Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (66 page)

“You hit him during sex,” the maenad said to Tom. “You hit him, because you are proud, and his subservience disgusted and excited you.” She stretched her bony hand to caress Tom’s dark face. I could see the whites of his eyes. “And you”—she patted Mike with her other hand—“you beat him, too, because you were seized with the madness. Then he threatened to tell.” Her hand left Tom and rubbed his wife, Cleo. Cleo had thrown on a sweater before she went out, but it wasn’t buttoned.

Since she had avoided notice, Tara began backing up. She was the only one who wasn’t paralyzed by fear. I could feel the tiny spark of hope in her, the desire to survive. Tara crouched under a wrought-iron table on the deck, made herself into a little ball, and squeezed her eyes shut. She was making a lot of promises to God about her future behavior, if he’d get her out of this. That poured into my mind, too. The reek of fear from the others built to a peak, and I could feel my body go into tremors as they broadcast so heavily that it broke through all my barriers. I had nothing left of myself. I was only fear. Eric and Bill locked arms with each other, to hold me upright and immobile between them.

Jan, in her nudity, was completely ignored by the maenad. I can only suppose that there was nothing in Jan that appealed to the creature; Jan was not proud, she was pathetic, and she hadn’t had a drink that night. She embraced sex out of other needs than the need for its loss of self—needs that had nothing to do with leaving one’s mind and body for a moment of wonderful madness. Trying, as always, to be the center of the group, Jan reached out with a would-be flirty smile and took the maenad’s hand. Suddenly she began to convulse, and the noises coming from her throat were horrible. Foam came from her mouth, and her eyes rolled up. She collapsed to the deck, and I could hear her heels drumming the wood.

Then the silence resumed. But something was brewing a few yards away in the little group on the deck: something terrible and fine, something pure and horrible. Their fear was subsiding, and my body began to calm again. The awful pressure eased in my head. But as it ebbed, a new force began to build, and it was indescribably beautiful and absolutely evil.

It was pure madness, it was mindless madness. From the maenad poured the berserker rage, the lust of pillage, the hubris of pride. I was overwhelmed when the people on the deck were overwhelmed, I jerked and thrashed as the insanity rolled off Callisto and into their brains, and only Eric’s hand across my mouth kept me from screaming as they did. I bit him and tasted his blood, and heard him grunt at the pain.

It went on and on and on, the screaming, and then there were awful wet sounds. The dog, pressed against our legs, whimpered.

Suddenly, it was over.

I felt like a dancing puppet whose strings have suddenly been severed. I went limp. Bill laid me down on Eric’s car hood again. I opened my eyes. The maenad looked down at me. She was smiling again, and she was drenched in blood. It was like someone had poured a bucket of red paint over her head; her hair was drenched, as was every bit of her bare body, and she reeked of the copper smell, enough to set your teeth on edge.

“You were close,” she said to me, her voice as sweet and high as a flute. She moved a little more deliberately, as if she’d eaten a heavy meal. “You were very close. Maybe as close as you’ll ever come, maybe not. I’ve never seen anyone maddened by the insanity of others. An entertaining thought.”

“Entertaining for you, maybe,” I gasped. The dog bit my leg to bring me to myself. She looked down at him.

“My dear Sam,” she murmured. “Darling, I must leave you.”

The dog looked up at her with intelligent eyes.

“We’ve had some good nights running through the woods,” she said, and stroked his head. “Catching little rabbits, little coons.”

The dog wagged his tail.

“Doing other things.”

The dog grinned and panted.

“But it’s time for me to go, darling. The world is full of woods and people that need to learn their lesson. I must be paid tribute. They mustn’t forget me. I’m owed,” she said, in her sated voice, “owed the madness and death.” She began to drift to the edge of the woods.

“After all,” she said over her shoulder, “it can’t always be hunting season.”

E
VEN IF I’D wanted to, I couldn’t have walked over to see what was on the deck. Bill and Eric seemed subdued, and when vampires seem subdued, it means you don’t really want to go investigate.

“We’ll have to burn the cabin,” Eric said from a few yards away. “I wish Callisto had taken care of her own mess.”

“She never has,” Bill said. “that I have heard. It is the madness. What does true madness care about discovery?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Eric said carelessly. He sounded as if he was lifting something. There was a heavy thud. “I have seen a few people who were definitely mad and quite crafty with it.”

“That’s true,” Bill said. “Shouldn’t we leave a couple of them on the porch?”

“How can you tell?”

“That’s true, too. It’s a rare night I can agree with you this much.”

“She called me and asked me to help.” Eric was responding to the subtext rather than the statement.

“Then, all right. But you remember our agreement.”

“How can I forget?”

“You know Sookie can hear us.”

“Quite all right with me,” Eric said, and laughed. I stared up at the night and wondered, not too curiously, what the hell they were talking about. It’s not like I was Russia, to be parceled out to the strongest dictator. Sam was resting beside me, back in his human form, and stark naked. At the moment, I could not have cared less. The cold didn’t bother Sam, since he was a shapeshifter.

“Whoops, here’s a live one,” Eric called.

“Tara,” Sam called.

Tara scrambled down the steps of the deck and over to us. She flung her arms around me and began sobbing. With tremendous weariness, I held her and let her boohoo. I was still in my Daisy Duke outfit, and she was in her fire-engine lingerie. We were like big white water lilies in a cold pond, we two. I made myself straighten up and hold Tara.

“Would there be a blanket in that cabin, you think?” I asked Sam. He trotted over to the steps, and I noticed the effect was interesting from behind. After a minute, he trotted back—wow, this view was even more arresting—and wrapped a blanket around the two of us.

“I must be gonna live,” I muttered.

“Why do you say that?” Sam was curious. He didn’t seem unduly surprised by the events of the night.

I could hardly tell him it was because I’d watched him bounce around, so I said, “How are Eggs and Andy?”

“Sounds like a radio show,” Tara said suddenly, and giggled. I didn’t like the sound of it.

“They’re still standing where she left them,” Sam reported. “Still staring.”

“I’m—still—staring,” Tara sang, to the tune of Elton’s “I’m Still Standing.”

Eric laughed.

He and Bill were just about to start the fire. They strolled over to us for a last-minute check.

“What car did you come in?” Bill asked Tara.

“Ooo, a vampire,” she said. “You’re Sookie’s honey, aren’t you? Why were you at the game the other night with a dog like Portia Bellefleur?”

“She’s kind, too,” Eric said. He looked down at Tara with a sort of beneficent but disappointed smile, like a dog breeder regarding a cute, but inferior, puppy.

“What car did you come in?” Bill asked again. “If there is a sensible side to you, I want to see it now.”

“I came in the white Camaro,” she said, quite soberly. “I’ll drive it home. Or maybe I better not. Sam?”

“Sure, I’ll drive you home. Bill, you need my help here?”

“I think Eric and I can cope. Can you take the skinny one?”

“Eggs? I’ll see.”

Tara gave me a kiss on the cheek and began picking her way across the yard to her car. “I left the keys in it,” she called.

“What about your purse?” The police would surely wonder if they found Tara’s purse in a cabin with a lot of bodies.

“Oh . . . it’s in there.”

I looked at Bill silently, and he went in to fetch the purse. He returned with a big shoulder bag, large enough to contain not only makeup and everyday items, but also a change of clothing.

“This is yours?”

“Yes, thanks,” Tara said, taking the bag from him as if she were afraid his fingers might touch hers. She hadn’t been so picky earlier in the evening, I thought.

Eric was carrying Eggs to her car. “He will not remember any of this,” Eric told Tara as Sam opened the back door of the Camaro so Eric could lay Eggs inside.

“I wish I could say the same.” Her face seemed to sag on its bones under the weight of the knowledge of what had happened this night. “I wish I’d never seen that thing, whatever she is. I wish I’d never come here, to start with. I hated doing this. I just thought Eggs was worth it.” She gave a look to the inert form in the backseat of her car. “He’s not. No one is.”

“I can remove your memory, too.” Eric made the offer offhandedly.

“No,” she said. “I need to remember some of this, and it’s worth carrying the burden of the rest.” Tara sounded twenty years older. Sometimes we can grow up all in a minute; I’d done that when I was about seven and my parents died. Tara had done that this night.

“But they’re all dead, all but me and Eggs and Andy. Aren’t you afraid we’ll talk? Are you gonna come after us?”

Eric and Bill exchanged glances. Eric moved a little closer to Tara. “Look, Tara,” he began, in a very reasonable voice, and she made the mistake of glancing up. Then, once her gaze was fixed, Eric began to erase the memory of the night. I was just too tired to protest, as if that would do any good. If Tara could even raise the question, she shouldn’t be burdened with the knowledge. I hoped she wouldn’t repeat her mistakes, having been separated from the knowledge of what they had cost her; but she couldn’t be allowed to tell tales.

Tara and Eggs, driven by Sam (who had borrowed Eggs’s pants), were on their way back to town when Bill began arranging a natural-looking fire to consume the cabin. Eric was apparently counting bones up on the deck, to make sure the bodies there were complete enough to reassure the investigators. He went across the yard to check on Andy.

“Why does Bill hate the Bellefleurs so much?” I asked him again.

“Oh, that’s an old story,” Eric said. “Back from before Bill had even changed over.” He seemed satisfied by Andy’s condition and went back to work.

I heard a car approaching, and Bill and Eric both appeared in the yard instantly. I could hear a faint crackle from the far side of the cabin. “We can’t start the fire from more than one place, or they may be able to tell it wasn’t natural,” Bill said to Eric. “I hate these strides in police science.”

“If we hadn’t decided to go public, they’d have to blame it on one of them,” Eric said. “But as it is, we are such attractive scapegoats . . . it’s galling, when you think of how much stronger we are.”

“Hey, guys, I’m not a Martian, I’m a human, and I can hear you just fine,” I said. I was glaring at them, and they were looking perhaps one-fiftieth embarrassed, when Portia Bellefleur got out of her car and ran to her brother. “What have you done to Andy?” she said, her voice harsh and cracking. “You damn vampires.” She pulled the collar of Andy’s shirt this way and that, looking for puncture marks.

“They saved his life,” I told her.

Eric looked at Portia for a long moment, evaluating her, and then he began to search the cars of the dead revelers. He’d gotten their car keys, which I didn’t want to picture.

Bill went over to Andy and said, “Wake up,” in the quietest voice, so quiet it could hardly be heard a few feet away.

Andy blinked. He looked over at me, confused that I wasn’t still in his grasp, I guess. He saw Bill, so close to him, and he flinched, expecting retaliation. He registered that Portia was at his side. Then he looked past Bill at the cabin.

“It’s on fire,” he observed, slowly.

“Yes,” Bill said. “They are all dead, except the two who’ve gone back into town. They knew nothing.”

“Then . . . these people did kill Lafayette?”

“Yes,” I said. “Mike, and the Hardaways, and I guess maybe Jan knew about it.”

“But I haven’t got any proof.”

“Oh, I think so,” Eric called. He was looking down into the trunk of Mike Spencer’s Lincoln.

We all moved to the car to see. Bill’s and Eric’s superior vision made it easy for them to tell there was blood in the trunk, blood and some stained clothes and a wallet. Eric reached down and carefully flipped the wallet open.

“Can you read whose it is?” Andy asked.

“Lafayette Reynold,” Eric said.

“So if we just leave the cars like this, and we leave, the police will find what’s in the trunk and it’ll all be over. I’ll be clear.”

“Oh, thank God!” Portia said, and gave a kind of sobbing gasp. Her plain face and thick chestnut hair caught a gleam of moonlight filtering through the trees. “Oh, Andy, let’s go home.”

“Portia,” Bill said, “look at me.”

She glanced up at him, then away. “I’m sorry I led you on like that,” she said rapidly. She was ashamed to apologize to a vampire, you could tell. “I was just trying to get one of the people who came here to invite me, so I could find out for myself what was going on.”

“Sookie did that for you,” Bill said mildly.

Portia’s gaze darted over to me. “I hope it wasn’t too awful, Sookie,” she said, surprising me.

“It was really horrible,” I said. Portia cringed. “But it’s over.”

“Thank you for helping Andy,” Portia said bravely.

“I wasn’t helping Andy. I was helping Lafayette,” I snapped.

She took a deep breath. “Of course,” she said, with some dignity. “He was your coworker.”

“He was my
friend,
” I corrected.