Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set

by Charlaine Harris

  “They’re all in the Thorne Building, right down there,” he said, pointing. “In the basement.” We turned to walk away. By this time, Barry had slung his arm around my shoulders, and not because he was feeling affectionate. He needed the support.

  “Let me get your names and addresses, so the mayor can thank you,” the gray-haired man said, holding a pen and clipboard at the ready.

  No! Barry said, and my mouth snapped shut.

  I shook my head. “We’re going to pass on that,” I said. I’d had a quick look in his head, and he was greedy for more of our help. Suddenly I understood why Barry had stopped me so abruptly, though my fellow telepath was so tired he couldn’t tell me himself. My refusal didn’t go over big.

  “You’ll work for vamps, but you don’t want to stand and be counted as someone who helped on this terrible day?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “That’s just about right.”

  He wasn’t happy with me, and I thought for a minute he was going to force the issue: grab my wallet out of my pants, send me to jail, or something. But he reluctantly nodded his head and jerked it in the direction of the Thorne Building.

  Someone will try to find out, Barry said. Someone will want to use us.

  I sighed, and I hardly had the energy to take in more air. I nodded. Yeah, someone will. If we go to the shelter, someone will be watching for us there, and they’ll ask for our names from someone who recognizes us, and after that, it’s only a matter of time.

  I couldn’t think of a way to dodge going in there. We had to have help, we had to find our parties and discover how and when we could leave the city, and we had to find out who had lived and who hadn’t.

  I patted my back pocket, and to my amazement, my cell phone was still in it and still had bars. I called Mr. Cataliades. If anyone besides me had come out of the Pyramid of Gizeh with a cell phone, the lawyer would be the one.

  “Yes,” he said cautiously. “Miss St—”

  “Shhh,” I said. “Don’t say my name out loud.” It was sheer paranoia talking.

  “Very well.”

  “We helped them out down here, and now they really want to get to know us better,” I said, feeling very clever for talking so guardedly. I was very tired. “Barry and I are outside the building where you are. We need to stay somewhere else. Too many people making lists in there, right?”

  “That is a popular activity,” he said.

  “You and Diantha okay?”

  “She has not been found. We were separated.”

  I didn’t speak for a few seconds. “I’m so sorry. Who were you holding when I saw them rescue you?”

  “The queen. She is here, though badly injured. We can’t find Andre.”

  He paused, and because I couldn’t help it, I said, “Who else?”

  “Gervaise is dead. Eric, Pam, Bill . . . burned, but here. Cleo Babbitt is here. I haven’t seen Rasul.”

  “Is Jake Purifoy there?”

  “I haven’t seen him, either.”

  “Because you might want to know he’s at least partially responsible if you do see him. He was in on the Fellowship plot.”

  “Ah.” Mr. Cataliades registered that. “Oh, yes, I certainly did want to know that. Johan Glassport will be especially interested, since he has several broken ribs and a broken collar-bone. He’s very, very angry.” It said something about Johan Glassport’s viciousness, that Mr. Cataliades thought him capable of exacting as much vengeance as a vampire would. “How did you come to know there was a plot at all, Miss Sookie?”

  I told the lawyer the story Clovache had told me; I figured now that she and Batanya had gone back to wherever they came from, that would be okay.

  “Hiring them proved to be worth the money for King Isaiah.” Cataliades sounded thoughtful rather than envious. “Isaiah is here and completely uninjured.”

  “We need to go find somewhere to sleep. Can you tell Barry’s king that he’s with me?” I asked, knowing I needed to get off the phone and make a plan.

  “He is too injured to care. He is not aware.”

  “All right. Just someone from the Texas party.”

  “I see Joseph Velasquez. Rachel is dead.” Mr. Cataliades couldn’t help himself; he had to tell me all the bad news.

  “Cecile, Stan’s assistant, is dead,” I told him.

  “Where are you going to go?” Cataliades asked.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said. I felt exhausted and hopeless, and I’d had too much bad news and gotten too battered to rally one more time.

  “I will send a cab for you,” Mr. Cataliades offered. “I can get a number from one of the nice volunteers. Tell the driver you are rescue workers and you need a ride to the nearest inexpensive hotel. Do you have a credit card?”

  “Yeah, and my debit card,” I said, blessing the impulse that had led me to stuff the little wallet in my pocket.

  “No, wait, they’ll track you very easily if you use it. Cash?”

  I checked. Thanks largely to Barry, we had a hundred ninety dollars between us. I told Mr. Cataliades we could swing it.

  “Then spend the night in a hotel, and tomorrow call me again,” he said, sounding unutterably weary.

  “Thanks for the plan.”

  “Thanks for your warning,” the courtly demon said. “We would all be dead if you and the Bellboy hadn’t wakened us.”

  I ditched the yellow jacket and the hard hat. Barry and I tottered along, more or less holding each other up. We found a concrete barricade to lean against, our arms around each other. I tried to tell Barry why we were doing this, but he didn’t care. I was worried that at any minute some firefighter or cop from the scene would spot us and stop to find out what we were doing, where we were going, who we were. I was so relieved that I felt sick when I spied a cab cruising slowly, the driver peering out the window. Had to be for us. I waved my free arm frantically. I had never hailed a cab before in my life. It was just like the movies.

  The cab driver, a wire-thin guy from Guyana, wasn’t too excited about letting filthy creatures like us get into his cab, but he couldn’t turn down people as pitiful as we were. The nearest “inexpensive” hotel was a mile back into the city, away from the water. If we’d had the energy, we could have walked it. At least the cab ride wasn’t too pricey.

  Even at the mid-range hotel, the desk clerks were less than thrilled with our appearance; but after all, it was a day for charity to people who were involved in the blast. We got a room at a price that would have made me gasp if I hadn’t seen the room rates at the Pyramid. The room itself wasn’t much, but we didn’t need much. A maid knocked on the door right after we got in and said she’d like to wash our clothes for us, since we didn’t have any more. She looked down when she said that, so she wouldn’t embarrass me. Trying not to choke up at her kindness, I looked down at my shirt and slacks and agreed. I turned to Barry to find he was absolutely out cold. I maneuvered him into the bed. It was unpleasantly like handling one of the vampires, and I held my lips pressed together in a tight line the whole time I undressed his limp body. Then I shucked my own clothes, found a plastic bag in the closet to hold them, and handed the soiled clothes out to her. I got a washcloth and wiped off Barry’s face and hands and feet, and then I covered him up.

  I had to shower, and I thanked God for the complimentary shampoo and soap and cream rinse and skin lotion. I also thanked God for hot and cold running water, particularly hot. The kind maid had even handed me two toothbrushes and a little packet of toothpaste, and I scrubbed my mouth clean of the flavor of ashes. I washed my panties and bra in the sink and rolled them up in a towel before I hung them up to dry. I’d given the lady every stitch of Barry’s clothes.

  Finally, there was nothing else to do, and I crawled into the bed beside Barry. Now that I smelled so good, I noticed that he didn’t, but that was just tough for me, right? I wouldn’t have woken him for anything. I turned on my side away from him, thought about how frightening that long, empty corridor had been—isn’t
it funny that that was what I picked out as scary, after such a horrific day?

  The hotel room was so very quiet after the tumult of the scene of the explosions, and the bed was so very comfortable, and I smelled so much better and hardly hurt at all.

  I slept and didn’t dream.

  18

  I KNOW THERE ARE MANY WORSE THINGS THAN WAKING up naked in a bed with someone you don’t know very well. But when my eyes fluttered open the next day, I couldn’t think of any, for five long minutes. I knew Barry was awake. You can tell when a brain pops into awareness. To my relief, he slipped out of the bed and into the bathroom without speaking, and I heard the drumming of the water in the shower stall soon after.

  Our clean clothes were in a bag hanging on our inside doorknob, and there was a USA Today, too. After hastily donning my clothes, I spread the newspaper out on the small table while I brewed a pot of the free coffee. I also extended the bag with Barry’s clothes in it into the bathroom and dropped it on the floor, waving it a little first to attract his attention.

  I’d looked at the room service menu, and we didn’t have enough cash to get anything on it. We had to reserve some of our funds for a cab, because I didn’t know what our next move would be. Barry came out, looking as refreshed as I’d been last night. To my surprise, he kissed me on the cheek, and then sat opposite me with his own insulated cup that contained something that bore a faint relationship to brewed coffee.

  “I don’t remember much about last night,” he said. “Fill me in on why we’re here.”

  I did.

  “That was good thinking on my part,” he said. “I’m in awe of myself.”

  I laughed. He might be feeling a little male chagrin that he had wilted before I did, but at least he could make fun of himself.

  “So, I guess we need to call your demon lawyer?”

  I nodded. It was eleven by then, so I called.

  He answered right away. “There are many ears here,” he said without preamble. “And I understand these phones aren’t too secure. Cell phones.”

  “All right.”

  “So I will come to you in a while, bringing some things you’ll need. You are where?”

  With a twinge of misgiving, since the demon was a guy people would notice, I told him the name of the hotel and our room number, and he told me to be patient. I’d been feeling fine until Mr. Cataliades said that, and all of a sudden I began to twitch inwardly. I felt like we were on the run now, when we in no way deserved to be. I’d read the newspaper, and the story about the Pyramid said the catastrophe was due to “a series of explosions” that Dan Brewer, head of the state terrorist task force, attributed to several bombs. The fire chief was less committal: “An investigation is underway.” I should damn well hope so.

  Barry said, “We could have sex while we wait.”

  “I liked you better unconscious,” I said. I knew Barry was only trying not to think about stuff, but still.

  “You undress me last night?” he said with a leer.

  “Yeah, that was me, lucky me,” I said. I smiled at him, surprising myself.

  A knock at the door had us both staring at it like startled deer.

  “Your demon guy,” said Barry after a second of mental checking.

  “Yep,” I said, and got up to answer it.

  Mr. Cataliades hadn’t had the kindness of a maid, so he was still in the soiled clothes of the day before. But he managed to look dignified, anyway, and his hands and face were clean.

  “Please, how is everyone?” I asked.

  “Sophie-Anne has lost her legs, and I don’t know if they’ll come back,” he said.

  “Oh, geez,” I said, wincing.

  “Sigebert fought free of the debris after dark,” he continued. “He’d hidden in a safe pocket in the parking garage, where he landed after the explosions. I suspect he found someone to feed off, because he was healthier than he ought to have been. But if that’s the case, he shoved the body into one of the fires, because we would have heard if a drained body had been found.”

  I hoped the donor had been one of the Fellowship guys.

  “Your king,” Mr. Cataliades said to Barry, “is so injured it may take him a decade to recover. Until the situation is clear, Joseph leads, though he’ll be challenged soon. The king’s child Rachel is dead; perhaps Sookie told you?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I just had too much bad news to finish getting through it all.”

  “And Sookie has told me the human Cecile perished.”

  “What about Diantha?” I asked, hesitating to do so. It had to be significant that Mr.Cataliades hadn’t mentioned his niece.

  “Missing,” he said briefly “And yet that piece of filth, Glassport, has only bruises.”

  “I’m sorry for both things,” I said.

  Barry seemed numb. All traces of his flippant mood had vanished. He looked smaller, sitting on the edge of the bed. The cocky sharp dresser I’d met in the lobby of the Pyramid had gone underground, at least for a while.

  “I told you about Gervaise,” Mr. Cataliades said. “I identified his woman’s body this morning. What was her name?”

  “Carla. I can’t remember her last name. It’ll come to me.”

  “The first name will probably be enough for them to identify her. One of the corpses in hotel uniform had a computer list in his pocket.”

  “They weren’t all in on it,” I said with some certainty.

  “No, of course not,” Barry said. “Only a few.”

  We looked at him.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I overheard them.”

  “When?”

  “The night before.”

  I bit the inside of my mouth, hard.

  “What did you hear?” Mr. Cataliades asked in a level voice.

  “I was with Stan in the, you know, the buy-and-sell thing. I had noticed the waiters and so on were dodging me, and then I watched to see if they were avoiding Sookie as well. So I thought, ‘They know what you are, Barry, and there’s something they don’t want you to know. You better check it out.’ I found a good place to sort of skulk behind some of those fake palm trees, close by the service door, and I could get a reading on what they were thinking inside. They didn’t spell it out or anything, okay?” He had gotten an accurate reading on our thoughts, too. “It was just, like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna get those vamps, damn them, and if we take some of their human slaves, well, that’s just too bad, we’ll live with it. Damned by association.’ ”

  I could only sit there and look at him.

  “No, I didn’t know when or what they were going to do! I went to bed finally kind of worrying about them, what the plan was, and when I couldn’t settle into a good sleep, I finally quit trying and called you. And we tried to get everyone out,” he said, and began crying.

  I sat beside him and put my arm around him. I didn’t know what to say. Of course, he could tell what I was thinking.

  “Yes, I wish I’d said something before I did,” he said in a choked voice. “Yes, I did the wrong thing. But I thought if I spoke up before I knew something for sure, the vamps would fall on them and drain them. Or they’d want me to point out who knew and who didn’t. And I couldn’t do that.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Mr. Cataliades, have you seen Quinn?” I asked to break the silence.

  “He’s at the human hospital. He couldn’t stop them from taking him.”

  “I have to go see him.”

  “How serious is your fear that the authorities will try to coerce you into doing their bidding?”

  Barry raised his head and looked at me. “Pretty serious,” we said simultaneously.

  “It’s the first time I’ve ever shown anyone, aside from local people, what I can do,” I said.

  “Me, too.” Barry wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “You should have seen that guy’s face when he finally believed that we could find people. He thought we were psychics or something, and he couldn’
t understand that what we were doing was registering a live brain signature. Nothing mystical about it.”

  “He was all over the idea once he believed us,” I said. “You could hear in his head that he was thinking of the hundred different ways we could be of use to rescue operations, to the government at conferences, police interrogations.”

  Mr. Cataliades looked at us. I couldn’t pick out all his snarly demon thoughts, but he was having a lot of them.

  “We’d lose control over our lives,” Barry said. “I like my life.”

  “I guess I could be saving a lot of people,” I said. I’d just never thought about it before. I’d never been faced with a situation like the one we’d faced the previous day. I hoped I never was again. How likely was it I would ever be on-site again at a disaster? Was I obligated to give up a job I liked, among people I cared about, to work for strangers in far away places? I shivered when I thought of it. I felt something harden within me when I realized that the advantage Andre had taken of me would only be the beginning, in situations like that. Like Andre, everyone would want to own me.

  “No,” I said. “I won’t do it. Maybe I’m just being selfish and I’m damning myself, but I won’t do it. I don’t think we’re exaggerating how bad that would be for us, not a bit.”

  “Then going to the hospital is not a good idea,” Cataliades said.

  “I know, but I have to, anyway.”

  “Then you can stop by on your way to the airport.”

  We sat up straighter.

  “There’s an Anubis plane flying out in three hours. It’ll go to Dallas first, then Shreveport. The queen and Stan are paying for it jointly. It’ll have all the survivors of both parties on it. The citizens of Rhodes have donated used coffins for the trip.” Mr. Cataliades made a face, and honestly, I couldn’t blame him. “Here’s all the cash we can spare,” he continued, handing me a short stack of bills. “Make it to the Anubis terminal in time, and you’ll both go home with us. If you don’t make it, I’ll assume something happened to stop you and you’ll have to call to make some other arrangement. We know we owe you a great debt, but we have wounded to get home ourselves, and the queen’s credit cards and so on were lost in the fire. I’ll have to call her credit company for emergency service, but that won’t take much time.”