The Complete Sookie Stackhouse Stories Page 7

  Then, suddenly, we were all standing, all but Mr. Cataliades, who was reaching into the briefcase.

  Before my eyes, Waldo turned into something even less human. His fangs ran out, and his eyes glowed red. He became even thinner, his body folding in on itself. Beside me, Bill and Bubba changed, too. I didn’t want to look at them when they were angry. Seeing my friends change like that was even worse than seeing my enemies do it. Full fighting mode is just scary.

  “You can’t accuse a servant of the queen,” Waldo said, and he actually hissed.

  Then Mr. Cataliades proved himself capable of some surprises of his own, as if I’d doubted it. Moving quickly and lightly, he rose from his lawn chair and tossed a silver lariat around the vampire’s head, large enough in circumference to circle Waldo’s shoulders. With a grace that startled me, he drew it tight at the critical moment, pinning Waldo’s arms to his sides.

  I thought Waldo would go berserk, but the vampire surprised me by holding still. “You’ll die for this,” Waldo said to the big round man, and Mr. Cataliades smiled at him.

  “I think not,” he said. “Here, Miss Stackhouse.”

  He tossed something in my direction, and quicker than I could watch, Bill’s hand shot out to intercept it. We both stared at what Bill was holding in his hand. It was polished, sharp, and wooden; a hardwood stake.

  “What’s up with this?” I asked Mr. Cataliades, moving closer to the long black limo.

  “My dear Miss Stackhouse, the queen wanted you to have the pleasure.”

  Waldo, who had been glaring with considerable defiance at everyone in the clearing, seemed to deflate when he heard what Mr. Cataliades had to say.

  “She knows,” the albino vampire said, and the only way I can describe his voice is “heartbroken.” I shivered. He loved his queen, really loved her.

  “Yes,” the big man said, almost gently. “She sent Valentine and Charity to the cemetery immediately, when you rushed in with your news. They found no traces of human attack on what was left of Hadley. Only your smell, Waldo.”

  “She sent me here with you,” Waldo said, almost whispering.

  “Our queen wanted Hadley’s kin to have the right of execution,” Mr. Cataliades said.

  I came closer to Waldo, until I was as close as I could get. The silver had weakened the vampire, though I had a feeling that he wouldn’t have struggled even if the chain hadn’t been made of the metal that vampires can’t tolerate. Some of the fire had gone out of Waldo, though his upper lip drew back from his fangs as I put the tip of the stake over his heart. I thought of Hadley, and I wondered, if she were in my shoes, could she do this?

  “Can you drive the limo, Mr. Cataliades?” I asked.

  “Yes, ma’am, I can.”

  “Could you drive yourself back to New Orleans?”

  “That was always my plan.”

  I pressed down on the wood, until I could tell it was hurting him. His eyes were closed. I had staked a vampire before, but it had been to save my life and Bill’s. Waldo was a pitiful thing. There was nothing romantic or dramatic about this vampire. He was simply vicious. I was sure he could do extreme damage when the situation called for it, and I was sure he had killed my cousin Hadley.

  Bill said, “I’ll do it for you, Sookie.” His voice was smooth and cold, as always, and his hand on my arm was cool.

  “I can help,” Bubba offered. “You’d do it for me, Miss Sookie.”

  “Your cousin was a bitch and a whore,” Waldo said, unexpectedly. I met his red eyes.

  “I expect she was,” I said. “I guess I just can’t kill you.” My hand, the one holding the stake, dropped to my side.

  “You have to kill me,” Waldo said, with the arrogance of surety. “The queen has sent me here to be killed.”

  “I’m just gonna have to ship you right back to the queen,” I said. “I can’t do it.”

  “Get your whoremonger to do it; he’s more than willing.”

  Bill was looking more vampiric by the second, and he tugged the stake from my fingers.

  “He’s trying to commit suicide by cop, Bill,” I said.

  Bill looked puzzled, and so did Bubba. Mr. Cataliades’s round face was unreadable.

  “He’s trying to make us mad enough, or scared enough, to kill him, because he can’t kill himself,” I said. “He’s sure the queen will do something much, much worse to him than I would. And he’s right.”

  “The queen was trying to give you the gift of vengeance,” Mr. Cataliades said. “Won’t you take it? She may not be happy with you if you send him back.”

  “That’s really her problem,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

  “I think it might be very much your problem,” Bill said quietly.

  “Well, that just bites,” I said. “You . . .” I paused, and told myself not to be a fool. “You were very kind to bring Waldo down here, Mr. Cataliades, and you were very clever in steering me around to the truth.” I took a deep breath and considered. “I appreciate your bringing down the legal papers, which I’ll look over at a calmer moment.” I thought I’d covered everything. “Now, if you’d be so good as to pop the trunk open, I’ll ask Bill and Bubba to put him in there.” I jerked my head toward the silver-bound vampire, standing in silence not a yard away.

  At that moment, when we were all thinking of something else, Waldo threw himself at me, jaws open wide like a snake’s, fangs fully extended. I threw myself backward, but I knew it wouldn’t be enough. Those fangs would rip open my throat, and I would bleed out here in my own yard. But Bubba and Bill were not bound with silver, and with a speed that was terrifying in itself, they gripped the old vampire and knocked him to the ground. Quicker than any human could wink, Bill’s arm rose and fell, and Waldo’s red eyes looked down at the stake in his chest with profound satisfaction. In the next second, those eyes caved in and his long, thin body began the instant process of disintegration. You never have to bury a really dead vampire.

  For a few long moments, we stayed frozen in the tableau; Mr. Cataliades was standing, I was on the ground on my butt, and Bubba and Bill were on their knees beside the thing that had been Waldo.

  Then the limo door opened, and before Mr. Cataliades could scramble to help her out, the Queen of Louisiana stepped out of the vehicle.

  She was beautiful, of course, but not in a fairy-tale princess sort of way. I don’t know what I expected, but she wasn’t it. While Bill and Bubba scrambled to their feet and then bowed deeply, I gave her a good once-over. She was wearing a very expensive midnight blue suit and high heels. Her hair was a rich reddish brown. Of course, she was pale as milk, but her eyes were large, tilted, and almost the same brown as her hair. Her fingernails were polished red, and somehow that seemed very weird. She wore no jewelry.

  Now I knew why Mr. Cataliades had kept the privacy glass up during the trip north. And I was sure that the queen had ways of masking her presence from Waldo’s senses, as well as his sight.

  “Hello,” I said uncertainly. “I’m . . .”

  “I know who you are,” she said. She had a faint accent; I thought it might be French. “Bill. Bubba.”

  Oooh-kay. So much for polite chitchat. I huffed out a breath and shut my mouth. No point in talking until she explained her presence. Bill and Bubba stood upright. Bubba was smiling. Bill wasn’t.

  The queen examined me head to toe, in a way I thought was downright rude. Since she was a queen, she was an old vampire, and the oldest ones, the ones who sought power in the vampire infrastructure, were among the scariest. It had been so long since she’d been human that there might not be much remembrance of humanity left in her.

  “I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” she said, shrugging.

  My lips twitched. I just couldn’t help it. My grin spread across my face, and I tried to hide it with my hand. The queen eyed me quizzically.

 
“She smiles when she’s nervous,” Bill said.

  I did, but that’s not why I was smiling now.

  “You were going to send Waldo back to me, for me to torture and kill,” the queen said to me. Her face was quite blank. I couldn’t tell if she approved or disapproved, thought I was clever or thought I was a fool.

  “Yes,” I said. The shortest answer was definitely the best.

  “He forced your hand.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He was too frightened of me to risk returning to New Orleans with my friend Mr. Cataliades.”

  “Yes.” I was getting good at one-word answers.

  “I wonder if you engineered this whole thing.”

  “Yes” would not be the right answer here. I maintained silence.

  “I’ll find out,” she said, with absolute certainty. “We’ll meet again, Sookie Stackhouse. I was fond of your cousin, but even she was foolish enough to go to a cemetery alone with her bitterest enemy. She counted too much on the power of my name alone to protect her.”

  “Did Waldo ever tell you if Marie Laveau actually rose?” I asked, too overwhelmed with curiosity to let the question go unanswered.

  She was getting back in the car as I spoke, and she paused with one foot inside the limo and one foot in the yard. Anyone else would have looked awkward, but not the Queen of Louisiana.

  “Interesting,” she said. “No, actually, he didn’t. When you come to New Orleans, you and Bill can repeat the experiment.”

  I started to point out that unlike Hadley, I wasn’t dead, but I had the sense to shut my mouth. She might have ordered me to become a vampire, and I was afraid, very afraid, that then Bill and Bubba would have held me down and made me so. That was too awful to think about, so I smiled at her.

  After the queen was all settled in the limo, Mr. Cataliades bowed to me. “It’s been a pleasure, Miss Stackhouse. If you have any questions about your cousin’s estate, call me at the number on my business card. It’s clipped to the papers.”

  “Thanks,” I said, not trusting myself to say more. Besides, one-word answers never hurt. Waldo was almost disintegrated. Bits of him would be in my yard for a while. Yuck. “Where’s Waldo? All over my yard,” I could say to anyone who asked.

  The night had clearly been too much for me. The limo purred out of my yard. Bill put his hand to my cheek, but I didn’t lean into it. I was grateful to him for coming, and I told him so.

  “You shouldn’t be in danger,” he said. Bill had a habit of using a word that changed the meaning of his statements, made them something ambiguous and unsettling. His dark eyes were fathomless pools. I didn’t think I would ever understand him.

  “Did I do good, Miss Sookie?” Bubba asked.

  “You did great, Bubba,” I said. “You did the right thing without me even having to tell you.”

  “You knew all along she was in the limo,” Bubba said. “Didn’t you, Miss Sookie?”

  Bill looked at me, startled. I didn’t meet his eyes. “Yes, Bubba,” I said gently. “I knew. Before Waldo got out, I listened with my other sense, and I found two blank spots in the limo.” That could only mean two vampires. So I’d known Cataliades had had a companion in the back of the limousine.

  “But you played it all out like she wasn’t there.” Bill couldn’t seem to grasp this. Maybe he didn’t think I’d learned anything since I’d met him. “Did you know ahead of time that Waldo would make a try for you?”

  “I suspected he might. He didn’t want to go back to her mercies.”

  “So.” Bill caught my arms and looked down at me. “Were you trying to make sure he died all along, or were you trying to send him back to the queen?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  One-word answers never hurt.

  LUCKY

  I teamed Amelia the witch with Sookie in “Lucky.” Sookie is asked by her insurance agent to discover who is snooping around his business. In the process of their investigation, Sookie and Amelia uncover some unexpected goings-on in the small town and get to the root of the problem . . . eventually.

  “Lucky” should be read right after All Together Dead.

  AMELIA BROADWAY AND I were painting each other’s toenails when my insurance agent knocked at the front door. I’d picked Roses on Ice. Amelia had opted for Mad Burgundy Cherry Glacé. She’d finished my feet, and I had about three toes to go on her left foot when Greg Aubert interrupted us.

  Amelia had been living with me for months, and it had been kind of nice to have someone else sharing my old house. Amelia is a witch from New Orleans, and she had been staying with me because she’d had a magical misfortune she didn’t want any of her witch buddies in the Big Easy to know about. Also, since Katrina, she really didn’t have anything to go home to, at least for a while. My little hometown of Bon Temps was swollen with refugees.

  Greg Aubert had been to my house after I’d had a fire that caused a lot of damage. As far as I knew, I didn’t have any insurance needs at the moment. I was pretty curious about his purpose, I confess.

  Amelia had glanced up at Greg, found his sandy hair and rimless glasses uninteresting, and completed painting her little toe while I ushered him to the wingback chair.

  “Greg, this is my friend Amelia Broadway,” I said. “Amelia, this is Greg Aubert.”

  Amelia looked at Greg with more interest. I’d told her Greg was a colleague of hers, in some respects. Greg’s mom had been a witch, and he’d found using the craft very helpful in protecting his clients. Not a car got insured with Greg’s agency without having a spell cast on it. I was the only one in Bon Temps who knew about Greg’s little talent. Witchcraft wouldn’t be popular in our devout little town. Greg always handed his clients a lucky rabbit’s foot to keep in their new vehicles or homes.

  After he turned down the obligatory offer of iced tea or water or Coke, Greg sat on the edge of the chair while I resumed my seat on one end of the couch. Amelia had the other end.

  “I felt the wards when I drove up,” Greg told Amelia. “Very impressive.” He was trying real hard to keep his eyes off my tank top. I would have put on a bra if I’d known we were going to have company.

  Amelia tried to look indifferent, and she might have shrugged if she hadn’t been holding a bottle of nail polish. Amelia, tan and athletic, with short glossy brown hair, is not only pleased with her looks but really proud of her witchcraft abilities. “Nothing special,” she said, with unconvincing modesty. She smiled at Greg, though.

  “What can I do for you today, Greg?” I asked. I was due to go to work in an hour, and I had to change and pull my long hair up in a ponytail.

  “I need your help,” he said, yanking his gaze up to my face.

  No beating around the bush with Greg.

  “Okay, how?” If he could be direct, so could I.

  “Someone’s sabotaging my agency,” he said. His voice was suddenly passionate, and I realized Greg was really close to a major breakdown. He wasn’t quite the broadcaster Amelia was—I could read most thoughts Amelia had as clearly as if she’d spoken them—but I could certainly read his inner workings.

  “Tell us about it,” I said, because Amelia could not read Greg’s mind.

  “Oh, thanks,” he said, as if I’d agreed to do something. I opened my mouth to correct this idea, but he plowed ahead.

  “Last week I came into the office to find that someone had been through the files.”

  “You still have Marge Barker working for you?”

  He nodded. A stray beam of sunlight winked off his glasses. It was October, and still warm in northern Louisiana. Greg got out a snowy handkerchief and patted his forehead. “I’ve got my wife, Christy; she comes in three days a week for half a day. And I’ve got Marge full-time.” Christy, Greg’s wife, was as sweet as Marge was sour.

  “How’d you know someone had been through the files?” Amelia as
ked. She screwed on the top of the polish bottle and put it on the coffee table.

  Greg took a deep breath. “I’d been thinking for a couple of weeks that someone had been in the office at night. But nothing was missing. Nothing was changed. My wards were okay. But two days ago, I got into the office to find that one of the drawers on our main filing cabinet was open. Of course, we lock them at night,” he said. “We’ve got one of those filing systems that locks up when you turn a key in the top drawer. Almost all of the client files were at risk. But every day, last thing in the afternoon, Marge goes around and locks all the cabinets. What if someone suspects . . . what I do?”

  I could see how that would shiver Greg down to his liver. “Did you ask Marge if she remembered locking the cabinet?”

  “Sure I asked her. She got mad—you know Marge—and said she definitely did. My wife had worked that afternoon, but she couldn’t remember if she watched Marge lock the cabinets or not. And Terry Bellefleur had dropped by at the last minute, wanting to check again on the insurance for his damn dog. He might have seen Marge lock up.”

  Greg sounded so irritated that I found myself defending Terry. “Greg, Terry doesn’t like being the way he is, you know,” I said, trying to gentle my voice. “He got messed up fighting for our country, and we got to cut him some slack.”

  Greg looked grumpy for a minute. Then he relaxed. “I know, Sookie,” he said. “He’s just been so hyped up about this dog.”

  “What’s the story?” Amelia asked. If I have moments of curiosity, Amelia has an imperative urge. She wants to know everything about everybody. The telepathy should have gone to her, not me. She might actually have enjoyed it, instead of considering it a disability.

  “Terry Bellefleur is Andy’s cousin,” I said. I knew Amelia had met Andy, a police detective, at Merlotte’s. “He comes in after closing and cleans the bar. Sometimes he substitutes for Sam. Maybe not the few evenings you were working.” Amelia filled in at the bar from time to time.