Dead But Not Forgotten

by Charlaine Harris

  I won’t ever settle for settling.

  He is always amused by those who insist that having a good choice and a bad choice means having no choices. In the end, it is a choice, everything is, good and bad, and crying otherwise is for children. He is many things, but he has not been a child since William of Normandy walked the earth.

  You’ve got no choice . . . There’s no choice . . . You have to . . . You must . . . You will . . . No. Eric has been forced, it’s true, but he always, always has choices. Forced to be with Appius, and then Freyda. Forced to speak to people he would never have spoken to otherwise; forced to touch and be touched by people he would never have touched otherwise. Well. They are gone and he remains. And like Merlotte, he has ensured his line regardless.

  Pam Ravenscroft and Karin Slaughter. His marriage/prison term with Freyda horrified Pam, because for all her morbid sense of humor and lethal charm, she values Eric’s happiness above all things. Pam had been so young when he married the queen—less than two hundred years old—that she still hadn’t picked up the knack of seeing the long con. She caught on after she’d been the Area Five sheriff for a decade. Karin, always more sanguine about such things, so pragmatic as to seem detached, caught on about a week after the wedding took place.

  Even better, his darlings were instrumental in Castro’s downfall. Karin had taken note of everyone, everyone who sought Sookie for any reason, every single night for a year. By the year’s end Sookie was used to having her around, and Karin offered to keep watch indefinitely, so Eric always knew who was in Bon Temps and why, and from there it was a simple matter to—

  There we are.

  He spots the other person he is there to see, another stranger who has no idea Eric Northman is in his future, however briefly; the idiots on the Council have sent a hard case to Were About. Said hard case is there to observe his targets, a flock of oblivious magpies all too busy bitching about unreasonable grandparents and great-grandparents, and also the sorry state of implant holos, whatever the hell those are (“You’ve never experienced Gone with the Wind until you’ve seen it projected inside your own head”) to realize they are in the crosshairs.

  How will the killer do it? Something in their food? Their drinks? A traffic accident? A home invasion gone wrong? Is he there for one of them or all of them? Will he order the ribs and, if so, try to kill one of Sookie’s line with barbecue sauce under his fingernails?

  For some reason, Eric finds that last thought borderline repulsive—and it takes a lot to repulse him.

  Whatever the hard case’s plan, for now he is there to observe, and it’s a hilarious irony that he has no idea he, in turn, is being watched. Well. It’s not as if Eric has come to Were About for the fine cuisine and—

  “That was just so completely icy I could have shit!”

  —stimulating conversation.

  He stands, he follows the hard case, he kills the would-be assassin in the men’s room. Stupid bastard never heard him come up, probably never heard the crunch of his C2 and C3 vertebrae disintegrating under Eric’s fingers and really? This guy (who dresses like an accountant but has the hands of a lumberjack, a good trick since there haven’t been lumberjacks for decades) is the best they can do? Who sends a norm to kill a Stackhouse-Merlotte? To kill a flock of Stackhouse-Merlottes? This was hardly worth getting out of bed for.

  Who are you kidding, Northman? You couldn’t see her, so you arranged for the next best thing. The killer-who-wasn’t was superfluous, just like the TrueBlood you had no interest in ordering, much less drinking.

  Well, yes, yes to all of it but it hardly matters at this point. Sookie’s protection had been part and parcel of that long-ago wedding contract and it’s interesting to see how that has evolved. Perhaps it is now difficult to find assassins not affiliated with vampires or shifters; perhaps the average freelance assassin has zero interest in messing with any or all Stackhouse-Merlottes. Perhaps the hard case is indicative of murder-for-hire’s shallow labor pool.

  That is . . . hilarious.

  Inwardly chortling, Eric is in a rush now, slinging the body over one shoulder and zipping to the Dumpster outside. Not as dangerous as it would seem; the kitchen and waitstaff are so busy handling the dinner rush they likely wouldn’t notice if he’d set the corpse on fire and heaved it onto the grill.

  (“Order up! Wait, what? This is not on the menu. Are you people trying to get the board of health to shut us down? Again? Get the corpse off the grill!”)

  As it is, the body will quickly be found (but not so quickly as to inconvenience him) and a good thing, too; a message no one receives isn’t much of a message. And the corpse will be more effective than a sternly worded note, to wit: DEAR SHITHEADS, ALL STACKHOUSE-MERLOTTE SPAWN ARE OFF-LIMITS OR I WILL FEED YOU YOUR OWN SEVERED HEAD. LOVE, ERIC NORTHMAN.

  He returns to his table, prepared to settle the bill and rebuff the waitress’s advances and—what was the other thing? Oh. Right. Flee the scene of his murder du jour.

  “Okay, sir, so do you want—”

  Ah! There she is. “I’m a widower who is off waitresses who have a smidge of fairy and are alternately brave and idiotic, determined and wishy-washy, loving and spiteful.”

  The waitress blinks at him slowly, like an owl. “Okay, I really only wanted to know if you needed anything else. And I don’t have a smidge of fairy. Are those even a real thing?”

  He shrugs.

  “Aw, cripes,” she mutters as she moves away, low enough so most customers wouldn’t have heard. “I always get these guys. Always.”

  He snickers to himself and then: the first genuine surprise in decades.

  “Hi.”

  “Hello.” It is one of the Merlotte magpies, the eldest boy. Eric is impressed and annoyed. He should have heard him coming.

  “I’m sorry to disturb your meal—” A pointed glance at the glass brimming with TrueBlood. “You look familiar. Have we met?”

  “No.” Not for the first time, Eric is thankful to be one of the supes who keep themselves out of the media spotlight. The boy will not recognize him, unless Sookie handed out pictures along with her bedtime stories.

  “Maybe you knew my Gram?”

  Or perhaps he will recognize Eric. The boy (who doubtless considers himself a man but he’s surely not old enough to drink) is polite and unafraid. Sookie’s eyes, Merlotte’s hair and build. Courteous but not fawning; an excellent balance and Eric is (a little) impressed in spite of himself.

  “Maybe I did know your Gram,” he replies, pointedly using the past tense. “We were . . . friends.”

  “Want to give me a name, so I can pass on your howdy to the rest of the family?”

  “No.” Pass on his howdy? Ugh. Not even on a dare.

  “Give me a name anyway.” Still polite, still not afraid. Steel behind the smiling eyes. Courage to spare, perhaps not so much intelligence. Even without the eyes, he would know one of her blood. “Or how about I give you one?”

  “As you like.”

  “It’s Eric Northman.”

  “What a coincidence,” he mock-gasps. “That’s my name.”

  “Mmmm. Mine’s Jason.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Poor thing, named for a Hotshot wedding survivor and fairy werepanther almost intelligent enough to remember to put pants on his human form. God, the humanity.

  Jason stares thoughtfully down at Eric, then flicks a glance back at the table of his relatives. The oldest three are watching them. The younger ones are more interested in a FreeVee-versus-implant-holo argument, and wolfing down the bowls of peanuts and popcorn that stand for hors d’oeuvres at Were About. This is very well, since the concentrated attention of four Stackhouse-Merlottes is . . . unsettling. For a moment Eric experiences an emotion he hasn’t felt in decades; for a moment, he fears them.

  Well. Afraid
or not, he must speed things up; there is a corpse in the Dumpster, after all, and he has miles to go before he et cetera. So he comes right out with it.

  “Yes.”

  Jason blinks and doesn’t speak right away. His confused not sure what’s going on but will blunder through anyway expression exactly mirrors that of his great-great-great-great-great-great-uncle and namesake. “Sorry?”

  “You’re about to ask me if I am just passing through. Yes, I am. Then you’ll ask me if I’ve ever been here before so you can recommend some hideous local B and B. I will laugh in derision and you’ll puff up like a toad, which will make me laugh harder, and you’ll swear at me and I’ll get a cramp from all the laughing and you’ll make a vague threat and then you’ll stomp back to your family while convincing yourself that our encounter went exactly as you planned and later will mention to your grandparents what an arrogant ass I am and they will concur.”

  “So I don’t actually have to be here for this conversation.”

  Eric laughs; he can’t help it. It’s kind of glorious. “No.”

  He is so intrigued by the boy he almost doesn’t notice the waitress is there again, not to pester Eric but to tease Jason. “You just go sit down with the rest of those reprobates. I’ll get your orders in a minute. Stop bothering my customers.”

  “Thank you,” Eric tells her. “I felt quite bullied and vulnerable, but now that you’re here I feel much safer.” He pauses. “Hold me?”

  She rolls her eyes—he’s deflected her flirting too often for her to think he’s truly interested—and as she walks away he hears her muttering, “Sunday rush, hate the Sunday rush.”

  There is a pause that is almost awkward—the boy has not left but is preparing to, and Eric decides to risk a quick query. “If you’ll permit an old friend of the family an impertinent question—”

  “The way I heard the stories, impertinent is sort of your middle name.”

  “Oh?”

  A shrug. “Your rep kind of precedes you.”

  “I literally have a ten-dollar bill for every time someone has said that to me over the years.”

  “And you’re eating here?” Jason doesn’t have to glance around the restaurant to make his point. The place isn’t a dive, certainly, but yes, Eric could certainly afford a finer meal. Several of them. “Except I’m betting you’re not here for the food.”

  “Nonsense. I love finger-lickin’ ribs,” he replies with a straight face. “You didn’t know that about me, did you?”

  “Nope. Good trick, since you don’t eat. Right?”

  “Right. And it doesn’t matter what I’m here for. Because you can ride on a reputation, or it can ride you or run you over like a dog in the street. But still: It’s your ride. And I’ll stop now, because I can practically hear your neurons shutting down.” Eric knows he looks young, knows he is conventionally handsome, and knows that most people who are aware of his true nature treat him based on how he looks, not how old they know him to be. It is a tremendous advantage at times to not be treated as a doddering elder relative who may or may not wet his pants while waiting for a nursing home volunteer to fetch him pudding.

  But that wouldn’t apply to any of Sookie’s family. They would know better than most that the outside doesn’t matter, maybe never mattered. They will treat someone they see as an old man . . . like an old man, and never mind how he looks or what he wears. So Jason, like most young people, is half listening to Eric’s well-meant advice while no doubt thinking about whatever teenage idiots ponder as he waits for their conversation to be over.

  “My neurons are none of your business,” Jason snaps, but he softens it with a smile.

  “Getting back to my impertinent question”—Eric hears the boy’s not-quite-inaudible sigh but lets it pass—“is she happy?”

  “Who? Her?” He jerks a thumb to the left, toward the kitchen. “The waitress?”

  “Sookie.” Shit. Should not have used the present tense. It was a luxury he should never have indulged. When he craved her the most, when he missed Sookie the most, it had been easier to think of her as apart from him, not dead. But that led to grammatical inaccuracy, among other things. Sookie was gone, but a part of her was stashed safely away in his mind, and she is always smiling, there, she is always happy to see him, there.

  “Which one?” Jason asks.

  Ye gods, there were multiple Sookies now at large in the universe? How fertile had the woman been? Let’s see, if each generation named at least one girl child after Sookie, that would . . . Horrified, he stops doing the math.

  “Mr. Northman? Which one?”

  “Your—” For a moment, he fears his lips won’t form the words. “Your, uh, great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, I think.”

  “Oh . . . Super Great Grammy Gram.”

  He is appalled and does not hide it. “That’s what you call her?”

  “No, we call her G-Cubed.”

  Dear God. “Yes, that one, was she happy?”

  The boy thinks it over, and Eric gives him a few marks for it. A platitude doesn’t come rushing out of his mouth as it would from almost anyone else. He wants Eric gone but will not say just anything to bring that about. “Yeah, I think so. Or at least not unhappy. From the stories I heard, anyway.” He shrugs with the fond blankness of a boy who loves his elderly relatives and tolerates stories about long-dead ancestors while remaining confident he himself will never be old, because that sort of thing only happens to Other People. “She loved her house and her family and her town. I don’t think there’s anything else. Or if there was . . .” Another shrug. “. . . she never said.”

  “A happy ending, then.” He’s surprised and pleased to hear no bitterness in his tone. Perhaps this errand wasn’t sentimental and silly. Or at least not just sentimental and silly.

  “Sure.”

  He studies the boy and thinks of the girl in the white dress, the one who is long dead and the one who lives in the lockbox of his mind, always young, always happy, always wanting him. I loved you and I hated you and I missed you and then I realized I would always love you and, in the end, they’re just words and they change nothing and you reaped what you sowed, my darling, but if it’s what you wanted I suppose I can be happy for you.

  “Thanks for answering my questions,” Jason says at last and oh, right. They are having a conversation. Best get to it, then. Or end it. Yes, that was better.

  “Thank you for answering mine.”

  “Nice talking to you.”

  “Was it?”

  Jason Stackhouse-Merlotte shrugs and wanders back to his family. Their heads come together like a flock of charismatic pigeons squabbling over peanuts in the park, and he feels their regard and, better, their dismissal

  (silly children, a rookie move, really, but I’ve got no time to show you your mistakes)

  and he knows he’s got maybe another five minutes before the body is discovered. He drains his drink, pops a fifteen percent tip into the waitress’s account via the table tab (the tables remind him of the iPads of old, except larger and with remarkably greasy screens), and heads out the door.

  He passes the table

  (don’t do it)

  unsure if he’s relieved or annoyed when none of them look up

  (do not do this)

  and pauses, ten feet from the door and the rest of his life.

  (Really? You’re really doing this?)

  “You can love a parent while disliking the decisions they made for you,” he informs them, part of his brain wondering why he is bothering. With any of it. Is he talking to them or just using them to remind himself of a few home truths? “You can love them even as you pull away from them. You won’t ever be rid of them. Even in death—perhaps especially not in death.”

  Jason looks up. They all look up. Bred to politeness by their elders, none of them say what they are thin
king.

  “Uh . . . okay. Thanks for that, I guess, mysterious weirdo.”

  “Eric,” the redhead corrects. “Jason just told us. God, if it’s not about food or sex you’re really not interested, are you?”

  “That’s exactly right. So anyway, thanks, mysterious weirdo who knew G-Cubed and whose name is Eric.”

  All right, one of them says what they are thinking. Eric has to bite his lip to stifle the smile.

  “Sookie,” Jason says by way of mild reproof.

  “Sorry,” This Younger Sookie says, not seeming at all remorseful.

  “And his name is Mr. Northman,” Jason reminds the rest of the table. “Like I started to tell you, he was a friend of G-Cubed.”

  “Sorry?” This Younger Sookie tries again, sounding the smallest bit remorseful.

  “I don’t think you are,” Eric replies, and gives them a real smile, and moves past them to the door, “but that’s fine.”

  “Um, okay.” And then, the last thing he hears before the door shuts between him and a throng of Stackhouse-Merlottes: “Well, that was mysterious. You gotta admit.”

  He feels good, and he thinks he even knows why. Returning had been bittersweet, but he’d been afraid the bitter would outweigh the sweet, and it hadn’t. He feels satisfied and curiously pleased. He’s seen evidence of Sookie’s post-Eric life and it hasn’t broken him. It hasn’t even bent him. He can move on to the next phase of his life knowing he has tied up loose ends.

  Perhaps he will marry again. It would be novel to marry without tricking the other party or being forced himself. How . . . how does a marriage like that even work? When you can just tell the other person the truth all the time? Perhaps charts are made. Or something. Chore charts? Lovemaking charts? Since everything can be out in the open from the beginning, there would be lots of time to plan spousal activities. So definitely charts of some kind would be involved. Maybe? He honestly has no idea; the whole thing is baffling.

  A strange thing to suddenly be happy about, but it is quite something to realize that even at his age, there is still unexplored territory, things he has yet to experience.