Behind their backs? Oh,
shit
. And now I knew whom to blame for my very deep predicament. My own dear love, Bill Compton.
“That got a reaction,” Pam observed.
“But not the one I expected,” Eric said slowly.
“I’m not too happy about the torture option.” I was in so much trouble, I couldn’t even begin to add it up, and I was so overloaded with stress that I felt like my head was floating somewhere above my body. “And I miss Bill.” Even though at the moment I would gladly kick his ass, I did miss him. And if I could just have ten minutes’ conversation with him, how much better prepared I would be to face the coming days. Tears rolled down my face. But there was more they had to tell me; more I had to hear, whether I wanted to or not. “I do expect you to tell me why he lied about this trip, if you know. Pam mentioned bad news.”
Eric looked at Pam with no love in his eyes at all.
“She’s leaking again,” Pam observed, sounding a little uncomfortable. “I think before she goes to Mississippi, she should know the truth. Besides, if she has been keeping secrets for Bill, this will . . .”
Make her spill the beans? Change her loyalty to Bill? Force her to realize she has to tell us?
It was obvious that Chow and Eric had been all for keeping me in ignorance and that they were acutely unhappy with Pam for hinting to me that, though I supposedly didn’t know it, all was not well with Bill and me. But they both eyed Pam intently for a long minute, and then Eric nodded curtly.
“You and Chow wait outside,” Eric said to Pam. She gave him a very pointed look, and then they walked out, leaving their drained bottles sitting on the table. Not even a thank-you for the blood. Didn’t even rinse the bottles out. My head felt lighter and lighter as I contemplated poor vampire manners. I felt my eyelids flicker, and it occurred to me that I was on the edge of fainting. I am not one of these frail gals who keels over at every little thing, but I felt I was justified right now. Plus, I vaguely realized I hadn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours.
“Don’t you do it,” Eric said. He sounded definite. I tried to concentrate on his voice, and I looked at him.
I nodded to indicate I was doing my best.
He moved over to my side of the table, turned the chair Pam had occupied until it faced me and was very close. He sat and leaned over to me, his big white hand covering both of mine, still folded neatly in my lap. If he closed his hand, he could crush all my fingers. I’d never work as a waitress again.
“I don’t enjoy seeing you scared of me,” he said, his face too close to mine. I could smell his cologne—Ulysse, I thought. “I have always been very fond of you.”
He’d always wanted to have sex with me.
“Plus, I want to fuck you.” He grinned, but at this moment it didn’t do a thing to me. “When we kiss . . . it’s very exciting.” We had kissed in the line of duty, so to speak, and not as recreation. But it had been exciting. How not? He was gorgeous, and he’d had several hundred years to work on his smooching technique.
Eric got closer and closer. I wasn’t sure if he was going to bite me or kiss me. His fangs had run out. He was angry, or horny, or hungry, or all three. New vampires tended to lisp while they talked until they got used to their fangs; you couldn’t even tell, with Eric. He’d had centuries of perfecting that technique, too.
“Somehow, that torture plan didn’t make me feel very sexy,” I told him.
“It did something for Chow, though,” Eric whispered in my ear.
I wasn’t shaking, but I should have been. “Could you cut to the chase here?” I asked. “Are you gonna torture me, or not? Are you my friend, or my enemy? Are you gonna find Bill, or let him rot?”
Eric laughed. It was short and unfunny, but it was better than him getting closer, at least at the moment. “Sookie, you are too much,” he said, but not as though he found that particularly endearing. “I’m not going to torture you. For one thing, I would hate to ruin that beautiful skin; one day, I will see all of it.”
I just hoped it was still on my body when that happened.
“You won’t always be so afraid of me,” he said, as if he were absolutely certain of the future. “And you won’t always be as devoted to Bill as you are now. There is something I must tell you.”
Here came the Big Bad. His cool fingers twined with mine, and without wanting to, I held his hand hard. I couldn’t think of a word to say, at least a word that was safe. My eyes fixed on his.
“Bill was summoned to Mississippi,” Eric told me, “by a vampire—a female—he’d known many years ago. I don’t know if you’ve realized that vampires almost never mate with other vampires, for any longer than a rare one-night affair. We don’t do this because it gives us power over each other forever, the mating and sharing of blood. This vampire . . .”
“Her name,” I said.
“Lorena,” he said reluctantly. Or maybe he wanted to tell me all along, and the reluctance was just for show. Who the heck knows, with a vampire.
He waited to see if I would speak, but I did not.
“She was in Mississippi. I am not sure if she regularly lives there, or if she went there to ensnare Bill. She had been living in Seattle for years, I know, because she and Bill lived there together for many years.”
I had wondered why he’d picked Seattle as his fictitious destination. He hadn’t just plucked it out of the air.
“But whatever her intention in asking him to meet her there . . . what excuse she gave him for not coming here . . . maybe he was just being careful of you . . .”
I wanted to die at that moment. I took a deep breath and looked down at our joined hands. I was too humiliated to look in Eric’s eyes.
“He was—he became—instantly enthralled with her, all over again. After a few nights, he called Pam to say that he was coming home early without telling you, so he could arrange your future care before he saw you again.”
“Future care?” I sounded like a crow.
“Bill wanted to make a financial arrangement for you.”
The shock of it made me blanch. “Pension me off,” I said numbly. No matter how well he had meant, Bill could not have offered me any greater offense. When he’d been in my life, it had never occurred to him to ask me how my finances were faring—though he could hardly
wait
to help his newly discovered descendants, the Bellefleurs.
But when he was going to be out of my life, and felt guilty for leaving pitiful, pitiable me—then he started worrying.
“He wanted . . .” Eric began, then stopped and looked closely at my face. “Well, leave that for now. I would not have told you any of this, if Pam hadn’t interfered. I would have sent you off in ignorance, because then it wouldn’t have been words from my mouth that hurt you so badly. And I would not have had to plead with you, as I’m going to plead.”
I made myself listen. I gripped Eric’s hand as if it were a lifeline.
“What I’m going to do—and you have to understand, Sookie, my hide depends on this, too . . .”
I looked him straight in the face, and he saw the rush of my surprise.
“Yes, my job, and maybe my life, too, Sookie—not just yours, and Bill’s. I’m sending you a contact tomorrow. He lives in Shreveport, but he has a second apartment in Jackson. He has friends among the supernatural community there, the vampires, shifters, and Weres. Through him you can meet some of them, and their human employees.”
I was not completely in my head right now, but I felt like I’d understand all this when I played it back. So I nodded. His fingers stroked mine, over and over.
“This man is a Were,” Eric said carelessly, “so he is scum. But he is more reliable than some others, and he owes me a big personal favor.”
I absorbed that, nodded again. Eric’s long fingers seemed almost warm.
“He’ll take you out and about in the vampire community in Jackson, and you can pick brains there among human employees. I know it’s a long shot, but if there’s something to discover, if Russell Edgington did abduct Bill, you may pick up a hint. The man who tried to abduct you was from Jackson, going by the bills in his car, and he was a Were, as the wolf’s head on his vest indicates. I don’t know why they came after you. But I suspect it means Bill is alive, and they wanted to grab you to use as leverage over him.”
“Then I guess they should have abducted
Lorena,
” I said.
Eric’s eyes widened in appreciation.
“Maybe they already have her,” he said. “But maybe Bill has realized it is Lorena who betrayed him. He wouldn’t have been taken if she hadn’t revealed the secret he had told her.”
I mulled that over, nodded yet again.
“Another puzzle is why she happened to be there at all,” Eric said. “I think I would have known if she’d been a regular member of the Mississippi group. But I’ll be thinking about that in my spare time.” From his grim face, Eric had already put in considerable brain time on that question. “If this plan doesn’t work within about three days, Sookie, we may have to kidnap one of the Mississippi vampires in return. This would almost certainly lead to a war, and a war—even with Mississippi—would be costly in lives and money. And in the end, they would kill Bill anyway.”
Okay, the weight of the world was resting on my shoulders. Thanks, Eric. I needed more responsibility and pressure.
“But know this: If they have Bill—if he is still alive—we will get him back. And you will be together again, if that’s what you want.”
Big
if
.
“To answer your question: I am your friend, and that will last as long as I can be your friend without jeopardizing my own life. Or the future of my area.”
Well, that laid it on the line. I appreciated his honesty. “As long as it’s convenient for you, you mean,” I said calmly, which was both unfair and inaccurate. However, I thought it was odd that my characterization of his attitude actually seemed to bother him. “Let me ask you something, Eric.”
He raised his eyebrows to tell me he was waiting. His hands traveled up and down my arms, absently, as if he wasn’t thinking of what he was doing. The movement reminded me of a man warming his hands at a fire.
“If I’m understanding you, Bill was working on a project for the . . .” I felt a wild bubble of laughter rising, and I ruthlessly suppressed it. “For the queen of Louisiana,” I finished. “But you didn’t know about it. Is this right?”
Eric stared at me for a long moment, while he thought about what to tell me. “She told me she had work for Bill to do,” he said. “But not what it was, or why he had to be the one to do it, or when it would be complete.”
That would miff almost any leader, having his underling co-opted like that. Especially if the leader was kept in ignorance. “So, why isn’t this queen looking for Bill?” I asked, keeping my voice carefully neutral.
“She doesn’t know he’s gone.”
“Why is that?”
“We haven’t told her.”
Sooner or later he’d quit answering. “Why not?”
“She would punish us.”
“Why?” I was beginning to sound like a two-year-old.
“For letting something happen to Bill, when he was doing a special project for her.”
“What would that punishment be?”
“Oh, with her it’s difficult to tell.” He gave a choked laugh. “Something very unpleasant.”
Eric was even closer to me, his face almost touching my hair. He was inhaling, very delicately. Vampires rely on smell, and hearing, much more than sight, though their eyesight is extremely accurate. Eric had had my blood, so he could tell more about my emotions than a vampire who hadn’t. All bloodsuckers are students of the human emotional system, since the most successful predators know the habits of their prey.
Eric actually rubbed his cheek against mine. He was like a cat in his enjoyment of contact.
“Eric.” He’d given me more information than he knew.
“Mmm?”
“Really, what will the queen do to you if you can’t produce Bill on the date her project is due?”
My question got the desired result. Eric pulled away from me and looked down at me with eyes bluer than mine and harder than mine and colder than the Arctic waste.
“Sookie, you really don’t want to know,” he said. “Producing his work would be good enough. Bill’s actual presence would be a bonus.”
I returned his look with eyes almost as cold as his. “And what will I get in return for doing this for you?” I asked.
Eric managed to look both surprised and pleased. “If Pam hadn’t hinted to you about Bill, his safe return would have been enough and you would have jumped at the chance to help,” Eric reminded me.
“But now I know about Lorena.”
“And knowing, do you agree to do this for us?”
“Yes, on one condition.”
Eric looked wary. “What would that be?” he asked.
“If something happens to me, I want you to take her out.”
He gaped at me for at least a whole second before he roared with laughter. “I would have to pay a huge fine,” he said when he’d quit chortling. “And I’d have to accomplish it first. That’s easier said than done. She’s three hundred years old.”
“You’ve told me that what will happen to you if all this comes unraveled would be pretty horrible,” I reminded him.
“True.”
“You’ve told me you desperately need me to do this for you.”
“True.”
“That’s what I ask in return.”
“You might make a decent vampire, Sookie,” Eric said finally. “All right. Done. If anything happens to you, she’ll never fuck Bill again.”
“Oh, it’s not just that.”
“No?” Eric looked very skeptical, as well he might.
“It’s because she betrayed him.”
Eric’s hard blue eyes met mine. “Tell me this, Sookie: Would you ask this of me if she were a human?” His wide, thin-lipped mouth, most often amused, was in a serious straight line.
“If she were a human, I’d take care of it myself,” I said, and stood to show him to the door.