Dead in the Family ss-10

by Charlaine Harris

  Eric was eyeing me cautiously. He could tell not all was well in Sookieville. “Yes,” he said. “Unless there’s some crisis that calls for an extra meeting. Each state is not a separate kingdom. For instance, there’s a ruler of New York City and a ruler of the rest of the state. Florida is also divided.”

  “Why?” That took me aback. Until I considered. “Oh, lots of tourists. Easy prey. High vampire population.”

  Eric nodded. “California is in thirds—California Sacramento, California San Jose, and California Los Angeles. On the other hand, North and South Dakota have become one kingdom, since the population is so thin.”

  I was getting the hang of looking at things through vampire eyes. There’d be more lions where the gazelles crowded around the watering hole. Fewer prey animals, fewer predators. “How does the business of—well, of Amun, say—get conducted between those biennial meetings?” There had to be stuff that came up.

  “Message boards, mostly. If we have to have a face-to-face, committees of sheriffs meet, depending on the situation. If I had an argument with the vampire of another sheriff, I’d call that sheriff, and if he wasn’t ready to give me satisfaction, his lieutenant would meet with my lieutenant.”

  “And if that didn’t work?”

  “We’d kick the dispute up the ladder, to the summit. In between meeting years, there’s an informal gathering, with no ceremony or celebration.”

  I could think of a lot of questions, but they were all of the “what if” variety, and there wasn’t any immediate need for me to know the answers.

  “Okeydokey,” I said. “Well, that was real interesting.”

  “You don’t sound interested. You sound irritated.”

  “This isn’t what I expected when I found out you were sleeping in the house.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “I expected you’d come over here because you couldn’t wait an extra minute to have fabulous, mind-blowing sex with me.” And to hell with the corpse, for the moment.

  “I’ve told you things for your own good,” Eric said soberly. “However, now that that’s done, I am as ready as ever to have sex with you, and I can certainly make it mind-blowing.”

  “Then cut to the chase, honey.”

  With a movement too fast for me to follow, Eric’s shirt was off, and while I was admiring the view, his other clothes followed.

  “Do I actually get to chase you?” he asked, his fangs already out.

  I made it halfway to the living room before he caught me. But he carried me back to the bedroom.

  It was great. Even though I had a niggling anxiety gnawing at me, that gnawing was successfully stifled for a very satisfying forty-five minutes.

  Eric liked to lie propped on his elbow, his other hand stroking my stomach. When I protested that since my stomach wasn’t completely flat, this made me feel fat, he laughed heartily. “Who wants a bag of bones?” he said, with absolute sincerity. “I don’t want to hurt myself on the sharp edges of the woman I’m bedding.”

  That made me feel better than anything he’d said to me in a long time. “Did women. Were women curvier when you were human?” I asked.

  “We didn’t always have choices about how fat we were,” Eric said dryly. “In bad years, we were all skin and bones. In good years, when we could eat, we did.”

  I felt abashed. “Oh, sorry.”

  “This is a wonderful century to live in,” Eric said. “You can have food anytime you want.”

  “If you have the money to pay for it.”

  “Oh, you can steal it,” he said. “The point is, the food is here to be had.”

  “Not in Africa.”

  “I know people still starve in many parts of the world. But sooner or later, this prosperity will extend everywhere. It just got here first.”

  I found his optimism amazing. “You really think so?”

  “Yes,” he said simply. “Braid my hair for me, would you, Sookie?”

  I got my hairbrush and an elastic band. Color me silly, but I really enjoyed doing this. Eric sat on the stool in front of my vanity table, and I threw on a robe he’d given me, a beautiful peach-and-white-silk one. I began brushing Eric’s long hair. After he said he didn’t mind, I got some hair gel and slicked the blond strands back so there wouldn’t be any loose hairs ruining the look. I took my time, making the neatest braid I could, and then I tied off the end. Without his hair floating around his face, Eric looked more severe, but just as handsome. I sighed.

  “What is this sound coming from you?” he asked, turning from side to side to get several views of himself in the mirror. “Are you not happy with the result?”

  “I think you look great,” I said. Only the fact that he might accuse me of false modesty kept me from saying, “So what on earth are you doing with me?”

  “Now I’ll do your hair.”

  Something in me flinched. The night I’d had sex for the very first time, Bill had brushed my hair until the sensuality of the movement had turned into a very different kind of sensuality. “No, thanks,” I said brightly.

  I realized that I felt very odd, all of a sudden.

  Eric swung around to look up at me. “What’s making you so jumpy, Sookie?”

  “Hey, what happened to Alaska and Hawaii?” I asked at random. I still had the brush in my hand, and without meaning to, I dropped it. It clattered on the wooden floor.

  “What?” Eric looked down at the brush, then up at my face, in some confusion.

  “What section are they in? They both in Nakamura?”

  “Narayana. No. Alaska is lumped in with the Canadians. They have their own system. Hawaii is autonomous.”

  “That’s just not right.” I was genuinely indignant. Then I remembered there was something very important I had to tell Eric. “I guess Heidi reported back to you after she sniffed out my land? She told you about the body?” My hand jerked involuntarily.

  Eric was watching my every move, his eyes narrowed. “We already talked about Debbie Pelt. If you really want me to, I’ll move her.”

  I shivered all over. I wanted to tell him that the body was fresh. I’d started out to do that, but somehow I was having trouble formulating my sentence. I felt so peculiar. Eric cocked his head, his eyes locked on my face. “You’re behaving very strangely, Sookie.”

  “Do you think Alcide could tell from the smell that the corpse was Debbie?” I asked. What was wrong with me?

  “Not from the scent,” he said. “A body is a body. It doesn’t retain the distinctive scent that identified it as a particular person, especially after this long. Are you so worried about what Alcide thinks?”

  “Not as much as I used to be,” I said, babbling on. “Hey, I heard on the radio today that one of the senators from Oklahoma came out as a Were. He said he’d register with some government bureau the day they pried his fangs from his cold, dead corpse.”

  “I think the backlash from this will benefit vampires,” Eric said with some satisfaction. “Of course, we’d always realized the government would want to keep track of us somehow. Now it seems that if the Weres win their fight to be free of supervision, we may be able to do the same.”

  “You better get dressed,” I said. Something bad was going to happen soon, and Eric needed clothes.

  He turned and peered at himself in the mirror one last time. “All right,” he said, a little surprised. He was still nude and magnificent. But at the moment, I wasn’t feeling a bit lusty. I was feeling jangly, and nervous, and worried. I felt like spiders were crawling all over my skin. I didn’t know what could be happening to me. I tried to speak but found I couldn’t. I made my fingers move in a “hurry up” gesture.

  Eric gave me a quick, worried glance and wordlessly began searching for his clothes. He found his pants, and he pulled them on.

  I sank down to the floor, my hands on both sides of my head. I thought my skull might detach from my spine. I whimpered. Eric dropped his shirt.

  “Can you tell me what’s wrong?”
he asked, sinking down to the floor beside me.

  “Someone’s coming,” I said. “I feel so strange. Someone’s coming. Almost here. Someone with your blood.” I realized I’d felt a faint, faint trace of this same oddness before, when I’d confronted Bill’s maker, Lorena. I hadn’t had a blood bond with Bill, or at least not one anything like as binding as the one I had with Eric.

  Eric rose to his feet in less than the blink of an eye, and I heard him make a sound deep in his chest. His hands were in white fists. I was huddled against my bed, and he was between me and the open window. In the blink of an eye, I realized there was someone right outside.

  “Appius Livius Ocella,” Eric said. “It’s been a hundred years.”

  Geez Louise. Eric’s maker.

  Chapter 8

  Between Eric’s legs I could see a man, very scarred and very muscular, with dark eyes and hair. I knew he was short because I could only see his head and shoulders. He was wearing jeans and a Black Sabbath T-shirt. I couldn’t help it. I giggled.

  “Haven’t you missed me, Eric?” The Roman’s voice had an accent I really couldn’t have broken down, it had so many layers.

  “Ocella, your presence is always an honor,” Eric said. I giggled harder. Eric was lying.

  “What is wrong with my wife?” he asked.

  “Her senses are confused,” the older vampire said. “You have my blood. She’s had your blood. And another child of mine is here. The bond between us all is scrambling her thoughts and feelings.”

  No shit.

  “This is my new son, Alexei,” Appius Livius Ocella told Eric.

  I peered past Eric’s legs. The new “son” was a boy of no more than thirteen or fourteen. In fact, I could hardly see his face. I froze, trying not to react.

  “Brother,” said Eric by way of greeting his new sibling. The words came out level and cold.

  I was going to stand up now. I was not going to crouch here any longer. Eric had crowded me into a very small space between the bed and the nightstand, with the bathroom door to my right. He hadn’t shifted from his defensive posture.

  “Excuse me,” I said, with a great effort, and Eric took a step forward to give me room, keeping himself between me and his maker and the boy. I rose to my feet, pushing on the bed to get upright. I still felt fried. I looked Eric’s sire right in his dark and liquid eyes. For a fraction of a second, he looked surprised.

  “Eric, you need to go to the front door and let them in,” I said. “I’ll bet they don’t really need an invitation.”

  “Eric, she’s rare,” said Ocella in his oddly accented English. “Where did you find her?”

  “I’m asking you in out of courtesy, because you’re Eric’s dad,” I said. “I could just leave you outside.” If I didn’t sound as strong as I wanted, at least I didn’t sound frightened.

  “But my child is in this house, and if he is welcome, so am I. Am I not?” Ocella’s thick black brows rose. His nose. Well, you could tell why they coined the term “Roman nose.” “I waited to come in out of courtesy. We could have appeared in your bedroom.”

  And the next moment they were inside.

  I didn’t dignify that with an answer. I spared a glance for the boy, whose face was absolutely blank. He was no ancient Roman. He hadn’t been a vampire a full century, I estimated, and he seemed to come from Germanic stock. His hair was light and short and cut evenly, his eyes were blue, and when he met my own, he inclined his head.

  “Your name is Alexei?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said his maker, while the boy stood mute. “This is Alexei Romanov.”

  Though the boy didn’t react, and neither did Eric, I had a moment of sheer horror. “You didn’t,” I said to Eric’s maker, who was about my height. “You didn’t.”

  “I tried to save one of his sisters, too, but she was beyond my recall,” Ocella said bleakly. His teeth were white and even, though he was missing the one next to his left canine. If you had lost teeth before you became a vampire, they didn’t regenerate.

  “Sookie, what is it?” Eric was not following, for once.

  “The Romanovs,” I said, trying to keep my voice hushed as though the boy couldn’t hear me from twenty yards away. “The last Russian royal family.”

  To Eric, the executions of the Romanovs must seem like yesterday, and perhaps not very important in the tapestry of deaths he’d experienced in his thousand years. But he understood that his maker had done something extraordinary. I looked at Ocella without anger, without fear, for just a few seconds, and I saw a man who, finding himself an outcast and lonely, looked for the most outstanding “children” he could find.

  “Was Eric the first vampire you made?” I asked Ocella.

  He was bemused by what he saw as my brazen attitude. Eric had a stronger reaction. As I felt his fear roll through me, I understood that Eric had to physically perform whatever Ocella ordered him to do. Before, that had been an abstract concept. Now I realized that if Ocella ordered Eric to kill me, Eric would be compelled to do it.

  The Roman decided to answer me. “Yes, he was the first one I brought over successfully. The others I tried to bring over—they died.”

  “Could we please leave my bedroom and go into the living room?” I said. “This is not the right place to receive visitors.” See? I was trying to be polite.

  “Yes, I suppose,” said the older vampire. “Alexei? Where do you suppose the living room is?”

  Alexei half turned and pointed in the right direction.

  “Then that’s where we’ll go, dearest,” Ocella said, and Alexei led the way.

  I had a moment to look up at Eric, and I knew my face was asking, “What the hell is going on here?” But he looked stunned, and helpless. Eric. Helpless. My head was whirling.

  When I had a second to think about it, I was pretty nauseated, because Alexei was a child and I was fairly sure that Ocella had a sexual relationship with the boy, as he’d had with Eric. But I wasn’t foolish enough to think that I could stop it, or that any protest I made would make the slightest difference. In fact, I was far from sure Alexei himself would thank me for intervening, when I remembered Eric telling me about his desperate attachment to his maker during the first years of his new life as a vampire.

  Alexei had been with Ocella for a long time now, at least in human terms. I couldn’t remember exactly when the Romanov family had been executed, but I thought it was sometime around 1918, and apparently it had been Ocella who’d saved the boy from final death. So whatever constituted their relationship, it had been ongoing for more than eighty years.

  All these thoughts flickered through my head, one after another, as we followed the two visitors. Ocella had said he could have entered without warning. It would have been nice if Eric had told me about that. I could see how he might have hoped that Ocella would never visit, so I was willing to give Eric a pass. but I couldn’t help thinking that instead of his lecture on the ways vampires had sliced up my country according to their own convenience, it would have been more practical to let me know his maker could appear in my bedroom.

  “Please, have a seat,” I said, after Ocella and Alexei had settled on the couch.

  “So much sarcasm,” said Ocella. “Will you not offer us hospitality?” His gaze ran up and down me, and though the color of his eyes was rich and brown, they were utterly cold.

  I had a second to realize how glad I was that I’d put a robe on. I would have rather eaten Alpo than been naked in front of these two. “I’m not happy with your popping up outside my bedroom window,” I said. “You could have come to the door and knocked, like people with good manners do.” I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know; vampires are good at reading people, and the oldest vampires are usually better than humans at telling what humans are feeling.

  “Yes, but then I wouldn’t have seen such a charming sight.” Ocella let his gaze brush Eric’s shirtless body almost tangibly. Alexei, for the first time, showed an emotion. He looked scared. Wa
s he afraid Ocella would reject him, throw him out onto the mercy of the world? Or was he afraid that Ocella would keep him?

  I pitied Alexei from the bottom of my heart, and I feared him just as much.

  He was as helpless as Eric.

  Ocella had been looking at Alexei with an attention that was almost frightening. “He’s already much better,” Ocella murmured. “Eric, your presence is doing him so much good.”

  I’d kind of figured things couldn’t get more awkward, but a peremptory knock at the back door followed by a “Sookie, you here?” told me that actually the night could get worse.

  My brother, Jason, came in without waiting for me to answer. “Sookie, I saw your light on when I pulled up, so I figured you were awake,” he said, and then he stopped abruptly when he realized how much company I had. And what they were.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Sook,” he said slowly. “Eric, how you doing?”

  Eric said, “Jason, this is my. This is Appius Livius Ocella, my maker, and his other son Alexei.” Eric said it properly, “AP-pi-us Li-WEE-us Oh-KEL-ah.”

  Jason nodded at both of the newcomers, but he avoided looking directly at the older vampire. Good instinct. “Good evening, O’Kelly. Hey, Alexei. So you’re Eric’s little brother, huh? Are you a Viking like Eric?”

  “No,” said the boy faintly. “I am Russian.” Alexei’s accent was much lighter than the Roman’s. He looked at Jason with interest. I hoped he wasn’t thinking about biting my brother. The thing about Jason, and what made him so attractive to people (particularly women), was that he practically radiated life. He just seemed to have an extra helping of vigor and vitality, and it was returning with a boom now that the misery of his wife’s death was fading. This was his manifestation of the fairy blood in his veins.

  “Well, good to meet you-all,” Jason said. Then he quit paying attention to the visitors. “Sookie, I came to get that little side table from up in the attic. I came by here once before to pick it up, but you were gone and I didn’t have my key with me.” Jason kept a key to my house for emergencies, just as I kept a key to his.