Dead Reckoning

by Harris, Charlaine

  When Dermot had come to the back door earlier, I’d let him in and gone back to my coffee without a word. As soon as he was in the door, I felt measurably better. Maybe I hadn’t noticed the contrast these past few weeks because I’d been so wrapped up in the blood bond? I’d been under the influence of a lot of supernatural things. I couldn’t say it felt better to be just myself, but it certainly made me feel more in touch with reality.

  Once my guests had gotten a good look at Dermot and realized how much he looked like Jason, there’d been a lot of raised eyebrows. I’d told them he was a distant cousin from Florida, and I’d heard from a lot of brains that ladies were going to be consulting their family trees to find a Florida connection for my family.

  I felt like myself today. I felt like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, in the community where I lived. I might not even be that same person who’d participated in a slaughter the night before.

  I took a sip from my glass cup. Maxine’s punch had turned out well, the cake I’d picked up from the bakery was delicious, my cheese straws were crispy and just a little spicy, and the salted pecans were toasted just enough. We played Baby Bingo as Tara opened her gifts, and she glowed and said “Thank you” about a million times.

  I felt more and more like the old Sookie Stackhouse as the event progressed. I was around people I understood, doing a good thing.

  As a kind of bonus, JB’s grandmother told me a lovely story about my grandmother. Taken altogether, it was a good afternoon.

  When I went in the kitchen with a tray full of dirty dishes, I thought, This is happiness. Last night wasn’t the real me.

  But it had been. I knew—even as I thought this—that I wasn’t going to be able to fool myself. I’d changed in order to survive, and I was paying the price of survival. I had to be willing to change myself forever, or everything I’d made myself do was for nothing.

  “Are you all right, Sookie?” Dermot asked, as he brought in more glasses.

  “Yes, thanks.” I tried to smile at him but felt it was a weak effort.

  There was a knock at the back door. I supposed it was a late guest, trying to sneak in unobtrusively.

  Mr. Cataliades stood there. He was wearing a suit, as always, but for the first time it seemed somewhat the worse for wear. He seemed not quite as circular as he had been, but he was smiling politely. I was astonished at his presence and not completely sure I wanted to talk to him, but if he was the guy who could answer big questions about my life, I really didn’t have a lot of choice. “Come in,” I told him, standing back and holding open the door.

  “Miss Stackhouse,” he said formally. “Thank you for your welcome.”

  He stared at Dermot, who was washing dishes very carefully, proud to be trusted with Gran’s good china. “Young man,” he said in acknowledgment.

  Dermot turned and froze. “Demon,” he said. Then he turned back to the sink, but I could tell he was thinking furiously.

  “You’re having a social occasion?” Mr. Cataliades asked me. “I can tell there are many women in the house.”

  I hadn’t even noticed the cacophony of feminine voices floating down the hall, but it sounded like there might be sixty women in the living room instead of twenty-five. “Yes,” I agreed. “There are. It’s a baby shower for a friend of mine.”

  “Perhaps I could sit at your kitchen table until it’s over?” he suggested. “Perhaps a bite to eat?”

  Reminded of my manners, I said, “Of course, you can have as much as you like!” I quickly made a ham sandwich and put some chips and pickles out, and prepared a separate plate with party goodies. I even poured him a cup of punch.

  Mr. Cataliades’s dark eyes glowed at the sight of the food in front of him. It might not be as fancy as he was used to (though for all I knew he ate raw mice), but he dug in with a will. Dermot seemed all right, if not exactly relaxed, at being in the same room with the lawyer, so I left them to make the best of it and returned to the living room. The hostess couldn’t be away for long; it wasn’t polite.

  Tara had opened all the presents. Her shop assistant, McKenna, had written down all the gifts and the givers, and taped the card in with each offering. Everyone was talking about her own labor and delivery—oh, joy—and Tara was fielding questions about her ob-gyn, the hospital where she’d deliver, what names they’d thought of for the babies, whether they knew the sexes of the twins, how far away her due date was, and on and on.

  Gradually, the guests began to depart, and when they were all gone I had to fend off sincere offers from Tara and her mother-in-law and Jason’s girlfriend, Michele, to help with the dishes. I told them, “No sirree, you just leave them there, that’s my job,” and I could hear my grandmother’s words flowing right out of my mouth. It almost made me laugh. If I hadn’t had a demon and a fairy in my kitchen, I might have. We got all the gifts loaded into Tara’s and her mother-in-law’s cars, and Michele told me she and Jason were having a catfish fry the next weekend and they wanted me to come. I said I’d see, that sounded wonderful.

  It was a huge relief when all the humans were gone.

  I would have thrown myself in the chair and read for thirty minutes or watched an episode of Jeopardy! before starting to clean up if I hadn’t had the two men waiting in my kitchen. Instead, I had to march back laden with still more plates and cups.

  To my surprise, Dermot was gone. I hadn’t noticed his car go down the driveway, but I assumed he’d blended in with all the other departing guests. Mr. Cataliades was sitting in the same chair, drinking a cup of coffee. He had put his plate over by the sink. Hadn’t washed it, but he’d carried it over.

  “So,” I said, “they’ve left. You didn’t eat Dermot, did you?”

  He beamed at me. “No, dear Miss Stackhouse, I did not. Though I’m sure he would be tasty. The ham sandwich was delicious.”

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it,” I responded automatically. “Listen, Mr. Cataliades, I found a letter from my grandmother. I’m not sure I understand our relationship correctly, or maybe I just don’t understand what it means that you are my sponsor.”

  His beam intensified. “Though I’m in a slight hurry, I’ll do everything I can to dispel your confusion.”

  “Okay.” I wondered why he was in a hurry, if he was still being pursued, but I wasn’t going to be sidetracked. “Let me sort of repeat this back to you and you can tell me if I got it straight.”

  He nodded his round head.

  “You were good friends with my birth grandfather, Fintan. Dermot’s brother.”

  “Yes, Dermot’s twin.”

  “But you don’t seem that fond of Dermot.”

  He shrugged. “I’m not.”

  I almost got off on a tangent there, but I stuck to my train of thought. “So, Fintan was still alive when Jason and I were born.”

  Desmond Cataliades nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, he was.”

  “My gran said in her letter that you visited my dad and his sister, Fintan’s actual children.”

  “I was here.”

  “So, did you give them—us—a gift?”

  “I tried, but you couldn’t all accept it. Not all of you had the essential spark.”

  That was a phrase Niall had used. “What is the essential spark?”

  “What a clever question!” Mr. Cataliades said, regarding me as if I were a monkey who’d opened a hatch to retrieve a banana. “The gift I gave to my dear friend Fintan was that any of his human descendants who possessed the essential spark would be able to read the minds of their fellow humans, as I can.”

  “So, when it turned out that my dad and aunt Linda didn’t have it, you returned when Jason and I were born.”

  He nodded. “Seeing you wasn’t absolutely necessary. After all, the gift had been given. But by visiting Jason and then you, I could know for certain. I was very excited when I held you, though I think your poor grandmother was frightened.”

  “So only I and—” I choked back Hunter’s name. Mr. Cataliades ha
d written Hadley’s will, and she hadn’t mentioned Hunter. It was possible he didn’t know Hadley had had a child. “Only I have had it so far. And you still haven’t explained what the spark is.”

  He gave me an arch look as if to say he sure couldn’t get anything by me. “The essential spark isn’t easy to pin down in terms of your DNA,” he told me. “It’s an openness to the other world. Some humans literally can’t believe there are creatures in another world besides ours, creatures who have feelings and rights and beliefs and deserve to live their own lives. Humans who are born with the essential spark are born to experience or perform something wonderful, something amazing.”

  I’d done something pretty amazing the night before, but it surely wasn’t wonderful . . . unless you hated vampires.

  “Gran had the essential spark,” I said suddenly. “So Fintan thought he’d find it in one of us.”

  “Yes, though of course he never wanted me to give her my gift.” Mr. Cataliades looked wistfully at the refrigerator, and I got up to make him another ham sandwich. This time I sliced some fresh tomato and put it on a little plate, and he piled every single bit on the sandwich and still managed to eat it neatly. Now that was supernatural.

  When he’d finished half the sandwich, Mr. Cataliades paused to say, “Fintan loved humans, and he especially loved human women, and he even more greatly loved human women with the essential spark. They aren’t easy to find. He adored Adele so much that he put the portal in the woods so he could visit her more easily, and I’m afraid he was mischievous enough to . . .”

  And it was Mr. Cataliades’s turn to stop and look at me uneasily, weighing his words.

  “He took my grandfather for a test drive every now and then,” I said. “Dermot recognized Fintan in some of the family pictures.”

  “I’m afraid that was very naughty of him.”

  “Yes,” I said heavily. “It was very naughty.”

  “He had great hopes when your father was born, and I was here the day after to inspect him, but he was quite normal, though of course attractive and magnetic, as those who are part fae are. Linda, the second child, was, too. And I’m sorry about the cancer; that shouldn’t have happened. I blame it on the environment. She should have been perfectly healthy all her life. Your father would have been, if the terrible infighting hadn’t broken out among the fairies. Perhaps if Fintan had survived, Linda’s health would have stayed with her.” Mr. Cataliades shrugged. “Adele tried to reach Fintan to ask if there was anything he could do for Linda, but by then he had passed away.”

  “I wonder why she didn’t use the cluviel dor to cure Aunt Linda’s cancer.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, with apparent regret. “Knowing Adele, I imagine she didn’t think it would be Christian. It’s possible that she didn’t even remember she had it by that time, or that she regarded it as a romantic love token but nothing more. After all, by the time her daughter’s illness became evident, it had been many years since I’d given it to her on Fintan’s behalf.”

  I thought hard, trying to pare down this conversation to learn what I had to know. “Why on earth did you think telepathy would be such a great gift?” I blurted.

  For the first time, he looked a bit miffed. “I thought it would give Fintan’s descendants an edge over their fellow humans for all of their lives, to know what other people were thinking and planning,” he said. “And since I’m nearly all demon, and I had it to give, it seemed a splendid gift to me. It would be wonderful even for a fairy! If your great-grandfather had known that Breandan’s henchmen were determined to murder him, he could have squelched the rebellion before it caught hold. Your father could have saved himself and your mother from drowning if he’d known a trap was set for him.”

  “But those things didn’t happen.”

  “Full-blooded fairies aren’t telepathic—though they can sometimes send messages, they can’t hear an answer—and your father didn’t have the essential spark.”

  This seemed like a circular kind of conversation.

  “So what this all boils down to is this: Since you two were such good buddies, Fintan asked you to give his and Adele’s descendants a gift, to stand as their—our—sponsor.”

  Mr. Cataliades smiled. “Correct.”

  “You were willing to do this, and you thought telepathy would be a dandy present.”

  “Correct again. Though it seems I was mistaken.”

  “You were. And you gave this gift in some mysterious demon way—”

  “Not so mysterious,” he said indignantly. “Adele and Fintan each drank a thimbleful of my blood.”

  Okay, I could not picture my grandmother doing that. But then, I couldn’t have imagined her consorting with a fairy, either. In point of fact, it had become obvious that I’d known my grandmother very well in some respects and not at all in others.

  “I put it in wine and told her it was a special vintage,” Mr. Cataliades confessed. “And in a way it was so.”

  “Okay, you lied. No big surprise there,” I said. Though Gran had been plenty smart, and I was sure she’d at least had suspicions. I waved my hands in the air. I could think about that later. “Okeydokey. So after they’d both ingested your blood, any descendants of theirs would be telepathic if they were also born with this essential spark.”

  “Correct.” He smiled so broadly that I felt I’d gotten an A on my test.

  “And my grandmother never used the cluviel dor.”

  “No, it’s a one-use thing. A very pretty gift from Fintan to Adele.”

  “Can I use it to take away the telepathy?”

  “No, my dear, it would be like wishing away your spleen or your kidneys. But an interesting thought.”

  So I couldn’t help Hunter with it. Or myself, either. Damn.

  “Can I kill someone with it?”

  “Yes, of course, if that someone is threatening someone you love. Directly. You couldn’t cause the death of your tax assessor . . . unless he was standing over your brother with an ax, say.”

  “Was it a coincidence that Hadley wound up with the queen?”

  “Not really, because she is part fairy, and as you know, part fairy is very attractive to vampires. It was only a matter of time before a vampire came into the bar and saw you.”

  “He was sent by the queen.”

  “Do tell.” Cataliades didn’t look a bit surprised. “The queen never asked me about the gift, and I never told her I was your sponsor. She never paid much attention to the world of the fae unless she wanted to drink fairy blood. She certainly never cared who my friends were or how I spent my time.”

  “Who’s on your trail now?”

  “A pertinent question, my dear, but one I can’t answer. In fact, I’ve been able to sense them getting nearer this past half hour, and I must take my departure. I noticed some excellent wards on the house, and I must congratulate you. Who laid them?”

  “Bellenos. An elf. He’s at the club called Hooligans in Monroe.”

  “Bellenos.” Mr. Cataliades looked thoughtful. “He’s my fifth cousin on my mother’s side, I think. By the way, on no account let the riffraff gathered at Hooligans know you have a cluviel dor, because they’ll kill you for it.”

  “What do you think I ought to do with it?” I asked curiously. He was standing and straightening the coat of his summer-weight blue suit. Though it was hot outside and he was heavy, he hadn’t been sweating when I let him in. “And where is Diantha?” His niece was as different from Mr. Cataliades as you could imagine, and I was kind of fond of her.

  “She’s far away and safe,” he said tersely. “And as for the cluviel dor, I can’t advise you. I’ve already done enough to you, it seems.” Just like that, he was out the back door. I caught a glimpse of his heavy body moving at incredible speed across the backyard, and then he was simply lost from sight.

  Well, that had been plenty amazing—and now I was out of ham.

  What an enlightening conversation—in some ways. Now I knew more about my own ba
ckground. I knew that my telepathy was a sort of pre-pregnancy baby shower gift from Desmond Cataliades to his friend Fintan the fairy and my grandmother. That was a stunning revelation, in and of itself.

  After I’d finished thinking about that, or at least after I’d pondered it as much as I could bear to, I thought about Cataliades’s reference to the “riffraff” at Hooligans. He had a low opinion of the gathering of exiles. I wondered more than ever what the fae were doing in Monroe, what they were plotting and planning. It couldn’t be anything good. And I thought of Sandra Pelt, still out there somewhere and determined to see me die.

  When my head was exhausted, I let my hands take over. I put the leftover food away, transferring it from the pretty serving pieces to Ziploc bags. I washed the epergne and a couple of cut-glass bowls. I glanced out the window as I rinsed them, which was how I came to observe two gray streaks crossing the yard at great speed. I could not identify what I’d seen, and I almost called animal control. But then I realized the creatures were pursuing the half-demon lawyer, and at the speed they were moving, they must already be far away. Besides, it wouldn’t be wise to try to lure anything that could move like that into a cage in the back of a pickup truck. I hoped Mr. Cataliades had his running shoes on. I hadn’t checked.

  Just when I got everything cleaned up and had changed into my cutoffs and a brown tank top, Sam called. There were no bar sounds in the background: no chink of ice in glasses, no juke box, no babble of conversation. He must be in his trailer. But it was Saturday, late in the afternoon, when Merlotte’s would be getting busy. Maybe he had a date with Jannalynn?

  “Sookie,” he said, and his voice sounded funny. My stomach instantly tied up in a knot. “Can you run into town? Come by the trailer. Someone dropped off a package for you at the bar.”

  “Who?” I asked. I was looking at the living room mirror as I talked to Sam, and I saw that I looked tense and frightened.