He pulled the side door open and shoved me inside, launching himself in on top of me. From the flurry of knees and elbows, I could tell Glassport had jumped into the van, too. We took off. I could hear yelling behind us and even a gunshot.
I was gasping for air and sanity. I looked around me, trying to orient myself. I was in a large van with two small passenger and driver doors at the front, a larger side door. The back seats had been removed to create an empty, carpeted space. Only the driver’s seat was occupied.
From my position sprawled on the floor, I tried to identify the driver. He half turned to look down at me. His face was like a nightmare, scarred and twisted. I could see his teeth, though he wasn’t smiling, and I saw shiny red patches on his cheeks. Someone had burned this guy, recently and severely. Only his long black hair seemed familiar.
Then he started laughing.
Full of horror and pity, I said, “Shepherd of Judea! Claude, is that you?”
Chapter 21
My fairy cousin Claude was never supposed to see the human world again. Yet here he was, with two of my worst enemies, and he was kidnapping me. I lost it.
“How many enemies do I have?” I screamed.
“Lots and lots, Sookie,” Claude said. His voice was smooth and silky, but not warm. The seductive voice combined with the nightmare of a face . . . oh, it was horrible. “It was very easy to hire Steve and Johan to help me track you.”
Steve Newlin and Johan Glassport had sorted themselves out and were sitting against the walls, congratulating each other on a job well done. Steve was smiling the whole time. “I was glad to help,” he said, as if he’d taken out the garbage for Claude. “After what happened to my poor wife.”
“And I was glad to help,” Johan Glassport said, “just because I hate you, Sookie.”
“Why?” I really couldn’t understand it.
“You nearly ruined everything for Sophie-Anne and me at Rhodes,” he said. “And you didn’t come to get us when you knew the building was going to collapse. You got your pretty boy Eric, instead.”
“Sophie-Anne is dead, and it doesn’t make any difference,” I snapped. “I figured you were like a cockroach, you’d survive a nuclear blast!”
Okay, that maybe wasn’t the smartest thing I’d ever said, but honestly! It was insane to think I’d run to help two people I didn’t particularly like when I knew the hotel was going to explode any second. Of course I’d gotten the people I had the strongest feelings for.
“Actually, I just like to hurt women,” Glassport said. “I don’t really need a reason. I like dark women better, but you’ll do. In a pinch.” And saying that, he poked the flesh of my arm with the knife. And I shrieked.
“We practically fell over the other guys who were after you,” Newlin said conversationally, as if I weren’t bleeding on the van floor. He’d pulled himself against the driver’s-side wall of the van. There was a strap there for him to hold on to, which he needed, because Claude was driving very fast, and he wasn’t a good driver. “But apparently you’ve taken care of them. And with the vampire on guard duty in your woods, we couldn’t watch you at night. So we knew God was being good to us when we saw our opportunity tonight.”
“Claude, what about you,” I said, hoping to put off Johan sticking me anymore. “Why do you hate me?”
“Niall was going to kill me, anyway, since I was trying to organize a coup against him. And that would have been a noble death. But after Dermot blabbed about me searching for the cluviel dor, my dear grandfather decided killing me was too quick. So he tortured me for quite some time.”
“It hasn’t been that long,” I protested.
“You’ve been tortured,” he said. “How long did that seem to you?”
Good point.
“Besides, we were in Faery, and time passes differently there. And the fae can take more punishment than humans.”
“Though we intend to discover your limits,” Glassport said.
“Where are we going?” I dreaded the answer.
“Oh, we’ve found a little place,” Glassport said. “Just down the road a piece.” He delivered the colloquialism mockingly.
Pam had wasted her blood healing me. I’d just have more flesh to torture. I don’t mind saying, I was at my wit’s end and then some. I didn’t know how fast Sam or Jason and Michele would be able to follow me, if they even had a clue which direction the van had taken. Maybe the furor over the abduction and the stabbing of the bouncer would impede them even getting out the door. And my guardian vampire, Karin, was back at my house, presumably making sure no coons came out of the woods to steal my tomatoes.
The first rule about kidnapping attempts is, Don’t get in the car. Well, we were already past that, though I’d given it a try. Probably the next rule was, Observe where you’re going. Oh, I knew that! We were going either north or south or east or west. I told myself not to be a Helpless Hilda, and I thought back. We’d turned to the right out of the parking lot, so we were going north. Okay. That should have been visible from Stompin’ Sally’s, because there weren’t many trees to obscure the line of sight . . . if anyone had had the presence of mind to watch.
I didn’t think Claude had made any turns since then, which even Claude would know was dumb, so we were going straight to whatever place they’d decided was secure, and it must be very close. I assumed they planned on getting there and concealing the van pretty quickly, before pursuit could even start out.
I felt like giving up right then. I didn’t think I’d ever felt so defeated. Johan Glassport was still looking at me with that sickly anticipation, and Steve Newlin was praying out loud, thanking the Lord for delivering his enemy into his hands. My heart sank as low as it could go.
I’d been tortured before, as Claude had so thoughtfully reminded me, and I still bore the scars on my body. I had the scars on my spirit, too, and I always would, no matter how well I’d recovered. Worst of all, I knew what was coming. I just wanted the whole thing to be over, even if I died . . . and I knew they intended to kill me. Death would be easier than going through that again. I was very clear on that. But I tried to rally. The only thing I could do was talk.
“I feel sorry for you, Claude,” I said. “I’m sorry Niall did that to you.” His face was an especially cruel target, since Claude had been outstandingly handsome and very proud. If he’d wanted women, he could have had them by the dozens, instead of sampling one now and then. As it happened, Claude liked men, men rough around the edges, and they’d responded to him with enthusiasm. Niall had found a perfectly devastating punishment for Claude’s treachery.
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” Claude said. “Wait to see what we’re going to do to you.”
“Cutting me will make you well again?”
“That’s not what I’m after.”
“What are you after?”
“Vengeance,” he said.
“What did I do to you, Claude?” I asked, genuinely curious. “I let you live in my house. I cooked for you. I let you sleep in my bed when you were lonely.” Of course, all the time he was scouring my house looking for the cluviel dor, but I hadn’t known that. I’d been genuinely glad to have him there. I also hadn’t known anything about the plot against Niall, the rebellion Claude was fomenting among the other fae who hadn’t made it into Faery when Niall closed the portals.
“You were the cause of Niall’s wanting to close Faery off,” Claude said, surprised at my even having to ask.
“Wasn’t he going to do that, anyway?” Geez Louise.
Steve Newlin leaned forward to bitch-slap me. “Shut up, you godforsaken whore,” he said.
“Don’t hit her again unless I tell you to,” Claude said. And he must have given them great cause to fear him earlier in their partnership, because Glassport put his knife away and Newlin settled back against the wall of the van. They hadn’t tied me; I guessed that was the weak point of an impromptu kidnapping, nothing to bind the victim with.
“You think I am unfounded in hating you,�
�� Claude said, and we made a hard left turn. I rolled over on my side, and only when the van straightened out was I able to make some cautious moves to sit up myself. To avoid the two men, I had to stay in the middle, so any turn or bump in the road was going to knock me over. Well, great. Then I spied a grip on the back of the passenger seat, and I grabbed it.
“I do think so,” I said. “There’s no reason for you to hate me. I never hated you.”
“You didn’t want to sleep with me,” Claude pointed out.
“Well, damn, Claude, you’re gay! Why would I want to have sex with someone who’s fantasizing about beard stubble?”
Neither Claude nor I considered what I’d said anything extraordinary, but you’d have thought I’d stuck a cattle prod where the sun didn’t shine on the two humans.
“Is this true, Claude? You’re a fairy who’s a fairy?” Steve Newlin’s voice had gone super-ugly, and Johan Glassport had pulled his knife out again.
“Uh-oh,” I said, just to alert Claude—since, after all, he was driving the vehicle—that there was dissension in his ranks. “Claude, your buddies are homophobes.”
“What does that mean?” he asked me.
“They hate men who like men.”
Claude appeared perplexed, but I could see the distortion and hatred in the brains of the two men, and I knew that completely without intending to, I’d hit the perk button on their ethical coffeemaker.
Ordinarily, in the interest of making trouble in the ranks, I’d be glad they had such a huge issue with Claude’s orientation. But then again, he was driving and I was the instantly available victim.
“He seemed like a tough man to me,” Glassport said to Steve Newlin. “He would have killed that young man if the lawyer hadn’t interfered.”
I finally had a clue about what had happened to Barry. I hoped the “lawyer” reference meant Mr. Cataliades had rescued him.
Claude said in a puzzled way, “Johan, are you calling me less than a strong man because I like other men in bed?”
Glassport winced, and his mouth compressed with disgust. “I am saying that I think less of you,” he replied. “I do not like contact with you.”
“And I think you’re going straight to hell with the imps of Satan,” Steve Newlin said. “You’re an abomination.”
There was more than one “abomination” in the van, but I wasn’t going to point that out. Very cautiously, I wiggled a little closer to the spot where the back of the passenger seat was very close to the sliding side door. Glassport had his back against the door a little farther away from the front of the van.
If Glassport would move away from the door, just a little, I would open it and throw myself out. I could see that the door was unlocked. Of course, it would be nice if Claude slowed down first. I had no idea what was outside the van, since I couldn’t see out the front windows; but I was assuming we were still in farmland, and there was a chance that with all the rain we’d had lately, I could make a relatively soft landing. Maybe. I would have to act with speed and no hesitation.
I defy you to throw yourself out of a moving vehicle without hesitating. Just the idea was giving me qualms.
“Then we have to have a serious discussion,” Claude said, and his voice became sexy as hell. “A very serious discussion about how we all have the right to find someone who wants to have sex with us.” The voice oozed over us like warm caramel.
It wasn’t working nearly as much on me as it was affecting Newlin and Glassport, who were looking oddly shaken and horribly frightened.
“Yes, many men love to think about the curved hips and firm thighs of other men,” Claude said.
Okay, he could stop anytime now. I was acutely uncomfortable.
“To think about their hard dicks and full balls,” Claude said, spinning a spell with his voice. That popped the sexy bubble for me, but the two men were eyeing each other with obvious lust, and I couldn’t bear to look at their crotches. Oh, yuck. Not these guys. Gross.
And then Claude made a huge mistake. He was so confident in his own sexuality, he was so sure of his audience, that he did the psychic equivalent of flipping them off. “See?” he said, and the spell dropped away. “There is nothing to it.”
Steve Newlin went apeshit. He lunged at the driver’s seat, grabbed Claude by the hair, and began punching him in the face. The van swerved all over the place. Johan Glassport was thrown across to the other side with a particularly violent lurch, while I half turned to clutch the grip on the back of the passenger seat with both hands.
Claude tried to defend himself, and since Glassport had his knife in his hand, I figured it was time to get the hell out of there. I got to my knees to see where we were going. The van crossed a lane of traffic, which was thank-God empty, and then we went down a shallow embankment and up again to end up in a field of corn. The headlights shone through the stalks in an eerie way, but eerie or not I was getting out of the van now.
I yanked the handle and the door opened, and I rolled out onto the ground. Johan yelled, but I scrambled to my feet and ran, ran, the corn making an ungodly noise at my passage. I was as obvious as a water buffalo, and I felt just as unwieldy and clumsy.
I thought the cowboy boots would come off, but they didn’t, and I spared a sliver of a second to wish I’d taken the jeans option for the bar. No, I’d wanted to look cute, and here I was, running through a cornfield in danger of getting killed in a flirty skirt and a formerly white eyelet blouse. Plus, my arm was bleeding. Thank God there weren’t any vamps after me.
I wanted away from the light. I wanted to find a place to hunker down. Or a house full of shotguns, that would be good. We’d swerved south into the field from a westbound road. I began to push my way across the rows rather than running with them. If I went west, and then started north, I’d hit the road. But I had to find a dark patch of the field to obscure my movement, because God knew I was making enough noise.
But it just wouldn’t get dark. Why not? Fields, night, one vehicle . . .
There was more than one vehicle.
There were ten vehicles streaming up the two-lane to the place the van had left the road.
I abandoned my plunge westward. I changed directions and ran toward them, thinking that at least one would stop.
They all stopped. They all angled so their lights were shining out into the field to illuminate the van. I heard lots of shouting and lots of advice, and I ran right toward them, because I knew all these people had followed the van out of the parking lot to rescue me. Or to avenge the bouncer. Or just because you don’t disrupt a good bar or a line dance by grabbing a dancer. Their brains were full of righteous indignation. And I loved each and every one of them.
“Help!” I yelled, as I made my way through the corn. “Help!”
“Are you Sookie Stackhouse?” called a deep bass voice.
“I am!” I called. “I’m coming out now!”
“The lady’s coming out,” the bass voice boomed. “Don’t shoot her!”
I broke out of the corn about ten yards to the west of where the van had gone in, and I ran down the edge of the field toward the line of saviors.
And the man with the bass voice yelled, “Duck, honey!”
I knew he meant me, and I dove into the ground like I was entering the ocean. His rifle took out Johan Glassport, who’d broken out of the corn behind me. In a second I was surrounded by people who were helping me up, exclaiming over my bleeding arm, or passing me by to stand in a silent knot around the body of the murderous lawyer.
One down.
A large posse headed out into the cornfield to see what had happened at the van, and Sam and Jason and Michele claimed me. There were fraught feelings bouncing around, there was self-blame, there were tears (okay, that was Michele), but what mattered was that I was safe and I was with the people who cared about me.
A heavy, silent man drew near and offered me his handkerchief to bind my arm. I accepted and thanked him sincerely. Michele did the binding, but my arm
would need stitches. Of course.
There was another wave of exclamations. They were bringing Claude and Steve Newlin through the trail of wrecked stalks the van had made.
Claude was badly wounded. Glassport had gotten to use the knife on him at least once, and Steve Newlin had pummeled his face.
They’d made Newlin help him to the road, and he hated that worse than anything.
When they were close enough to hear me, I said, “Claude. Human jail.”
His thoughts focused, though I couldn’t read them. Then he understood. As if someone had given him a shot of vampire blood, he went nuts. Utterly reenergized, he spun on Steve Newlin, throwing him down with a terrible force, and then he leaped for the nearest Good Samaritan, a man wearing a Stompin’ Sally’s shirt, and the Good Samaritan shot him dead.
Two down.
To make things even simpler, Claude had thrown Steve Newlin down with enough force to fracture his skull, and I heard later that he died that night in the Monroe hospital, where they moved him after stabilizing him in Clarice. Before he did, he was moved to confess his part in Arlene’s murder. Maybe the Lord forgave him. I didn’t.
Three down.
After I talked to the law, Sam took me to the hospital. I asked after Xavier; he was in surgery. The ER doctor thought a butterfly bandage was enough for my arm, to my profound relief. I wanted to get back home. I’d spent enough time in hospitals, and I’d spent enough nights scared.
Now, everyone who wished me ill was dead. That is, everyone I knew of. I wasn’t happy about that, but I wasn’t grieving, either. Each of them would have been glad enough if I’d been the one on my way to the grave.
I was pretty shaken up by my abduction from Stompin’ Sally’s. A few days later, Sally herself called. She said she’d sent me a gift card for ten free drinks at her establishment, and she offered to buy me a new pair of cowboy boots, since mine would never be the same after my flight through the cornfield. I appreciated that—but right then, I wasn’t sure about any future line dancing.
And I knew I’d never be able to watch Signs again.
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