Rasul had escorted me from the other side of the street to the main entrance to the queen's domain. It was a three-story office building, perhaps dating from the fifties, and extending a whole city block. In other places, the basement would have been the vampires' retreat, but in New Orleans, with its high water table, that was impossible. All the windows had received a distinctive treatment. The panels that covered them were decorated in a Mardi Gras theme, so the staid brick building was pepped up with pink, purple, and green designs on a white or black background. There were iridescent patches on the shutters, too, like Mardi Gras beads. The effect was disconcerting.
"What does she do when she throws a party?" I asked. Despite the shutters, the prosaic office rectangle was simply not festive.
"Oh, she owns an old monastery," Melanie said. "You can get a brochure about it before you go. That's where all the state functions are held. Some of the old ones can't go into the former chapel, but other than that… it's got a high wall all around, so it's easy to patrol, and it's decorated real nice. The queen has apartments there, but it's too insecure for year-round living."
I couldn't think of anything to say. I doubted I would ever see the queen's state residence. But Melanie seemed bored and inclined to chat. "You were Hadley's cousin, I hear?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Strange, to think of having living relatives." For a moment, she looked far away, and as wistful as a vampire can look. Then she seemed to kind of shake herself mentally. "Hadley wasn't bad for one so young. But she seemed to take her vampire longevity a little too much for granted."
Melanie shook her head. "She should never have crossed someone as old and wily as Waldo."
"That's for damn sure," I said.
"Chester," Melanie called. Chester was the next guard in line, and he was standing with a familiar figure clothed in the (what I was coming to think of as) usual SWAT garb.
"Bubba!" I exclaimed, as the vampire said, "Miss Sookie!" Bubba and I hugged, to the vampires' amusement. Vampires don't shake hands, in the ordinary course of things, and hugging is just as outre in their culture.
I was glad to see they hadn't let him have a gun, just the accoutrements of the guards. He was looking fine in the military outfit, and I told him so. "Black looks real good with your hair," I said, and Bubba smiled his famous smile.
"You're mighty nice to say so," he said. "Thank you very much."
Back in the day, everyone in the world had known Bubba's face and smile. When he'd been wheeled into the morgue in Memphis, a vampire attendant had detected the tiniest flicker of life. Since the attendant was a huge fan, he had taken on the responsibility for bringing the singer over, and a legend had been born. Unfortunately, Bubba's body had been so saturated with drugs and physical woes that the conversion hadn't been entirely successful, and the vampire world passed Bubba around like the public relations nightmare he was.
"How long have you been here, Bubba?" I asked.
"Oh, a couple of weeks, but I like it real well," he said. "Lots of stray cats."
"Right," I said, trying not to think about that too graphically. I really like cats. So did Bubba, but not in the same way.
"If a human catches a glimpse of him, they think he's an impersonator," Chester said quietly. Melanie had gone back to her post, and Chester, who'd been a sandy-haired kid from the backwoods with poor dentition when he was taken, was now in charge of me. "That's fine, most often. But every so now and then, they call him by his used-to-be name. Or they ask him to sing."
Bubba very seldom sang these days, though every now and then he could be coaxed into belting out a familiar song or two. That was a memorable occasion. Most often, though, he denied he could sing a note, and he usually got very agitated when he was called by his original name.
He trailed along after us as Chester led me further into the building. We had turned, and gone up a floor, encountering more and more vampires—and a few humans—heading here or there with a purposeful air. It was like any busy office building, any weekday, except the workers were vampires and the sky outside was as dark as the New Orleans sky ever got. As we walked, I noticed that some vampires seemed more at ease than others. I observed that the wary vamps were all wearing the same pins attached to their collars, pins in the shape of the state of Arkansas. These vamps must be part of the entourage of the queen's husband, Peter Threadgill. When one of the Louisiana vampires bumped into an Arkansas vampire, the Arkansan snarled and for a second I thought there would be a fight in the corridor over a slight accident.
Jeesh, I'd be glad to get out of here. The atmosphere was tense.
Chester stopped before a door that didn't look any different from all the other closed doors, except for the two whacking big vampires outside it. The two must have been considered giants in their day, since they stood perhaps six foot three. They looked like brothers, but maybe it was just their size and mien, and the color of their chestnut hair, that sparked the comparison: big as boulders, bearded, with pony-tails that trailed down their backs, the two looked like prime meat for the pro wrestling circuit. One had a huge scar across his face, acquired before death, of course. The other had had some skin disease in his original life. They weren't just display items; they were absolutely lethal.
(By the way, some promoter had had the idea for a vampire wrestling circuit a couple of years before, but it went down in flames immediately. At the first match, one vamp had ripped another's arm off, on live TV. Vamps don't get the concept of exhibition fighting.)
These two vampires were hung with knives, and each had an ax in his belt. I guess they figured if someone had penetrated this far, guns weren't going to make a difference. Plus their own bodies were weapons.
"Bert, Bert," Chester said, nodding to each one in turn. "This here's the Stackhouse woman; the queen wants to see her."
He turned and walked away, leaving me with the queen's bodyguards.
Screaming didn't seem like a good idea, so I said, "I can't believe you both have the same name. Surely he made a mistake?"
Two pairs of brown eyes focused on me intently. "I am Sigebert," the scarred one said, with a heavy accent I couldn't identify. He said his name as See-ya-bairt. Chester was using a very Americanized version of what must be a very old name. "Dis my brodder, Wybert."
This is my brother, Way-bairt? "Hello," I said, trying not to twitch. "I'm Sookie Stackhouse."
They seemed unimpressed. Just then, one of the pinned vampires squeezed past, casting a look of scarcely veiled contempt at the brothers, and the atmosphere in the corridor became lethal. Sigebert and Wybert watched the vamp, a tall woman in a business suit, until she rounded a corner. Then their attention switched back to me.
"The queen is… busy," Wybert said. "When she wants you in her room, the light, it will shine." He indicated a round light set in the wall to the right of the door.
So I was stuck here for an indefinite time—until the light, it shone. "Do your names have a meaning? I'm guessing they're, um, early English?" My voice petered out.
"We were Saxons. Our fadder went from Germany to England, you call now," Wybert said. "My name mean Bright Battle."
"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 unfond 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 facade 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.
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