I made it.
It was much quieter outside, and it was warm. The wind was blowing, just a little. I was barefoot and penniless, standing under the glaring lights of the walk-in doors. I had no idea where I was in relation to the house, and no idea if that was where I was going, but I wasn’t in the hospital any more.
A homeless man stepped in front of me. “You got any change, sister?” he asked. “I’m down on my luck, too.”
“Do I look like I have anything?” I asked him, in a reasonable voice.
He looked as unnerved as the nurse had. He said, “Sorry,” and backed away. I took a step after him.
I screamed, “I HAVE NOTHING!” And then I said, in a perfectly calm voice, “See, I never had anything to start with.”
He gibbered and quavered and I ignored him. I began my walk. The ambulance had turned right coming in, so I turned left. I couldn’t remember how long the ride had been. I’d been talking to Delagardie. I had been a different person. I walked and I walked. I walked under palm trees, heard the rich rhythm of music, brushed against the peeling shutters of houses set right up to the sidewalk.
On a street with a few bars, a group of young men came out just as I was passing, and one of them grabbed my arm. I turned on him with a scream, and with a galvanic effort I swung him into a wall. He stood there, dazed and rubbing his head, and his friends pulled him away.
“She crazy,” one of them said softly. “Leave her be.” They wandered off in the other direction.
After a time, I recovered enough to ask myself why I was doing this. But the answer was vague. When I fell on some broken pavement, scraping my knee badly enough to make it bleed, the new physical pain called me back to myself a little bit more.
“Are you doing this so they’ll feel sorry they hurt you?” I asked myself out loud. “Oh my God, poor Sookie! She walked out of the hospital all by herself, driven crazy with grief, and she wandered alone through the dangerous streets of the Big Easy because Bill made her so crazy!”
I didn’t want my name to cross Bill’s lips ever again. When I was a little more myself—just a little—the depth of my reaction began to surprise me. If we’d still been a couple when I learned what I’d learned this evening, I’d have killed him; I knew that with crystal clarity. But the reason I’d had to get away from the hospital was equally clear; I couldn’t have stood dealing with anyone in the world just then. I’d been blindsided with the most painful knowledge: the first man to ever say he loved me had never loved me at all.
His passion had been artificial.
His pursuit of me had been choreographed.
I must have seemed so easy to him, so gullible, so ready for the first man who devoted a little time and effort to winning me. Winning me! The very phrase made me hurt worse. He’d never thought of me as a prize.
Until the structure had been torn down in a single moment, I hadn’t realized how much of my life in the past year had been built on the false foundation of Bill’s love and regard.
“I saved his life,” I said, amazed. “I went to Jackson and risked my life for his, because he loved me.” One part of my brain knew that wasn’t entirely accurate. I’d done it because I had loved him. And I was amazed, at the same moment, to realize that the pull of his maker, Lorena, had been even stronger than the orders of his queen. But I wasn’t in the mood to split emotional hairs. When I thought of Lorena, another realization socked me in the stomach. “I killed someone for him,” I said, my words floating in the thick dark night. “Oh, my God. I killed someone for him.”
I was covered in scrapes, bruises, blood, and dirt when I looked up to see a sign reading CHLOE STREET. That was where Hadley’s apartment was, I realized slowly. I turned right, and began to walk again.
The house was dark, up and down. Maybe Amelia was still at the hospital. I had no idea what time it was or how long I had walked.
Hadley’s apartment was locked. I went downstairs and picked up one of the flowerpots Amelia had put around her door. I carried it up the stairs and smashed in a glass pane on the door. I reached inside, unlocked the door, and stepped in. No alarm shrieked. I’d been pretty sure the police wouldn’t have known the code to activate it when they’d left after doing whatever it was they’d done.
I walked through the apartment, which was still turned upside down by our fight with Jake Purifoy. I had some more cleaning to do in the morning, or whenever . . . whenever my life resumed. I went into the bathroom and stripped off the clothes I’d been wearing. I held them and looked at them for a minute, at the state they were in. Then I stepped across the hall, unlocked the closest French window, and threw the clothes over the railing of the gallery. I wished all problems were that easily disposed of, but at the same time my real personality was waking up enough to trigger a thread of guilt that I was leaving a mess that someone else would have to clean up. That wasn’t the Stackhouse way. That thread wasn’t strong enough to make me go back down the stairs to retrieve the filthy garments. Not then.
After I’d wedged a chair under the door I’d broken, and after I’d set the alarm system with the numbers Amelia had taught me, I got into the shower. The water stung my many scrapes and cuts, and the deep bite in my arm began bleeding again. Well, shit. My cousin the vampire hadn’t needed any first aid supplies, of course. I finally found some circular cotton pads she’d probably used for removing makeup, and I rummaged through one of the bags of clothes until I found a ludicrously cheerful leopard-patterned scarf. Awkwardly, I bound the pads to the bite and got the scarf tight enough.
At least the vile sheets were the least of my worries. I climbed painfully into my nightgown and lay on the bed, praying for oblivion.
16
I WOKE UP UNREFRESHED, WITH THAT AWFUL FEELING that in a moment I would remember bad things.
The feeling was right on the money.
But the bad things had to take a backseat, because I had a surprise to start the day with. Claudine was lying beside me on the bed, propped up on one elbow looking down at me compassionately. And Amelia was at the end of the bed in an easy chair, her bandaged leg propped up on an ottoman. She was reading.
“How come you’re here?” I asked Claudine. After seeing Eric and Bill last night, I wondered if everyone I knew followed me around. Maybe Sam would come in the door in a minute.
“I told you, I’m your fairy godmother,” Claudine said. Claudine was usually the happiest fairy I knew. Claudine was just as lovely for a woman as her twin Claude was for a man; maybe lovelier, because her more agreeable personality shone through her eyes. Her coloring was the same as his; black hair, white skin. Today she was wearing pale blue capris and a coordinating black-and-blue tunic. She looked ethereally lovely, or at least as ethereal as you can look in capris.
“You can explain that to me right after I go to the bathroom,” I said, remembering all the water I’d chugged down when I’d gotten to the sink the night before. All my wanderings had made me thirsty. Claudine swung gracefully from the bed, and I followed her awkwardly.
“Careful,” Amelia advised, when I tried to stand up too quickly.
“How’s your leg?” I asked her, when the world had righted itself. Claudine kept a grip on my arm, just in case. It felt good to see Claudine, and I was surprisingly glad to see Amelia, even limping.
“Very sore,” she said. “But unlike you, I stayed at the hospital and had the wound treated properly.” She closed her book and put it on the little table by the chair. She looked a little better than I suspected I did, but she was not the radiant and happy witch she’d been the day before.
“Had a learning experience, didn’t we?” I said, and then my breath caught when I remembered just how much I’d learned.
Claudine helped me into the bathroom, and when I assured her I could manage, she left me alone. I did the necessary things and came out feeling better, almost human. Claudine had gotten some clothes out of my sports bag, and there was a mug on the bedside table with steam rising from it. I
carefully sat against the headboard, my legs crossed in front of me, and held the mug to my face so I could breathe in the smell.
“Explain the fairy godmother thing,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about anything more urgent, not just yet.
“Fairies are your basic supernatural being,” Claudine said. “From us come elves and brownies and angels and demons. Water sprites, green men, all the natural spirits . . . all are some form of fairy.”
“So you’re what?” Amelia asked. It hadn’t occurred to Amelia to leave, and that seemed to be okay with Claudine, too.
“I’m trying to become an angel,” Claudine said softly. Her huge brown eyes looked luminous. “After years of being . . . well, a good citizen, I guess you’d call it, I got a person to guard. The Sook, here. And she’s really kept me busy.” Claudine looked proud and happy.
“You’re not supposed to prevent pain?” I asked. If so, Claudine was doing a lousy job.
“No, I wish I could.” The expression on Claudine’s oval face was downcast. “But I can help you recover from disasters, and sometimes I can prevent them.”
“Things would be worse without you around?”
She nodded vigorously.
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said. “How come I rated a fairy godmother?”
“I’m not allowed to say,” Claudine said, and Amelia rolled her eyes.
“We’re not learning a lot, here,” she said. “And in view of the problems we had last night, maybe you’re not the most competent fairy godmother, huh?”
“Oh, right, Miss I-Sealed-Up-The-Apartment-So-It-Would-Be-All-Fresh,” I responded, irrationally indignant at this assault on my godmother’s competence.
Amelia scrambled out of her chair, her skin flushed with anger. “Well, I did seal it up! He would have risen like that no matter when he rose! I just delayed it some!”
“It would have helped if we had known he was in there!”
“It would have helped if your ho of a cousin hadn’t killed him in the first place!”
We both screeched to a halt in our dialogue. “Are you sure that’s what happened?” I asked. “Claudine?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice placid. “I’m not omnipotent or omniscient. I just pop in to intervene when I can. You remember that time you fell asleep at the wheel and I got there in time to save you?”
And she’d nearly given me a heart attack in the process, appearing in the front seat of the car in the blink of an eye. “Yes,” I said, trying to sound grateful and humble. “I remember.”
“It’s really, really hard to get somewhere that fast,” she said. “I can only do that in a real emergency. I mean, a life-or-death emergency. Fortunately, I had a bit more time when your house was on fire. . . .”
Claudine was not going to give us any rules, or even explain the nature of the rule maker. I’d just have to muddle through on my belief system, which had helped me out all my life. Come to think of it, if I was completely wrong, I didn’t want to know.
“Interesting,” said Amelia. “But we have a few more things to talk about.”
Maybe she was being so hoity-toity because she didn’t have her own fairy godmother.
“What do you want to talk about first?” I asked.
“Why’d you leave the hospital last night?” Her face was tight with resentment. “You should have told me. I hauled myself up these stairs last night to look for you, and there you were. And you’d barricaded the door. So I had to go back down the damn stairs again to get my keys, and let myself in the French windows, and hurry—on this leg—to the alarm system to turn it off. And then this doofus was sitting by your bed, and she could have done all of that.”
“You couldn’t open the windows with magic?” I asked.
“I was too tired,” she said with dignity. “I had to recharge my magical batteries, so to speak.”
“So to speak,” I said, my voice dry. “Well, last night, I found out . . .” and I stopped dead. I simply couldn’t speak of it.
“Found out what?” Amelia was exasperated, and I couldn’t say as I blamed her.
“Bill, her first lover, was planted in Bon Temps to seduce her and gain her trust,” Claudine said. “Last night, he admitted that to her face, and in front of her only other lover, another vampire.”
As a synopsis, it was flawless.
“Well . . . that sucks,” Amelia said faintly.
“Yeah,” I said. “It does.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t kill him for you,” Claudine said. “I’d have to take too many steps backward.”
“That’s okay,” I told her. “He’s not worth your losing any brownie points.”
“Oh, I’m not a brownie,” Claudine explained kindly. “I thought you understood. I’m a full-blooded fairy.”
Amelia was trying not to laugh, and I glared at her. “Just let it go, witch,” I said.
“Yes, telepath.”
“So what next?” I asked, in general. I would not talk any more about my broken heart and my demolished self-worth.
“We figure out what happened,” the witch said.
“How? Call CSI?”
Claudine looked confused, so I guessed fairies didn’t watch television.
“No,” Amelia said, with elaborate patience. “We do an ectoplasmic reconstruction.”
I was sure that my expression matched Claudine’s, now.
“Okay, let me explain,” Amelia said, grinning all over. “This is what we do.”
Amelia, in seventh heaven at this exhibition of her wonderful witch powers, told Claudine and me at length about the procedure. It was time- and energy-consuming, she said, which was why it wasn’t done more often. And you had to gather at least four witches, she estimated, to cover the amount of square footage involved in Jake’s murder.
“And I’ll need real witches,” Amelia said. “Quality workers, not some hedgerow Wiccan.” Amelia went off on Wiccans for a good long while. She despised Wiccans (unfairly) as tree-hugging wannabes—that came out of Amelia’s thoughts clearly enough. I regretted Amelia’s prejudice, as I’d met some impressive Wiccans.
Claudine looked down at me, her expression doubtful. “I’m not sure we ought to be here for this,” she said.
“You can go, Claudine.” I was ready to experiment with anything, just to take my mind off the big hole in my heart. “I’m going to stay to watch. I have to know what happened here. There are too many mysteries in my life, right now.”
“But you have to go to the queen’s tonight,” Claudine said. “You missed last night. Visiting the queen is a dress-up occasion. I have to take you shopping. You don’t want to wear any of your cousin’s clothes.”
“Not that my butt could get into them,” I said.
“Not that your butt should want to,” she said, equally harshly. “You can cut that out right now, Sookie Stackhouse.”
I looked up at her, letting her see the pain inside me.
“Yeah, I get that,” she said, her hand patting me gently on the cheek. “And that sucks big-time. But you have to write it off. He’s only one guy.”
He’d been the first guy. “My grandmother served him lemonade,” I said, and somehow that triggered the tears again.
“Hey,” Amelia said. “Fuck him, right?”
I looked at the young witch. She was pretty and tough and off-the-wall nuts, I thought. She was okay. “Yeah,” I said. “When can you do the ecto thing?”
She said, “I have to make some phone calls, see who I can get together. Night’s always better for magic, of course. When will you go pay your call to the queen?”
I thought for a moment. “Just at full dark,” I said. “Maybe about seven.”
“Should take about two hours,” Amelia said, and Claudine nodded. “Okay, I’ll ask them to be here at ten, to have a little wiggle room. You know, it would be great if the queen would pay for this.”
“How much do you want to charge?”
<
br /> “I’d do it for nothing, to have the experience and be able to say I’d done one,” Amelia said frankly, “but the others will need some bucks. Say, three hundred apiece, plus materials.”
“And you’ll need three more witches?”
“I’d like to have three more, though whether I can get the ones I want on this short notice . . . well, I’ll do the best I can. Two might do. And the materials ought to be . . .” She did some rapid mental calculations. “Somewhere in the ballpark of sixty dollars.”
“What will I need to do? I mean, what’s my part?”
“Observe. I’ll do the heavy lifting.”
“I’ll ask the queen.” I took a deep breath. “If she won’t pay for it, I will.”
“Okay, then. We’re set.” She limped out of the bedroom happily, counting off things on her fingers. I heard her go down the stairs.
Claudine said, “I have to treat your arm. And then we need to go find you something to wear.”
“I don’t want to spend money on a courtesy call to the vampire queen.” Especially since I might have to foot the bill for the witches.
“You don’t have to. It’s my treat.”
“You may be my fairy godmother, but you don’t have to spend money on me.” I had a sudden revelation. “It’s you who paid my hospital bill in Clarice.”
Claudine shrugged. “Hey, it’s money that came in from the strip club, not from my regular job.” Claudine co-owned the strip club in Ruston, with Claude, who did all the day-today running of the place. Claudine was a customer service person at a department store. People forgot their complaints once they were confronted with Claudine’s smile.
It was true that I didn’t mind spending the strip club money as much as I would have hated using up Claudine’s personal savings. Not logical, but true.
Claudine had parked her car in the courtyard on the circular drive, and she was sitting in it when I came down the stairs. She’d gotten a first aid kit from the car, and she’d bandaged my arm and helped me into some clothes. My arm was sore but it didn’t seem to be infected. I was weak, as if I’d had the flu or some other illness involving high fever and lots of fluids. So I was moving slowly.
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