Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (60 page)

And while I thought about it, he said, “She is gone.” While I stared up at him, the silence became complete. The only noise in the house was the sobbing of Farrell’s wounded date, who was pressing both hands to his reddened thigh. From outside came the remote sounds of vehicles pulling out in a hurry up and down the quiet suburban street. The attack was over. I seemed to be having trouble breathing, and figuring out what I should do next. Surely there was something, some action, I should be taking?

This was as close to war as I would ever come.

The room was full of the survivors’ screams and the vampires’ howls of rage. Bits of stuffing from the couch and chairs floated in the air like snow. There was broken glass on everything and the heat of the night poured into the room. Several of the vampires were already up and giving chase, Joseph Velasquez among them, I noticed.

“No excuse to linger,” Eric said with a mock sigh, and lifted off of me. He looked down at himself. “My shirts always get ruined when I am around you.”

“Oh shit, Eric.” I got to my knees with clumsy haste. “You’re bleeding. You got hit. Bill! Bill!” My hair was slithering around my shoulders as I turned from side to side searching the room. The last time I’d noticed him he’d been talking to a black-haired vampire with a pronounced widow’s peak. She’d looked something like Snow White, to me. Now I half-stood to search the floor and I saw her sprawled close to a window. Something was protruding from her chest. The window had been hit by a shotgun blast, and some splinters had flown into the room. One of them had pierced her chest and killed her. Bill was not in sight, among the living or the dead.

Eric pulled off his sodden shirt and looked down at his shoulder. “The bullet is right inside the wound, Sookie,” Eric said, through clenched teeth. “Suck it out.”

“What?” I gaped at him.

“If you don’t suck it out, it will heal inside my flesh. If you are so squeamish, go get a knife and cut.”

“But I can’t do that.” My tiny party purse had a pocketknife inside, but I had no idea where I’d put it down, and I couldn’t gather my thoughts to search.

He bared his teeth at me. “I took this bullet for you. You can get it out for me. You are no coward.”

I forced myself to steady. I used his discarded shirt as a swab. The bleeding was slowing, and by peering into the torn flesh, I could just see the bullet. If I’d had long fingernails like Trudi, I’d have been able to get it out, but my fingers are short and blunt, and my nails are clipped close. I sighed in resignation.

The phrase “biting the bullet” took on a whole new meaning as I bent to Eric’s shoulder.

Eric gave a long moan as I sucked, and I felt the bullet pop into my mouth. He’d been right. The rug could hardly be stained any worse than it already was, so though it made me feel like a real heathen, I spat the bullet onto the floor along with most of the blood in my mouth. But some of it, inevitably, I swallowed. His shoulder was already healing. “This room reeks of blood,” he whispered.

“Well, there,” I said, and looked up. “That was the grossest—”

“Your lips are bloody.” He seized my face in both hands and kissed me.

It’s hard not to respond when a master of the art of kissing is laying one on you. And I might have let myself enjoy it—well, enjoy it more—if I hadn’t been so worried about Bill; because let’s face it, brushes with death have that effect. You want to reaffirm the fact that you’re alive. Though vampires actually aren’t, it seems they are no more immune to that syndrome than humans, and Eric’s libido was up because of the blood in the room.

But I was worried about Bill, and I was shocked by the violence, so after a long hot moment of forgetting the horror around me, I pulled away. Eric’s lips were bloody now. He licked them slowly. “Go look for Bill,” he said in a thick voice.

I glanced at his shoulder again, to see the hole had begun to close. I picked up the bullet off the carpet, tacky as it was with blood, and wrapped it in a scrap from Eric’s shirt. It seemed like a good memento, at the time. I really don’t know what I was thinking. There were still the injured and dead on the floor in the room, but most of those who were still alive had help from other humans or from two vampires who hadn’t joined in the chase.

Sirens were sounding in the distance.

The beautiful front door was splintered and pitted. I stood to one side to open it, just in case there was a lone vigilante in the yard, but nothing happened. I peered around the doorframe.

“Bill?” I called. “Are you okay?”

Just then he sauntered back in the yard looking positively rosy.

“Bill,” I said, feeling old and grim and gray. A dull horror, that really was just a deep disappointment, filled the pit of my stomach.

He stopped in his tracks.

“They fired at us and killed some of us,” he said. His fangs gleamed, and he was shiny with excitement.

“You just killed somebody.”

“To defend us.”

“To get vengeance.”

There was a clear difference between the two, in my mind, at that moment. He seemed nonplussed.

“You didn’t even wait to see if I was okay,” I said. Once a vampire, always a vampire. Tigers can’t change their stripes. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I heard every warning anyone had ever fed me, in the warm drawl of home.

I turned and went back into the house, walking obliviously through the bloodstains and chaos and mess as if I saw such things every day. Some of the things I saw I didn’t even register I’d seen, until the next week when my brain would suddenly throw out a picture for my viewing: maybe a closeup of a shattered skull, or a spouting artery. What was important to me at the moment was that I find my purse. I found that purse in the second place I looked. While Bill fussed with the wounded so he wouldn’t have to talk to me, I walked out of that house and got in that rental car and, despite my anxiety, I drove. Being at this house was worse than the fear of big city traffic. I pulled away from the house right before the police got there.

After I’d driven a few blocks, I parked in front of a library and extricated the map from the glove compartment. Though it took twice as long as it should have, since my brain was so shell-shocked it was almost not functioning, I figured out how to get to the airport.

And that’s where I went. I followed the signs that said RENTAL CARS and I parked the car and left the keys in it and walked away. I got a seat on the next flight to Shreveport, which was leaving within the hour. I thanked God I had my own credit card.

Since I’d never done it before, it took me a few minutes to figure out the pay phone. I was lucky enough to get hold of Jason, who said he’d meet me at the airport.

I was home in bed by early morning.

I didn’t start crying until the next day.

W
E’D FOUGHT BEFORE, Bill and I. I’d gotten fed up before, tired of the vampirey stuff I had to learn to accommodate, frightened of getting in deeper. Sometimes, I just wanted to see humans for a while.

So for over three weeks, that was what I did. I didn’t call Bill; he didn’t call me. I knew he was back from Dallas because he left my suitcase on my front porch. When I unpacked it, I found a black velvet jeweler’s box tucked in the side pocket. I wish I’d had the strength to keep from opening it, but I didn’t. Inside was a pair of topaz earrings, and a note that said, “To go with your brown dress.” Which meant the taupe knit thing I’d worn to the vampires’ headquarters. I stuck my tongue out at the box, and drove over to his house that afternoon to leave it in his mailbox. He’d finally gone out and bought me a present, and here I had to return it.

I didn’t even try to “think things through.” I figured my brain would clear up in a while, and then I would know what to do.

I did read the papers. The vampires of Dallas and their human friends were now martyrs, which probably suited Stan down to the ground. The Dallas Midnight Massacre was being touted in all the newsmagazines as the perfect example of a hate crime. Legislatures were being pressured to pass all kinds of laws that would never make it onto the books, but it made people feel better to think they might; laws that would provide vampire-owned buildings with federal protection, laws that would permit vampires to hold certain elected positions (though no one yet suggested a vampire could run for the U.S. Senate or serve as a representative). There was even a motion in the Texas legislature to appoint a vampire as legal executioner of the state. After all, a Senator Garza was quoted as saying, “Death by vampire bite is at least supposed to be painless, and the vampire receives nutrition from it.”

I had news for Senator Garza. Vampire bites were only pleasant by the will of the vampire. If the vampire didn’t glamour you first, a serious vampire bite (as opposed to a love nip) hurt like hell.

I wondered if Senator Garza was related to Luna, but Sam told me that “Garza” was as common among Americans of Mexican descent as “Smith” was among Americans of English stock.

Sam didn’t ask why I wanted to know. That made me feel a little forlorn, because I was used to feeling important to Sam. But he was preoccupied these days, on the job and off. Arlene said she thought he was dating someone, which was a first, as far as any of us could remember. Whoever she was, none of us got to see her, which was strange in and of itself. I tried to tell him about the shapeshifters of Dallas, but he just smiled and found an excuse to go do something else.

My brother, Jason, dropped by the house for lunch one day. It wasn’t like it had been when my grandmother was alive. Gran would have a huge meal on the table at lunchtime, and then we’d just eat sandwiches at night. Jason had come by pretty frequently then; Gran had been an excellent cook. I managed to serve him meatloaf sandwiches and potato salad (though I didn’t tell him it was from the store), and I had some peach tea fixed, which was lucky.

“What’s with you and Bill?” he asked bluntly, when he was through. He’d been real good about not asking on the drive back from the airport.

“I got mad at him,” I said.

“Why?”

“He broke a promise to me,” I said. Jason was trying hard to act like a big brother, and I should try to accept his concern instead of getting mad. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that possibly I had a pretty hot temper. Under some circumstances. I locked my sixth sense down firmly, so I would only hear what Jason was actually saying.

“He’s been seen over in Monroe.”

I took a deep breath. “With someone else?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“You’re not going to believe this. Portia Bellefleur.”

I couldn’t have been more surprised if Jason had told me Bill had been dating Hillary Clinton (though Bill
was
a Democrat). I stared at my brother as if he’d suddenly announced he was Satan. The only things Portia Bellefleur and I had in common were a birthplace, female organs, and long hair. “Well,” I said blankly. “I don’t know whether to pitch a fit or laugh. What do you make of that?”

Because if anyone knew about man-woman stuff, it was Jason. At least, he knew about it from the man’s point of view.

“She’s your opposite,” he said, with undue thoughtfulness. “In every way that I can think of. She’s real educated, she comes from an, I guess you’d call it, aristocratic background, and she’s a lawyer. Plus, her brother’s a cop. And they go to symphonies and shit.”

Tears prickled at my eyes. I would have gone to a symphony with Bill, if he’d ever asked me.

“On the other hand, you’re smart, you’re pretty, and you’re willing to put up with his little ways.” I wasn’t exactly sure what Jason meant by that, and thought it better not to ask. “But we sure ain’t aristocracy. You work in a bar, and your brother works on a road crew.” Jason smiled at me lopsidedly.

“We’ve been here as long as the Bellefleurs,” I said, trying not to sound sullen.

“I know that, and you know that. And Bill sure knows that, because he was alive then.” True enough.

“What’s happening about the case against Andy?” I asked.

“No charges brought against him yet, but the rumors are flying around town thick and fast about this sex club thing. Lafayette was so pleased to have been asked; evidently he mentioned it to quite a few people. They say that since the first rule of the club is Keep Silent, Lafayette got whacked for his enthusiasm.”

“What do you think?”

“I think if anyone was forming a sex club around Bon Temps, they woulda called me,” he said, dead serious.

“You’re right,” I said, struck again by how sensible Jason could be. “You’d be number one on the list.” Why hadn’t I thought of that before? Not only did Jason have a reputation as a guy who’d heated up many a bed, he was both very attractive and unmarried.

“The only thing I can think of,” I said slowly, “Lafayette was gay, as you well know.”

“And?”

“And maybe this club, if it exists, only accepts people who are all right with that.”

“You might have a point there,” Jason said.

“Yes, Mr. Homophobe.”

Jason smiled and shrugged. “Everybody’s got a weak point,” he said. “Plus, as you know, I’ve been going out with Liz pretty steady. I think anyone with a brain would see Liz ain’t about to share a napkin, much less a boyfriend.”

He was right. Liz’s family notoriously took “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” to a complete extreme.

“You are a piece of work, brother,” I said, focusing on his shortcomings, rather than those of Liz’s folks. “There are so many worse things to be than gay.”

“Such as?”

“Thief, traitor, murderer, rapist . . .”

“Okay, okay, I get the idea.”

“I hope you do,” I said. Our differences grieved me. But I loved Jason anyway; he was all I had left.

I saw Bill out with Portia that same night. I caught a glimpse of them together in Bill’s car, driving down Claiborne Street. Portia had her head turned to Bill, talking; he was looking straight ahead, expressionless, as far as I could tell. They didn’t see me. I was coming from the automated teller at the bank, on my way to work.