Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set

by Charlaine Harris

  “Yes, I do!” Amelia exclaimed. “Ah, it’s kind of daring. I was the bridesmaid at an extreme wedding.” She emerged from the closet with her hair disheveled, her eyes lit with triumph. She rotated the hanger so I could get the full effect. She’d had to pin the dress to the hanger because there was so little to hang.

  “Yikes,” I said, uneasily. Made mostly of lime-green chiffon, it was cut in a deep V almost down to the waist. A single narrow strap ran around the neck.

  “It was a movie star wedding,” Amelia said, looking as if she had a lot of memories of the service. Since the dress was also backless, I was wondering how those Hollywood women kept their boobs covered. Double-sided tape? Some kind of glue? As I hadn’t seen Claudine since she vanished from the courtyard before the ectoplasmic reconstruction, I had to assume she’d gone back to her job and her life in Monroe. I could have used her special services just about now. There had to be a fairy spell that would make your dress stay still.

  “At least you don’t need a special bra to wear under it,” Amelia said helpfully. That was true; it wasn’t possible to wear a bra at all. “And I’ve got the shoes, if you can wear a seven.”

  “That’s a big help,” I said, trying to sound pleased and grateful. “I don’t suppose you can do hair?”

  “Nah,” Amelia said. She waved a hand at her own short ’do. “I wash it, brush it, and that’s that. But I can call Bob.” Her eyes glowed happily. “He’s a hairdresser.”

  I tried not to look too astonished. At a funeral home? I thought, but I was smart enough to keep that to myself. Bob just looked no way like any hairdresser I’d ever seen.

  After a couple of hours, I was more or less into the dress, and fully made up.

  Bob had done a good job with my hair, though he’d reminded me several times to keep very still, in a way that had made me a little nervous.

  And Quinn had shown up on time in his car. When Eric and Rasul had dropped me off at about two in the morning, Quinn had just gotten in his car and driven away to wherever he was staying, though he’d put a light kiss on my forehead before I started up the stairs. Amelia had come out of her apartment, all happy I was safely back, and I’d had to return a call from Mr. Cataliades, who wondered if I was quite all right, and who wanted me to go to the bank with him to finalize Hadley’s financial affairs. Since I’d missed my chance to go with Everett, I’d been grateful.

  But when I’d returned to Hadley’s apartment after the bank trip, I’d found a message on Hadley’s answering machine telling me that the queen expected to see me at the party at the old monastery tonight. “I don’t want you to leave the city without seeing me again,” the queen’s human secretary had quoted her as saying, before informing me that the dress code was formal. After my discovery, when I realized I’d have to attend the party, I’d gone down the stairs to Amelia’s in a panic.

  The dress caused another kind of panic. I was better-endowed than Amelia, though a bit shorter, and I had to stand really straight.

  “The suspense is killing me,” said Quinn, eyeing my chest. He looked wonderful in a tux. My wrist bandages stuck out against my tan like strange bracelets; in fact, one of them was acutely uncomfortable, and I was anxious to take it off. But the wrist would have to stay covered a while, though the bite on my left arm could remain uncovered. Maybe the suspense about my boobs would distract partygoers from the fact that my face was swollen and discolored on one side.

  Quinn, of course, looked as though nothing had ever happened to him. Not only did he have the quick-healing flesh of most shape-shifters, but a man’s tux covers up a lot of injuries.

  “Don’t you make me feel any more self-conscious than I already do,” I said. “For about a dime, I’d go crawl back into bed and sleep for a week.”

  “I’m up for that, though I’d reduce the sleep time,” Quinn said sincerely. “But for our peace of mind, I think we better do this first. By the way, my suspense was about the trip to the bank, not your dress. I figure, with your dress, it’s a win-win situation. If you stay in it, good. If you don’t, even better.”

  I looked away, trying to control an involuntary smile. “The trip to the bank.” That seemed like a safe topic. “Well, her bank account didn’t have a lot in it, which I figured would be the case. Hadley didn’t have much sense about money. Hadley didn’t have much sense, period. But the safe-deposit box . . .”

  The safe-deposit box had held Hadley’s birth certificate, a marriage license, and a divorce decree dated more than three years ago—both naming the same man, I was glad to see—and a laminated copy of my aunt’s obituary. Hadley had known when her mother had died, and she’d cared enough to keep the clipping. There were pictures from our shared childhood, too: my mother and her sister; my mother and Jason, me, and Hadley; my grandmother and her husband. There was a pretty necklace with sapphires and diamonds (which Mr. Cataliades had said the queen had given to Hadley), and a pair of matching earrings. There were a couple more things that I wanted to think about.

  But the queen’s bracelet was not there. That was why Mr. Cataliades had wanted to accompany me, I think; he half expected the bracelet would be there, and he seemed quite anxious when I held the lockbox out to him so he could see its contents for himself.

  “I finished packing the kitchen stuff this afternoon after Cataliades took me back to Hadley’s apartment,” I said to Quinn, and watched his reaction. I would never again take the disinterestedness of my companions for granted. I found myself fairly convinced Quinn had not been helping me pack the day before in order to search for something, after I saw that his reaction was perfectly calm.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t make it over to help you today. I was closing out Jake’s dealings with Special Events. I had to call my partners, let them know. I had to call Jake’s girlfriend. He wasn’t steady enough to be around her, if she even wants to see him again. She’s not a vamp lover, to put it mildly.”

  At the moment, I wasn’t either. I couldn’t fathom the true reason the queen wanted me at the party, but I had found another reason to see her. Quinn smiled at me, and I smiled back at him, hoping that some good would come out of this evening. I had to admit to myself that I was a bit curious about seeing the queen’s party barn, so to speak—and I was also kind of glad to dress up and be pretty after all the swamp slogging.

  As we drove, I almost opened a conversation with Quinn at least three times—but on every occasion, when it got to the point, I kept my mouth shut.

  “We’re getting close,” he told me when we’d reached one of the oldest neighborhoods in New Orleans, the Garden District. The houses, set in beautiful grounds, would cost many times what even the Bellefleur mansion would fetch. In the middle of these marvelous homes, we came to a high wall that extended for a whole block. This was the renovated monastery that the queen used for entertaining.

  There might be other gates at the back of the property, but tonight all the traffic was moving through the main front entrance. It was heavily protected with the most efficient guards of all: vampires. I wondered if Sophie-Anne Leclerq was paranoid, or wise, or simply did not feel loved (or safe) in her adopted city. I was sure the queen also had the regular security provisions—cameras, infrared motion detectors, razor wire, maybe even guard dogs. There was security out the ying-yang here, where the elite vampires occasionally partied with the elite humans. Tonight the party was supes only, the first large party the newlyweds had given since they’d become a couple.

  Three of the queen’s vampires were at the gate, along with three of the Arkansas vampires. Peter Threadgill’s vampires all wore a uniform, though I suspected the king called it livery. The Arkansas bloodsuckers, male and female, were wearing white suits with blue shirts and red vests. I didn’t know if the king was ultrapatriotic or if the colors had been chosen because they were in the Arkansas state flag as well as the U.S. flag. Whichever, the suits were beyond tacky and into some fashion hall of shame, all on their own. And Threadgill h
ad been dressed so conservatively! Was this some tradition I’d never heard of? Gosh, even I knew better than that, tastewise, and I bought most of my clothes at Wal-Mart.

  Quinn had the queen’s card to show to the guards at the gate, but still they called up to the main house. Quinn looked uneasy, and I hoped he was as concerned as I was about the extreme security and the fact that Threadgill’s vampires had worked so hard to distinguish themselves from the queen’s adherents. I was thinking hard about the queen’s need to offer the king’s vamps a reason she would go upstairs with me at Hadley’s. I thought of the anxiety she displayed when she asked about the bracelet. I thought of the presence of both camps of vampires at the main gate. Neither monarch trusted the spouse to provide protection.

  It seemed like a long time before we were given leave to pass through. Quinn was as quiet as I while we waited.

  The grounds seemed to be beautifully landscaped and kept, and they were certainly well lit.

  “Quinn, this is just wrong,” I said. “What’s going on here? Do you think they’d let us leave?” Unfortunately, it seemed as though all my suspicions were true.

  Quinn didn’t look any happier than I was. “They won’t let us out,” he said. “We have to go on now.” I clutched my little evening bag closer to me, wishing there was something more lethal in it than a few small items like a compact and a lipstick, and a tampon. Quinn drove us carefully up the winding drive to the front of the monastery.

  “What did you do today, besides work on your outfit?” Quinn asked.

  “I made a lot of phone calls,” I said. “And one of them paid off.”

  “Calls? Where to?”

  “Gas stations, all along the route from New Orleans to Bon Temps.”

  He turned to stare at me, but I pointed just in time for Quinn to apply the brakes.

  A lion strolled across the drive.

  “Okay, what’s that? Animal? Or shifter?” I was edgier by the minute.

  “Animal,” Quinn said.

  Scratch the idea of dogs roaming the enclosure. I hoped the wall was high enough to keep the lion in.

  We parked in front of the former monastery, which was a very large two-story building. It hadn’t been built for beauty, but for utility, so it was a largely featureless structure. There was one small door in the middle of the façade, and small windows placed regularly. Again, fairly easy to defend.

  Outside the small door stood six more vampires, three in fancy but unmatching clothes—surely Louisiana bloodsuckers—and three more from Arkansas, in their glaringly garish outfits.

  “That’s just butt-ugly,” I said.

  “But easy to see, even in the dark,” Quinn said, looking as if he were thinking deep, significant thoughts.

  “Duh,” I said. “Isn’t that the point? So they’ll instantly . . . oh.” I mulled it over. “Yeah,” I said. “No one would wear anything close to that, on purpose or by accident. Under any circumstances. Unless it was really important to be instantly identifiable.”

  Quinn said, “It’s possible that Peter Threadgill is not devoted to Sophie-Anne.”

  I gave a squawk of laughter just as two Louisiana vampires opened our car doors in a move so coordinated it must have been rehearsed. Melanie, the guard vampire I’d met at the queen’s downtown headquarters, took my hand to help me from the car, and she smiled at me. She looked a lot better out of the overwhelming SWAT gear. She was wearing a pretty yellow dress with low heels. Now that she wasn’t wearing a helmet, I could see her hair was short, intensely curly, and light brown.

  She took a deep, dramatic breath as I passed, and then made an ecstatic face. “Oh, the odor of the fairy!” she exclaimed. “It makes my heart sing!”

  I swatted at her playfully. To say I was surprised would be an understatement. Vampires, as a whole, are not noted for their sense of humor.

  “Cute dress,” Rasul said. “Kind of on the daring side, huh?”

  Chester said, “Can’t be too daring for me. You look really tasty.”

  I thought it couldn’t be a coincidence that the three vampires I’d met at the queen’s headquarters were the three vampires on door duty tonight. I couldn’t figure out what that could mean, though. The three Arkansas vampires were silent, regarding the to-and-fro between us with cold eyes. They were not in the same relaxed and smiling mood as their fellows.

  Something definitely off-kilter here. But with the acute vampire hearing all around, there wasn’t anything to say about it.

  Quinn took my arm. We walked into a long hall that seemed to run nearly the length of the building. A Threadgill vampire was standing at the door of a room that seemed to serve as a reception area.

  “Would you like to check your bag?” she asked, obviously put out at being relegated to a hat-check girl.

  “No, thanks,” I said, and thought she was going to pull it out from under my arm.

  “May I search it?” she asked. “We screen for weapons.”

  I stared at her, always a risky thing to do to a vampire. “Of course not. I have no weapons.”

  “Sookie,” Quinn said, trying not to sound alarmed. “You have to let her look in your purse. It’s procedure.”

  I glared at him. “You could have told me,” I said sharply.

  The door guard, who was a svelte young vamp with a figure that challenged the cut of the white pants, seized my purse with an air of triumph. She turned it out over a tray, and its few contents clattered to the metal surface: a compact, a lipstick, a tiny tube of glue, a handkerchief, a ten-dollar bill, and a tampon in a rigid plastic applicator, completely covered in plastic wrap.

  Quinn was not unsophisticated enough to turn red, but he did glance discreetly away. The vampire, who had died long before women carried such items in their purses, asked me its purpose and nodded when I explained. She repacked my little evening bag and handed it to me, indicating with a hand gesture that we should proceed down the hall. She’d turned to the people who’d come in behind us, a Were couple in their sixties, before we’d even exited the room.

  “What are you up to?” Quinn asked, in the quietest possible voice, as we moved along the corridor.

  “Do we have to pass through any more security?” I asked, in a voice just as hushed.

  “I don’t know. I don’t see any up ahead.”

  “I have to do something,” I said. “Excuse me, while I find the nearest ladies’ room.” I tried to tell him, with my eyes, and with the pressure of my hand on his arm, that in a few minutes everything would be all right, and I sincerely hoped that was the truth. Quinn was clearly not happy with me, but he waited outside the ladies’ room (God knows what that had been when the building was a monastery) while I ducked into one of the stalls and made a few adjustments. When I came out, I’d tossed the tampon container into the little bin in the stall, and one of my wrists had been rebandaged. My purse was a little heavier.

  The door at the end of the corridor led into the very large room that had been the monks’ refectory. Though the room was still walled with stone and large pillars supported the roof, three on the left and three on the right, the rest of the decor was considerably different now. The middle of the room was cleared for dancing, and the floor was wooden. There was a dais for musicians close to the refreshments table, and another dais at the opposite end of the room for the royalty.

  Around the sides of the room were chairs in conversational groupings. The whole room was decorated in white and blue, the colors of Louisiana. One of the walls had murals depicting scenes from around the state: a swamp scene, which made me shudder; a Bourbon Street montage; a field being plowed and lumber being cut; and a fisherman hoisting up a net in the Gulf Coast. These were all scenes featuring humans, I thought, and wondered what the thinking was behind that. Then I turned to look at the wall surrounding the doorway I’d just entered, and I saw the vampire side of Louisiana life: a group of happy vampires with fiddles under their chins, playing away; a vampire police officer patrolling the French Quarter;
a vampire guide leading tourists through one of the Cities of the Dead. No vamps snacking on humans, no vamps drinking anything, I noticed. This was a statement in public relations. I wondered if it really fooled anyone. All you had to do was sit down at a supper table with vampires, and you’d be reminded how different they were, all right.

  Well, this wasn’t what I’d come to do. I looked around for the queen, and I finally saw her standing by her husband. She was wearing a long-sleeved orange silk dress, and she looked fabulous. Long sleeves maybe seemed a little strange in the warm evening, but vampires didn’t notice such things. Peter Threadgill was wearing a tux, and he looked equally impressive. Jade Flower was standing behind him, sword strapped to her back even though she was wearing a red sequined dress (in which, by the way, she looked awful). Andre, also fully armed, was at his station behind the queen. Sigebert and Wybert couldn’t be far off. I spotted them on either side of a door that I assumed led to the queen’s private apartments. The two vampires looked acutely uncomfortable in their tuxes; it was like watching bears who’d been made to wear shoes.

  Bill was in the room. I caught a glimpse of him in the far corner, in the opposite direction from the queen, and I shivered with loathing.

  “You have too many secrets,” Quinn complained, following the direction of my gaze.

  “I’ll be glad to tell you a few of ’em, real soon,” I promised, and we joined the tail end of the reception line. “When we reach the royals, you go ahead of me. While I’m talking to the queen, you distract the king, okay? Then I will tell you everything.”

  We reached to Mr. Cataliades first. I guess he was sort of the queen’s secretary of state. Or maybe attorney general would be more appropriate?

  “Good to see you again, Mr. Cataliades,” I said, in my most correct social tone. “I’ve got a surprise for you,” I added.

  “You may have to save it,” he said with a kind of stiff cordiality. “The queen is about to have the first dance with her new king. And we’re all so looking forward to seeing the present the king gave her.”