“This is my reasoning,” Alcide said calmly. The room quieted as the pack listened. “According to them,” and he pointed at Ham and Patricia, “Annabelle’s only guilt is a moral one, in sleeping with two men at the same time while telling one of them she was faithful. We don’t know what she told Basim.”
Alcide spoke the truth. at least, the truth as he saw it. I looked at Annabelle and saw her all: the disciplined woman who was in the Air Force, the practical woman who balanced her pack life with the rest of her life, the woman who lost all her practicality and restraint when it came to sex. Annabelle was a rainbow of colors right now, none of them happy except the vibrating white line of relief that Alcide did not plan to kill her.
“As for Ham and Patricia. Ham is the murderer of a pack member. Instead of an open challenge, he took the path of stealth. That would call for severe punishment, maybe death. We should consider that Basim was a traitor—not only a pack member, but a second, who was willing to deal with someone outside the pack, to plot against the pack interests and against the good name of a friend of the pack,” Alcide continued.
“Oh,” I murmured to Jason. “That’s me.”
“And Patricia, who promised to be loyal to this pack, broke her vow,” Alcide said. “So she should be cast out forever.”
“Packmaster, you’re too merciful,” Jannalynn said vehemently. “Ham clearly deserves death for his disloyalty. Ham, at least.”
There was a long silence, broken by a growing buzz of discussion. I looked around the room, seeing the color of thoughtfulness (brown, of course) turning into all kinds of shades as passions rose. Jason put his arms around me from behind. “You need to back out of this,” he whispered, and I could see his words turn pink and curly. He loved me. I put a hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t laugh out loud. We stepped backward; one step, two, three, four, five. Then we were standing in the foyer.
“We need to leave,” Jason said. “If they’re going to kill two good-looking gals like Annabelle and Patricia, I don’t want to be around to see it. If we don’t see anything, we won’t have to testify in court, if it comes to that.”
“They won’t debate long. I think Annabelle will see tomorrow. Alcide will let Jannalynn persuade him to kill Ham and Patricia,” I said. “His colors tell me so.”
Jason gaped at me. “I don’t know what you took or smoked or inhaled upstairs,” he said, “but you need to get out of here now.”
“Okay,” I said, and suddenly I realized I felt pretty damn bad. I made it outside to Alcide’s shrubbery before I threw up. I waited for the second wave to roll over me before I risked getting into Jason’s truck.
“What would Gran say about me leaving before I saw the results of what I’d done?” I asked him sadly. “I left after the Were war when Alcide was celebrating his victory. I don’t know how you panthers celebrate, but believe me, I didn’t want to be around when he fucked one of the Weres. It was bad enough seeing Jannalynn execute the wounded. On the other hand. ” I lost my train of thought in another wave of sickness, though this one wasn’t as violent.
“Gran would say you’re not obliged to watch people kill each other, and you didn’t cause it, they did,” Jason said briskly. I could tell that my brother, though sympathetic, wasn’t thrilled about driving me all the way home with my stomach so jittery.
“Listen, can I just drop you by Eric’s?” he said. “I know he’s gotta have a bathroom or two, and that way my truck can stay clean.”
Under any other circumstances I would have refused, since Eric was in such a charged situation. But I felt shaky, and I was still seeing colors. I chewed two antacids from the glove compartment and rinsed my mouth out repeatedly with some Sprite Jason had in the truck. I had to agree that it would be better if I could spend the night in Shreveport.
“I can come back and get you in the morning,” Jason offered. “Or maybe his day guy can give you a ride to Bon Temps.”
Bobby Burnham would rather transport a flock of turkeys.
While I hesitated, I discovered that now that I wasn’t surrounded by Weres, I felt the misery rolling through the blood bond. It was the strongest, most active emotion I’d felt from Eric in days. The misery began to swell as unhappiness and physical pain overwhelmed him.
Jason opened his mouth to ask questions about what I’d taken before the pack meeting. “Get me to Eric’s,” I said. “Quick, Jason. Something’s wrong.”
“There, too?” he said plaintively, but we roared out of Alcide’s driveway.
I was practically shaking with anxiety when we stopped at the gate so Dan the security guard could give me a look. He hadn’t recognized Jason’s truck.
“I’m here to see Eric, and this is my brother,” I said, trying to act normal.
“Go on through,” Dan said, smiling. “It’s been a while.”
When we pulled into Eric’s driveway, I saw that his garage door was open, though the garage light was off. In fact, the house was in total darkness. Maybe everyone was over at Fangtasia. Nope. I knew Eric was there. I simply knew it.
“I don’t like this,” I said, and sat up a little straighter. I struggled against the effects of the drug. Though I was a little closer to normal since I’d been sick, I still felt as though I were experiencing the world through gauze.
“He don’t leave it open?” Jason peered out over his steering wheel.
“No, he
never
leaves it open. And look! The kitchen door is open, too.” I got out of the truck, and I heard Jason get out on his side. His truck lights stayed on automatically for a few seconds, so I got to the kitchen door easily enough. I always knocked at Eric’s door if he didn’t expect me, because I never knew who would be there or what they’d be talking about, but this time I simply pushed the door even wider. I could see a short distance into the kitchen because of the truck lights. The wrongness rolled out in a cloud, that feeling a mixture of the sense I’d been born with and the extra layer of senses the drug had imparted. I was glad Jason was right behind me. I could hear his breathing, way too fast and noisy.
“Eric,” I said, very quietly.
No one answered. There was no sound of any kind.
I stepped into the kitchen just as Jason’s truck lights went off. There were streetlights out on the street, and they supplied a dim glow. “Eric?” I called. “Where are you?” Tension made my voice crack. Something was awfully wrong.
“In here,” he said from farther in the house, and my heart clenched.
“Thank you, God,” I said, and my hand went out to the wall switch. I flicked it down, flooding the room with light. I looked around. The kitchen was pristine, as always.
So the awful things hadn’t happened here.
I crept from the kitchen into Eric’s big living room. I knew immediately that someone had died here. There were bloodstains everywhere. Some of them were still wet. Some of them dripped. I heard Jason’s breath catch in his throat.
Eric was sitting on the couch, his head in his hands. There was no one else alive in the room.
Though the smell of blood was almost choking me, I was by him in a second. “Honey?” I said. “Look at me.”
When he raised his head, I could see a terrible gash across his forehead. He’d bled copiously from the head wound. There was dried blood all over his face. When he straightened, I could see the blood on his white shirt. The head wound was healing, but the other one. “What’s under the shirt?” I said.
“My ribs are broken and they’ve come through,” he said. “They’ll heal, but it’ll take time. You’ll have to push them back into place.”
“Tell me what’s happened,” I said, trying very hard to sound calm. Of course, he knew I wasn’t.
“Dead guy over here,” Jason called. “Human.”
“Who is it, Eric?” I eased his bare feet up onto the sofa so he could lie down.
“It’s Bobby,” he said. “I tried to get him out of here in time, but he was so sure there was something he could do to help me.” Eric sounded incredibly tired.
“Who killed him?” I hadn’t even scanned for other beings in this house, and I almost gasped at my own carelessness.
“Alexei snapped,” Eric said. “Tonight he left his room when Ocella came in here to talk to me. I knew Bobby was still in the house, but I simply didn’t think about his being in danger. Felicia was here, too, and Pam.”
“Why was Felicia here?” I asked, because Eric didn’t ask his staff to his house, as a rule. Felicia, the Fangtasia bartender, had been lowest on the vampire totem pole.
“She was dating Bobby. He had some papers I needed to sign, and she’d just come over with him.”
“So Felicia.?”
“Part of a vampire left over here,” Jason called. “Looks like the rest has flaked away.”
“She’s gone to her final death,” Eric told me.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” I put my arms around him, and after a second, his shoulders relaxed. I had never seen Eric so defeated. Even the awful night we’d been surrounded by the vampires of Las Vegas and forced to surrender to Victor, the night he’d thought we might all die, he’d had that spark of determination and vigor. But at the moment he was literally overwhelmed with depression and anger and helplessness. Thanks to his damn
maker
, whose ego had required he bring back a traumatized boy from the dead.
“Where’s Alexei now?” I asked, making my voice as brisk as I could manage. “Where’s Appius? Is he still alive?” To hell with the two-name requirement. I thought it would be great if Alexei had been helpful enough to kill the old vampire, save me the trouble.
“I don’t know.” Eric sounded completely defeated.
“Why not?” I was genuinely shocked. “He’s your maker, buddy! You’d know if he died. If I’ve been feeling you three for a week, I know you’ve been feeling him even stronger.” Judith had said she’d felt a tug the day of Lorena’s death, though she hadn’t understood what it meant. Eric had been alive for so long, maybe it would actually cause him physical harm if Appius died. In a snap, I completely reversed my thinking. Appius should live until Eric recovered from his wounds. “You need to get out of here and go find him!”
“He asked me not to follow when he went after Alexei. He doesn’t want us all to die.”
“So you’re just going to sit home because he said so? When you don’t know where they are or what they’re doing, or who they’re doing it to?” I didn’t know what I wanted Eric to actually do. The drug was still coasting through my system, though it was slightly weaker—I was only seeing colors where they shouldn’t be every now and then. But I had very little control over my thoughts and my speech. I was simply trying to get Eric to act like Eric. And I wanted him to stop bleeding. And I wanted Jason to come push Eric’s bones back in because I could see them sticking out.
“Ocella asked this of me,” Eric said, and he glared at me.
“So, he
asked
? That doesn’t sound like a direct order to me. It sounds like a request. Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said, as snarkily as I could.
“No,” Eric said through clenched teeth. I could feel his anger rising. “It was
not
a direct order.”
“Jason!” I yelled. My brother appeared, looking very grim. “Please push Eric’s ribs back in,” I said, which is another sentence I never thought I’d hear myself saying. Without a word, but with a hard-set mouth, Jason put his hands on each side of the gaping wound. He looked at Eric’s nose, and said, “Ready?” Without waiting for an answer, he pushed in.
Eric made an awful noise, but I noticed the bleeding stopped and the healing began. Jason looked down at his reddened hands and went to find a bathroom.
“Well, then?” I said, handing Eric an open bottle of TrueBlood that had been left on the coffee table. He made a face, but gulped it down. “What are you gonna do?”
“Later on we’ll have words about this,” he said. He gave me a look.
“Fine with me!” I glared right back and went off on an irrational tangent. “And while you’re listing the things you should be doing, where’s the cleaning crew?”
“Bobby. ” he began, and then stopped short.
Bobby would have called the cleaning crew for Eric.
“Okay, how’s about I do that part,” I said, and wondered where to find a phone book.
“He kept a list of important numbers in the right-hand desk drawer in my office,” Eric said, very quietly.
I found the name of the vampire cleaning service based midway between Shreveport and Baton Rouge, Fangster Cleanup. Since it was vampire run, they’d be open. A male answered the phone immediately, and I described the problem. “We’ll be there in three hours, if the homeowner can guarantee us a safe sleeping place in case the job runs over,” he said.
“No problem.” There was no telling where the other two resident vampires were or if they’d survive to return before the dawn. If they did, they could all sleep in Eric’s big bed or in the other light-tight bedroom, if the coffins were required. I thought there were a couple of the fiberglass pods stashed in the laundry room, too.
Now the carpets and the furniture would be cleaned. We just had to make sure no one else died tonight. After I hung up I felt super efficient but strangely empty, which I attributed to having lost everything that had been in my stomach. Since I was so light, I floated when I walked. Okay, maybe I still had more drug in me than I’d thought.
Then it suddenly hit me—Eric had said that Pam was in the house, too. Where was she? “Jason,” I yelled, “please, please—find Pam.”
I returned to the foul-smelling living room, marched over to the windows, and opened them. I swung around to face my boyfriend, who before this night had been many things: Arrogant, quick thinking, strong willed, secretive, and tricky were only the short list. But he’d never been indecisive, and he’d never been hopeless.
“What’s the plan?” I asked him.
He was looking a little better now that Jason had done his thing. I couldn’t see any bones anymore. “There isn’t one,” Eric said, but at least he looked guilty about it.
“What’s the
plan
?” I asked again.
“I told you. I haven’t made a plan. I don’t know what to do. Ocella may be dead by now, if Alexei was clever enough to waylay him.” Eric’s bloody tears ran down his cheeks.
“Bzzzzzt!”
I made the noise of a buzzer going off. “You’d know if Appius Livius was dead. He’s your maker.
What’s the plan?
”