Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (93 page)

“Sookie,” he said, against my hair, “I’m—”

“Hush,” I said. “Hush.” I huddled closer against him. I relaxed. It was like taking off an Ace bandage, one that had been wrapped too tight.

“You’re wearing someone else’s clothes,” he whispered, after a minute or two.

“Yes, a vampire named Bernard. He gave me clothes to wear after my dress got ruined at the bar.”

“At Josephine’s?”

“Yes.”

“How did your dress get ruined?”

“I got staked.”

Everything about him went still. “Where? Did it hurt?” He folded down the blanket. “Show me.”

“Of course it hurt,” I said deliberately. “It hurt like hell.” I lifted the hem of the sweatshirt carefully.

His fingers stroked the shiny skin. I would not heal like Bill. It might take a night or two more for him to become as smooth and perfect as he had been, but he would look just as before, despite a week of torture. I would have a scar the rest of my life, vampire blood or no vampire blood. The scar might not be as severe, and it was certainly forming at a phenomenal rate, but it was undeniably red and ugly, the flesh underneath it still tender, the whole area sore.

“Who did this to you?”

“A man. A fanatic. It’s a long story.”

“Is he dead?”

“Yeah. Betty Joe Pickard killed him with two big blows of her fist. It kind of reminded me of a story I read in elementary school, about Paul Bunyan.”

“I don’t know that story.” His dark eyes caught mine.

I shrugged.

“As long as he’s dead now.” Bill had a good grip on that idea.

“Lots of people are dead now. All because of your program.”

There was a long moment of silence.

Bill cast a glance at the door Eric had tactfully closed behind him. Of course, he was probably listening right outside, and like all vampires, Eric had excellent hearing. “It’s safe?”

“Yes.”

Bill’s mouth was right by my ear. It tickled when he whispered, “Did they search my house?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the vamps from Mississippi went in. I never had a chance to get over there after Eric and Pam and Chow came to tell me you’d been snatched.”

“And they told you . . . ?”

“That you were planning on leaving me. Yes. They told me.”

“I already got paid back for that piece of madness,” Bill said.

“You might have been paid back enough to suit
you
,” I said, “but I don’t know if you’ve been paid back enough to suit
me
.”

There was a long silence in the cold, empty room. It was quiet out in the living room, too. I hoped Eric had worked out what we were going to do next, and I hoped it involved going home. No matter what happened between Bill and me, I needed to be home in Bon Temps. I needed to go back to my job and my friends and I needed to see my brother. He might not be much, but he was what I had.

I wondered what was happening in the next apartment.

“When the queen came to me and said she’d heard I was working on a program that had never been attempted before, I was flattered,” Bill told me. “The money she offered was very good, and she would have been within her rights not to offer any, since I am her subject.”

I could feel my mouth twisting at hearing yet another reminder of how different Bill’s world was from mine. “Who do you think told her?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t really want to,” Bill said. His voice sounded offhand, even gentle, but I knew better.

“You know I had been working on it for some time,” Bill said, when he figured I wasn’t going to say anything.

“Why?”

“Why?” He sounded oddly disconcerted. “Well, because it seemed like a good idea to me. Having a list of all America’s vampires, and at least some of the rest of the world’s? That was a valuable project, and actually, it was kind of fun to compile. And once I started doing research, I thought of including pictures. And aliases. And histories. It just grew.”

“So you’ve been, um, compiling a—like a directory? Of vampires?”

“Exactly.” Bill’s glowing face lit up even brighter. “I just started one night, thinking how many other vampires I’d come across in my travels over the past century, and I started making a list, and then I started adding a drawing I’d done or a photograph I’d taken.”

“So vampires do photograph? I mean, they show up in pictures?”

“Sure. We never liked to have our picture made, when photography became a common thing in America, because a picture was proof we’d been in a particular place at a particular time, and if we showed up looking exactly the same twenty years later, well, it was obvious what we were. But since we have admitted our existence, there is no point clinging to the old ways.”

“I’ll bet some vampires still do.”

“Of course. There are some who still hide in the shadows and sleep in crypts every night.”

(This from a guy who slept in the soil of the cemetery from time to time.)

“And other vampires helped you with this?”

“Yes,” he said, sounding surprised. “Yes, a few did. Some enjoyed the exercise of memory . . . some used it as a reason to search for old acquaintances, travel to old haunts. I am sure that I don’t have all the vampires in America, especially the recent immigrants, but I think I have probably eighty percent of them.”

“Okay, so why is the queen so anxious to have this program? Why would the other vampires want it, once they learned about it? They could assemble all the same information, right?”

“Yes,” he said. “But it would be far easier to take it from me. And as for why it’s so desirable to have this program . . . wouldn’t you like to have a booklet that listed all the other telepaths in the United States?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “I could get lots of tips on how to handle my problem, or maybe how to use it better.”

“So, wouldn’t it be good to have a directory of vampires in the United States, what they’re good at, where their gifts lie?”

“But surely some vampires really wouldn’t want to be in such a book,” I said. “You’ve told me that some vamps don’t want to come out, that they want to stay in the darkness and hunt secretly.”

“Exactly.”

“Those vamps are in there, too?”

Bill nodded.

“Do you want to get yourself staked?”

“I never realized how tempting this project would be to anyone else. I never thought of how much power it would give to the one who owned it, until others began trying to steal it.”

Bill looked glum.

The sound of shouting in the apartment next door drew our attention.

Alcide and Debbie were at it again. They were really bad for each other. But some mutual attraction kept them ricocheting back to each other. Maybe, away from Alcide, Debbie was a nice person.

Nah, I couldn’t bring myself to believe that. But maybe she was at least tolerable when Alcide’s affections weren’t an issue.

Of course they should separate. They should never be in the same room again.

And I had to take this to heart.

Look at me. Mangled, drained, staked, battered. Lying in a cold apartment in a strange city with a vampire who had betrayed me.

A big decision was standing right in front of my face, waiting to be recognized and enacted.

I shoved Bill away, and wobbled to my feet. I pulled on my stolen jacket. With his silence heavy at my back, I opened the door to the living room. Eric was listening with some amusement to the battle going on in the next apartment.

“Take me home,” I said.

“Of course,” he said. “Now?”

“Yes. Alcide can drop my things by when he goes back to Baton Rouge.”

“Is the Lincoln drivable?”

“Oh, yes.” I pulled the keys out of my pocket. “Here.”

We walked out of the empty apartment and took the elevator down to the garage.

Bill didn’t follow.

E
RIC CAUGHT UP with me as I was climbing into the Lincoln.

“I had to give Bill a few instructions about cleaning up the mess he caused,” he said, though I didn’t ask.

Eric was used to driving sports cars, and he had a few issues with the Lincoln.

“Had it occurred to you,” he said, after we’d rolled out of the city’s center, “that you tend to walk away when things between you and Bill become rocky? Not that I mind, necessarily, since I would be glad for you two to sever your association. But if this is the pattern you follow in your romantic attachments, I want to know now.”

I thought of several things to say, discarded the first few, which would have blistered my grandmother’s ears, and drew a deep breath.

“Firstly, Eric, what happens between Bill and me is just none of your damn business.” I let that sink in for a few seconds. “Second, my relationship with Bill is the only one I’ve ever had, so I’ve never had any idea what I’m going to do even from day to day, much less establishing a policy.” I paused to work on phrasing my next idea. “Third, I’m through with you all. I’m tired of seeing all this sick stuff. I’m tired of having to be brave, and having to do things that scare me, and having to hang out with the bizarre and the supernatural. I am just a regular person, and I just want to date regular people. Or at least people who are
breathing
.”

Eric waited to see if I’d finished. I cast a quick glance over at him, and the streetlights illuminated his strong profile with its knife-edge nose. At least he wasn’t laughing at me. He wasn’t even smiling.

He glanced at me briefly before turning his attention back to the road. “I’m listening to what you say. I can tell you mean it. I’ve had your blood: I know your feelings.”

A mile of darkness went by. I was pleased Eric was taking me seriously. Sometimes he didn’t; and sometimes he didn’t seem to care what he said to me.

“You are spoiled for humans,” Eric said. His slight foreign accent was more apparent.

“Maybe I am. Though I don’t see that as much of a loss, since I didn’t have any luck with guys before.” Hard to date, when you know exactly what your date is thinking. So much of the time, knowing a man’s exact thoughts can erase desire and even liking. “But I’d be happier with no one than I am now.”

I’d been considering the old Ann Landers rule of thumb: Would I be better off with him, or without him? My grandmother and Jason and I had read Ann Landers every day when Jason and I had been growing up. We’d discussed all Ann’s responses to reader questions. A lot of the advice she’d ladled out had been intended to help women deal with guys like Jason, so he certainly brought perspective to the conversations.

Right at this moment, I was pretty darn sure I was better off without Bill. He’d used me and abused me, betrayed me and drained me.

He’d also defended me, avenged me, worshiped me with his body, and provided hours of uncritical companionship, a very major blessing.

Well, I just didn’t have my scales handy. What I had was a heart full of hurt and a way to go home. We flew through the black night, wrapped in our own thoughts. Traffic was light, but this was an interstate, so of course there were cars around us from time to time.

I had no idea what Eric was thinking about, a wonderful feeling. He might be debating pulling over to the shoulder and breaking my neck, or he might be wondering what tonight’s take at Fangtasia would add up to. I wanted him to talk to me. I wished he would tell me about his life before he became a vampire, but that’s a real touchy subject with lots of vamps, and I wasn’t about to bring it up tonight of all nights.

About an hour out of Bon Temps, we took an exit ramp. We were a little low on gas, and I needed to use the ladies’ room. Eric had already begun to fill the tank as I eased my sore body carefully out of the car. He had dismissed my offer to pump the gas with a courteous, “No, thank you.” One other car was filling up, and the woman, a peroxide blond about my age, hung up the nozzle as I got out of the Lincoln.

At one in the morning, the gas station/convenience store was almost empty besides the young woman, who was heavily made up and wrapped in a quilted coat. I spied a battered Toyota pickup parked by the side of the filling station, in the only shadow on the lot. Inside the pickup, two men were sitting, involved in a heated conversation.

“It’s too cold to be sitting outside in a pickup,” the dark-rooted blond said, as we went through the glass doors together. She gave an elaborate shiver.

“You’d think so,” I commented. I was halfway down the aisle by the back of the store, when the clerk, behind a high counter on a raised platform, turned away from his little television to take the blond’s money.

The door to the bathroom was hard to shut behind me, since the wooden sill had swollen during some past leakage. In fact, it probably didn’t shut all the way behind me, since I was in something of a hurry. But the stall door shut and locked, and it was clean enough. In no hurry to get back in the car with the silent Eric, I took my time after using the facilities. I peered in the mirror over the sink, expecting I’d look like holy hell and not being contradicted by what I saw reflected there.

The mangled bite mark on my neck looked really disgusting, as though a dog had had hold of me. As I cleaned the wound with soap and wet paper towels, I wondered if having ingested vampire blood would give me a specific quantity of extra strength and healing, and then be exhausted, or if it was good for a certain amount of time like a time-release capsule, or what the deal was. After I’d had Bill’s blood, I’d felt great for a couple of months.

I didn’t have a comb or brush or anything, and I looked like something the cat dragged in. Trying to tame my hair with my fingers just made a bad thing worse. I washed my face and neck, and stepped back into the glare of the store. I hardly registered that once again the door didn’t shut behind me, instead lodged quietly on the swollen sill. I emerged behind the last long aisle of groceries, crowded with CornNuts and Lays Chips and Moon Pies and Scotch Snuf and Prince Albert in a can . . .