Dead Reckoning ss(v-11

by Шарлин Харрис

  Pam didn’t move. She didn’t even twitch.

  “You may go,” Victor said, overdoing the offhanded air. “Since I’ve given you the news about my regency, and you’ve seen my beautiful club. Oh, I’m thinking of opening a tattoo establishment and maybe a lawyer’s office, though my man for that post has to study modern law. He received his law degree in Paris in the eighteen hundreds.” Victor’s indulgent smile faded completely. “You know that as regent, I have the right to open a business in anyone’s sheriffdom? All the money from the new clubs will come directly to me. I hope your revenues don’t suffer too much, Eric.”

  “Not at all,” Eric said. (I didn’t think that actually had any meaning.) “We’re all a part of your turf, Master.” If his voice had been laundry, it would have flapped in the wind, it was so dry and empty.

  We rose, more or less as one, and dipped our heads to Victor. He waved a dismissive hand at us and bent to kiss Mindy Simpson. Mark huddled closer on the vampire’s other side to nuzzle Victor’s shoulder. Pam went over to Miriam Earnest and bent over the girl to put her arm around her and help her to rise. Once on her feet and supported by Pam, Miriam focused on making it out the door. Her mind might be clouded, but her eyes were screaming.

  We left the club in grim silence (at least as far as our own conversation went; the music just never let up), escorted by Luis and Antonio. The brothers bypassed sturdy Ana Lyudmila to follow us out into the parking lot, which surprised me.

  When we had filed through the first row of cars, Eric turned to face them. Not coincidentally, the bulk of an Escalade blocked the view between Ana Lyudmila and our little party. “Do you two have something to say to me?” he asked very softly. As if she suddenly understood she was out of Vampire’s Kiss, Miriam gasped and began crying, and Pam took her in her arms.

  “It wasn’t our idea, sheriff,” said Antonio, the shorter of the two. His oiled abs gleamed under the parking lot lights.

  Luis said, “We’re loyal to Felipe, our true king, but Victor is not easy to serve. It was a bad night for us when we were dispatched to Louisiana to serve him. Now that Bruno and Corinna have disappeared, he hasn’t found anyone to take their places. No strong lieutenant. He’s traveling constantly, trying to keep his eye on every corner of Louisiana.” Luis shook his head. “We’re badly overextended. He needs to settle in New Orleans, building back up the vampire structure there. We don’t need to be trailing around in leather scarcely covering our asses, draining the income from your club. Halving the available income is not good economics, and the startup costs were steep.”

  “If you’re trying to lure me into betraying my new master, you’ve picked the wrong vampire,” Eric said, and I tried not to let my mouth hang open. I’d thought it was Christmas in June when Luis and Antonio revealed their discontent, but obviously I hadn’t been thinking deviously enough . . . again.

  Pam said, “Leather shorts are attractive compared to the black synthetics I have to wear.” She was holding up Miriam, but she didn’t look at her or refer to her, as if she wanted everyone else to forget the girl was there.

  Her costume complaint was not out of character, but it was irrelevant. Pam had always been nothing if not on task. Antonio gave her a look of disillusioned disgust. “You were supposed to be so fierce,” he muttered. He looked at Eric. “And you were supposed to be so bold.” He and Luis turned and strode back into the club.

  After that, Pam and Eric began to move with speed, as if we had a deadline to get off the property.

  Pam simply picked up Miriam and hurried to Eric’s car. He opened the back door, and she got her girlfriend in and slid in after her. Seeing that haste was the order of the night, I climbed into the front passenger seat and buckled up in silence. I looked back to see that Miriam had passed out the minute she realized she was safe.

  As the car left the parking lot, Pam began sniggering and Eric grinned broadly. I was too startled to ask them what was funny.

  “Victor just can’t restrain himself,” Pam said. “Making the show of my poor Miriam.”

  “And then the priceless offer from the leather twins!”

  “Did you see Antonio’s face?” Pam demanded. “Honestly, I haven’t had so much fun since I flashed my fangs at that old woman who complained about the color I painted my house!”

  “That’ll give them something to think about,” Eric said. He glanced over at me, his fangs glistening. “That was a good moment. I can’t believe he thought we’d fall for that.”

  “What if Antonio and Luis were sincere?” I asked. “What if Victor had taken Miriam’s blood or brought her over himself?” I twisted in my seat to look back at Pam.

  She was looking at me almost with pity, as if I were a hopeless romantic. “He couldn’t,” she said. “He had her in a public place, she has lots of human relatives, and he has to know I’d kill him if he did that.”

  “Not if you were dead first,” I said. Eric and Pam didn’t seem to have my own respect for Victor’s lethal tactics. They seemed almost insanely cocky. “And why are you both so sure that Antonio and Luis were making all that up just to see how you’d react?”

  “If they meant what they said, they’ll approach us again,” Eric said bluntly. “They have no other recourse, if they’ve tried Felipe and he’s turned them down. I suspect he has. Tell me, lover, what was the problem with the drinks?”

  “The problem was that he’d rubbed the inside of the glasses with fairy blood,” I said. “The human server, the guy with the gray eyes, gave me the tip-off.”

  And the smiles vanished as if they’d been turned off with a switch. I had a moment of unpleasant satisfaction.

  Pure fairy blood is intoxicating to vampires. There’s no telling what Pam or Eric would have done if they’d drunk from those glasses. And they’d have gulped it down as quickly as they could because the smell is just as entrancing as the actual substance.

  As poisoning attempts went, this one was subtle.

  “I don’t think that amount could have caused us to behave in an uncontrollable way,” Pam said. But she didn’t sound so confident.

  Eric raised his blond eyebrows. “It was a cautious experiment,” he said thoughtfully. “We might have attacked anyone in the club, or we might have gone for Sookie, since she has that interesting streak of fairy. We would have made public fools of ourselves, in any case. We might have been arrested. It was an excellent thing that you stopped us, Sookie.”

  “I have my uses,” I said, suppressing the jolt of fear that the idea of Eric and Pam going fairy-struck on me evinced.

  “And you’re Eric’s wife,” Pam observed quietly.

  Eric glared at her in the rearview mirror.

  The silence that fell was so thick I wished I’d had a knife. This Pam-and-Eric secret quarrel was both upsetting and frustrating. And that was the understatement of the year.

  “Is there something you want to tell me?” I asked, frightened of the answer. But anything was better than not knowing.

  “Eric got a letter — ” Pam began, and before I could register that he’d moved, Eric had whipped around, reached over the seat, and seized her throat. Since he was still driving, I squawked in terror.

  “Eyes ahead, Eric! Not with the fighting again,” I said. “Look, just go on and tell me!”

  With his right hand, Eric was still holding Pam in a grip that would have choked her if she’d been a breather. He was steering with his left hand, and we coasted to a stop on the side of the road. I couldn’t see any oncoming traffic, and there were no lights behind us, either. I didn’t know if the isolation made me feel good or bad. Eric looked back at his child, and his eyes were so bright they were practically throwing sparks. He said, “Pam, don’t speak. That’s an order. Sookie, leave this be.”

  I could have said several things. I could have said, “I’m not your vassal, and I’ll say what I want to say,” or I could have said, “Fuck you, let me out,” and called my brother to come get me.

  But I sat i
n silence.

  I am ashamed to say that at that moment I was scared of Eric, this desperate and determined vampire who was attacking his best friend because he didn’t want me to know . . . something. Through the tie I felt with him, I got a confused bundle of negative emotions: fear, anger, grim resolve, frustration.

  “Take me home,” I said.

  In an eerie echo, the limp Miriam whispered, “Take me home. . . .”

  After a long moment, Eric let go of Pam, who collapsed in the backseat like a sack of rice. She hunched over Miriam protectively. In a frozen silence, Eric took me back to my house. There was no further mention of the sex we’d been scheduled to have after this “fun” evening. At that point, I would rather have had sex with Luis and Antonio. Or Pam. I said good-bye to Pam and Miriam, got out, and walked into my house without a backward glance.

  I guess Eric and Pam and Miriam drove back to Shreveport together, and I guess at some point he permitted Pam to speak again, but I don’t know.

  I couldn’t sleep after I’d washed my face and hung up the pretty dress. I hoped I’d get to wear it on a happier evening, sometime in the future. I’d looked too good to be this miserable. I wondered if Eric would have handled the evening with such sangfroid if it had been me Victor had captured and drugged and put out there on that banquette for the entire world to gape at.

  And there was another thing troubling me. Here’s what I would have asked Eric if he hadn’t been playing dictator. I would have said, “Where did Victor get the fairy blood?”

  That’s what I would have asked.

  Chapter 4

  I rose the next day feeling pretty grim in general, but I brightened when I saw that Claude and Dermot had returned to the house the night before. The evidence was clear. Claude’s shirt was tossed over the back of a kitchen chair, and Dermot’s shoes were at the foot of the stairs. Plus, after I’d had my coffee and my shower, and emerged from my room in shorts and a green T-shirt, the two were waiting for me in the living room.

  “Good morning, guys,” I said. Even to my own ears, I didn’t sound too perky. “Did you remember that today was the day the antiques dealers come? They should be here in an hour or two.” I braced myself for the talk we had to have.

  “Good, then this room will not look like a junk shop,” Claude said in his charming way.

  I just nodded. Today, we had Obnoxious Claude, as opposed to the more rarely seen Tolerable Claude.

  “We did promise you a talk,” Dermot said.

  “And then you didn’t come home that night.” I sat back in an old rocker from the attic. I didn’t feel particularly ready for this conversation, but I was also anxious for some answers.

  “Things were happening at the club,” Claude said evasively.

  “Uh-huh. Let me guess, one of the fairies is missing.”

  That made them sit up and take notice. “What? How did you know?” Dermot recovered first.

  “Victor has him. Or her,” I added. I told them the story about last night.

  “It’s not enough that we have to handle our own race’s problems,” Claude said. “Now we’re sucked into the fucking vampire struggles, too.”

  “No,” I said, feeling I was walking uphill in this conversation. “You as a group weren’t sucked into the vampire struggles. One of you was taken for a specific purpose. Different scenario. Let me point out that at the very least, that fairy who was taken has been bled, because that was what the vamps needed, the blood. I’m not saying your missing comrade couldn’t be alive, but you know how the vamps lose control when a fairy is around, much less a bleeding fairy.”

  “She’s right,” Dermot told Claude. “Cait must be dead. Are any of the fairies at the club her kin? We need to ask if they’ve had a death vision.”

  “A female,” Claude said. His handsome face was set in stone. “One we couldn’t afford to lose. Yes, we have to find out.”

  For a second I was confused, because Claude didn’t think that much about women in terms of his personal life. Then I remembered that there were fewer and fewer female fairies. I didn’t know about the rest of the fae, but it seemed the fairies were on the wane. It wasn’t that I lacked concern about the missing Cait (though I didn’t think there was a snowball’s chance in hell that she was alive), but I had other, selfish questions to ask, and I was not going to be diverted. As soon as Dermot had called Hooligans and asked Bellenos to call the fae together to ask about Cait’s kin, I got back on my own track.

  “While Bellenos is busy, you have some free time, and since the appraisers are coming soon, I really need you to answer my questions,” I said.

  Dermot and Claude looked at each other. Dermot seemed to lose the conversational coin toss, because he took a deep breath and began, “You know when one of your Caucasians marries one of your Negroes, sometimes the babies turn out looking much more like one race than another, seemingly at random. That likeness can vary even between children of the same couple.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve heard that.”

  “When Jason was a baby, our great-grandfather Niall checked on him.”

  I felt my mouth drop open. “Wait,” I said, and it came out in a hoarse croak. “Niall said he couldn’t visit because his half-human son Fintan guarded us from him. That Fintan was actually our grandfather.”

  “This is why Fintan guarded you from the fae. He didn’t want his father interfering in your lives the way he had interfered in his own. But Niall had his ways, and nonetheless, he found that the essential spark had passed Jason by. He became . . . uninterested,” Claude said.

  I waited.

  He continued, “That’s why he took so many years to make your acquaintance. He could have evaded Fintan, but he assumed you would be the same as Jason . . . attractive to humans and supernaturals, but other than that, essentially a normal human.”

  “But then he heard you weren’t,” Dermot said.

  “Heard? From who? Whom?” My grandmother would have been proud.

  “From Eric. They had a few business dealings together, and Niall thought to ask Eric to alert him to events in your life. Eric would tell Niall from time to time what you were up to. There came a time when Eric thought you needed the protection of your great-grandfather, and of course you were withering.”

  Huh?

  “So Grandfather sent Claudine, and then when she grew worried she couldn’t take care of you, he decided to meet you himself. Eric arranged that, too. I suppose he thought that he would get Niall’s goodwill as kind of a finder’s fee.” Dermot shrugged. “That seems to have worked for Eric. Vampires are all venal and selfish.”

  The words “pot” and “kettle” popped into my mind.

  I said, “So Niall appeared in my life and made himself known to me, via Eric’s intervention. And that precipitated the fairy war, because the water fairies didn’t want any more contact with humans, much less a minor royal who was only one-eighth fairy.” Thanks, guys. I loved hearing that a whole war was my fault.

  “Yes,” Claude said judiciously. “That’s a fair summary. And so the war came, and after many deaths Niall made the decision to seal off Faery.” He sighed heavily. “I was left outside, and Dermot, too.”

  “And by the way, I’m not withering,” I pointed out with some sharpness. “I mean, do I look withered to you?” I knew I was ignoring the big picture, but I was getting angry. Or maybe, even angrier.

  “You have only a little fae blood,” Dermot said gently, as if that would be a crushing reminder. “You are aging.”

  I couldn’t deny that. “So why am I feeling more and more like one of you, if I have such a little dab of fairy in me?”

  “Our sum is more than our parts,” Dermot said. “I’m half-human, but the longer I’m with Claude, the stronger my magic is. Claude, though a full-blooded fairy, has been in the human world for so long he was getting weak. Now he’s stronger. You only have a dash of fae blood, but the longer you’re with us, the more prominent an element it is in your nature.”


  “Like priming a pump?” I said doubtfully. “I don’t get it.”

  “Like — like — washing a new red garment with the whites,” said Dermot triumphantly, who had done that very thing the week before. Everyone in our house had pink socks now.

  “But wouldn’t that mean Claude was getting less red? I mean, less fae? If we’re absorbing some of his?”

  “No,” Claude said, with some complacence. “I am redder than I was.”

  Dermot nodded. “Me, too.”

  “I haven’t really noticed any difference,” I said.

  “Are you not stronger than you were?”

  “Well . . . yeah. Some days.” It wasn’t like ingesting vampire blood, which would give you increased strength for an indeterminate period, if it didn’t make you batshit crazy. It was more like I felt increased vigor. I felt, in fact . . . younger. And since I was only in my twenties, that was just unnerving.

  “Don’t you long to see Niall again?” Claude asked.

  “Sometimes.” Every day.

  “Are you not happy when we sleep in the bed with you?”

  “Yeah. But just so you know, I think it’s kind of creepy, too.”

  “Humans,” Claude said to Dermot, with a blend of exasperation and patronage in his voice. Dermot shrugged. After all, he was half-human.

  “And yet you chose to stay here,” I said.

  “I wonder every day if I made a mistake.”

  “Why are you two still here, if you’re so nuts about Niall and your life in Faery? How did you get the letter from Niall that you gave me a month ago, the one where he told me he’d used all his influence to make the FBI leave me alone?” I glared at them suspiciously. “Was that letter a forgery?”

  “No, it was genuine,” Dermot said. “And we’re here because we both love and fear our prince.”