Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (172 page)

“We could go to a hockey game.”

“That might be fun.”

“We could cook together in your kitchen, and then watch a movie on your DVD.”

“Better put that one on a back burner.” That sounded a little too personal for a first date, not that I’ve had that much experience with first dates. But I know that proximity to a bedroom is never a good idea unless you’re sure you wouldn’t mind if the flow of the evening took you in that direction.

“We could go see
The Producers.
That’s coming to the Strand.”

“Really?” Okay, I was excited now. Shreveport’s restored Strand Theater hosted traveling stage productions ranging from plays to ballet. I’d never seen a real play before. Wouldn’t that be awfully expensive? Surely he wouldn’t have suggested it if he couldn’t afford it. “Could we?”

He nodded, pleased at my reaction. “I can make the reservations for this weekend. What about your work schedule?”

“I’m off Friday night,” I said happily. “And, um, I’ll be glad to chip in for my ticket.”

“I invited you. My treat,” Quinn said firmly. I could read from his thoughts that he thought it was surprising that I had offered. And touching. Hmmm. I didn’t like that. “Okay then. It’s settled. When I get back to my laptop, I’ll order the tickets online. I know there are some good ones left, because I was checking out our options before I drove over.”

Naturally, I began to wonder about appropriate clothes. But I stowed that away for later. “Quinn, where do you actually live?”

“I have a house outside Memphis.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking that seemed a long way away for a dating relationship.

“I’m partner in a company called Special Events. We’re a sort of secret offshoot of Extreme(ly Elegant) Events. You’ve seen the logo, I know. E(E)E?” He made the parentheses with his fingers. I nodded. E(E)E did a lot of very fancy event designing nationally. “There are four partners who work full-time for Special Events, and we each employ a few people full- or part-time. Since we travel a lot, we have places we use all over the country; some of them are just rooms in houses of friends or associates, and some of them are real apartments. The place I stay in this area is in Shreveport, a guesthouse in back of the mansion of a shifter.”

I’d learned a lot about him in two minutes flat. “So you put on events in the supernatural world, like the contest for packmaster.” That had been a dangerous job and one requiring a lot of specialized paraphernalia. “But what else is there to do? A packmaster’s contest can only come up every so now and then. How much do you have to travel? What other special events can you stage?”

“I generally handle the Southeast, Georgia across to Texas.” He sat forward in his chair, his big hands resting on his knees. “Tennessee south through Florida. In those states, if you want to stage a fight for packmaster, or a rite of ascension for a shaman or witch, or a vampire hierarchal wedding—and you want to do it right, with all the trimmings—you come to me.”

I remembered the extraordinary pictures in Alfred Cumberland’s photo gallery. “So there’s enough of that to keep you busy?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Of course, some of it is seasonal. Vamps get married in the winter, since the nights are so much longer. I did a hierarchal wedding in New Orleans in January, this past year. And then, some of the occasions are tied to the Wiccan calendar. Or to puberty.”

I couldn’t begin to imagine the ceremonies he arranged, but a description would have to wait for another occasion. “And you have three partners who do this full-time, too? I’m sorry. I’m just grilling you, seems like. But this is such an interesting way to make a living.”

“I’m glad you think so. You gotta have a lot of people skills, and you gotta have a mind for details and organization.”

“You have to be really, really, tough,” I murmured, adding my own thought.

He smiled, a slow smile. “No problem there.”

Yep, didn’t seem as though toughness was a problem for Quinn.

“And you have to be good at sizing up people, so you can steer clients in the right direction, leave them happy with the job you’ve done,” he said.

“Can you tell me some stories? Or is there a client confidentiality clause with your jobs?”

“Customers sign a contract, but none of them have ever requested a confidentiality clause,” he said. “Special Events, you don’t get much chance to talk about what you do, obviously, since the clients are mostly still traveling beneath the surface of the regular world. It’s actually kind of a relief to talk about it. I usually have to tell a girl I’m a consultant, or something bogus like that.”

“It’s a relief to me, too, to be able to talk without worrying I’m spilling secrets.”

“Then it’s lucky we found each other, huh?” Again, the white grin. “I’d better let you get some rest, since you just got off work.” Quinn got up and stretched after he’d reached his full height. It was an impressive gesture on someone as muscular as he was. It was just possible Quinn knew how excellent he looked when he stretched. I glanced down to hide my smile. I didn’t mind one bit that he wanted to impress me.

He reached for my hand and pulled me to my feet in one easy motion. I could feel his focus centered on me. His own hand was warm and hard. He could crack my bones with it.

The average woman would not be pondering how fast her date could kill her, but I’ll never be an average woman. I’d realized that by the time I became old enough to understand that not every child could understand what her family members were thinking about her. Not every little girl knew when her teachers liked her, or felt contempt for her, or compared her to her brother (Jason had an easy charm even then). Not every little girl had a funny uncle who tried to get her alone at every family gathering.

So I let Quinn hold my hand, and I looked up into his pansy-purple eyes, and for a minute I indulged myself by letting his admiration wash over me like a bath of approval.

Yes, I knew he was a tiger. And I don’t mean in bed, though I was willing to believe he was ferocious and powerful there, too.

When he kissed me good night, his lips brushed my cheek, and I smiled.

I like a man who knows when to rush things . . . and when not to.

I
GOT A PHONE CALL THE NEXT NIGHT AT MERLOTTE’S. Of course, it’s not a good thing to get phone calls at work; Sam doesn’t like it, unless there’s some kind of home emergency. Since I get the least of any of the barmaids—in fact, I could count the calls I’d gotten at work on one hand—I tried not to feel guilty when I gestured to Sam that I’d take the call back at the phone on his desk.

“Hello,” I said cautiously.

“Sookie,” said a familiar voice.

“Oh, Pam. Hi.” I was relieved, but only for a second. Pam was Eric’s second in command, and she was his child, in the vampire sense.

“The boss wants to see you,” she said. “I’m calling from his office.”

Eric’s office, in the back of his club, Fangtasia, was well soundproofed. I could barely hear KDED, the all-vampire radio station, playing in the background: Clapton’s version of “After Midnight.”

“Well, lah-de-dah. He’s too lofty to make his own phone calls?”

“Yes,” Pam said. That Pam—
literal-minded
was the phrase for her.

“What’s this about?”

“I am following his instructions,” she said. “He tells me to call the telepath, I call you. You are summoned.”

“Pam, I need a little more explanation than that. I don’t especially want to see Eric.”

“You are being recalcitrant?”

Uh-oh. I hadn’t had that on my Word of the Day calendar yet. “I’m not sure I understand.” It’s better to just go on and confess ignorance than try to fake my way through.

Pam sighed, a long-suffering gust of sound. “You’re digging in your heels,” she clarified, her English accent making itself known. “And you shouldn’t be. Eric treats you very well.” She sounded faintly incredulous.

“I’m not giving up work
or
free time to drive over to Shreveport because Mr. High and Mighty wants me to jump to do his bidding,” I protested—reasonably, I thought. “He can haul his ass over here if he wants to tell me something. Or he can pick up the telephone his ownself.” So there.

“If he had wanted to pick up the phone ‘his ownself,’ as you put it, he would have done so. Be here Friday night by eight, he bids me tell you.”

“Sorry, no can do.”

A significant silence.

“You won’t come?”

“I can’t. I have a date,” I said, trying to keep any trace of smugness out of my voice.

There was another silence. Then Pam snickered. “Oh, that’s rich,” she said, abruptly switching to American vernacular. “Oh, I’m going to love telling him that.”

Her reaction made me begin to feel uneasy. “Um, Pam,” I began, wondering if I should backpedal, “listen . . .”

“Oh, no,” she said, almost laughing out loud, which was very un-Pam-like.

“You tell him I did say thanks for the calendar proofs,” I said. Eric, always thinking of ways to make Fangtasia more lucrative, had come up with a vampire calendar to sell in the little gift shop. Eric himself was Mr. January. He’d posed with a bed and a long white fur robe. Eric and the bed were set against a pale gray background hung with giant glittering snowflakes. He wasn’t wearing the robe: oh, no. He wasn’t wearing anything. He had one bent knee on the rumpled bed, and the other foot was on the floor, and he was looking directly at the camera, smoldering. (He could have taught Claude a few lessons.) Eric’s blond hair fell in a tousled mane around his shoulders, and his right hand gripped the robe tossed on the bed, so the white fur rose just high enough to cover his kit ’n’ kaboodle. His body was turned just slightly to flaunt the curve of his world-class butt. A light trail of dark blond hair pointed south of his navel. It practically screamed, “Carrying concealed!”

I happened to know that Eric’s pistol was more of a .357 Magnum than a snub-nose.

Somehow I’d never gotten past looking at January.

“Oh, I’ll let him know,” Pam said. “Eric said many people wouldn’t like it if I were in the calendar made for women . . . so I’m in the one for men. Would you like me to send you a copy of my picture, as well?”

“That surprises me,” I told her. “It really does. I mean, that you wouldn’t mind posing.” I had a hard time imagining her participation in a project that would pander to human tastes.

“Eric tells me to pose, I pose,” she said matter-of-factly. Though Eric had considerable power over Pam since he was her maker, I have to say that I’d never known Eric to ask Pam to do anything she wasn’t ready to do. Either he knew her well (which, of course, he did) or Pam was willing to do just about anything.

“I have a whip in my picture,” Pam said. “The photographer says it’ll sell a million.” Pam had wide-ranging tastes in the area of sex.

After a long moment while I contemplated the mental image that raised, I said, “I’m sure it will, Pam. But I’ll give it a pass.”

“We’ll all get a percentage, all of us who agreed to pose.”

“But Eric will get a bigger percentage than the rest.”

“Well, he’s the sheriff,” Pam said reasonably.

“Right. Well, bye.” I started to hang up.

“Wait, what am I to tell Eric?”

“Just tell him the truth.”

“You know he’ll be angry.” Pam didn’t sound at all scared. In fact, she sounded gleeful.

“Well, that’s his problem,” I said, maybe a bit childishly, and this time I did hang up. An angry Eric would surely be my problem, too.

I had a nasty feeling I’d taken a serious step in denying Eric. I had no idea what would happen now. When I’d first gotten to know the sheriff of Area Five, I’d been dating Bill. Eric had wanted to use my unusual talent. He’d simply held hurting Bill over my head to get me to comply. When I’d broken up with Bill, Eric had lacked any means of coercion until I’d needed a favor from him, and then I’d supplied Eric with the most potent ammunition of all—the knowledge that I’d shot Debbie Pelt. It didn’t matter that he’d hidden her body and her car and he couldn’t himself remember where; the accusation would be enough to ruin the rest of my life, even if it was never proved. Even if I could bring myself to deny it.

As I carried out my duties in the bar the rest of that night, I found myself wondering if Eric really would reveal my secret. If Eric told the police what I’d done, he’d have to admit he’d had a part in it, wouldn’t he?

I was waylaid by Detective Andy Bellefleur when I was on my way to the bar. I’ve known Andy and his sister Portia all my life. They’re a few years older than me, but we’d been through the same schools, grown up in the same town. Like me, they’d been largely raised by their grandmother. The detective and I have had our ups and downs. Andy had been dating a young schoolteacher, Halleigh Robinson, for a few months now.

Tonight, he had a secret to share with me and a favor to ask.

“Listen, she’s going to order the chicken basket,” he said, without preamble. I glanced over to their table, to make sure Halleigh was sitting with her back to me. She did. “When you bring the food to the table, make sure this is in it, covered up.” He stuffed a little velvet-covered box into my hand. There was a ten-dollar bill under it.

“Sure, Andy, no problem,” I said, smiling.

“Thanks, Sookie,” he said, and for once he smiled back, a simple and uncomplicated and terrified smile.

Andy had been right on the money. Halleigh ordered the chicken basket when I went to their table.

“Make that extra fries,” I said to our new cook when I turned in the order. I wanted plenty of camouflage. The cook turned from the grill to glare at me. We’ve had an assortment of cooks, of every age, color, gender, and sexual preference. We even had a vampire, once. Our current cook was a middle-aged black woman named Callie Collins. Callie was heavy, so heavy I didn’t know how she could get through the hours she spent standing on her feet in the hot kitchen. “Extra fries?” Callie said, as if she’d never heard of such a thing. “Uh-huh. People get extra fries when they pay for them, not because they friends of yours.”