Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (127 page)

If you’d asked me, I would’ve had a hard time tracing the steps that had led me to this dangerous place at this dangerous time. I was on the edges of a battle in which both sides were pretty dubious. If I’d fallen in with Hallow’s witches first, I would probably have been convinced that the Weres and the vampires deserved to be eradicated.

At this time a year ago, no one in the world really understood what I was, or cared. I was just Crazy Sookie, the one with the wild brother, a woman others pitied and avoided, to varying degrees. Now here I was, on a freezing street in Shreveport, gripping the hand of a vampire whose face was legendary and whose brain was mush. Was this betterment?

And I was here not for amusement, or improvement, but to reconnoiter for a bunch of supernatural creatures, gathering information on a group of homicidal, blood-drinking, shape-changing witches.

I sighed, I hoped inaudibly. Oh, well. At least no one had hit me.

My eyes closed, and I dropped my shields and reached out with my mind to the building across the street.

Brains, busy busy busy. I was startled at the bundle of impressions I was receiving. Maybe the absence of other humans in the vicinity, or the overwhelming pervasion of magic, was responsible; but some factor had sharpened my other sense to the point of pain. Almost stunned by the flow of information, I realized I had to sort through it and organize it. First, I counted brains. Not literally (“One temporal lobe, two temporal lobes . . .”), but as a thought cluster. I came up with fifteen. Five were in the front room, which had been the showroom of the store, of course. One was in the smallest space, which was most likely the bathroom, and the rest were in the third and largest room, which lay to the rear. I figured it had been the work area.

Everyone in the building was awake. A sleeping brain still gives me a low mumble of a thought or two, in dreaming, but it’s not the same as a waking brain. It’s like the difference between a dog twitching in its sleep and an alert puppy.

To get as much information as possible, I had to get closer. I had never attempted to pick through a group to get details as specific as guilt or innocence, and I wasn’t even sure that was possible. But if any of the people in the building were not evil witches, I didn’t want them to be in the thick of what was to come.

“Closer,” I breathed to Bubba. “But under cover.”

“Yes’m,” he whispered back. “You gonna keep your eyes closed?”

I nodded, and he led me very carefully across the street and into the shadow of the Dumpster that stood about five yards south of the building. I was glad it was cold, because that kept the garbage smell at an acceptable level. The ghosts of the scents of doughnuts and blossoms lay on top of the funk of spoiled things and old diapers that passersby had tossed into the handy receptacle. It didn’t blend happily with the magic smell.

I adjusted, blocked out the assault on my nose, and began listening. Though I’d gotten better at this, it was still like trying to hear twelve phone conversations at once. Some of them were Weres, too, which complicated matters. I could only get bits and pieces.

This was not decisive, but no one had been thinking, “Oh, these demonic witches have trapped me, won’t somebody help?” or “I hear the vampires approaching!” or anything dramatic like that. This sounded like a band of people who knew each other, were at least relaxed in each other’s company, and therefore held the same goals. Even the one who was praying was not in any state of urgency or need. I hoped Hallow wouldn’t sense the crush of my mind, but everyone I’d touched had seemed preoccupied.

“Bubba,” I said, just a little louder than a thought, “you go tell Pam there are fifteen people in there, and as far as I can tell, they’re all witches.”

“Yes’m.”

“You remember how to get to Pam?”

“Yes’m.”

“So you can let go my hand, okay?”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Be silent and careful,” I whispered.

And he was gone. I crouched in the shadow that was darker than the night, beside the smells and cold metal, listening to the witches. Three brains were male, the rest female. Hallow was in there, because one of the women was looking at her and thinking of her . . . dreading her, which kind of made me uneasy. I wondered where they’d parked their cars—unless they flew around on broomsticks, ha ha. Then I wondered about something that should already have crossed my mind.

If they were so darn wary and dangerous, where were their sentries?

At that moment, I was seized from behind.

“
W
HO ARE YOU?” ASKED A THIN VOICE.

Since she had one hand clapped over my mouth and the other was holding a knife to my neck, I couldn’t answer. She seemed to grasp that after a second, because she told me, “We’re going in,” and began to push me toward the back of the building.

I couldn’t have that. If she’d been one of the witches in the building, one of the blood-drinking witches, I couldn’t have gotten away with this, but she was a plain old witch, and she hadn’t watched Sam break up as many bar fights as I had. With both hands, I reached up and grabbed her knife wrist, and I twisted it as hard as I could while I hit her hard with my lower body. Over she went, onto the filthy cold pavement, and I landed right on top of her, pounding her hand against the ground until she released the knife. She was sobbing, the will seeping out of her.

“You’re a lousy lookout,” I said to Holly, keeping my voice low.

“Sookie?” Holly’s big eyes peered out from under a knit watch cap. She’d dressed for utility tonight, but she still had on bright pink lipstick.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“They told me they’d get my boy if I didn’t help them.”

I felt sick. “How long have you been helping them? Before I came to your apartment, asking for help? How long?” I shook her as hard as I could.

“When she came to the bar with her brother, she knew there was another witch there. And she knew it wasn’t you or Sam, after she’d talked to you. Hallow can do anything. She knows everything. Late that night, she and Mark came to my apartment. They’d been in a fight; they were all messed up, and they were mad. Mark held me down while Hallow punched me. She liked that. She saw my picture of my son; she took it and said she could curse him long distance, all the way from Shreveport—make him run out in the traffic or load his daddy’s gun. . . .” Holly was crying by now. I didn’t blame her. It made me sick to think of it, and he wasn’t even my child. “I had to say I’d help her,” Holly whimpered.

“Are there others like you in there?”

“Forced to do this? A few of them.”

That made some thoughts I’d heard more understandable.

“And Jason? He in there?” Though I’d looked at all three of the male brains in the building, I still had to ask.

“Jason is a Wiccan? For real?” She pulled off the watch cap and ran her fingers through her hair.

“No, no, no. Is she holding him hostage?”

“I haven’t seen him. Why on earth would Hallow have Jason?”

I’d been fooling myself all along. A hunter would find my brother’s remains someday: it’s always hunters, or people walking their dogs, isn’t it? I felt a falling away beneath my feet, as if the ground had literally dropped out from under me, but I called myself back to the here and now, away from emotions I couldn’t afford to feel until I was in a safer place.

“You have to get out of here,” I said in the lowest voice I could manage. “You have to get out of this area
now
.”

“She’ll get my son!”

“I guarantee she won’t.”

Holly seemed to read something in the dim view she had of my face. “I hope you kill them all,” she said as passionately as you can in a whisper. “The only ones worth saving are Parton and Chelsea and Jane. They got blackmailed into this just like I did. Normally, they’re just Wiccans who like to live real quiet, like me. We don’t want to do no one no harm.”

“What do they look like?”

“Parton’s a guy about twenty-five, brown hair, short, birthmark on his cheek. Chelsea is about seventeen, her hair’s dyed that bright red. Jane, um, well—Jane’s just an old woman, you know? White hair, pants, blouse with flowers on it. Glasses.” My grandmother would have reamed Holly for lumping all old women together, but God bless her, she wasn’t around anymore, and I didn’t have the time.

“Why didn’t Hallow put one of her toughest people out here on guard duty?” I asked, out of sheer curiosity.

“They got a big ritual spell thing set up for tonight. I can’t believe the stay-away spell didn’t work on you. You must be resistant.” Then Holly whispered, with a little rill of laughter in her voice, “Plus, none of ’em wanted to get cold.”

“Go on, get out of here,” I said almost inaudibly, and helped her up. “It doesn’t matter where you parked your car, go north out of here.” In case she didn’t know which direction was north, I pointed.

Holly took off, her Nikes making almost no sound on the cracked sidewalk. Her dull dyed black hair seemed to soak up the light from the streetlamp as she passed beneath it. The smell around the house, the smell of magic, seemed to intensify. I wondered what to do now. Somehow I had to make sure that the three local Wiccans within the dilapidated building, the ones who’d been forced to serve Hallow, wouldn’t be harmed. I couldn’t think of a way in hell to do that. Could I even save one of them?

I had a whole collection of half thoughts and abortive impulses in the next sixty seconds. They all led to a dead end.

If I ran inside and yelled, “Parton, Chelsea, Jane—out!” that would alert the coven to the impending attack. Some of my friends—or at least my allies—would die.

If I hung around and tried to tell the vampires that three of the people in the building were innocent, they would (most likely) ignore me. Or, if a bolt of mercy struck them, they’d have to save all the witches and then cull the innocent ones out, which would give the coven witches time to counterattack. Witches didn’t need physical weapons.

Too late, I realized I should have kept a hold of Holly and used her as my entrée into the building. But endangering a frightened mother was not a good option, either.

Something large and warm pressed against my side. Eyes and teeth gleamed in the city’s night light. I almost screamed until I recognized the wolf as Alcide. He was very large. The silver fur around his eyes made the rest of his coat seem even darker.

I put an arm across his back. “There are three in there who mustn’t die,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”

Since he was a wolf, Alcide didn’t know what to do, either. He looked into my face. He whined, just a little. I was supposed to be back at the cars by now; but here I was, smack in the danger zone. I could feel movement in the dark all around me. Alcide slunk away to his appointed position at the rear door of the building.

“What are you doing here?” Bill said furiously, though it sounded strange coming out in a tiny thread of a whisper. “Pam told you to leave once you’d counted.”

“Three in there are innocent,” I whispered back. “They’re locals. They were forced.”

Bill said something under his breath, and it wasn’t a happy something.

I passed along the sketchy descriptions Holly had given me.

I could feel the tension in Bill’s body, and then Debbie joined us in our foxhole. What was she thinking, to pack herself in so closely with the vampire and the human who hated her most?

“I told you to stay back,” Bill said, and his voice was frightening.

“Alcide abjured me,” she told me, just as if I hadn’t been there when it happened.

“What did you expect?” I was exasperated at her timing and her wounded attitude. Hadn’t she ever heard of consequences?

“I have to do something to earn back his trust.”

She’d come to the wrong shop, if she wanted to buy some self-respect.

“Then help me save the three in there who are innocent.” I recounted my problem again. “Why haven’t you changed into your animal?”

“Oh, I can’t,” she said bitterly. “I’ve been abjured. I can’t change with Alcide’s pack anymore. They have license to kill me, if I do.”

“What did you shift into, anyway?”

“Lynx.”

That was appropriate.

“Come on,” I said. I began to wriggle toward the building. I loathed this woman, but if she could be of use to me, I had to ally with her.

“Wait, I’m supposed to go to the back door with the Were,” Bill hissed. “Eric’s already back there.”

“So go!”

I sensed that someone else was at my back and risked a quick glance to see that it was Pam. She smiled at me, and her fangs were out, so that was a little unnerving.

Maybe if the witches inside hadn’t been involved in a ritual, and hadn’t been relying on their less-than-dedicated sentry and their magic, we wouldn’t have made it to the door undetected. But fortune favored us for those few minutes. We got to the front door of the building, Pam and Debbie and I, and there met up with the young Were, Sid. I could recognize him even in his wolf body. Bubba was with him.

I was struck with a sudden inspiration. I moved a few feet away with Bubba.

“Can you run back to the Wiccans, the ones on our side? You know where they are?” I whispered.

Bubba nodded his head vigorously.

“You tell them there are three local Wiccans inside who’re being forced into this. Ask if they can make up some spell to get the three innocent ones to stand out.”