Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (5 page)

I was glad Rene and Hoyt weren’t there the night the vampire returned.

He sat at the same table.

Now that the vampire was actually in front of me, I felt a little shy. I found I’d forgotten the almost imperceptible glow of his skin. I’d exaggerated his height and the clear-cut lines of his mouth.

“What can I get you?” I asked.

He looked up at me. I had forgotten, too, the depth of his eyes. He didn’t smile or blink; he was so immobile. For the second time, I relaxed into his silence. When I let down my guard, I could feel my face relax. It was as good as getting a massage (I am guessing).

“What are you?” he asked me. It was the second time he’d wanted to know.

“I’m a waitress,” I said, again deliberately misunderstanding him. I could feel my smile snap back into place again. My little bit of peace vanished.

“Red wine,” he ordered, and if he was disappointed I couldn’t tell by his voice.

“Sure,” I said. “The synthetic blood should come in on the truck tomorrow. Listen, could I talk to you after work? I have a favor to ask you.”

“Of course. I’m in your debt.” And he sure didn’t sound happy about it.

“Not a favor for me!” I was getting miffed myself. “For my grandmother. If you’ll be up—well, I guess you will be—when I get off work at one-thirty, would you very much mind meeting me at the employee door at the back of the bar?” I nodded toward it, and my ponytail bounced around my shoulders. His eyes followed the movement of my hair.

“I’d be delighted.”

I didn’t know if he was displaying the courtesy Gran insisted was the standard in bygone times, or if he was plain old mocking me.

I resisted the temptation to stick out my tongue at him or blow a raspberry. I spun on my heel and marched back to the bar. When I brought him his wine, he tipped me 20 percent. Soon after that, I looked over at his table only to realize he’d vanished. I wondered if he’d keep his word.

Arlene and Dawn left before I was ready to go, for one reason and another; mostly because all the napkin holders in my area proved to be half-empty. As I retrieved my purse from the locked cabinet in Sam’s office, where I stow it while I work, I called good-bye to my boss. I could hear him clanking around in the men’s room, probably trying to fix the leaky toilet. I stepped into the ladies’ room for a second to check my hair and makeup.

When I stepped outside I noticed that Sam had already switched off the customer parking lot lights. Only the security light on the electricity pole in front of his trailer illuminated the employee parking lot. To the amusement of Arlene and Dawn, Sam had put in a yard and planted box-wood in front of his trailer, and they were constantly teasing him about the neat line of his hedge.

I thought it was pretty.

As usual, Sam’s truck was parked in front of his trailer, so my car was the only one left in the lot.

I stretched, looking from side to side. No Bill. I was surprised at how disappointed I was. I had really expected him to be courteous, even if his heart (did he have one?) wasn’t in it.

Maybe, I thought with a smile, he’d jump out of a tree, or appear with a poof! in front of me draped in a red-lined black cape. But nothing happened. So I trudged over to my car.

I’d hoped for a surprise, but not the one I got.

Mack Rattray jumped out from behind my car and in one stride got close enough to clip me in the jaw. He didn’t hold back one little bit, and I went down onto the gravel like a sack of cement. I let out a yell when I went down, but the ground knocked all the air out of me and some skin off of me, and I was silent and breathless and helpless. Then I saw Denise, saw her swing back her heavy boot, had just enough warning to roll into a ball before the Rattrays began kicking me.

The pain was immediate, intense, and unrelenting. I threw my arms over my face instinctively, taking the beating on my forearms, legs, and my back.

I think I was sure, during the first few blows, that they’d stop and hiss warnings and curses at me and leave. But I remember the exact moment I realized that they intended to kill me.

I could lie there passively and take a beating, but I would not lie there and be killed.

The next time a leg came close I lunged and grabbed it and held on for my life. I was trying to bite, trying to at least mark one of them. I wasn’t even sure whose leg I had.

Then, from behind me, I heard a growl. Oh, no, they’ve brought a dog, I thought. The growl was definitely hostile. If I’d had any leeway with my emotions, the hair would have stood up on my scalp.

I took one more kick to the spine, and then the beating stopped.

The last kick had done something dreadful to me. I could hear my own breathing, stertorous, and a strange bubbling sound that seemed to be coming from my own lungs.

“What the hell is that?” Mack Rattray asked, and he sounded absolutely terrified.

I heard the growl again, closer, right behind me. And from another direction, I heard a sort of snarl. Denise began wailing, Mack was cursing. Denise yanked her leg from my grasp, which had grown very weak. My arms flopped to the ground. They seemed to be beyond my control. Though my vision was cloudy, I could see that my right arm was broken. My face felt wet. I was scared to continue evaluating my injuries.

Mack began screaming, and then Denise, and there seemed to be all kinds of activity going on around me, but I couldn’t move. My only view was my broken arm and my battered knees and the darkness under my car.

Some time later there was silence. Behind me, the dog whined. A cold nose poked my ear, and a warm tongue licked it. I tried to raise my hand to pet the dog that had undoubtedly saved my life, but I couldn’t. I could hear myself sigh. It seemed to come from a long way away.

Facing the fact, I said, “I’m dying.” It began to seem more and more real to me. The toads and crickets that had been making the most of the night had fallen silent at all the activity and noise in the parking lot, so my little voice came out clearly and fell into the darkness. Oddly enough, soon after that I heard two voices.

Then a pair of knees covered in bloody blue jeans came into my view. The vampire Bill leaned over so I could look into his face. There was blood smeared on his mouth, and his fangs were out, glistening white against his lower lip. I tried to smile at him, but my face wasn’t working right.

“I’m going to pick you up,” Bill said. He sounded calm.

“I’ll die if you do,” I whispered.

He looked me over carefully. “Not just yet,” he said, after this evaluation. Oddly enough, this made me feel better; no telling how many injuries he’d seen in his lifetime, I figured.

“This will hurt,” he warned me.

It was hard to imagine anything that wouldn’t.

His arms slid under me before I had time to get afraid. I screamed, but it was a weak effort.

“Quick,” said a voice urgently.

“We’re going back in the woods out of sight,” Bill said, cradling my body to him as if it weighed nothing.

Was he going to bury me back there, out of sight? After he’d just rescued me from the Rats? I almost didn’t care.

It was only a small relief when he laid me down on a carpet of pine needles in the darkness of the woods. In the distance, I could see the glow of the light in the parking lot. I felt my hair trickling blood, and I felt the pain of my broken arm and the agony of deep bruises, but what was most frightening was what I didn’t feel.

I didn’t feel my legs.

My abdomen felt full, heavy. The phrase “internal bleeding” lodged in my thoughts, such as they were.

“You will die unless you do as I say,” Bill told me.

“Sorry, don’t want to be a vampire,” I said, and my voice was weak and thready.

“No, you won’t be,” he said more gently. “You’ll heal. Quickly. I have a cure. But you have to be willing.”

“Then trot out the cure,” I whispered. “I’m going.” I could feel the pull the grayness was exerting on me.

In the little part of my mind that was still receiving signals from the world, I heard Bill grunt as if he’d been hurt. Then something was pressed up against my mouth.

“Drink,” he said.

I tried to stick out my tongue, managed. He was bleeding, squeezing to encourage the flow of blood from his wrist into my mouth. I gagged. But I wanted to live. I forced myself to swallow. And swallow again.

Suddenly the blood tasted good, salty, the stuff of life. My unbroken arm rose, my hand clamped the vampire’s wrist to my mouth. I felt better with every swallow. And after a minute, I drifted off to sleep.

When I woke up, I was still in the woods, still lying on the ground. Someone was stretched out beside me; it was the vampire. I could see his glow. I could feel his tongue moving on my head. He was licking my head wound. I could hardly begrudge him.

“Do I taste different from other people?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said in a thick voice. “What are you?”

It was the third time he’d asked. Third time’s the charm, Gran always said.

“Hey, I’m not dead,” I said. I suddenly remembered I’d expected to check out for good. I wiggled my arm, the one that had been broken. It was weak, but it wasn’t flopping any longer. I could feel my legs, and I wiggled them, too. I breathed in and out experimentally and was pleased with the resulting mild ache. I struggled to sit up. That proved to be quite an effort, but not an impossibility. It was like my first fever-free day after I’d had pneumonia as a kid. Feeble but blissful. I was aware I’d survived something awful.

Before I finished straightening, he’d put his arms under me and cradled me to him. He leaned back against a tree. I felt very comfortable sitting on his lap, my head against his chest.

“What I am, is telepathic,” I said. “I can hear people’s thoughts.”

“Even mine?” He sounded merely curious.

“No. That’s why I like you so much,” I said, floating on a sea of pinkish well-being. I couldn’t seem to be bothered with camouflaging my thoughts.

I felt his chest rumble as he laughed. The laugh was a little rusty.

“I can’t hear you at all,” I blathered on, my voice dreamy. “You have no idea how peaceful that is. After a lifetime of blah, blah, blah, to hear . . . nothing.”

“How do you manage going out with men? With men your age, their only thought is still surely how to get you into bed.”

“Well, I don’t. Manage. And frankly, at any age, I think their goal is get a woman in bed. I don’t date. Everyone thinks I’m crazy, you know, because I can’t tell them the truth; which is, that I’m driven crazy by all these thoughts, all these heads. I had a few dates when I started working at the bar, guys who hadn’t heard about me. But it was the same as always. You can’t concentrate on being comfortable with a guy, or getting a head of steam up, when you can hear they’re wondering if you dye your hair, or thinking that your butt’s not pretty, or imagining what your boobs look like.”

Suddenly I felt more alert, and I realized how much of myself I was revealing to this creature.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I didn’t mean to burden you with my problems. Thank you for saving me from the Rats.”

“It was my fault they had a chance to get you at all,” he said. I could tell there was rage just under the calm surface of his voice. “If I had had the courtesy to be on time, it would not have happened. So I owed you some of my blood. I owed you the healing.”

“Are they dead?” To my embarrassment, my voice sounded squeaky.

“Oh, yes.”

I gulped. I couldn’t regret that the world was rid of the Rats. But I had to look this straight in the face, I couldn’t dodge the realization that I was sitting in the lap of a murderer. Yet I was quite happy to sit there, his arms around me.

“I should worry about this, but I’m not,” I said, before I knew what I was going to say. I felt that rusty laugh again.

“Sookie, why did you want to talk to me tonight?”

I had to think back hard. Though I was miraculously recovered from the beating physically, I felt a little hazy mentally.

“My grandmother is real anxious to know how old you are,” I said hesitantly. I didn’t know how personal a question that was to a vampire. The vampire in question was stroking my back as though he were soothing a kitten.

“I was made vampire in 1870, when I was thirty human years old.” I looked up; his glowing face was expressionless, his eyes pits of blackness in the dark woods.

“Did you fight in the War?”

“Yes.”

“I have the feeling you’re gonna get mad. But it would make her and her club so happy if you’d tell them a little bit about the War, about what it was really like.”

“Club?”

“She belongs to Descendants of the Glorious Dead.”

“Glorious dead.” The vampire’s voice was unreadable, but I could tell, sure enough, he wasn’t happy.

“Listen, you wouldn’t have to tell them about the maggots and the infections and the starvation,” I said. “They have their own picture of the War, and though they’re not stupid people—they’ve lived through other wars—they would like to know more about the way people lived then, and uniforms and troop movements.”

“Clean things.”

I took a deep breath. “Yep.”

“Would it make you happy if I did this?”

“What difference does that make? It would make Gran happy, and since you’re in Bon Temps and seem to want to live around here, it would be a good public relations move for you.”

“Would it make you happy?”

He was not a guy you could evade. “Well, yes.”

“Then I’ll do it.”

“Gran says to please eat before you come,” I said.

Again I heard the rumbling laugh, deeper this time.

“I’m looking forward to meeting her now. Can I call on you some night?”

“Ah. Sure. I work my last night tomorrow night, and the day after I’m off for two days, so Thursday would be a good night.” I lifted my arm to look at my watch. It was running, but the glass was covered with dried blood. “Oh, yuck,” I said, wetting my finger in my mouth and cleaning the watch face off with spit. I pressed the button that illuminated the hands, and gasped when I saw what time it was.