Sookie 10 Dead in the Family (24 page)

Then I had another unwelcome thought, and my mouth went dry. “If Appius Livius isn’t having sex with Alexei, who
is
he having sex with?” I asked in a small voice.

“I know this is your business, since we’re married—something I’ve insisted on and you’ve belittled,” Eric said, and the bitterness was back in his voice. “I can only tell you that I’m not having sex with my maker. But I would if he told me that was what he wanted. I would have no choice.”

I tried to think of a way to round this conversation off, escape with some dignity. “Eric, you’re busy with your visitors.” Busy in a way I’d never imagined. “I’m going to that meeting at Alcide’s Monday night. I’ll tell you what happens, when and if you call me. There are a couple of things I need to bring you up to speed on, if you ever have a chance to come to my place to talk.” Like Dermot appearing on my doorstep. That was a story Eric would be interested to hear, and God knows I wanted to tell him about it. But now was not the right time.

“If they stay until Tuesday, I’m going to see you no matter what they’re doing,” Eric told me. He sounded a little more like himself. “We’ll make love. I feel like buying you a present.”

“That sounds like a great night to me,” I said, feeling a surge of hope. “I don’t need a present, just you. So I’ll see you Tuesday, no matter what. That’s what you said, right?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Okay then, until Tuesday.”

“I love you,” Eric said in a drained voice. “And you are my wife, in the only way that matters to me.”

“Love you, too,” I said, passing on the last half of his closing statement because I didn’t know what it meant. I got up to go, and Pam appeared by my side to walk me to my car. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Eric get up and walk over to the Boudreaux table to make sure his important visitors were happy.

Pam said, “He’ll ruin Eric if he stays.”

“How so?”

“The boy will kill again, and we won’t be able to cover it up. He can escape if you so much as blink. He has to be watched constantly. Yet Ocella argues with himself about putting the boy down.”

“Pam, let Ocella decide,” I warned her. I thought since we were by ourselves I could take the huge liberty of calling Eric’s maker by his personal name. “I’m serious. Eric’ll have to let him kill you if you take Alexei out.”

“You care, don’t you?” Pam was unexpectedly touched.

“You’re my bud,” I said. “Of course I care.”

“We are friends,” Pam said.

“You know it.”

“This isn’t going to end well,” Pam said, as I got in my car.

I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

She was right.

I ate a Little Debbie cinnamon roll when I got home, just because I thought I deserved one. I was so worried I couldn’t even think of going to bed just yet. Alexei had given me his own personal nightmare. I’d never heard of a vampire (or any other being, human or not) being able to transmit a memory like that. It struck me as peculiarly horrible that it should be Alexei who was so “gifted,” when he had such a ghastly memory to share. I went though the royal family’s excruciating ordeal again. I could understand why the boy was the way he was. But I could also understand why he might have to be—put to sleep. I pushed up from the table, feeling thoroughly exhausted. I was ready for bed. But my plan got altered when the doorbell rang.

You’d think, living out in the country at the end of a long driveway through the woods, that I would have plenty of warning of guests. But that wasn’t always the case, especially with supes. I didn’t recognize the woman I saw through the peephole, but I knew she was a vampire. That meant she couldn’t come in without being invited, so it was safe to find out why she was there. I opened the door, feeling mostly curious.

“Hi, can I help you?” I asked.

She looked me up and down. “Are you Sookie Stackhouse?”

“I am.”

“You e-mailed me.”

Alexei had blown out my brain cells. I was slow tonight. “Judith Vardamon?”

“The same.”

“So Lorena was your sire? Your maker?”

“She was.”

“Please come in,” I said, and stepped aside. I might have been making a big mistake, but I’d almost given up hope that Judith would respond to my message. Since she’d come all the way here from Little Rock, I thought I owed her that much trust.

Judith raised her eyebrows and stepped over my threshold. “You must love Bill, or else you’re a fool,” she said.

“Neither, I hope. You want some TrueBlood?”

“Not now, thank you.”

“Please, have a seat.”

I sat on the edge of the recliner while Judith took the couch. I thought it was incredible that Lorena had “made” both Bill and Judith. I wanted to ask a lot of questions, but I didn’t want to offend or irritate this vampire, who’d already done me a huge favor.

“Do you know Bill?” I said, to kick off the talk we had to have.

“Yes, I know him.” She seemed cautious, which was odd when I considered how much stronger she was than I.

“You’re the younger sister?” She looked to be about thirty, or at least that had been her death age. She had dark brown hair and blue eyes, and she was short and pleasantly round. She was one of the most nonthreatening vampires I’d ever met, at least superficially. And she looked oddly familiar.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Lorena turned you after she turned Bill? Why’d she pick you?”

“You were Bill’s lover for some months, I gather? Reading between the lines of your message?” she asked in turn.

“Yes, I was. I’m with someone else now.”

“How is it that he never told you how he came to meet Lorena?”

“I don’t know. His choice.”

“Very strange.” She looked openly distrustful.

“You can think it’s strange till the cows come home,” I said. “I don’t know why Bill didn’t tell me, but he didn’t. If you want to tell me, fine. Tell me. But that’s not really important. The important thing is that Bill’s not getting well. He got bitten by a fairy with silver-tipped teeth. If he has your blood, he might get over it.”

“Did Bill perhaps hint to you that you should ask me?”

“No, ma’am, he didn’t. But I hate to see him hurting.”

“Has he mentioned my name?”

“Ah. No. I found out by myself so I could get in touch with you. It seems to me that if you’re Lorena’s get, too, you must have known he was suffering. I find myself wondering why you haven’t shown up before.”

“I’ll tell you why.” Judith’s voice was ominous.

Oh, great, another tale of pain and suffering. I knew I wasn’t going to like this story.

I was right.

Judith began her story by asking me a question. “Have you ever met Lorena?”

“Yes,” I said, and left it at that. Evidently, Judith didn’t know exactly how I’d met Lorena, which had been a few seconds before I drove a stake through her heart and ended her long, nasty life.

“Then you know she’s ruthless.”

I nodded.

“You need to know why I’ve stayed away from Bill all these years, when I’m very fond of him,” Judith said. “Lorena has had a hard life. I wouldn’t necessarily believe everything she’s told me, but I’ve heard confirmation of a few parts of it from others.” Judith wasn’t seeing me anymore; she was looking past me, down the years, I guess.

“How old was she?” I said, just to keep the story rolling.

“By the time Lorena met Bill she had been a vampire for many decades. She had been turned in 1788 by a man named Solomon Brunswick. He met her in a brothel in New Orleans.”

“He met her in the obvious way?”

“Not exactly. He was there to take blood from another whore, one who specialized in the odder desires of men. Compared to some of her other customers, a little bite wasn’t anything too remarkable.”

“Had Solomon been a vampire a long time?” I was curious despite myself. Vampires as living history. Well, since they’d come out of the coffin, they’d added a lot to college courses. Bring a vampire to class to tell his or her story, and you got great attendance.

“Solomon had been a vampire for twenty years by then. He became a vampire by accident. He was a sort of tinker. He sold pots and pans, and he mended broken ones. He had other goods that were hard to find in New England then: needles, thread, odds and ends like that. He took his horse and cart from town to town and farm to farm, all by himself. Solomon encountered one of us while he camped in the woods one night. He told me that he survived the first encounter, but the vampire followed him during the night to his next camp and attacked him again. This second attack was a critical one. Solomon was one of the unfortunates who get turned accidentally. Since the vampire who drank from him left him for dead, unaware of the change—or at least, I like to think so—Solomon was untrained and had to learn all by himself.”

“Sounds really awful,” I said, and I meant that.

She nodded. “It must have been. He worked his way down to New Orleans to avoid people who wondered why he hadn’t aged. Where he came upon Lorena. After he’d had his meal, he was leaving out the back when he spotted her in the dark courtyard. She was with a man. The customer tried to leave without paying, and in the blink of an eye Lorena seized him and cut his throat.”

That sounded like the Lorena I’d known.

“Solomon was impressed with her savagery and excited by the fresh blood. He grabbed the dying man and drained him, and when he threw the body into the yard of the next house, Lorena was impressed and fascinated. She wanted to be like he was.”

“That sounds about right.”

Judith smiled faintly. “She was illiterate but tenacious and a tremendous survivor. He was far more intelligent, but he had poor killing skills. By then, he had figured some things out, and so he was able to bring her over. They took blood from each other sometimes, and that gave them the courage to find others like us, to learn what they needed to learn to live well instead of merely surviving. The two of them practiced how to be successful vampires, tested the limits of their new natures, and made an excellent team.”

“So Solomon was your grandfather, since he begat Lorena,” I said biblically. “What happened after that?”

“Eventually, the bloom went off the rose,” Judith said. “Makers and their children stay together longer than a merely sexual couple but not forever. Lorena betrayed Solomon. She was caught with the half-drained body of a dead child, but she was able to play a human woman pretty convincingly. She told the men who grabbed her that Solomon was the one who’d killed the child, that he’d made her carry the body, so the blood was all over her. Solomon barely got out of the town alive—they were in Natchez, Mississippi. He never saw Lorena again. He’s never met Bill, either. Lorena found him after the War between the States.

“As Bill later told me, one night Lorena was wandering through this area. It was much harder then to stay concealed, especially in rural areas. There weren’t as many people to hunt you down, true, and there was little or no communication. But strangers were conspicuous and with the thinner population, the choices of prey were less. An individual death was noticed more. A body had to be hidden very carefully, or the death meticulously staged. At least there wasn’t much organized law enforcement.”

I reminded myself not to look disgusted. This knowledge was nothing new. That was how vampires had lived until a few years ago.

“Lorena saw Bill and his family through the windows of their house.” Judith looked away. “She fell in love. For several nights, she listened to the family. During the day she would dig a hole in the woods and bury herself. At night, she’d watch.

“Finally, she decided to act. She realized—even Lorena realized—Bill would never forgive her if she killed his children, so she waited until he came out in the middle of the night to find out why the dog wouldn’t stop barking. When Bill came out with his rifle, she crept up behind him and took him.”

I thought of Lorena, so close to my own family, right through the woods. She could have come to my great-great-grandparents’ place just as easily, and my whole family history would have been different.

“She turned him that night, buried him, and helped him resurrect three nights later.”

I couldn’t imagine how shattered Bill must have been. Everything gone in the blink of an eye: his whole life taken and altered and given back to him in a terrible form.

“I guess she took him away from here,” I said.

“Yes, that was essential. She had arranged a death for him. She’d smeared a clearing with his blood and left his gun there and rags from his clothing. He told me it looked as though a panther had gotten him. So they traveled together, and while he was bound to her, he hated her, too. He was miserable with her, but she remained obsessed with him. After thirty years, she tried to make him happier by killing a woman who looked very much like his wife.”

“Oh, gosh,” I said, trying not to feel sick. “You, huh?” That was why her face had been vaguely familiar. I’d seen Bill’s old family pictures.

Judith nodded. “Evidently, Bill saw me entering a neighbor’s house, going to a party with my family. He followed me home and watched me, because the resemblance caught his fancy. When Lorena discovered this new interest, she thought Bill would stay with her if she provided him with a companion.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really, really sorry.”

Judith shrugged. “It wasn’t Bill’s fault, but you’ll understand why I had to think about it before I came in answer to your message. Solomon is in Europe now, or I would have asked him to come with me. I dread seeing Lorena again, and I was afraid. afraid she would be here, afraid you would have asked her to help Bill, too. Or she might have made up this story to bring me here, for all I knew. Is she. Is she around?”

“She’s dead. Didn’t you know?”

Judith’s round blue eyes went wide. She couldn’t be any more pale, but her eyes closed for a long moment. “I felt a strong wrench around eighteen months ago. That was Lorena’s death?”

I nodded.

“That’s why she hasn’t summoned me. Oh, this is wonderful, wonderful!”

Judith looked like a different woman.

“I guess I’m a little surprised that Bill didn’t get in touch with you to tell you.”

“Maybe he thought I would know it. Children and makers are bound. But I wasn’t sure. It seemed too good to be true.” Judith smiled, and she looked suddenly pretty, even with the fangs. “Where is Bill?”

“He’s through the woods.” I pointed in the right direction. “In his old home.”

“I’ll be able to track him once I’m outside,” she said happily. “Oh, to be with him without Lorena near!”

Ah. What?

Before, it had been okay for Judith to sit and talk my ear off, but now all of a sudden, she was ready to take off like a scalded cat. I was sitting there with my eyes narrowed, wondering what I’d done.

“I’ll heal him, and I’m sure he’ll thank you after,” she said, and I felt like I’d been dismissed. “Was Bill there when Lorena died?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Did he suffer much punishment for killing her?”

“He didn’t kill her,” I said. “I did.”

She froze, staring at me as if I’d suddenly announced I was King Kong. She said, “I owe you my freedom. Bill must think very highly of you.”

“I believe he does,” I said. To my embarrassment, she bent to kiss my hand. Her lips were cold.

“Bill and I can be together now,” she said. “Finally! I’ll see you another night to tell you how grateful I am, but now I have to go to him.” And she was out of the house and zipping through the woods to the south before I could say Jack Robinson.

I kind of felt like a very large fist had hit me upside the head.

I would be a total sleaze to feel anything but happy for Bill. Now he could hang around with Judith for centuries, if he wanted to. With the never-aging duplicate of his wife. I made myself smile with gladness.

When looking happy didn’t make me happy, I did twenty jumping jacks, then twenty push-ups.
Okay, that’s better,
I thought, as I lay on my stomach on the living room floor. Now I was ashamed that my arm muscles were trembling. I remembered the workouts the Lady Falcons softball coach had put us through, and I knew Coach Peterson would kick my butt if she could see me now. On the other hand, I wasn’t seventeen anymore.

As I rolled over to lie on my back, I considered that fact soberly. It wasn’t the first occasion I’d felt the passage of time, but it was the first occasion that I’d noticed my body had changed into something a little less efficient. I had to contrast that with the lot of the vampires I knew. At least 99 percent of them had become vamps at the peak of their lives. There were a few who had been younger, like Alexei, and a few who had been older, like the Ancient Pythoness, but most of them had ranged in age from sixteen to thirty-five at the time of their first death. They’d never have to apply for Social Security or Medicare. They’d never need to worry about hip replacements or lung cancer or arthritis.

By the time I reached middle age (if I was so lucky, since my life was what you would call “high risk”), I would be slowing down in perceptible ways. After that, the wrinkles would only grow and deepen, my skin would look looser on my bones and sport a spot or two, and my hair would thin out. My chin would sag a little, and my boobs would, too. My joints would ache when I sat too long in one position. I’d have to get reading glasses.

I might develop high blood pressure. I might have a blocked artery. My heart might beat irregularly. When I got the flu, I would be
very
sick. I’d fear Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, a stroke, pneumonia. the boogie-bears that hid under the beds of the aging.

What if I told Eric I wanted to be with him forever? Assuming he didn’t scream and run as fast as he could in the other direction, assuming he actually changed me, I tried to imagine what being a vampire would be like. I would watch all my friends grow old and die. I would sleep in the hidey-hole in the closet floor myself. If Jason married Michele, she might not like me holding their babies. I would feel the urge to attack people, to bite them; they’d all be walking McBloodburgers to me. I’d think of people as food. I stared up at the ceiling fan and tried to imagine wanting to bite Andy Bellefleur or Holly. Ick.

On the other hand, I’d never be sick again unless someone shot me or bit me with silver, or staked me, or put me out in the sun. I could protect frail humans from danger. I could be with Eric forever. except for that bit where vampire couples usually didn’t stay together all that long.

Okay, I could still be with Eric for a few years.

How would I make my living? I could only take the later shift at Merlotte’s, and that after dark had fallen, if Sam let me keep my job. And Sam, too, would grow old and die. A new owner might not like having a permanent barmaid who could only work one shift. I could go back to college and take night classes and computer classes until I got some kind of degree. In what?

I’d reached the limit of my imagination. I rolled to my knees and rose from the floor, wondering if I was imagining a slight stiffness in my joints.

Sleep was long in coming that night, despite my very long and very scary day. The silence of the house pressed in around me. Claude came home in the wee hours, whistling.

When I got up the next morning, not bright but way too early, I felt sluggish and dispirited. I found two envelopes shoved under my front door on my way to the porch with my coffee. The first note was from Mr. Cataliades, and it had been hand-delivered by his niece Diantha at three a.m., she’d noted on the envelope. I was sorry to miss a chance to talk to Diantha, though I was grateful she hadn’t woken me. I opened that envelope first out of sheer curiosity. “Dear Miss Stackhouse,” Mr. Cataliades wrote. “Here is a check for the amount in Claudine Crane’s account when she passed away. She wanted you to have it.”

Short and to the point, which was more than most people I’d talked to recently. I flipped the check over and found that it was for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

“Oh my God,” I said out loud. “Oh my God.” I dropped it because my fingers suddenly lost their power, and the check drifted down to the porch. I scrambled to retrieve it and read it again to make sure I hadn’t been mistaken.

“Oh,” I said. I was sticking with the classics, because saying anything else seemed to be beyond me. I couldn’t even imagine what I would do with so much money. That was beyond me, too. I had to give myself a little space until I could think about this unexpected legacy with any rational plan.

I carried the amazing check into the house and put it in a drawer, terrified something would happen to it before I got it to the bank. Only when I was sure it was safe did I even think of opening my other note, which was from Bill.