“Sookie?” Holly’s big eyes peered out from under a knit watch cap. She’d dressed for utility tonight, but she still had on bright pink lipstick.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“They told me they’d get my boy if I didn’t help them.”
I felt sick. “How long have you been helping them? Before I came to your apartment, asking for help? How long?” I shook her as hard as I could.
“When she came to the bar with her brother, she knew there was another witch there. And she knew it wasn’t you or Sam, after she’d talked to you. Hallow can do anything. She knows everything. Late that night, she and Mark came to my apartment. They’d been in a fight; they were all messed up, and they were mad. Mark held me down while Hallow punched me. She liked that. She saw my picture of my son; she took it and said she could curse him long distance, all the way from Shreveport—make him run out in the traffic or load his daddy’s gun. . . .” Holly was crying by now. I didn’t blame her. It made me sick to think of it, and he wasn’t even my child. “I had to say I’d help her,” Holly whimpered.
“Are there others like you in there?”
“Forced to do this? A few of them.”
That made some thoughts I’d heard more understandable.
“And Jason? He in there?” Though I’d looked at all three of the male brains in the building, I still had to ask.
“Jason is a Wiccan? For real?” She pulled off the watch cap and ran her fingers through her hair.
“No, no, no. Is she holding him hostage?”
“I haven’t seen him. Why on earth would Hallow have Jason?”
I’d been fooling myself all along. A hunter would find my brother’s remains someday: it’s always hunters, or people walking their dogs, isn’t it? I felt a falling away beneath my feet, as if the ground had literally dropped out from under me, but I called myself back to the here and now, away from emotions I couldn’t afford to feel until I was in a safer place.
“You have to get out of here,” I said in the lowest voice I could manage. “You have to get out of this area now.”
“She’ll get my son!”
“I guarantee she won’t.”
Holly seemed to read something in the dim view she had of my face. “I hope you kill them all,” she said as passionately as you can in a whisper. “The only ones worth saving are Parton and Chelsea and Jane. They got blackmailed into this just like I did. Normally, they’re just Wiccans who like to live real quiet, like me. We don’t want to do no one no harm.”
“What do they look like?”
“Parton’s a guy about twenty-five, brown hair, short, birthmark on his cheek. Chelsea is about seventeen, her hair’s dyed that bright red. Jane, um, well—Jane’s just an old woman, you know? White hair, pants, blouse with flowers on it. Glasses.” My grandmother would have reamed Holly for lumping all old women together, but God bless her, she wasn’t around anymore, and I didn’t have the time.
“Why didn’t Hallow put one of her toughest people out here on guard duty?” I asked, out of sheer curiosity.
“They got a big ritual spell thing set up for tonight. I can’t believe the stay-away spell didn’t work on you. You must be resistant.” Then Holly whispered, with a little rill of laughter in her voice, “Plus, none of ’em wanted to get cold.”
“Go on, get out of here,” I said almost inaudibly, and helped her up. “It doesn’t matter where you parked your car, go north out of here.” In case she didn’t know which direction was north, I pointed.
Holly took off, her Nikes making almost no sound on the cracked sidewalk. Her dull dyed black hair seemed to soak up the light from the streetlamp as she passed beneath it. The smell around the house, the smell of magic, seemed to intensify. I wondered what to do now. Somehow I had to make sure that the three local Wiccans within the dilapidated building, the ones who’d been forced to serve Hallow, wouldn’t be harmed. I couldn’t think of a way in hell to do that. Could I even save one of them?
I had a whole collection of half thoughts and abortive impulses in the next sixty seconds. They all led to a dead end.
If I ran inside and yelled, “Parton, Chelsea, Jane—out!” that would alert the coven to the impending attack. Some of my friends—or at least my allies—would die.
If I hung around and tried to tell the vampires that three of the people in the building were innocent, they would (most likely) ignore me. Or, if a bolt of mercy struck them, they’d have to save all the witches and then cull the innocent ones out, which would give the coven witches time to counterattack. Witches didn’t need physical weapons.
Too late, I realized I should have kept a hold of Holly and used her as my entrée into the building. But endangering a frightened mother was not a good option, either.
Something large and warm pressed against my side. Eyes and teeth gleamed in the city’s night light. I almost screamed until I recognized the wolf as Alcide. He was very large. The silver fur around his eyes made the rest of his coat seem even darker.
I put an arm across his back. “There are three in there who mustn’t die,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”
Since he was a wolf, Alcide didn’t know what to do, either. He looked into my face. He whined, just a little. I was supposed to be back at the cars by now; but here I was, smack in the danger zone. I could feel movement in the dark all around me. Alcide slunk away to his appointed position at the rear door of the building.
“What are you doing here?” Bill said furiously, though it sounded strange coming out in a tiny thread of a whisper. “Pam told you to leave once you’d counted.”
“Three in there are innocent,” I whispered back. “They’re locals. They were forced.”
Bill said something under his breath, and it wasn’t a happy something.
I passed along the sketchy descriptions Holly had given me.
I could feel the tension in Bill’s body, and then Debbie joined us in our foxhole. What was she thinking, to pack herself in so closely with the vampire and the human who hated her most?
“I told you to stay back,” Bill said, and his voice was frightening.
“Alcide abjured me,” she told me, just as if I hadn’t been there when it happened.
“What did you expect?” I was exasperated at her timing and her wounded attitude. Hadn’t she ever heard of consequences?
“I have to do something to earn back his trust.”
She’d come to the wrong shop, if she wanted to buy some self-respect.
“Then help me save the three in there who are innocent.” I recounted my problem again. “Why haven’t you changed into your animal?”
“Oh, I can’t,” she said bitterly. “I’ve been abjured. I can’t change with Alcide’s pack anymore. They have license to kill me, if I do.”
“What did you shift into, anyway?”
“Lynx.”
That was appropriate.
“Come on,” I said. I began to wriggle toward the building. I loathed this woman, but if she could be of use to me, I had to ally with her.
“Wait, I’m supposed to go to the back door with the Were,” Bill hissed. “Eric’s already back there.”
“So go!”
I sensed that someone else was at my back and risked a quick glance to see that it was Pam. She smiled at me, and her fangs were out, so that was a little unnerving.
Maybe if the witches inside hadn’t been involved in a ritual, and hadn’t been relying on their less-than-dedicated sentry and their magic, we wouldn’t have made it to the door undetected. But fortune favored us for those few minutes. We got to the front door of the building, Pam and Debbie and I, and there met up with the young Were, Sid. I could recognize him even in his wolf body. Bubba was with him.
I was struck with a sudden inspiration. I moved a few feet away with Bubba.
“Can you run back to the Wiccans, the ones on our side? You know where they are?” I whispered.
Bubba nodded his head vigorously.
/>
“You tell them there are three local Wiccans inside who’re being forced into this. Ask if they can make up some spell to get the three innocent ones to stand out.”
“I’ll tell them, Miss Sookie. They’re real sweet to me.”
“Good fella. Be quick, be quiet.”
He nodded, and was gone into the darkness.
The smell around the building was intensifying to such a degree that I was having trouble breathing. The air was so permeated with scent, I was reminded of passing a candle shop in a mall.
Pam said, “Where have you sent Bubba?”
“Back to our Wiccans. They need to make three innocent people stand out somehow so we won’t kill ’em.”
“But he has to come back now. He has to break down the door for me!”
“But . . .” I was disconcerted at Pam’s reaction. “He can’t go in without an invitation, like you.”
“Bubba is brain damaged, degraded. He’s not altogether a true vampire. He can enter without an express invitation.”
I gaped at Pam. “Why didn’t you tell me?” She just raised her eyebrows. When I thought back, it was true that I could remember at least twice that Bubba had entered dwellings without an invitation. I’d never put two and two together.
“So I’ll have to be the first through the door,” I said, more matter-of-factly than I was really feeling. “Then I invite you all in?”
“Yes. Your invitation will be enough. The building doesn’t belong to them.”
“Should we do this now?”
Pam gave an almost inaudible snort. She was smiling in the glow of the streetlight, suddenly exhilarated. “You waiting for an engraved invite?”
Lord save me from sarcastic vampires. “You think Bubba’s had enough time to get to the Wiccans?”
“Sure. Let’s nail some witch butt,” she said happily. I could tell the fate of the local Wiccans was very low on her list of priorities. Everyone seemed to be looking forward to this but me. Even the young Were was showing a lot of fang.
“I kick, you go in,” Pam said. She gave me a quick peck on the cheek, utterly surprising me.
I thought, I so don’t want to be here.
Then I got up from my crouch, stood behind Pam, and watched in awe while she cocked a leg and kicked with the force of four or five mules. The lock shattered, the door sprang inward while the old wood nailed over it splintered and cracked, and I leaped inside and screamed “Come in!” to the vampire behind me and the ones at the back door. For an odd moment, I was in the lair of the witches by myself, and they’d all turned to look at me in utter astonishment.
The room was full of candles and people sitting on cushions on the floor; during the time we’d waited outside, all the others in the building seemed to have come into this front room, and they were sitting cross-legged in a circle, each with a candle burning before her, and a bowl, and a knife.
Of the three I’d try to save, “old woman” was easiest to recognize. There was only one white-haired woman in the circle. She was wearing bright pink lipstick, a little skewed and smeared, and there was dried blood on her cheek. I grabbed her arm and pushed her into a corner, while all about me was chaos. There were only three human men in the room. Hallow’s brother, Mark, now being attacked by a pack of wolves, was one of them. The second male was a middle-aged man with concave cheeks and suspicious black hair, and he not only was muttering some kind of spell but pulling a switch-blade from the jacket lying on the floor to his right. He was too far away for me to do anything about it; I had to rely on the others to protect themselves. Then I spotted the third man, birthmark on cheek—must be Parton. He was cowering with his hands over his head. I knew how he felt.
I grabbed his arm and pulled up, and he came up punching, of course. But I wasn’t having any of that, no one was going to hit me, so I aimed my fist through his ineffectually flailing arms and got him right on the nose. He shrieked, adding another layer of noise to the already cacophonous room, and I yanked him over to the same corner where I’d stashed Jane. Then I saw that the older woman and the young man were both shining. Okay, the Wiccans had come through with a spell and it was working, though just a tad late. Now I had to find a shining young woman with dyed red hair, the third local.
But my luck ran out then; hers already had. She was shining, but she was dead. Her throat had been torn out by one of the wolves: one of ours, or one of theirs, it didn’t really matter.
I scrambled though the melee back to the corner and seized both of the surviving Wiccans by the arm. Debbie Pelt came rushing up. “Get out of here,” I said to them. “Find the other Wiccans out there, or go home now. Walk, get a cab, whatever.”
“It’s a bad neighborhood out there,” quavered Jane.
I stared at her. “And this isn’t?” The last I saw of the two, Debbie was pointing and giving them instructions. She had stepped out the doorway with them. I was about to take off after them, since I wasn’t supposed to be here anyway, when one of the Were witches snapped at my leg. Its teeth missed flesh but snagged my pants leg, and that was enough to yank me back. I stumbled and nearly fell to the floor, but managed to grasp the doorjamb in time to regain my feet. At that moment, the second wave of Weres and vamps came through from the back room, and the wolf darted off to meet the new assault from the rear.
The room was full of flying bodies and spraying blood and screams.
The witches were fighting for all they were worth, and the ones who could shift had done so. Hallow had changed, and she was a snarling mass of snapping teeth. Her brother was trying to work some kind of magic, which required him to be in his human form, and he was trying to hold off the Weres and the vampires long enough to complete the spell.
He was chanting something, he and the concave-cheeked man, even as Mark Stonebrook drove a fist into Eric’s stomach.
A heavy mist began to crawl through the room. The witches, who were fighting with knives or wolf teeth, got the idea, and those who could speak began to add to whatever Mark was saying. The cloud of mist in the room began to get thicker and thicker, until it was impossible to tell friend from foe.
I leaped for the door to escape from the suffocating cloud. This stuff made breathing a real effort. It was like trying to inhale and exhale cotton balls. I extended my hand, but the bit of wall I touched didn’t include a door. It had been right there! I felt a curl of panic in my stomach as I patted frantically, trying to trace the outline of the exit.
Not only did I fail to find the doorjamb, I lost touch with the wall altogether on my next sideways step. I stumbled over a wolf’s body. I couldn’t see a wound, so I got hold of its shoulders and dragged, trying to rescue it from the thick smoke.
The wolf began to writhe and change under my hands, which was pretty disconcerting. Even worse, it changed into a naked Hallow. I didn’t know anyone could change that fast. Terrified, I let go of her immediately and backed away into the cloud. I’d been trying to be a good Samaritan with the wrong victim. A nameless woman, one of the witches, grabbed me from behind with superhuman strength. She tried to grip my neck with one hand while holding my arm with the other, but her hand kept slipping, and I bit her as hard as I could. She might be a witch, and she might be a Were, and she might have drunk a gallon of vamp blood, but she was no warrior. She screamed and released me.
By now I was completely disoriented. Which way was out? I was coughing and my eyes were streaming. The only sense I was sure of was gravity. Sight, hearing, touch: all were affected by the thick white billows, which were getting ever denser. The vampires had an advantage in this situation; they didn’t need to breathe. All the rest of us did. Compared to the thickening atmosphere in the old bakery, the polluted city air outside had been pure and delicious.
Gasping and weeping, I flung my arms out in front of me and tried to find a wall or a doorway, any sort of landmark. A room that had not seemed so large now seemed cavernous. I felt I’d stumbled through yards of nothingness, but that wasn’t possible un
less the witches had changed the dimensions of the room, and my prosaic mind just couldn’t accept the possibility. From around me I heard screams and sounds that were muffled in the cloud, but no less frightening. A spray of blood suddenly appeared down the front of my coat. I felt the spatter hit my face. I made a noise of distress that I couldn’t form into words. I knew it wasn’t my blood, and I knew I hadn’t been hurt, but somehow that was hard for me to believe.
Then something fell past me, and as it was on its way to the floor I glimpsed a face. It was the face of Mark Stonebrook, and he was in the process of dying. The smoke closed in around him, and he might as well have been in another city.
Maybe I should crouch, too? The air might be better close to the floor. But Mark’s body was down there, and other things. So much for Mark removing the spell on Eric, I thought wildly. Now we’ll need Hallow. “The best-laid plans of mice and men . . .” Where’d my grandmother gotten that quote? Gerald knocked me sideways as he pushed past in pursuit of something I couldn’t see.
I told myself I was brave and resourceful, but the words rang hollow. I blundered ahead, trying not trip over the debris on the floor. The witches’ paraphernalia, bowls and knives and bits of bone and vegetation that I couldn’t identify, had been scattered in the scuffle. A clear spot opened up unexpectedly, and I could see an overturned bowl and one of the knives on the floor at my feet. I scooped up the knife just before the cloud rolled back over it. I was sure the knife was supposed to be used for some ritual—but I wasn’t a witch, and I needed it to defend myself. I felt better when I had the knife, which was real pretty and felt very sharp.
I wondered what our Wiccans were doing. Could they be responsible for the cloud? I wished I’d gotten to vote.
Our witches, as it turned out, were getting a live feed from the scene of the fight from one of their coven sisters, who was a scryer. (Though she was physically with them, she could see what was happening on the surface of a bowl of water, I learned later.) She could make out more using that method than we could, though why she didn’t see just a bunch of white smoke billowing on the surface of that water, I don’t know.
Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set Page 99