Dead Reckoning: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel

by Charlaine Harris

  “You know Hadley left the rest of her estate to me,” I said. This had been weighing on me.

  “The lawyer told me.” Remy’s face wasn’t giving anything away, but of course I have other methods. He was calm through and through.

  “You aren’t mad?”

  “No, I don’t want nothing of Hadley’s.”

  “But for Hunter . . . his college. There wasn’t much cash, but there was some good jewelry, and I could sell it.”

  “I got a college fund started for him,” Remy said. “One of my great-aunts says she’s going to leave what she’s got to him since she doesn’t have any kids of her own. Hadley put me through hell, and she didn’t even care enough about Hunter to plan for him. I don’t want it.”

  “In all fairness, she didn’t expect to die young. . . . In fact, she didn’t expect to die ever,” I said. “It’s my belief she didn’t put Hunter in her will because she didn’t want anyone to know about him and come looking for him to use him as a hostage for her good behavior.”

  “I hope that’s the case,” Remy said. “I mean, I hope she thought about him. But taking her money, knowing how she turned out, how she earned it . . . that would make me feel sick.”

  “All right,” I said. “If you think it over and change your mind, call me by tomorrow night! You never know when I might go on a spending spree or put that jewelry down on the table at one of the casinos.”

  He smiled, just a little. “You’re a good woman,” he said, and returned to his girlfriend and his son.

  I started the drive home with a clear conscience and a happier heart.

  I’d worked half of the early shift that day (Holly had taken my half and her own shift), so I was free. I thought of brooding over Gran’s letter a little more. Mr. Cataliades’s visit to us when we were babies, the cluviel dor, the deceptions Gran’s lover had practiced on her . . . Because surely when Gran had thought she smelled Fintan when she was seeing her husband, she was seeing Fintan in disguise. It was hard to absorb.

  Amelia and Bob were busy casting spells when I got back. They were walking around the perimeter of the house in opposite directions, chanting and swinging incense like the priests in the Catholic Church.

  Some days I realized it was all to the good that I lived out in the country.

  I didn’t want to break their concentration, so I wandered off into the woods. I wondered where the portal was, if I could recognize it. “A thin place,” Dermot had called it. Could I spot a thin place? At least I knew the general direction, and I started east.

  It was a warm afternoon, and I began sweating the minute I started to make my way through the woods. The sun broke through the branches in a thousand patterns, and the birds and the bugs made the thousand noises that left the woods anything but silent. It wouldn’t be long until evening closed in and the light would fracture and slant, making the footing uncertain. The birds would fall silent, and the night creatures would make their own harmony.

  I picked my way through the undergrowth, thinking of the night before. I wondered if Judith had packed all her things and left, as she’d said she would. I wondered if Bill felt lonely now that she was gone. I assumed nothing and no one had popped up in my yard the night before, since I’d slept through the hours of the dark and into the morning.

  Then all I had left to wonder about was when Sandra Pelt would try to kill me again. Just as I began to suspect that being alone in the woods wasn’t a good idea, I stepped into a tiny clearing about a quarter of a mile, or less, slightly southeast of my back door.

  I was pretty sure this was the thin place, this little clearing. For one thing, there was no reason for it to be clear that I could see. There were wild grasses growing thickly, but there were no bushes, nothing above calf-high. No vines stretched across the area, no branches drooped over it.

  Before I stepped out of the trees, I gave the ground a very careful examination. The last thing I needed was to be caught in some kind of fairy booby trap. But I couldn’t see anything extraordinary, except perhaps . . . a slight wavering in the air. Right in the middle of the clearing. The odd spot—if I was even seeing it right—hovered at the height of my knees. It was the shape of a small and irregular circle, perhaps fifteen inches in diameter. And in just that spot, the air seemed to distort, a little like a heat illusion. Was it actually hot? I wondered.

  I knelt in the weeds about an arm’s length from the wobbly air. I plucked a long blade of grass and very nervously poked it into the distorted area.

  I let go of it, and it vanished. I snatched my fingers back and yipped with surprise.

  I’d established something. I wasn’t sure what. If I’d doubted Claude’s word, here was verification he’d been telling me the truth. Very carefully, I moved a little closer to the wavery patch. “Hi, Niall,” I said. “If you’re listening, if you’re there. I miss you.”

  Of course, there came no answer.

  “I have a lot of troubles, but I expect you do, too,” I said, not wanting to sound whiny. “I don’t know how Faery fits into this world. Are you all walking around us, but invisible? Or do you have a whole’nother world, like Atlantis?” This was a pretty weak and one-sided conversation. “Well, I better go back to the house before it gets dark. If you need me, come see me. I do miss you,” I said again.

  Nothing continued to happen.

  Feeling both pleased that I’d found the thin spot and disappointed that nothing had changed as a result, I made my way back through the woods to the house. Bob and Amelia had finished their magical doings in the yard, and Bob had fired up the grill. He and Amelia were going to cook steaks. Though I’d had ice cream with Remy and Hunter, I couldn’t turn down grilled steak rubbed with Bob’s secret seasoning. Amelia was cutting up potatoes to wrap in foil to go on the grill, too. I was pleased as punch. I volunteered to cook some crookneck squash.

  The house felt happier. And safer.

  While we ate, Amelia told us funny stories about working in the Genuine Magic Shop, and Bob unbent enough to imitate some of his odder colleagues in the unisex hair salon where he worked. The hairdresser Bob replaced had become so discouraged by the complications of life in post-Katrina New Orleans that she’d loaded up her car and left for Miami. Bob had gotten the job by being the first qualified person to walk in the door after the previous one had walked out. In answer to my question about whether that had been sheer coincidence, Bob just smiled. Every now and then, I saw a flash of what fascinated Amelia about Bob, who otherwise looked like a skinny, rough-haired encyclopedia salesman. I told him about Immanuel and my emergency haircut, and he said Immanuel had done a wonderful job.

  “So, the work on the wards is all done?” I asked anxiously, trying to sound casual about the change of topic.

  “You bet,” Amelia said, looking proud. She cut another bite of steak. “They’re even better now. A dragon couldn’t get through ’em. No one who means you harm will make it.”

  “So if a dragon was friendly . . .” I said, half teasing, and she swatted me with her fork.

  “No such thing, the way I hear tell,” Amelia said. “Of course, I’ve never seen one.”

  “Of course.” I didn’t know whether to feel curious or relieved.

  Bob said, “Amelia’s got a surprise for you.”

  “Oh?” I tried to sound more relaxed than I felt.

  “I found the cure,” she said, half-proudly and half-shyly. “I mean, you did ask me to when I left. I kept looking for a way to break the blood bond. I found it.”

  “How?” I scrambled to conceal how flustered I was.

  “First I asked Octavia. She didn’t know, because she doesn’t specialize in vampire magic, but she e-mailed a couple of her older friends in other covens, and they scouted around. It all took time, and there were some dead ends, but eventually I came up with a spell that doesn’t end in the death of one of the . . . bondees.”

  “I’m stunned,” I said, which was the absolute truth.

  “Shall I cast it ton
ight?”

  “You mean . . . right now?”

  “Yes, after supper.” Amelia looked slightly less happy because she wasn’t getting the response she’d anticipated. Bob was looking from Amelia to me, and he, too, looked doubtful. He’d assumed I’d be both delighted and effusive, and that wasn’t the reaction he was seeing.

  “I don’t know.” I put my fork down. “It wouldn’t hurt Eric?”

  “As if anything can hurt a vampire that old,” she said. “Honestly, Sook, why you’re worrying about him . . .”

  “I love him,” I said. They both stared at me.

  “For real?” Amelia said in a small voice.

  “I told you that before you left, Amelia.”

  “I guess I just didn’t want to believe you. You sure you’ll feel that way when the bond is dissolved?”

  “That’s what I want to find out.”

  She nodded. “You need to know. And you need to be free of him.”

  The sun had just set, and I could feel Eric rising. His presence was with me like a shadow: familiar, irritating, reassuring, intrusive. All those things at once.

  “If you’re ready, do it now,” I said. “Before I lose all courage.”

  “This is actually a good time of day to do it,” she said. “Sunset. End of the day. Endings, in general. It makes sense.” Amelia hurried to the bedroom. She returned in a couple of minutes with an envelope and three little jars: jelly jars in a chrome rack, like the kind a waitress in a diner puts on the table at breakfast. The jars were half-full of a mixture of herbs. Amelia was now wearing an apron. I could see that there were objects in one of the pockets.

  “All right,” she said, and handed the envelope to Bob, who extracted the paper and scanned it quickly, a frown on his narrow face.

  “Out in the yard,” he suggested, and we three left the kitchen, crossed the back porch, and went down into the yard, smelling the steak all over again as we passed my old grill. Amelia positioned me in one spot, Bob in another, and then positioned the jelly jars, too. Bob and I each had one on the ground behind us, and there was one at the spot where she would stand. We’d form a triangle. I didn’t ask any questions. I probably wouldn’t have believed the answers, anyway.

  She gave me a book of matches and handed one to Bob, too. She kept a third for herself. “When I tell you, set fire to your herbs. Then walk counterclockwise around your jar three times,” she said. “Stop at your station again after the third time. Then we’ll say some words—Bob, you got ’em in your head? Sookie’ll need the paper.”

  Bob looked at the words again, nodded, and passed me the paper. I could just read the script by the security light, because the evening was closing in fast now that the sun was down.

  “Ready?” Amelia asked sharply. She looked older and colder in the twilight.

  I nodded, wondering if I was being truthful.

  Bob said, “Yes.”

  “Then turn and light your fire,” Amelia said, and like a robot I did as I was told. I was scared to death, and I wasn’t sure why. This was what I needed to do. My match struck and I dropped it in the jelly jar. The herbs flared up with a sharp smell, and then we three were upright again and moving counterclockwise.

  Was this a bad thing for a Christian to be doing? Probably. On the other hand, it had never occurred to me to ask the Methodist minister if he had a ritual in place to sever a blood bond between a woman and a vampire.

  And when we’d been around three times and stopped again, Amelia pulled a ball of red yarn from her apron. She held one end and passed the ball to Bob. He measured out some and took hold and then passed the ball to me. I did the same and returned the ball to Amelia, because that seemed to be the program. I held the yarn with one hand and gripped the paper with the other. This was busier than I had counted on. Amelia also had a pair of shears, and she extracted those from a pocket, too.

  Amelia, who had been chanting the whole time, pointed at me and then at Bob, to indicate that we should join in. I peered down at the paper, picked my way through the words that made no sense to me, and then it was over.

  We stood in silence, and the little flames in the jars died out, and the night had set in hard.

  “Cut,” Amelia said, handing me the shears. “And mean it.”

  Feeling a little ridiculous and a lot scared, but sure that I needed to do this, I snipped the red yarn.

  And I lost Eric.

  He wasn’t there.

  Amelia rolled up the cut yarn and handed it to me. To my surprise, she was smiling; she looked fierce and triumphant. I took the length of yarn automatically from her hand, all my senses stretching out to seek Eric. Nothing.

  I felt a rush of panic. It wasn’t entirely pure: There was some relief mixed in, which I had expected. And there was grief. As soon as I was sure he was okay, that he hadn’t been hurt, I knew I would relax and feel the full measure of the success of the spell.

  In the house, my phone rang, and I sprinted for the back door.

  “Are you there?” he said. “Are you there, are you all right?”

  “Eric,” I said, my breath coming out in a great ripping sigh. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re all right! You are, aren’t you?”

  “What have you done?”

  “Amelia found a way to break the bond.”

  There was a long silence. Before, I would have known if Eric was anxious, furious, or thoughtful. Now, I couldn’t imagine. Finally, he spoke.

  “Sookie, the marriage gives you some protection, but the bond is what is important.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I am so angry with you.” He really meant it.

  “Come here,” I said.

  “No. If I see Amelia, I’ll break her neck.” He meant that, too. “She’s always wanted you to get rid of me.”

  “But . . .” I began, not knowing how to end the sentence.

  “I’ll see you when I’ve got control of myself,” he said. And he hung up.

  Chapter 9

  I should have foreseen this, I told myself for the tenth, or twentieth, time. I’d rushed into something that I should have prepared for. At the least, I should have called Eric and warned him what was about to happen. But I’d been afraid he’d talk me out of it, and I had to know what my true feeling for him was.

  Just at the moment, Eric’s true feeling for me was anger. He was mighty pissed off. On the one hand, I didn’t blame him. We were supposed to be in love, and that meant we were supposed to consult one another, right? On the other hand, I could count the times Eric had consulted me without even using up all my fingers. On one of my hands. So at other moments, I did blame him for his reaction. Of course he wouldn’t have let me do it, and I would never have known something I had to know.

  So I was hopping from foot to foot mentally when it came to deciding whether I’d done the right thing.

  But I was upset and worried pretty much nonstop, no matter which foot I was standing on at the moment.

  Bob and Amelia had a consultation in their bedroom, as a result of which they decided to stay another day to “see what happens.” I could tell Amelia was worried. She thought she ought to have eased into the idea a little more slowly before encouraging me to take the plunge. Bob thought we were both being silly, but he was smart enough not to say so. However, he couldn’t help but think it, and though he wasn’t as clear a broadcaster as Amelia, I could hear him.

  I did go to work the next day, but I was so distracted and miserable, and business was so light, that Sam told me to go home early. India kindly patted me on the shoulder and told me to take it easy, a concept I had a lot of trouble understanding.

  That night, Eric came an hour after sundown. He drove up, so we’d have warning. I’d hoped he would come, and I’d been pretty sure he would have cooled off enough. Right after supper, I’d asked Amelia and Bob if they’d like to go to a movie in Clarice.

  “You sure you’ll be all right?” Amelia had asked. “Because we’re ready to stay with you if you th
ink he’s still angry.” If she’d been pleased before, it had vanished now.

  “I don’t know how he feels,” I said, and I was still a little giddy at the thought. “But I do think he’ll come tonight. It’d probably go better if he didn’t have you here to make him madder.”

  Bob had bristled a little at that, but Amelia had nodded understandingly. “I hope you still think of me as your friend,” she said, and for once I didn’t see her thoughts coming. “I mean, I think I’ve screwed you up, but that wasn’t my intention. I intended to free you.”

  “I understand, and I still think of you as one of my best friends,” I said as reassuringly as I could manage. If I was weak-willed enough to go along with Amelia’s impulses, then it was my problem.

  I was sitting alone on my front porch in that gloomy kind of mood where you remember all of your mistakes and none of your good decisions when I saw the headlights of Eric’s car zooming up the driveway.

  I didn’t expect that he would hesitate when he got out of the car.

  “Are you still mad?” I said, trying not to cry. Weeping would be craven, and I was forcing some steel into my backbone.

  “Do you still love me?” he asked.

  “You first.” Childish.

  “I’m not angry,” he said. “At least, not anymore. At least, not right now. I should have encouraged you to find a way to break the bond, and in fact we have a ritual for it. I should have offered it to you. I was afraid that without it we would be parted, whether because you didn’t want to be dragged into my troubles or because Victor found out you were vulnerable. If he chooses to ignore the marriage, without the bond I won’t know that you are in danger.”

  “I should have asked you what you thought, or at least warned you what we were going to do,” I said. I took a deep breath. “I do love you, all on my own.”

  And he was up on the porch with me, and then he was picking me up and kissing me, my lips, my neck, my shoulders. He held my feet off the ground and lifted me high enough that his mouth could find my breasts through my bra and T-shirt.

  I gave a little shriek and swung my legs until they latched around him. I rubbed against him as hard as I could. Eric loved monkey sex.