Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set

by Charlaine Harris

  My opinion of the hotelier plummeted. If he thought such a strategy would work on Sophie-Anne, he had a lot of thinking to do.

  I didn’t see Jake Purifoy anywhere around, and I wondered what Andre had him doing. Something innocuous probably, like checking to make sure all the cars were gassed up. He wasn’t really trusted to handle anything more taxing, at least not yet. Jake’s youth and his Were heritage counted against him, and he’d have to bust his tail to earn points. But Jake didn’t have that fire in him. He was looking to the past, to his life as a Were. He had a backlog of bitterness.

  Sophie’s suite had been cleaned; all the vampire suites had to be cleaned at night, of course, while the vamps were out of them. Christian Baruch started telling us about the extra help he’d had to take on to cope with the summit crowd and how nervous some of them were about cleaning rooms occupied by vampires. I could tell Sophie-Anne was not impressed by Baruch’s assumption of superiority. He was so much younger than her, he must seem like a swaggering teenager to the centuries-old queen.

  Jake came in just then, and after paying his respects to the queen and meeting Dahlia, he came to sit by me. I was slumping in an uncomfortable straight chair, and he pulled a matching one over.

  “What’s up, Jake?”

  “Not much. I’ve been getting the queen and Andre tickets to a show for tomorrow night. It’s an all-vampire production of Hello, Dolly!”

  I tried to imagine that, found I couldn’t. “What are you going to be doing? It’s marked as free time on the schedule.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, a curiously remote tone in his voice. “My life has changed so much I just can’t predict what will happen. Are you going out tomorrow in the day, Sookie? Shopping, maybe? There are some wonderful stores on Widewater Drive. That’s down by the lake.”

  Even I had heard of Widewater Drive, and I said, “I guess it’s possible. I’m not much of a shopper.”

  “You really should go. There’re some great shoe stores, and a big Macy’s—you’d love Macy’s. Make a day of it. Get away from this place while you can.”

  “I’ll sure think about it,” I said, a little puzzled. “Um, have you seen Quinn today?”

  “Glimpsed him. And I talked to Frannie for a minute. They’ve been busy getting props ready for the closing ceremonies.”

  “Oh,” I said. Right. Sure. That took loads of time.

  “Call him, ask him to take you out tomorrow,” Jake said.

  I tried to picture me asking Quinn to take me shopping. Well, it wasn’t totally out of the question, but it wasn’t likely, either. I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get out some.”

  He looked pleased.

  “Sookie, you can go,” Andre said. I was so tired I hadn’t even noticed him glide up.

  “Okay. Good night, you two,” I said, and stood to stretch. I noticed the blue suitcase was still where I’d dropped it two nights ago. “Oh, Jake, you need to take that suitcase back down to the basement. They called me and told me to bring it up here, but no one’s claimed it.”

  “I’ll ask around,” he said vaguely, and took off for his own room. Andre’s attention had already returned to the queen, who was laughing at the description of some wedding Dahlia had attended.

  “Andre,” I said in a very low voice, “I gotta tell you, I think Mr. Baruch had something to do with that bomb outside the queen’s door.”

  Andre looked as if someone had stuck a nail up his fundament. “What?”

  “I’m thinking that he wanted Sophie-Anne scared,” I said. “I’m thinking that he thought she’d be vulnerable and need a strong male protector if she felt threatened.”

  Andre was not Mr. Expressive, but I saw incredulity, disgust, and belief cross his face in quick order.

  “And I’m also thinking maybe he told Henrik Feith that Sophie-Anne was going to kill him. Because he’s the hotel owner, right? And he’d have a key to get into the queen’s room, where we thought Henrik was safe, right? So Henrik would continue the queen’s trial, because he’d been persuaded she would do him in. Again, Christian Baruch would be there, to be her big savior. Maybe he had Henrik killed, after he’d set him up, so he could do a tah-dah reveal and dazzle Sophie-Anne with his wonderful care of her.”

  Andre had the strangest expression on his face, as if he was having trouble following me. “Is there proof?” he asked.

  “Not a smidge. But when I talked to Mr. Donati in the lobby this morning, he hinted that there was a security tape I might want to watch.”

  “Go see,” Andre said.

  “If I go ask for it, he’ll get fired. You need to get the queen to ask Mr. Baruch point-blank if she can see the security tape for the lobby outside during the time the bomb was planted. Gum on the camera or not, that tape will show something.”

  “Leave first, so he won’t connect you to this.” In fact, the hotelier had been absorbed in the queen and her conversation, or his vampire hearing would have tipped him off that we were talking about him.

  Though I was exhausted, I had the gratifying feeling that I was earning the money they were paying me for this trip. And it was a load off my mind to feel that the Dr Pepper thing was solved. Christian Baruch would not be doing any more bomb planting now that the queen was on to him. The threat the splinter group of the Fellowship posed . . . well, I’d only heard of that from hearsay, and I didn’t have any evidence of what form it would take. Despite the death of the woman at the archery place, I felt more relaxed than I had since I’d walked into the Pyramid of Gizeh, because I was inclined to attribute the killer archer to Baruch, too. Maybe when he saw that Henrik would actually take Arkansas from the queen, he’d gotten greedy and had the assassin take out Henrik, so the queen would get everything. There was something confusing and wrong about that scenario, but I was too tired to think it through, and I was content to let the whole tangled web lie until I was rested.

  I crossed the little lobby to the elevator and pressed the button. When the doors dinged open, Bill stepped out, his hands full of order forms.

  “You did well this evening,” I said, too tired to hate him. I nodded at the forms.

  “Yes, we’ll all make a lot of money from this,” he said, but he didn’t sound particularly excited.

  I waited for him to step out of my way, but he didn’t do that, either.

  “I would give it all away if I could erase what happened between us,” he said. “Not the times we spent loving each other, but . . .”

  “The times you spent lying to me? The times you pretended you could hardly wait to date me when it turns out you were under order to? Those times?”

  “Yes,” he said, and his deep brown eyes didn’t waver. “Those times.”

  “You hurt me too much. That’s not ever gonna happen.”

  “Do you love any man? Quinn? Eric? That moron JB?”

  “You don’t have the right to ask me that,” I said. “You don’t have any rights at all where I’m concerned.”

  JB? Where’d that come from? I’d always been fond of the guy, and he was lovely, but his conversation was about as stimulating as a stump’s. I was shaking my head as I rode down in the elevator to the human floor.

  Carla was out, as usual, and since it was five in the morning the chances seemed good that she’d stay out. I put on my pink pajamas and put my slippers beside the bed so I wouldn’t have to grope around for them in the darkened room in case Carla came in before I awoke.

  17

  MY EYES SNAPPED OPEN LIKE SHADES THAT WERE wound too tight.

  Wake up, wake up, wake up! Sookie, something’s wrong.

  Barry, where are you?

  Standing at the elevators on the human floor.

  I’m coming. I pulled on last night’s outfit, but without the heels. Instead, I slid my feet into my rubber-soled slippers. I grabbed the slim wallet that held my room key, driver’s license, and credit card, and stuffed it in one pocket, jammed my cell phone into the other, and hurried out of the room. The door slammed b
ehind me with an ominous thud. The hotel felt empty and silent, but my clock had read 9:50.

  I had to run down a long corridor and turn right to get to the elevators. I didn’t meet a soul. A moment’s thought told me that was not so strange. Most humans on the floor would still be asleep, because they kept vampire hours. But there weren’t even any hotel employees cleaning the halls.

  All the little tracks of disquiet that had crawled through my brain, like slug tracks on your back doorstep, had coalesced into a huge throbbing mass of uneasiness.

  I felt like I was on the Titanic, and I’d just heard the hull scrape against the iceberg.

  I finally spotted someone, lying on the floor. I’d been woken so suddenly and sharply that everything I did had a dreamlike quality to it, so finding a body in the hall was not such a jolt.

  I let out a cry, and Barry came bounding around the corner. He crouched down with me. I rolled over the body. It was Jake Purifoy, and he couldn’t be roused.

  Why isn’t he in his room? What was he doing out so late? Even Barry’s mental voice sounded panicked.

  Look, Barry, he’s lying sort of pointing toward my room. Do you think he was coming to see me?

  Yes, and he didn’t make it.

  What could have been so important that Jake wasn’t prepared for his day’s sleep? I stood up, thinking furiously. I’d never, ever heard of a vampire who didn’t know instinctively that the dawn was coming. I thought of the conversations I’d had with Jake, and the two men I’d seen leaving his room.

  “You bastard,” I hissed through my teeth, and I kicked him as hard as I could.

  “Jesus, Sookie!” Barry grabbed my arm, horrified. But then he got the picture from my brain.

  “We need to find Mr. Cataliades and Diantha,” I said. “They can get up; they’re not vamps.”

  “I’ll get Cecile. She’s human, my roommate,” Barry said, and we both went off in different directions, leaving Jake to lie where he was. It was all we could do.

  We were back together in five minutes. It had been surprisingly easy to raise Mr. Cataliades, and Diantha had been sharing his room. Cecile proved to be a young woman with a no-nonsense haircut and a competent way about her, and I wasn’t surprised when Barry introduced her as the king’s new executive assistant.

  I’d been a fool to discount, even for a minute, the warning that Clovache had passed along. I was so angry at myself I could hardly stand to be inside my own skin. But I had to shove that aside and we had to act now.

  “Listen to what I think,” I said. I’d been putting things together in my head. “Some of the waiters have been avoiding Barry and me over the past couple of days, as soon as they found out what we were.”

  Barry nodded. He’d noticed, too. He looked oddly guilty, but that had to wait.

  “They know what we are. They didn’t want us to know what they’re about to do, I’m assuming. So I’m also assuming it must be something really, really bad. And Jake Purifoy was in on it.”

  Mr. Cataliades had been looking faintly bored, but now he began to look seriously alarmed. Diantha’s big eyes went from face to face.

  “What shall we do?” Cecile asked, which earned her high marks in my book.

  “It’s the extra coffins,” I said. “And the blue suitcase in the queen’s suite. Barry, you were asked to bring up a suitcase, too, right? And it didn’t belong to anyone?”

  Barry said, “Right. It’s still sitting in the foyer of the king’s suite, since everyone passes through there. We thought someone would claim it. I was going to take it back to the luggage department today.”

  I said, “The one I went down for is sitting in the living room of the queen’s suite. I think the guy who was in on it was Joe, the manager down in the luggage and delivery area. He’s the one who called me down to get the suitcase. No one else seemed to know anything about it.”

  “The suitcases will blow up?” Diantha said in her shrill voice. “The unclaimed coffins in the basement, too? If the basement goes, the building will collapse!” I’d never heard Diantha sound so human.

  “We have to wake them up,” I said. “We have to get them out.”

  “The building’s going to blow,” said Barry, trying to process the idea.

  “The vamps won’t wake up.” Cecile the practical. “They can’t.”

  “Quinn!” I said. I was thinking of so many things at once that I was standing rooted in place. Fishing my phone from my pocket, I punched his number on speed dial and heard his mumble at the other end. “Get out,” I said. “Quinn, get your sister and get out. There’s going to be an explosion.” I only waited to hear him sound more alert before I shut the phone.

  “We have to save ourselves, too,” Barry was saying.

  Brilliantly, Cecile ran down the hall to a red fixture and flipped the fire alarm. The clamor almost split our eardrums, but the effect was wonderful on the sleeping humans on this floor. Within seconds, they began to come out of the rooms.

  “Take the stairs,” Cecile directed them in a bellow, and obediently, they did. I was glad to see Carla’s dark head among them. But I didn’t see Quinn, and he was always easy to spot.

  “The queen is high up,” said Mr. Cataliades.

  “Can those glass panels be busted from the inside?” I asked.

  “They did it on Fear Factor,” Barry said.

  “We could try sliding the coffins down.”

  “They’d break on impact,” Cecile said.

  “But the vamps would survive the explosion,” I pointed out.

  “To be burned up by the sun,” Mr. Cataliades said. “Diantha and I will go up and try to get out the queen’s party, wrapped up in blankets. We’ll take them . . .” He looked at me desperately.

  “Ambulances! Call 911 now! They can figure out where to take them!”

  Diantha called 911 and was incoherent and desperate enough to get ambulances started to an explosion that had not happened yet. “The building’s on fire,” she said, which was like a future truth.

  “Go,” I told Mr. Cataliades, actually shoving the demon, and off he sped to the queen’s suite.

  “Go try to get your party out,” I said to Barry, and he and Cecile ran for the elevator, though at any minute it might be unworkable.

  I’d done everything about getting humans out that I could. Cataliades and Diantha could take care of the queen and Andre. Eric and Pam! I knew where Eric’s room was, thank God. I took the stairs. As I ran up, I met a party coming down: the two Britlingens, both with large packs on their backs, carrying a wrapped bundle. Clovache had the feet, Batanya the head. I had no doubt that the bundle was the King of Kentucky, and that they were doing their duty. They both nodded as I hugged the wall to let them by. If they weren’t as calm as if they were out for a stroll, they were close to it.

  “You set off the fire alarm?” Batanya said. “Whatever the Fellowship is doing, it’s today?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Thanks. We’re getting out now, and you should, too,” Clovache said.

  “We’ll go back to our place after we deposit him,” Batanya said. “Good-bye.”

  “Good luck,” I told them stupidly, and then I was running upstairs as if I’d trained for this. As a result, I was huffing like a bellows when I flung open the door to the ninth floor. I saw a lone maid pushing a cart down a long corridor. I ran up to her, frightening her even more than the fire alarm already had.

  “Give me your master key,” I said.

  “No!” She was middle-aged and Hispanic, and she wasn’t about to give in to such a crazy demand. “I’ll get fired.”

  “Then open this door”—I pointed to Eric’s—“and get out of here.” I’m sure I looked like a desperate woman, and I was. “This building is going to blow up any minute.”

  She flung the key at me and made tracks down the hallway to the elevators. Dammit.

  And then the explosions began. There was a deep, resounding quiver and a boom from way below my feet, as if some g
argantuan sea creature were making its way to the surface. I staggered over to Eric’s room, thrusting the plastic key into the slot and shoving open the door in a moment of utter silence. The room was in complete darkness.

  “Eric, Pam!” I yelled. I fumbled for a light switch in the pitch-black room, felt the building sway. At least one of the upper charges had gone off. Oh, shit! Oh, shit! But the light came on, and I saw that Eric and Pam had gotten in the beds, not the coffins.

  “Wake up!” I said, shaking Pam since she was closest. She didn’t stir at all. It was exactly like shaking a doll stuffed with sawdust. “Eric!” I screamed right in his ear.

  This got a bit of a reaction; he was much older than Pam. His eyes opened a slit and tried to focus. “What?” he said.

  “You have to get up! You have to! You have to go out!”

  “Daytime,” he whispered. He began to flop over on his side.

  I slapped him harder than I’ve ever hit anyone in my life. I screamed, “Get up!” until my voice would hardly work. Finally Eric stirred and managed to sit up. He was wearing black silk pajama bottoms, thank God, and I spied the ceremonial black cloak tossed over his coffin. He hadn’t returned it to Quinn, which was huge luck. I arranged it over him and fastened it at the neck. I pulled the hood over his face. “Cover your head!” I yelled, and I heard a burst of noise above my head: shattering glass, followed by shrieks.

  Eric would drop back to sleep if I didn’t keep him awake. At least he was trying. I remembered that Bill had managed to stagger, under dire circumstances, at least for a few minutes. But Pam, though roughly the same age as Bill, simply could not be roused. I even pulled her long pale hair.

  “You have to help me get Pam out,” I said finally, despairing. “Eric, you just have to.” There was another roar and a lurch in the floor. I screamed, and Eric’s eyes went wide. He staggered to his feet. As if we’d shared thoughts like Barry and I could, we both shoved his coffin off its trestle and onto the carpet. Then we slid it over to the opaque slanting glass panel forming the side of the building.