Sookie 04 Dead to the World (23 page)

He was chanting something, he and the concave-cheeked man, even as Mark Stonebrook drove a fist into Eric’s stomach.

A heavy mist began to crawl through the room. The witches, who were fighting with knives or wolf teeth, got the idea, and those who could speak began to add to whatever Mark was saying. The cloud of mist in the room began to get thicker and thicker, until it was impossible to tell friend from foe.

I leaped for the door to escape from the suffocating cloud. This stuff made breathing a real effort. It was like trying to inhale and exhale cotton balls. I extended my hand, but the bit of wall I touched didn’t include a door. It had been right there! I felt a curl of panic in my stomach as I patted frantically, trying to trace the outline of the exit.

Not only did I fail to find the doorjamb, I lost touch with the wall altogether on my next sideways step. I stumbled over a wolf’s body. I couldn’t see a wound, so I got hold of its shoulders and dragged, trying to rescue it from the thick smoke.

The wolf began to writhe and change under my hands, which was pretty disconcerting. Even worse, it changed into a naked Hallow. I didn’t know anyone could change that fast. Terrified, I let go of her immediately and backed away into the cloud. I’d been trying to be a good Samaritan with the wrong victim. A nameless woman, one of the witches, grabbed me from behind with superhuman strength. She tried to grip my neck with one hand while holding my arm with the other, but her hand kept slipping, and I bit her as hard as I could. She might be a witch, and she might be a Were, and she might have drunk a gallon of vamp blood, but she was no warrior. She screamed and released me.

By now I was completely disoriented. Which way was out? I was coughing and my eyes were streaming. The only sense I was sure of was gravity. Sight, hearing, touch: all were affected by the thick white billows, which were getting ever denser. The vampires had an advantage in this situation; they didn’t need to breathe. All the rest of us did. Compared to the thickening atmosphere in the old bakery, the polluted city air outside had been pure and delicious.

Gasping and weeping, I flung my arms out in front of me and tried to find a wall or a doorway, any sort of landmark. A room that had not seemed so large now seemed cavernous. I felt I’d stumbled through yards of nothingness, but that wasn’t possible unless the witches had changed the dimensions of the room, and my prosaic mind just couldn’t accept the possibility. From around me I heard screams and sounds that were muffled in the cloud, but no less frightening. A spray of blood suddenly appeared down the front of my coat. I felt the spatter hit my face. I made a noise of distress that I couldn’t form into words. I knew it wasn’t my blood, and I knew I hadn’t been hurt, but somehow that was hard for me to believe.

Then something fell past me, and as it was on its way to the floor I glimpsed a face. It was the face of Mark Stonebrook, and he was in the process of dying. The smoke closed in around him, and he might as well have been in another city.

Maybe I should crouch, too? The air might be better close to the floor. But Mark’s body was down there, and other things. So much for Mark removing the spell on Eric, I thought wildly. Now we’ll need Hallow. “The best-laid plans of mice and men . . .” Where’d my grandmother gotten that quote? Gerald knocked me sideways as he pushed past in pursuit of something I couldn’t see.

I told myself I was brave and resourceful, but the words rang hollow. I blundered ahead, trying not trip over the debris on the floor. The witches’ paraphernalia, bowls and knives and bits of bone and vegetation that I couldn’t identify, had been scattered in the scuffle. A clear spot opened up unexpectedly, and I could see an overturned bowl and one of the knives on the floor at my feet. I scooped up the knife just before the cloud rolled back over it. I was sure the knife was supposed to be used for some ritual-but I wasn’t a witch, and I needed it to defend myself. I felt better when I had the knife, which was real pretty and felt very sharp.

I wondered what our Wiccans were doing. Could they be responsible for the cloud? I wished I’d gotten to vote.

Our witches, as it turned out, were getting a live feed from the scene of the fight from one of their coven sisters, who was a scryer. (Though she was physically with them, she could see what was happening on the surface of a bowl of water, I learned later.) She could make out more using that method than we could, though why she didn’t see just a bunch of white smoke billowing on the surface of that water, I don’t know.

Anyway, our witches made it rain . . . in the building. Somehow the rain slowly cut back on the cloud cover, and though I felt damp and extremely cold, I also discovered I was close to the inner door, the one leading into the second, large room. Gradually, I became aware that I could see; the room had started to glow with light, and I could discern shapes. One bounded toward me on legs that seemed not-quite-human, and Debbie Pelt’s face snarled at me. What was she doing here? She’d stepped out the door to show the Wiccans which way to find safety, and now she was back in the room.

I don’t know if she could help it or not, or if she’d just gotten swept up in the madness of battle, but Debbie had partially changed. Her face was sprouting fur, and her teeth had begun to lengthen and sharpen. She snapped at my throat, but a convulsion caused by the change made her teeth fall short. I tried to step back, but I stumbled over something on the floor and took a precious second or two to regain my footing. She began to lunge again, her intent unmistakable, and I recalled that I had a knife in my hand. I slashed at her, and she hesitated, snarling.

She was going to use the confusion to settle our score. I wasn’t strong enough to fight a shape-shifter. I’d have to use the knife, though something inside me cringed at the thought.

Then from the tags and tatters of the mist came a big hand stained with blood, and that big hand grabbed Debbie Pelt’s throat and squeezed. And squeezed. Before I could track the hand up the arm to the face of its owner, a wolf leaped from the floor to knock me down.

And sniff my face.

Okay, that was . . . then the wolf on top of me was knocked off and rolling on the floor, snarling and snapping at another wolf. I couldn’t help, because the two were moving so quickly I couldn’t be sure I’d help the right party.

The mist was dispersing at a good rate now, and I could see the room as a whole, though there were still patches of opaque fog. Though I’d been desperate for this moment, I was almost sorry now that it’d arrived. Bodies, both dead and wounded, littered the floor among the paraphernalia of the coven, and blood spattered the walls. Portugal, the handsome young Were from the air force base, lay sprawled in front of me. He was dead. Culpepper crouched beside him, keening. This was a small piece of war, and I hated it.

Hallow was still standing and completely in her human form, bare and smeared with blood. She picked up a wolf and slung it at the wall as I watched. She was magnificent and horrible. Pam was creeping up behind her, and Pam was disheveled and dirty. I’d never seen the vampire so much as ruffled, and I almost didn’t recognize her. Pam launched herself, catching Hallow at the hips and knocking her to the floor. It was as good a tackle as I’d ever seen in years of Friday night football, and if Pam had caught Hallow a little higher up and could have gotten a grip on her, it would have been all over. But Hallow was slippery with the misty rain and with blood, and her arms were free. She twisted in Pam’s grasp and seized Pam’s long straight hair in both hands and pulled, and clumps of the hair came off, attached to a good bit of scalp.

Pam shrieked like a giant teakettle. I’d never heard a noise that loud come out of a throat-in this case not a human throat, but a throat nonetheless. Since Pam was definitely of the “get even” school, she pinned Hallow to the floor by gripping both her upper arms and pressing, pressing, until Hallow was flattened. Since the witch was so strong, it was a terrible struggle, and Pam was hampered by the blood streaming down her face. But Hallow was human, and Pam was not. Pam was winning until one of the witches, the hollow-cheeked man, crawled over to the two woman and bit into Pam’s neck. Both her arms were occupied, and she couldn’t stop him. He didn’t just bite, he drank, and as he drank, his strength increased, as if his battery was getting charged. He was draining right from the source. No one seemed to be watching but me. I scrambled across the limp, furry body of a wolf and one of the vampires to pummel on the hollow-cheeked man, who simply ignored me.

I would have to use the knife. I’d never done something like this; when I’d struck back at someone, it had always been a life-or-death situation, and the life and the death had been mine. This was different. I hesitated, but I had to do something quick. Pam was weakening before my eyes, and she would not be able to restrain Hallow much longer. I took the black-bladed knife with its black handle, and I held it to his throat; I jabbed him, a little.

“Let go of her,” I said. He ignored me.

I jabbed harder, and a stream of scarlet ran down the skin of his neck. He let go of Pam then. His mouth was all covered in her blood. But before I could rejoice that he’d freed her, he spun over while he was still underneath me and came after me, his eyes absolutely insane and his mouth open to drink from me, too. I could feel the yearning in his brain, thewant, want, want.I put the knife to his neck again, and just as I was steeling myself, he lunged forward and pushed the blade into his own neck.

His eyes went dull almost instantly.

He’d killed himself by way of me. I don’t think he’d ever realized the knife was there.

This was a close killing, a right-in-my-face killing, and I’d been the instrument of death, however inadvertently.

When I could look up, Pam was sitting on Hallow’s chest, her knees pinning Hallow’s arms, and she was smiling. This was so bizarre that I looked around the room to find the reason, and I saw that the battle appeared to be over. I couldn’t imagine how long it had lasted, that loud but invisible struggle in the thick mist, but now I could see the results all too clearly.

Vampires don’t kill neat, they kill messy. Wolves, too, are not known for their table manners. Witches seemed to manage to splash a little less blood, but the end result was really horrible, like a very bad movie, the kind you were ashamed you’d paid to see.

We appeared to have won.

At the moment, I hardly cared. I was really tired, mentally and physically, and that meant all the thoughts of the humans, and some of the thoughts of the Weres, rolled around in my brain like clothes in a dryer. There was nothing I could do about it, so I let the tag ends drift around in my head while, using the last of my strength, I pushed off of the corpse. I lay on my back and stared up at the ceiling. Since I had no thoughts, I filled up with everyone else’s. Almost everyone was thinking the same kind of thing I was: how tired they were, how bloody the room was, how hard it was to believe they’d gone through a fight like this and survived. The spiky-haired boy had reverted to his human form, and he was thinking how much more he’d enjoyed it than he thought he should. In fact, his unclothed body was showing visible evidence of how much he’d enjoyed it, and he was trying to feel embarrassed about that. Mostly, he wanted to track down that cute young Wiccan and find a quiet corner. Hallow was hating Pam, she was hating me, she was hating Eric, she was hating everyone. She began to try to mumble a spell to make us all sick, but Pam gave her an elbow in the neck, and that shut her right up.

Debbie Pelt got up from the floor in the door and surveyed the scene. She looked amazingly pristine and energetic, as if she’d never had a furry face and wouldn’t even begin to know how to kill someone. She picked her way through the bodies strewn on the floor, some living and some not, until she found Alcide, still in his wolf form. She squatted down to check him over for wounds, and he growled at her in clear warning. Maybe she didn’t believe he would attack, or maybe she just fooled herself into believing it, but she laid her hand on his shoulder, and he bit her savagely enough to draw blood. She shrieked and scrambled back. For a few seconds, she crouched there, cradling her bleeding hand and crying. Her eyes met mine and almost glowed with hatred. She would never forgive me. She would blame me the rest of her life for Alcide’s discovery of her dark nature. She’d toyed with him for two years, pulling him to her, pushing him back, concealing from him the elements of her nature he would never accept, but wanting him with her nonetheless. Now it was all over.

And this was my fault?

But I wasn’t thinking in Debbie terms, I was thinking like a rational human being, and of course Debbie Pelt was not. I wished the hand that had caught her neck during the struggle in the cloud had choked her to death. I watched her back as she pushed open the door and strode into the night, and at that moment I knew Debbie Pelt would be out to get me for the rest of her life. Maybe Alcide’s bite would get infected and she’d get blood poisoning?

In reflex action, I chastised myself: That was an evil thought; God didn’t want us to wish ill on anyone. I just hoped He was listening in to Debbie, too, the way you hope the highway patrolman who stopped you for a ticket is also going to stop the guy behind you who was trying to pass you on the double yellow line.

The redheaded Were, Amanda, came over to me. She was bitten here and there, and she had a swollen lump on her forehead, but she was quietly beaming. “While I’m in a good mood, I want to apologize for insulting you,” she said directly. “You came through in this fight. Even if you can tolerate vamps, I won’t hold that against you anymore. Maybe you’ll see the light.” I nodded, and she strolled away to check on her packmates.

Pam had tied up Hallow, and Pam, Eric, and Gerald had gone to kneel beside someone on the other side of the room. I wondered vaguely what was happening over there, but Alcide was shimmering back into human form, and when he’d oriented himself, he crawled over to me. I was too exhausted to care that he was naked, but I had a floating idea that I should try to remember the sight, since I’d want to recall it at my leisure later.