Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set

by Charlaine Harris

  “Well, I know him better than I want to,” she said, with the frankness that seemed to be Amelia Broadway’s defining characteristic. “I hear you using the past tense, though. Dare I hope that Waldo has gone to his final destination?”

  “You can,” I said. “Dare, that is.”

  “Oo-wee,” she said happily. “My, my, my.”

  At least I’d brightened someone’s day. I could see in Amelia’s thoughts how much she’d disliked the older vampire, and I didn’t blame her. He’d been loathsome. Amelia was a single-minded kind of woman, which must make her a formidable witch. But right now she should have been thinking about other possibilities involving me, and she wasn’t. There’s a downside to being focused on a goal.

  “So you want to clear out Hadley’s apartment because you think your building won’t be targeted any more? By these thieves who’ve learned that Hadley’s dead?”

  “Right,” she said, taking a final gulp of her coffee. “I kind of like knowing someone else is here, too. Having the apartment empty just gives me the creeps. At least vampires can’t leave ghosts behind.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. And I’d never thought about it, either.

  “No vamp ghosts,” Amelia said blithely. “Nary a one. Got to be human to leave a ghost behind. Hey, you want me to do a reading on you? I know, I know, it’s kind of scary, but I promise, I’m good at it!” She was thinking that it would be fun to give me a touristy-type thrill, since I wouldn’t be in New Orleans long; she also believed that the nicer she was to me, the quicker I’d clean out Hadley’s place so she could have the use of it back.

  “Sure,” I said slowly. “You can do a reading, right now, if you want.” This might be a good measure of how gifted a witch Amelia really was. She sure didn’t bear any resemblance to the witch stereotype. Amelia looked scrubbed and glowing and healthy, like a happy suburban housewife with a Ford Explorer and an Irish setter. But quick as a wink, Amelia extricated a Tarot pack from a pocket of her cargo shorts and leaned over the coffee table to deal them out. She did this in a quick and professional way that didn’t make a bit of sense to me.

  After poring over the pictures for a minute, her gaze stopped roaming over the cards and fixed on the table. Her face reddened, and she closed her eyes as if she were feeling mortified. Of course, she was.

  “Okay,” she said at last, her voice calm and flat. “What are you?”

  “Telepath.”

  “I’m always making assumptions! Why don’t I learn!”

  “No one thinks of me as scary,” I said, trying to sound gentle, and she winced.

  “Well, I won’t make that mistake again,” she said. “You did seem more knowledgeable about supes than the ordinary person.”

  “And learning more every day.” Even to myself, my voice sounded grim.

  “Now I’ll have to tell my advisor that I blew it,” my landlady said. She looked as gloomy as it was possible for her to look. Not very.

  “You have a . . . mentor?”

  “Yeah, an older witch who kind of monitors our progress the first three years of being a professional.”

  “How do you know when you’re a professional?”

  “Oh, you have to pass the exam,” Amelia explained, getting to her feet and going over to the sink. In a New York minute, she had washed the coffeepot and the filter apparatus, put them neatly in the drainer, and wiped out the sink.

  “So we’ll start packing up stuff tomorrow?” I said.

  “What’s wrong with right now?”

  “I’d like to go through Hadley’s things by myself, first,” I said, trying not to sound irritated.

  “Oh. Well, sure you would.” She tried to look as if she’d thought of that already. “And I guess you have to go over to the queen’s tonight, huh?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet they’re expecting you. Was there a tall, dark, and handsome vamp out there with you last night? He sure looked familiar.”

  “Bill Compton,” I said. “Yes, he’s lived in Louisiana for years and he’s done some work for the queen.”

  She looked at me, her clear blue eyes surprised. “Oh, I thought he knew your cousin.”

  “No,” I said. “Thanks for getting me up so I could start work, and thanks for being willing to help me.”

  She was pleased that she was leaving, because I hadn’t been what she’d expected, and she wanted to think about me some and make some phone calls to sisters in the craft in the Bon Temps area. “Holly Cleary,” I said. “She’s the one I know best.”

  Amelia gasped and said a shaky good-bye. She left as unexpectedly as she’d arrived.

  I felt old all of a sudden. I’d just been showing off, and I’d reduced a confident, happy young witch to an anxious woman in the space of an hour.

  But as I got out a pad and pencil—right where they should be, in the drawer closest to the telephone—to figure out my plan of action, I consoled myself with the thought that Amelia had needed the mental slap in the face pretty badly. If it hadn’t come from me, it might have come from someone who actually meant her harm.

  15

  I NEEDED BOXES, THAT WAS FOR SURE. SO I’D ALSO need strapping tape, lots of it, and a Magic Marker, and probably scissors. And finally, I’d need a truck to take whatever I salvaged back to Bon Temps. I could ask Jason to drive down, or I could rent a truck, or I could ask Mr. Cataliades if he knew of a truck I could borrow. If there was a lot of stuff, maybe I would rent a car and a trailer. I’d never done such a thing, but how hard could it be? Since I didn’t have a ride right now, there was no way to obtain the supplies. But I might as well start sorting, since the sooner I finished, the sooner I could get back to work and away from the New Orleans vampires. I was glad, in a corner of my mind, that Bill had come, too. As angry as I sometimes felt with him, he was familiar. After all, he’d been the first vampire I’d ever met, and it still seemed almost miraculous to me how it had happened.

  He’d come into the bar, and I’d been fascinated with the discovery that I couldn’t hear his thoughts. Then later the same evening, I’d rescued him from drainers. I sighed, thinking how good it had been until he’d been recalled by his maker, Lorena, now also definitely dead.

  I shook myself. This wasn’t the time for a trip down memory lane. This was the time for action and decision. I decided to start with the clothes.

  After fifteen minutes, I realized that the clothes were going to be easy. I was going to give most of them away. Not only was my taste radically different from my cousin’s, but her hips and breasts had been smaller and her coloring had been different from mine. Hadley had liked dark, dramatic clothes, and I was altogether a lower-key person. I did sort of wonder about one or two of the black wispy blouses and skirts, but when I tried them on, I looked just like one of the fangbangers who hung around Eric’s bar. Not the image I was going for. I put only a handful of tank tops and a couple of pairs of shorts and sleep pants in the “keep” pile.

  I found a large box of garbage bags and used those to pack the clothes away. As I finished with each bag, I set it out on the gallery to keep the apartment clear of clutter.

  It was about noon when I started to work, and the hours passed quickly after I found out how to operate Hadley’s CD player. A lot of the music she had was by artists who’d never been high on my list, no big surprise there—but it was interesting listening. She had a horde of CDs: No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, Eminem, Usher.

  I’d started on the drawers in the bedroom when it just began turning dark. I paused for a moment to stand on the gallery in the mild evening, and watch the city wake up for the dark hours ahead. New Orleans was a city of the night now. It had always been a place with a brawling and brazen nightlife, but now it was such a center for the undead that its entire character had changed. A lot of the jazz on Bourbon Street was played these days by hands that had last seen sunlight decades before. I could catch a faint spatter of notes on the air, the music of faraway revels. I s
at on a chair on the gallery and listened for a while, and I hoped I’d get to see some of the city while I was here. New Orleans is like no other place in America, both before the vampire influx and after it. I sighed and realized I was hungry. Of course, Hadley didn’t have any food in the apartment, and I wasn’t about to start drinking blood. I hated to ask Amelia for anything else. Tonight, whoever came to pick me up to go to the queen’s might be willing to take me to the grocery store. Maybe I should shower and change?

  As I turned to go back into the apartment, I spotted the mildewed towels I’d set out the night before. They smelled much stronger, which surprised me. I would have thought the smell would have diminished by now. Instead, my breath caught in the back of my throat in disgust as I picked up the basket to bring it inside. I intended to wash them. In a corner of the kitchen was one of those washer/dryer sets with the dryer on top. Like a tower of cleanliness.

  I tried to shake out the towels, but they’d dried in a stiff crumpled mass. Exasperated, I jerked at the protruding edge of one towel, and with a little resistance, the clots of stuff binding the folds together gave, and the medium blue terrycloth spread out before my eyes.

  “Oh, shit,” I said out loud in the silent apartment. “Oh, no.”

  The fluid that had dried and clumped on the towels was blood.

  “Oh, Hadley,” I said. “What did you do?”

  The smell was as awful as the shock. I sat down at the small dining table in the kitchen area. Flakes of dried blood had showered onto the floor and clung to my arms. I couldn’t read the thoughts of a towel, for God’s sake. My condition was of no help to me whatsoever. I needed . . . a witch. Like the one I’d chastened and sent away. Yep, just like that one.

  But first I needed to check the whole apartment, see if it held any more surprises.

  Oh, yeah. It did.

  The body was in the walk-in closet in the hall.

  There was no odor at all, though the corpse, a young man, had probably been there for the whole time my cousin had been dead. Maybe this young man had been a demon? But he didn’t look anything like Diantha or Gladiola, or Mr. Cataliades, for that matter. If the towels had started to smell, you would think . . . oh well, maybe I’d just gotten lucky. This was something that I would have to find the answer to, and I suspected it lay downstairs.

  I knocked on Amelia’s door. She answered it immediately, and I saw over her shoulder that her place, though of course laid out exactly like Hadley’s, was full of light colors and energy. She liked yellow, and cream, and coral, and green. Her furniture was modern and heavily cushioned, and the wooden bits were polished to the nth degree. As I’d suspected, Amelia’s place was spotless.

  “Yes?” she said, in a subdued kind of way.

  “Okay,” I said, as if I were laying down an olive branch. “I’ve got a problem, and I suspect you do, too.”

  “Why do you say that?” she asked. Her open face was closed now, as if keeping her expression blank would keep me out of her mind.

  “You put a stasis spell on the apartment, right? To keep everything exactly as it was. Before you warded it against intruders?”

  “Yes,” she said cautiously. “I told you that.”

  “No one’s been in that apartment since the night Hadley died?”

  “I can’t give you my word on it, because I suppose a very good witch or wizard could have breached my spell,” she said. “But to the best of my knowledge, no one’s been in there.”

  “So you don’t know that you sealed a body in there?”

  I don’t know what I expected in the way of reaction, but Amelia was pretty cool about it. “Okay,” she said steadily. She may have gulped. “Okay. Who is it?” Her eyelids fluttered up and down a few extra times.

  Maybe she wasn’t quite so cool.

  “I really don’t know,” I said carefully. “You’ll have to come see.” As we went up the stairs, I said, “He was killed there, and the mess was cleaned up with towels. They were in the hamper.” I told her about the condition of the towels.

  “Holly Cleary tells me you saved her son’s life,” Amelia said.

  That took me aback. It made me feel awkward, too. “The police would have found him,” I said. “I just accelerated it a little.”

  “The doctor told Holly if the little boy hadn’t gotten to the hospital when he did, the bleeding in his brain might not have been stopped in time,” Amelia said.

  “That’s good then,” I said, uncomfortable in the extreme. “How’s Cody doing?”

  “Well,” the witch said. “He’s going to be well.”

  “In the meantime, we got a problem right here,” I reminded her.

  “Okay, let’s see the corpse.” Amelia worked hard to keep her voice level.

  I kind of liked this witch.

  I led her to the closet. I’d left the door open. She stepped inside. She didn’t make a sound. She came back out with a slightly green tinge to her glowing tan and leaned against the wall.

  “He’s a Were,” she said, a moment later. The spell she’d put on the apartment had kept everything fresh, as part of the way it worked. The blood had begun to smell a little before the spell had been cast, and when I’d entered the apartment, the spell had been broken. Now the towels reeked of decay. The body didn’t have an odor yet, which surprised me a little, but I figured it would any minute. Surely the body would decompose rapidly now that it had been released from Amelia’s magic, and she was obviously trying not to point out how well that had worked.

  “You know him?”

  “Yes, I know him,” she said. “The supernatural community, even in New Orleans, isn’t that big. It’s Jake Purifoy. He did security for the queen’s wedding.”

  I had to sit down. I exited the walk-in closet and slid down the wall until I was sitting propped up, facing Amelia. She sat against the opposite wall. I hardly knew where to start asking questions.

  “That’s would be when she married the King of Arkansas?” I recalled what Felicia had said, and the wedding photo I’d seen in Al Cumberland’s album. Had that been the queen, under that elaborate headdress? When Quinn had mentioned making the arrangements for a wedding in New Orleans, was this the wedding he’d meant?

  “The queen, according to Hadley, is bi,” Amelia told me. “So yes, she married a guy. Now they have an alliance.”

  “They can’t have kids,” I said. I know, that was obvious, but I wasn’t getting this alliance thing.

  “No, but unless someone stakes them, they’ll live forever, so passing things on is not a big issue,” Amelia said. “It takes months, even years, of negotiations to hammer out the rules for such a wedding. The contract can take just as long. Then they both gotta sign it. That’s a big ceremony, takes place right before the wedding. They don’t actually have to spend their lives together, you know, but they have to visit a couple of times a year. Conjugal-type visit.”

  Fascinating as this was, it was beside the point right now. “So this guy in the closet, he was part of the security force.” Had he worked for Quinn? Hadn’t Quinn said that one of his workers had gone missing in New Orleans?

  “Yeah, I wasn’t asked to the wedding, of course, but I helped Hadley into her dress. He came to pick her up.”

  “Jake Purifoy came to pick Hadley up for the wedding.”

  “Yep. He was all dressed up that night.”

  “And that was the night of the wedding.”

  “Yeah, the night before Hadley died.”

  “Did you see them leave?”

  “No, I just . . . No. I heard the car pull up. I looked out my living room window and saw Jake coming in. I knew him already, kind of casually. I had a friend who used to date him. I went back to whatever I was doing, watching TV I think, and I heard the car leave after a while.”

  “So he may not have left at all.”

  She stared at me, her eyes wide. “Could be,” she said at last, sounding as if her mouth were dry.

  “Hadley was by herself when he came
to pick her up . . . right?”

  “When I came down from her apartment, I left her there alone.”

  “All I came to do,” I said, mainly to my bare feet, “was clean out my cousin’s apartment. I didn’t much like her anyway. Now I’m stuck with a body. The last time I got rid of a body,” I told the witch, “I had a big strong helper, and we wrapped it in a shower curtain.”

  “You did?” Amelia said faintly. She didn’t look too happy to be the recipient of this information.

  “Yes.” I nodded. “We didn’t kill him. We just had to get rid of the body. We thought we’d be blamed for the death, and I’m sure we would have been.” I stared at my toenail polish some more. It had been a good job when it started out, a nice bright pink, but now I needed to refresh the paint job or remove it. I stopped trying to think about other things and resumed my gloomy contemplation of the body. He was lying in the closet, stretched out on the floor, pushed under the lowest shelf. He’d been covered with a sheet. Jake Purifoy had been a handsome man, I suspected. He’d had dark brown hair, and a muscular build. Lots of body hair. Though he’d been dressed for a formal wedding, and Amelia had said he looked very nice, now he was naked. A minor question: where were his clothes?

  “We could just call the queen,” Amelia said. “After all, the body’s been here, and Hadley either killed him or hid the body. No way could he have died the night she went out with Waldo to the cemetery.”

  “Why not?” I had a sudden, awful thought.

  “You got a cell phone?” I asked, rising to my feet as I spoke. Amelia nodded. “Call the queen’s place. Tell them to send someone over right now.”

  “What?” Her eyes were confused, even as her fingers were punching in numbers.

  Looking into the closet, I could see the fingers of the corpse twitch.

  “He’s rising,” I said quietly.

  It only took a second for her to get it. “This is Amelia Broadway on Chloe Street! Send an older vampire over here right now,” she yelled into the phone. “New vamp rising!” She was on her feet now, and we were running for the door.