Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set

by Charlaine Harris

  He put me down when we reached his house. “Can you make it up the stairs?” he asked.

  “I’ll take you,” offered Charles.

  “No, I can do it,” I said, and started up before they could say anything more. To tell the truth, I was not so sure I could, but slowly I made my way up to the bedroom I’d used when Bill had been my boyfriend. He had a snug light-tight place somewhere on the ground floor of the house, but I’d never asked him exactly where. (I had a pretty good idea it was in the space the builders had lopped off the kitchen to create the hot tub/plant room.) Though the water table is too high in Louisiana for houses to have basements, I was almost as sure there was another dark hole concealed somewhere. He had room for Charles without them bunking together, anyway—not that that was too high on my list of concerns. One of my nightgowns still lay in the drawer in the old-fashioned bedroom, and there was still a toothbrush of mine in the hall bathroom. Bill hadn’t put my things in the trash; he’d left them, like he’d expected me to return.

  Or maybe he just hadn’t had much reason to go upstairs since we’d broken up.

  Promising myself a long shower in the morning, I took off my smelly, stained pajamas and ruined socks. I washed my face and pulled on the clean nightgown before I crawled in the high bed, using the antique stool still positioned where I’d left it. As the incidents of the day and night buzzed in my head like bees, I thanked God for the fact that my life had been spared, and that was all I had time to say to Him before sleep swallowed me up.

  I slept only three hours. Then worry woke me up. I was up in plenty of time to meet Greg Aubert, the insurance agent. I dressed in a pair of Bill’s jeans and a shirt of his. They’d been left outside my door, along with heavy socks. His shoes were out of the question, but to my delight I found an old pair of rubber-soled slippers I’d left at the very back of the closet. Bill still had some coffee and a coffeemaker in his kitchen from our courtship, and I was grateful to have a mug to carry with me as I made my way carefully across the cemetery and through the belt of woods surrounding what was left of my house.

  Greg was pulling into the front yard as I stepped from the trees. He got out of his truck, scanned my oddly fitting ensemble, and politely ignored it. He and I stood side by side, regarding the old house. Greg had sandy hair and rimless glasses, and he was an elder in the Presbyterian Church. I’d always liked him, at least in part because whenever I’d taken my grandmother by to pay her premiums, he’d come out of his office to shake her hand and make her feel like a valued client. His business acumen was matched only by his luck. People had said for years that his personal good fortune extended to his policyholders, though of course they said this in a joking kind of way.

  “If only I could have foreseen this,” Greg said. “Sookie, I am so sorry this happened.”

  “What do you mean, Greg?”

  “Oh, I’m just . . . I wish I’d thought of you needing more coverage,” he said absently. He began walking around to the back of the house, and I trailed behind him. Curious, I began to listen in to his head, and I was startled out of my gloom by what I heard there.

  “So casting spells to back up your insurance really works?” I asked.

  He yelped. There’s no other word for it. “It’s true about you,” he gasped. “I—I don’t—it’s just . . .” He stood outside my blackened kitchen and gaped at me.

  “It’s okay,” I said reassuringly. “You can pretend I don’t know if it’ll help you feel better.”

  “My wife would just die if she knew,” he said soberly. “And the kids, too. I just want them kept separate from this part of my life. My mother was . . . she was . . .”

  “A witch?” I supplied helpfully.

  “Well, yes.” Greg’s glasses glinted in the early morning sun as he looked at what was left of my kitchen. “But my dad always pretended he didn’t know, and though she kept training me to take her place, I wanted to be a normal man more than anything in the world.” Greg nodded, as if to say he’d achieved his goal.

  I looked down into my mug of coffee, glad I had something to hold in my hands. Greg was lying to himself in a major way, but it wasn’t up to me to point that out to him. It was something he’d have to square with his God and his conscience. I wasn’t saying Greg’s method was a bad one, but it sure wasn’t a normal man’s choice. Insuring your livelihood (literally) by the use of magic had to be against some kind of rule.

  “I mean, I’m a good agent,” he said, defending himself, though I hadn’t said a word. “I’m careful about what I insure. I’m careful about checking things out. It’s not all the magic.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, because he would just explode with anxiety if I didn’t. “People have accidents anyway, right?”

  “Regardless of what spells I use,” he agreed gloomily. “They drive drunk. And sometimes metal parts give way, no matter what.”

  The idea of conventional Greg Aubert going around Bon Temps putting spells on cars was almost enough to distract me from the ruin of my house . . . but not quite.

  In the clear chilly daylight, I could see the damage in full. Though I kept telling myself it could have been much worse—and that I was very lucky that the kitchen had extended off the back of the house, since it had been built at a later date—it had also been the room that had held big-ticket items. I’d have to replace the stove, the refrigerator, the hot water heater, and the microwave, and the back porch had been home to my washer and drier.

  After the loss of those major appliances, there came the dishes and the pots and the pans and the silverware, some of it very old indeed. One of my greats had come from a family with a little money, and she’d brought a set of fine china and a silver tea service that had been a pain to polish. I’d never have to polish it again, I realized, but there was no joy in the thought. My Nova was old, and I’d needed to replace it for a long time, but I hadn’t planned on that being now.

  Well, I had insurance, and I had money in the bank, thanks to the vampires who’d paid me for keeping Eric when he’d lost his memory.

  “And you had smoke detectors?” Greg was asking.

  “Yes, I did,” I said, remembering the high-pitched pulsing that had started up right after Claudine had woken me. “If the ceiling in the hall is still there, you’ll be able to see one.”

  There were no more back steps to get us up onto the porch, and the porch floorboards looked very unsteady. In fact, the washer had half fallen through and was tilted at an odd angle. It made me sick, seeing my everyday things, things I’d touched and used hundreds of times, exposed to the world and ruined.

  “We’ll go through from the front door,” Greg suggested, and I was glad to agree.

  It was still unlocked, and I felt a flutter of alarm before I realized how ludicrous that was. I stepped in. The first thing I noticed was the smell. Everything reeked of smoke. I opened the windows, and the cool breeze that blew through began to clear the smell out until it was just tolerable.

  This end of the house was better than I’d expected. The furniture would need cleaning, of course. But the floor was solid and undamaged. I didn’t even go up the stairs; I seldom used the rooms up there, so whatever had happened up there could wait.

  My arms were crossed under my breasts. I looked from side to side, moving slowly across the room toward the hall. I felt the floor vibrate as someone else came in. I knew without looking around that Jason was behind me. He and Greg said something to each other, but after a second Jason fell silent, as shocked as I was.

  We passed into the hall. The door to my bedroom and the door to the bedroom across the hall were both open. My bedding was still thrown back. My slippers were beside the night table. All the windows were smudged with smoke and moisture, and the dreadful odor grew even stronger. There was the smoke detector on the hall ceiling. I pointed to it silently. I opened the door to the linen closet and found that everything in it felt damp. Well, these things could be washed. I went into my room and opened my closet door. My cl
oset shared a wall with the kitchen. At first glance my clothes looked intact, until I noticed that each garment hanging on a wire hanger had a line across the shoulders where the heated hanger had singed the cloth. My shoes had baked. Maybe three pairs were usable.

  I gulped.

  Though I felt shakier by the second, I joined my brother and the insurance agent as they carefully continued down the hall to the kitchen.

  The floor closest to the old part of the house seemed okay. The kitchen had been a large room, since it had also served as the family dining room. The table was partially burned, as were two of the chairs. The linoleum on the floor was all broken up, and some of it was charred. The hot water heater had gone through the floor, and the curtains that had covered the window over the sink were hanging in strips. I remembered Gran making those curtains; she hadn’t enjoyed sewing, but the ones from JCPenney that she’d liked were just too much. So she’d gotten out her mother’s old sewing machine and bought some cheap but pretty flowered material at Hancock’s, and she’d measured, and cursed under her breath, and worked and worked until finally she’d gotten them done. Jason and I had admired them extravagantly to make her feel it had been worth the effort, and she’d been so pleased.

  I opened one drawer, the one that had held all the keys. They were melted together. I pressed my lips together, hard. Jason stood beside me, looked down.

  “Shit,” he said, his voice low and vicious. That helped me push the tears back.

  I held on to his arm for just a minute. He patted me awkwardly. Seeing items so familiar, items made dear by use, irrevocably altered by fire was a terrible shock, no matter how many times I reminded myself that the whole house could have been consumed by the flames; that I could have died, too. Even if the smoke detector had wakened me in time, there was every likelihood I would have run outside to be confronted by the arsonist, Jeff Marriot.

  Almost everything on the east side of the kitchen was ruined. The floor was unstable. The kitchen roof was gone.

  “It’s lucky the rooms upstairs don’t extend over the kitchen,” Greg said when he came down from examining the two bedrooms and the attic. “You’ll have to get a builder to let you know, but I think the second story is essentially sound.”

  I talked to Greg about money after that. When would it come? How much would it be? What deductible would I have to pay?

  Jason wandered around the yard while Greg and I stood by his car. I could interpret my brother’s posture and movements. Jason was very angry: at my near-death escape, at what had happened to the house. After Greg drove off, leaving me with an exhausting list of things to do and phone calls to make (from where?) and work to get ready for (wearing what?), Jason meandered over to me and said, “If I’d been here, I coulda killed him.”

  “In your new body?” I asked.

  “Yeah. It would’ve given that sumbitch the scare of his life before he left it.”

  “I think Charles probably was pretty scary, but I appreciate the thought.”

  “They put the vamp in jail?”

  “No, Bud Dearborn just told him not to leave town. After all, the Bon Temps jail doesn’t have a vampire cell. And regular cells don’t hold ’em, plus they have windows.”

  “That’s where the guy was from—Fellowship of the Sun? Just a stranger who came to town to do you in?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “What they got against you? Other than you dating Bill and associating with some of the other vamps?”

  Actually, the Fellowship had quite a bit against me. I’d been responsible for their huge Dallas church being raided and one of their main leaders going underground. The papers had been full of what the police had found in the Fellowship building in Texas. Arriving to find the members dashing in turmoil around their building, claiming vampires had attacked them, the police entered the building to search it and found a basement torture chamber, illegal arms adapted to shoot wooden stakes into vampires, and a corpse. The police failed to see a single vampire. Steve and Sarah Newlin, the leaders of the Fellowship church in Dallas, had been missing since that night.

  I’d seen Steve Newlin since then. He’d been at Club Dead in Jackson. He and one of his cronies had been preparing to stake a vampire in the club when I’d prevented them. Newlin had escaped; his buddy hadn’t.

  It appeared that the Newlins’ followers had tracked me down. I hadn’t foreseen such a thing, but then, I’d never foreseen anything that had happened to me in the past year. When Bill had been learning how to use his computer, he’d told me that with a little knowledge and money, anyone could be found through a computer.

  Maybe the Fellowship had hired private detectives, like the couple who had been in my house yesterday. Maybe Jack and Lily Leeds had just been pretending to be hired by the Pelt family? Maybe the Newlins were their real employers? They hadn’t struck me as politicized people, but the power of the color green is universal.

  “I guess dating a vampire was enough for them to hate me,” I told Jason. We were sitting on the tailgate of his truck, staring dismally at the house. “Who do you think I should call about rebuilding the kitchen?”

  I didn’t think I needed an architect: I just wanted to replace what was missing. The house was raised up off the ground, so slab size wasn’t a factor. Since the floor was burned through in the kitchen and would have to be completely replaced, it wouldn’t cost much more to make the kitchen a little bigger and enclose the back porch completely. The washer and dryer wouldn’t be so awful to use in bad weather, I thought longingly. I had more than enough money to satisfy the deductible, and I was sure the insurance would pay for most of the rest.

  After a while, we heard another truck coming. Maxine Fortenberry, Hoyt’s mother, got out with a couple of laundry baskets. “Where’s your clothes, girl?” she called. “I’m gonna take them home and wash them, so you’ll have something to wear that don’t smell like smoke.”

  After I protested and she insisted, we went into the chokingly unpleasant air of the house to get some clothes. Maxine also insisted on getting an armful of linens out of the linen closet to see if some of them could be resurrected.

  Right after Maxine left, Tara drove her new car into the clearing, followed by her part-time help, a tall young woman called McKenna, who was driving Tara’s old car.

  After a hug and a few words of sympathy, Tara said, “You drive this old Malibu while you’re getting your insurance stuff straightened out. It’s just sitting in my carport doing nothing, and I was just about to put it in the paper in the For Sale column. You can be using it.”

  “Thank you,” I said in a daze. “Tara, that’s so nice of you.” She didn’t look good, I noticed vaguely, but I was too sunk in my own troubles to really evaluate Tara’s demeanor. When she and McKenna left, I gave them a limp wave good-bye.

  After that, Terry Bellefleur arrived. He offered to demolish the burned part for a very nominal sum, and for a little bit more he’d haul all the resultant trash to the parish dump. He’d start as soon as the police gave him the go-ahead, he said, and to my astonishment he gave me a little hug.

  Sam came after that, driven by Arlene. He stood and looked at the back of the house for a few minutes. His lips were tightly compressed. Almost any man would have said, “Pretty lucky I sent the vampire home with you, huh?” But Sam didn’t. “What can I do?” he said instead.

  “Keep me working,” I said, smiling. “Forgive me coming to work in something besides my actual work clothes.” Arlene walked all around the house, and then hugged me wordlessly.

  “That’s easily done,” he said. He still wasn’t smiling. “I hear that the guy who started the fire was a Fellowship member, that this is some kind of payback for you dating Bill.”

  “He had the card in his wallet, and he had a gas can.” I shrugged.

  “But how’d he find you? I mean, no one around here . . .” Sam’s voice trailed off as he considered the possibility more closely.

  He was thinking,
as I had, that though the arson could be just because I’d dated Bill, it seemed a drastic overreaction. A more typical retaliation was a Fellowship member throwing pig’s blood on humans who dated, or had a work partnership with, a vampire. That had happened more than once, most notably to a designer from Dior who’d employed all vampire models for one spring show. Such incidents usually occurred in big cities, cities that hosted large Fellowship “churches” and a bigger vampire population.

  What if the man had been hired to set fire to my house by someone else? What if the Fellowship card in his wallet was planted there for misdirection?

  Any of these things could be true; or all of them, or none of them. I couldn’t decide what I believed. So, was I the target of an assassin, like the shape-shifters? Should I, too, fear the shot from the dark, now that the fire had failed?

  That was such a frightening prospect that I flinched from pursuing it. Those were waters too deep for me.

  The state police arson investigator appeared while Sam and Arlene were there. I was eating a lunch plate Arlene had brought me. That Arlene was not much of a food person is the nicest way to put it, so my sandwich was made of cheap bologna and plastic cheese, and my canned drink was off-brand sugared tea. But she’d thought of me and she’d brought them to me, and her kids had drawn a picture for me. I would have been happy if she’d brought me just a slice of bread under those conditions.

  Automatically, Arlene made eyes at the arson investigator. He was a lean man in his late forties named Dennis Pettibone. Dennis had a camera, a notebook, and a grim outlook. It took Arlene maybe two minutes of conversation to coax a little smile from Mr. Pettibone’s lips, and his brown eyes were admiring her curves after two more minutes had passed. Before Arlene drove Sam home, she had a promise from the investigator that he’d drop by the bar that evening.

  Also before she left, Arlene offered me the foldout couch in her trailer, which was sweet of her, but I knew it would crowd her and throw off her get-the-kids-to-school morning routine, so I told her I had a place to stay. I didn’t think Bill would evict me. Jason had mentioned his house was open to me, and to my amazement, before he left, Sam said, “You can stay with me, Sookie. No strings. I have two empty bedrooms in the double-wide. There’s actually a bed in one of them.”