Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set

by Charlaine Harris

  Phony bitch, I decided in the time it takes to snap your fingers, and I made up my mind to behave accordingly. The goblin Hob led the way to an empty table within view of the happy party, and held out a chair for me. I nodded to him politely, and unwound my wrap, folding it and tossing it onto an empty chair. Alcide sat in the chair to my right, so he could put his back to the corner where the shifters were having such a raucous good time.

  A bone-thin vampire came to take our order. Alcide asked my pleasure with an inclination of his head. “A champagne cocktail,” I said, having no idea what one tasted like. I’d never gone to the trouble to mix myself one at Merlotte’s, but now that I was in someone else’s bar, I thought I’d give it a shot. Alcide ordered a Heineken. Debbie was casting many glances our way, so I leaned forward and smoothed back a lock of Alcide’s curly black hair. He looked surprised, though of course Debbie couldn’t see that.

  “Sookie?” he said, rather doubtfully.

  I smiled at him, not my nervous smile—because I wasn’t, for once. Thanks to Bill, I now had a little confidence about my own physical attractiveness. “Hey, I’m your date, remember? I’m acting date-like,” I told him.

  The thin vampire brought our drinks just then, and I clinked my glass against his bottle. “To our joint venture,” I said, and his eyes lit up. We sipped.

  I loved champagne cocktails.

  “Tell me more about your family,” I said, because I enjoyed listening to his rumbly voice. I would have to wait until there were more humans in the bar before I began listening in to others’ thoughts.

  Alcide obligingly began telling me about how poor his dad had been when he started his surveying business, and how long it had taken for him to prosper. He was just beginning to tell me about his mother when Debbie sashayed up.

  It had only been a matter of time.

  “Hello, Alcide,” she purred. Since he hadn’t been able to see her coming, his strong face quivered. “Who’s your new friend? Did you borrow her for the evening?”

  “Oh, longer than that,” I said clearly, and smiled at Debbie, a smile that matched her own for sincerity.

  “Really?” If her eyebrows had crawled any higher, they’d have been in heaven.

  “Sookie is a good friend,” Alcide said impassively.

  “Oh?” Debbie doubted his word. “It wasn’t too long ago you told me you’d never have another ‘friend’ if you couldn’t have . . . Well.” She smirked.

  I covered Alcide’s huge hand with my own and gave her a look that implied much.

  “Tell me,” Debbie said, her lips curling in a skeptical way, “how do you like that birthmark of Alcide’s?”

  Who could have predicted she was willing to be a bitch so openly? Most women try to hide it, at least from strangers.

  It’s on my right butt cheek. It’s shaped like a rabbit. Well, how nice. Alcide had remembered what I’d said, and he’d thought directly at me.

  “I love bunnies,” I said, still smiling, my hand drifting down Alcide’s back to caress, very lightly, the top of his right buttock.

  For a second, I saw sheer rage on Debbie’s face. She was so focused, so controlled, that her mind was a lot less opaque than most shifters’. She was thinking about her owl fiancé, about how he wasn’t as good in the sack as Alcide, but he had a lot of ready cash and he was willing to have children, which Alcide wasn’t. And she was stronger than the owl, able to dominate him.

  She was no demon (of course, her fiancé would have a really short shelf life if she were) but she was no sweetie, either.

  Debbie still could have recovered the situation, but her discovery that I knew Alcide’s little secret made her nuts. She made a big mistake.

  She raked me over with a glare that would have paralyzed a lion. “Looks like you went to Janice’s salon today,” she said, taking in the casually tumbled curls, the fingernails. Her own straight black hair had been cut in asymmetrical clumps, tiny locks of different lengths, making her look a little like a dog in a very good show, maybe an Afghan. Her narrow face increased the resemblance. “Janice never sends anyone out looking like they live in this century.”

  Alcide opened his mouth, rage tensing all his muscles. I laid my hand on his arm.

  “What do you think of my hair?” I asked softly, moving my head so it slithered over my bare shoulders. I took his hand and held it gently to the curls falling over my chest. Hey, I was pretty good at this! Sookie the sex kitten.

  Alcide caught his breath. His fingers trailed through the length of my hair, and his knuckles brushed my collarbone. “I think it’s beautiful,” he said, and his voice was both sincere and husky.

  I smiled at him.

  “I guess instead of borrowing you, he rented you,” Debbie said, goaded into irreparable error.

  It was a terrible insult, to both of us. It took every bit of resolution I had to hang on to a ladylike self-control. I felt the primitive self, the truer me, swim nearly to the surface. We sat staring at the shifter, and she blanched at our silence. “Okay, I shouldn’t have said that,” she said nervously. “Just forget it.”

  Because she was a shifter, she’d beat me in a fair fight. Of course, I had no intention of fighting fair, if it came to that.

  I leaned over and touched one red fingertip to her leather pants. “Wearing Cousin Elsie?” I asked.

  Unexpectedly, Alcide burst into laughter. I smiled at him as he doubled over, and when I looked up, Debbie was stalking back to her party, who had fallen silent during our exchange.

  I reminded myself to skip going to the ladies’ room alone this evening.

  BY THE TIME we ordered our second drinks, the place was full. Some Were friends of Alcide’s came in, a large group—Weres like to travel in packs, I understand. Shifters, it depended on the animal they most often shifted to. Despite their theoretical versatility, Sam had told me that shape-shifters most often changed to the same animal every time, some creature they had a special affinity for. And they might call themselves by that animal: weredog, or werebat, or weretiger. But never just “Weres”—that term was reserved for the wolves. The true werewolves scorned such variance in form, and they didn’t think much of shifters in general. They, the werewolves, considered themselves the cream of the shape-shifting world.

  Shifters, on the other hand, Alcide explained, thought of werewolves as the thugs of the supernatural scene. “And you do find a lot of us in the building trades,” he said, as if he were trying hard to be fair. “Lots of Weres are mechanics, or brick masons, or plumbers, or cooks.”

  “Useful occupations,” I said.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “But not exactly white-collar. So though we all cooperate with each other, to some extent, there’s a lot of class discrimination.”

  A small group of Weres in motorcycle gear strode in. They wore the same sort of leather vest with wolf’s heads on the back that had been worn by the man who’d attacked me at Merlotte’s. I wondered if they’d started searching for their comrade yet. I wondered if they had a clearer idea of who they were looking for, what they’d do if they realized who I was. The four men ordered several pitchers of beer and began talking very secretively, heads close together and chairs pulled right up to the table.

  A deejay—he appeared to be a vampire—began to play records at the perfect level; you could be sure what the song was, but you could still talk.

  “Let’s dance,” Alcide suggested.

  I hadn’t expected that; but it would put me closer to the vampires and their humans, so I accepted. Alcide held my chair for me, and took my hand as we went over to the minuscule dance floor. The vampire changed the music from some heavy metal thing to Sarah Mc-Lachlan’s “Good Enough,” which is slow, but with a beat.

  I can’t sing, but I can dance; as it happened, Alcide could, too.

  The good thing about dancing is that you don’t have to talk for a while, if you feel chatted out. The bad thing is it makes you hyperconscious of your partner’s body. I had already been uncom
fortably aware of Alcide’s—excuse me—animal magnetism. Now, so close to him, swaying in rhythm with him, following his every move, I found myself in a kind of trance. When the song was over, we stayed on the little dance floor, and I kept my eyes on the floor. When the next song started up, a faster piece of music—though for the life of me I couldn’t have told you what—we began dancing again, and I spun and dipped and moved with the werewolf.

  Then the muscular squat man sitting at a bar stool behind us said to his vampire companion, “He hasn’t talked yet. And Harvey called today. He said they searched the house and didn’t find anything.”

  “Public place,” said his companion, in a sharp voice. The vampire was a very small man—perhaps he’d become a vampire when men were shorter.

  I knew they were talking about Bill, because the human was thinking of Bill when he said, “He hasn’t talked.” And the human was an exceptional broadcaster, both sound and visuals coming through clearly.

  When Alcide tried to lead me away from their orbit, I resisted his lead. Looking up into his surprised face, I cut my eyes toward the couple. Comprehension filtered into his eyes, but he didn’t look happy.

  Dancing and trying to read another person’s mind at the same time is not something I’d recommend. I was straining mentally, and my heart was pounding with shock at the glimpse of Bill’s image. Luckily, Alcide excused himself to go to the men’s room just then, parking me on a stool at the bar right by the vampire. I tried to keep looking around at different dancers, at the deejay, at anything but the man to the vampire’s left, the man whose mind I was trying to pick through.

  He was thinking about what he’d done during the day; he’d been trying to keep someone awake, someone who really needed to sleep—a vampire. Bill.

  Keeping a vampire awake during the day was the worst kind of torture. It was difficult to do, too. The compulsion to sleep when the sun came up was imperative, and the sleep itself was like death.

  Somehow, it had never crossed my mind—I guess since I’m an American—that the vampires who had snatched Bill might be resorting to evil means to get him to talk. If they wanted the information, naturally they weren’t just going to wait around until Bill felt like telling them. Stupid me—dumb, dumb, dumb. Even knowing Bill had betrayed me, even knowing he had thought of leaving me for his vampire lover, I was struck deep with pain for him.

  Engrossed in my unhappy thoughts, I didn’t recognize trouble when it was standing right beside me. Until it grabbed me by the arm.

  One of the Were gang members, a big dark-haired man, very heavy and very smelly, had grabbed hold of my arm. He was getting his greasy fingerprints all over my beautiful red sleeves, and I tried to pull away from him.

  “Come to our table and let us get to know you, sweet thing,” he said, grinning at me. He had a couple of earrings in one ear. I wondered what happened to them during the full moon. But almost immediately, I realized I had more serious problems to solve. The expression on his face was too frank; men just didn’t look at women that way unless those women were standing on a street corner in hot pants and a bra: in other words, he thought I was a sure thing.

  “No, thank you,” I said politely. I had a weary, wary feeling that this wasn’t going to be the end of it, but I might as well try. I’d had plenty of experience at Merlotte’s with pushy guys, but I always had backup at Merlotte’s. Sam wouldn’t tolerate the servers being pawed or insulted.

  “Sure, darlin’. You want to come see us,” he said insistently.

  For the first time in my life, I wished Bubba were with me.

  I was getting far too used to people who bothered me meeting a bad end. And maybe I was getting too accustomed to having some of my problems solved by others.

  I thought of scaring the Were by reading his mind. It would have been an easy read—he was wide open, for a Were. But not only were his thoughts boring and un-surprising (lust, aggression), if his gang was charged with searching for the girlfriend of Bill the vampire, and they knew she was a barmaid and a telepath, and they found a telepath, well . . .

  “No, I don’t want to come sit with you,” I said definitely. “Leave me alone.” I slid off the stool so I wouldn’t be trapped in one position.

  “You don’t have no man here. We’re real men, honey.” With his free hand, he cupped himself. Oh, charming. That really made me horny. “We’ll keep you happy.”

  “You couldn’t make me happy if you were Santa Claus,” I said, stomping on his instep with all my strength. If he hadn’t been wearing motorcycle boots, it might have been effective. As it was, I came close to breaking the heel of my shoe. I was mentally cursing my false nails because they made it hard to form a fist. I was going to hit him in the nose with my free hand; a blow to the nose really hurts badly. He’d have to let go.

  He snarled at me, really snarled, when my heel hit his instep, but he didn’t loosen his grip. His free hand seized my bare shoulder, and his fingers dug in.

  I’d been trying to be quiet, hoping to resolve this without hubbub, but I was past that point right now. “Let go!” I yelled, as I made a heroic attempt to knee him in the balls. His thighs were heavy and his stance narrow, so I couldn’t get a good shot. But I did make him flinch, and though his nails gouged my shoulder, he let go.

  Part of this was due to the fact that Alcide had a hold on the scruff of his neck. And Mr. Hob stepped in, just as the other gang members surged around the bar to come to the aid of their buddy. The goblin who’d ushered us into the club doubled as the bouncer, it happened. Though he looked like a very small man on the outside, he wrapped his arms around the biker’s waist and lifted him with ease. The biker began shrieking, and the smell of burned flesh began to circulate in the bar. The rail-thin bartender switched on a heavy-duty exhaust fan, which helped a lot, but we could hear the screams of the biker all the way down a narrow dark hall I hadn’t noticed before. It must lead to the rear exit of the building. Then there was a big clang, a yell, and the same clang sounding again. Clearly, the back door of the bar had been opened and the offender tossed outside.

  Alcide swung around to face the biker’s friends, while I stood shaking with reaction behind him. I was bleeding from the imprints of the biker’s fingernails in the flesh of my shoulder. I needed some Neosporin, which was what my grandmother had put on every injury when I’d objected to Campho-Phenique. But any little first-aid concerns were going to have to wait: It looked as though we faced another fight. I glanced around for a weapon, and saw the bartender had gotten a baseball bat out and laid it on the bar. She was keeping a wary eye on the situation. I seized the bat and went to stand beside Alcide. I swung the bat into position and waited for the next move. As my brother, Jason, had taught me—based on his many fights in bars, I’m afraid—I picked out one man in particular, pictured myself swinging the bat and bringing it to strike on his knee, which was more accessible to me than his head. That would bring him down, sure enough.

  Then someone stepped into the no-man’s-land between Alcide and me and the Weres. It was the small vampire, the one who’d been talking with the human whose mind had been such a source of unpleasant information.

  Maybe five feet five with his shoes on, he was also slight of build. When he’d died, he’d been in his early twenties, I guessed. Clean-shaven and very pale, he had eyes the color of bitter chocolate, a jarring contrast with his red hair.

  “Miss, I apologize for this unpleasantness,” he said, his voice soft and his accent heavily Southern. I hadn’t heard an accent that thick since my great-grandmother had died twenty years ago.

  “I’m sorry the peace of the bar has been disturbed,” I said, summoning up as much dignity as I could while gripping a baseball bat. I’d instinctively kicked off my heels so I could fight. I straightened up from my fighting stance, and inclined my head to him, acknowledging his authority.

  “You men should leave now,” the little man said, turning to the group of Weres, “after apologizing to this lady and her esc
ort.”

  They milled around uneasily, but none wanted to be the first to back down. One of them who was apparently younger and dumber than the others, was a blond with a heavy beard and a bandanna around his head in a particularly stupid-looking style. He had the fire of battle in his eyes; his pride couldn’t handle the whole situation. The biker telegraphed his move before he’d even begun it, and quick as lightning I held out the bat to the vampire, who snatched it in a move so fast, I couldn’t even glimpse it. He used it to break the werewolf’s leg.

  The bar was absolutely silent as the screaming biker was carried out by his friends. The Weres chorused, “Sorry, sorry,” as they lifted the blond and removed him from of the bar.

  Then the music started again, the small vampire returned the bat to the bartender, Alcide began checking me over for damage, and I began shaking.

  “I’m fine,” I said, pretty much just wanting everyone to look somewhere else.

  “But you’re bleeding, my dear,” said the vampire.

  It was true; my shoulder was trailing blood from the biker’s fingernails. I knew etiquette. I leaned toward the vampire, offering him the blood.

  “Thank you,” he said instantly, and his tongue flicked out. I knew I would heal better and quicker with his saliva anyway, so I held quite still, though to tell the truth, it was like letting someone feel me up in public. Despite my discomfort, I smiled, though I know it can’t have been a comfortable smile. Alcide held my hand, which was reassuring.

  “Sorry I didn’t come out quicker,” he said.

  “Not something you can predict.” Lick, lick, lick. Oh, come on, I had to have stopped bleeding by now.