly and their henchmen were the perpetrators and Luna was a victim. There were so many people around that when yet another car of men from the Fellowship pulled up, there wasn’t any way they could just haul us off. God bless the American spectator, I thought. I was in a sentimental mood.
The paramedic that ended up extricating me from the car was the cutest guy I’d ever seen. His name was Salazar, according to his bar pin, and I said, “Salazar,” just to be sure I could say it. I had to sound it out carefully.
“Yep, that’s me,” he said while lifting my eyelid to look at my eye. “You’re kinda banged up, lady.”
I started to tell him that I’d had some of these injuries before the car accident, but then I heard Luna say, “My calendar flew off the dashboard and hit her in the face.”
“Be a lot safer if you’d keep your dash clear, ma’am,” said a new voice with a flat twang to it.
“I hear you, Officer.”
Officer? I tried to turn my head and got admonished by Salazar. “You just keep still till I finish looking you over,” he said sternly.
“Okay.” After a second I said, “The police are here?”
“Yes, ma’am. Now, what hurts?”
We went through a whole list of questions, most of which I was able to answer.
“I think you’re going to be fine, ma’am, but we need to take you and your friend to the hospital just to check you out.” Salazar and his partner, a heavy Anglo woman, were matter-of-fact about this necessity.
“Oh,” I said anxiously, “we don’t need to go to the hospital, do we, Luna?”
“Sure,” she said, as surprised as she could be. “We have to get you X-rayed, honey bunch. I mean, that cheek of yours looks bad.”
“Oh.” I was a little stunned by this turn of events. “Well, if you think so.”
“Oh, yeah.”
So Luna walked to the ambulance, and I was loaded in on a gurney, and with siren blaring, we started off. My last view before Salazar shut the doors was of Polly and Sarah talking to a very tall policeman. Both of them looked very upset. That was good.
The hospital was like all hospitals. Luna stuck to me like white to rice, and when we were in the same cubicle and a nurse entered to take down still more details, Luna said, “Tell Dr. Josephus that Luna Garza and her sister are here.”
The nurse, a young African American woman, gave Luna a doubtful look, but said, “Okay,” and left immediately.
“How’d you do that?” I asked.
“Get a nurse to stop filling out charts? I asked for this hospital on purpose. We’ve got someone at every hospital in the city, but I know our man here best.”
“Our?”
“Us. The Two-Natured.”
“Oh.” The shapeshifters. I could hardly wait to tell Sam about this.
“I’m Dr. Josephus,” said a calm voice. I raised my head to see that a spare, silver-haired man had stepped into our curtained area. His hair was receding and he had a sharp nose on which a pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched. He had intent blue eyes, magnified by his glasses.
“I’m Luna Garza, and this is my friend, ah, Marigold.” Luna said this as if she were a different person. In fact, I glanced over to see if it was the same Luna. “We met with misfortune tonight in the line of duty.”
The doctor looked at me with some mistrust.
“She is worthy,” Luna said with great solemnity. I didn’t want to ruin the moment by giggling, but I had to bite the inside of my mouth.
“You need X rays,” the doctor said after looking at my face and examining my grotesquely swollen knee. I had various abrasions and bruises, but those were my only really significant injuries.
“Then we need them very quickly, and then we need out of here in a secure way,” Luna said in a voice that would brook no denial.
No hospital had ever moved so quickly. I could only suppose that Dr. Josephus was on the board of directors. Or maybe he was the chief of staff. The portable X-ray machine was wheeled in, the X rays were taken, and in a few minutes Dr. Josephus told me that I had
a hairline fracture of the cheekbone which would mend on its own. Or I could see a plastic surgeon when the swelling had gone down. He gave me a prescription for pain pills, a lot of advice, and an ice pack for my face and another for my knee, which he called “wrenched.”
Within ten minutes after that, we were on our way out of the hospital. Luna was pushing me in a wheelchair, and Dr. Josephus was leading us through a kind of service tunnel. We passed a couple of employees on their way in. They appeared to be poor people, the kind who take low-paying jobs like hospital janitor and cook. I couldn’t believe the massively self-assured Dr. Josephus had ever come down this tunnel before, but he seemed to know his way, and the staff didn’t act startled at the sight of him. At the end of the tunnel, he pushed open a heavy metal door.
Luna Garza nodded to him regally, said, “Many thanks,” and wheeled me out into the night. There was a big old car parked out there. It was dark red or dark brown. As I looked around a little more, I realized that we were in an alley. There were big trash bins lining the wall, and I saw a cat pouncing on something—I didn’t want to know what—between two of the bins. After the door whooshed pneumatically shut behind us, the alley was quiet. I began to feel afraid again.
I was incredibly tired of being afraid.
Luna went over to the car, opened the rear door, and said something to whoever was inside. Whatever answer she got, it made her angry. She expostulated in another language.
There was further argument.
Luna stomped back to me. “You have to be blindfolded,” she said, obviously certain I would take great offense.
“No problem,” I said, with a sweep of one hand to indicate how trifling a matter this was.
“You don’t mind?”
“No. I understand, Luna. Everyone likes his privacy.”
“Okay, then.” She hurried back to the car and returned with a scarf in her hands, of green and peacock blue silk. She folded it as if we were going to play pin-the-tail, and tied it securely behind my head. “Listen to me,” she said in my ear, “these two are tough. You watch it.” Good. I wanted to be more frightened.
She rolled me over to the car and helped me in. I guess she wheeled the chair back to the door to await pickup; anyway, after a minute she got in the other side of the car.
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