Dead Reckoning: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel

by Charlaine Harris

  “Yes, in the kitchen,” I said. When I’d rebuilt my burned-out kitchen, custom had made me buy a high stool like the one my gran had perched on while she talked on the old telephone. The new phone was cordless, and I didn’t need to stay in the kitchen when I used it, but the counter simply hadn’t looked right without a stool beside it.

  My three guests trailed behind me, and I dragged the stool into the middle of the floor. There was just enough room for everyone when Pam and Eric sat on the other side of the table. Eric was glowering at Immanuel in an ominous way, and Pam was simply waiting to be entertained by our emotional upheavals.

  I clambered up on the stool and made myself sit with a straight back. My legs were smarting, my eyes were prickly, and my throat was scratchy. But I forced myself to smile at the hairstylist. Immanuel was real nervous. You don’t want that in a person with sharp scissors.

  Immanuel took the elastic band off my ponytail. There was a long silence while he regarded the damage. He wasn’t thinking good thoughts. My vanity got hold of me. “Is it very bad?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from quavering. Reaction was definitely getting the upper hand, now that I was safe at home.

  “I’m going to have to take off about three inches,” he said quietly, as if he were telling me a relative was terminally ill.

  To my shame, I reacted much the same way as if that had been the news. I could feel tears well up in my eyes, and my lips were quivering. Ridiculous! I told myself. My eyes slewed left when Immanuel set his leather case on the kitchen table. He unzipped it and took out a comb. There were also several pairs of scissors in special loops and an electric trimmer with its cord neatly coiled. Have hair care, will travel.

  Pam was texting with incredible speed. She was smiling as though her message were pretty damn funny. Eric stared at me, thinking many dark thoughts. I couldn’t read ’em, but I could sure tell he was unhappy in a major way.

  I sighed and returned my gaze to straight ahead. I loved Eric, but at the moment I wanted him to take his broodiness and shove it. I felt Immanuel’s touch on my hair as he began combing. It felt strange when he reached the end of its length, and a little tug and a funny sound let me know that some of my burned hair had fallen to the floor.

  “It’s damaged beyond repair,” Immanuel murmured. “I’ll cut. Then you wash. Then I cut again.”

  “You must quit this job,” Eric said abruptly, and Immanuel’s comb stopped moving until he realized Eric was talking to me.

  I wanted to throw something heavy at my honeybun. And I wanted it to smack him right in his stubborn, handsome head. “We’ll talk later,” I said, not looking at him.

  “What will happen next? You’re too vulnerable!”

  “We’ll talk later.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Pam look away so Eric wouldn’t see her smirk.

  “Doesn’t she need something around her?” Eric snarled at Immanuel. “Covering her clothes?”

  “Eric,” I said, “since I’m all smelly and smoky and covered with fire extinguisher stuff, I don’t think keeping my clothes free of burned hair is a big deal.”

  Eric didn’t snort, but he came close. However, he did seem to pick up on my feeling that he was being a total pain, and he shut up and got a hold on himself.

  The relief was tremendous.

  Immanuel, whose hands were surprisingly steady for someone cooped up in a kitchen with two vampires (one remarkably irritable) and a charred barmaid, combed until my hair was as smooth as it could be. Then he picked up his scissors. I could feel the hairdresser focusing completely on his task. Immanuel was a champion at concentration, I discovered, since his mind lay open to me.

  It really didn’t take long. The burned bits drifted to the floor like sad snowflakes.

  “You need to go shower now and come back with clean, wet hair,” Immanuel said. “After that, I’ll even it up. Where’s your broom, your dustpan?”

  I told him where to find them, and then I went into my bedroom, passing through it to my own bathroom. I wondered if Eric would join me, since I knew from past experience that he liked my shower. The way I felt, it would be far better if he stayed in the kitchen.

  I pulled off my smelly clothes and ran the water as hot as I could stand it. It was a relief to step into the tub and let the heat and wetness flow over me. When the warm water hit my legs, it stung. For a few moments I wasn’t appreciative or happy about anything. I just remembered how scared I’d been. But after I’d dealt with that, I had something on my mind.

  The figure I’d spotted running toward the bar, bottle in hand—I couldn’t be completely sure, but I suspected it had not been human.

  Chapter 2

  I stuffed my grimy, reeking clothes into the hamper in my bathroom. I’d have to presoak them in some Clorox 2 before I even tried to wash them, but of course I couldn’t just toss them out before they were clean and I could assess the damage. I wasn’t feeling too optimistic about the future of the black pants. I hadn’t noticed they were a little scorched until I pulled them down over my tender thighs and found that my skin was pink. Only then did I remember looking down to see my apron on fire.

  As I examined my legs, I realized it could have been much worse. The sparks had caught my apron, not my pants, and Sam had been very quick with the extinguisher. Now I appreciated his checking the extinguishers every year; I appreciated his going down to the fire station to get them refilled; I appreciated the smoke alarms. I had a flash of what might have been.

  Deep breath, I told myself as I patted my legs dry. Deep breath. Think of how good it feels to be clean. It had felt wonderful to wash away the smell, to lather up my hair, to rinse out all the smell along with the shampoo.

  I couldn’t stop worrying about what I’d seen when I’d looked out Merlotte’s window: a short figure running toward the building, holding something in one hand. I hadn’t been able to tell if the runner was a man or a woman, but one thing I was sure of: The runner was a supe, and I suspected he—or she—was a twoey. This suspicion gained more weight when I added in the speed and agility of the runner and the strength and accuracy of the throw—the bottle had come at the window harder than a human could have hurled it, with enough velocity to shatter the window.

  I couldn’t be 100 percent sure. But vampires don’t like to handle fire. Something about the vampire condition causes them to be extra flammable. It would take a very confident, or very reckless, fanger to use a Molotov cocktail as a weapon.

  For that reason alone, I was inclined to put my money on the bomber being a twoey—a shapeshifter or were of some variety. Of course, there were other sorts of supernatural creatures like elves and fairies and goblins, and they were all quicker than humans. To my regret, the whole incident had happened too swiftly for me to scope out the bomber’s mind. That would have been decisive, because vampires are a big blank to me, a hole in the aether, and I also can’t read fairies, though they register differently. Some twoeys I can read with fair accuracy, some I can’t, but I see their brains as warm and busy.

  Normally, I’m not an indecisive person. But as I patted myself dry and combed through my wet hair (feeling how strange it was that my comb completed its passage much more quickly), I worried about sharing my suspicions with Eric. When a vampire loves you—even when he simply feels proprietary toward you—his notion of protection can be pretty drastic. Eric loved going into battle; often he had to struggle to balance the political savvy of a move with his instinct to leap in with a swinging sword. Though I didn’t think he’d go charging off at the two-natured community, in his present mood it seemed wiser to keep my ideas to myself until I had some evidence one way or another.

  I pulled on sleep pants and a Bon Temps Lady Falcons T-shirt. I looked at my bed with longing before I left my room to rejoin the strange crowd in the kitchen. Eric and Pam were drinking some bottled synthetic blood I’d had in the refrigerator, and Immanuel was sipping on a Coke. I was stricken because I hadn’t thought of offering them refre
shment, but Pam caught my eye and gave me a level look. She’d taken care of it. I nodded gratefully and told Immanuel, “I’m ready now.” He unfolded his skinny frame from the chair and gestured to the stool.

  This time my new hairdresser unfolded a thin, shoulders-only plastic capelet and tied it around my neck. He combed through my hair himself, eyeing it intently. I tried to smile at Eric to show this wasn’t so bad, but my heart wasn’t in it. Pam scowled at her cell phone. A text had displeased her.

  Apparently Immanuel had passed the time by combing Pam’s hair. The pale golden mane, straight and fine, was pushed off her face with a blue headband. You just couldn’t get any more Alice-like. She wasn’t wearing a full-skirted blue dress and a white pinafore, but she was wearing pale blue: a sheath dress, perhaps from the sixties, and pumps with three-inch heels. And pearls.

  “What’s up, Pam?” I asked, simply because the silence in my kitchen was getting oppressive. “Someone sending you a nasty text?”

  “Nothing’s up,” she snarled, and I tried not to flinch. “Absolutely nothing is happening. Victor is still our leader. Our position doesn’t improve. Our requests go unanswered. Where is Felipe? We need him.”

  Eric glared at her. Whoa, trouble in paradise. I’d never seen them seriously at odds.

  Pam was the only “child” of Eric’s I’d ever met. She’d gone off on her own after spending her first few years as a vampire with him. She’d done well, but she’d told me she was glad enough to return to Eric after he’d called her to help him out in Area Five when the former queen had appointed him to the position of sheriff.

  The tense atmosphere was getting to Immanuel, who was wavering in and out of his focus on his job . . . which was cutting my hair.

  “Chill out, guys,” I said sharply.

  “And what is it with all the crap sitting out in your driveway?” Pam asked, her original British accent peeking through. “To say nothing of your living room and your porch. Are you having a garage sale?” You could tell she was proud of getting her terminology correct.

  “Almost finished,” Immanuel muttered, his scissors snicking at a frantic rate in response to the growing tension.

  “Pam, that all came out of my attic,” I said, glad to talk about something so mundane and (I hoped) calming. “Claude and Dermot are helping me clean it out. I’m going to go see an antiques dealer with Sam in the morning—well, we were going to go. I don’t know if Sam’ll be able to make it, now.”

  “There, see!” Pam said to Eric. “She lives with other men. She goes shopping with other men. What kind of husband are you?”

  And Eric launched himself across the table, hands extended toward Pam’s throat.

  The next second the two were rolling on the floor in a serious attempt to damage each other. I didn’t know if Pam could actually initiate the moves to hurt Eric, since she was his child, but she was defending herself vigorously; there’s a fine line there.

  I couldn’t scramble down from the stool fast enough to escape some collateral damage. It seemed inevitable that they would slam into the stool, and of course they did in a second. Over I went to join them on the floor, banging my shoulder against the counter in the process. Immanuel very intelligently leaped backward, and he didn’t drop his scissors, a blessing to all of us. One of the vampires might have grabbed them as a weapon, or the gleaming scissors might have become embedded in some part of me.

  Immanuel’s hand gripped my arm with surprising strength, and he yanked me up and away. We scuttled out of the kitchen and into the living room. We stood, panting, in the middle of the cluttered room, staring down the hall in case the fight followed us.

  I could hear crashing and banging, and a persistent snarly noise I finally identified as growling.

  “Sounds like two pit bulls going at each other,” Immanuel said. He was handling this with amazing calm. I was glad to have some human company.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with them,” I said. “I’ve never seen them act like this.”

  “Pam’s frustrated,” he said with a familiarity that surprised me. “She wants to make her own child, but there’s some vampire reason she can’t.”

  I couldn’t curb my surprise. “And you know all this—how? I’m sorry, that sounds rude, but I hang around with Pam and Eric a fair bit, and I haven’t seen you before.”

  “Pam’s been dating my sister.” Immanuel didn’t seem offended by my frankness, thank goodness. “My sister Miriam. My mom’s religious,” he explained. “And kind of crazy. The situation is, my sister is sick and getting sicker, and Pam really wants to bring her over before Mir gets any worse. She’ll be skin and bones forever if Pam doesn’t hurry.”

  I hardly knew what to say. “What illness does your sister have?” I said.

  “She has leukemia,” Immanuel said. Though he maintained his casual facade, I could read the pain underneath, and the fear and worry.

  “So that’s how Pam knows you.”

  “Yeah. But she was right. I am the best hairstylist in Shreveport.”

  “I believe you,” I said. “And I’m sorry about your sister. I don’t guess they told you why Pam wasn’t able to bring Miriam over?”

  “Nope, but I don’t think the roadblock is Eric.”

  “Probably not.” There was a shriek and a clatter from the kitchen. “I wonder if I ought to intervene.”

  “If I were you, I’d leave them to it.”

  “I hope they plan on paying to have my kitchen set to rights,” I said, doing my best to sound angry rather than frightened.

  “You know, he could order her to be still and she’d have to do it.” Immanuel sounded almost casual.

  He was absolutely right. As Eric’s child, Pam had to obey a direct order. But for whatever reasons, Eric wasn’t saying the magic word. In the meantime, my kitchen was getting wiped out. When I realized he could make the whole thing stop at any time he chose, I lost my own temper.

  Though Immanuel made an ineffective grab at my arm, I stomped on my bare feet into the hall bathroom, got the handled pitcher Claude used when he cleaned the bathtub, filled it with cold water, and went into the kitchen. (I was walking a little wonky after the fall from the stool, but I managed.) Eric was on top of Pam, punching away at her. His own face was bloody. Pam’s hands were on his shoulders, keeping him from getting any closer. Maybe she feared he would bite.

  I stepped into position, estimating trajectory. When I was sure I had it right, I pitched cold water on the battling vampires.

  I was putting out a different kind of fire, this time.

  Pam shrieked like a teakettle as the cold water drenched her face, and Eric said something that sounded vile in a language I didn’t know. For a split second, I thought they’d both launch themselves at me. Standing with my feet braced, empty pitcher in my hand, I gave them glare for glare. Then I turned on my heel and walked away.

  Immanuel was surprised to see me return in one piece. He shook his head. Obviously, he didn’t know whether to admire me or think me an idiot.

  “You’re nuts, woman,” he said, “but at least I got your hair looking good. You should come in and get some highlights. I’ll give you a break on the price. I charge more than anybody else in Shreveport.” He added that in a matter-of-fact way.

  “Oh. Thanks. I’ll think about it.” Exhausted by my long day and my burst of anger—anger and fear, they wear you out—I perched on an empty corner of my couch and waved Immanuel to my recliner, the only other chair in the room that wasn’t covered with attic fallout.

  We were silent, listening for renewed combat in the kitchen. To my relief, the noise didn’t resume. After a few seconds Immanuel said, “I’d leave, if Pam wasn’t my ride.” He looked apologetic.

  “No problem,” I answered, stifling a yawn. “I’m just sorry I can’t get into the kitchen. I could offer you more to drink or something to eat if they’d get out of there.”

  He shook his head. “The Coke was enough, thanks. I’m not a big eater. What
do you think they’re doing? Fucking?”

  I hoped I didn’t look as shocked as I felt. It was true that Pam and Eric had been lovers right after he turned her. In fact, she’d told me how much she’d enjoyed that phase of their relationship, though over the decades she’d found she preferred women. So there was that; also, Eric was married to me now, in a sort of nonbinding vampire way, and I was pretty sure that even a vampire-human marriage precluded the having of sex with another partner in the wife’s kitchen?

  On the other hand . . .

  “Pam usually prefers the ladies,” I said, trying to sound more certain than I actually was. When I thought of Eric with someone else, I wanted to rip out all his beautiful blond hair. By the roots. In clumps.

  “She’s sort of omnisexual,” Immanuel offered. “My sister and Pam have had another man in the bed with them.”

  “Ah, okay.” I held up a hand in a “stop” gesture. Some things I didn’t want to imagine.

  “You’re a little prudish for someone who goes with a vampire,” Immanuel observed.

  “Yes. Yes, I am.” I’d never applied that adjective to myself, but compared to Immanuel—and Pam—I was definitely straightlaced.

  I preferred to think of it as having a more evolved sense of privacy.

  Finally, Pam and Eric came into the living room, and Immanuel and I sat forward on the edge of our seats, not knowing what to expect. Though the two vampires were expressionless, their defensive body language let me know that they were ashamed of their loss of control.

  They’d begun healing already, I noticed with some envy. Eric’s hair was disheveled and one shirt sleeve was torn off. Pam’s dress was ripped, and she was carrying her shoes because she’d broken a heel.

  Eric opened his mouth to speak, but I jumped in first.

  “I don’t know what that was about,” I said, “but I’m too tired to care. You two are liable for anything you broke, and I want you to leave this house right now. I’ll rescind your invitation, if I have to.”