“And mine, Bright Victory,” Sigebert added.
I remembered a program I’d seen on the History Channel. The Saxons eventually became the Anglo-Saxons and later were overwhelmed by the Normans. “So you were raised to be warriors,” I said, trying to look intelligent.
They exchanged glances. “There was nothing else,” Sigebert said. The end of his scar wiggled when he talked, and I tried not to stare. “We were sons of war leader.”
I could think of a hundred questions to ask them about their lives as humans, but standing in the middle of a hallway in an office building in the night didn’t seem the time to do it. “How’d you happen to become vampires?” I asked. “Or is that a tacky question? If it is, just forget I said anything. I don’t want to step on any toes.”
Sigebert actually glanced down at his feet, so I got the idea that colloquial English wasn’t their strong suit. “This woman . . . very beautiful . . . she come to us the night before battle,” Wybert said haltingly. “She say . . . we be stronger if she . . . have us.”
They looked at me inquiringly, and I nodded to show I understood that Wybert was saying the vampire had implied her interest was in bedding them. Or had they understood she meant to bleed them? I couldn’t tell. I thought it was a mighty ambitious vampire who would take on these two humans at the same time.
“She did not say we only fight at night after that,” Sigebert said, shrugging to show that there had been a catch they hadn’t understood. “We did not ask plenty questions. We too eager!” And he smiled. Okay, nothing so scary as a vampire left with only his fangs. It was possible Sigebert had more teeth in the back of his mouth, ones I couldn’t see from my height, but Chester’s plentiful-though-crooked teeth had looked super in comparison.
“That must have been a very long time ago,” I said, since I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “How long have you worked for the queen?”
Sigebert and Wybert looked at each other. “Since that night,” Wybert said, astonished I hadn’t understood. “We are hers.”
My respect for the queen, and maybe my fear of the queen, escalated. Sophie-Anne, if that was her real name, had been brave, strategic, and busy in her career as a vampire leader. She’d brought them over and kept them with her, in a bond that—the one whose name I wasn’t going to speak even to myself—had explained to me was stronger than any other emotional tie, for a vampire.
To my relief, the light shone green in the wall.
Sigebert said, “Go now,” and pushed open the heavy door. He and Wybert gave me matching nods of farewell as I walked over the threshold and into a room that was like any executive’s office anywhere.
Sophie-Anne Leclerq, Queen of Louisiana, and a male vampire were sitting at a round table piled with papers. I’d met the queen once before, when she’d come to my place to tell me about my cousin’s death. I hadn’t noticed then how young she must have been when she died, maybe no more than fifteen. She was an elegant woman, perhaps four inches shorter than my height of five foot six, and she was groomed down to the last eyelash. Makeup, dress, hair, stockings, jewelry—the whole nine yards.
The vampire at the table with her was her male counterpart. He wore a suit that would have paid my cable bill for a year, and he was barbered and manicured and scented until he almost wasn’t a guy any more. In my neck of the woods, I didn’t often see men so groomed. I guessed this was the new king. I wondered if he’d died in such a state; actually, I wondered if the funeral home had cleaned him up like that for his funeral, not knowing that his descent below ground was only temporary. If that had been the case, he was younger than his queen. Maybe age wasn’t the only requirement, if you were aiming to be royalty.
There were two other people in the room. A short man stood about three feet behind the queen’s chair, his legs apart, his hands clasped in front of him. He had close-cut white-blond hair and bright blue eyes. His face lacked maturity; he looked like a large child, but with a man’s shoulders. He was wearing a suit, and he was armed with a saber and a gun.
Behind the man at the table stood a woman, a vampire, dressed all in red; slacks, T-shirt, Converses. Her preference was unfortunate, because red was not her color. She was Asian, and I thought she’d come from Vietnam—though it had probably been called something else then. She had very short unpainted nails, and a terrifying sword strapped to her back. Apparently, her hair had been cut off at chin length by a pair of rusty scissors. Her face was the unenhanced one God had given her.
Since I hadn’t had a briefing on the correct protocol, I dipped my head to the queen, said, “Good to see you again, ma’am,” and tried to look pleasantly at the king while doing the head-dip thing again. The two standees, who must be aides or bodyguards, received smaller nods. I felt like an idiot, but I didn’t want to ignore them. However, they didn’t have a problem with ignoring me, once they’d given me an all-over threat assessment.
“You’ve had some adventures in New Orleans,” the queen said, a safe lead-in. She wasn’t smiling, but then I had the impression she was not a smiley kind of gal.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Sookie, this is my husband. Peter Threadgill, King of Arkansas.” There was not a trace of affection on her face. She might as well have been telling me the name of her pet cockapoo.
“How-de-do,” I said, and repeated my head-bob, adding, “Sir,” hastily. Okay, already tired of this.
“Miss Stackhouse,” he said, turning his attention back to the papers in front of him. The round table was large and completely cluttered with letters, computer printouts, and an assortment of other papers—bank statements?
While I was relieved not to be an object of interest to the king, I was wondering exactly why I was there. I found out when the queen began to question me about the night before. I told her as explicitly as I could what had happened.
She looked very serious when I talked about Amelia’s stasis spell and what it had done to the body.
“You don’t think the witch knew the body was there when she cast the spell?” the queen asked. I noticed that though the king’s gaze was on the papers in front of him, he hadn’t moved a one of them since I’d begun talking. Of course, maybe he was a very slow reader.
“No, ma’am. I know Amelia didn’t know he was there.”
“From your telepathic ability?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Peter Threadgill looked at me then, and I saw that his eyes were an unusual glacial gray. His face was full of sharp angles: a nose like a blade, thin straight lips, high cheekbones.
The king and the queen were both good-looking, but not in a way that struck any chord in me. I had an impression that the feeling was mutual. Thank God.
“You’re the telepath that my dear Sophie wants to bring to the conference,” Peter Threadgill said.
Since he was telling me something I already knew, I didn’t feel the need to answer. But discretion won over sheer irritation. “Yes, I am.”
“Stan has one,” the queen said to her husband, as if vampires collected telepaths the way dog fanciers collected springer spaniels.
The only Stan I knew was a head vampire in Dallas, and the only other telepath I’d ever met had lived there. From the queen’s few words, I guessed that Barry the Bellman’s life had changed a lot since I’d met him. Apparently he worked for Stan Davis now. I didn’t know if Stan was the sheriff or even a king, since at the time I hadn’t been privy to the fact that vampires had such.
“So you’re now trying to match your entourage to Stan’s?” Peter Threadgill asked his wife, in a distinctly un-fond kind of way. From the many clues thrown my way, I’d gotten the picture that this wasn’t a love match. If you asked me to cast a vote, I would say it wasn’t even a lust match. I knew the queen had liked my cousin Hadley in a lusty way, and the two brothers on guard had said she’d rocked their world. Peter Threadgill was nowhere near either side of that spectrum. But maybe that only proved the queen was omnisexual, if that was a word. I�
�d have to look it up when I went home. If I ever got home.
“If Stan can see the advantage in employing such a person, I can certainly consider it—especially since one is easily available.”
I was in stock.
The king shrugged. Not that I had formed many expectations, but I would have anticipated that the king of a nice, poor, scenic state like Arkansas would be less sophisticated and folksier, with a sense of humor. Maybe Threadgill was a carpetbagger from New York City. Vampire accents tended to be all over the map—literally—so it was impossible to tell from his speech.
“So what do you think happened in Hadley’s apartment?” the queen asked me, and I realized we’d reverted to the original subject.
“I don’t know who attacked Jake Purifoy,” I said. “But the night Hadley went to the graveyard with Waldo, Jake’s drained body landed in her closet. As to how it came there, I couldn’t say. That’s why Amelia is having this ecto thing tonight.”
The queen’s expression changed; she actually looked interested. “She’s having an ectoplasmic reconstruction? I’ve heard of those, but never witnessed one.”
The king looked more than interested. For a split second, he looked extremely angry.
I forced my attention back to the queen. “Amelia wondered if you would care to, ah, fund it?” I wondered if I should add, “My lady,” but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“That would be a good investment, since our newest vampire might have gotten us all into a great deal of trouble. If he had gotten loose on the populace . . . I will be glad to pay.”
I drew a breath of sheer relief.
“And I think I’ll watch, too,” the queen added, before I could even exhale.
That sounded like the worst idea in the world. I thought the queen’s presence would flatten Amelia until all the magic was squished out. However, there was no way I was going to tell the queen she was not welcome.
Peter Threadgill had looked up sharply when the queen had announced she’d watch. “I don’t think you should go,” he said, his voice smooth and authoritative. “It will be hard for the twins and Andre to guard you out in the city in a neighborhood like that.”
I wondered how the King of Arkansas had any idea what Hadley’s neighborhood was like. Actually, it was a quiet, middle-class area, especially compared to the zoo that was vampire central headquarters, with its constant stream of tourists and picketers and fanatics with cameras.
Sophie-Anne was already preparing to go out. That preparation consisted of glancing in a mirror to make sure the flawless façade was still flawless and sliding on her high, high heels, which had been below the edge of the table. She’d been sitting there barefoot. That detail suddenly made Sophie-Anne Leclerq much more real to me. There was a personality under that glossy exterior.
“I suppose you would like Bill to accompany us,” the queen said to me.
“No,” I snapped. Okay, there was a personality—and it was unpleasant and cruel.
But the queen looked genuinely startled. Her husband was outraged at my rudeness—his head shot up and his odd gray eyes fixed me with a luminous anger—but the queen was simply taken aback by my reaction. “I thought you were a couple,” she said, in a perfectly even voice.
I bit back my first answer, trying to remember who I was talking to, and said, almost in a whisper, “No, we are not.” I took a deep breath and made a great effort. “I apologize for being so abrupt. Please excuse me.”
The queen simply looked at me for a few seconds longer, and I still could not get the slightest indication of her thoughts, emotions, or intentions. It was like looking at an antique silver tray—a shining surface, an elaborate pattern, and hard to the touch. How Hadley could have been adventurous enough to bed this woman was simply beyond my comprehension.
“You are excused,” she said finally.
“You’re too lenient,” her husband said, and his surface, at least, began to thin somewhat. His lips curled in something closely approaching a snarl, and I discovered I didn’t want to be the focus of those luminous eyes for another second. I didn’t like the way the Asian gal in red was looking at me, either. And every time I looked at her haircut, it gave me the heebie-jeebies. Gosh, even the elderly lady who’d given my gran a permanent three times a year would have done a better job than the Mad Weed Whacker.
“I’ll be back in an hour or two, Peter,” Sophie-Anne said, very precisely, in a tone that could have sliced a diamond. The short man, his childish face blank, was by her side in a jiffy, extending his arm so she could have his assistance in rising. I guessed he was Andre.
The atmosphere was cuttable. Oh, I so wished I were somewhere else.
“I would feel more at ease if I knew Jade Flower was with you,” the king said. He motioned toward the woman in red. Jade Flower, my ass: she looked more like Stone Killer. The Asian woman’s face didn’t change one iota at the king’s offer.
“But that would leave you with no one,” the queen said.
“Hardly true. The building is full of guards and loyal vampires,” Peter Threadgill said.
Okay, even I caught that one. The guards, who belonged to the queen, were separate from the loyal vampires, whom I guessed were the ones Peter had brought with him.
“Then, of course, I would be proud to have a fighter like Jade Flower accompany me.”
Yuck. I couldn’t tell if the queen was serious, or trying to placate her new husband by accepting his offer, or laughing up her sleeve at his lame strategy to ensure that his spy was at the ectoplasmic reconstruction. The queen used the intercom to call down—or up, for all I knew—to the secure chamber where Jake Purifoy was being educated in the ways of the vampire. “Keep extra guards on Purifoy,” she said. “And let me know the minute he remembers something.” An obsequious voice assured Sophie-Anne that she’d be the first to know.
I wondered why Jake needed extra guards. I found it hard to get real concerned about his welfare, but obviously the queen was.
So here we went—the queen, Jade Flower, Andre, Sigebert, Wybert, and me. I guess I’ve been in company just as assorted, but I couldn’t tell you when. After a lot of corridor tromping, we entered a guarded garage and piled into a stretch limo. Andre jerked his thumb at one of the guards, indicating that the guard should drive. I hadn’t heard the baby-faced vampire utter a word, so far. To my pleasure, the driver was Rasul, who felt like an old friend compared to the others.
Sigebert and Wybert were uncomfortable in the car. They were the most inflexible vampires I’d ever met, and I wondered if their close association with the queen hadn’t been their undoing. They hadn’t had to change, and changing with the times was the key vampire survival technique before the Great Revelation. It remained so in countries that hadn’t accepted the existence of vampire with the tolerance America had shown. The two vampires would have been happy wearing skins and hand-woven cloth and would have looked perfectly at home in handmade leather boots, carrying shields on their arms.
“Your sheriff, Eric, came to speak to me last night,” the queen told me.
“I saw him at the hospital,” I said, hoping I sounded equally offhanded.
“You understand that the new vampire, the one that was a Were—he had no choice, you understand?”
“I get that a lot with vampires,” I said, remembering all the times in the past when Bill had explained things by saying he couldn’t help himself. I’d believed him at the time, but I wasn’t so sure any more. In fact, I was so profoundly tired and miserable I hardly had the heart to continue trying to wrap up Hadley’s apartment and her estate and her affairs. I realized that if I went home to Bon Temps, leaving unfinished business here, I’d just sit and brood when I got there.
I knew this, but at the moment, it was hard to face.
It was time for one of my self-pep talks. I told myself sternly I’d already enjoyed a moment or two of that very evening, and I would enjoy a few more seconds of every day until I built back to my former conten
ted state. I’d always enjoyed life, and I knew I would again. But I was going to have to slog through a lot of bad patches to get there.
I don’t think I’ve ever been a person with a lot of illusions. If you can read minds, you don’t have many doubts about how bad even the best people can be.
But I sure hadn’t seen this coming.
To my horror, tears began sliding down my face. I reached into my little purse, pulled out a Kleenex, and patted my cheeks while all the vamps stared at me, Jade Flower with the most identifiable expression I’d seen on her face: contempt.
“Are you in pain?” the queen asked, indicating my arm.
I didn’t think she really cared; I was sure that she had schooled herself to give the correct human response for so long that it was a reflex.
“Pain of the heart,” I said, and could have bitten my tongue off.
“Oh,” she said. “Bill?”
“Yes,” I said, and gulped, doing my best to stop the display of emotion.
“I grieved for Hadley,” she said unexpectedly.
“It was good she had someone to care.” After a minute I said, “I would have been glad to know she was dead earlier than I did,” which was as cautiously as I could express it. I hadn’t found out my cousin was gone until weeks after the fact.
“There were reasons I had to wait to send Cataliades down,” Sophie-Anne said. Her smooth face and clear eyes were as impenetrable as a wall of ice, but I got the definite impression that she wished I hadn’t raised the subject. I looked at the queen, trying to pick up on some clue, and she gave a tiny flick of the eye toward Jade Flower, who was sitting on her right. I didn’t know how Jade Flower could be sitting in her relaxed position with the long sword strapped to her back. But I definitely had the feeling that behind her expressionless face and flat eyes, Jade Flower was listening to everything that transpired.
To be on the safe side, I decided I wouldn’t say anything at all, and the rest of the drive passed in silence.
Rasul didn’t want to take the limo into the courtyard, and I recalled that Diantha had parked on the street, too. Rasul came back to open the door for the queen, and Andre got out first, looked around for a long time, then nodded that it was safe for the queen to emerge. Rasul stood at the ready, rifle in his hands, sweeping the area visually for attackers. Andre was just as vigilant.
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