Sookie 10 Dead in the Family (23 page)

The phone rang, and I held my breath. After the second ring, Eric answered. “The pack meeting has been set,” I blurted.

“Sookie,” he said. “Can you come here?”

On my drive to Shreveport, I wondered at least four times if I was doing the right thing. But I concluded that whether I was right or wrong (in running to see Eric when he asked me to) was simply a dead issue. We were both on the ends of the line stretched between us, a line spun from blood. It trumped how we felt about each other at any given moment. I knew he was tired and desperate. He knew I was angry, uneasy, hurt. I wondered, though. If I’d called him and said the same thing, would he have hopped into his car (or into the sky) and arrived on my doorstep?

They were all at Fangtasia, he’d said.

I was shocked to see how few cars were parked in front of the only vampire bar in Shreveport. Fangtasia was a huge tourist draw in a town that was boasting a tourist increase, and I’d expected it to be packed. There were almost as many cars parked in the employee parking at the back as there were at the main door. That had never happened before.

Maxwell Lee, an African-American businessman who also happened to be a vampire, was on duty at the rear entrance, and that was a first, too. The rear door had never been specially guarded, because the vampires were so sure they could take care of themselves. Yet here he was, wearing his usual three-piece suit but doing a task he normally would have considered beneath him. He didn’t look resentful; he looked worried.

I said, “Where are they?”

He jerked his head toward the main room of the bar. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said, and I knew Eric’s maker’s visit wasn’t going well.

So often having out-of-town visitors is awkward, huh? You take them to see the local sights, you try to feed them and keep them entertained, but then you’re really wishing they would leave. It wasn’t hard to see that Eric was on his last nerve. He was sitting in a booth with Appius Livius Ocella and Alexei. Of course, Alexei looked too young to be in a bar, and that added to the absurdity of the moment.

“Good evening,” I said stiffly. “Eric, you wanted to see me?”

Eric scooted over closer to the wall so I’d have plenty of room, and I sat by him. Appius Livius and Alexei both greeted me, Appius with a strained smile and Alexei with more ease. When we were all together, I discovered that being close to them relaxed the tense thread inside me, the thread that bound us all together.

“I’ve missed you,” Eric said so quietly that at first I thought I’d imagined it.

I wouldn’t refer to the fact that he’d been completely out of touch for days. He knew that.

It took all my self-control to bite back a few choice words. “As I was trying to tell you over the phone, the pack meeting about Basim has been set for Monday night.”

“Where and when?” he said, and there was a note in his voice that let me know he was not a happy camper. Well, he could pitch his tent right alongside mine.

“At Alcide’s house. The one that used to be his dad’s. At eight o’clock.”

“And Jason’s going with you? Without a doubt?”

“I haven’t talked to him yet, but I left him a message.”

“You’ve been angry with me.”

“I’ve been worried about you.” I couldn’t tell him anything about how I’d felt that he didn’t already know.

“Yes,” Eric said. His voice was empty.

“Eric is an excellent host,” the tsarevitch said, as if I expected a report.

I scratched up a smile to offer the boy. “That’s good to hear, Alexei. What have you two been doing? I don’t think you’ve ever been to Shreveport before.”

“No,” Appius Livius said in his curious accent. “We hadn’t been here to visit. It’s a nice little city. My older son has been doing his best to keep us busy and out of trouble.”

Okay, that had been a tad on the sarcastic side. I could tell from Eric’s tension that he hadn’t entirely succeeded in the “keeping them out of trouble” part of his agenda.

“The World Market is fun. You can get stuff from all over the world there. And Shreveport was the capitol of the Confederacy for a while.” Geez Louise, I needed to do better than that. “If you go to the Municipal Auditorium, you can see Elvis’s dressing room,” I said brightly. I wondered if Bubba ever visited there to see his old stomping grounds.

“I had a very good teenager last night,” Alexei said, matching my cheerful tone. As though he’d said he’d run a red light.

I opened my mouth and nothing came out. If I said the wrong thing, I might be dead right then and there. “Alexei,” I said, sounding much calmer than I felt, “you have to watch it. That’s against the law here. Your maker and Eric could both suffer for it.”

“When I was with my human family, I could do anything I wanted,” Alexei said. I really couldn’t read his voice at all. “I was so sick, they indulged me.”

Eric twitched.

“I can sure understand that,” I said. “Any family would be tempted to do that with a sick child. But since you’re well now, and you’ve had lots of years to mature, I know you understand that doing exactly what you want to do is not a good plan.” I thought of at least twenty other things I could have said, but I stopped right there. And that was a good thing. Appius Livius looked directly into my eyes and nodded almost imperceptibly.

“I don’t look grown up,” Alexei said.

Again, too many options on what I could say. The boy—the old, old, boy—definitely expected me to answer. “No, and it’s an awful pity what happened to you and your family. But—”

And Alexei reached over, took my hand, and
showed me
what had happened to him and his family. I saw the cellar, the royal family, the doctor, the maid, facing the men who had come to kill them, and I heard the guns fire, and the bullets found their marks; or in the case of the women, they didn’t, since the royal women had sewn jewels into their clothes for the escape that never came about. The jewels saved their lives for all of a few seconds, until the soldiers killed each groaning and bleeding and screaming individual. His mother, his father, his sisters, his doctor, his mother’s maid, the cook, his father’s valet. and his dog. And after the shooting, the soldiers went around with bayonets.

I thought I was going to throw up. I swayed where I sat, and Eric’s cold arm went around me. Alexei had let go, and I was never gladder of anything in my life. I would not have touched the child again for anything.

“You see,” Alexei said triumphantly. “You see! I should be free to go my own way.”

“No,” I said. And I was proud that my voice was firm. “No matter how we suffer, we have an obligation to others. We have to be unselfish enough to try to live in the right way, so others can get through their own lives without us fouling them up.”

Alexei looked rebellious. “That’s what Master says, too,” he muttered. “More or less.”

“Master is right,” I said, though the words tasted bad in my mouth.

“Master” waved for the bartender to come over. Felicia slunk up to the table. She was tall and pretty and as gentle as a vampire can be. She had some fresh scars on her neck. “What can I get you-all?” she said. “Sookie, can I bring you a beer or.?”

“Some iced tea would be great, Felicia,” I said.

“And some TrueBlood for all of you?” she asked the vampires. “Or, we do have a bottle of Royalty.”

Eric’s eyes closed, and Felicia realized her blunder. “Okay,” she said briskly. “TrueBlood for Eric, tea for Sookie.”

“Thank you!” I said, smiling up at the bartender.

Pam strode up to the table. She was trailing the gauzy black costume she wore at Fangtasia, and she was as close to panic as I’d ever seen her. “Excuse me,” she said, bowing in the direction of the guests. “Eric, Katherine Boudreaux is visiting Fangtasia tonight. She’s with Sallie and a small party.”

Eric looked as if he were going to explode. “Tonight,” he said, and one word spoke volumes. “With much regret, Ocella, I must ask you and Alexei to go back to my office.”

Appius Livius got up without asking for further explanation, and Alexei, to my surprise, followed him without any questions. If Eric had been in the habit of breathing, I would say that he exhaled with relief when his visitors had left his sight. He said a few things in an ancient tongue, but I didn’t know which one.

Then a stout, attractive blonde in her forties was standing by the table, another woman right behind her.

“You must be Katherine Boudreaux,” I said pleasantly. “I’m Sookie Stackhouse; I’m Eric’s girlfriend.”

“Hi, honey. I’m Katherine,” she said. “This is my partner, Sallie. We’re here with some friends who were curious about my job. I try to visit all the vampire workplaces during the year, and we hadn’t been to Fangtasia in months. Since I’m based right here in Shreveport, I ought to make it in more often.”

“We’re so glad you’re here,” Eric said smoothly. He sounded like his normal self. “Sallie, always good to see you. How’s the tax business?”

Sallie, a slim brunette whose hair was just beginning to gray, laughed. “Taxes are booming, as always,” she said. “You ought to know, Eric, you pay enough of them.”

“It’s good to see our vampire citizens getting along with our human citizens,” Katherine said heartily, looking around the bar, which was so thinly populated it almost wasn’t open. Her blond eyebrows contracted slightly for a moment, but that was the only sign Ms. Boudreaux gave that she noticed Eric’s business was down.

Pam said, “Your table is ready!” She swept her hand toward two tables that had been put together for the party, and the state BVA agent said, “Excuse me, Eric. I’ve gotta go pay attention to my company.”

After a shower of pleasantries and pleased-to-meet-yous, we were finally by ourselves, if sitting in a booth in the middle of a bar can be counted as being by ourselves. Pam started over, but Eric checked her with a raised finger. He took my hand with one of his and rested his forehead on his other hand.

“Can you tell me what’s up with you?” I said bluntly. “This is awful. It’s very hard to have faith in us when I don’t know what’s happening.”

“Ocella has had some business to discuss with me,” Eric said. “Some unwelcome business. And as you saw, my half brother is ailing.”

“Yes, he shared that with me,” I said. It was still hard to believe what I’d seen and suffered with the child, through his memory of the deaths of everyone he’d loved. The tsarevitch of Russia, sole survivor of a mass murder, could use some counseling. Maybe he and Dermot could be in the same therapy group. “You don’t go through something like that and come out Mr. Mental Health, but I’ve never experienced anything like that. I know it must have been hell for him, but I’ve got to say. ”

“You don’t want to go through it, too,” Eric said. “You’re not alone in that. It’s clearest for us: Ocella, me, you. But he can share that with other people, too. It’s not as detailed for them, they tell me. No one wants that memory. We all carry plenty of our own bad memories. I’m afraid that he may not be able to survive as a vampire.” He paused, turning the bottle of TrueBlood around and around on the table. “Apparently, it’s a nightly grind to get Alexei to do the simplest things. And not to do others. You heard his remark about the teenager. I don’t want to go into the details. However. have you read the papers lately, the Shreveport papers?”

“You mean
Alexei
might be responsible for those two murders?” I could only sit there staring at Eric. “The stab wounds, the throats? But he’s so small and young.”

“He’s insane,” Eric said. “Ocella finally told me that Alexei had had episodes like this before—not as severe. It has led him to consider, very reluctantly, giving Alexei the final death.”

“You mean putting him to sleep?” I said, not sure I’d heard him right. “Like a dog?”

Eric looked me straight in the eyes. “Ocella loves the boy, but he cannot be allowed to kill people or other vampires when these fits take him. Such incidents will get into the paper. What if he were caught? What if some Russian recognized him as a result of the notoriety? What would that do to our relationship with the Russian vampires? Most important, Ocella cannot keep track of him every moment. Two times, the boy has gotten out on his own. And two deaths resulted. In my area! He’ll subvert all we’re trying to do here in the United States. Not that my maker cares about my position in this country,” Eric added, a little bitterly.

I gave Eric a sort of heavy pat on the cheek. Not a slap. A heavy pat. “Yeah, let’s not forget the
two dead men
,” I said. “That Alexei murdered, in a painful and horrible way. I mean, I realize that this is all about him and your maker and your personal cred, but let’s spare a tip of the hat to those guys he killed.”

Eric shrugged. He was worried and he was at his wit’s end, and he didn’t care at all about the deaths of two humans. He was probably thankful that Alexei had picked victims who wouldn’t attract much sympathy and whose deaths were easily explained. Gang members killed one another all the time, after all. I gave up on making my point. At least partly because I’d had a thought—if Alexei was capable of turning against his own kind, maybe we could steer him onto Victor?

I shuddered. I was creeping myself out. “So your maker brought Alexei to you hoping that you’d have some bright ideas about keeping your half brother alive, teaching him some self-control?”

“Yes. That’s one of the reasons he’s here.”

“Appius Livius having sex with the kid can’t be helping Alexei’s mental health,” I said, since I simply couldn’t
not
say it.

“Please understand. In Ocella’s time, that was not a consideration,” Eric said. “Alexei would be old enough, in those times. And men of a certain station were free to indulge themselves with very little guilt or question. Ocella doesn’t think in the modern way about such things. As it happens, Alexei has become so. Well, they are not having sex now. Ocella is an honorable man.” Eric sounded very intent, very serious, as if he had to persuade me of his maker’s integrity. And all this concern was about the man who’d murdered him. But if Eric admired Ocella, respected him, didn’t I have to do the same?

And—it popped into my head that Eric wasn’t doing anything for his brother that I wouldn’t do for mine.