Sookie 06 Definitely Dead (17 page)

He’d come into the bar, and I’d been fascinated with the discovery that I couldn’t hear his thoughts. Then later the same evening, I’d rescued him from drainers. I sighed, thinking how good it had been until he’d been recalled by his maker, Lorena, now also definitely dead.

I shook myself. This wasn’t the time for a trip down memory lane. This was the time for action and decision. I decided to start with the clothes.

After fifteen minutes, I realized that the clothes were going to be easy. I was going to give most of them away. Not only was my taste radically different from my cousin’s, but her hips and breasts had been smaller and her coloring had been different from mine. Hadley had liked dark, dramatic clothes, and I was altogether a lower-key person. I did sort of wonder about one or two of the black wispy blouses and skirts, but when I tried them on, I looked just like one of the fangbangers who hung around Eric’s bar. Not the image I was going for. I put only a handful of tank tops and a couple of pairs of shorts and sleep pants in the “keep” pile.

I found a large box of garbage bags and used those to pack the clothes away. As I finished with each bag, I set it out on the gallery to keep the apartment clear of clutter.

It was about noon when I started to work, and the hours passed quickly after I found out how to operate Hadley’s CD player. A lot of the music she had was by artists who’d never been high on my list, no big surprise there-but it was interesting listening. She had a horde of CDs: No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, Eminem, Usher.

I’d started on the drawers in the bedroom when it just began turning dark. I paused for a moment to stand on the gallery in the mild evening, and watch the city wake up for the dark hours ahead. New Orleans was a city of the night now. It had always been a place with a brawling and brazen nightlife, but now it was such a center for the undead that its entire character had changed. A lot of the jazz on Bourbon Street was played these days by hands that had last seen sunlight decades before. I could catch a faint spatter of notes on the air, the music of faraway revels. I sat on a chair on the gallery and listened for a while, and I hoped I’d get to see some of the city while I was here. New Orleans is like no other place in America, both before the vampire influx and after it. I sighed and realized I was hungry. Of course, Hadley didn’t have any food in the apartment, and I wasn’t about to start drinking blood. I hated to ask Amelia for anything else. Tonight, whoever came to pick me up to go to the queen’s might be willing to take me to the grocery store. Maybe I should shower and change?

As I turned to go back into the apartment, I spotted the mildewed towels I’d set out the night before. They smelled much stronger, which surprised me. I would have thought the smell would have diminished by now. Instead, my breath caught in the back of my throat in disgust as I picked up the basket to bring it inside. I intended to wash them. In a corner of the kitchen was one of those washer/dryer sets with the dryer on top. Like a tower of cleanliness.

I tried to shake out the towels, but they’d dried in a stiff crumpled mass. Exasperated, I jerked at the protruding edge of one towel, and with a little resistance, the clots of stuff binding the folds together gave, and the medium blue terrycloth spread out before my eyes.

“Oh,shit” I said out loud in the silent apartment. “Oh,no .”

The fluid that had dried and clumped on the towels was blood.

“Oh, Hadley,” I said. “What did you do?”

The smell was as awful as the shock. I sat down at the small dining table in the kitchen area. Flakes of dried blood had showered onto the floor and clung to my arms. I couldn’t read the thoughts of a towel, for God’s sake. My condition was of no help to me whatsoever. I needed … a witch. Like the one I’d chastened and sent away. Yep, just like that one.

But first I needed to check the whole apartment, see if it held any more surprises.

Oh, yeah. It did.

The body was in the walk-in closet in the hall.

There was no odor at all, though the corpse, a young man, had probably been there for the whole time my cousin had been dead. Maybe this young man had been a demon? But he didn’t look anything like Diantha or Gladiola, or Mr. Cataliades, for that matter. If the towels had started to smell, you would think … oh well, maybe I’d just gotten lucky. This was something that I would have to find the answer to, and I suspected it lay downstairs.

I knocked on Amelia’s door. She answered it immediately, and I saw over her shoulder that her place, though of course laid out exactly like Hadley’s, was full of light colors and energy. She liked yellow, and cream, and coral, and green. Her furniture was modern and heavily cushioned, and the wooden bits were polished to the nth degree. As I’d suspected, Amelia’s place was spotless.

“Yes?” she said, in a subdued kind of way.

“Okay,” I said, as if I were laying down an olive branch. “I’ve got a problem, and I suspect you do, too.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked. Her open face was closed now, as if keeping her expression blank would keep me out of her mind.

“You put a stasis spell on the apartment, right? To keep everything exactly as it was. Before you warded it against intruders?”

“Yes,” she said cautiously. “I told you that.”

“No one’s been in that apartment since the night Hadley died?”

“I can’t give you my word on it, because I suppose a very good witch or wizard could have breached my spell,” she said. “But to the best of my knowledge, no one’s been in there.”

“So you don’t know that you sealed a body in there?”

I don’t know what I expected in the way of reaction, but Amelia was pretty cool about it. “Okay,” she said steadily. She may have gulped. “Okay. Who is it?” Her eyelids fluttered up and down afew extra times.

Maybe she wasn’t quite so cool.

“I really don’t know,” I said carefully. “You’ll have to come see.” As we went up the stairs, I said, “He was killed there, and the mess was cleaned up with towels. They were in the hamper.” I told her about the condition of the towels.

“Holly Cleary tells me you saved her son’s life,” Amelia said.

That took me aback. It made me feel awkward, too. “The police would have found him,” I said. “I just accelerated it a little.”

“The doctor told Holly if the little boy hadn’t gotten to the hospital when he did, the bleeding in his brain might not have been stopped in time,” Amelia said.

“That’s good then,” I said, uncomfortable in the extreme. “How’s Cody doing?”

“Well,” the witch said. “He’s going to be well.”

“In the meantime, we got a problem right here,” I reminded her.

“Okay, let’s see the corpse.” Amelia worked hard to keep her voice level.

I kind of liked this witch.

I led her to the closet. I’d left the door open. She stepped inside. She didn’t make a sound. She came back out with a slightly green tinge to her glowing tan and leaned against the wall.

“He’s a Were,” she said, a moment later. The spell she’d put on the apartment had kept everything fresh, as part of the way it worked. The blood had begun to smell a little before the spell had been cast, and when I’d entered the apartment, the spell had been broken. Now the towels reeked of decay. The body didn’t have an odor yet, which surprised me a little, but I figured it would any minute. Surely the body would decompose rapidly now that it had been released from Amelia’s magic, and she was obviously trying not to point out how well that had worked.

“You know him?”

“Yes, I know him,” she said. “The supernatural community, even in New Orleans, isn’t that big. It’s Jake Purifoy. He did security for the queen’s wedding.”

I had to sit down. I exited the walk-in closet and slid down the wall until I was sitting propped up, facing Amelia. She sat against the opposite wall. I hardly knew where to start asking questions.

“That’s would be when she married the King of Arkansas?” I recalled what Felicia had said, and the wedding photo I’d seen in Al Cumberland’s album. Had that been the queen, under that elaborate headdress? When Quinn had mentioned making the arrangements for a wedding in New Orleans, was this the wedding he’d meant?

“The queen, according to Hadley, is bi,” Amelia told me. “So yes, she married a guy. Now they have an alliance.”

“They can’t have kids,” I said. I know, that was obvious, but I wasn’t getting this alliance thing.

“No, but unless someone stakes them, they’ll live forever, so passing things on is not a big issue,” Amelia said. “It takes months, even years, of negotiations to hammer out the rules for such a wedding. The contract can take just as long. Then they both gotta sign it. That’s a big ceremony, takes place right before the wedding. They don’t actually have to spend their lives together, you know, but they have to visit a couple of times a year. Conjugal-type visit.”

Fascinating as this was, it was beside the point right now.

“So this guy in the closet, he was part of the security force.” Had he worked for Quinn? Hadn’t Quinn said that one of his workers had gone missing in New Orleans?

“Yeah, I wasn’t asked to the wedding, of course, but I helped Hadley into her dress. He came to pick her up.”

“Jake Purifoy came to pick Hadley up for the wedding.”

“Yep. He was all dressed up that night.”

“And that was the night of the wedding.”

“Yeah, the night before Hadley died.”

“Did you see them leave?”

“No, I just … No. I heard the car pull up. I looked out my living room window and saw Jake coming in. I knew him already, kind of casually. I had a friend who used to date him. I went back to whatever I was doing, watching TV I think, and I heard the car leave after a while.”

“So he may not have left at all.”

She stared at me, her eyes wide. “Could be,” she said at last, sounding as if her mouth were dry.

“Hadley was by herself when he came to pick her up … right?”

“When I came down from her apartment, I left her there alone.”

“All I came to do,” I said, mainly to my barefeet , “was clean out my cousin’s apartment. I didn’t much like her anyway. Now I’m stuck with a body. The last time I got rid of a body,” I told the witch, “I had a big strong helper, and we wrapped it in a shower curtain.”

“You did?” Amelia said faintly. She didn’t look too happy to be the recipient of this information.

“Yes.” I nodded. “We didn’t kill him. We just had to get rid of the body. We thought we’d be blamed for the death, and I’m sure we would have been.” I stared at my toenail polish some more. It had been a good job when it started out, a nice bright pink, but now I needed to refresh the paint job or remove it. I stopped trying to think about other things and resumed my gloomy contemplation of the body. He was lying in the closet, stretched out on the floor, pushed under the lowest shelf. He’d been covered with a sheet. Jake Purifoy had been a handsome man, I suspected. He’d had dark brown hair, and a muscular build. Lots of body hair. Though he’d been dressed for a formal wedding, and Amelia had said he looked very nice, now he was naked. A minor question: where were his clothes?

“We could just call the queen,” Amelia said. “After all, the body’s been here, and Hadley either killed him or hid the body. No way could he have died the night she went out with Waldo to the cemetery.”

“Why not?” I had a sudden, awful thought.

“You got a cell phone?” I asked, rising to my feet as I spoke. Amelia nodded. “Call the queen’s place. Tell them to send someone overright now .”

“What?” Her eyes were confused, even as her fingers were punching in numbers.

Looking into the closet, I could see the fingers of the corpse twitch.

“He’s rising,” I said quietly.

It only took a second for her to get it. “This is Amelia Broadway on Chloe Street! Send an older vampire over hereright now ,” she yelled into the phone. “New vamp rising!” She was on her feet now, and we were running for the door.

We didn’t make it.

Jake Purifoy was after us, and he was hungry.

Since Amelia was behind me (I’d had a head start) he dove to grab her ankle. She shrieked as she went down, and I spun around to help her. I didn’t think at all, because I would have kept on going out the door if I had. The new vamp’s fingers were wrapped around Amelia’s bare ankle like a shackle, and he was pulling her toward him across the smooth laminated-wood floor. She was clawing at the floor with her fingers, trying to find something to stop her progress toward his mouth, which was wide open with the fangs extended full length, oh God! I grabbed her wrists and began pulling. I hadn’t known Jake Purifoy in life, so I didn’t know what he’d been like. And I couldn’t find anything human left in his face, anything I could appeal to. “Jake!” I yelled. “Jake Purifoy! Wake up!” Of course, that didn’t do a damn bit of good. Jake had changed into something that was not a nightmare but a permanent otherness, and he could not be roused from it: he was it. He was making a kind ofgnarr-gnarr-gnarr noise, the hungriest sound I’d ever heard, and then he bit down on the calf of Amelia’s leg, and she screamed.

It was like a shark had hold of her. If I yanked at her any more, he might take out the bit his teeth had clamped on. He was sucking on the leg wound now, and I kicked him in the head with my heel, cursing my lack of shoes. I put everything I had behind it, and it didn’t faze the new vampire in the least. He made a noise of protest, but continued sucking, and the witch kept shrieking with pain and shock. There was a candlestick on the table behind one of the loveseats, a tall glass candlestick with lots of heft to it. I plucked the candle from it, grasped it with both hands, and brought it down as hard as I could on Jake Purifoy’s head. Blood began to run from his wound, very sluggishly; that’s how vampires bleed. The candlestick came apart with the blow, and I was left with empty hands and a furious vampire. He raised his blood-smeared face to glare at me, and I hope I’m never on the receiving end of another look like that again in my life. His face held the mindless rage of a mad dog.

But he’d let go of Amelia’s leg, and she began to scramble away. It was obvious she was hurt, and it was kind of a slow scramble, but she made the effort. Tears were streaming down her face and her breathing was all over the place, harsh in the night’s silence. I could hear a siren drawing closer and I hoped it was coming here. It would be too late, though. The vampire launched himself from the floor to knock me down, and I didn’t have time to think about anything.