Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (134 page)

In the first month I knew Bill, there was a serial killer in the area hunting down barmaids with vampire boyfriends—and the main suspect was my brother Jason (
Dead Until Dark
).

Then, at the beginning of fall, the vampires of Dallas asked the vampires of Shreveport if they could borrow me for a little investigation into a missing nestmate of theirs (
Living Dead in Dallas
). At the same time, the short-order cook at Merlotte’s was murdered, and since I counted myself his friend, I felt I should do everything I could to solve the mystery of his death. Bill’s boss, Eric, had a lot to do with my trip to Big D, and he developed an interest in me that hasn’t flagged.

Right before Christmas, I began to think Bill was engaged in some hanky-panky. He left town, and vanished in Mississippi. Eric talked me into going to Jackson to search for him. As my cover, I was escorted by the Werewolf Alcide Herveaux. While searching for Bill, I met some of the state’s less reputable citizens at the supernatural hangout in Jackson, called Club Dead.

That brings me up to the start of
Dead to the World.

And now that I’m pretty much mad at everyone, and Jason might be a Shifter at the next full moon, what’s going to happen next?

The way my life’s been going since Bill Compton came into Merlotte’s, there just no telling.

 

DEAD UNTIL DARK
LIVING DEAD IN DALLAS
CLUB DEAD
DEAD TO THE WORLD
DEAD AS A DOORNAIL

 

 

SHAKESPEARE’S TROLLOP
SHAKESPEARE’S COUNSELOR

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

Dead as a Doornail: Southern Vampire Mysteries

 

AN ACE Book / published by arrangement with the author

 

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2005 by The ACE Publishing Group.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

For information address:

The ACE Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

 

The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is
http://www.penguinputnam.com

 

ISBN: 0-4410-1279-5

 

AN ACE BOOK®

ACE Books first published byACE Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to

Penguin Putnam Inc.

 

Electronic edition: March 2005

This book is dedicated to a wonderful woman I don’t get to see often enough. Janet Hutchings (then an editor at Walker, now editor of
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
) was brave enough to take me on many years ago after I’d taken a long sabbatical from writing. God bless her.

I didn’t thank Patrick Schulz for loaning me his Benelli for the last book—sorry, Son. My friend Toni L. P. Kelner, who pointed out some problems in the first half of the book, is due a big hats-off. My friend Paula Woldan gave me moral support and some information on pirates, and was willing to endure me on Talk Like a Pirate Day. Her daughter Jennifer saved my life by helping me prepare the manuscript. Shay, a Faithful Reader, had the great idea for the calendar. And in thanking the Woldan family, I have to include Jay, a volunteer firefighter for many years, who shared his knowledge and expertise with me.

I
KNEW MY BROTHER WOULD TURN INTO A PANTHER before he did. As I drove to the remote crossroads community of Hotshot, my brother watched the sunset in silence. Jason was dressed in old clothes, and he had a plastic Wal-Mart bag containing a few things he might need—toothbrush, clean underwear. He hunched inside his bulky camo jacket, looking straight ahead. His face was tense with the need to control his fear and his excitement.

“You got your cell phone in your pocket?” I asked, knowing I’d already asked him as soon as the words left my mouth. But Jason just nodded instead of snapping at me. It was still afternoon, but at the end of January the dark comes early.

Tonight would be the first full moon of the New Year.

When I stopped the car, Jason turned to look at me, and even in the dim light I saw the change in his eyes. They weren’t blue like mine anymore. They were yellowish. The shape of them had changed.

“My face feels funny,” he said. But he still hadn’t put two and two together.

Tiny Hotshot was silent and still in the waning light. A cold wind was blowing across the bare fields, and the pines and oaks were shivering in the gusts of frigid air. Only one man was visible. He was standing outside one of the little houses, the one that was freshly painted. This man’s eyes were closed, and his bearded face was raised to the darkening sky. Calvin Norris waited until Jason was climbing out the passenger’s door of my old Nova before he walked over and bent to my window. I rolled it down.

His golden-green eyes were as startling as I’d remembered, and the rest of him was just as unremarkable. Stocky, graying, sturdy, he looked like a hundred other men I’d seen in Merlotte’s Bar, except for those eyes.

“I’ll take good care of him,” Calvin Norris said. Behind him, Jason stood with his back to me. The air around my brother had a peculiar quality; it seemed to be vibrating.

None of this was Calvin Norris’s fault. He hadn’t been the one who’d bitten my brother and changed him forever. Calvin, a werepanther, had been born what he was; it was his nature. I made myself say, “Thank you.”

“I’ll bring him home in the morning.”

“To my house, please. His truck is at my place.”

“All right, then. Have a good night.” He raised his face to the wind again, and I felt the whole community was waiting, behind their windows and doors, for me to leave.

So I did.

 

Jason knocked on my door at seven the next morning. He still had his little Wal-Mart bag, but he hadn’t used anything in it. His face was bruised, and his hands were covered with scratches. He didn’t say a word. He just stared at me when I asked him how he was, and walked past me through the living room and down the hall. He closed the door to the hall bathroom with a decisive click. I heard the water running after a second, and I heaved a weary sigh all to myself. Though I’d gone to work and come home tired at about two a.m., I hadn’t gotten much sleep.

By the time Jason emerged, I’d fixed him some bacon and eggs. He sat down at the old kitchen table with an air of pleasure: a man doing a familiar and pleasant thing. But after a second of staring down at the plate, he leaped to his feet and ran back into the bathroom, kicking the door shut behind him. I listened to him throw up, over and over.

I stood outside the door helplessly, knowing he wouldn’t want me to come in. After a moment, I went back to the kitchen to dump the food into the trash can, ashamed of the waste but utterly unable to force myself to eat.

When Jason returned, he said only, “Coffee?” He looked green around the gills, and he walked like he was sore.

“Are you okay?” I asked, not sure if he would be able to answer or not. I poured the coffee into a mug.

“Yes,” he said after a moment, as though he’d had to think about it. “That was the most incredible experience of my life.”

For a second, I thought he meant throwing up in my bathroom, but that was sure no new experience for Jason. He’d been quite a drinker in his teens, until he’d figured out that there was nothing glamorous or attractive about hanging over a toilet bowl, heaving your guts out.

“Shifting,” I said tentatively.

He nodded, cradling his coffee mug in his hands. He held his face over the steam rising from the hot, strong blackness. He met my eyes. His own were once again their ordinary blue. “It’s the most incredible rush,” he said. “Since I was bitten, not born, I don’t get to be a true panther like the others.”

I could hear envy in his voice.

“But even what I become is amazing. You feel the magic inside you, and you feel your bones moving around and adapting, and your vision changes. Then you’re lower to the ground and you walk in a whole different way, and as for running, damn, you can
run
. You can chase. . . .” And his voice died away.

I would just as soon not know that part, anyway.

“So it’s not so bad?” I asked, my hands clasped together. Jason was all the family I had, except for a cousin who’d drifted away into the underworld of drugs years before.

“It’s not so bad,” Jason agreed, scraping up a smile to give me. “It’s great while you’re actually the animal. Everything’s so simple. It’s when you’re back to being human that you start to worry about stuff.”

He wasn’t suicidal. He wasn’t even despondent. I wasn’t aware I’d been holding my breath until I let it out. Jason was going to be able to live with the hand he’d been dealt. He was going to be okay.

The relief was incredible, like I’d removed something jammed painfully between my teeth or shaken a sharp rock out of my shoe. For days, weeks even, I’d been worried, and now that anxiety was gone. That didn’t mean Jason’s life as a shape-shifter would be worry-free, at least from my point of view. If he married a regular human woman, their kids would be normal. But if he married into the shifter community at Hotshot, I’d have nieces or nephews who turned into animals once a month. At least, they would after puberty; that would give them, and their auntie Sook, some preparation time.

Luckily for Jason, he had plenty of vacation days, so he wasn’t due at the parish road department. But I had to work tonight. As soon as Jason left in his flashy pickup truck, I crawled back into bed, jeans and all, and in about five minutes I was fast asleep. The relief acted as a kind of sedative.

When I woke up, it was nearly three o’clock and time for me to get ready for my shift at Merlotte’s. The sun outside was bright and clear, and the temperature was fifty-two, said my indoor-outdoor thermometer. This isn’t too unusual in north Louisiana in January. The temperature would drop after the sun went down, and Jason would shift. But he’d have some fur—not a full coat, since he turned into half-man, half-cat—and he’d be with other panthers. They’d go hunting. The woods around Hotshot, which lay in a remote corner of Renard Parish, would be dangerous again tonight.

As I went about eating, showering, folding laundry, I thought of a dozen things I’d like to know. I wondered if the shifters would kill a human being if they came upon one in the woods. I wondered how much of their human consciousness they retained in their animal form. If they mated in panther form, would they have a kitten or a baby? What happened when a pregnant werepanther saw the full moon? I wondered if Jason knew the answer to all these questions yet, if Calvin had given him some kind of briefing.

But I was glad I hadn’t questioned Jason this morning while everything was still so new to him. I’d have plenty of chances to ask him later.

For the first time since New Year’s Day, I was thinking about the future. The full moon symbol on my calendar no longer seemed to be a period marking the end of something, but just another way of counting time. As I pulled on my waitress outfit (black pants and a white boat-neck T-shirt and black Reeboks), I felt almost giddy with cheer. For once, I left my hair down instead of pulling it back and up into a ponytail. I put in some bright red dot earrings and matched my lipstick to the color. A little eye makeup and some blush, and I was good to go.