Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set

by Charlaine Harris

  “Oh, who is being held like a little cub?” inquired a voice behind Andy.

  Oh, this was just peachy.

  “It is my messenger!” The maenad sauntered around Andy in a wide circle and came to stand to his right, a few feet before him. She was not between Andy and the group on the deck. She was clean tonight, and wearing nothing at all. I guessed she and Sam had been out in the woods making whoopee, before they heard the crowd. Her black hair fell in a tangled mass all the way to her hips. She didn’t seem cold. The rest of us (except the vampires) were definitely feeling the nip in the air. We’d come dressed for an orgy, not an outdoors party.

  “Hello, messenger,” the maenad said to me. “I forgot to introduce myself last time, my canine friend reminds me. I am Callisto.”

  “Miss Callisto,” I said, since I had no idea what to call her. I would have nodded, but Andy had hold of my neck. It was sure beginning to hurt.

  “Who is this stalwart brave gripping you?” Callisto moved a little closer.

  I had no idea what Andy looked like, but everyone on the deck was enthralled and terrified, Eric and Bill excepted. They were easing back, away from the humans. This wasn’t good.

  “This is Andy Bellefleur,” I croaked. “He has a problem.”

  I could tell from the way my skin crawled that the maenad had eased forward a little.

  “You have never seen anything like me, have you?” she said to Andy.

  “No,” Andy admitted. He sounded dazed.

  “Am I beautiful?”

  “Yes,” he said, without hesitation.

  “Do I deserve tribute?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I love drunkenness, and you are very drunk,” Callisto said happily. “I love pleasures of the flesh, and these people are full of lust. This is my kind of place.”

  “Oh, good,” Andy said uncertainly. “But one of these people is a murderer, and I need to know which.”

  “Not just one,” I muttered. Reminded I was on the end of his arm, Andy shook me again. I was getting really tired of this.

  The maenad had gotten close enough now to touch me. She gently stroked my face, and I smelled earth and wine on her fingers.

  “You are not drunk,” she observed.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “And you have not had the pleasures of the flesh this evening.”

  “Oh, just give me time,” I said.

  She laughed. It was a high, whooping laugh. It went on and on.

  Andy’s grip loosened, as he grew more and more disconcerted by the maenad’s nearness. I don’t know what the people on the deck thought they saw. But Andy knew he was seeing a creature of the night. He let go of me, quite suddenly.

  “Come on up here, new girl,” called Mike Spencer. “Let’s have a look at you.”

  I was on a heap on the ground by Dean, who was licking my face enthusiastically. From that point of view, I could see the maenad’s arm snake around Andy’s waist. Andy transferred his gun to his left hand so he could return the compliment.

  “Now, what did you want to know?” she asked Andy. Her voice was calm and reasonable. She idly waved the long wand with the tuft on the end. It was called a thyrsis; I’d looked maenad up in the encyclopedia. Now I could die educated.

  “One of those people killed a man named Lafayette, and I want to know which one,” Andy said with the belligerence of the drunk.

  “Of course you do, my darling,” the maenad crooned. “Shall I find out for you?”

  “Please,” he begged.

  “All right.” She scanned the people, and crooked her finger at Eggs. Tara held on to his arm to try to keep him with her, but he lurched down the steps and over to the maenad, grinning foolishly all the while.

  “Are you a girl?” Eggs asked.

  “Not by any stretch of the imagination,” Callisto said. “You have had a lot of wine.” She touched him with the thyrsis.

  “Oh, yeah,” he agreed. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked into Callisto’s eyes, and he shivered and shook. Her eyes were glowing. I looked at Bill, and saw he had his own eyes focused on the ground. Eric was looking at the hood of his car. Ignored by everyone, I began to crawl toward Bill.

  This was a fine kettle of fish.

  The dog paced beside me, nosing me anxiously. I felt he wanted me to move faster. I reached Bill’s legs and gripped them. I felt his hand on my hair. I was scared to make the large movement of rising to my feet.

  Callisto wrapped her thin arms around Eggs and began to whisper to him. He nodded and whispered back. She kissed him, and he went rigid. When she left him to glide over to the deck, he stood absolutely still, staring into the woods.

  She stopped by Eric, who was closer to the deck than we were. She looked him up and down, and smiled that terrifying smile again. Eric looked at her chest fixedly, careful not to meet her eyes. “Lovely,” she said, “just lovely. But not for me, you beautiful piece of dead meat.”

  Then she was up amongst the people on the deck. She took a deep breath, inhaling the scents of drinking and sex. She sniffed as if she were following a trail, and then she swung to face Mike Spencer. His middle-aged body did not fare well in the chilly air, but Callisto seemed delighted with him.

  “Oh,” she said as happily as though she’d just gotten a present, “you’re so proud! Are you a king? Are you a great soldier?”

  “No,” Mike said. “I own a funeral home.” He didn’t sound too sure. “What are you, lady?”

  “Have you ever seen anything like me before?”

  “No,” he said, and all the others shook their heads.

  “You don’t remember my first visit?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “But you’ve made me an offering before.”

  “I have? An offering?”

  “Oh, yes, when you killed the little black man. The pretty one. He was a lesser child of mine, and a fitting tribute for me. I thank you for leaving him outside the drinking place; bars are my particular delight. Could you not find me in the woods?”

  “Lady, we didn’t make no offering,” Tom Hardaway said, his dark skin all over goose pimples and his penis gone south.

  “I saw you,” she said.

  Everything fell silent then. The woods around the lake, always full of little noises and tiny movements, became still. I very carefully rose to my feet beside Bill.

  “I love the violence of sex, I love the reek of drink,” she said dreamily. “I can run from miles away to be there for the end.”

  The fear pouring out of their heads began to fill mine up, and run out. I covered my face with my hands. I threw up the strongest shields I could fashion, but I could still barely contain the terror. My back arched, and I bit my tongue to keep from making a sound. I could feel the movement as Bill turned to me, and then Eric was by his side and they were both mashing me between them. There is not a thing erotic about being pressed between two vampires under those circumstances. Their own urgent desire for my silence fed the fear, because what would frighten vampires? The dog pressed against our legs as if he offered us protection.

  “You hit him during sex,” the maenad said to Tom. “You hit him, because you are proud, and his subservience disgusted and excited you.” She stretched her bony hand to caress Tom’s dark face. I could see the whites of his eyes. “And you”—she patted Mike with her other hand—“you beat him, too, because you were seized with the madness. Then he threatened to tell.” Her hand left Tom and rubbed his wife, Cleo. Cleo had thrown on a sweater before she went out, but it wasn’t buttoned.

  Since she had avoided notice, Tara began backing up. She was the only one who wasn’t paralyzed by fear. I could feel the tiny spark of hope in her, the desire to survive. Tara crouched under a wrought-iron table on the deck, made herself into a little ball, and squeezed her eyes shut. She was making a lot of promises to God about her future behavior, if he’d get her out of this. That poured into my mind, too. The reek of fear from the others built to a peak, and
I could feel my body go into tremors as they broadcast so heavily that it broke through all my barriers. I had nothing left of myself. I was only fear. Eric and Bill locked arms with each other, to hold me upright and immobile between them.

  Jan, in her nudity, was completely ignored by the maenad. I can only suppose that there was nothing in Jan that appealed to the creature; Jan was not proud, she was pathetic, and she hadn’t had a drink that night. She embraced sex out of other needs than the need for its loss of self—needs that had nothing to do with leaving one’s mind and body for a moment of wonderful madness. Trying, as always, to be the center of the group, Jan reached out with a would-be flirty smile and took the maenad’s hand. Suddenly she began to convulse, and the noises coming from her throat were horrible. Foam came from her mouth, and her eyes rolled up. She collapsed to the deck, and I could hear her heels drumming the wood.

  Then the silence resumed. But something was brewing a few yards away in the little group on the deck: something terrible and fine, something pure and horrible. Their fear was subsiding, and my body began to calm again. The awful pressure eased in my head. But as it ebbed, a new force began to build, and it was indescribably beautiful and absolutely evil.

  It was pure madness, it was mindless madness. From the maenad poured the berserker rage, the lust of pillage, the hubris of pride. I was overwhelmed when the people on the deck were overwhelmed, I jerked and thrashed as the insanity rolled off Callisto and into their brains, and only Eric’s hand across my mouth kept me from screaming as they did. I bit him and tasted his blood, and heard him grunt at the pain.

  It went on and on and on, the screaming, and then there were awful wet sounds. The dog, pressed against our legs, whimpered.

  Suddenly, it was over.

  I felt like a dancing puppet whose strings have suddenly been severed. I went limp. Bill laid me down on Eric’s car hood again. I opened my eyes. The maenad looked down at me. She was smiling again, and she was drenched in blood. It was like someone had poured a bucket of red paint over her head; her hair was drenched, as was every bit of her bare body, and she reeked of the copper smell, enough to set your teeth on edge.

  “You were close,” she said to me, her voice as sweet and high as a flute. She moved a little more deliberately, as if she’d eaten a heavy meal. “You were very close. Maybe as close as you’ll ever come, maybe not. I’ve never seen anyone maddened by the insanity of others. An entertaining thought.”

  “Entertaining for you, maybe,” I gasped. The dog bit my leg to bring me to myself. She looked down at him.

  “My dear Sam,” she murmured. “Darling, I must leave you.”

  The dog looked up at her with intelligent eyes.

  “We’ve had some good nights running through the woods,” she said, and stroked his head. “Catching little rabbits, little coons.”

  The dog wagged his tail.

  “Doing other things.”

  The dog grinned and panted.

  “But it’s time for me to go, darling. The world is full of woods and people that need to learn their lesson. I must be paid tribute. They mustn’t forget me. I’m owed,” she said, in her sated voice, “owed the madness and death.” She began to drift to the edge of the woods.

  “After all,” she said over her shoulder, “it can’t always be hunting season.”

  Chapter 11

  EVEN IF I’D wanted to, I couldn’t have walked over to see what was on the deck. Bill and Eric seemed subdued, and when vampires seem subdued, it means you don’t really want to go investigate.

  “We’ll have to burn the cabin,” Eric said from a few yards away. “I wish Callisto had taken care of her own mess.”

  “She never has,” Bill said. “that I have heard. It is the madness. What does true madness care about discovery?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Eric said carelessly. He sounded as if he was lifting something. There was a heavy thud. “I have seen a few people who were definitely mad and quite crafty with it.”

  “That’s true,” Bill said. “Shouldn’t we leave a couple of them on the porch?”

  “How can you tell?”

  “That’s true, too. It’s a rare night I can agree with you this much.”

  “She called me and asked me to help.” Eric was responding to the subtext rather than the statement.

  “Then, all right. But you remember our agreement.”

  “How can I forget?”

  “You know Sookie can hear us.”

  “Quite all right with me,” Eric said, and laughed. I stared up at the night and wondered, not too curiously, what the hell they were talking about. It’s not like I was Russia, to be parceled out to the strongest dictator. Sam was resting beside me, back in his human form, and stark naked. At the moment, I could not have cared less. The cold didn’t bother Sam, since he was a shapeshifter.

  “Whoops, here’s a live one,” Eric called.

  “Tara,” Sam called.

  Tara scrambled down the steps of the deck and over to us. She flung her arms around me and began sobbing. With tremendous weariness, I held her and let her boohoo. I was still in my Daisy Duke outfit, and she was in her fire-engine lingerie. We were like big white water lilies in a cold pond, we two. I made myself straighten up and hold Tara.

  “Would there be a blanket in that cabin, you think?” I asked Sam. He trotted over to the steps, and I noticed the effect was interesting from behind. After a minute, he trotted back—wow, this view was even more arresting—and wrapped a blanket around the two of us.

  “I must be gonna live,” I muttered.

  “Why do you say that?” Sam was curious. He didn’t seem unduly surprised by the events of the night.

  I could hardly tell him it was because I’d watched him bounce around, so I said, “How are Eggs and Andy?”

  “Sounds like a radio show,” Tara said suddenly, and giggled. I didn’t like the sound of it.

  “They’re still standing where she left them,” Sam reported. “Still staring.”

  “I’m—still—staring,” Tara sang, to the tune of Elton’s “I’m Still Standing.”

  Eric laughed.

  He and Bill were just about to start the fire. They strolled over to us for a last-minute check.

  “What car did you come in?” Bill asked Tara.

  “Ooo, a vampire,” she said. “You’re Sookie’s honey, aren’t you? Why were you at the game the other night with a dog like Portia Bellefleur?”

  “She’s kind, too,” Eric said. He looked down at Tara with a sort of beneficent but disappointed smile, like a dog breeder regarding a cute, but inferior, puppy.

  “What car did you come in?” Bill asked again. “If there is a sensible side to you, I want to see it now.”

  “I came in the white Camaro,” she said, quite soberly. “I’ll drive it home. Or maybe I better not. Sam?”

  “Sure, I’ll drive you home. Bill, you need my help here?”

  “I think Eric and I can cope. Can you take the skinny one?”

  “Eggs? I’ll see.”

  Tara gave me a kiss on the cheek and began picking her way across the yard to her car. “I left the keys in it,” she called.

  “What about your purse?” The police would surely wonder if they found Tara’s purse in a cabin with a lot of bodies.

  “Oh . . . it’s in there.”

  I looked at Bill silently, and he went in to fetch the purse. He returned with a big shoulder bag, large enough to contain not only makeup and everyday items, but also a change of clothing.

  “This is yours?”

  “Yes, thanks,” Tara said, taking the bag from him as if she were afraid his fingers might touch hers. She hadn’t been so picky earlier in the evening, I thought.

  Eric was carrying Eggs to her car. “He will not remember any of this,” Eric told Tara as Sam opened the back door of the Camaro so Eric could lay Eggs inside.

  “I wish I could say the same.” Her face seemed to sag on its bones under the weight of the knowle
dge of what had happened this night. “I wish I’d never seen that thing, whatever she is. I wish I’d never come here, to start with. I hated doing this. I just thought Eggs was worth it.” She gave a look to the inert form in the backseat of her car. “He’s not. No one is.”

  “I can remove your memory, too.” Eric made the offer offhandedly.

  “No,” she said. “I need to remember some of this, and it’s worth carrying the burden of the rest.” Tara sounded twenty years older. Sometimes we can grow up all in a minute; I’d done that when I was about seven and my parents died. Tara had done that this night.

  “But they’re all dead, all but me and Eggs and Andy. Aren’t you afraid we’ll talk? Are you gonna come after us?”

  Eric and Bill exchanged glances. Eric moved a little closer to Tara. “Look, Tara,” he began, in a very reasonable voice, and she made the mistake of glancing up. Then, once her gaze was fixed, Eric began to erase the memory of the night. I was just too tired to protest, as if that would do any good. If Tara could even raise the question, she shouldn’t be burdened with the knowledge. I hoped she wouldn’t repeat her mistakes, having been separated from the knowledge of what they had cost her; but she couldn’t be allowed to tell tales.

  Tara and Eggs, driven by Sam (who had borrowed Eggs’s pants), were on their way back to town when Bill began arranging a natural-looking fire to consume the cabin. Eric was apparently counting bones up on the deck, to make sure the bodies there were complete enough to reassure the investigators. He went across the yard to check on Andy.

  “Why does Bill hate the Bellefleurs so much?” I asked him again.

  “Oh, that’s an old story,” Eric said. “Back from before Bill had even changed over.” He seemed satisfied by Andy’s condition and went back to work.

  I heard a car approaching, and Bill and Eric both appeared in the yard instantly. I could hear a faint crackle from the far side of the cabin. “We can’t start the fire from more than one place, or they may be able to tell it wasn’t natural,” Bill said to Eric. “I hate these strides in police science.”