“Bill,” I whispered, thinking it was already maybe too late. With the little strength I had left, I pinched his ear with the fingers of my right hand. “Please listen, Bill.”
“Ow,” he said. His voice sounded rough; his throat was sore. He had stopped taking blood. Now another need was on him, one closely related to feeding. His hands pulled down my sweatpants, and after a lot of fumbling and rearranging and contorting, he entered me with no preparation at all. I screamed, and he clapped a hand over my mouth. I was crying, sobbing, and my nose was all stopped up, and I needed to breathe through my mouth. All restraint left me and I began fighting like a wildcat. I bit and scratched and kicked, not caring about the air supply, not caring that I would enrage him. I just had to have air.
After a few seconds, his hand fell away. And he stopped moving. I drew air in with a deep, shuddering gasp. I was crying in earnest, one sob after another.
“Sookie?” Bill said uncertainly. “Sookie?”
I couldn’t answer.
“It’s you,” he said, his voice hoarse and wondering. “It’s you. You were really there in that room?”
I tried to gather myself, but I felt very fuzzy and I was afraid I was going to faint. Finally, I was able to say, “Bill,” in a whisper.
“It is you. Are you all right?”
“No,” I said almost apologetically. After all, it was Bill who’d been held prisoner and tortured.
“Did I . . .” He paused, and seemed to brace himself. “Have I taken more blood than I should?”
I couldn’t answer. I laid my head on his arm. It seemed too much trouble to speak.
“I seem to be having sex with you in a closet,” Bill said in a subdued voice. “Did you, ah, volunteer?”
I turned my head from side to side, then let it loll on his arm again.
“Oh, no,” he whispered. “Oh, no.” He pulled out of me and fumbled around a lot for the second time. He was putting me back to rights; himself, too, I guess. His hands patted our surroundings. “Car trunk,” he muttered.
“I need air,” I said, in a voice almost too soft to hear.
“Why didn’t you say so?” Bill punched a hole in the trunk. He was stronger. Good for him.
Cold air rushed in and I sucked it deep. Beautiful, beautiful oxygen.
“Where are we?” he asked, after a moment.
“Parking garage,” I gasped. “Apartment building. Jackson.” I was so weak, I just wanted to let go and float away.
“Why?”
I tried to gather enough energy to answer him. “Alcide lives here,” I managed to mutter, eventually.
“Alcide who? What are we supposed to do now?”
“Eric’s . . . coming. Drink the bottled blood.”
“Sookie? Are you all right?”
I couldn’t answer. If I could have, I might have said, “Why do you care? You were going to leave me anyway.” I might have said, “I forgive you,” though that doesn’t seem real likely. Maybe I would have just told him that I’d missed him, and that his secret was still safe with me; faithful unto death, that was Sookie Stackhouse.
I heard him open a bottle.
As I was drifting off in a boat down a current that seemed to be moving ever faster, I realized that Bill had never revealed my name. I knew they had tried to find it out, to kidnap me and bring me to be tortured in front of him for extra leverage. And he hadn’t told.
The trunk opened with a noise of tearing metal.
Eric stood outlined by the fluorescent lights of the garage. They’d come on when it got dark. “What are you two doing in here?” he asked.
But the current carried me away before I could answer.
“SHE’S COMING AROUND,” Eric observed. “Maybe that was enough blood.” My head buzzed for a minute, went silent again.
“She really is,” he was saying next, and my eyes flickered open to register three anxious male faces hovering above me: Eric’s, Alcide’s, and Bill’s. Somehow, the sight made me want to laugh. So many men at home were scared of me, or didn’t want to think about me, and here were the three men in the world who wanted to have sex with me, or who at least had thought about it seriously; all crowding around the bed. I giggled, actually giggled, for the first time in maybe ten years. “The Three Musketeers,” I said.
“Is she hallucinating?” Eric asked.
“I think she’s laughing at us,” Alcide said. He didn’t sound unhappy about that. He put an empty TrueBlood bottle on the vanity table behind him. There was a large pitcher beside it, and a glass.
Bill’s cool fingers laced with mine. “Sookie,” he said, in that quiet voice that always sent shivers down my spine. I tried to focus on his face. He was sitting on the bed to my right.
He looked better. The deepest cuts were scars on his face, and the bruises were fading.
“They said, was I coming back for the crucifixion?” I told him.
“Who said that to you?” He bent over me, his face intent, dark eyes wide.
“Guards at the gate.”
“The guards at the gates of the mansion asked you if you were coming back for a crucifixion tonight? This night?”
“Yes.”
“Whose?”
“Don’t know.”
“I would have expected you to say, ‘Where am I? What happened to me?’ ” Eric said. “Not ask whose crucifixion would be taking place—perhaps is taking place,” he corrected himself, glancing at the clock by the bed.
“Maybe they meant mine?” Bill looked a little stunned by the idea. “Maybe they decided to kill me tonight?”
“Or perhaps they caught the fanatic who tried to stake Betty Joe?” Eric suggested. “He would be a prime candidate for crucifixion.”
I thought it over, as much as I was able to reason through the weariness that kept threatening to overwhelm me. “Not the picture I got,” I whispered. My neck was very, very sore.
“You were able to read something from the Weres?” Eric asked.
I nodded. “I think they meant Bubba,” I whispered, and everyone in the room froze.
“That cretin,” Eric said savagely, after he’d had time to process that. “They caught him?”
“Think so.” That was the impression I’d gotten.
“We’ll have to retrieve him,” Bill said. “If he’s still alive.”
It was very brave for Bill to say he would go back in that compound. I would never have said that, if I’d been him.
The silence that had fallen was distinctly uneasy.
“Eric?” Bill’s dark eyebrows arched; he was waiting for a comment.
Eric looked royally angry. “I guess you are right. We have the responsibility of him. I can’t believe his home state is willing to execute him! Where is their loyalty?”
“And you?” Bill’s voice was considerably cooler as he asked Alcide.
Alcide’s warmth filled the room. So did the confused tangle of his thoughts. He’d spent part of last night with Debbie, all right.
“I don’t see how I can,” Alcide said desperately. “My business, my father’s, depends on my being able to come here often. And if I’m on the outs with Russell and his crew, that would be almost impossible. It’s going to be difficult enough when they realize Sookie must be the one who stole their prisoner.”
“And killed Lorena,” I added.
Another pregnant silence.
Eric began to grin. “You offed Lorena?” He had a good grasp of the vernacular, for a very old vampire.
It was hard to interpret Bill’s expression. “Sookie staked her,” he said. “It was a fair kill.”
“She killed Lorena in a fight?” Eric’s grin grew even broader. He was as proud as if he’d heard his firstborn reciting Shakespeare.
“Very short fight,” I said, not wanting to take any credit that was not due me. If you could term it credit.
“Sookie killed a vampire,” Alcide said, as if that raised me in his evaluation, too. The two vampires in the room scowled.
> Alcide poured and handed me a big glass of water. I drank it, slowly and painfully. I felt appreciably better after a minute or two.
“Back to the original subject,” Eric said, giving me another meaningful look to show me he had more to say about the killing of Lorena. “If Sookie has not been pegged as having helped Bill escape, she is the best choice to get us back on the grounds without setting off alarms. They might not be expecting her, but they won’t turn her away, either, I’m sure. Especially if she says she has a message for Russell from the queen of Louisiana, or if she says she has something she wants to return to Russell . . .” He shrugged, as if to say surely we could make up a good story.
I didn’t want to go back in there. I thought of poor Bubba, and tried to worry about his fate—which he might have already met—but I was just too weak to worry about it.
“Flag of truce?” I suggested. I cleared my throat. “Do the vampires have such a thing?”
Eric looked thoughtful. “Of course, then I’d have to explain who I am,” he said.
Happiness had made Alcide a lot easier to read. He was thinking about how soon he could call Debbie.
I opened my mouth, reconsidered, shut it, opened it again. What the hell. “Know who pushed me in the trunk and slammed it shut?” I asked Alcide. His green eyes locked onto me. His face became still, contained, as if he was afraid emotion would leak out. He turned and left the room, pulling the door shut behind him. For the first time, I registered that I was back in the guest bedroom in his apartment.
“So, who did the deed, Sookie?” Eric asked.
“His ex-girlfriend. Not so ex, after last night.”
“Why would she do that?” Bill asked.
There was another significant silence. “Sookie was represented as Alcide’s new girlfriend to gain entrée to the club,” Eric said delicately.
“Oh,” Bill said. “Why did you need to go to the club?”
“You must have gotten hit on the head a few times, Bill,” Eric said coldly. “She was trying to ‘hear’ where they had taken you.”
This was getting too close to things Bill and I had to talk about alone.
“It’s dumb to go back in there,” I said. “What about a phone call?”
They both stared at me like I was turning into a frog.
“Well, what a good idea,” Eric said.
THE PHONE, AS it turned out, was just listed under Russell Edgington’s name; not “Mansion of Doom,” or “Vampires R Us.” I worked on getting my story straight as I downed the contents of a big opaque plastic mug. I hated the taste of the synthetic blood Bill insisted I drink, so he’d mixed it with apple juice, and I was trying not to look as I gulped it down.
They’d made me drink it straight when they’d gotten up to Alcide’s apartment that evening; and I didn’t ask them how. At least I knew why the clothes I’d borrowed from Bernard were really horrible now. I looked like I’d had my throat cut, instead of mangled by Bill’s painful bite. It was still very sore, but it was better.
Of course I had been picked to make the call. I never met a man yet, above the age of sixteen, who liked to talk on the phone.
“Betty Joe Pickard, please,” I said to the male voice that answered the phone.
“She’s busy,” he said promptly.
“I need to talk to her right now.”
“She’s otherwise engaged. May I take your number?”
“This is the woman who saved her life last night.” No point beating around the bush. “I need to talk to her, right now. Tout de suite.”
“I’ll see.”
There was a long pause. I could hear people walking by the phone from time to time, and I heard a lot of cheering that sounded as if it was coming from a distance. I didn’t want to think about that too much. Eric, Bill, and Alcide—who had finally stomped back into the room when Bill had asked him if we could borrow his phone—were standing there making all kinds of faces at me, and I just shrugged back.
Finally, there was the click, click, click of heels on tile.
“I’m grateful, but you can’t bank on this forever,” Betty Jo Pickard said briskly. “We arranged for your healing, you had a place to stay to recuperate. We didn’t erase your memory,” she added, as if that was a little detail that had escaped her until just this moment. “What have you called to ask?”
“You have a vampire there, an Elvis impersonator?”
“So?” Suddenly she sounded very wary. “We caught an intruder within our walls last night, yes.”
“This morning, after I left your place, I was stopped again,” I said. We had figured this would sound convincing because I sounded so hoarse and weak.
There was a long silence while she thought through the implications. “You have a habit of being in the wrong place,” she said, as if she were remotely sorry for me.
“They are getting me to call you now,” I said carefully. “I am supposed to tell you that the vampire you have there, he’s the real thing.”
She laughed a little. “Oh, but . . .” she began. Then she fell silent. “You’re shitting me, right?” Mamie Eisenhower would never have said that, I was willing to swear.
“Absolutely not. There was a vamp working in the morgue that night,” I croaked. Betty Jo made a sound that came out between a gasp and a choke. “Don’t call him by his real name. Call him ‘Bubba.’ And for goodness’ sake, don’t hurt him.”
“But we’ve already . . . hold on!”
She ran. I could hear the urgent sound die away.
I sighed, and waited. After a few seconds, I was completely nuts with the two guys standing around looking down at me. I was strong enough to sit up, I figured.
Bill gently held me up, while Eric propped pillows behind my back. I was glad to see one of them had had the presence of mind to spread the yellow blanket over the bed so I wouldn’t stain the bedspread. All this while, I’d held the phone clamped to my ear, and when it squawked, I was actually startled.
“We got him down in time,” Betty Joe said brightly.
“The call came in time,” I told Eric. He closed his eyes and seemed to be offering up a prayer. I wondered to whom Eric prayed. I waited for further instructions.
“Tell them,” he said, “to just let him go, and he will take himself home. Tell them that we apologize for letting him stray.”
I relayed that message from my “abductors.”
Betty Jo was quick to dismiss the directions. “Would you ask if he could stay and sing to us a little? He’s in pretty good shape,” she said.
So I relayed that. Eric rolled his eyes. “She can ask him, but if he says no, she must take it to heart and not ask him anymore,” he said. “It just upsets him, if he’s not in the mood. And sometimes when he does sing, it brings back memories, and he gets, ah, obstreperous.”
“All right,” she said, after I’d explained. “We’ll do our best. If he doesn’t want to sing, we’ll let him go right away.” From the sound of it, she turned to someone by her. “He can sing, if he’ll consent,” she said, and the someone said, “Yippee!” Two big nights in a row for the crowd at the king of Mississippi’s mansion, I guess.
Betty Joe said into the telephone, “I hope you get out of your difficulties. I don’t know how whoever’s got you got lucky enough to have the care of the greatest star in the world. Would he consider negotiating?”
She didn’t know yet about the troubles that entailed. “Bubba” had an unfortunate predilection for cat blood, and he was addlepated, and he could only follow the simplest directions; though every now and then, he exhibited a streak of shrewdness. He followed directions quite literally.
“She wants permission to keep him,” I told Eric. I was tired of being the go-between. But Betty Joe couldn’t meet with Eric, or she’d know he was the supposed friend of Alcide’s who’d helped me get to the mansion the night before.
This was all too complicated for me.
“Yes?” Eric said into the telephone. Suddenly he had an Engl
ish accent. Mr. Master of Disguise. Soon he was saying things like, “He’s a sacred trust,” and, “You don’t know what you’re biting off,” into the phone. (If I’d had any sense of humor that night, I would have thought the last statement was pretty funny.) After a little more conversation, he hung up, with a pleased air.
I was thinking how strange it was that Betty Joe hadn’t indicated that anything else was amiss at the compound. She hadn’t accused Bubba of taking their prisoner, and she hadn’t commented on finding the body of Lorena. Not that she’d necessarily mention these things in a phone conversation with a human stranger; and, for that matter, not that there’d be much to find; vampires disintegrate pretty quickly. But the silver chains would still be in the pool, and maybe enough sludge to identify as the corpse of a vampire. Of course, why would anyone look under the pool cover? But surely someone had noticed their star prisoner was gone?
Maybe they were assuming Bubba had freed Bill while he was roaming the compound. We’d told him not to say anything, and he would follow that directive to the letter.
Maybe I was off the hook. Maybe Lorena would be completely dissolved by the time they started to clean the pool in the spring.
The topic of corpses reminded me of the body we’d found stuffed in the closet of this apartment. Someone sure knew where we were, and someone sure didn’t like us. Leaving the body there was an attempt to tie us to the crime of murder, which, actually, I had committed. I just hadn’t done that particular murder. I wondered if the body of Jerry Falcon had been discovered yet. The chance seemed remote. I opened my mouth to ask Alcide if it had been on the news, and then I closed it again. I lacked the energy to frame the sentence.
My life was spinning out of control. In the space of two days I’d hidden one corpse and created another one. And all because I’d fallen in love with a vampire. I gave Bill an unloving glance. I was so absorbed in my thoughts, I hardly heard the telephone. Alcide, who had gone into the kitchen, must have answered it on the first ring.
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