Dead in the Family ss-10 Read online

  “Now that I’m thinking about Gran, I’ve been meaning to ask you if I could have that table she put up in the attic,” Jason said. “The pie-crust table that used to sit by the armchair in the living room?”

  “Sure, swing by and pick it up sometime,” I said. “It’s probably sitting right where you put it the day she asked you to take it up to the attic.”

  I left soon after with my almost-empty casserole dish, some leftover steak, and a cheerful heart.

  I certainly hadn’t thought having dinner with my brother and his girlfriend was any big deal, but when I got home that night I slept all the way through until morning, for the first time in weeks.

  MARCH

  THE FOURTH WEEK

  “There,” said Sam. I had to strain to hear him. Someone had put Jace Everett’s “Bad Things” on, and just about everyone in the bar was singing along. “You’ve smiled three times tonight.”

  “You counting my facial expressions?” I put down my tray and gave him a look. Sam, my boss and friend, is a true shapeshifter; he can change into anything warm-blooded, I guess. I haven’t asked him about lizards and snakes and bugs.

  “Well, it’s good to see that smile again,” he said. He rearranged some bottles on the shelf, just to look busy. “I missed it.”

  “It’s good to feel like smiling,” I told him. “I like the haircut, by the way.”

  Sam ran a self-conscious hand across his head. His hair was short, and it hugged his scalp like a red gold cap. “Summer’s coming up. I thought it might feel good.”

  “Probably will.”

  “You already started sunbathing?” My tan was famous.

  “Oh, yeah.” In fact, I’d started extra early this spring. The first day I’d put on my swimsuit, all hell had broken loose. I’d killed a fairy. But that was past. I’d lain out yesterday, and not a thing had happened. Though I confess I hadn’t taken the radio outside, because I’d wanted to be sure I could hear if something was sneaking up on me. But nothing had. In fact, I’d had a remarkably peaceful hour lying in the sun, watching a butterfly waft by every now and then. One of my great-great-grandmother’s rosebushes was blooming, and the scent had healed something inside me. “The sun just makes me feel real good,” I said. I suddenly remembered that the fae had told me that I came from sky fairies, instead of water fairies. I didn’t know anything about that, but I wondered if my love of the sun was a genetic thing.

  Antoine called, “Order up!” and I hurried over to fetch the plates.

  Antoine had settled in at Merlotte’s, and we all hoped he’d stick with the cooking job. Tonight he was moving around the small kitchen like he had eight arms. Merlotte’s menu was the most basic—hamburgers, chicken strips, a salad with chicken strips cut up on it, chili fries, French-fried pickles—but Antoine had mastered it with amazing speed. Now in his fifties, Antoine had gotten out of New Orleans after staying in the Superdome during Katrina. I respected Antoine for his positive attitude and his determination to start over after losing everything. He was also good to D’Eriq, who helped him with food prep and bused the tables. D’Eriq was sweet but slow.

  Holly was working that night, and in between hustling drinks and plates she stood by Hoyt Fortenberry, her fiancé, who was perched on a barstool. Hoyt’s mom had proven to be only too glad to keep Holly’s little boy on the evenings Hoyt wanted to spend time with Holly. It was hard to look at Holly and recognize her as the sullen Goth Wiccan she’d been in one phase of her life. Her hair was its natural dark brown and had grown to nearly shoulder length, her makeup was light, and she smiled all the time. Hoyt, my brother’s best friend again since they’d mended their differences, seemed like a stronger man now that he had Holly to brace him up.

  I glanced over at Sam, who’d just answered his cell phone. Sam was spending a lot of time on that phone these days, and I suspected he was seeing someone, too. I could find out if I looked in his head long enough (though the two-natured are harder to read than simple basic humans), but I tried hard to stay out of Sam’s thoughts. It’s just rude to rummage around inside the ideas of people you care about. Sam was smiling while he talked, and it was good to see him looking—at least temporarily—carefree.

  “You see Vampire Bill much?” Sam asked when I was helping him close up an hour later.

  “No. I haven’t seen him in a long time,” I said. “I wonder if Bill’s dodging me. I went by his house a couple of times and left him a six-pack of TrueBlood and a thank-you note for all he did when he came to rescue me, but he never called me or came over.”

  “He was in a couple of nights ago when you were off. I think you ought to pay him a visit,” Sam said. “I’m not saying any more.”

  MARCH

  THE END OF THE FOURTH WEEK

  On a beautiful night later that week, I was rummaging in my closet for my biggest flashlight. Sam’s suggestion that I needed to see Bill had been nagging at me, so after I got home from work, I resolved to take a walk across the cemetery to Bill’s house.

  Sweet Home Cemetery is the oldest cemetery in Renard Parish. There isn’t much room left for the dead, so there’s one of those new “burial parks” with flat headstones on the south side of town. I hate it. Even if the ground is uneven and the trees are all grown up and some of the fences around the plots are falling down, to say nothing of the earliest headstones, I love Sweet Home. Jason and I had played there as kids, whenever we could escape Gran’s attention.

  The route through the memorials and trees to Bill’s house was second nature, from the time he’d been my very first boyfriend. The frogs and bugs were just starting up their summer singing. The racket would only build with the hotter weather. I remembered D’Eriq asking me wasn’t I scared, living by a graveyard, and I smiled to myself. I wasn’t afraid of the dead lying in the ground. The walking and talking dead were much more dangerous. I’d cut a rose to lay on my grandmother’s grave. I felt sure she knew I was there and thinking of her.

  There was a dim light on at the old Compton house, which had been built about the same time my house had been. I rang the doorbell. Unless Bill was out in the woods roaming around, I was sure he was home since his car was there. But I had to wait some time until the creaking door swung open.

  He switched on the porch light, and I tried not to gasp. He looked awful.

  Bill had gotten infected with silver poisoning during the Fae War, thanks to the silver teeth of Neave. He’d had massive amounts of blood then—and since—from his fellow vampires, but I observed with some unease that his skin was still gray instead of white. His step was faltering, and his head hung a little forward like an old man’s.

  “Sookie, come in,” he said. Even his voice didn’t seem as strong as it had been.

  Though his words were polite, I couldn’t tell how he really felt about my visit. I can’t read vampire minds, one of the reasons I’d initially been so attracted to Bill. You can imagine how intoxicating silence is after nonstop unwanted sharing.

  “Bill,” I said, trying to sound less shocked than I felt. “Are you feeling better? This poison in your system. Is it going away?”

  I could swear he sighed. He gestured me to precede him into the living room. The lamps were off. Bill had lit candles. I counted eight. I wondered what he’d been doing, sitting alone in the flickering light. Listening to music? He loved his CDs, particularly Bach. Feeling distinctly worried, I sat on the couch, while Bill took his favorite chair across the low coffee table. He was as handsome as ever, but his face lacked animation. He was clearly suffering. Now I knew why Sam had wanted me to visit.

  “You are well?” he asked.

  “I’m much better,” I said carefully. He’d seen the worst they’d done to me.

  “The scars, the. mutilation?”

  “The scars are there, but they’re much fainter than I ever expected they’d be. The missing bits have filled in. I kind of have a dimple in this thigh,” I said, tapping my left knee. “But I had plenty of thigh to spare.” I tried to
smile, but truthfully, I was too concerned to manage it. “Are you getting better?” I asked again, hesitantly.

  “I’m not worse,” he said. He shrugged, a minimal lift of the shoulders.

  “What’s with the apathy?” I said.

  “I don’t seem to want anything any longer,” Bill told me, after a lengthy pause. “I’m not interested in my computer anymore. I’m not inclined to work on the incoming additions and subtractions to my database. Eric sends Felicia over to package up the orders and send them out. She gives me some blood while she’s here.” Felicia was the bartender at Fangtasia. She hadn’t been a vampire that long.

  Could vampires suffer from depression? Or was the silver poisoning responsible?

  “Isn’t there anyone who can help you? I mean, help you heal?”

  He smiled in a sardonic sort of way. “My creator,” he said. “If I could drink from Lorena, I would have healed completely by now.”

  “Well, that sucks.” I couldn’t let him know that bothered me, but ouch. I’d killed Lorena. I shook the feeling off. She’d needed killing, and it was over and done with. “Did she make any other vampires?”

  Bill looked slightly less apathetic. “Yes, she did. She has another living child.”

  “Well, would that help? Getting blood from that vamp?”

  “I don’t know. It might. But I won’t. I can’t reach out to her.”

  “You don’t know if it would help or not? You-all need a Handy Hints rule book or something.”

  “Yes,” he said, as if he’d never heard of such an idea. “Yes, we do indeed.”

  I wasn’t going to ask Bill why he was reluctant to contact someone who could help him. Bill was a stubborn and persistent man, and I wasn’t going to be able to persuade him otherwise since he’d made up his mind. We sat in silence for a moment.

  “Do you love Eric?” Bill said, all of a sudden. His deep brown eyes were fi xed on me with the total attention that had played a large part in attracting me to him when we’d met.

  Was everyone I knew fixated on my relationship with the sheriff of Area Five? “Yes,” I said steadily. “I do love him.”

  “Does he say he loves you?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t look away.

  “I wish he would die, some nights,” Bill said.

  We were being really honest tonight. “There’s a lot of that going around. There are a couple of people I wouldn’t miss myself,” I admitted. “I think about that when I’m grieving over the people I’ve cared about who’ve passed, like Claudine and Gran and Tray.” And they were just at the top of the list. “So I guess I know how you feel. But I—please don’t wish bad stuff on Eric.” I’d lost about as much as I could stand to lose in the way of important people in my life.

  “Who do you want dead, Sookie?” There was a spark of curiosity in his eyes.

  “I’m not about to tell you.” I gave him a weak smile. “You might try to make it happen for me. Like you did with Uncle Bartlett.” When I’d discovered Bill had killed my grandmother’s brother, who’d molested me—that’s when I should have cut and run. Wouldn’t my life have been different? But it was too late now.

  “You’ve changed,” he said.

  “Sure, I have. I thought I was going to die for a couple of hours. I hurt like I’ve never hurt before. And Neave and Lochlan enjoyed it so much. That snapped something inside me. When you and Niall killed them, it was like an answer to the biggest prayer I’d ever prayed. I’m supposed to be a Christian, but most days I don’t feel like I can even presume to say that about myself any longer. I have a lot of mad left over. When I can’t sleep, I think about the other people who didn’t care how much pain and trouble they caused me. And I think about how good I’d feel if they died.”

  That I could tell Bill about this awful secret part of me was a measure of how close I’d been to him.

  “I love you,” he said. “Nothing you do or say will change that. If you asked me to bury a body for you—or to make a body—I would do it without a qualm.”

  “We’ve got some bad history between us, Bill, but you’ll always have a special place in my heart.” I cringed inside when I heard the hackneyed phrase coming from my own mouth. But sometimes clichés are true; this was the truth. “I hardly feel worthy of being cared about that strongly,” I admitted.

  He managed a smile. “As to your being worthy, I don’t think falling in love has much to do with the worth of the object of love. But I’d dispute your assessment. I think you’re a fine woman, and I think you always try to be the best person you can be. No one could be. carefree and sunny. after coming as close to death as you did.”

  I rose to leave. Sam had wanted me to see Bill, to understand his situation, and I’d done that. When Bill got up to see me to the door, I noticed he didn’t have the lightning speed he’d once had. “You’re going to live, right?” I asked him, suddenly frightened.

  “I think so,” he said, as if it didn’t make any difference one way or another. “But just in case, give me a kiss.”

  I put one arm around his neck, the arm that wasn’t burdened with the flashlight, and I let him put his lips against mine. The feeling of him, the smell of him, triggered a lot of memories. For what seemed like a very long time, we stood pressed together, but instead of growing excited, I grew calmer. I was oddly conscious of my breathing—slow and steady, almost like the respiration of someone sleeping.

  I could see that Bill looked better when I stepped away. My eyebrows flew up.

  “Your fairy blood helps me,” he said.

  “I’m just an eighth fairy. And you didn’t take any.”

  “Proximity,” he said briefly. “The touch of skin on skin.” His lips quirked up in a smile. “If we made love, I would be much closer to being healed.”

  Bullshit, I thought. But I can’t say that cool voice didn’t make something leap south of my navel, in a momentary twinge of lust. “Bill, that’s not gonna happen,” I said. “But you should think about tracking down that other vampire child of Lorena’s.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Maybe.” His dark eyes were curiously luminous; that might have been an effect of the poisoning, or it might have been the candlelight. I knew he wouldn’t make an effort to reach out to Lorena’s other get. Whatever spark my visit had raised in him was already dying out.

  Feeling sad, concerned, and also just a tiny smidge pleased—you can’t tell me it’s not flattering to be loved so much, because it is—I went home through the graveyard. I patted Bill’s tombstone by habit. As I walked carefully over the uneven ground, I thought about Bill, naturally enough. He’d been a Confederate soldier. He’d survived the war only to succumb to a vampire after his return home to his wife and children, a tragic end to a hard life.

  I was glad all over again that I’d killed Lorena.

  Here’s something I didn’t like about myself: I realized I didn’t feel bad when I killed a vampire. Something inside me kept insisting they were dead already, and that the first death had been the one that was most important. When I’d killed a human I’d loathed, my reaction had been much more intense.

  Then I thought, You’d think I’d be glad that I was avoiding some pain instead of thinking I should feel worse about taking out Lorena. I hated trying to figure out what was best morally, because so often that didn’t jibe with my gut reaction.

  The bottom line of all this self-examination was that I’d killed Lorena, who could have cured Bill. Bill had gotten wounded when he came to my rescue. Clearly, I had a responsibility. I’d try to figure out what to do.

  By the time I realized I’d been alone in the dark and should have been mortally afraid (at least according to D’Eriq), I was walking into my well-lit backyard. Maybe worrying about my spiritual life was a welcome distraction from reliving physical torture. Or maybe I felt better because I’d done someone a good turn; I’d hugged Bill, and that had made him feel better. When I went to bed that night, I was able to lie on my side in my favorite position instead of tos
sing and turning, and I slept with no dreams—at least, none that I could remember in the morning.

  For the next week, I enjoyed untroubled sleep, and as a result I began to feel much more like my former self. It was gradual, but perceptible. I hadn’t thought of a way to help Bill, but I bought him a new CD (Beethoven) and put it where he’d find it when he got out of his daytime hiding place. Another day I sent him an e-card. Just so he knew I was thinking about him.

  Each time I saw Eric, I felt a little more cheerful. And finally, I had my very own orgasm, a moment so explosive it was like I’d been saving up for a holiday.

  “You. Are you all right?” Eric asked. His blue eyes looked down at me, and he was half-smiling, as if he weren’t sure whether he should be clapping or calling an ambulance.

  “I am very, very all right,” I whispered. Grammar be damned. “I’m so all right I might slide off the bed and lie in a puddle on the floor.”

  His smile became more secure. “So that was good for you? Better than it’s been?”

  “You knew that.?”

  He cocked an eyebrow.

  “Well, of course you knew. I just. had some issues that had to work themselves out.”

  “I knew it couldn’t be my lovemaking, wife of mine,” Eric said, and though the words were cocky, his expression was definitely on the relieved side.

  “Don’t call me your wife. You know our so-called marriage is just strategy. To get back to your previous statement. A-one lovemaking, Eric.” I had to give credit where credit was due. “The no-orgasm problem was in my head. Now I’ve self-corrected.”

  “You are bullshitting me, Sookie,” he murmured. “But I’ll show you some A-one lovemaking. Because I think you can come again.”

  As it turned out, I could.

  Chapter 1

  APRIL

  I love spring for all the obvious reasons. I love the flowers blooming (which happens early here in Louisiana); I love the birds twittering; I love the squirrels scampering across my yard.