"What did they tell you to do?"
"They told us to wait along the interstate. There are more fellas waiting at other gas stations."
They'd called about forty thugs altogether. They'd outlaid a lot of cash.
"What were you supposed to watch for?"
"A big dark guy and a tall blond guy. With a blond woman, real young, with nice tits."
Eric's hand moved too fast for me to track. I was only sure he'd moved when I saw the blood running down Sonny's face.
"You are speaking of my future lover. Be more respectful. Why were you looking for us?"
"We were supposed to catch you. Take you back to Jackson."
"Why?"
"The gang suspected you mighta had something to do with Jerry Falcon's disappearance. They wanted to ask you some questions about it. They had someone watching some apartment building, seen you two coming out in a Lincoln, had you followed part of the way. The dark guy wasn't with you, but the woman was the right one, so we started tracking you."
"Do the vampires of Jackson know anything about this plan?"
"No, the gang figured it was their problem. But they also got a lot of other problems, a prisoner escape and so on, and lots of people out sick. So what with one thing and another, they recruited a bunch of us to help."
"What are these men?" Eric asked me.
I closed my eyes and thought carefully. "Nothing," I said. "They're nothing." They weren't shifters, or Weres, or anything. They were hardly human beings, in my opinion, but nobody died and made me God.
"We need to get out of here," Eric said. I agreed heartily. The last thing I wanted to do was spend the night at the police station, and for Eric, that was an impossibility. There wasn't an approved vampire jail cell any closer than Shreveport. Heck, the police station in Bon Temps had just gotten wheelchair accessible.
Eric looked into Sonny's eyes. "We weren't here," he said. "This lady and myself."
"Just the boy," Sonny agreed.
Again, the other robber tried to keep his eyes tight shut, but Eric blew in his face, and just as a dog would, the man opened his eyes and tried to wiggle back. Eric had him in a second, and repeated his procedure.
Then he turned to the clerk and handed him the shotgun. "Yours, I believe," Eric said.
"Thanks," the boy said, his eyes firmly on the barrel of the gun. He aimed at the robbers. "I know you weren't here," he growled, keeping his gaze ahead of him. "And I ain't saying nothing to the police."
Eric put forty dollars on the counter. "For the gas," he explained. "Sookie, let's make tracks."
"A Lincoln with a big hole in the trunk does stand out," the boy called after us.
"He's right." I was buckling up and Eric was accelerating as we heard sirens, pretty close.
"I should have taken the truck," Eric said. He seemed pleased with our adventure, now that it was over.
"How's your face?"
"It's getting better."
The welts were not nearly as noticeable.
"What happened?" I asked, hoping this was not a very touchy subject.
He cast me a sideways glance. Now that we were back on the interstate, we had slowed down to the speed limit, so it wouldn't seem to any of the many police cars converging on the convenience store that we were fleeing.
"While you were tending to your human needs in the bathroom," he said, "I finished putting gas in the tank. I had hung up the pump and was almost at the door when those two got out of the truck and just tossed a net over me. It is very humiliating, that they were able to do that, two fools with a silver net."
"Your mind must have been somewhere else."
"Yes," he said shortly. "It was."
"So then what happened?" I asked, when it seemed he was going to stop there.
"The heavier one hit me with the butt of his gun, and it took me a small time to recover," Eric said.
"I saw the blood."
He touched a place on the back of his head. "Yes, I bled. After getting used to the pain, I snagged a corner of the net on the bumper of their truck and managed to roll out of it. They were inept in that, as well as robbery. If they had tied the net shut with silver chains, the result might have been different."
"So you got free?"
"The head blow was more of a problem than I thought at first," Eric said stiffly. "I ran along the back of the store to the water spigot on the other side. Then I heard someone coming out of the back. When I was recovered, I followed the sounds and found you." After a long moment's silence, Eric asked me what had happened in the store.
"They got me confused with the other woman who went in the store at the same time I went to the ladies' room," I explained. "They didn't seem to be sure I was in the store, and the clerk was telling them that there had been only one woman, and she'd gone. I could tell he had a shotgun in his truck-you know, I heard it in his head-and I went and got it, and I disabled their truck, and I was looking for you because I figured something had happened to you."
"So you planned to save me and the clerk, together?"
"Well … yeah." I couldn't understand the odd tone of his voice. "I didn't feel like I had a whole lot of choices there."
The welts were just pink lines now.
The silence still didn't seem relaxed. We were about forty minutes from home now. I started to let it drop. I didn't.
"You don't seem too happy about something," I said, a definite edge to my voice. My own temper was fraying around the edges. I knew I was heading in the wrong direction conversationally; I knew I should just be content with silence, however brooding and pregnant.
Eric took the exit for Bon Temps and turned south.
Sometimes, instead of going down the road less taken, you just charge right down the beaten path.
"Would there be something wrong with me rescuing the two of you?" We were driving through Bon Temps now. Eric turned east after the buildings along Main gradually thinned and vanished. We passed Merlotte's, still open. We turned south again, on a small parish road. Then we were bumping down my driveway.
Eric pulled over and killed the engine. "Yes," he said. "There is something wrong with that. And why the hell don't you get your driveway fixed?"
The string of tension that had stretched between us popped. I was out of the car in a New York minute, and he was, too. We faced each other across the roof of the Lincoln, though not much of me showed. I charged around it until I was right in front of him.
"Because I can't afford it, that's why! I don't have any money! And you all keep asking me to take time off from my job to do stuff for you! I can't! I can't do it anymore!" I shrieked. "I quit!"
There was a long moment of silence while Eric regarded me. My chest was heaving underneath my stolen jacket. Something felt funny, something was bothering me about the appearance of my house, but I was too het up to examine my worry.
"Bill …" Eric began cautiously, and it set me off like a rocket.
"He's spending all his money on the freaking Bellefleurs," I said, my tone this time low and venomous, but no less sincere. "He never thinks about giving me money. And how could I take it? It would make me a kept woman, and I'm not his whore, I'm his … I used to be his girlfriend."
I took a deep, shuddering breath, dismally aware that I was going to cry. It would be better to get mad again. I tried. "Where do you get off, telling them that I'm your … your lover? Where'd that come from?"
"What happened to the money you earned in Dallas?" Eric asked, taking me completely by surprise.
"I paid my property taxes with it."
"Did you ever think that if you told me where Bill's hiding his computer program, I would give you anything you asked for? Did you not realize that Russell would have paid you handsomely?"
I sucked in my breath, so offended, I hardly knew where to begin.
"I see you didn't think of those things."
"Oh, yeah, I'm just an angel." Actually, none of those things had occurred to me, and I was almost defensive
they hadn't. I was shaking with fury, and all my good sense went out the window. I would feel the presence of other brains at work, and the fact that someone was in my place enraged me farther. The rational part of my mind crumpled under the weight of my anger.
"Someone's waiting in my house, Eric." I swung around and stomped over to my porch, finding the key I'd hidden under the rocker my grandmother had loved. Ignoring everything my brain was trying to tell me, ignoring the beginning of a bellow from Eric, I opened the front door and got hit with a ton of bricks.
Chapter Fourteen
"We got her," said a voice I didn't recognize. I had been yanked to my feet, and I was swaying between two men who were holding me up.
"What about the vamp?"
"I shot him twice, but he's in the woods. He got away."
"That's bad news. Work fast."
I could sense that there were many men in the room with me, and I opened my eyes. They'd turned on the lights. They were in my house. They were in my home. As much as the blow to my jaw, that made me sick. Somehow, I'd assumed my visitors would be Sam or Arlene or Jason.
There were five strangers in my living room, if I was thinking clearly enough to count. But before I could form another idea, one of the men-and now I realized he was wearing a familiar leather vest-punched me in the stomach.
I didn't have enough breath to scream.
The two men holding me pulled me back upright.
"Where is he?"
"Who?" I really couldn't remember, at this point, what particular missing person he wanted me to locate. But, of course, he hit me again. I had a dreadful minute when I needed to gag but hadn't the air to do it. I was strangling and suffocating.
Finally, I drew in a long breath. It was noisy and painful and just heaven.
My Were interrogator, who had light hair shaved close to his scalp and a nasty little goatee, slapped me, hard, open-handed. My head rocked on my neck like a car on faulty shock absorbers. "Where's the vampire, bitch?" the Were said. He drew his fist back.
I couldn't take any more of this. I decided to speed things up. I pulled my legs up, and while the two at my sides kept desperate grips on my arms, I kicked the Were in front of me with both feet. If I hadn't had on bedroom slippers, it probably would have been more effective. I'm never wearing safety boots when I need them. But Nasty Goatee did stagger back, and then he came for me with my death in his eyes.
By then my legs had swung back to the floor, but I made them keep going backward, and threw my two captors completely off balance. They staggered, tried to recover, but their frantic footing was in vain. Down we all went, the Were along with us.
This might not be better, but it was an improvement over waiting to get hit.
I'd landed on my face, since my arms and hands weren't under my control. One guy did let go as we fell, and when I got that hand underneath me for leverage, I yanked away from the other man.
I'd gotten halfway to my feet when the Were, quicker than the humans, managed to grab my hair. He dealt a slap to my face while he wound my hair around his hand for a better grip. The other hired hands closed in, either to help the two on the floor to rise, or just to see me get battered.
A real fight is over in a few minutes because people wear out quick. It had been a very long day, and the fact was, I was ready to give up against these overwhelming odds. But I had a little pride and I went for the guy closest to me, a potbellied pig of a man with greasy dark hair. I dug my fingers into his face, trying to cause any damage I could, while I could.
The Were kneed me in the belly and I screamed, and the pig-man began to yell for the others to get me off of him, and the front door crashed open as Eric came in, blood covering his chest and right leg. Bill was right behind him.
They lost all control.
I saw firsthand what a vampire could do.
After a second, I realized my help would not be needed, and I decided the Goddess of Really Tough Gals would have to excuse me while I closed my eyes.
In two minutes, all the men in my living room were dead.
***
"Sookie? Sookie?" Eric's voice was hoarse. "Do we need to take her to the hospital?" he asked Bill.
I felt cool fingers on my wrist, touching my neck. I almost explained that for once I was conscious, but it was just too hard. The floor seemed like a good place to be.
"Her pulse is strong," Bill reported. "I'm going to turn her over."
"She's alive?"
"Yes."
Eric's voice, suddenly closer, said, "Is the blood hers?"
"Yes, some of it."
He drew a deep, shuddering breath. "Hers is different."
"Yes," Bill said coldly. "But surely you are full by now."
"It's been a long time since I had real blood in quantity," Eric said, just exactly like my brother, Jason, would have remarked it had been a long time since he'd had blackberry cobbler.
Bill slid his hands underneath me. "For me, too. We'll need to put them all out in the yard," he said casually, "and clean up Sookie's house."
"Of course."
Bill began rolling me over, and I began crying. I couldn't help it. As strong as I wanted to be, all I could think of was my body. If you've ever been really beaten, you'll know what I mean. When you've been really beaten, you realize that you are just an envelope of skin, an easily penetrated envelope that holds together a lot of fluids and some rigid structures, which in their turn can simply be broken and invaded. I thought I'd been badly hurt in Dallas a few weeks before, but this felt worse. I knew that didn't mean it was worse; there was a lot of soft tissue damage. In Dallas, my cheekbone had been fractured and my knee twisted. I thought maybe the knee had been compromised all over again, and I thought maybe one of the slaps had rebroken the cheekbone. I opened my eyes, blinked, and opened them again. My vision cleared after a few seconds.
"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 coll
ege 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?"
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