Definitely Dead ss(v-6

by Шарлин Харрис

  "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, awf
ul 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.

  We didn't make it.

  Jake Purifoy was after us, and he was hungry.

  Since Amelia was behind me (I'd had a head start) he dove to grab her ankle. She shrieked as she went down, and I spun around to help her. I didn't think at all, because I would have kept on going out the door if I had. The new vamp's fingers were wrapped around Amelia's bare ankle like a shackle, and he was pulling her toward him across the smooth laminated-wood floor. She was clawing at the floor with her fingers, trying to find something to stop her progress toward his mouth, which was wide open with the fangs extended full length, oh God! I grabbed her wrists and began pulling. I hadn't known Jake Purifoy in life, so I didn't know what he'd been like. And I couldn't find anything human left in his face, anything I could appeal to. "Jake!" I yelled. "Jake Purifoy! Wake up!" Of course, that didn't do a damn bit of good. Jake had changed into something that was not a nightmare but a permanent otherness, and he could not be roused from it: he was it. He was making a kind of gnarr-gnarr-gnarr noise, the hungriest sound I'd ever heard, and then he bit down on the calf of Amelia's leg, and she screamed.

  It was like a shark had hold of her. If I yanked at her any more, he might take out the bit his teeth had clamped on. He was sucking on the leg wound now, and I kicked him in the head with my heel, cursing my lack of shoes. I put everything I had behind it, and it didn't faze the new vampire in the least. He made a noise of protest, but continued sucking, and the witch kept shrieking with pain and shock. There was a candlestick on the table behind one of the loveseats, a tall glass candlestick with lots of heft to it. I plucked the candle from it, grasped it with both hands, and brought it down as hard as I could on Jake Purifoy's head. Blood began to run from his wound, very sluggishly; that's how vampires bleed. The candlestick came apart with the blow, and I was left with empty hands and a furious vampire. He raised his blood-smeared face to glare at me, and I hope I'm never on the receiving end of another look like that again in my life. His face held the mindless rage of a mad dog.

  But he'd let go of Amelia's leg, and she began to scramble away. It was obvious she was hurt, and it was kind of a slow scramble, but she made the effort. Tears were streaming down her face and her breathing was all over the place, harsh in the night's silence. I could hear a siren drawing closer and I hoped it was coming here. It would be too late, though. The vampire launched himself from the floor to knock me down, and I didn't have time to think about anything.

  He bit down on my arm, and I thought the teeth would penetrate the bone. If I hadn't thrown up the arm, those teeth would have gripped my neck, and that would have been fatal. The arm might be preferable, but just at this moment the pain was so intense I nearly passed out, and I'd better not do that. Jake Purifoy's body was heavy on top of mine, and his hands were pressing my free arm to the floor, and his legs were on top of mine. Another hunger was wakening in the new vampire, and I felt its evidence pressing against my thigh. He freed a hand to begin yanking at my pants.

  Oh, no… this was so bad. I would die in the next few minutes, here in New Orleans in my cousin's apartment, far away from my friends and my family.

  Blood was all over the new vampire's face and hands.

  Amelia crawled awkwardly across the floor toward us, her leg trailing blood behind her. She should have run, since she couldn't save me. No more candlesticks. But Amelia had another weapon, and she reached out with a violently shaking hand to touch the vampire. "Utinam hie sanguis in ignem commutet!" she yelled.

  The vampire reared back, screaming and clawing at his face, which was suddenly covered by tiny licking blue flames.

  And the police came through the door.

  They were vampires, too.

  For an interesting moment, the police officers thought we had attacked Jake Purifoy. Amelia and I, bleeding and screaming, were shoved up against the wall. But in the meantime, the spell Amelia had cast on the new undead lost its efficacy and he leaped on the nearest uniformed cop, who happened to be a black woman with a proud straight back and a high-bridged nose. The cop whipped out her nightstick and used it with a reckless disregard for the new vamp's teeth. Her partner, a very short man whose skin was the color of butterscotch, fumbled to open a bottle of TrueBlood that was stuck in his belt like another tool. He bit off the tip, and stuck the rubber cap in Jake Purifoy's questing mouth. Suddenly, all was silence as the new vamp sucked down the contents of the bottle. The rest of us stood panting and bleeding.

  "He will be quiet now," said the female officer, the cadence of her voice letting me know that she was far more African than American. "I think we have subdued him."

  Amelia and I sank onto the floor, after the male cop gave us a nod to let us know we were off the hook. "Sorry we got confused about who was the bad guy," he said in a voice as warm as melted butter. "You ladies okay?" It was a good thing his voice was so reassuring, since his fangs were out. I guess the excitement of the blood and the violence triggered the reaction, but it was kind of disconcerting in a law enforcement officer.

  "I think not," I said. "Amelia here is bleeding pretty bad, and I guess I am, too." The bite didn't hurt as badly as it was going to. The vamp's saliva secretes a tiny bit of anesthetic, along with a healing agent. But the healing agent was meant for sealing the pinpricks of fangs, not for actual large tears in human flesh. "We're going to need a doctor." I'd met a vamp in Mississippi who could heal large wounds, but it was a rare talent.

  "You both human?" he asked. The female cop was crooning in a foreign language to the new vampire. I didn't know if the former werewolf, Jake Purifoy, could speak the language, but he recognized safety when he saw it. The burns on his face healed as we sat there.

  "Yes," I said.

  While we waited for the paramedics to come, Amelia and I leaned against each other wordlessly. Was this the second body I'd found in a closet, or the third? I wondered why I even opened closet doors any more.

  "We should have known," Amelia said wearily. "When he didn't smell at all, we should have known."

  "Actually, I figured that out. Since it was only thirty seconds before he woke up, it didn't do a hell of a lot of good," I said. My voice was just as limp as hers.

  Everything got very confusing after that. I kept thinking it would be a good time to faint if I was ever going to, because this was really not a process I wanted to be in on, but I just couldn't pass out. The paramedics were very nice young men who seemed to think we'd been partying with a vamp and it had gotten out of hand. I guessed neither of them would be calling Amelia or me for a date any time soon.

  "You don't want to be messing with no vampires, cherie," said the man who was working on me. His name tag read DELAGARDIE. "They supposed to be so attractive to women, but you wouldn't believe how many poor girls we've had to patch up. And that was the lucky ones," Delagardie said grimly. "What's your name, young lady?"

  "Sookie," I said. "Sookie Stackhouse."

  "Pleased to meet you, Miss Sookie. You and your friend seem like nice girls. You need to hang with better people, live people. This city's overrun with the dead, now. It was better when everyone here was breathing, I tell you the truth. Now let's get you to the hospital and get you stitched up. I'd shake your hand if you wasn't all bloody," he said. He gave me a sudden smile, white-toothed and charming. "I'm giving you good advice for free, pretty lady."

  I smiled, but it was the last time I was going to be doing t
hat for a while. The pain was beginning to make itself felt. Very quickly, I became preoccupied with coping.

  Amelia was a real warrior. Her teeth were gritted as she fought to keep herself together, but she managed all the way to the hospital. The emergency room seemed to be packed.

  By a combination of bleeding, being escorted by cops, and the friendly Delagardie and his partner putting in a word for us, Amelia and I got put in curtained cubicles right away. We weren't adjacent to each other, but we were in line to see a doctor. I was grateful. I knew that had to be quick, for an urban emergency room.

  As I listened to the bustle around me, I tried not to swear at the pain in my arm. In moments when it wasn't throbbing as much, I wondered what had happened to Jake Purifoy. Had the vampire cops taken him to a vampire cell at the jail, or was everything excused since he was a brand new vamp with no guidance? There'd been a law passed about that, but I couldn't remember the terms and strictures. It was hard for me to be too concerned. I knew the young man was a victim of his new state; that the vampire who had made him should have been there to guide him through his first wakening and hunger. The vampire to blame was most likely my cousin Hadley, who had hardly expected to be murdered. Only Amelia's stasis spell on the apartment had kept Jake from rising months ago. It was a strange situation, probably unprecedented even in vampire annals. And a werewolf who'd become a vampire! I'd never heard tell of such a thing. Could he still change?

  I had a while to think about that and quite a few other things, since Amelia was too far away for conversation, even if she'd been up to it. After about twenty minutes, during which time I was disturbed only by a nurse who wrote down some information, I was surprised to see Eric peer around the curtain.

  "May I come in?" he asked stiffly. His eyes were wide and he was speaking carefully. I realized that to a vampire, the smell of blood in the emergency room was enchanting and pervasive. I caught a glimpse of his fangs.