Dead in the Family ss-10

by Charlaine Harris

  I’d forgotten his asking me for the table when we’d had dinner together. At this point, he could have asked me for my bedroom set, and I would have agreed just to get him out of danger. I said, “Sure, I don’t need it. Go on up. I don’t think it’s very far inside the door.”

  Jason excused himself, and everyone’s eyes followed him as he bounded up the stairs. Eric was probably just trying to keep his eyes busy while he thought, but Ocella watched my brother with frank appraisal, and Alexei with a kind of yearning.

  “Would you like some TrueBlood?” I asked the vampires, through clenched teeth.

  “I suppose, if you won’t offer yourself or your brother,” the ancient Roman said.

  “I won’t.”

  I turned to go to the kitchen.

  “I feel your anger,” Ocella said.

  “I don’t care,” I said, without turning to face him. I heard Jason coming downstairs, a little more slowly now that he was carrying the table. “Jason, you want to come with me?” I said over my shoulder.

  He was more than glad to leave the room. Though he was civil to Eric because he knew I loved him, Jason was not happy in the company of vamps. He put the table down in a corner of the kitchen.

  “Sook, what’s going on here?”

  “Come into my room for a second,” I said after I’d gotten the bottles out of my refrigerator. I’d feel a lot better if I had more clothes on. Jason trailed after me. I shut the door once we were inside my bedroom.

  “Watch the door. I don’t trust that old one,” I said, and Jason obligingly turned his back and watched the door while I pulled off the robe, getting into my clothes as fast as I’ve ever dressed in my life.

  “Whoa,” Jason said, and I jumped. I turned to see that Alexei had opened the door and would have entered if Jason hadn’t been holding it.

  “I’m sorry,” Alexei said. His voice was a ghost of a voice, a voice that once had been. “I apologize to you, Sookie, and you, Jason.”

  “Jason, you can let him in. What are you sorry for, Alexei?” I asked. “Come on, let’s go to the kitchen and I’ll warm up the TrueBlood.” We trailed into the kitchen. We were a little farther from the living room, and there was a chance Eric and Ocella wouldn’t hear us.

  “My master is not always like this. His age, it turns him.”

  “Turns him into what? A total jerk? A sadist? A child molester?”

  A faint smile crossed the boy’s face. “At times, all of those,” he said succinctly. “But truthfully, I haven’t been well myself. That’s why we’re here.”

  Jason began to look angry. He likes kids, always has. Even though Alexei could have killed Jason in a second, Jason thought of Alexei as a child. My brother was building up a big mad, actually thinking of charging into the living room to confront Appius Livius Ocella.

  “Listen, Alexei, you don’t have to stay with that dude if you don’t want to,” Jason said. “You can stay with me or Sookie, if Eric won’t put you up. Nobody’s gonna make you stay with someone you don’t want to be with.” Bless Jason’s heart, he sure didn’t know what he was talking about.

  Alexei smiled, a faint smile that was simply heart-piercing. “Really, he is not so bad. He is a good man, I believe, but from a time you can’t imagine. I think you are used to knowing vampires who are trying to. mainstream. Master, he is not trying to do this. He is much happier in the shadows. And I must stay with him. Please don’t trouble yourselves, but I thank you for your concern. I’m feeling better already now that I’m with my brother. I don’t feel as if I’ll suddenly do something. regrettable.”

  Jason and I looked at each other. That was enough to make us both worried.

  Alexei was looking around the kitchen as if he seldom saw one. I figured that was probably true.

  I took the warm bottles out of the microwave and shook them. I put some napkins on the tray with the bottles. Jason got himself a Coke from the refrigerator.

  I didn’t know what to think about Alexei. He apologized for Ocella like the Roman was his grumpy grandpa, but it was apparent that he was in Ocella’s sway. Of course he was; he was Ocella’s child in a very real sense.

  It was an awfully strange situation, having a figure out of history sitting in your living room. I thought of the horrors he’d experienced, both before and after his death. I thought of his childhood as the tsarevitch, and I knew that despite his hemophilia, that childhood must have contained some glorious moments. I didn’t know whether the boy often longed for the love, devotion, and luxury that had surrounded him from birth until the rebellion, or (considering he’d been executed along with his whole immediate family) whether it was possible he saw being a vampire as an improvement over being buried in a pit in the woods in Russia.

  Though with the hemophilia, his life expectancy in those days would have been pretty damn short anyway.

  Jason added ice to his glass and looked in the cookie jar. I didn’t keep cookies anymore, because if I did, I’d eat ’em. He closed the jar sadly. Alexei was watching everything Jason did as if he were observing an animal he’d never seen before.

  He noticed me looking at him. “Two men took care of me, two sailors,” he said, as though he could read the questions in my mind. “They carried me around when the pain was bad. After the world turned upside down, one of them abused me when he had the chance. But the other died, simply because he was still kind to me. Your brother reminds me a little of that one.”

  “Sorry about your family,” I said awkwardly, since I felt compelled to say something.

  He shrugged. “I was glad when they found them and gave the burial,” he said. But when I saw his eyes, I knew that his words were a thin layer of ice over a pit of pain.

  “Who was that in your coffin?” I asked. Was I being tacky? What on earth else was there to talk about? Jason was looking from Alexei to me, mystified. Jason’s idea of history was remembering Jimmy Carter’s embarrassing brother.

  “When the big grave was found, Master knew they would find my sister and me soon. We overestimated the searchers, perhaps. It took sixteen more years. But in the meantime, we revisited the place where I was buried.”

  I felt my eyes fill with tears. The place where I was buried.

  He continued, “We had to provide some of my bones for it, because we had learned about DNA by then. Otherwise, of course, we could have found a boy about the right age. ”

  I really couldn’t think of anything remotely normal to say. “So you cut out some of your own bones to put in the grave,” I said, my voice clogged and shaky.

  “In steps, over time. Everything grew back,” he said reassuringly. “We had to burn my bones a little. They had burned Maria and me, and poured acid on us, too.”

  Finally, I managed, “Why was that necessary? To put your bones there?”

  “Master wanted me to be at rest,” he said. “He didn’t want any sightings. He reasoned that if my bones were found, there would be no more controversy. Of course, by now no one would expect me to be alive anyway, much less looking like I did then. Perhaps we weren’t thinking clearly. When you’ve been out of the world so long. And in the first five years after the revolution, I was seen by a couple of people who did recognize me. Master had to take care of them.”

  That, too, took a minute to sink in. Jason looked nauseated. I wasn’t far behind him. But this little chitchat had already taken long enough. I didn’t want “Master” to think we were plotting against him.

  “Alexei,” Appius Livius called in a sharp voice. “Is all well with you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Alexei said, and hurried back to the Roman.

  “Jesus Christ, Shepherd of Judea,” I said, and turned to carry the tray of bottles into the living room. Jason was clearly unhappy, but he followed me.

  Eric was fixed on Appius Livius Ocella like a 7-Eleven clerk watches a customer who may have a gun. But he seemed to have relaxed a smidgen, now that he’d had a little time to recover from the shock of his maker’s appearance. Through
the bond, I felt a wash of overwhelming relief from Eric. After I thought about that, I believed I understood. Eric was relieved beyond measure that the older vampire had brought a bedmate with him. Eric, who had given a pretty good impression of indifference about his many years as Ocella’s sexual companion, had had a moment of crazed unwillingness when he actually saw his maker again. Eric was reassembling and rearming himself. He was returning to being Eric, the sheriff, from his abrupt reversion to Eric, the new vampire and love slave.

  The way I perceived Eric would never be quite the same again. I knew now what he feared. What I was getting from Eric was that it wasn’t so much the physical aspect as the mental; above all else, Eric did not want to be under the control of his maker.

  I served each of the vampires a bottle, carefully placing it on a napkin. At least I didn’t have to worry about serving an accompanying snack. unless Ocella decided all three of them would feed from me. In which case, I had no hope I would survive, and there wouldn’t be a damn thing I could do about it. This should have made me the model of discretion. I should have determined to sit there with my ankles crossed and not let butter melt in my mouth.

  But it just pissed me off.

  Eric’s hand twitched, and I knew he was reading my mood. He wanted to tell me to tone it down, to cool off, to come in under the radar. He might not want to be under Ocella’s sway again, but he loved the vampire, too. I made myself back down. I hadn’t given the Roman a chance. I didn’t really know him. I only knew some things I didn’t like about him, and there must be some other things I would like or admire. If he’d been Eric’s for-real father, I’d have given him lots of chances to prove his worth.

  I wondered how clearly Ocella could sense my emotions. He was still tuned in to Eric and always would be, and Eric and I were bonded. But it seemed my feelings didn’t carry over; the Roman didn’t so much as glance my way. I cast my eyes down. I would have to learn how to be stealthier, and in a hurry. Normally, I was good at hiding what I felt, but the nearness of the ancient vampire and his new protégé, their blood so like Eric’s, had thrown me for a loop.

  “I’m not sure what to call you,” I said, meeting the Roman’s eyes. I was trying to mimic my grandmother’s best company voice.

  “You may call me Appius Livius,” he said, “since you are Eric’s wife. It took Eric a hundred years to earn the right to call me Appius, rather than Master. Then centuries to be able to call me Ocella.”

  So only Eric got to call him Ocella. Fine with me. I noticed Alexei was still at the “Master” stage. Alexei was sitting as still as if he’d taken a huge tranquilizer, his synthetic blood sitting on the coffee table in front of him with only a sip missing.

  “Thanks,” I said, aware that I didn’t sound very thankful. I glanced over at my brother. Jason was thinking he had a pretty good idea about what he wanted to call the Roman, but I gave my head a small but definite shake.

  “Eric, tell me how you are doing these days,” Appius Livius said. He sounded genuinely interested. His hand went over to Alexei, and I saw he was stroking the boy’s back, as if Alexei were a puppy. But I couldn’t deny there was affection in the gesture.

  “I’m very well. Area Five is prosperous. I was the only Louisiana sheriff to survive the takeover by Felipe de Castro.” Eric managed to sound matter-of-fact.

  “How did that come about?”

  Eric gave the older vampire a rundown on the political situation with Victor Madden. When he thought Appius Livius was up to speed on the Felipe de Castro/Victor Madden situation, Eric asked him, “How did you come to be on hand for the rescue of this young man?” Eric smiled at Alexei.

  This would be a story worth listening to, now that I’d heard Alexei’s horrifying tale about “salting” his grave. While Alexei Romanov sat by his side in remote silence, Appius told Eric about tracking down the Russian royal family in 1918.

  “Though I had expected something of the sort, I had to move much faster than I had anticipated,” Appius said. He finished his bottled blood. “The decision to execute them was made so swiftly, conducted at such speed. No one wanted the men to have time to think twice about it. For many of the soldiers, it was a terrible thing they were doing.”

  “Why did you want to save the Romanovs?” Eric asked, as if Alexei weren’t there.

  And Appius Livius laughed. He gave great laugh. “I hated the fucking Bolsheviks,” he said. “And I had a tie to the boy. Rasputin had been giving him my blood for years. I happened to be in Russia already; you remember the St. Petersburg Massacre?”

  Eric nodded. “I do indeed. I had not seen you in many years, and only caught a glimpse of you then.” Eric had talked about the St. Petersburg Massacre before. A vampire named Gregory had had madness visited on him by a vengeful maenad, and it had taken twenty vampires to pin him down and then disguise the results.

  “After that night, when so many of us worked together to tidy up the scene after Gregory was subdued, I developed a fondness for the Russian vampires—and the Russian people, too.” He tacked the Russian people on with a gracious nod toward me and Jason, as representatives of the human race. “The fucking Bolsheviks killed so many of us. I was grieved. The deaths of Fedor and Velislava were particularly hard. They were both great vampires, and hundreds of years old.”

  “I knew them,” Eric said.

  “I sent them a message to get out before I started to look for the royal family. I could track Alexei because he’d had my blood. Rasputin knew what we were. Whenever the empress would call him to heal the boy when the hemophilia was very bad, Rasputin would beg some of my blood and the boy would recover. I heard a rumor they were thinking of killing the royal family, and I began following the scent of my blood. When I set out to rescue them, you can imagine how like a crusader I felt!”

  They both laughed, and I suddenly understood that the two vampires had actually seen crusaders, the original Christian knight crusaders. When I tried to comprehend how old they were, how much they’d witnessed, how many experiences they’d had that almost no one else walking the earth remembered, it made my head hurt.

  “Sook, you got the most interesting company,” Jason said.

  “Listen, I know you want to go, but if you could stick around for a while, I’d appreciate it,” I said. I wasn’t happy with having Eric’s maker and the poor child Alexei here, and since Alexei was clearly happy with Jason, his presence might help ease this uncomfortable situation.

  “I’ll just go put the table out in the truck and call Michele,” he said. “Alexei, you want to come with me?”

  Appius Livius didn’t move, but he definitely grew tense. Alexei looked over at the ancient Roman. After a long pause, Appius Livius nodded at the boy. “Alexei, remember your company manners,” Appius Livius said softly. Alexei bobbed his head.

  Having been given permission, the tsarevitch of Russia went outside with the road-crew worker to stow a table in the back of a pickup.

  When I was alone with Eric and his maker, I felt a stab of anxiety. Actually, it was flowing right through the bond I had with Eric. I wasn’t the only one around here who was worried. And their conversation appeared to be at a standstill.

  “Excuse me, Appius Livius,” I said carefully. “Since you were in the right empire at the right time, I wonder if you ever saw Jesus?”

  The Roman was staring at the hallway, willing Alexei to reappear. “The carpenter? No, I didn’t see him,” Appius said, and I could tell he was making an effort to be courteous. “The Jew died right around the time I was changed. As you will appreciate, I had many other things to think of. In fact, I didn’t hear the whole myth until some time later when the world began to change as a result of his death.”

  That would really have been amazing, talking to a creature who’d seen the living God. even if he called him a “myth.” And I went back to fearing the Roman—not for what he’d done to me, or what he’d done to Eric, or even what he was doing to Alexei, but for what he might do to all of us,
if he took a mind to. I had always tried to find the good in people, but the best I could say of Appius was that he had good taste in those he picked to become vampires.

  While I brooded, Appius was explaining to Eric how conveniently it had worked out in the cellar in Ekaterinburg. Alexei had almost bled out from his wounds, so he’d given the boy a big gulp of his blood—moving at superspeed, and therefore invisible to the execution squad. Then he’d watched from the shadows while the bodies were thrown down a well. The next day, the royal family was dug up again since the murderers feared the uproar that might follow the deaths of the Romanovs.

  “I followed them the minute the sun set the next day,” Appius said. “They’d stopped to rebury them. Alexei and one of his sisters. ”

  “Maria,” Alexei said softly, and I jumped. He had reappeared silently in the living room, standing behind Appius’s chair. “It was Maria.”

  There was a silence. Appius looked hugely relieved. “Yes, of course, dear boy,” Appius said, and he did manage to sound as though he cared. “Your sister Maria was completely gone, but there was a tiny spark in you.” Alexei put his hand on Appius Livius’s shoulder, and Appius Livius reached up to pat him.

  “They had shot him many times,” he explained to Eric. “Twice in the head. I put my blood directly in the bullet holes.” He turned his head to look at the boy behind him. “My blood worked well, since you had lost so much of yours.” It was like he was recollecting happy times. Hoo, boy. The Roman turned back to look at Eric and me, and he smiled proudly. But I could see Alexei’s face.

  Appius Livius genuinely felt that he’d been a savior to Alexei. I wasn’t so sure Alexei was totally convinced of that.

  “Where’s your brother?” Appius Livius suddenly asked, and I pushed to my feet to go find him. I had put two and two together, and I understood that Eric’s maker wanted to be sure Alexei hadn’t drained Jason and left him out in the yard.

  Jason came into the living room just then, slipping his cell phone into his pocket. He narrowed his eyes. Jason was not a nuance kind of guy, but he could tell when I was unhappy. “Sorry,” he said. “Talkin’ to Michele.”