Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (41 page)

“Bill,” I whispered, but with his vampire hearing, it was like a shout.

He was instantly still, his eyes scanning the shadows. “I’m here,” I said, and swallowed back a sob. “Watch out.” I might be a living booby trap.

In the moonlight, I could see that his face was clean of emotion, but I knew he was weighing the odds, just as I was. One of us had to move, and I realized if I came out into the moon glow, at least Bill could see more clearly if anything attacked.

I stuck my hands out, gripped the grass, and pulled. I couldn’t even get up to my knees, so this progress was my best speed. I pushed a little with my feet, though even that use of my back muscles was excruciating. I didn’t want to look at Bill while I moved toward him, because I didn’t want to soften at the sight of his rage. It was an almost palpable thing.

“What did this to you, Sookie?” he asked softly.

“Get me in the car. Please, get me out of here,” I said, doing my best to hold myself together. “If I make a lot of noise, she might come back.” I shivered all over at the thought. “Take me to Eric,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “She said this was a message for Eric Northman.”

Bill squatted beside me. “I have to lift you,” he told me.

Oh, no. I started to say, “There must be some other way,” but I knew there wasn’t. Bill knew better than to hesitate. Before I could anticipate the pain to its full extent, he scooted an arm under me and applied his other hand to my crotch, and in an instant he had me dangling across his shoulder.

I screamed out loud. I tried not to sob after that, so Bill could listen for an attack, but I didn’t manage that very well. Bill began to run along the road, back to the car. It was running already, its engine idling smoothly. Bill flung open the back door and tried to feed me gently but quickly onto the backseat of the Cadillac. It was impossible not to cause me more pain by doing this, but he made the attempt.

“It was her,” I said, when I could say anything coherent. “It was her who made the car stop and made me get out.” I was keeping an open mind about whether she’d caused the fight to begin with.

“We’ll talk about it in a little while,” he said. He sped toward Shreveport, at the highest speed he could, while I clawed at the upholstery in an attempt to keep control over myself.

All I remember about that ride was that it was at least two years long.

Bill got me to the back door of Fangtasia somehow, and kicked it to get attention.

“What?” Pam sounded hostile. She was a pretty blond vampire I’d met a couple of times before, a sensible sort of individual with considerable business acumen. “Oh, Bill. What’s happened? Oh, yum, she’s bleeding.”

“Get Eric,” Bill said.

“He’s been waiting in here,” she began, but Bill strode right by her with me bouncing on his shoulder like a bag of bloody game. I was so out of it by that time that I wouldn’t have cared if he’d carried me onto the dance floor of the bar out front, but instead, Bill blew into Eric’s office laden with me and rage.

“This is on your account,” Bill snarled, and I moaned as he shook me as though he were drawing Eric’s attention to me. I hardly see how Eric could have been looking anywhere else, since I was a full-grown female and probably the only bleeding woman in his office.

I would have loved to faint, to pass right out. But I didn’t. I just sagged over Bill’s shoulder and hurt. “Go to hell,” I mumbled.

“What, my darling?”

“Go to
hell
.”

“We must lay her on her stomach on the couch,” Eric said. “Here, let me . . .” I felt another pair of hands grip my legs, Bill sort of turned underneath me, and together they deposited me carefully on the broad couch that Eric had just bought for his office. It had that new smell, and it was leather. I was glad, staring at it from the distance of half an inch, that he hadn’t gotten cloth upholstery. “Pam, call the doctor.” I heard footsteps leave the room, and Eric crouched down to look into my face. It was quite a crouch, because Eric, tall and broad, looks exactly like what he is, a former Viking.

“What has happened to you?” he asked.

I glared at him, so incensed I could hardly speak. “I am a message to you,” I said, almost in a whisper. “This woman in the woods made Bill’s car stop, and maybe even made us argue, and then she came up to me with this hog.”

“A
pig
?” Eric could not have been more astonished if I’d said she had a canary up her nose.

“Oink, oink. Razorback. Wild pig. And she said she wanted to send you a message, and I turned in time to keep her from getting my face, but she got my back, and then she left.”

“Your face. She would have gotten your face,” Bill said. I saw his hands clenching by his thighs, and the back of him as he began pacing around the office. “Eric, her cuts are not so deep. What’s wrong with her?”

“Sookie,” Eric said gently, “what did this woman look like?”

His face was right by mine, his thick golden hair almost touching my face.

“She looked nuts, I’ll tell you how she looked. And she called you Eric Northman.”

“That’s the last name I use for human dealings,” he said. “By looking nuts, you mean she looked . . . how?”

“Her clothes were all ragged and she had blood around her mouth and in her teeth, like she’d just eaten something raw. She was carrying this kind of wand thing, with something on the end of it. Her hair was long and tangled . . . look, speaking of hair, my hair is getting stuck to my back.” I gasped.

“Yes, I see.” Eric began trying to separate my long hair from my wounds, where blood was acting as an adherent as it thickened.

Pam came in then, with the doctor. If I had hoped Eric meant a regular doctor, like a stethoscope and tongue depressor kind of person, I was once again doomed to disappointment. This doctor was a dwarf, who hardly had to bend over to look me in the eyes. Bill hovered, vibrating with tension, while the small woman examined my wounds. She was wearing a pair of white pants and a tunic, just like doctors at the hospital; well, just like doctors used to, before they started wearing that green color, or blue, or whatever crazy print came their way. Her face was full of her nose, and her skin was olive. Her hair was golden brown and coarse, incredibly thick and wavy. She wore it clipped fairly short. She put me in mind of a hobbit. Maybe she
was
a hobbit. My understanding of reality had taken several raps to the head in the past few months.

“What kind of doctor are you?” I asked, though it took some time for me to collect myself enough.

“The healing kind,” she said in a surprisingly deep voice. “You have been poisoned.”

“So that’s why I keeping thinking I’m gonna die,” I muttered.

“You will, quite soon,” she said.

“Thanks a lot, Doc. What can you do about that?”

“We don’t have a lot of choices. You’ve been poisoned. Have you ever heard of Komodo dragons? Their mouths are teeming with bacteria. Well, maenad wounds have the same toxic level. After a dragon has bitten you, the creature tracks you for hours, waiting for the bacteria to kill you. For maenads, the delayed death adds to the fun. For Komodo dragons, who knows?”

Thanks for the National Geographic side trip, Doc. “What can you do?” I asked, through gritted teeth.

“I can dose the exterior wounds. But your bloodstream has been compromised, and your blood must be removed and replaced. That is a job for the vampires.” The good doctor seemed positively jolly at the prospect of everyone working together. On me.

She turned to the gathered vamps. “If only one of you takes the poisoned blood, that one will be pretty miserable. It’s the element of magic that the maenad imparts. The Komodo dragon bite would be no problem for you guys.” She laughed heartily.

I hated her. Tears streamed down my face from the pain.

“So,” she continued, “when I’m finished, each of you take a turn, removing just a little. Then we’ll give her a transfusion.”

“Of human blood,” I said, wanting to make that perfectly clear. I’d had to have Bill’s blood once to survive massive injuries and once to survive an examination of sorts, and I’d had another vampire’s blood by accident, unlikely as that sounds. I’d been able to see changes in me after that blood ingestion, changes I didn’t want to amplify by taking another dose. Vampire blood was the drug of choice among the wealthy now, and as far as I was concerned, they could have it.

“If Eric can pull some strings and get the human blood,” the dwarf said. “At least half the transfusion can be synthetic. I’m Dr. Ludwig, by the way.”

“I can get the blood, and we owe her the healing,” I heard Eric say, to my relief. I would have given a lot to see Bill’s face, at that moment. “What is your type, Sookie?” Eric asked.

“O positive,” I said, glad my blood was so common.

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Eric said. “Can you take care of that, Pam?”

Again, a sense of movement in the room. Dr. Ludwig bent forward and began licking my back. I shrieked.

“She’s the doctor, Sookie,” Bill said. “She will heal you this way.”

“But she’ll get poisoned,” I said, trying to think of an objection that wouldn’t sound homophobic and sizist. Truly, I didn’t want anyone licking my back, female dwarf or large male vampire.

“She is the healer,” Eric said, in a rebuking kind of way. “You must accept her treatment.”

“Oh, all right,” I said, not even caring how sullen I sounded. “By the way, I haven’t heard an ‘I’m sorry’ from you yet.” My sense of grievance had overwhelmed my sense of self-preservation.

“I am sorry that the maenad picked on you.”

I glared at him. “Not enough,” I said. I was trying hard to hang on to this conversation.

“Angelic Sookie, vision of love and beauty, I am prostrate that the wicked evil maenad violated your smooth and voluptuous body, in an attempt to deliver a message to me.”

“That’s more like it.” I would have taken more satisfaction in Eric’s words if I hadn’t been jabbed with pain just then. (The doctor’s treatment was not exactly comfortable.) Apologies had better be either heartfelt or elaborate, and since Eric didn’t have a heart to feel (or at least I hadn’t noticed it so far) he might as well distract me with words.

“I take it the message means that she’s going to war with you?” I asked, trying to ignore the activities of Dr. Ludwig. I was sweating all over. The pain in my back was excruciating. I could feel tears trickling down my face. The room seemed to have acquired a yellow haze; everything looked sickly.

Eric looked surprised. “Not exactly,” he said cautiously. “Pam?”

“It’s on the way,” she said. “This is bad.”

“Start,” Bill said urgently. “She’s changing color.”

I wondered, almost idly, what color I’d become. I couldn’t hold my head off the couch anymore, as I’d been trying to do to look a little more alert. I laid my cheek on the leather, and immediately my sweat bound me to the surface. The burning sensation that radiated through my body from the claw marks on my back grew more intense, and I shrieked because I just couldn’t help it. The dwarf leaped from the couch and bent to examine my eyes.

She shook her head. “Yes, if there’s to be any hope,” she said, but she sounded very far away to me. She had a syringe in her hand. The last thing I registered was Eric’s face moving closer, and it seemed to me he winked.

I
OPENED MY eyes with great reluctance. I felt that I’d been sleeping in a car, or that I’d taken a nap in a straight-back chair; I’d definitely dozed off somewhere inappropriate and uncomfortable. I felt groggy, and I ached all over. Pam was sitting on the floor a yard away, her wide blue eyes fixed on me.

“It worked,” she commented. “Dr. Ludwig was right.”

“Great.”

“Yes, it would have been a pity to lose you before we’d gotten a chance to get some good out of you,” she said with shocking practicality. “There are many other humans associated with us the maenad could have picked, and those humans are far more expendable.”

“Thanks for the warm fuzzies, Pam,” I muttered. I felt the last degree of nasty, as if I’d been dipped in a vat of sweat and then rolled in the dust. Even my teeth felt scummy.

“You’re welcome,” she said, and she almost smiled. So Pam had a sense of humor, not something vampires were noted for. You never saw vampire stand-up comedians, and human jokes just left vampires cold, ha-ha. (Some of
their
humor could give you nightmares for a week.)

“What happened?”

Pam relaced her fingers around her knee. “We did as Dr. Ludwig said. Bill, Eric, Chow, and I all took a turn, and when you were almost dry we began the transfusion.”

I thought about that for a minute, glad I’d checked out of consciousness before I could experience the procedure. Bill always took blood when we were making love, so I associated it with the height of erotic activity. To have “donated” to so many people would have been extremely embarrassing to me if I’d been there for it, so to speak. “Who’s Chow?” I asked.

“See if you can sit up,” Pam advised. “Chow is our new bartender. He is quite a draw.”

“Oh?”

“Tattoos,” Pam said, sounding almost human for a moment. “He’s tall for an Asian, and he has a wonderful set of . . . tattoos.”

I tried to look like I cared. I pushed up, feeling a certain tenderness that made me very cautious. It was like my back was covered with wounds that had just healed, wounds that might break open again if I weren’t careful. And that, Pam told me, was exactly the case.

Also, I had no shirt on. Or anything else. Above the waist. Below, my jeans were still intact, though remarkably nasty.

“Your shirt was so ragged we had to tear it off,” Pam said, smiling openly. “We took turns holding you on our laps. You were much admired. Bill was furious.”

“Go to hell” was all I could think of to say.