A Touch of Dead (7 page)

B
ubba the Vampire and I were raking up clippings from my newly trimmed bushes about midnight when the long black car pulled up. I’d been enjoying the gentle scent of the cut bushes and the songs of the crickets and frogs celebrating spring. Everything hushed with the arrival of the black limousine. Bubba vanished immediately, because he didn’t recognize the car. Since he changed over to the vampire persuasion, Bubba’s been on the shy side.

I leaned against my rake, trying to look nonchalant. In reality, I was far from relaxed. I live pretty far out in the country, and you have to want to be at my house to find the way. There’s not a sign out at the parish road
that points down my driveway reading STACKHOUSE HOME. My home is not visible from the road, because the driveway meanders through some woods to arrive in the clearing where the core of the house has stood for a hundred and sixty years.

Visitors are not real frequent, and I didn’t remember ever seeing a limousine before. No one got out of the long black car for a couple of minutes. I began to wonder if maybe I should have hidden myself, like Bubba. I had the outside lights on, of course, since I couldn’t see in the dark like Bubba, but the limousine windows were heavily smoked. I was real tempted to whack the shiny bumper with my rake to find out what would happen. Fortunately, the door opened while I was still thinking about it.

A large gentleman emerged from the rear of the limousine. He was six feet tall, and he was made up of circles. The largest circle was his belly. The round head above it was almost bald, but a fringe of black hair circled it right above his ears. His little eyes were round, too, and black as his hair and his suit. His shirt was gleaming white, but his tie was black without a pattern. He looked like the director of a funeral home for the criminally insane.

“Not too many people do their yard work at midnight,” he commented, in a surprisingly melodious voice. The true answer—that I liked to rake when I had someone to talk to, and I had company that night with Bubba, who couldn’t come out in the sunlight—was better left unsaid. I just nodded. You couldn’t argue with his statement.

“Would you be the woman known as Sookie Stackhouse?” asked the large gentleman. He said it as if he often addressed creatures that weren’t men or women, but something else entirely.

“Yes, sir, I am,” I said politely. My grandmother, God rest her soul, had raised me well. But she hadn’t raised a fool; I wasn’t about to invite him in. I wondered why the driver didn’t get out.

“Then I have a legacy for you.”

“Legacy” meant someone had died. I didn’t have anyone left except for my brother, Jason, and he was sitting down at Merlotte’s Bar with his girlfriend, Crystal. At least that’s where he’d been when I’d gotten off my barmaid’s job a couple of hours before.

The little night creatures were beginning to make their sounds again, having decided the big night creatures weren’t going to attack.

“A legacy from who?” I said. What makes me different from other people is that I’m telepathic. Vampires, whose minds are simply silent holes in a world made noisy to me by the cacophony of human brains, make restful companions for me, so I’d been enjoying Bubba’s chatter. Now I needed to rev up my gift. This wasn’t a casual drop-in. I opened my mind to my visitor. While the large, circular gentleman was wincing at my ungrammatical question, I attempted to look inside his head. Instead of a stream of ideas and images (the usual human broadcast), his thoughts came to me in bursts of static. He was a supernatural creature of some sort.

“Whom,” I corrected myself, and he smiled at me. His teeth were very sharp.

“Do you remember your cousin Hadley?”

Nothing could have surprised me more than this question. I leaned the rake against the mimosa tree and shook the plastic garbage bag that we’d already filled. I put the plastic band around the top before I spoke. I could only hope my voice wouldn’t choke when I answered him. “Yes, I do.” Though I sounded hoarse, my words were clear.

Hadley Delahoussaye, my only cousin, had vanished into the underworld of drugs and prostitution
years before. I had her high school junior picture in my photo album. That was the last picture she’d had taken, because that year she’d run off to New Orleans to make her living by her wits and her body. My aunt Linda, her mother, had died of cancer during the second year after Hadley’s departure.

“Is Hadley still alive?” I said, hardly able to get the words out.

“Alas, no,” said the big man, absently polishing his black-framed glasses on a clean white handkerchief. His black shoes gleamed like mirrors. “Your cousin Hadley is dead, I’m afraid.” He seemed to relish saying it. He was a man—or whatever—who enjoyed the sound of his own voice.

Underneath the distrust and confusion I was feeling about this whole weird episode, I was aware of a sharp pang of grief. Hadley had been fun as a child, and we’d been together a lot, naturally. Since I’d been a weird kid, Hadley and my brother, Jason, had been the only children I’d had to play with for the most part. When Hadley hit puberty, the picture changed; but I had some good memories of my cousin.

“What happened to her?” I tried to keep my voice even, but I knew it wasn’t.

“She was involved in an Unfortunate Incident,” he said.

That was the euphemism for a vampire killing. When it appeared in newspaper reports, it usually meant that some vampire had been unable to restrain his bloodlust and had attacked a human. “A vampire killed her?” I was horrified.

“Ah, not exactly. Your cousin Hadley was the vampire. She got staked.”

This was so much bad and startling news that I couldn’t take it in. I held up a hand to indicate he shouldn’t talk for a minute, while I absorbed what he’d said, bit by bit.

“What is your name, please?” I asked.

“Mr. Cataliades,” he said. I repeated that to myself several times since it was a name I’d never encountered. Emphasis on the
tal
, I told myself. And a long
e
.

“Where might you hail from?”

“For many years, my home has been New Orleans.” New Orleans was at the other end of Louisiana from my little town, Bon Temps. Northern Louisiana is pretty darn different from southern Louisiana in several fundamental ways: it’s the Bible Belt without the pizzazz of New Orleans; it’s the older sister who
stayed home and tended the farm while the younger sister went out partying. But it shares other things with the southern part of the state, too: bad roads, corrupt politics, and a lot of people, both black and white, who live right on the poverty line.

“Who drove you?” I asked pointedly, looking at the front of the car.

“Waldo,” called Mr. Cataliades, “the lady wants to see you.”

I was sorry I’d expressed an interest after Waldo got out of the driver’s seat of the limo and I’d had a look at him. Waldo was a vampire, as I’d already established in my own mind by identifying a typical vampire brain signature, which to me is like a photographic negative, one I “see” with my brain. Most vampires are good-looking or extremely talented in some way or another. Naturally, when a vamp brings a human over, the vamp’s likely to pick a human who attracted him or her by beauty or some necessary skill. I didn’t know who the heck had brought over Waldo, but I figured it was somebody crazy. Waldo had long, wispy white hair that was almost the same color as his skin. He was maybe five foot eight, but he looked taller because he was very thin. Waldo’s eyes looked red under the
light I’d had mounted on the electric pole. The vampire’s face looked corpse white with a faint greenish tinge, and his skin was wrinkled. I’d never seen a vampire who hadn’t been taken in the prime of life.

“Waldo,” I said, nodding. I felt lucky to have had such long training in keeping my face agreeable. “Can I get you anything? I think I have some bottled blood. And you, Mr. Cataliades? A beer? Some soda?”

The big man shuddered and tried to cover it with a graceful half bow. “Much too hot for coffee or alcohol for me, but perhaps we’ll take refreshments later.” It was maybe sixty-two degrees, but Mr. Cataliades was indeed sweating, I noticed. “May we come in?” he asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said, without a bit of apology in my voice. “I think not.” I was hoping that Bubba had had the sense to rush across the little valley between our properties to fetch my nearest neighbor, my former lover Bill Compton, known to the residents of Bon Temps as Vampire Bill.

“Then we’ll conduct our business out here in your yard,” Mr. Cataliades said coldly. He and Waldo came around the body of the limousine. I felt uneasy when it wasn’t between us anymore, but they kept their
distance. “Miss Stackhouse, you are your cousin’s sole heir.”

I understood what he said, but I was incredulous. “Not my brother, Jason?” Jason and Hadley, both three years older than I, had been great buddies.

“No. In this document, Hadley says she called Jason Stackhouse once for help when she was very low on funds. He ignored her request, so she’s ignoring him.”

“When did Hadley get staked?” I was concentrating very hard on not getting any visuals. Since she was older than I by three years, Hadley had been a mere twenty-nine when she’d died. She’d been my physical opposite in most ways. I was robust and blond, she was thin and dark. I was strong, she was frail. She’d had big, thickly lashed brown eyes, mine were blue; and now, this strange man was telling me, she had closed those eyes for good.

“A month ago.” Mr. Cataliades had to think about it. “She died about a month ago.”

“And you’re just now letting me know?”

“Circumstances prevented.”

I considered that.

“She died in New Orleans?”

“Yes. She was a handmaiden to the queen,” he said, as
though he were telling me she’d gotten her partnership at a big law firm or managed to buy her own business.

“The Queen of Louisiana,” I said cautiously.

“I knew you would understand,” he said, beaming at me. “‘This is a woman who knows her vampires,’ I said to myself when I met you. ”

“She knows this vampire,” Bill said, appearing at my side in that disconcerting way he had.

A flash of displeasure went across Mr. Cataliades’s face like quick lightning across the sky.

“And you would be?” he asked with cold courtesy.

“I would be Bill Compton, resident of this parish and friend to Miss Stackhouse,” Bill said ominously. “I’m also an employee of the queen, like you.”

The queen had hired Bill so the computer database about vampires he was working on would be her property. Somehow, I thought Mr. Cataliades performed more personal services. He looked like he knew where all the bodies were buried, and Waldo looked like he had put them there.

Bubba was right behind Bill, and when he stepped out of Bill’s shadow, for the first time I saw the vampire Waldo show an emotion. He was in awe.

“Oh, my gracious! Is this El—” Mr. Cataliades blurted.

“Yes,” said Bill. He shot the two strangers a significant glance. “This is
Bubba
. The past upsets him very much.” He waited until the two had nodded in understanding. Then he looked down at me. His dark brown eyes looked black in the stark shadows cast by the overhead lights. His skin had the pale gleam that said “vampire.” “Sookie, what’s happened?”

I gave him a condensed version of Mr. Cataliades’s message. Since Bill and I had broken up when he was unfaithful to me, we’d been trying to establish some other workable relationship. He was proving to be a reliable friend, and I was grateful for his presence.

“Did the queen order Hadley’s death?” Bill asked my visitors.

Mr. Cataliades gave a good impression of being shocked. “Oh, no!” he exclaimed. “Her Highness would never cause the death of someone she held so dear.”

Okay, here came another shock. “Ah, what kind of dear . . . ? How dear did the queen hold my cousin?” I asked. I wanted to be sure I was interpreting the implication correctly.

Mr. Cataliades gave me an old-fashioned look. “She held Hadley dearly,” he said.

Okay, I got it.

Every vampire territory had a king or queen, and with that title came power. But the Queen of Louisiana had extra status, since she was seated in New Orleans, which was the most popular city in the United States if you were one of the undead. Since vampire tourism now accounted for so much of the city’s revenue, even the humans of New Orleans listened to the queen’s wants and wishes, in an unofficial way. “If Hadley was such a big favorite of the queen’s, who’d be fool enough to stake her?” I asked.

“The Fellowship of the Sun,” said Waldo, and I jumped. The vampire had been silent so long, I’d assumed he wasn’t ever going to speak. The vampire’s voice was as creaky and peculiar as his appearance. “Do you know the city well?”

I shook my head. I’d only been to the Big Easy once, on a school field trip.

“You are familiar, perhaps, with the cemeteries that are called the Cities of the Dead?”