I wondered how long this movement would last if Steve were removed. Then I was ashamed of myself for thinking this, because what I meant was, if Steve were killed. I was beginning to think either Sarah or Polly would be able to step into his shoes, if they were allowed, because both seemed made of steel.
All the offices were perfectly open and innocent, if you considered the premise on which the organization was founded to be innocent. These all looked like average, rather cleaner-cut-than-normal, Americans, and there were even a few people who were non-Caucasian.
And one nonhuman.
We passed a tiny, thin Hispanic woman in the hall, and as her eyes flicked over to us, I caught a mental signature I'd only felt once before. Then, it came from Sam Merlotte. This woman, like Sam, was a shapeshifter, and her big eyes widened as she caught the waft of "difference" from me. I tried to catch her gaze, and for a minute we stared at each other, me trying to send her a message, and her trying not to receive it.
"Did I tell you the first church to occupy this site was built in the early sixties?" Sarah was saying, as the tiny woman went on down the hall at a fast clip. She glanced back over her shoulder, and I met her eyes again. Hers were frightened. Mine said, "Help."
"No," I said, startled at the sudden turn in the conversation.
"Just a little bit more," Sarah coaxed. "We'll have seen the whole church." We'd come to the last door at the end of the corridor. The corresponding door on the other wing had led to the outside. The wings had seemed to be exactly balanced from the outside of the church. My observations had obviously been faulty, but still …
"It's certainly a large place," said Hugo agreeably. Whatever ambivalent emotions had been plaguing him seemed to have subsided. In fact, he no longer seemed at all concerned. Only someone with no psychic sense at all could fail to be worried about this situation.
That would be Hugo. No psychic sense at all. He looked only interested when Polly opened the last door, the door flat at the end of the corridor. It should have led outside.
Instead, it led down.
Chapter 6
"You know, I have a touch of claustrophobia," I said instantly. "I didn't know many Dallas buildings had a basement, but I have to say, I just don't believe I want to see it." I clung to Hugo's arm and tried to smile in a charming but self-deprecating way.
Hugo's heart was beating like a drum because he was scared shitless—I'll swear he was. Faced with those stairs, somehow his calm was eroding again. What was with Hugo? Despite his fear, he gamely patted my shoulder and smiled apologetically at our companions. "Maybe we should go," he murmured.
"But I really think you should see what we've got underground. We actually have a bomb shelter," Sarah said, almost laughing in her amusement. "And it's fully equipped, isn't it, Steve?"
"Got all kinds of things down there," Steve agreed. He still looked relaxed, genial, and in charge, but I no longer saw those as benign characteristics. He stepped forward, and since he was behind us, I had to step forward or risk him touching me, which I found I very much did not want.
"Come on," Sarah said enthusiastically. "I'll bet Gabe's down here, and Steve can go on and see what Gabe wanted while we look at the rest of the facility." She trotted down the stairs as quickly as she'd moved down the hall, her round butt swaying in a way I probably would have considered cute if I hadn't been just on the edge of terrified.
Polly waved us down ahead of her, and down we went. I was going along with this because Hugo seemed absolutely confident that no harm would come to him. I was picking that up very clearly. His earlier fear had completely abated. It was as though he'd resigned himself to some program, and his ambivalence had vanished. Vainly, I wished he were easier to read. I turned my focus on Steve Newlin, but what I got from him was a thick wall of self-satisfaction.
We moved farther down the stairs, despite the fact that my steps had slowed, and then become slower again. I could tell Hugo was convinced that he would get to walk back up these stairs: after all, he was a civilized person. These were all civilized people.
Hugo really couldn't imagine that anything irreparable could happen to him, because he was a middle-class white American with a college education, as were all the people on the stairs with us.
I had no such conviction. I was not a wholly civilized person.
That was a new and interesting thought, but like many of my ideas that afternoon, it had to be stowed away, to be explored at leisure. If I ever had leisure again.
At the base of the stairs there was another door, and Sarah knocked on it in a pattern. Three fast, skip, two fast, my brain recorded. I heard locks shooting back.
Black Crewcut—Gabe—opened the door. "Hey, you brought me some visitors," he said enthusiastically. "Good show!" His golf shirt was tucked neatly into his pleated Dockers, his Nikes were new and spotless, and he was shaved as clean as a razor could get. I was willing to bet he did fifty push-ups every morning. There was an undercurrent of excitement in his every move and gesture; Gabe was really pumped about something.
I tried to "read" the area for life, but I was too agitated to concentrate.
"I'm glad you're here, Steve," Gabe said. "While Sarah is showing our visitors the shelter, maybe you can give our guest room a look-see." He nodded his head to the door in the right side of the narrow concrete hall. There was another door at the end of it, and a door to the left.
I hated it down here. I had pleaded claustrophobia to get out of this. Now that I had been coerced into coming down the stairs, I was finding that it was a true failing of mine. The musty smell, the glare of the artificial light, and the sense of enclosure … I hated it all. I didn't want to stay here. My palms broke out in a sweat. My feet felt anchored to the ground. "Hugo," I whispered. "I don't want to do this." There was very little act in the desperation in my voice. I didn't like to hear it, but it was there.
"She really needs to get back upstairs," Hugo said apologetically. "If you all don't mind, we'll just go back up and wait for you there."
I turned around, hoping this would work, but I found myself looking up into Steve's face. He wasn't smiling anymore. "I think you two need to wait in the other room over there, until I'm through with my business. Then, we'll talk." His voice brooked no discussion, and Sarah opened the door to disclose a bare little room with two chairs and two cots.
"No," I said, "I can't do that," and I shoved Steve as hard as I could. I am very strong, very strong indeed, since I've had vampire blood, and despite his size, he staggered. I nipped up the stairs as fast as I could move, but a hand closed around my ankle, and I fell most painfully. The edges of the stairs hit me everywhere, across my left cheekbone, my breasts, my hipbones, my left knee. It hurt so much I almost gagged.
"Here, little lady," said Gabe, hauling me to my feet.
"What have you—how could you hurt her like that?" Hugo was sputtering, genuinely upset. "We come here thinking of joining your group, and this is the way you treat us?"
"Drop the act," Gabe advised, and he twisted my arm behind my back before I had gotten my wits back from the fall. I gasped with the new pain, and he propelled me into the room, at the last minute grabbing my wig and yanking it off my head. Hugo stepped in behind me, though I gasped, "No!" and then they shut the door behind him.
And we heard it lock.
And that was that.
***
"Sookie," Hugo said, "there's a dent across your cheekbone."
"No shit," I muttered weakly.
"Are you badly hurt?"
"What do you think?"
He took me literally. "I think you have bruises and maybe a concussion. You didn't break any bones, did you?"
"Not but one or two," I said.
"And you're obviously not hurt badly enough to cut out the sarcasm," Hugo said. If he could be angry with me, it would make him feel better, I could tell, and I wondered why. But I didn't wonder too hard. I was pretty sure I knew.
I was lying on one of the cots, an ar
m across my face, trying to keep private and do some thinking. We hadn't been able to hear much happening in the hall outside. Once I thought I'd heard a door opening, and we'd heard muted voices, but that was all. These walls were built to withstand a nuclear blast, so I guess the quiet was to be expected.
"Do you have a watch?" I asked Hugo.
"Yes. It's five-thirty."
A good two hours until the vampires rose.
I let the quiet go on. When I knew hard-to-read Hugo must have relapsed into his own thoughts, I opened my mind and I listened with complete concentration.
Not supposed to happen like this, don't like this, surely everything'll be okay, what about when we need to go to the bathroom, I can't haul it out in front of her, maybe Isabel won't ever know, I should have known after that girl last night, how can I get out of this still practicing law, if I begin to distance myself after tomorrow maybe I can kind of ease out of it …
I pressed my arm against my eyes hard enough to hurt, to stop myself from jumping up and grabbing a chair and beating Hugo Ayres senseless. At present, he didn't fully understand my telepathy, and neither did the Fellowship, or they wouldn't have left me in here with him.
Or maybe Hugo was as expendable to them as he was to me. And he certainly would be to the vampires; I could hardly wait to tell Isabel that her boy toy was a traitor.
That sobered up my bloodlust. When I realized what Isabel would do to Hugo, I realized that I would take no real satisfaction in it if I witnessed it. In fact, it would terrify me and sicken me.
But part of me thought he richly deserved it.
To whom did this conflicted lawyer owe fealty?
One way to find out.
I sat up painfully, pressed my back against the wall. I would heal pretty fast—the vampire blood, again—but I was still a human, and I still felt awful. I knew my face was badly bruised, and I was willing to believe my cheekbone was fractured. The left side of my face was swelling something fierce. But my legs weren't broken, and I could still run, given the chance; that was the main thing.
Once I was braced and as comfortable as I was going to get, I said, "Hugo, how long have you been a traitor?"
He flushed an incredible red. "To whom? To Isabel, or to the human race?"
"Take your pick."
"I betrayed the human race when I took the side of the vampires in court. If I'd had any idea of what they were … I took the case sight unseen, because I thought it would be an interesting legal challenge. I have always been a civil rights lawyer, and I was convinced vampires had the same civil rights as other people."
Mr. Floodgates. "Sure," I said.
"To deny them the right to live anywhere they wanted to, that was un-American, I thought," Hugo continued. He sounded bitter and world-weary.
He hadn't seen bitter, yet.
"But you know what, Sookie? Vampires aren't American. They aren't even black or Asian or Indian. They aren't Rotarians or Baptists. They're all just plain vampires. That's their color and their religion and their nationality."
Well, that was what happened when a minority went underground for thousands of years. Duh.
"At the time, I thought if Stan Davis wanted to live on Green Valley Road, or in the Hundred-Acre Wood, that was his right as an American. So I defended him against the neighborhood association, and I won. I was real proud of myself. Then I got to know Isabel, and I took her to bed one night, feeling real daring, really the big man, the emancipated thinker."
I stared at him, not blinking or saying a word.
"As you know, the sex is great, the best. I was in thrall to her, couldn't get enough. My practice suffered. I started seeing clients only in the afternoon, because I couldn't get up in the morning. I couldn't make my court dates in the morning. I couldn't leave Isabel after dark."
This sounded like an alcoholic's tale, to me. Hugo had become addicted to vampiric sex. I found the concept fascinating and repellent.
"I started doing little jobs she found for me. This past month, I've been going over there and doing the housekeeping chores, just so I can hang around Isabel. When she wanted me to bring the bowl of water into the dining room, I was excited. Not at doing such a menial task—I'm a lawyer, for God's sake! But because the Fellowship had called me, asked me if I could give them any insight into what the vampires of Dallas intended to do. At the time they called, I was mad at Isabel. We'd had a fight about the way she treated me. So I was open to listening to them. I'd heard your name pass between Stan and Isabel, so I passed it on to the Fellowship. They have a guy who works for Anubis Air. He found out when Bill's plane was coming in, and they tried to grab you at the airport so they could find out what the vamps wanted with you. What they'd do to get you back. When I came in with the bowl of water, I heard Stan or Bill call you by name, so I knew they'd missed you at the airport. I felt like I had something to tell them, to make up for losing the bug I'd put in the conference room."
"You betrayed Isabel," I said. "And you betrayed me, though I'm human, like you."
"Yes," he said. He didn't look me in the eyes.
"What about Bethany Rogers?"
"The waitress?"
He was stalling. "The dead waitress," I said.
"They took her," he said, shaking his head from side to side, as if he were actually saying, No, they couldn't have done what they did. "They took her, and I didn't know what they were going to do. I knew she was the only one who'd seen Farrell with Godfrey, and I'd told them that. When I got up today and I heard she'd been found dead, I just couldn't believe it."
"They abducted her after you told them she'd been at Stan's. After you told them she was the only true witness."
"Yes, they must have."
"You called them last night."
"Yes, I have a cell phone. I went out in the backyard and I called. I was really taking a chance, because you know how well the vamps can hear, but I called." He was trying to convince himself that had been a brave, bold thing to do. Place a phone call from vamp headquarters to lay the finger on poor, pathetic Bethany, who'd ended up shot in an alley.
"She was shot after you betrayed her."
"Yes, I … I heard that on the news."
"Guess who did that, Hugo."
"I … just don't know."
"Sure you do, Hugo. She'd been an eyewitness. And she was a lesson, a lesson to the vampires: 'This is what we'll do to people who work for you or make their living from you, if they go against the Fellowship.' What do you think they're going to do with you, Hugo?"
"I've been helping them," he said, surprised.
"Who else knows that?"
"No one."
"So who would die? The lawyer that helped Stan Davis live where he wanted."
Hugo was speechless.
"If you're so all-fired important to them, how come you're in this room with me?"
"Because up until now, you didn't know what I'd done," he pointed out. "Up until now, it was possible you would give me other information we could use against them."
"So now, now that I know what you are, they'll let you out. Right? Why don't you try it and see? I'd much rather be alone."
Just then a small aperture in the door opened. I hadn't even known it was there, having been preoccupied while I was out in the hall. A face appeared at the opening, which measured perhaps ten inches by ten inches.
It was a familiar face. Gabe, grinning. "How you doing in there, you two?"
"Sookie needs a doctor," Hugo said. "She's not complaining, but I think her cheekbone is broken." He sounded reproachful. "And she knows about my alliance with the Fellowship, so you might as well let me out."
I didn't know what Hugo thought he was doing, but I tried to look as beaten as possible. That was pretty easy.
"I have me an idea," Gabe said. "I've gotten kind of bored down here, and I don't expect Steve or Sarah—or even old Polly—will be coming back down here any time soon. We got another prisoner over here, Hugo, might be glad to see you. Farrell? Y
ou meet him over at the headquarters of the Evil Ones?"
"Yes," said Hugo. He looked very unhappy about this turn of the conversation.
"You know how fond Farrell's gonna be of you? And he's gay, too, a queer bloodsucker. We're so deep underground that he's been waking up early. So I thought I might just put you in there with him, while I have me a little fun with the female traitor, here." And Gabe smiled at me in a way that made my stomach lurch.
Hugo's face was a picture. A real picture. Several things crossed my mind, pertinent things to say. I forewent the doubtful pleasure. I needed to save my energy.
One of my Gran's favorite adages popped into my mind irresistibly as I looked at Gabe's handsome face. "Pretty is as pretty does," I muttered, and began the painful process of getting to my feet to defend myself. My legs might not be broken, but my left knee was surely in bad shape. It was already badly discolored and swollen.
I wondered if Hugo and I together could take Gabe down when he opened the door, but as soon as it swung outward, I saw he'd armed himself with a gun and a black, menacing-looking object I decided might be a stun gun.
"Farrell!" I called. If he were awake, he'd hear me; he was a vampire.
Gabe jumped, looked at me suspiciously.
"Yes?" came a deep voice from the room farther down the hall. I heard chains clink as the vampire moved. Of course, they'd have to chain him with silver. Otherwise he could rip the door off its hinges.
"Stan sent us!" I yelled, and then Gabe backhanded me with the hand that held the gun. Since I was against the wall, my head bounced off it. I made an awful noise, not quite a scream but too loud for a moan.
"Shut up, bitch!" Gabe screamed. He was pointing the gun at Hugo and had the stun gun held at the ready a few inches from me. "Now, Lawyer, you get out here in the hall. Keep away from me, you hear?"
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