In the space of a couple of seconds, Calvin and Felton had bounded over the clearing toward the sound of Crystal’s voice, and the Reverend Jimmy and I were left to run behind. I hoped the agitation of the moment would obscure his perception of the way Calvin and Felton were moving. Up ahead of us, we heard an indescribable noise, a loud chorus of squeals and frenetic movement coming from the undergrowth. Then a hoarse shout and another shrill scream came to us muffled by the cold thickness of the woods.
We heard yelling from all directions as the other searchers responded, hurrying toward the alarming sounds.
My heel caught in a snarl of vines and I went down, ass over teacup. Though I rolled to my feet and began running again, Jimmy Fullenwilder had gotten ahead of me, and as I plunged through a stand of low pines, each no bigger around than a mailing tube, I heard the boom of the rifle.
Oh, my God, I thought. Oh, my God.
The little clearing was filled with blood and tumult. A huge animal was thrashing in the dead leaves, spraying scarlet drops on everything in its vicinity. But it was no panther. For the second time in my life, I was seeing a razorback hog, that ferocious feral pig that grows to a huge size.
In the time it took me to realize what was in front of me, the sow collapsed and died. She reeked of pig and blood. A crashing and squealing in the undergrowth around us indicated she hadn’t been alone when Crystal stumbled upon her.
But not all the blood was the sow’s.
Crystal Norris was swearing a blue streak as she sat with her back against an old oak, her hands clamped over her gored thigh. Her jeans were wet with her own blood, and her uncle and her—well, I didn’t know what relationship Felton bore to Crystal, but I was sure there was one—kinsman were bending over her. Jimmy Fullenwilder was standing with his rifle still pointed at the beast, and he had an expression on his face that I can only describe as shell-shocked.
“How is she?” I asked the two men, and only Calvin looked up. His eyes had gone very peculiar, and I realized they’d gotten more yellow, rounder. He cast an unmistakable look at the huge carcass, a look of sheer desire. There was blood around his mouth. There was a patch of fur on the back of his hand, kind of buff-colored. He must make a strange-looking wolf. I pointed silently at this evidence of his nature, and he shivered with longing as he nodded acknowledgment. I yanked a handkerchief out of my coat pocket, spat on it, and wiped his face with it before Jimmy Fullenwilder could fall out of his fascination with his kill and observe his strange companions. When Calvin’s mouth wasn’t stained anymore, I knotted the handkerchief around his hand to conceal the fur.
Felton seemed to be normal, until I observed what was at the end of his arms. They weren’t really hands anymore . . . but not really wolf paws, either. They were something very odd, something big and flat and clawed.
I couldn’t read the men’s thoughts, but I could feel their desires, and most of those desires had to do with raw red pig meat, and lots of it. Felton actually rocked back and forth once or twice with the force of his desire. Their silent struggle was painful to endure, even secondhand. I felt the change when the two men began to force their brains into human patterns. In a few seconds, Calvin managed to speak.
“She’s losing blood fast, but if we get her to the hospital she’ll be all right.” His voice was thick, and he spoke with an effort. Felton, his eyes still downcast, began tearing clumsily at his flannel shirt. With his hands misshapen, he couldn’t manage the job, and I took it over. When Crystal’s wound was bound as tightly as the makeshift bandage could compress it, the two men lifted the now white and silent Crystal and began to carry her rapidly out of the woods. The position of Felton’s hands hid them from sight, thank God.
This all occurred so quickly that the other searchers converging on the clearing were just beginning to absorb what had happened, and react.
“I shot a hog,” Jimmy Fullenwilder was saying, shaking his head from side to side, as Kevin and Kenya burst into the clearing from the east. “I can’t believe it. It just threw her over and the other sows and little ones scattered and then the two men were on it, and then they got out of the way and I shot it in the throat.” He didn’t know if he was a hero or if he was in big trouble with the Department of Wildlife. He’d had more to fear than he would ever realize. Felton and Calvin had almost gone into full Were mode at the threat to Crystal and the arousal of their own hunting instincts, and the fact that they’d thrown themselves away from the pig rather than change utterly proved they were very strong, indeed. But the fact that they’d begun to change, hadn’t been able to stop it, seemed to argue the opposite. The line between the two natures of some of the denizens of Hotshot seemed be growing very blurred.
In fact, there were bite marks on the hog. I was so overwhelmed with anxiety that I couldn’t keep up my guard, and all the excitement of all the searchers poured into my head—all the revulsion/fear/panic at the sight of the blood, the knowledge that a searcher had been seriously injured, the envy of other hunters at Jimmy Fullenwilder’s coup. It was all too much, and I wanted to get away more than I’ve ever wanted anything.
“Let’s go. This’ll be the end of the search, at least for today,” Sam said at my elbow. We walked out of the woods together, very slowly. I told Maxine what had happened, and after I’d thanked her for her wonderful contribution and accepted a box of doughnuts, I drove home. Sam followed me. I was a little more myself by the time we got there.
As I unlocked the back door, it felt quite strange knowing that there was actually someone else already in the house. Was Eric conscious on some level of my footsteps on the floor above his head—or was he as dead as an ordinary dead person? But the wondering ran through my head and out the other side, because I was just too overloaded to consider it.
Sam began to make coffee. He was somewhat at home in the kitchen, as he’d dropped in a time or two when my Gran was alive, and he’d visited on other occasions.
As I hung up our coats, I said, “That was a disaster.”
Sam didn’t disagree.
“Not only did we not find Jason, which I truly never expected we would, but the guys from Hotshot almost got outed, and Crystal got hurt. I don’t know why they thought they should be there anyway, frankly.” I know it wasn’t nice of me to say that, but I was with Sam, who’d seen enough of my bad side to be under no illusions.
“I talked to them before you got there. Calvin wanted to show he was willing to court you, in a Hotshot kind of way,” Sam said, his voice quiet and even. “Felton is their best tracker, so he made Felton come, and Crystal just wanted to find Jason.”
Instantly I felt ashamed of myself. “I’m sorry,” I said, holding my head in my hands and dropping into a chair. “I’m sorry.”
Sam knelt in front of me and put his hands on my knees. “You’re entitled to be cranky,” he said.
I bent over him and kissed the top of his head. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” I said, without any thought at all.
He looked up at me, and there was a long, odd moment, when the light in the room seemed to dance and shiver. “You’d call Arlene,” he said with a smile. “She’d come over with the kids, and she’d try to spike your coffee, and she’d tell you about Tack’s angled dick, and she’d get you to laughing, and you’d feel better.”
I blessed him for letting the moment pass. “You know, that kind of makes me curious, that bit about Tack, but it probably falls into the category of ‘too much information,’ ” I said.
“I thought so, too, but that didn’t prevent me from hearing it when she was telling Charlsie Tooten.”
I poured us each a cup of coffee and put the half-empty sugar bowl within Sam’s reach, along with a spoon. I glanced over at the kitchen counter to see how full the clear sugar canister was, and I noticed that the message light on the answering machine was blinking. I only had to get up and take a step to press the button. The message had been recorded at 5:01 A.M. Oh. I’d turned the phone ringer off when I’
d gone to bed exhausted. Almost invariably my messages were real mundane—Arlene asking me if I’d heard a piece of gossip, Tara passing the time of day during a slow hour at the store—but this one was a real doozy.
Pam’s clear voice said, “Tonight we attack the witch and her coven. The Weres have persuaded the local Wiccans to join us. We need you to bring Eric. He can fight, even if he doesn’t know who he is. He will be useless to us if we can’t break the spell, anyway.” That Pam, ever practical. She was willing to use Eric for cannon fodder, since we might not be able to restore him to full Eric leadership mode. After a little pause, she continued, “The Weres of Shreveport are allying with vampires in battle. You can watch history being made, my telepathic friend.”
The sound of the phone being put back in the cradle. The click that heralded the next message, which came in two minutes after the first.
“Thinking of that,” Pam said, as if she’d never hung up, “there is the idea that your unusual ability can help us in our fight, and we want to explore that. Isn’t that the right buzzword now? Explore? So get here as close to first dark as possible.” She hung up again.
Click. “ ‘Here’ is 714 Parchman Avenue,” Pam said. Hung up.
“How can I do that, with Jason still missing?” I asked, when it became clear Pam hadn’t called again.
“You’re going to sleep now,” Sam said. “Come on.” He pulled me to my feet, led me to my room. “You’re going to take off your boots and jeans, crawl back in the bed, and take a long nap. When you get up, you’ll feel better. You leave Pam’s number so I can reach you. Tell the cops to call the bar if they learn anything, and I’ll phone you if I hear from Bud Dearborn.”
“So you think I should do this?” I was bewildered.
“No, I’d give anything if you wouldn’t. But I think you have to. It’s not my fight; I wasn’t invited.” Sam gave me a kiss on the forehead and left to go back to Merlotte’s.
His attitude was kind of interesting, after all the vampire insistence (both Bill’s and Eric’s) that I was a possession to be guarded. I felt pretty empowered and gung-ho for about thirty seconds, until I remembered my New Year’s resolution: no getting beaten up. If I went to Shreveport with Eric, then I was sure to see things I didn’t want to see, learn things I didn’t want to know, and get my ass whipped, too.
On the other hand, my brother Jason had made a deal with the vampires, and I had to uphold it. Sometimes I felt that my whole life had been spent stuck between a rock and a hard place. But then, lots of people had complicated lives.
I thought of Eric, a powerful vampire whose mind had been stripped clean of his identity. I thought of the carnage I’d seen in the bridal shop, the white lace and brocade speckled with dried blood and matter. I thought of poor Maria-Star, in the hospital in Shreveport. These witches were bad, and bad should be stopped; bad should be overcome. That’s the American model.
It seemed kind of strange to think that I was on the side of vampires and werewolves, and that was the good side. That made me laugh a little, all to myself. Oh, yes, we good guys would save the day.
11
AMAZINGLY, I DID SLEEP. I WOKE WITH ERIC ON THE bed beside me. He was smelling me.
“Sookie, what is this?” he asked in a very quiet voice. He knew, of course, when I woke. “You smell of the woods, and you smell of shifter. And something even wilder.”
I supposed the shifter he smelled was Sam. “And Were,” I prompted, not wanting him to miss out on anything.
“No, not Were,” he said.
I was puzzled. Calvin had lifted me over the brambles, and his scent should still have been on me.
“More than one kind of shifter,” Eric said in the near-dark of my room. “What have you been doing, my lover?”
He didn’t exactly sound angry, but he didn’t sound happy, either. Vampires. They wrote the book on possessive.
“I was in the search party for my brother, in the woods behind his home,” I said.
Eric was still for a minute. Then he wrapped his arms around me and hauled me up against him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you are worried.”
“Let me ask you something,” I said, willing to test a theory of mine.
“Of course.”
“Look inside yourself, Eric. Are you really, really sorry? Worried about Jason?” Because the real Eric, in his right mind, would not have cared one little bit.
“Of course,” he protested. Then, after a long moment—I wished I could see his face—he said, “Not really.” He sounded surprised. “I know I should be. I should be concerned about your brother, because I love having sex with you, and I should want you to think well of me so you’ll want sex, too.”
You just had to like the honesty. This was the closest to the real Eric I’d seen in days.
“But you’ll listen, right? If I need to talk? For the same reason?”
“Of course, my lover.”
“Because you want to have sex with me.”
“That, of course. But also because I find I really do . . .” He paused, as if he were about to say something outrageous. “I find I have feelings for you.”
“Oh,” I said into his chest, sounding as astonished as Eric had. His chest was bare, as I suspected the rest of him was. I felt the light sprinkling of curly blond hair against my cheek.
“Eric,” I said, after a long pause, “I almost hate to say this, but I have feelings for you, too.” There was a lot I needed to tell Eric, and we should be in the car on our way to Shreveport already. But I was taking this moment to savor this little bit of happiness.
“Not love, exactly,” he said. His fingers were busy trying to find out how best to get my clothes off.
“No, but something close.” I helped him. “We don’t have much time, Eric,” I said, reaching down, touching him, making him gasp. “Let’s make it good.”
“Kiss me,” he said, and he wasn’t talking about his mouth. “Turn this way,” he whispered. “I want to kiss you, too.”
It didn’t take long, after all, for us to be holding each other, sated and happy.
“What’s happened?” he asked. “I can tell something is frightening you.”
“We have to go to Shreveport now,” I said. “We’re already past the time Pam said on the phone. Tonight’s the night we face off against Hallow and her witches.”
“Then you must stay here,” he said immediately.
“No,” I said gently, putting my hand on his cheek. “No, baby, I have to go with you.” I didn’t tell him Pam thought using me in the battle would be a good idea. I didn’t tell him he was going to be used as a fighting machine. I didn’t tell him I was sure someone was going to die tonight; maybe quite a few someones, human and Were and vampire. It was probably the last time I would use an endearment when I addressed Eric. It was perhaps the last time Eric would wake up in my house. One of us might not survive this night, and if we did, there was no way to know how we’d be changed.
The drive to Shreveport was silent. We’d washed up and dressed without talking much, either. At least seven times, I thought of heading back to Bon Temps, with or without Eric.
But I didn’t.
Eric’s skills did not include map reading, so I had to pull over to check my Shreveport map to plot our course to 714 Parchman, something I hadn’t foreseen before we got to the city. (I’d somehow expected Eric to remember the directions, but of course, he didn’t.)
“Your word of the day was ‘annihilate,’ ” he told me cheerfully.
“Oh. Thanks for checking.” I probably didn’t sound very thankful. “You’re sounding pretty excited about all this.”
“Sookie, there’s nothing like a good fight,” he said defensively.
“That depends on who wins, I would think.”
That kept him quiet for a few minutes, which was fine. I was having trouble negotiating the strange streets in the darkness, with so much on my mind. But we finally got to the right street, and the right house on that
street. I had always pictured Pam and Chow living in a mansion, but the vampires had a large ranch-style house in an upper-middle-class suburb. It was a trimmed-lawn, bike-riding, lawn-sprinkling street, from what I could tell.
The light by the driveway was on at 714, and the three-car garage around at the rear was full. I drove up the slope to the concrete apron that was placed for overflow parking. I recognized Alcide’s truck and the compact car that had been parked in Colonel Flood’s carport.
Before we got out of my old car, Eric leaned over to kiss me. We looked at each other, his eyes wide and blue, the whites so white you could hardly look away, his golden hair neatly brushed. He’d tied it back with one of my elastic bands, a bright blue one. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a new flannel shirt.
“We could go back,” he said. In the dome light of the car, his face looked hard as stone. “We could go back to your house. I can stay with you always. We can know each other’s bodies in every way, night after night. I could love you.” His nostrils flared, and he looked suddenly proud. “I could work. You would not be poor. I would help you.”
“Sounds like a marriage,” I said, trying to lighten the atmosphere. But my voice was too shaky.
“Yes,” he said.
And he would never be himself again. He would be a false version of Eric, an Eric cheated out of his true life. Providing our relationship (such as it was) lasted, he would stay the same; but I wouldn’t.
Enough with the negative thinking, Sookie, I told myself. I would be a total idiot to pass up living with this gorgeous creature for however long. We actually had a good time together, and I enjoyed Eric’s sense of humor and his company, to say nothing of his lovemaking. Now that he’d lost his memory, he was lots of uncomplicated fun.
And that was the fly in the ointment. We would have a counterfeit relationship, because this was the counterfeit Eric. I’d come full loop.
I slid out of the car with a sigh. “I’m a total idiot,” I said as he came around the back of the car to walk with me to the house.
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