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 contented 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.
Jade Flower slithered out of the backseat next and added her eyes to those scanning the area. Protecting the queen with their bodies, they moved into the courtyard. Sigebert got out next, ax in hand, and waited for me. After I'd joined him on the sidewalk, he and Wybert took me through the open gateway with less ceremony than the others had taken the queen.
I'd seen the queen at my own home, unguarded by anyone but Cataliades. I'd seen the queen in her own office, guarded by one person. I guess I didn't realize until that moment how important security was for Sophie-Anne, how precarious her hold on power must be. I wanted to know against whom all these guards were protecting her. Who wanted to kill the Louisiana queen? Maybe all vampire rulers were in this much danger—or maybe it was just Sophie-Anne. Suddenly the vampire conference in the fall seemed like a much scarier proposition than it had before.
The courtyard was well lit, and Amelia was standing on the circular driveway with three friends. For the record, none of them were crones with broomsticks. One of them was a kid who looked just like
a Mormon missionary: black pants, white shirt, dark tie, polished black shoes. There was a bicycle leaning up against the tree in the center of the circle. Maybe he was a Mormon missionary. He looked so young that I thought he might still be growing. The tall woman standing beside him was in her sixties, but she had a Bowflex body. She was wearing a tight T-shirt, knit slacks, sandals, and a pair of huge hoop earrings. The third witch was about my age, in her mid- to late twenties, and she was Hispanic. She had full cheeks, bright red lips, and rippling black hair, and she was short and had more curves than an S turn. Sigebert admired her especially (I could tell by his leer), but she ignored all the vampires as if she couldn't see them.
Amelia might have been startled by the influx of vampires, but she handled introductions with aplomb. Evidently the queen had already identified herself before I approached. "Your Majesty," Amelia was saying, "These are my co-practitioners." She swept her hand before them as if she were showing off a car to the studio audience. "Bob Jessup, Patsy Sellers, Terencia Rodriguez—Terry, we call her."
The witches glanced at each other before nodding briefly to the queen. It was hard to tell how she took that lack of deference, her face was so glass-smooth—but she nodded back, and the atmosphere remained tolerable.
"We were just preparing for our reconstruction," Amelia said. She sounded absolutely confident, but I noticed that her hands were trembling. Her thoughts were not nearly as confident as her voice, either. Amelia was running over their preparations in her head, frantically itemizing the magic stuff she'd assembled, anxiously reassessing her companions to satisfy herself they were up to the ritual, and so on. Amelia, I belatedly realized, was a perfectionist.
I wondered where Claudine was. Maybe she'd seen the vamps coming and prudently fled to some dark corner. While I was looking around for her, I had a moment when the heartache I was staving off just plain ambushed me. It was like the moments I had after my grandmother died, when I'd be doing something familiar like brushing my teeth, and all of a sudden the blackness would overwhelm me. It took a moment or two to collect myself and swim back to the surface again.
It would be like that for a while, and I'd just have to grit my teeth and bear it.
I made myself take notice of those around me. The witches had assumed their positions. Bob settled himself in a lawn chair in the courtyard, and I watched with a tiny flare of interest as he drew powdered stuff from little snack-size Ziploc bags and got a box of matches out of his chest pocket. Amelia bounded up the stairs to the apartment, Terry stationed herself halfway down the stairs, and the tall older witch, Patsy, was already standing on the gallery looking down at us.
"If you all want to watch, probably up here would be best," Amelia called, and the queen and I went up the stairs. The guards gathered in a clump by the gate so they'd be as far away from the magic as they could be; even Jade Flower seemed respectful of the power that was about to be put to use, even if she did not respect the witches as people.
As a matter of course, Andre followed the queen up the stairs, but I thought there was a less than enthusiastic droop to his shoulders.
It was nice to focus on something new instead of mulling over my miseries, and I listened with interest as Amelia, who looked like she should be out playing beach volleyball, instead gave us instructions on the magic spell she was about to cast.
"We've set the time to two hours before I saw Jake arrive," she said. "So you may see a lot of boring and extraneous stuff. If that gets old, I can try to speed up the events."
Suddenly I had a thought that blinded me by its sheer serendipity. I would ask Amelia to return to Bon Temps with me, and there I would ask her to repeat this procedure in my yard; then I would know what had happened to poor Gladiola. I felt much better once I'd had this idea, and I made myself pay attention to the here and now.
Amelia called out "Begin!" and immediately began reciting words, I suppose in Latin. I heard a faint echo come up from the stairs and the courtyard as the other witches joined in.
We didn't know what to expect, and it was oddly boring to hear the chanting continue after a couple of minutes. I began to wonder what would happen to me if the queen got very bored.
Then my cousin Hadley walked into the living room.
I was so shocked, I almost spoke to her. When I looked for just a second longer, I could tell it wasn't really Hadley. It had the shape of her, and it moved like her, but this simulacrum was only washed with color. Her hair was not a true dark, but a glistening impression of dark. She looked like tinted water, walking. You could see the surface's shimmer. I looked at her eagerly: it had been so long since we'd seen each other. Hadley looked older, of course. She looked harder, too, with a sardonic set to her mouth and a skeptical look to her eyes.
Oblivious to the presence of anyone else in the room, the reconstruction went over to the loveseat, picked up a phantom remote control, and turned on the television. I actually glanced at the screen to see if it would show anything, but of course, it didn't.
I felt a movement beside me and I glanced at the queen. If I had been shocked, she was electrified. I had never really thought the queen could have truly loved Hadley, but I saw now that she had, as much as she was able.
We watched Hadley glance at the television from time to time while she painted her toenails, drank a phantom glass of blood, and made a phone call. We couldn't hear her. We could only see, and that within a limited range. The object she reached for would appear the minute her hand touched it, but not before, so you could be sure of what she had only when she began to use it. When she leaned forward to replace the glass of blood on the table, and her hand was still holding the glass, we'd see the glass, the table with its other objects, and Hadley, all at once, all with that glistening patina. The ghost table was imposed over the real table, which was still in almost exactly the same space as it had been that night, just to make it weirder. When Hadley let go of the glass, both glass and table winked out of existence.
Andre's eyes were wide and staring when I glanced back at him, and it was the most expression I'd seen on his face. If the queen was grieving and I was fascinated and sad, Andre was simply freaked out.
We stood through a few more minutes of this until Hadley evidently heard a knock at the door. (Her head turned toward the door, and she looked surprised.) She rose (the phantom loveseat, perhaps two inches to the right of the real one, became nonexistent) and padded across the floor. She stepped through my sneakers, which were sitting side by side next to the loveseat.
Okay, that was weird. This whole thing was weird, but fascinating.
Presumably the people in the courtyard had watched the caller come up the outside stairs, since I heard a loud curse from one of the Berts—Wybert, I thought. When Hadley opened a phantom door, Patsy, who'd been stationed outside on the gallery, pushed open the real door so we could see. From Amelia's chagrined face, I could tell she hadn't thought that one through ahead of time.
Standing at the door was (phantom) Waldo, a vampire who had been with the queen for years. He had been much punished in the years before his death, and it had left him with permanently wrinkled skin. Since Waldo had been an ultrathin albino before this punishment, he'd looked awful the one and only night I'd known him. As a watery ghost creature, he looked better, actually.
Hadley looked surprised to see him. That expression was strong enough to be easily recognizable. Then she looked disgusted. But she stepped back to let him in.
When she strolled back to the table to pick up her glass, Waldo glanced around him, as if to see if anyone else was there. The temptation to warn Hadley was so strong it was almost irresistible.
After some conversation, which of course we couldn't understand, Hadley shrugged and seemed to agree to some plan. Presumably, this was the idea Waldo had told me about the night he'd confessed to killing my cousin. He'd said it had been Hadley's idea to go to St. Louis Cemetery Number One to raise the ghost of voodooienne Marie Laveau, but from this evidence it seemed Wa
ldo was the one who had suggested the excursion.
"What's that in his hand?" Amelia said, as quietly as she could, and Patsy stepped in from the gallery to check.
"Brochure," she called to Amelia, trying to use equally hushed tones. "About Marie Laveau."
Hadley looked at the watch on her wrist and said something to Waldo. It was something unkind, judging by Hadley's expression and the jerk of her head as she indicated the door. She was saying "No," as clearly as body language could say it.
And yet the next night she had gone with him. What had happened to change her mind?
Hadley walked back to her bedroom and we followed her. Looking back, we watched Waldo leave the apartment, putting the brochure on the table by the door as he departed.
It felt oddly voyeuristic to stand in Hadley's bedroom with Amelia, the queen, and Andre, watching Hadley take off a bathrobe and put on a very fancy dress.
"She wore that to the party the night before the wedding," the queen said quietly. It was a skintight, cut-down-to-here red dress decked with darker red sequins and some gorgeous alligator pumps. Hadley was going to make the queen regret what she was losing, evidently.
We watched Hadley primp in the mirror, do her hair two different ways, and mull her choice of lipsticks for a very long time. The novelty was wearing off the process, and I was willing to fast-forward, but the queen just couldn't get enough of seeing her beloved again. I sure wasn't going to protest, especially since the queen was footing the bill.
Hadley turned back and forth in front of her full-length mirror, appeared satisfied with what she saw, then burst into tears.
"Oh, my dear," the queen said quietly. "I am so sorry."
I knew exactly how Hadley felt, and for the first time I felt the kinship with my cousin I'd lost through the years of separation. In this reconstruction, it was the night before the queen's wedding, and Hadley was going to have to go to a party and watch the queen and her fiance be a couple. And the next night she would have to attend their wedding; or so she thought. She didn't know that she'd be dead by then; finally, definitely dead.
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