Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (96 page)

“Can you speak?” Eric said, after a long, long moment.

I tried, but my mouth was so dry, nothing came out.

“She needs a drink.” Bill went to the kitchen, having to take a less than direct route, since there were a lot of obstructions in the way.

Eric’s hands stroked back my hair. He’d been shot, I remembered, and I wanted to ask him how he felt, but I couldn’t. He was sitting on his butt beside me, leaning on the cushions of my couch. There was blood on his face, and he looked pinker than I’d ever seen him, ruddy with health. When Bill returned with my water—he’d even added a straw—I looked at his face. Bill looked almost sunburned.

Bill held me up carefully and put the straw to my lips. I drank, and it was the best thing I’d ever tasted.

“You killed them all,” I said in a creaky voice.

Eric nodded.

I thought of the circle of brutish faces that had surrounded me. I thought of the Were slapping me in the face.

“Good,” I said. Eric looked a little amused, just for a second. Bill didn’t look anything in particular.

“How many?”

Eric looked around vaguely, and Bill pointed a finger silently as he toted them up.

“Seven?” Bill said doubtfully. “Two in the yard and five in the house?”

“I was thinking eight,” Eric murmured.

“Why did they come after you like that?”

“Jerry Falcon.”

“Oh,” said Bill, a different note in his voice. “Oh, yes. I’ve encountered him. In the torture room. He is first on my list.”

“Well, you can cross him off,” Eric said. “Alcide and Sookie disposed of his body in the woods yesterday.”

“Did this Alcide kill him?” Bill looked down at me, reconsidered. “Or Sookie?”

“He says no. They found the corpse in the closet of Alcide’s apartment, and they hatched a plan to hide his remains.” Eric sounded like that had been kind of cute of us.

“My Sookie hid a corpse?”

“I don’t think you can be too sure about that possessive pronoun.”

“Where did you learn that term, Northman?”

“I took ‘English as a Second Language’ at a community college in the seventies.”

Bill said, “She is mine.”

I wondered if my hands would move. They would. I raised both of them, making an unmistakable one-fingered gesture.

Eric laughed, and Bill said, “Sookie!” in shocked admonishment.

“I think that Sookie is telling us she belongs to herself,” Eric said softly. “In the meantime, to finish our conversation, whoever stuffed the corpse in the closet meant to saddle Alcide with the blame, since Jerry Falcon had made a blatant pass at Sookie in the bar the night before, and Alcide had taken umbrage.”

“So all this plot might be directed at Alcide instead of us?”

“Hard to say. Evidently, from what the armed robbers at the gas station told us, what’s remaining of the gang called in all the thugs they knew and stationed them along the interstate to intercept us on the way back. If they’d just called ahead, they wouldn’t now be in jail for armed robbery. And I’m certainly sure that’s where they are.”

“So how’d these guys get here? How’d they know where Sookie lived, who she really was?”

“She used her own name at Club Dead. They didn’t know the name of Bill’s human girlfriend. You were faithful.”

“I hadn’t been faithful in other ways,” Bill said bleakly. “I thought it was the least I could do for her.”

And this was the guy whom I’d shot the bird. On the other hand, this was the guy who was talking like I wasn’t in the room. And most importantly, this was the guy who’d had another “darling,” for whom he’d planned to leave me flat.

“So the Weres may not know she was your girlfriend; they only know she was staying in the apartment with Alcide when Jerry disappeared. They know Jerry may have come by the apartment. This Alcide says that the packmaster in Jackson told Alcide to leave and not return for a while, but that he believed Alcide had not killed Jerry.”

“This Alcide . . . he seemed to have a troubled relationship with his girlfriend.”

“She is engaged to someone else. She believes he is attached to Sookie.”

“And is he? He has the gall to tell this virago Debbie that Sookie is good in bed.”

“He wanted to make her jealous. He has not slept with Sookie.”

“But he likes her.” Bill made it sound like a capital crime.

“Doesn’t everyone?”

I said, with great effort, “You just killed a bunch of guys who didn’t seem to like me at all.” I was tired of them talking about me right above my head, as illuminating as it was. I was hurting real bad, and my living room was full of dead men. I was ready for both those situations to be remedied.

“Bill, how’d you get here?” I asked in a raspy whisper.

“My car. I negotiated a deal with Russell, since I didn’t want to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my existence. Russell was in a tantrum when I called him. Not only had I disappeared and Lorena vanished, but his hired Weres had disobeyed him and thus jeopardized business dealings Russell has with this Alcide and his father.”

“Who was Russell angriest with?” Eric asked.

“Lorena, for letting me escape.”

They had a good laugh over that one before Bill continued his story. Those vamps. A laugh a minute.

“Russell agreed to return my car and leave me alone if I would tell him how I’d escaped, so he could plug the hole I’d wiggled out of. And he asked me to put in a bid for him to share in the vampire directory.”

If Russell had just done that in the first place, it would have saved everyone a lot of grief. On the other hand, Lorena would still be alive. So would the thugs who’d beaten me, and perhaps so would Jerry Falcon, whose death was still a mystery.

“So,” Bill continued, “I sped down the highway, on the way to tell you two that the Weres and their hired hands were pursuing you, and that they had gone ahead to lie in wait. They had discovered, via the computer, that Alcide’s girlfriend Sookie Stackhouse lived in Bon Temps.”

“These computers are dangerous things,” Eric said. His voice sounded weary, and I remembered the blood on his clothes. Eric had been shot twice, because he’d been with me.

“Her face is swelling,” Bill said. His voice was both gentle and angry.

“Eric okay?” I asked wearily, figuring I could skip a few words if I got the idea across.

“I will heal,” he said, from a great distance. “Especially since having all that good . . .”

And then I fell asleep, or passed out, or some blend of the two.

 

S
UNSHINE. IT HAD been so long since I’d seen sunshine; I’d almost forgotten how good it looked.

I was in my own bed, and I was in my soft blue brushed-nylon nightgown, and I was wrapped up like a mummy. I really, really had to get up and get to the bathroom. Once I moved enough to establish how awful walking was going to be, only my bladder compelled me to get out of that bed.

I took tiny steps across the floor, which suddenly seemed as wide and empty as the desert. I covered it inch by painful inch. My toenails were still painted bronze, to match my nails. I had a lot of time to look at my toes as I made my journey.

Thank God I had indoor plumbing. If I’d had to make it into the yard to an outhouse, as my grandmother had as a child, I would’ve given up.

When I had completed my journey and pulled on a fleecy blue robe, I inched my way down the hall to the living room to examine the floor. I noticed along the way that the sun outside was brilliant and the sky was the deep rich blue of heaven. It was forty-two, said the thermometer Jason had given me on my birthday. He’d mounted it for me on the window frame, so I could just peek out to read it.

The living room looked real good. I wasn’t sure how long the vampire cleaning crew had been at work the night before, but there were no body parts visible. The wood of the floor was gleaming, and the furniture looked spanky clean. The old throw rug was missing, but I didn’t care. It had been no wonderful heirloom anyway, just a sort of pretty rug Gran had picked up at a flea market for thirty-five dollars. Why did I remember that? It didn’t matter at all. And my grandmother was dead.

I felt the sudden danger of weeping, and I pushed it away. I wasn’t going to fall back into a trough of self-pity. My reaction to Bill’s unfaithfulness seemed faint and far away now; I was a colder woman, or maybe my protective hide had just grown thicker. I no longer felt angry with him, to my surprise. He’d been tortured by the woman—well, the vampire—he’d thought loved him. And she’d tortured him for financial gain—that was the worst.

To my startled horror, suddenly I relived the moment when the stake had gone in under her ribs, and I was feeling the movement of the wood as it plowed through her body.

I made it back to the hall bathroom just in time.

Okay, I’d killed someone.

I’d once hurt someone who was trying to kill me, but that had never bothered me: oh, the odd dream or two. But the horror of staking the vampire Lorena felt worse. She would’ve killed me a lot quicker, and I was sure it would have been no problem whatsoever for Lorena. She probably would’ve laughed her ass off.

Maybe that was what had gotten to me so much. After I’d sunk the stake in, I was sure I’d had a moment, a second, a flash of time in which I’d thought,
So there, bitch
. And it had been pure pleasure.

 

A
COUPLE OF hours later, I’d discovered it was the early afternoon, and it was Monday. I called my brother on his cell phone, and he came by with my mail. When I opened my door, he stood for a long minute, looking me up and down.

“If he did that to you, I’m heading over there with a torch and a sharpened broom handle,” he said.

“No, he didn’t.”

“What happened to the ones who did?”

“You better not think about it too much.”

“At least he does some things right.”

“I’m not gonna see him anymore.”

“Uh-huh. I’ve heard that before.”

He had a point. “For a while,” I said firmly.

“Sam said you’d gone off with Alcide Herveaux.”

“Sam shouldn’t have told you.”

“Hell, I’m your brother. I need to know who you’re going around with.”

“It was business,” I said, trying a little smile on for size.

“You going into surveying?”

“You know Alcide?”

“Who doesn’t, at least by name? Those Herveauxes, they’re well known. Tough guys. Good to work for. Rich.”

“He’s a nice guy.”

“He coming around anymore? I’d like to meet him. I don’t want to be on a road crew working for the parish my whole life.”

That was news to me. “Next time I see him, I’ll call you. I don’t know if he’ll be stopping by anytime soon, but if he does, you’ll know about it.”

“Good.” Jason glanced around. “What happened to the rug?”

I noticed a spot of blood on the couch, about where Eric had leaned. I sat down so my legs were covering it. “The rug? I spilled some tomato sauce on it. I was eating spaghetti out here while I watched TV.”

“So you took it to get it cleaned?”

I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t know if that was what the vampires had done with the rug, or if it’d had to be torched. “Yes,” I said, with some hesitation. “But they may not be able to get the stain out, they said.”

“New gravel looks good.”

I stared at him in gape-mouthed surprise. “What?”

He looked at me as if I were a fool. “The new gravel. On the driveway. They did a good job, getting it level. Not a single pothole.”

Completely forgetting the bloodstain, I heaved myself up from the couch with some difficulty and peered out the front window, this time really looking.

Not only was the driveway done, but also there was a new parking area in front of the house. It was outlined with landscaping timbers. The gravel was the very expensive kind, the kind that’s supposed to interlock so it doesn’t roll out of the desired area. I put my hand over my mouth as I calculated how much it had cost. “It’s done like that all the way to the road?” I asked Jason, my voice hardly audible.

“Yeah, I saw the Burgess and Sons crew out here when I drove by earlier,” he said slowly. “Didn’t you fix it up to have it done?”

I shook my head.

“Damn, they did it by mistake?” Quick to rage, Jason flushed. “I’ll call that Randy Burgess and ream his ass. Don’t you pay the bill! Here’s the note that was stuck to the front door.” Jason pulled a rolled receipt from his front pocket. “Sorry, I was going to hand that to you before I noticed your face.”

I unrolled the yellow sheet and read the note scribbled across it. “Sookie—Mr. Northman said not to knock on your door, so I’m sticking this to it. You may need this in case something is wrong. Just call us. Randy.”

“It’s paid for,” I said, and Jason calmed a little.

“The boyfriend? The ex?”

I remembered screaming at Eric about my driveway. “No,” I said. “Someone else.” I caught myself wishing the man who’d been so thoughtful had been Bill.

“You sure are getting around these days,” Jason said. He didn’t sound as judgmental as I expected, but then Jason was shrewd enough to know he could hardly throw many stones.

I said flatly, “No, I’m not.”

He eyed me for a long moment. I met his gaze. “Okay,” he said slowly. “Then someone owes you, big time.”

“That would be closer to the truth,” I said, and wondered in turn if I myself was being truthful. “Thanks for getting my mail for me, Big Bro. I need to crawl back in bed.”

“No problem. You want to go to the doctor?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t face the waiting room.

“Then you let me know if you need me to get you some groceries.”

“Thanks,” I said again, with more pleasure. “You’re a good brother.” To our mutual surprise, I stood on tip-toe and gave him a kiss on the cheek. He awkwardly put his arm around me, and I made myself keep the smile on my face, rather than wincing from the pain.