"Sookie!" The last thing I expected—though frankly, I was way beyond consciously expecting anything—was for Charles to call to me. "Come out here, if you please!"
I slid my feet into my pink fuzzy slippers and hurried down the hall to the back door; that was where the voice had been coming from, I thought.
"I'm turning on the outside light," I yelled. Didn't want anyone to be blinded by the sudden electricity. "You sure it's safe out there?"
"Yes," said two voices almost simultaneously.
I flipped the switch with my eyes shut. After a second, I opened them and stepped to the door of the screened-in back porch, in my pink jammies and slippers. I crossed my arms over my chest. Though it wasn't cold tonight, it was cool.
I absorbed the scene in front of me. "Okay," I said slowly. Charles was in the graveled area where I parked, and he had an elbow around the neck of Bill Compton, my neighbor. Bill is a vampire, has been since right after the Civil War. We have a history. It's probably just a pebble of a history in Bill's long life, but in mine, it's a boulder.
"Sookie," Bill said between clenched teeth. "I don't want to cause this foreigner harm. Tell him to get his hands off me."
I mulled that over at an accelerated rate. "Charles, I think you can let him go," I said, and as fast as I could snap my fingers, Charles was standing beside me.
"You know this man?" Charles's voice was steely.
Just as coldly, Bill said, "She does know me, intimately."
Oh,
gack
.
"Now, is that polite?" I may have had a little cold steel in my own voice. "I don't go around telling everyone the details of our former relationship. I would expect the same of any gentleman."
To my gratification, Charles glared at Bill, raising one eyebrow in a very superior and irritating way.
"So this one is sharing your bed now?" Bill jerked his head toward the smaller vampire.
If he'd said anything else, I could've held on to my temper. I don't lose it a lot, but when I do, it's well and truly lost. "Is that any of your business?" I asked, biting off each word. "If I sleep with a hundred men, or a hundred sheep, it's not any of your business! Why are you creeping around my house in the middle of the night? You scared me halfway to death."
Bill didn't look remotely repentant. "I'm sorry you wakened and were frightened," he said insincerely. "I was checking on your safety."
"You were roaming around the woods and smelled another vampire," I said. He'd always had an extremely acute sense of smell. "So you came over here to see who it was."
"I wanted to be sure you weren't being attacked," Bill said. "I thought I caught a sniff of human, too. Did you have a human visitor today?"
I didn't believe for a minute Bill was only concerned with my safety, but I didn't want to believe jealousy brought him to my window, or some kind of prurient curiosity. I just breathed in and out for a minute, calming down and considering.
"Charles is not attacking me," I said, proud I was speaking so levelly.
Bill sneered. "Charles," he repeated in tones of great scorn.
"Charles Twining," said my companion, bowing—if you could call a slight inclination of his curly brown head a bow.
"Where did you come up with this one?" Bill's voice had regained its calm.
"Actually, he works for Eric, like you do."
"Eric's provided you with a bodyguard? You need a bodyguard?"
"Listen, bozo," I said through clenched jaws, "my life goes on while you're gone. So does the town. People are getting shot around here, among them Sam. We needed a substitute bartender, and Charles was volunteered to help us out." That may not have been entirely accurate, but I was not in the accuracy business at the moment. I was in the Make My Point business.
At least Bill was appropriately taken aback by the information.
"Sam. Who else?"
I was shivering, since it wasn't nylon pajama weather. But I didn't want Bill in the house. "Calvin Norris and Heather Kinman."
"Shot dead?"
"Heather was. Calvin was pretty badly wounded."
"Have the police arrested anyone?"
"No."
"Do you know who did it?"
"No."
"You're worried about your brother."
"Yes."
"He turned at the full moon."
"Yes."
Bill looked at me with what might have been pity. "I'm sorry, Sookie," he said, and he meant it.
"No point telling me about it," I snapped. "Tell Jason—it's him who turns fuzzy."
Bill's face went cold and stiff. "Excuse my intrusion," he said. "I'll go." He melted into the woods.
I don't know how Charles reacted to the episode, because I turned and stalked back into the house, turning off the outside light as I went. I threw myself back in bed and lay there, fuming and fussing silently. I pulled the covers up over my head so the vampire would take the hint that I didn't want to discuss the incident. He moved so quietly, I couldn't be sure where he was in the house; I think he paused in the doorway for a second, and then moved on.
I lay awake for at least forty-five minutes, and then I found myself settling back into sleep.
Then someone shook me by the shoulder. I smelled sweet perfume, and I smelled something else, something awful. I was terribly groggy.
"Sookie, your house is on fire," a voice said.
"Couldn't be," I said. "I didn't leave anything on."
"You have to get out now," the voice insisted. A persistent shriek reminded me of fire drills at the elementary school.
"Okay," I said, my head thick with sleep and (I saw when I opened my eyes) smoke. The shriek in the background, I slowly realized, was my smoke detector. Thick gray plumes were drifting through my yellow and white bedroom like evil genies. I wasn't moving fast enough for Claudine, who yanked me out of bed and carried me out the front door. A woman had never lifted me, but, of course, Claudine was no ordinary woman. She set me on my feet in the chilly grass of the front yard. The cold feel of it suddenly woke me up. This was not a nightmare.
"My house caught on fire?" I was still struggling to be alert.
"The vampire says it was that human, there," she said, pointing to the left of the house. But for a long minute my eyes were fixed on the terrible sight of flames, and the red glow of fire lighting the night. The back porch and part of the kitchen were blazing.
I made myself look at a huddled form on the ground, close to a forsythia in bud. Charles was kneeling by it. "Have you called the fire department?" I asked them both as I picked my way around the house in my bare feet to have a look at the recumbent figure. I peered at the dead man's slack face in the poor light. He was white, clean-shaven, and probably in his thirties. Though conditions were hardly ideal, I didn't recognize him.
"Oh, no, I didn't think of it." Charles looked up from the body. He came from a time before fire departments.
"And I forgot my cell phone," said Claudine, who was thoroughly modern.
"Then I have to go back in and do it, if the phones still work," I said, turning on my heel. Charles rose to his inconsiderable height and stared at me.
"You will not go back in there." This was definitely an order from Claudine. "New man, you run fast enough to do that."
"Fire," Charles said, "is very quickly fatal to vampires."
It was true; they went up like a torch once they caught. Selfishly, for a second I almost insisted; I wanted my coat and my slippers and my purse.
"Go call from Bill's phone," I said, pointing in the right direction, and off he took like a jackrabbit. The minute he was out of sight and before Claudine could stop me, I dashed back in the front door and made my way to my room. The smoke was much thicker, and I could see the flames a few feet down the hall in the kitchen. As soon as I saw the flames I knew I'd made a huge mistake by reentering the house, and it was hard not to panic. My purse was right where I'd left it, and my coat was tossed over the slipper chair in a corner of my room. I couldn't find my slippers, and I knew I couldn't stay. I fumbled in a drawer for a pair of socks, since I knew for sure they were there, and then I ran out of my room, coughing and choking. Acting through sheer instinct, I turned briefly to my left to shut the door to the kitchen, and then whirled to hurry out the front door. I fell over a chair in the living room.
"That was stupid," said Claudine the fairy, and I shrieked. She grabbed me around the waist and ran out of the house again, with me under her arm like a rolled-up carpet.
The combination of shrieking and coughing tied my respiratory system in knots for a minute or two, during which time Claudine moved me farther away from my house. She sat me down on the grass and put the socks on my feet. Then she helped me stand up and get my arms into the coat. I buttoned it around me gratefully.
This was the second time Claudine had appeared out of nowhere when I was about to get into serious trouble. The first time, I'd fallen asleep at the wheel after a very long day.
"You're making it awfully hard on me," she said. She still sounded cheerful, but maybe not quite as sweet.
Something changed about the house, and I realized the night-light in the hall had gone out. Either the electricity was out, or the line had been shut down in town by the fire department.
"I'm sorry," I said, feeling that was appropriate, though I had no idea why Claudine felt put upon when it was my house that was burning. I wanted to hurry to the backyard to get a better view, but Claudine caught hold of my arm.
"No closer," she said simply, and I could not break her hold. "Listen, the trucks are coming."
Now I could hear the fire engines, and I blessed every person who was coming to help. I knew the pagers had gone off all over the area, and the volunteers had rushed to the firehouse straight from their beds.
Catfish Hunter, my brother's boss, pulled up in his car. He leaped out and ran right to me. "Anyone left inside?" he asked urgently. The town's fire truck pulled in after him, scattering my new gravel all to hell.
"No," I said.
"Is there a propane tank?"
"Yes."
"Where?"
"Backyard."
"Where's your car, Sookie?"
"In the back," I said, and my voice was starting to shake.
"Propane tank in the back!"Catfish bellowed over his shoulder.
There was an answering yell, followed by a lot of purposeful activity. I recognized Hoyt Fortenberry and Ralph Tooten, plus four or five other men and a couple of women.
Catfish, after a quick conversation with Hoyt and Ralph, called over a smallish woman who seemed swamped by her gear. He pointed to the still figure in the grass, and she threw off her helmet and knelt beside him. After some peering and touching, she shook her head. I barely recognized her as Dr. Robert Meredith's nurse, Jan something.
"Who's the dead man?" asked Catfish. He didn't seem too upset by the corpse.
"I have no idea," I said. I only discovered how shocked I was by the way my voice came out—quavery, small. Claudine put her arm around me.
A police car pulled in to the side of the fire truck, and Sheriff Bud Dearborn got out of the driver's seat. Andy Bellefleur was his passenger.
Claudine said, "Ah-oh."
"Yeah," I said.
Then Charles was with me again, and Bill was right on his heels. The vampires took in the frantic but purposeful activity. They noticed Claudine.
The small woman, who'd stood to resume her gear, called, "Sheriff, do me a favor and call an ambulance to take this body away."
Bud Dearborn glanced at Andy, who turned away to speak into the car radio.
"Having one dead beau ain't enough, Sookie?" Bud Dearborn asked me.
Bill snarled, the firefighters broke out the window by my great-great-grandmother's dining table, and a visible rush of heat and sparks gushed into the night. The pumper truck made a lot of noise, and the tin roof that covered the kitchen and porch separated from the house.
My home was going up in flames and smoke.
CLAUDINE WAS ON my left. Bill came to stand to my right and took my hand. Together, we watched the firefighters aim the hose through the broken window. A sound of shattering glass from the other side of the house indicated they were breaking the window over the sink, too. While the firefighters concentrated on the fire, the police concentrated on the body. Charles stepped up to bat right away.
"I killed him," he said calmly. "I caught him setting fire to the house. He was armed, and he attacked me."
Sheriff Bud Dearborn looked more like a Pekinese than any human should look. His face was practically concave. His eyes were round and bright, and at the moment extremely curious. His brown hair, liberally streaked with gray, was combed back from his face all around, and I expected him to snuffle when he spoke. "And you would be?" he asked the vampire.
"Charles Twining," Charles answered gracefully."At your service."
I wasn't imagining the snort the sheriff gave or Andy Bellefleur's eye roll.
"And you'd be on the spot because . . . ?"
"He's staying with me," Bill said smoothly, "while he works at Merlotte's."
Presumably the sheriff had already heard about the new bartender, because he just nodded. I was relieved at not having to confess that Charles was supposed to be sleeping in my closet, and I blessed Bill for having lied about that. Our eyes met for a moment.
"So you admit you killed this man?" Andy asked Charles. Charles nodded curtly.
Andy beckoned to the woman in hospital scrubs who'd been waiting by her car—which made maybe five cars in my front yard, plus the fire truck. This new arrival glanced at me curiously as she walked past to the huddled form in the bushes. Pulling a stethoscope from a pocket, she knelt by the man and listened to various parts of his body. "Yep, dead as a doornail," she called.
Andy had gotten a Polaroid out of the police car to take pictures of the body. Since the only light was the flash of the camera and the flicker of flame from my burning house, I didn't think the pictures would turn out too well. I was numb with shock, and I watched Andy as if this were an important activity.
"What a pity. It would have been a good thing to find out why he torched Sookie's house," Bill said as he watched Andy work. His voice rivaled a refrigerator for coldness.
"In my fear for Sookie's safety, I suppose I struck too hard." Charles tried to look regretful.
"Since his neck seems to be broken, I suppose you did," said the doctor, studying Charles's white face with the same careful attention she'd given mine. The doctor was in her thirties, I thought; a woman slim to the point of skinny, with very short red hair. She was about five foot three, and she had elfin features, or at least the kind I'd always thought of as elfin: a short, turned-up nose, wide eyes,large mouth. Her words were both dry and bold, and she didn't seem at all disconcerted by or excited at being called out in the middle of the night for something like this. She must be the parish coroner, so I must have voted for her, but I couldn't recall her name.
"Who are you?" Claudine asked in her sweetest voice.
The doctor blinked at the vision of Claudine. Claudine, at this ungodly hour of the morning, was in full makeup and a fuchsia knit top with black knit leggings. Her shoes were fuchsia and black striped, and her jacket was, too. Claudine's black rippling hair was held off her face with fuchsia combs.
"I'm Dr. Tonnesen. Linda. Who are you?"
"Claudine Crane," the fairy said. I'd never known the last name Claudine used.
"And why were you here on the spot, Ms. Crane?" Andy Bellefleur asked.
"I'm Sookie's fairy godmother," Claudine said, laughing. Though the scene was grim, everyone else laughed, too. It was like we just couldn't stop being cheerful around Claudine. But I wondered very much about Claudine's explanation.
"No, really," Bud Dearborn said. "Why are you here, Ms. Crane?"
Claudine smiled impishly. "I was spending the night with Sookie," she said, winking.
In a second, we were the objects of fascinated scrutiny from every male within hearing, and I had to lock down my head as if it were a maximum-security prison to block the mental images the guys were broadcasting.
Andy shook himself, closed his mouth, and squatted by the dead man. "Bud, I'm going to roll him," he said a little hoarsely, and turned the corpse so he could feel inside the dead man's pockets. The man's wallet proved to be in his jacket, which seemed a little unusual to me. Andy straightened and stepped away from the body to examine the billfold's contents.
"You want to have a look, see if you recognize him?" Sheriff Dearborn asked me. Of course I didn't, but I also saw that I really didn't have a choice. Nervously, I inched a little closer and looked again at the face of the dead man. He still looked ordinary. He still looked dead. He might be in his thirties. "I don't know him," I said, my voice small in the din of the firefighters and the water pouring onto the house.
"What?" Bud Dearborn was having trouble hearing me. His round brown eyes were locked onto my face.
"Don't know him!" I said, almost yelling. "I've never seen him, that I remember. Claudine?"
I don't know why I asked Claudine.
"Oh, yes, I've seen him," she said cheerfully.
That attracted the undivided attention of the two vampires, the two lawmen, the doctor, and me.
"Where?"
Claudine threw her arm around my shoulders. "Why, he was in Merlotte's tonight. You were too worried about your friend to notice, I guess. He was over in the side of the room where I was sitting." Arlene had been working that side.
It wasn't too amazing that I'd missed one male face in a crowded bar. But it did bother me that I'd been listening in to people's thoughts and I'd missed out on thoughts that must have been relevant to me. After all, he was in the bar with me, and a few hours later he'd set fire to my house. He must have been mulling me over, right?
"This driver's license says he's from Little Rock, Arkansas ," Andy said.
"That wasn't what he told me," Claudine said. "He said he was from Georgia ." She looked just as radiant when she realized he'd lied to her, but she wasn't smiling. "He said his name was Marlon."
"Did he tell you why he was in town, Ms. Crane?"
"He said he was just passing through, had a motel room up on the interstate."
"Did he explain any further?"
"Nope."
"Did you go to his motel, Ms. Crane?" Bud Dearborn asked in his best nonjudgmental voice.
Dr. Tonnesen was looking from speaker to speaker as if she was at a verbal tennis match.
"Gosh, no, I don't do things like that." Claudine smiled all around.
Bill looked as if someone had just waved a bottle of blood in front of his face. His fangs extended, and his eyes fixed on Claudine. Vampires can only hold out so long when fairies are around. Charles had stepped closer to Claudine, too.
She had to leave before the lawmen observed how the vampires were reacting. Linda Tonnesen had already noticed; she herself was pretty interested in Claudine. I hoped she'd just attribute the vamps' fascination to Claudine's excellent looks, rather than the overwhelming allure fairies held for vamps.
"Fellowship of the Sun," Andy said. "He has an honest-to-God membership card in here. There's no name written on the card; that's strange. His license is issued to Jeff Marriot." He looked at me questioningly.
I shook my head. The name meant nothing to me.
It was just like a Fellowship member to think that he could do something as nasty as torching my house—with me in it—and no one would question him. It wasn't the first time the Fellowship of the Sun, an anti-vampire hate group, had tried to burn me alive.
"He must have known you've had, ah, an association with vampires," Andy said into the silence.
"I'm losing my home, and I could have died, because I know vampires?"
Even Bud Dearborn looked a little embarrassed.
"Someone must have heard you used to date Mr. Compton, here," Bud muttered. "I'm sorry, Sookie."
I said, "Claudine needs to leave."
The abrupt change of subject startled both Andy and Bud, as well as Claudine. She looked at the two vampires, who were perceptibly closer to her, and hastily said, "Yes, I'm sorry, I have to get back home. I have to work tomorrow."
"Where's your car, Ms. Crane?" Bud Dearborn looked around elaborately. "I didn't see any car but Sookie's, and it's parked in the back."
"I'm parked over at Bill's," Claudine lied smoothly, having had years of practice. Without waiting for further discussion, she disappeared into the woods, and only my hands gripping their arms prevented Charles and Bill from gliding into the darkness after her. They were staring into the blackness of the trees when I pinched them, hard.
"What?" asked Bill, almost dreamily.
"Snap out of it," I muttered, hoping Bud and Andy and the new doctor wouldn't overhear. They didn't need to know that Claudine was supernatural.
"That's quite a woman," Dr. Tonnesen said, almost as dazed as the vampires. She shook herself. "The ambulance will come get, uh, Jeff Marriot. I'm just here because I had my scanner turned on as I was driving back from my shift at the Clarice hospital. I need to get home and get some sleep. Sorry about your fire, Ms. Stackhouse, but at least you didn't end up like this guy here." She nodded down at the corpse.
As she got into her Ranger, the fire chief trudged up to us. I'd known Catfish Hunter for years—he'd been a friend of my dad's—but I'd never seen him in his capacity as volunteer fire chief. Catfish was sweating despite the cold, and his face was smudged with smoke.
"Sookie, we done got it out," he said wearily. "It's not as bad as you might think."
"It's not?" I asked in a small voice.
"No, honey.You lost your back porch and your kitchen and your car, I'm afraid. He splashed some gas in that, too. But most of the house should be okay."
The kitchen . . . where the only traces of the death I'd caused could have been found. Now not even the technicians featured on the Discovery Channel could find any blood traces in the scorched room. Without meaning to, I began to laugh. "The kitchen," I said between giggles. "The kitchen's all gone?"
"Yes," said Catfish uneasily. "I hope you got you some homeowners insurance."
"Oh," I said, trying hard not to giggle any more. "I do. It was hard for me to keep up the payments, but I kept the policy Grandmother had on the house." Thank God my grandmother had been a great believer in insurance. She'd seen too many people drop policy payments to cut their monthly expenses and then suffer losses they were unable to recoup.
"Who's it with? I'll call right now." Catfish was so anxious to stop me laughing, he was ready to make clown faces and bark if I asked him to.
"Greg Aubert," I said.
The whole night suddenly rose up and whalloped me one. My house had burned, at least partially. I'd had more than one prowler. I had a vampire in residence forwhom daytime cover had to be provided. My car was gone. There was a dead man named Jeff Marriot in my yard, and he'd set fire to my house and car out of sheer prejudice. I was overwhelmed.
"Jason isn't at home," Catfish said from a distance. "I tried him. He'd want her to come over to his house."
"She and Charles—that is, Charles and I will take her over to my house," Bill said. He seemed to be equally far away.
"I don't know about that," Bud Dearborn said doubtfully. "Sookie, is that okay with you?"
I could barely make my mind shuffle through a few options. I couldn't call Tara because Mickey was there. Arlene's trailer was as crowded as it needed to be already.
"Yes, that would be all right," I said, and my voice sounded remote and empty, even to my own ears.
"All right, long's we know where to reach you."
"I called Greg, Sookie, and left a message on his office answering machine. You better call him yourself in the morning," Catfish said.
"Fine," I said.
And all the firefighters shuffled by, and they all told me how sorry they were. I knew every one of them: friends of my father's, friends of Jason's, regulars at the bar, high school acquaintances.
"You all did the best you could," I said over and over. "Thanks for saving most of it."
And the ambulance came to cart away the arsonist.
By then, Andy had found a gasoline can in the bushes, and the corpse's hands reeked of gasoline, Dr. Tonnesen said.
I could hardly believe that a stranger had decided I should lose my home and my life because of my dating preference. Thinking at that moment of how close I'd come to death, I didn't feel it was unjust that he'd lost his own life in the process. I admitted to myself that I thought Charles had done a good thing. I might owe my life to Sam's insistence that the vampire be billeted at my house. If Sam had been there at the moment, I would have given him a very enthusiastic thank-you.
Finally Bill and Charles and I started over to Bill's house. Catfish had advised me not to go back into my house until the morning, and then only after the insurance agent and the arson investigator had checked it over. Dr. Tonnesen had told me that if I felt wheezy, to come in to her office in the morning. She'd said some other stuff, but I hadn't quite absorbed it.
It was dark in the woods, of course, and by then it was maybe five in the morning. After a few paces into the trees, Bill picked me up and carried me. I didn't protest, because I was so tired I'd been wondering how I was going to manage stumbling through the cemetery.
He put me down when we reached his house. "Can you make it up the stairs?" he asked.
"I'll take you," offered Charles.
"No, I can do it," I said, and started up before they could say anything more. To tell the truth, I was not so sure I could, but slowly I made my way up to the bedroom I'd used when Bill had been my boyfriend. He had a snug light-tight place somewhere on the ground floor of the house, but I'd never asked him exactly where. (I had a pretty good idea it was in the space the builders had lopped off the kitchen to create the hot tub/plant room.) Though the water table is too high in Louisiana for houses to have basements, I was almost as sure there was another dark hole concealed somewhere. He had room for Charles without them bunking together, anyway—not that that was too high on my list of concerns. One of my nightgowns still lay in the drawer in the old-fashioned bedroom, and there was still a toothbrush of mine in the hall bathroom. Bill hadn't put my things in the trash; he'd left them, like he'd expected me to return.