With my right hand, I covered the spot where the stake entered my body. I didn’t want to see it, and I was scared I’d look down. I could feel the growing wetness around the wound.
“Call nine-one-one!” Tara yelled as she landed on her knees beside me. The bartender and Betty Joe exchanged a look over her head. I understood.
“Tara,” I said, and it came out like a croak. “Honey, all the shifters are changing. It’s full moon. The police can’t come in here, and they’ll come if anyone calls nine-one-one.”
The shifter part just didn’t seem to register with Tara, who didn’t know such things were possible. “The vampires are not gonna let you die,” Tara said confidently. “You just saved one of them!”
I wasn’t so sure about that. I saw Franklin Mott’s face above Tara. He was looking at me, and I could read his expression.
“Tara,” I whispered, “you have to get out of here. This is getting crazy, and if there’s any chance the police are coming, you can’t be here.”
Franklin Mott nodded in approval.
“I’m not going to leave you until you have help,” Tara said, her voice full of determination. Bless her heart.
The crowd around me consisted of vampires. One of them was Eric. I could not decipher his face.
“The tall blond will help me,” I told Tara, my voice barely a rasp. I pointed a finger at Eric. I didn’t look at him for fear I’d read rejection in his eyes. If Eric wouldn’t help me, I suspected I would lie here and die on this polished wood floor in a vampire bar in Jackson, Mississippi.
My brother, Jason, would be so pissed off.
Tara had met Eric in Bon Temps, but their introduction had been on a very stressful night. She didn’t seem to identify the tall blond she’d met that night with the tall blond she saw tonight, wearing glasses and a suit and with his hair pulled back strictly into a braid.
“Please help Sookie,” she said to him directly, as Franklin Mott almost yanked her to her feet.
“This young man will be glad to help your friend,” Mott said. He gave Eric a sharp look that told Eric he damn well better agree.
“Of course. I’m a good friend of Alcide’s,” Eric said, lying without a blink.
He took Tara’s place by my side, and I could tell after he was on his knees that he caught the smell of my blood. His face went even whiter, and his bones stood out starkly under his skin. His eyes blazed.
“You don’t know how hard it is,” he whispered to me, “not to bend over and lick.”
“If you do, everyone else will,” I said. “And they won’t just lick, they’ll bite.” There was a German shepherd staring at me with luminous yellow eyes, just past my feet.
“That’s the only thing stopping me.”
“Who are you?” asked Russell Edgington. He was giving Eric a careful once-over. Russell was standing to my other side, and he bent over both of us. I had been loomed over enough, I can tell you that, but I was in no position to do a damn thing about it.
“I’m a friend of Alcide’s,” Eric repeated. “He invited me here tonight to meet his new girlfriend. My name is Leif.”
Russell could look down at Eric, since Eric was kneeling, and his golden brown eyes bored into Eric’s blue ones. “Alcide doesn’t hang with many vampires,” Russell said.
“I’m one of the few.”
“We have to get this young lady out of here,” Russell said.
The snarling a few feet away increased in intensity. There appeared to be a knot of animals gathered around something on the floor.
“Take that out of here!” roared Mr. Hob. “Out the back door! You know the rules!”
Two of the vampires lifted the corpse, for that was what the Weres and shifters were squabbling over, and carried it out the back door, followed by all the animals. So much for the black-haired fanatic.
Just this afternoon Alcide and I had disposed of a corpse. We’d never thought of just bringing it down to the club, laying it in the alley. Of course, this one was fresh.
“. . . maybe has nicked a kidney,” Eric was saying. I had been unconscious, or at least somewhere else, for a few moments.
I was sweating heavily, and the pain was excruciating. I felt a flash of chagrin when I realized I was sweating all over my dress. But possibly the big bloody hole had already ruined the dress anyway, huh?
“We’ll take her to my place,” Russell said, and if I hadn’t been sure I was very badly hurt, I might have laughed. “The limo’s on its way. I’m sure a familiar face would make her more comfortable, don’t you agree?”
What I thought was, Russell didn’t want to get his suit nasty picking me up. And Talbot probably couldn’t lug me. Though the small vampire with curly black hair was still there, and still smiling, I would be awful bulky for him . . .
And I lost some more time.
“Alcide turned into a wolf and chased after the assassin’s companion,” Eric was telling me, though I didn’t remember asking. I started to tell Eric who the companion was, and then I realized that I’d better not. “Leif,” I muttered, trying to commit the name to memory. “Leif. I guess my garters are showing. Does that mean . . . ?”
“Yes, Sookie?”
. . . and I was out again. Then I was aware I was moving, and I realized that Eric was carrying me. Nothing had ever hurt so badly in my life, and I reflected, not for the first time, that I’d never even been in a hospital until I’d met Bill, and now I seemed to spend half my time battered or recovering from being battered. This was very significant and important.
A lynx padded out of the bar beside us. I looked down into the golden eyes. What a night this was turning out to be for Jackson. I hoped all the good people had decided to stay home tonight.
And then we were in the limo. My head was resting on Eric’s thigh, and in the seat across from us sat Talbot, Russell, and the small curly-haired vampire. As we stopped at a light, a bison lumbered by.
“Lucky no one’s out in downtown Jackson on a weekend night in December,” Talbot was remarking, and Eric laughed.
We drove for what seemed like some time. Eric smoothed my skirt over my legs, and brushed my hair out of my face. I looked up at him, and . . .
“. . . did she know what he was going to do?” Talbot was asking.
“She saw him pull the stake out, she said,” Eric said mendaciously. “She was going to the bar to get another drink.”
“Lucky for Betty Joe,” Russell said in his smooth Southern drawl. “I guess she’s still hunting the one that got away.”
Then we pulled up into a driveway and stopped at a gate. A bearded vampire came up and peered in the window, looking at all the occupants carefully. He was far more alert than the indifferent guard at Alcide’s apartment building. I heard an electronic hum, and the gate opened. We went up a driveway (I could hear the gravel crunching) and then we swung around in front of a mansion. It was lit up like a birthday cake, and as Eric carefully extracted me from the limo, I could see we were under a porte cochere that was as fancy as all get-out. Even the carport had columns. I expected to see Vivian Leigh come down the steps.
I had a blank moment again, and then we were in the foyer. The pain seemed to be fading away, and its absence left me giddy.
As the master of this mansion, Russell’s return was a big event, and when the inhabitants smelled fresh blood, they were doubly quick to come thronging. I felt like I’d landed in the middle of romance cover model contest. I had never seen so many cute men in one place in my life. But I could tell they were not for me. Russell was like the gay vampire Hugh Hefner, and this was the Playboy Mansion, with an emphasis on the “boy.”
“Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” I said, and Eric laughed out loud. That was why I liked him, I thought rosily; he “got” me.
“Good, the shot’s taking effect,” said a white-haired man in a sports shirt and pleated trousers. He was human, and he might as well have had a stethoscope tattooed around his neck, he was so clearly a
doctor. “Will you be needing me?”
“Why don’t you stay for a while?” Russell suggested. “Josh will keep you company, I’m sure.”
I didn’t get to see what Josh looked like, because Eric was carrying me upstairs then.
“Rhett and Scarlet,” I said.
“I don’t understand,” Eric told me.
“You haven’t seen Gone with the Wind?” I was horrified. But then, why should a vampire Viking have seen that staple of the Southern mystique? But he’d read The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, which I had worked my way through in high school. “You’ll have to watch it on video. Why am I acting so stupid? Why am I not scared?”
“That human doctor gave you a big dose of drugs,” Eric said, smiling down at me. “Now I am carrying you to a bedroom so you can be healed.”
“He’s here,” I told Eric.
His eyes flashed caution at me. “Russell, yes. But I’m afraid that Alcide made less than a stellar choice, Sookie. He raced off into the night after the other attacker. He should have stayed with you.”
“Screw him,” I said expansively.
“He wishes, especially after seeing you dance.”
I wasn’t feeling quite good enough to laugh, but it did cross my mind. “Giving me drugs maybe wasn’t such a great idea,” I told Eric. I had too many secrets to keep.
“I agree, but I am glad you’re out of pain.”
Then we were in a bedroom, and Eric was laying me on a gosh-to-goodness canopied four-poster. He took the opportunity to whisper, “Be careful,” in my ear. And I tried to bore that thought into my drug-addled brain. I might blurt out the fact that I knew, beyond a doubt, that Bill was somewhere close to me.
Chapter Ten
THERE WAS QUITE a crowd in the bedroom, I noticed. Eric had gotten me situated on the bed, which was so high, I might need a stepstool to get down. But it would be convenient for the healing, I had heard Russell comment, and I was beginning to worry about what constituted “the healing.” The last time I’d been involved in a vampire “healing,” the treatment had been what you might call nontraditional.
“What’s gonna happen?” I asked Eric, who was standing at the side of the bed on my left, non-wounded, side.
But it was the vampire who had taken his place to my right who answered. He had a long, horsy face, and his blond eyebrows and eyelashes were almost invisible against his pallor. His bare chest was hairless, too. He was wearing a pair of pants, which I suspected were vinyl. Even in the winter, they must be, um, unbreathing. I wouldn’t like to peel those suckers off. This vamp’s saving grace was his lovely straight pale hair, the color of white corn.
“Miss Stackhouse, this is Ray Don,” Russell said.
“How de do.” Good manners would make you welcome anywhere, my gran had always told me.
“Pleased to meet you,” he responded correctly. He had been raised right, too, though no telling when that had been. “I’m not going to ask you how you’re doing, cause I can see you got a great big hole in your side.”
“Kind of ironic, isn’t it, that it was the human that got staked,” I said socially. I hoped I would see that doctor again, because I sure wanted to ask him what he’d given me. It was worth its weight in gold.
Ray Don gave me a dubious look, and I realized I’d just shot out of his comfort zone, conversationally. Maybe I could give Ray Don a Word of the Day calendar, like Arlene gave me every Christmas.
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, Sookie,” Eric said. “You know, when we start to feed and our fangs come out, they release a little anticoagulant?”
“Um-hum.”
“And when we are ready to finish feeding, the fangs release a little coagulant and a little trace of the, the—”
“Stuff that helps you all heal so fast?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“So, Ray Don is going to what?”
“Ray Don, his nest mates say, has an extra supply of all these chemicals in his body. This is his talent.”
Ray Don beamed at me. He was proud of that.
“So he will start the process on a volunteer, and when he has fed, he will begin cleaning your wound and healing it.”
What Eric had left out of this narrative was that at some point during this process, the stake was going to have to come out, and that no drug in the world could keep that from hurting like a son of a bitch. I realized that in one of my few moments of clarity.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get the show on the road.”
The volunteer turned out to be a thin blond human teenager, who was no taller than me and probably no wider in the shoulders. He seemed to be quite willing. Ray Don gave him a big kiss before he bit him, which I could have done without, since I’m not into public displays of carnal affection. (When I say “big,” I don’t mean a loud smack, but the intense, moaning, tonsil-sucking kind.) When that was done, to both their satisfactions, Blondie inclined his head to one side, and the taller Ray Don sank his fangs in. There was much cleaving, and much panting—and even to drug-addled me, Ray Don’s vinyl pants didn’t leave enough to the imagination.
Eric watched without apparent reaction. Vampires seem, as a whole, to be extremely tolerant of any sexual preference; I guess there aren’t that many taboos when you’ve been alive a few hundred years.
When Ray Don drew back from Blondie and turned to face the bed, he had a bloody mouth. My euphoria evaporated as Eric instantly sat on the bed and pinned my shoulders. The Big Bad Thing was coming.
“Look at me,” he demanded. “Look at me, Sookie.”
I felt the bed indent, and I assumed Ray Don was kneeling beside it and leaning over to my wound.
There was a jar in the torn flesh of my side that jolted me down to the marrow of my bones. I felt the blood leave my face and felt hysteria bubbling up my throat like my blood was leaving the wound.
“Don’t, Sookie! Look at me!” Eric said urgently.
I looked down to see that Ray Don had grabbed the stake.
Next he would . . .
I screamed over and over, until I didn’t have the energy. I met Eric’s eyes as I felt Ray Don’s mouth sucking at the wound. Eric was holding my hands, and I was digging my nails into him like we were doing something else. He won’t mind, I thought, as I realized I’d drawn blood.
And sure enough, he didn’t. “Let go,” he advised me, and I loosened my grip on his hands. “No, not of me,” he said, smiling. “You can hold on to me as long as you want. Let go of the pain, Sookie. Let go. You need to drift away.”
It was the first time I had relinquished my will to someone else. As I looked at him, it became easy, and I retreated from the suffering and uncertainty of this strange place.
The next thing I knew, I was awake. I was tucked in the bed, lying on my back, my formerly beautiful dress removed. I was still wearing my beige lace underwear, which was good. Eric was in the bed with me, which was not. He was really making a habit of this. He was lying on his side, his arm draped over me, one leg thrown over mine. His hair was tangled with my hair, and the strands were almost indistinguishable, the color was so similar. I contemplated that for a while, in a sort of misty, drifting state.
Eric was having downtime. He was in that absolutely immobile state into which vampires retreat when they have nothing else to do. It refreshes them, I think, reduces the wear and tear of the world that ceaselessly passes them by, year after year, full of war and famine and inventions that they must learn how to master, changing mores and conventions and styles that they must adopt in order to fit in. I pulled down the covers to check out my side. I was still in pain, but it was greatly reduced. There was a large circle of scar tissue on the site of the wound. It was hot and shiny and red and somehow glossy.
“It’s much better,” Eric said, and I gasped. I hadn’t felt him rouse from his suspended animation.
Eric was wearing silk boxers. I would have figured him for a Jockey man.
“Thank you, Eric.” I didn’t care f
or how shaky I sounded, but an obligation is an obligation.
“For what?” His hand gently stroked my stomach.
“For standing by me in the club. For coming here with me. For not leaving me alone with all these people.”
“How grateful are you?” he whispered, his mouth hovering over mine. His eyes were very alert now, and his gaze was boring into mine.
“That kind of ruins it, when you say something like that,” I said, trying to keep my voice gentle. “You shouldn’t want me to have sex with you just because I owe you.”
“I don’t really care why you have sex with me, as long as you do it,” he said, equally gently. His mouth was on mine then. Try as I might to stay detached, I wasn’t too successful. For one thing, Eric had had hundreds of years to practice his kissing technique, and he’d used them to good advantage. I snuck my hands up to his shoulders, and I am ashamed to say I responded. As sore and tired as my body was, it wanted what it wanted, and my mind and will were running far behind. Eric seemed to have six hands, and they were everywhere, encouraging my body to have its way. A finger slid under the elastic of my (minimal) panties, and glided right into me.
I made a noise, and it was not a noise of rejection. The finger began moving in a wonderful rhythm. Eric’s mouth seemed bent on sucking my tongue down his throat. My hands were enjoying the smooth skin and the muscles that worked underneath it.
Then the window flew open, and Bubba crawled in.
“Miss Sookie! Mr. Eric! I tracked you down!” Bubba was proud.
“Oh, good for you, Bubba,” Eric said, ending the kiss. I clamped my hand on his wrist, and pulled his hand away. He allowed me to do it. I am nowhere near as strong as the weakest vampire.
“Bubba, have you been here the whole time? Here in Jackson?” I asked, once I had some wits in my head. It was a good thing Bubba had come in, though Eric didn’t think so.
“Mr. Eric told me to stick with you,” Bubba said simply. He settled into a low chair tastefully upholstered in flowered material. He had a dark lock of hair falling over his forehead, and he was wearing a gold ring on every finger. “You get hurt bad at that club, Miss Sookie?”
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