Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set

by Charlaine Harris

  19

  I SLEPT THE SLEEP OF THE DEAD. WELL, PROBABLY not, but as close as a human would ever come. As if in a dream, I heard the witches come carousing back into the courtyard. They were still congratulating one another with alcohol-lubricated vigor. I’d found some real, honest cotton sheets among the linens (Why are they still called linens? Have you seen a linen sheet in your life?) and I’d tossed the black silky ones into the washer, so it was very easy to slip back into sleep.

  When I got up, it was after ten in the morning. There was a knocking at the door, and I stumbled down the hall to unlock it after I’d pulled on a pair of Hadley’s spandex exercise pants and a hot pink tank top. I saw boxes through the peephole, and I opened the door feeling really happy.

  “Miss Stackhouse?” said the young black man who was holding the flattened boxes. When I nodded, he said, “I got orders to bring you as many boxes as you want. Will thirty do to start with?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Oh, that’ll be great.”

  “I also got instructions,” he said precisely, “to bring you anything related to moving that you might need. I have here strapping tape, masking tape, some Magic Markers, scissors, and stick-on labels.”

  The queen had given me a personal shopper.

  “Did you want colored dots? Some people like to put living room things in boxes with an orange dot, bedroom things in boxes with a green dot, and so on.”

  I had never moved, unless you counted taking a couple of bags of clothes and towels over to Sam’s furnished duplex after the kitchen burned, so I didn’t know the best way to go about it. I had an intoxicating vision of rows of neat boxes with colored dots on each side, so there couldn’t be any mistake from any angle. Then I snapped back to reality. I wouldn’t be taking that much back to Bon Temps. It was hard to form an estimate, since this was unknown territory, but I knew I didn’t want much of the furniture.

  “I don’t think I’ll need the dots, thanks anyway,” I said. “I’ll start working on these boxes, and then I can call you if I need any more, okay?”

  “I’ll assemble them for you,” he said. He had very short hair and the curliest eyelashes I’d ever seen on a person. Cows had eyelashes that pretty, sometimes. He was wearing a golf-type shirt and neatly belted khakis, along with high-end sneakers.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” I said, as he whipped a roll of strapping tape from a large lumpy plastic shopping bag. He set to work.

  “Oh, ’scuse me,” he said, and it was the first time he’d sounded natural. “My name is Everett O’Dell Smith.”

  “Pleasure to meet you,” I said, and he paused in his work so we could shake hands. “How did you come to be here?”

  “Oh, I’m in Tulane Business School, and one of my professors got a call from Mr. Cataliades, who is, like, the most famous lawyer in the vampire area. My professor specializes in vampire law. Mr. Cataliades needed a day person; I mean, he can come out in the day, but he needed someone to be his gofer.” He’d gotten three boxes done, already.

  “And in return?”

  “In return, I get to sit in court with him on his next five cases, and I get to earn some money I need real bad.”

  “Will you have time this afternoon to take me to my cousin’s bank?”

  “Sure will.”

  “You’re not missing a class now, are you?”

  “Oh, no, I got two hours before my second class.”

  He’d already been to a class and accumulated all this stuff before I’d even gotten up. Well, he hadn’t been up half the night watching his dead cousin walk around.

  “You can take these garbage bags of clothes to the nearest Goodwill or Salvation Army store.” That would clear the gallery and make me feel productive all at the same time. I’d gone over the garments quite carefully to make sure Hadley hadn’t hidden anything in them, and I wondered what the Salvation Army would make of them. Hadley had been into Tight and Skimpy; that was the nicest way to put it.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, whipping out a notebook and scribbling in it. Then he waited attentively. “Anything else?” he prompted me.

  “Yes, there’s no food in the house. When you come back this afternoon, can you bring me something to eat?” I could drink tap water, but I couldn’t create food out of nothing.

  Just then a call from the courtyard made me look over the railing. Quinn was down there with a bag of something greasy. My mouth began watering.

  “Looks like the food angle is covered,” I told Everett, waving Quinn up.

  “What can I do to help?” Quinn asked. “It struck me your cousin might not have coffee and food, so I brought some beignets and some coffee so strong it’ll make you grow hair on your chest.”

  I’d heard that quite a few times, but it still made me smile. “Oh, that’s my goal,” I said. “Bring it on. There’s actually coffee here, but I didn’t have a chance to make it because Everett here is such a take-charge kind of guy.”

  Everett smiled up from his tenth box. “You know that’s not true, but it’s good to hear you say it,” he said. I introduced the two men, and after Quinn handed me my bag, he began to help Everett assemble boxes. I sat at the glass-topped dining table and ate every crumb of the beignets that were in the bag and drank every drop of the coffee. I got powdered sugar all over me, and I didn’t care a bit. Quinn turned to look at me and tried to hide his smile. “You’re wearing your food, babe,” he said.

  I looked down at the tank top. “No hair on my chest, though,” I said, and he said, “Can I check?”

  I laughed and went to the back to brush my teeth and hair, both essential tasks. I checked out Hadley’s clothes that I’d wriggled into. The black spandex workout pants came to midthigh. Hadley probably had never worn them, because they would have been too big, to her taste. On me, they were very snug, but not the snug Hadley liked, where you could count the . . . oh, never mind. The hot pink tank top left my pale pink bra straps showing, to say nothing of a couple of inches of my middle, but thanks to Peck’s Tan-a-Lot (located inside Peck’s Bunch-o-Flicks, a video rental place in Bon Temps), that middle was nice and brown. Hadley would have put a piece of jewelry in her belly button. I looked at myself in the mirror, trying to picture myself with a gold stud or something. Nah. I slipped on some sandals decorated with crystal beads and felt quite glamorous for about thirty seconds.

  I began talking to Quinn about what I planned to do that day, and rather than yell, I stepped from the bedroom into the hall with my brush and my elastic band. I bent over at the waist, brushed my hair while I was inverted, and gathered it into a ponytail on top of my head. I was sure it was centered, because the movements were just automatic after all these years. My ponytail came down past my shoulder blades now. I looped the band, ran the ponytail through, and I straightened, ponytail flying back over my shoulders to bounce in the middle. Quinn and Everett had stopped their task to stare. When I looked back at them, the two men hastily bent back to their tasks.

  Okay, I didn’t get that I’d done anything interesting, but apparently I had. I shrugged and vanished into the master bathroom to slap on some makeup. After another glance in the mirror, it occurred to me that maybe anything I did in that outfit was fairly interesting, if you were a fully functional guy.

  When I came out, Everett had gone and Quinn gave me a slip of paper with Everett’s cell number on it. “He says to call him when you need some more boxes,” Quinn said. “He took all the bagged clothes. Looks like you don’t need me at all.”

  “No comparison,” I said, smiling. “Everett didn’t bring me grease and caffeine this morning, and you did.”

  “So what’s the plan, and how can I help?”

  “Okay, the plan is . . .” I didn’t exactly have one more specific than “go through this stuff and sort it out,” and Quinn couldn’t do that for me.

  “How’s this?” I asked. “You get everything out of the kitchen cabinets, and set it out where I can see it all, and I’ll make a ‘keep
or toss’ decision. You can pack what I want to keep, and put what I want to toss out on the gallery. I hope the rain stays away.” The sunny morning was clouding over, fast. “While we work, I’ll fill you in on what happened here last night.”

  Despite the threat of bad weather, we worked all morning, called in a pizza for lunch, and resumed work in the afternoon. The stuff I didn’t want went into garbage bags, and Quinn furthered his muscular development by carrying all the garbage bags down to the courtyard and putting them in the little shed that had held the lawn chairs, still set up on the grass. I tried to admire his muscles only when he wasn’t looking, and I think I was successful. Quinn was very interested to hear about the ectoplasmic reconstruction, and we talked about what it might all mean without reaching any conclusions. Jake didn’t have any enemies among the vampires that Quinn knew of, and Quinn thought that Jake must have been killed for the embarrassment it would cause Hadley, rather than for any sin of Jake’s own.

  I saw neither hide nor hair of Amelia, and I wondered if she’d gone home with the Mormonish Bob. Or maybe he’d stayed with her, and they were having a fabulous time in Amelia’s apartment. Maybe he was a real ball of fire under that white shirt and those black pants. I looked around the courtyard. Yes, Bob’s bicycle was still propped against the brick wall. Since the sky was getting darker by the minute, I put the bike in the little shed, too.

  Being with Quinn all day was stoking my fire a bit hotter every moment. He was down to a tank top and jeans, and I found myself wondering what he’d look like without those. And I didn’t think I was the only one conjecturing about what people would look like naked. I could catch a flash from Quinn’s mind every now and then as he was toting a bag down the stairs or packing pots and pans into a box, and those flashes weren’t about opening his mail or doing his laundry.

  I had enough practical presence of mind left to switch on a lamp when I heard the first peal of thunder in the distance. The Big Easy was about to be drenched.

  Then it was back to flirting with Quinn wordlessly—making sure he had a good view when I stretched up to get a glass down from the cabinets or bent down to wrap that glass in newspaper. Maybe a quarter of me was embarrassed, but the rest of me was having fun. Fun had not been a big factor in my life recently—well, ever—and I was enjoying my little toddle on the wild side.

  Downstairs, I felt Amelia’s brain click on, after a fashion. I was familiar with the feel of this, from working in a bar: Amelia had a hangover. I smiled to myself as the witch thought of Bob, who was still asleep beside her. Aside from a basic, “How could I?” Amelia’s most coherent thought was that she needed coffee. She needed it bad. She couldn’t even turn on a light in the apartment, which was darkening steadily with the approach of the storm. A light would hurt her eyes too much.

  I turned with a smile on my lips, ready to tell Quinn we might be hearing from Amelia soon, only to find he was right behind me, and his face was intent with a look I could not mistake. He was ready for something entirely different.

  “Tell me you don’t want me to kiss you, and I’ll back off,” he said, and then he was kissing me.

  I didn’t say a word.

  When the height difference became an issue, Quinn just picked me up and put me on the edge of the kitchen counter. A clap of thunder sounded outside as I parted my knees to let him get as close to me as he could. I wrapped my legs around him. He pulled the elastic band out of my hair, not a totally pain-free process, and ran his fingers through the tangles. He crushed my hair in his hand and inhaled deeply, as if he were extracting the perfume from a flower.

  “This is okay?” he asked raggedly, as his fingers found the bottom back edge of my tank top and sneaked up under it. He examined my bra tactilely and figured out how to open it in record time.

  “Okay?” I said, in a daze. I wasn’t sure whether I meant, “Okay? Hell, yes, hurry up!” or “Which part of this is okay, you want to know?” but Quinn naturally took it as a green light. His hands pushed the bra aside and he ran his thumbs across my nipples, which were already hard. I thought I was going to explode, and only the sure anticipation of better things to come kept me from losing it right then and there. I wriggled even further to the edge of the counter, so the big bulge in the front of Quinn’s jeans was pressed against the notch in my pants. Just amazing, how they fit. He pressed against me, released, pressed again, the ridge formed by the stretch of the jeans over his penis hitting just the right spot, so easy to reach through the thin and stretchy spandex. Once more, and I cried out, holding on to him through the blind moment of orgasm when I could swear I’d been catapulted into another universe. My breathing was more like sobbing, and I wrapped myself around him like he was my hero. In that moment, he certainly was.

  His breathing was still ragged, and he moved against me again, seeking his own release, since I had so loudly had mine. I sucked on his neck while my hand went down between us, and stroked him through his jeans, and suddenly he gave a cry as ragged as mine had been, and his arms tightened around me convulsively. “Oh, God,” he said, “oh, God.” His eyes closed tight with his release, he kissed my neck, my cheek, my lips, over and over. When his breathing—and mine—was a little more even, he said, “Babe, I haven’t come like that since I was seventeen, in the backseat of my dad’s car with Ellie Hopper.”

  “So, that’s a good thing,” I mumbled.

  “You bet,” he said.

  We stayed clinched for a moment, and I became aware that the rain was beating against the windows and the doors, and the thunder was booming away. My brain was thinking of shutting down for a little nap, and I was lazily aware of Quinn’s brain going equally drowsy as he rehooked my bra at my back. Downstairs, Amelia was making coffee in her dark kitchen and Bob the witch was waking up to the wonderful smell and wondering where his pants were. And in the courtyard, swarming silently up the stairs, enemies were approaching.

  “Quinn!” I exclaimed, just in the moment his sharp hearing picked up the shuffle of the footsteps. Quinn went into fighting mode. Since I hadn’t been home to check the calendar symbols, I’d forgotten we were close to the full moon. There were claws on Quinn’s hands now, claws at least three inches long, instead of fingers. His eyes slanted and became altogether gold, with dilated black pupils. The change in the bones of his face had made him alien. I’d made a form of love with this man in the past ten minutes, and now I would hardly have known him if I’d passed him on the street.

  But there wasn’t time to think about anything but our best defense. I was the weak link, and I had better depend on surprise. I slid off the counter, hurried past him to the door, and lifted the lamp from its pedestal. When the first Were burst through the door, I bashed him upside the head, and he staggered, and the one coming in right after him tripped over his flailing predecessor, and Quinn was more than ready for the third one.

  Unfortunately, there were six more.

  20

  IT TOOK JUST TWO OF THEM TO SUBDUE ME, AND I WAS kicking and screaming, biting and hitting, with every bit of energy I had. It took four for Quinn, but those four succeeded only because they used a stun gun. Otherwise, I’m sure he could have taken six or eight of them out of action, instead of the three he took care of before they got him.

  I knew I would be overcome, and I knew I could save myself some bruises and maybe a broken bone if I just assented to be taken. But I have my pride. More practically, I wanted to be sure that Amelia heard what was happening above her. She’d do something. I wasn’t sure what she’d do, but she’d act.

  I was hustled down the stairs, my feet hardly touching them, by two husky men I’d never seen before. These same two men had bound my wrists together with duct tape. I’d done my best to arrange for a little slack, but I was afraid they’d done a fair job of it.

  “Mmm, smells like sex,” the shorter one said as he pinched my butt. I ignored his tacky leer and took some satisfaction in eyeing the bruise I’d given him on his cheek-bone with my fist. (Which,
by the way, was aching and smarting over the knuckles. You can’t hit someone without paying for it yourself.)

  They had to carry Quinn, and they weren’t gentle about it. He got banged around against the stairs, and once they dropped him. He was a big guy. Now he was a bleeding big guy, since one of the blows had cut the skin above his left eye. He’d had the duct tape treatment, too, and I wondered how the fur would react to the tape.

  We were being held side by side in the courtyard, briefly, and Quinn looked over at me as if he desperately wanted to speak to me. The blood was running down his cheek from the wound over his eyes, and he looked groggy from the stun gun. His hands were changing back to regular hands. I lunged toward him, but the Weres kept us apart.

  Two vans drove into the circular drive, two vans that said BIG EASY ELECTRIC on the side. They were white and long and windowless in the back, and the logo on the side had been covered up with mud, which looked highly suspicious. A driver jumped out of the cab of each van, and the first driver threw open the doors to the rear of the first vehicle.

  While our captors were hustling Quinn and me over to that van, the rest of the raiding party was being brought down the stairs. The men Quinn had managed to hurt were damaged far worse than Quinn, I’m glad to say. Claws can do an amazing amount of damage, especially wielded with the force a tiger can exert. The guy I’d hit with the lamp was unconscious, and the one who’d reached Quinn first was possibly dead. He was certainly covered with blood and there were things exposed to the light that should have been neatly packed in his belly.

  I was smiling with satisfaction when the men holding me shoved me into the back of the van, which I discovered was awash with trash and absolutely filthy. This was a high-class operation. There was a wide-mesh screen between the two front seats and the open rear, and the shelves in the rear had been emptied, I supposed for our occupancy.

  I was crammed into the narrow aisle between the shelves, and Quinn was jammed in after me. They had to work hard because he was still so stunned. My two escorts were slamming the rear van doors on the two of us as the hors de combat Weres were loaded into the other van. I was guessing the vans had been parked out on the street briefly so we wouldn’t hear the vehicles pulling into the driveway. When they were ready to load us up, our captors had pulled into the courtyard. Even the people of a brawling city like New Orleans would notice some battered bodies being loaded into vans . . . in the pouring rain.