Dead But Not Forgotten (13 page)

The crew showed up a few minutes after six. Andy and Sam and Bud Dearborn and Alcee Beck were waiting inside, sitting around a table with coffee cups and a mostly empty pot on top of it. Bud was the Renard Parish sheriff, Alcee one of his detectives.

For the past hour, Andy had felt a growing kinship with that old bull Bust-'em-up. The nearer six o'clock came, the more he felt trapped in a narrow space, when all he wanted to do was get out, get away, run.
Move.

But he stayed and drank coffee and traded stories with the Renard Parish cops, even though he'd heard theirs before and they'd heard his. When the door opened and Tristan Kowel looked in, Andy sat with his hands on the tabletop, trying to look as if he hadn't a care.

“Sam?” Kowel said. “Ready for the big day?”

“Come on in, Tris,” Sam said. “Everybody with you?”

“The whole crew.”

Kowel entered, and the others trailed behind him, each looking at the men around the table with some measure of curiosity and surprise. When Casey-Lynn came in, she started toward Andy, then hesitated. The pause was brief; some people might have missed it, but Andy didn't. Then she was walking toward him again, her steps a little more determined. Also more forced, as was her smile.

“I didn't expect to see you here so early, Andy,” she said. She put her arms around him, gave him a quick hug. He returned it without enthusiasm. “Something wrong?” she asked.

“You tell me.”

“I don't— What are you talking about?”

“It's Bill, isn't it?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

Andy pointed to the egg-carton wall. “Wooden stakes, loaded into spring-fired launchers, enough to blanket the whole dining area. Silver nitrate coating the inside of every glass in the place—barely enough to be noticeable, maybe enough to make some humans sick. But probably enough to make a vampire dead. Electric current in the bar, wired separately for each position, probably controlled remotely. I don't know what else—we only had a few hours, so we haven't completely torn the place apart.”

“Andy, baby, I—”

“When I told you about him, I called him ‘Vampire Bill.' You knew he was Bill Compton, even though I never said his last name. And you acted surprised when I mentioned that there was an out vampire livin' here—but how could it be a surprise if you already knew his name?”

As he spoke, something changed in her face. It was almost like she'd been standing in a light that had been switched off. She closed up, looked away from him, pressed her lips together. For a long moment, she didn't speak.

Then she touched his arm, a glancing pass, and dropped her hand to her side. “Okay, yes. I told you about my family, Andy. How none of them—none of
us
—have ever been any good. That's true, much as I hate to admit it. And that kind of thing has deep roots.”

“What's that got to do with Bill?”

“Bill's the taproot,” she said. “The one from which all the rest emerged. He murdered my great-grandfather. It's family legend. Everybody in my family knows Bill Compton's name, and everybody knows that after his death, Enoch's wife, Clara, went a little nuts. More than a little.”

“So you're trying to kill Bill—and endangering everybody else in Merlotte's in the bargain—because of something you think he did decades ago?”

“Longer than that. And we
know
he did it. That's never been at issue. Some don't think that's the only reason the family fell apart, but I believe it is. The hatred, the bitterness, the thirst for vengeance—that's as hereditary as hair color or high cholesterol, and it got passed down to all of us. Bill Compton's an abomination, and I hate him. But not
just
him—I hate
all
bloodsuckers. That's why I joined the Fellowship of the Sun—because their goals match those I've had for so long. And if some vamp-loving people get hurt, too, well, that'll just make a bigger statement, won't it?”

“You're a member of that cu—”

“Don't say ‘cult,' Andy. It's a church. We
believe
.”

“I thought churches believed in forgiveness. You might try that sometime.”

“Some things aren't so easily forgiven,” she said.

“Tell me about it.” Even as he spoke, he knew he hadn't truly forgiven, either. If he had, he might not have been so quick to suspect her. “So, what, is the whole crew in on this?”

“Just a few. Fellowship folks got me the job in the first place. When I told them what I had in mind—what a splash it would make—they were on board. Not Tristan, though, so don't blame him. He never knew. I was the instigator.” She raised the hand to his arm again, and this time clutched it tight. “I'm sorry, Andy. About . . . you know, everything. The way I was raised. The way I left you. Lying to you.”

“I'm sorry, too, Casey-Lynn. I don't like vampires, either, but the law's the law. And Bill's never done anything to hurt me, or anyone else I know. You'll have to go with Bud—with Sheriff Dearborn, there. What happens after that is out of my hands.”

She swallowed, eyes glistening, but then she hardened again, dropped her hand, looked him straight in the eye. “It was a hell of a plan, Andy. And this doesn't change anything. The Fellowship's work—the Lord's work—goes on, with or without me.”

She turned away and went toward Dearborn, hands out, wrists together. “I take it you'd like to handcuff me?” she said.

Bud talked quietly with Casey-Lynn for a few minutes, and she pointed out the four Fellowship members who had helped her. Some looked like they wanted to run, but Alcee was blocking the door, and nobody wanted to tangle with him.

While Bud and Casey-Lynn talked, Sam and Tristan Kowel were deep in conversation. Then Dearborn and Alcee led the conspirators away, and Kowel turned to those left behind. “We're going to put it back, people.”

“Back?” someone asked.

“Merlotte's. Back to what it was when we came.”

“But it looks so much
better
now,” Bradley complained.

“Back,”
Sam said.

“Back,” Kowel echoed.

As the crew debated how to proceed, Andy walked out the front door and watched Bud and Alcee divide the detained into two vehicles. Bud took Casey-Lynn, though she had to sit in his front seat.

She craned her head as Bud drove out of the lot. When she met Andy's gaze, her lips curled into a smile. It wasn't a smile of victory, or even one acknowledging an old friend. He thought perhaps it was the smile of the faithful, of someone who could afford to take the long view. It lasted for only an instant, and then the smile was gone and she looked straight ahead, through the windshield, as if ready to face whatever came next.

Andy watched her leave him again. He'd thought the last time was for keeps, but he knew this one was. Even if she was convicted and incarcerated locally, he wouldn't visit. He would testify at the trial, but that was all. He wouldn't be drawn into her life again. That was a trap, as surely as a rodeo chute to a bull, and he wasn't dumb enough to enter it a third time.

When both sheriff's vehicles were out of sight, Andy started back into Merlotte's, but he stopped himself as he reached for the door. He needed some sleep, a clear head.

Bill was safe, for now, but Lafayette's killer was still out there.

Andy stood there a moment longer. The early-morning sun picked out the needles on the big pines, defining each one distinctly and surrounding it with a halo of light. The smell of the trees hung heavy in the morning air and high clouds dotted the sky, and somewhere a bird chittered, and he heard the whine of a mosquito, and he knew that Bon Temps was waking up.

Bon Temps.
His
town.

He got into the Honda, but instead of going home and closing his eyes, he drove to Caddo Road, made a right on Court Street, and cruised slowly through downtown, then the side streets leading away. He didn't have Casey-Lynn, or anyone like her. But he had someplace he knew he belonged, and she'd never had that. Maybe that made a difference. All the difference.

Anyway, it did to him.

SEANAN MCGUIRE

Seanan McGuire has always found Amelia fascinating. The witch has crossed paths with Sookie time and again, but her true home is New Orleans, a city that needs its witches more than ever after the last few years. Luckily for Amelia, she has her boyfriend, Bob, to keep her from biting off more than she can chew . . . most of the time.

—

The cherry tree on my dining room table was growing steadily. According to my notes, it was likely maturing about a day every two seconds, giving me a respectable “one minute equals one month” benchmark to use for judging its age. It had been a seed when I'd dropped it into the pot filled with rich bayou soil and started the stopwatch. In the fifteen minutes since then, it had reached and passed a year's growth, putting out branches and stretching eagerly toward the ceiling. If Wikipedia was correct, I'd be seeing the first pale cherry blossoms within the next three-minute “season,” even though I couldn't expect fruit until the tree reached its fourth year.

The trouble with witchcraft is that, for the most part, the only people practicing it are witches. That's sort of like taking an entire field of engineering and only letting it be used by Boy Scouts, or handing obstetric medicine off to bird-watchers. You'll still get bridges built and babies born, but it'll come with a lot of weird bric-a-brac around the edges, like the tolls have to be paid with merit badges, and you can't go into labor until someone's spotted a blue-winged blackbird or something. Witches enjoy tinkering with the subtle fabric of the universe. It's how we're made. We're the sort of people who see a loose thread and think, “I should yank on that to see what happens,” and it doesn't much matter whether it's a thread on a sweater or a weather pattern. Yank the wrong thread on a sweater and the whole thing unravels. Yank the wrong thread on a heat wave and you're having a snowstorm in New Orleans in July. Half the bizarre weather in the South can be blamed on witchcraft gone stupid—only half, thankfully. No one who grows up in hurricane territory goes playing with
those
threads, because there's just too much chance that your try at a Hail Mary pass will cause another Katrina. We don't mess with big weather, but no witch born has ever been able to resist the little threads—and sometimes little threads can be more effective than big ones. Which brought us back to the cherry tree, spreading branches as big around as my wrist and laying in the infrastructure that would eventually be used to support a healthy crop of delicious fruit.

Witching isn't like shapeshifting or being a telepathic fairy lady that all the vampires want to cozy up to; it's big and it's versatile and it's dangerous as all hell. But that's also what makes it so much fun.

The cherry tree was brushing the ceiling, and I was no longer confident in my ability to get it out of the apartment. I glanced at the stopwatch. The tree was entering its fourth year and should be reaching its private summer in another eighteen seconds. I watched intently as petals fell down like confetti, blanketing the room in pink and white, and small green fruit began to appear.

There were footsteps behind me. Bob was back from the store. The footsteps stopped abruptly, and he said, sounding bemused, “Amelia, there's a tree in the dining room.”

“I know,” I said, not taking my eyes off the rapidly swelling fruits of my labor. “It's a modification on that stasis spell I used right after Sookie's cousin got killed. I was thinking if I could use it to freeze time for a while, maybe turning it on its ear would make it so I could speed time up within a certain limited sphere. I started it on the cherry seed, didn't enchant the dirt or the pot I planted it in, and look—it's working.”

Bob didn't say anything. That wasn't a surprise, although it was something of a disappointment. Then again, we'd been together for both more and less time than the calendar would admit; we'd been dating as humans for less than a month when I'd accidentally turned him into a cat by trying something outside my witchy weight class. He'd lived with me throughout his “feline period,” been turned back by someone who wasn't me, tried to kill me, dumped me, taken me back, and, finally, taken me to Paris. It had been a weird relationship progression at best, and a really problematic one at worst. But he was a witch, too. He understood what it was like to see a thread and want to yank on it just to find out what would happen.

That didn't make him comfortable with me being the one doing the yanking.

“Can you get a bowl from the kitchen?” I asked. The fruit was ripening with glorious speed, and that meant I needed to focus on suspending the spell. The last thing I wanted was to cover my entire dining room with rotten cherries.

“Sure,” said Bob. The footsteps started again, followed by the sound of a cabinet swinging open. I kept my attention focused on the cherry tree, where the cherries were about two seconds away from the peak of ripeness.

Witchcraft is a funny thing. All the really
good
spells are in Greek or Latin or something that sounds like Greek or Latin, but is probably as made up as Klingon or Pig Latin. It doesn't make sense. Either only people in Europe ever figured out how magic worked—and I know that's not true—or magic didn't exist until some point after the rise of the Roman Empire, and that doesn't make sense, either. We have stories about vampires and weres and fairies that go back way earlier than the Caesars, so why should witchcraft be any different? Answer is, it shouldn't be. Our insistence on dead languages is all in our heads.

It's all in our heads, but I still didn't want a dining room full of rotten cherries. I rattled off the syllables of the break spell, making the modified hand gesture I'd concocted to go with them, and was gratified when the cherries stopped swelling. The tree rustled once before settling in its pot with a faint but audible
thump
that knocked the first few cherries off their branches. Most of them hit the table. I managed to catch one and looked at it admiringly before I popped it into my mouth, where it burst in a sweet rush of cherry juice against my tongue.

“Well?”

I turned to face Bob, grinning with cherry-flavored lips, before spitting the cherry seed into my palm. I tucked it into my pocket for luck and said, “I'm baking a pie tonight.”

The nice thing about being a witch in a committed if complicated relationship with another witch is not needing to explain things like, “Where did you get twenty pounds of fresh cherries?” Bob wouldn't have bothered to ask even if he hadn't seen the tree. Instead, he went for the practical side of things, asking, “What are we going to do with a cherry tree?”

I paused in the act of pitting a bowlful of cherries, looking past him to the dining room where our cherry tree, branches still laden with fruit, waited for its fate to be decided. “I don't know. I think it makes a nice centerpiece, don't you? Plus we can trigger another harvest any-time we feel like a fresh slice of cherry pie.”

Bob looked at me dubiously. I beamed at him. That only seemed to intensify his dubiousness, returning him to what I sometimes thought of as his factory setting: the funereal, almost dour man who'd managed to catch my full attention just by seeming like the last person in the world who'd have any interest in the arcane. “And you don't think anyone will notice the buckets of cherry seeds? Or were you planning to bribe all the neighbors into silence with cherry pies?”

“Now that you suggest it . . .” I batted my eyelashes. Bob scowled. Laughing, I went back to pitting cherries.

“Amelia.” Bob sounded perfectly calm, which didn't really tell me much; Bob almost always sounded perfectly calm. Bob was one of those men who could have looked a charging
T. rex
in the face and said, “I thought you were extinct,” while the rest of us were working up a good head of running and screaming. That was part of his appeal, if I was being honest with myself. He kept me calm. “I know you well enough to know that you didn't just start experimenting with cherry stones because you wanted a pie. What were you trying to accomplish here? What was the goal?”

I focused a little more tightly on the bowl of pitted cherries in front of me. It was starting to look disturbingly like a bowl of organs, making me wonder whether haruspicy would work if you read fruit instead of a sliced-open dove. “I want to try something,” I said quietly.

“What was that?”

“I said, I want to try something.” I raised my head. “I haven't really been stretching myself since that whole thing with Sookie and the blood bond, and I can't really say that using a ritual someone else created to sever an artificial connection to a dead man is ‘stretching myself.' The universe doesn't want to connect living things to dead ones. Breaking them apart doesn't really upset the natural order of things. Good for me if I don't want the magic going strange, but not so good if what I'm looking for is a learning experience.”

“As someone who's been on the receiving end of a ‘learning experience,' can I just say that I'm not really that excited when you go looking for them?”

I flicked a cherry at him. It bounced off his shirt, leaving a little red mark behind, like a lipstick stain or a wound. Bob looked at it, sighed, and murmured a word with too many vowels. The stain lifted off his shirt and flapped, like a molecule-thin butterfly, to hover in the air above the garbage. Once there, it burst, sending cherry juice raining down on the coffee grounds and used paper towels.

“Very mature,” he said.

“I'm not going to turn you into a cat again,” I said. “I know what I did wrong that time, and besides, it's not like the spell I want to try would be directed at you. I've learned my lesson about using magic on my boyfriend.”

“It's a miracle,” said Bob dryly. “So what, exactly, do you want to attempt that would somehow be made easier by being able to magically generate a cherry crop in our dining room?”

I smiled hopefully. “Help me get our pie in the oven and I'll explain?”

Bob sighed and reached for the spare cherry pitter.

“Lots of cultures have stories about witches who've bound a wind to their service somehow,” I said, taking another bite of cherry pie. It had come out perfectly, with a flaky golden crust and just the right amount of sugar to make the cherry juice that oozed out of the pastry taste like a little bit of heaven. “Winds are supposed to be like puppies. If you do the right things and say the right words, they'll come when you call, heel, sit, stay, the whole nine yards. Doesn't that sound like about the best thing you've ever heard? Who needs the SPCA when you can have a pet weather pattern?”

“Since I was the last ‘pet' you had, this isn't really selling me on the idea,” said Bob blandly. “I have two major reservations. First, where does this wind come from? Are you stealing something from the local troposphere? Because we don't have the most stable weather in the world here in New Orleans, and I don't want the next hurricane to have your name on it.”