“Heidi,” which conjured up braids and full skirts in my imagination, seemed like a very perky name for a vampire.
“So what should I do about the Long Tooth pack’s warning?” I said, to bring the discussion back to the original problem. “You’re going to send Heidi to my place to try to track the fairy? I have to tell you something else. Basim scented a body, not a fresh one, buried very deep at the back of my property.”
“Oh,” Eric said. “Whoops.” Eric turned to Pam. “Give us some alone time.”
She nodded and went out through the kitchen. I heard the back door shut.
Eric said, “I’m sorry, my lover. Unless you’ve buried someone else on your property and kept it from me, that body is Debbie Pelt’s.”
That was what I’d been afraid of. “Is the car back there, too?”
“No, the car is sunk in a pond about ten miles south of your place.”
That was a relief. “Well, at least it was a werewolf who found it,” I said. “I guess we don’t have to worry about it, unless Alcide can identify her scent. They won’t go digging the body up. It’s none of their doings.” Debbie had been Alcide’s ex-girlfriend when I’d had the misfortune to meet her. I don’t want to drag out the story, but she’d tried to kill me first. It took me a while, but I’m over the angst of her death. Eric had been with me that night, but he hadn’t been in his right mind. And that’s yet another story.
“Come here,” Eric said. His face held my very favorite expression, and I was doubly glad to see it because I didn’t want to think too much about Debbie Pelt.
“Hmmm. What will you give me if I do?” I gave him a questioning eye.
“I think you know very well what I will give you. I think you love me to give it to you.”
“So. you don’t enjoy it at all?”
Before I could blink he was on his knees in front of me, pushing my legs apart, leaning in to kiss me. “I think you know how I feel,” he said, in a whisper. “We are bonded. Can you believe I’m not thinking of you while I work? When my eyes open, I think of you, of every part of you.” His fingers got busy, and I gasped. This was direct, even for Eric. “Do you love me?” he asked, his eyes fi xing mine.
This was a little difficult to answer, especially considering what his fingers were doing. “I love being with you, whether we’re having sex or not. Oh, God, do that again! I love your body. I love what we do together. You make me laugh, and I love that. I like to watch you do anything.” I kissed him, long and lingeringly. “I like to watch you get dressed. I like to watch you undress. I like to watch your hands when you’re doing this to me. Oh!” I shuddered all over with pleasure. When I’d had a moment of recovery, I murmured, “If I asked you the same question, what would your answer be?”
“I would say exactly the same thing,” Eric said. “And I think that means I love you. If this is not true love, it’s as close as anyone gets. Can you see what you’ve done to me?” He didn’t really have to point. It was pretty damn obvious.
“That looks painful. Would you like me to nurse it?” I asked, in the coolest voice I could manage.
In reply, he simply growled. We switched places in an instant. I knelt in front of Eric, and his hands rested on my head, stroking. Eric was a sizable guy, and this was a part of our sex life that I’d had to work on. But I thought I was getting pretty good at it, and he seemed to agree. His hands tightened in my hair after a minute or two, and I made a little noise of protest. He let go and gripped the couch instead. He growled, deep in his throat. “Faster,” he said. “Now, now!” He shut his eyes and his head fell back, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. I loved having that power over him; that was another thing I loved. Suddenly, he said something in an ancient language, and his back arched, and I moved with increased purpose, swallowing down everything he gave me.
And all this with most of our clothes on. “Was that enough love for you?” he asked, his voice slow and dreamy.
I climbed into his lap and wound my arms around his neck for an interlude of cuddling. Now that I had recovered my pleasure in sex, I felt limp as a dishrag after a session with Eric; but this was my favorite part, though it made me feel very “women’s magazine” to admit it.
As we sat holding each other, Eric told me about a conversation he’d had with a fangbanger at the bar, and we laughed about it. I told him about how torn up Hummingbird Road was while the parish was patching it. I suppose this is the kind of thing you talk about with someone you love; you figure they’ll care about trivial topics, since those things are important to you.
Unfortunately, I knew that Eric had more business to get through that night, so I told him I’d go back to Bon Temps with Pam. Sometimes I stayed at his place, reading while he worked. It’s not easy to arrange alone time with a leader and businessman who’s awake only during the hours of darkness.
He gave me a kiss to remember him by. “I’ll send Heidi to you, probably night after next,” he said. “She’ll verify what Basim says he smelled in the woods. Let me know if you hear from Alcide.”
When Pam and I left Eric’s house, it had started raining. The rain put a little chill in the air, and I turned the heat on low in Pam’s car. It wouldn’t make any difference to her. We drove for a while in silence, each lost in our own thoughts. I watched the windshield wipers fan back and forth.
Pam said, “You didn’t tell Eric about the fairy staying with you.” “Oh, gosh!” I put my hand over my eyes. “No, I didn’t. There was so much else to talk about, I completely forgot.”
“You realize Eric won’t like another man living in the same house with his woman.”
“Another man who is my cousin and also gay.”
“But very beautiful and a stripper.” Pam glanced over at me. She was smiling. Pam’s smiles are somewhat disconcerting.
“You can strip all you want to—if you don’t like the person you’re looking at while you’re naked, it’s not going to happen,” I said tartly.
“I kind of understand that sentence,” she said, after a moment. “But still, having such an attractive man in the same house. It’s not good, Sookie.”
“You’re kidding me, right? Claude is gay. Not only does he like men, he likes men with beard stubble and oil stains on their blue jeans.”
“What does that mean?” Pam said.
“That means he likes blue-collar guys who work with their hands. Or their fists.”
“Oh. Interesting.” Pam still had an air of disapproval. She hesitated for a moment, then said, “Eric hasn’t had anyone like you in a long, long time, Sookie. I think he’s levelheaded enough to keep on course, but you have to consider his responsibilities. This is a perilous time for the few of us in his original crew remaining since Sophie-Anne met her final death. We Shreveport vampires doubly belong to Eric, since he’s the only surviving sheriff from the old regime. If Eric goes down, we all go down. If Victor succeeds in discrediting Eric or somehow eating into his base here in Shreveport, we’ll all die.”
I hadn’t put the situation to myself in terms that dire. Eric hadn’t spelled it out to me, either. “It’s that bad?” I said, feeling numb.
“He is male enough to want to look strong in front of you, Sookie. Truly, Eric’s a great vampire, and very practical. But he isn’t practical nowadays—not when it comes to you.”
“Are you saying you don’t think Eric and I should see each other anymore?” I asked her directly. Though generally I was very glad that vampire minds were closed to me, sometimes I found it frustrating. I was used to knowing more than I wanted to know about how people were thinking and feeling, rather than wondering if I was right.
“No, not exactly.” Pam looked thoughtful. “I would hate to see him unhappy. And you, too,” she added, as an afterthought. “But if he’s worried about you, he won’t react the same as he would—as he should. ”
“If I weren’t in the picture.”
Pam didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, “I think the only
reason Victor hasn’t abducted you to hold you over Eric is because Eric married you. Victor’s still trying to cover his ass by doing everything by the book. He isn’t ready to rebel against Felipe openly. He’ll still try to show justification for whatever he does. He’s walking on thin ice with Felipe right now because he almost let you get killed.”
“Maybe Felipe will do the job for us,” I said.
Pam looked thoughtful. “That would be ideal,” she said. “But we’ll have to wait for it. Felipe’s not going to do anything rash when it comes to killing a lieutenant of his. That would make his other lieutenants uneasy and uncertain.”
I shook my head. “That’s too bad. I don’t think it would bother Felipe very much at all to kill Victor.”
“And it would bother you, Sookie?”
“Yes. It would bother me.” Though not as much as it ought to.
“So if you could do it in a rush of rage when Victor was attacking you, that would be far preferable to planning a way to kill him when he couldn’t fight back effectively?”
Okay, put like that my attitude didn’t make much sense. I could see that if you were willing to kill someone, planning to kill someone, wishing someone would die, quibbling about the circumstances was ridiculous.
“It shouldn’t make a difference,” I said quietly. “But it does. Victor has to go, though.”
“You’ve changed,” Pam said, after a little silence. She didn’t sound surprised or horrified or disgusted. For that matter, she didn’t sound happy. It was more as though she’d realized I’d altered my hairstyle.
“Yes,” I said. We watched the rain pour down some more.
Suddenly, Pam said, “Look!” There was a sleek white car parked on the shoulder of the interstate. I didn’t understand why Pam was so agitated until I noticed that the man leaning against the car had his arms crossed over his chest in an attitude of total nonchalance, despite the rain.
As we drew abreast of the car, a Lexus, the figure waved a languid hand at us. We were being flagged down.
“Shit,” Pam said. “That’s Bruno Brazell. We have to stop.” She pulled over to the shoulder and stopped in front of the car. “And Corinna,” she said, sounding bitter. I glanced in the side mirror to see that a woman had gotten out of the Lexus.
“They’re here to kill us,” Pam said quietly. “I can’t kill them both. You have to help.”
“They’re going to try to kill us?” I was really, really scared.
“That’s the only reason I can think of that Victor would send two people on a one-person errand,” she said. She sounded calm. Pam was obviously thinking much faster than I was. “Showtime! If the peace can be kept, we need to keep it, at least for now. Here.” She pressed something into my hand. “Take it out of the sheath. It’s a silver dagger.”
I remembered Bill’s gray skin and the slow way he moved after silver poisoning. I shuddered, but I was angry with myself for my squeamishness. I slid the dagger from the leather sheath.
“We have to get out, huh?” I said. I tried to smile. “Okay, showtime.”
“Sookie, be brave and ruthless,” Pam said, and she opened her door and disappeared from sight. I sent a last waft of love toward Eric by way of good-bye while I was sticking the dagger through my skirt’s waistband at the back. I got out of the car into the pelting darkness, holding my hands out to show they were empty.
I was drenched in seconds. I shoved my hair behind my ears so it wouldn’t hang in my eyes. Though the Lexus’s headlights were on, it was very dark. The only other light came from oncoming headlights from both sides of the interstate, and the brightly lit truck stop a mile away. Otherwise, we were nowhere, an anonymous stretch of divided interstate with woods on either side. The vampires could see a lot better than I could. But I knew where everyone was because I cast out that other sense of mine and felt for their brains. Vampires register as holes to me, almost black spots in the atmosphere. It’s negative tracking.
No one spoke, and the only noise was the pelting of the rain drumming on the cars. I couldn’t hear an oncoming vehicle. “Hi, Bruno,” I called, and I sounded perky in a crazy way. “Who’s your buddy?”
I walked over to him. Across the median, a car whizzed by going west. If the driver caught a glimpse of us, it probably looked as though two Good Samaritans had stopped to help some people with car trouble. Humans see what they want to see. what they expect to see.
Now that I was closer to Bruno, I could tell that his short brown hair was plastered to his head. I’d seen Bruno only once before, and he was wearing the same serious expression on his face that he’d worn the night he’d been standing in my front yard ready to move in and burn down my house with me in it. Bruno was a serious kind of guy in the same way I’m a perky kind of woman. It was a fallback position.
“Hello, Miss Stackhouse,” Bruno said. He wasn’t any taller than me, but he was a burly man. The vampire Pam had called Corinna loomed up on Bruno’s right. Corinna was—had been—African-American, and the water was dripping off the tips of her intricately braided hair. The beads worked into the braids clicked together, a sound I could just pick up under the drumming of the rain. She was thin and tall, and she’d added to her height with three-inch heels. Though she was wearing a dress that had probably been very expensive, her whole ensemble had suffered by the drenching it had taken. She looked like a very elegant drowned rat.
Since I was almost out of my head with alarm anyway, I started laughing.
“You got a flat tire or something, Bruno?” I asked. “I can’t imagine what else you’d be doing out here in the middle of nowhere in the pouring rain.”
“I was waiting for you, bitch.”
I wasn’t sure where Pam was, and I couldn’t spare the brainpower to search for her. “Language, Bruno! I don’t think you know me well enough to call me that. I guess you-all have someone watching Eric’s house.”
“We do. When we saw you two leaving together, it seemed like a good time to take care of a few things.”
Corinna hadn’t spoken still, but she was looking around her warily, and I realized she didn’t know where Pam had gone. I grinned. “For the life of me, I don’t know why you’re doing all this. It seems like Victor should be glad to have someone as smart as Eric working for him. Why can’t he appreciate that?” And leave us alone.
Bruno took a step closer to me. The light was too poor for me to make out his eye color, but I could tell he was still looking serious. I thought it was strange when Bruno took the time to answer me, but anything that bought us more time was good. “Eric is a great vampire. But Eric will never bow to Victor, not really. And he’s accumulating his own power at a pace that makes Victor anxious. He’s got you, for one thing. Your great-grandfather may have sealed himself away, but who’s to say he won’t come back? And Eric can use your stupid ability whenever he chooses. Victor doesn’t want Eric to have that advantage.” And then Bruno had his hands around my neck. He’d moved so quickly I couldn’t possibly react, and I knew vaguely over the pounding in my ears that there was a sudden and violent commotion going on to my left. I reached behind me to pull the knife, but we were suddenly down in the tall, wet grass at the edge of the shoulder, and I kicked my leg up and over, and pushed, trying to get on top. I kind of overdid it, because we began rolling down into the drainage ditch. That was a pity, because it was filling with water. Bruno couldn’t drown, but I sure could. Wrenching my shoulder with the force of my effort, I yanked the knife out of my skirt when I rotated to the top, and as we rolled yet again I saw dark spots in front of my eyes. I knew this was my last chance. I stabbed Bruno up under his ribs.
And I killed him.
Chapter 4
Pam yanked Bruno’s body off me and rolled him all the way down into the water coursing through the ditch. She helped me up.
“Where were you?” I croaked.
“Disposing of Corinna,” literal-minded Pam said. She pointed to the body lying by the white car. Fortunately, the corpse wa
s on the side of the car concealed from the view of the rare passerby. In the poor light it was hard to be sure, but I believed Corinna was already beginning to flake away. I’d never seen a dead vampire in the rain before.
“I thought Bruno was such a great fighter. How come you didn’t take him on?”
“I gave you the knife,” Pam said, giving a good imitation of surprise. “He didn’t have a knife.”
“Right.” I coughed and, boy, did that hurt my throat. “So what do we do now?”
“We’re getting out of here,” Pam said. “We’re going to hope that no one noticed my car. I think only three cars passed since we pulled over. With the rain and poor visibility, if the drivers were human, we have a very good chance that none of them will remember seeing us.”
By then we were back in Pam’s car. “Wouldn’t it be better if we moved the Lexus?” I said, wheezing out the words.
“What a good idea,” Pam said, patting me on the head. “Do you think you can drive it?”
“Where to?”
Pam thought for a moment, which was good, because I needed the recovery time. I was soaked through and shivering, and I felt awful.
“Won’t Victor know what’s happened?” I asked. I couldn’t seem to stop asking questions.
“Maybe. He wasn’t brave enough to do this himself, so he has to take the consequences. He’s lost his two best people, and he has nothing to show for it.” Pam was enjoying the hell out of that.
“I think we get out of here right now. Before some more of his people come to check, or whatever.” I sure wasn’t up for fighting again.
“It’s you who keeps asking questions. I think Eric will be here soon; I’d better call him to tell him to stay away,” Pam said. She looked faintly worried.
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