Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set

by Charlaine Harris

  He was a proper man.

  “How are they forcing you to do this?” I asked.

  “They have a marker of my dad’s,” he said. He put his massive hands on the table and leaned into them. “They own a casino in Shreveport, you know?”

  “Sure.” It was a popular weekend excursion for people in this area, to go over to Shreveport or up to Tunica (in Mississippi, right below Memphis) and rent a room for a couple of nights, play the slots, see a show or two, eat lots of buffet food.

  “My dad got in too deep. He owns a surveying company—I work for him—but he likes to gamble.” The green eyes smoldered with rage. “He got in too deep in the casino in Louisiana, so your vamps own his marker, his debt. If they call it in, our company will go under.” Werewolves seemed to respect vampires about as much as vampires respect them. “So, to get the marker back, I have to help you hang around with the vamps in Jackson.” He leaned back in the chair, looking me in the eyes. “That’s not a hard thing, taking a pretty woman to Jackson and out barhopping. Now that I’ve met you, I’m glad to do it, to get my father out from under the debt. But why the hell you want to do that? You look like a real woman, not one of those sick bitches who get off on hanging around the vamps.”

  This was a refreshingly direct conversation, after my conference with the vampires. “I only hang around with one vampire, by choice,” I said bitterly. “Bill, my—well, I don’t know if he’s even my boyfriend anymore. It seems the vampires of Jackson may have kidnapped him. Someone tried to grab me last night.” I thought it only fair to let him know. “Since the kidnapper didn’t seem to know my name, just that I worked at Merlotte’s, I’ll probably be safe in Jackson if no one figures out I’m the woman who goes with Bill. I have to tell you, the man who tried to grab me was a werewolf. And he had a Hinds County car plate.” Jackson was in Hinds County.

  “Wearing a gang vest?” Alcide asked. I nodded. Alcide looked thoughtful, which was a good thing. This was not a situation I took lightly, and it was a good sign that he didn’t, either. “There’s a small gang in Jackson made up of Weres. Some of the bigger shifters hang around the edges of this gang—the panther, the bear. They hire themselves out to the vamps on a pretty regular basis.”

  “There’s one less of them now,” I said.

  After a moment’s digestion of that information, my new companion gave me a long, challenging stare. “So, what good is a little human gal going to do against the vampires of Jackson? You a martial artist? You a great shot? You been in the Army?”

  I had to smile. “No. You never heard my name?”

  “You’re famous?”

  “Guess not.” I was pleased that he didn’t have any preconceptions about me. “I think I’ll just let you find out about me.”

  “Long as you’re not gonna turn into a snake.” He stood up. “You’re not a guy, are you?” That late-breaking thought made his eyes widen.

  “No, Alcide. I’m a woman.” I tried to say that matter-of-factly, but it was pretty hard.

  “I was willing to put money on that.” He grinned at me. “If you’re not some kind of superwoman, what are you going to do when you know where your man is?”

  “I’m going to call Eric, the . . .” Suddenly I realized that telling vampire secrets is a bad idea. “Eric is Bill’s boss. He’ll decide what to do after that.”

  Alcide looked skeptical. “I don’t trust Eric. I don’t trust any of ’em. He’ll probably double-cross you.”

  “How?”

  “He might use your man as leverage. He might demand restitution, since they have one of his men. He might use your man’s abduction as an excuse to go to war, in which case your man will be executed tout de suite.”

  I had not thought that far. “Bill knows stuff,” I said. “Important stuff.”

  “Good. That may keep him alive.” Then he saw my face, and chagrin ran across his own. “Hey, Sookie, I’m sorry. I don’t think before I talk sometimes. We’ll get him back, though it makes me sick to think of a woman like you with one of those bloodsuckers.”

  This was painful, but oddly refreshing.

  “Thanks, I guess,” I said, attempting a smile. “What about you? Do you have a plan about how to introduce me to the vampires?”

  “Yeah. There’s a nightclub in Jackson, close to the capitol. It’s for Supes and their dates only. No tourists. The vamps can’t make it pay on their own, and it’s a convenient meeting place for them, so they let us lowlifes share the fun.” He grinned. His teeth were perfect—white and sharp. “It won’t be suspicious if I go there. I always drop in when I’m in Jackson. You’ll have to go as my date.” He looked embarrassed. “Uh, I better tell you, you seem like you’re a jeans kind of person like me—but this club, they like you to dress kind of party style.” He feared I had no fancy dresses in my closet; I could read that clearly. And he didn’t want me to be humiliated by appearing in the wrong clothes. What a man.

  “Your girlfriend won’t be crazy about this,” I said, angling for information out of sheer curiosity.

  “She lives in Jackson, as a matter of fact. But we broke up a couple of months ago,” he said. “She took up with another shape-shifter. Guy turns into a damn owl.”

  Was she nuts? Of course, there’d be more to the story. And of course, it fell into the category of “none of your business.”

  So without comment, I went to my room to pack my two party dresses and their accessories in a hanging bag. Both were purchases from Tara’s Togs, managed (and now owned) by my friend Tara Thornton. Tara was real good about calling me when things went on clearance. Bill actually owned the building that housed Tara’s Togs, and had told all the businesses housed in there to run a tab for me that he would pay, but I had resisted the temptation. Well, except for replacing clothes that Bill himself had ripped in our more thrilling moments.

  I was very proud of both these dresses, since I’d never had anything like them before, and I zipped the bag shut with a smile.

  Alcide stuck his head in the bedroom to ask if I was ready. He looked at the cream-and-yellow bed and curtains, and nodded approvingly. “I got to call my boss,” I said. “Then we’ll be good to go.” I perched on the side of the bed and picked up the receiver.

  Alcide propped himself against the wall by my closet door while I dialed Sam’s personal number. His voice was sleepy when he answered, and I apologized for calling so early. “What’s happening, Sookie?” he asked groggily.

  “I have to go away for a few days,” I said. “I’m sorry for not giving you more notice, but I called Sue Jennings last night to see if she’d work for me. She said yes, so I gave her my hours.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “I have to go to Mississippi,” I said. “Jackson.”

  “You got someone lined up to pick up your mail?”

  “My brother. Thanks for asking.”

  “Plants to water?”

  “None that won’t live till I get back.”

  “Okay. Are you going by yourself?”

  “No,” I said hesitantly.

  “With Bill?”

  “No, he, uh, he hasn’t shown up.”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “I’m just fine,” I lied.

  “Tell him a man’s going with you,” Alcide rumbled, and I gave him an exasperated look. He was leaning against the wall, and he took up an awful lot of it.

  “Someone’s there?” Sam’s nothing if not quick on the uptake.

  “Yes, Alcide Herveaux,” I said, figuring it was a smart thing to tell someone who cared about me that I was leaving the area with this guy. First impressions can be absolutely false, and Alcide needed to be aware there was someone who would hold him accountable.

  “Aha,” Sam said. The name did not seem to be unfamiliar to him. “Let me talk to him.”

  “Why?” I can take a lot of paternalism, but I was about up to my ears.

  “Hand over the damn phone.” Sam almost never curses, so I made a face
to show what I thought of his demand and gave the phone to Alcide. I stomped out to the living room and looked through the window. Yep. A Dodge Ram, extended cab. I was willing to bet it had everything on it that could be put on.

  I’d rolled my suitcase out by its handle, and I’d slung my carrying bag over a chair by the door, so I just had to pull on my heavy jacket. I was glad Alcide had warned me about the dress-up rule for the bar, since it never would have occurred to me to pack anything fancy. Stupid vampires. Stupid dress code.

  I was Sullen, with a capital S.

  I wandered back down the hall, mentally reviewing the contents of my suitcase, while the two shape-shifters had (presumably) a “man talk.” I glanced through the doorway of my bedroom to see that Alcide, with the phone to his ear, was perched on the side of my bed where I’d been sitting. He looked oddly at home there.

  I paced restlessly back into the living room and stared out the window some more. Maybe the two were having shape-shifting talk. Though to Alcide, Sam (who generally shifted into a collie, though he was not limited to that form) would rank as a lightweight, at least they were from the same branch of the tree. Sam, on the other hand, would be a little leery of Alcide; werewolves had a bad rep.

  Alcide strode down the hall, safety shoes clomping on the hardwood floor. “I promised him I’d take care of you,” he said. “Now, we’ll just hope that works out.” He wasn’t smiling.

  I had been tuning up to be aggravated, but his last sentence was so realistic that the hot air went out of me as if I’d been punctured. In the complex relationship between vampire, Were, and human, there was a lot of leeway for something to go wrong somewhere. After all, my plan was thin, and the vampires’ hold over Alcide was tenuous. Bill might not have been taken unwillingly; he might be happy being held captive by a king, as long as the vampire Lorena was on site. He might be enraged that I had come to find him.

  He might be dead.

  I locked the door behind me and followed Alcide as he stowed my things in the extended cab of the Ram.

  The outside of the big truck gleamed, but inside, it was the littered vehicle of a man who spent his working life on the road; a hard hat, invoices, estimates, business cards, boots, a first-aid kit. At least there wasn’t any food trash. As we bumped down my eroded driveway, I picked up a rubber-banded sheaf of brochures whose cover read, “Herveaux and Son, AAA Accurate Surveys.” I eased out the top one and studied it carefully as Alcide drove the short distance to interstate 20 to go east to Monroe, Vicksburg, and then to Jackson.

  I discovered that the Herveauxes, father and son, owned a bi-state surveying company, with offices in Jackson, Monroe, Shreveport, and Baton Rouge. The home office, as Alcide had told me, was in Shreveport. There was a photo inside of the two men, and the older Herveaux was just as impressive (in a senior way) as his son.

  “Is your dad a werewolf, too?” I asked, after I’d digested the information and realized that the Herveaux family was at least prosperous, and possibly rich. They’d worked hard for it, though; and they’d keep working hard, unless the older Mr. Herveaux could control his gambling.

  “Both my parents,” Alcide said, after a pause.

  “Oh, sorry.” I wasn’t sure what I was apologizing for, but it was safer than not.

  “That’s the only way to produce a Were child,” he said, after a moment. I couldn’t tell if he was explaining to be polite, or because he really thought I should know.

  “So how come America’s not full of werewolves and shapeshifters?” I asked, after I’d considered his statement.

  “Like must marry like to produce another, which is not always doable. And each union only produces one child with the trait. Infant mortality is high.”

  “So, if you marry another werewolf, one of your kids will be a werebaby?”

  “The condition will manifest itself at the onset of, ah, puberty.”

  “Oh, that’s awful. Being a teenager is tough enough.”

  He smiled, not at me, but at the road. “Yeah, it does complicate things.”

  “So, your ex-girlfriend . . . she a shifter?”

  “Yeah. I don’t normally date shifters, but I guess I thought with her it would be different. Weres and shifters are strongly attracted to each other. Animal magnetism, I guess,” Alcide said, as an attempt at humor.

  My boss, also a shifter, had been glad to make friends with other shifters in the area. He had been hanging out with a maenad (“dating” would be too sweet a word for their relationship), but she’d moved on. Now, Sam was hoping to find another compatible shifter. He felt more comfortable with a strange human, like me, or another shifter, than he did with regular women. When he’d told me that, he’d meant it as a compliment, or maybe just as a simple statement; but it had hurt me a little, though my abnormality had been borne in on me since I was very young.

  Telepathy doesn’t wait for puberty.

  “How come?” I asked baldly. “How come you thought it would be different?”

  “She told me she was sterile. I found out she was on birth control pills. Big difference. I’m not passing this along. Even a shifter and a werewolf may have a child who has to change at the full moon, though only kids of a pure couple—both Weres or both shifters—can change at will.”

  Food for thought, there. “So you normally date regular old girls. But doesn’t it make it hard to date? Keeping secret such a big, ah, factor, in your life?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “Dating regular girls can be a pain. But I have to date someone.” There was an edge of desperation to his rumbly voice.

  I gave that a long moment’s contemplation, and then I closed my eyes and counted to ten. I was missing Bill in a most elemental and unexpected way. My first clue had been the tug-below-the-waist I’d felt when I’d watched my tape of The Last of the Mohicans the week before and I’d fixated on Daniel Day-Lewis bounding through the forest. If I could appear from behind a tree before he saw Madeleine Stowe . . .

  I was going to have to watch my step.

  “So, if you bite someone, they won’t turn into a werewolf?” I decided to change the direction of my thoughts. Then I remembered the last time Bill had bitten me, and felt a rush of heat through . . . oh, hell.

  “That’s when you get your wolf-man. Like the ones in the movies. They die pretty quick, poor people. And that’s not passed along, if they, ah, engender children in their human form. If it’s when they’re in their altered form, the baby is miscarried.”

  “How interesting.” I could not think of one other thing to say.

  “But there’s that element of the supernatural, too, just like with vampires,” Alcide said, still not looking in my direction. “The tie-in of genetics and the supernatural element, that’s what no one seems to understand. We just can’t tell the world we exist, like the vampires did. We’d be locked up in zoos, sterilized, ghettoized—because we’re sometimes animals. Going public just seems to make the vampires glamorous and rich.” He sounded more than a little bitter.

  “So how come you’re telling me all this, right off the bat? If it’s such a big secret?” He had given me more information in ten minutes than I’d had from Bill in months.

  “If I’m going to be spending a few days with you, it will make my life a lot easier if you know. I figure you have your own problems, and it seems the vampires have some power over you, too. I don’t think you’ll tell. And if the worst happens, and I’ve been utterly wrong about you, I’ll ask Eric to pay you a visit and wipe out your memory.” He shook his head in baffled irritation. “I don’t know why, really. I just feel like I know you.”

  I couldn’t think of a response to that, but I had to speak. Silence would lend too much importance to his last sentence. “I’m sorry the vampires have a hold on your dad. But I have to find Bill. If this is the only way I can do it, this is what I have to do. I at least owe him that much, even if . . .” My voice trailed off. I didn’t want to finish the sentence. All the possible endings were too sad, too final
.

  He shrugged, a large movement on Alcide Herveaux. “Taking a pretty girl to a bar isn’t that big a deal,” he reassured me again, trying to bolster my spirits.

  In his position, I might not have been so generous. “Is your dad a constant gambler?”

  “Only since my mother died,” Alcide said, after a long pause.

  “I’m sorry.” I kept my eyes off his face in case he needed some privacy. “I don’t have either of my parents,” I offered.

  “They been gone long?”

  “Since I was seven.”

  “Who raised you?”

  “My grandmother raised me and my brother.”

  “She still living?”

  “No. She died this year. She was murdered.”

  “Tough.” He was matter-of-fact.

  “Yeah.” I had one more question. “Did both your parents tell you about yourself?”

  “No. My grandfather told me when I was about thirteen. He’d noticed the signs. I just don’t know orphaned Weres get through it without guidance.”

  “That would be really rough.”

  “We try to keep aware of all the Weres breeding in the area, so no one will go unwarned.”

  Even a secondhand warning would be better than no warning at all. But still, such a session would be a major trauma in anyone’s life.

  We stopped in Vicksburg to get gas. I offered to pay for filling the tank, but Alcide told me firmly this could go on his books as a business expense, since he did in fact need to see some customers. He waved off my offer to pump the gas, too. He did accept the cup of coffee I bought him, with as many thanks as if it had been a new suit. It was a cold, bright day, and I took a brisk walk around the travel center to stretch my legs before climbing back into the cab of the truck.

  Seeing the signs for the battlefield reminded me of one of the most taxing days I’d had as an adult. I found myself telling Alcide about my grandmother’s favorite club, the Descendants of the Glorious Dead, and about their field trip to the battlefield two years before. I’d driven one car, Maxine Fortenberry (grandmother of one of my brother Jason’s good buddies) another, and we’d toured at length. Each of the Descendants had brought a favorite text covering the siege, and an early stop at the visitors’ center had gotten the Descendants all tanked up with maps and memorabilia. Despite the failure of Velda Cannon’s Depends, we’d had a great time. We’d read every monument, we’d had a picnic lunch by the restored USS Cairo, and we’d gone home laden with souvenir booty and exhausted. We’d even gone into the Isle of Capri Casino for an hour of amazed staring, and some tentative slot machine feeding. It had been a very happy day for my grandmother, almost as happy a time as the evening she’d inveigled Bill into speaking at the Descendants meeting.