Cold all over.
Bill would be hungry. Really, really hungry. Crazy hungry.
And here I was—fast food.
Would he know who I was? Would he realize it was me, in time to stop?
It hurt even worse to think that he might not care enough anymore—care enough about me—to stop. He might just keep sucking and sucking, until I was drained dry. After all, he’d had an affair with Lorena. He’d seen me kill her, right in front of his eyes. Granted, she’d betrayed and tortured him, and that should have doused his ardor, right there. But aren’t relationships crazy anyway?
Even my grandmother would have said, “Oh,
shit
.”
Okay. I had stay calm. I had to breathe shallow and slow to save air. And I had to rearrange our bodies, so I could be more comfortable. I was relieved this was the biggest trunk I’d ever seen, because that made such a maneuver possible. Bill was limp—well, he was dead, of course. So I could sort of shove him without worrying too much about the consequences. The trunk was cold, too, and I tried to unwrap Bill a little bit so I could share the blanket.
The trunk was also quite dark. I could write the car designer a letter, and let him know I could vouch for its light-tightness, if that was how you’d put it. If I got out of here alive, that is. I felt the shape of the two bottles of blood. Maybe Bill would be content with that?
Suddenly, I remembered an article I’d read in a news magazine while I was waiting in the dentist’s office. It was about a woman who’d been taken hostage and forced into the trunk of her own car, and she’d been campaigning ever since to have inside latches installed in trunks so any captive could release herself. I wondered if she’d influenced the people who made Lincolns. I felt all around the trunk, at least the parts I could reach, and I did feel a latch release, maybe; there was a place where wires were sticking into the trunk. But whatever handle they’d been attached to had been clipped off.
I tried pulling, I tried yanking to the left or right. Damn it, this just wasn’t right. I almost went nuts, there in that trunk. The means of escape was in there with me, and I couldn’t make it work. My fingertips went over and over the wires, but to no purpose.
The mechanism had been disabled.
I tried real hard to figure out how that could have happened. I am ashamed to confess, I wondered if somehow Eric knew I’d be shut in the trunk, and this was his way of saying, “That’s what you get for preferring Bill.” But I just couldn’t believe that. Eric sure had some big blank moral blind spots, but I didn’t think he’d do that to me. After all, he hadn’t reached his stated goal of having me, which was the nicest way I could put it to myself.
Since I had nothing else to do but think, which didn’t take up extra oxygen, as far as I knew, I considered the car’s previous owner. It occurred to me that Eric’s friend had pointed out a car that would be easy to steal; a car belonging to someone who was sure to be out late at night, someone who could afford a fine car, someone whose trunk would hold the litter of cigarette papers, powder, and Baggies.
Eric had liberated the Lincoln from a drug dealer, I was willing to bet. And that drug dealer had disabled the inner trunk release for reasons I didn’t even want to think about too closely.
Oh, give me a break, I thought indignantly. (It was easy just then to forget the many breaks I’d had during the day.) Unless I got a final break, and got out of this trunk before Bill awoke, none of the others would exactly count.
It was a Sunday, and very close to Christmas, so the garage was silent. Maybe some people had gone home for the holidays, and the legislators had gone home to their constituency, and the other people were busy doing . . . Christmas, Sunday stuff. I heard one car leave while I lay there, and then I heard voices after a time; two people getting off the elevator. I screamed, and banged on the trunk lid, but the sound was swallowed up in the starting of a big engine. I quieted immediately, frightened of using more air than I could afford.
I’ll tell you, time spent in the nearly pitch-black dark, in a confined space, waiting for something to happen—that’s pretty awful time. I didn’t have a watch on; I would have had to have one with those hands that light up, anyway. I never fell asleep, but I drifted into an odd state of suspension. This was mostly due to the cold, I expect. Even with the quilted jacket and the blanket, it was very cold in the trunk. Still, cold, unmoving, dark, silent. My mind drifted.
Then I was terrified.
Bill was moving. He stirred, made a pain noise. Then his body seemed to go tense. I knew he had smelled me.
“Bill,” I said hoarsely, my lips almost too stiff with cold to move. “Bill, it’s me, Sookie. Bill, are you okay? There’s some bottled blood in here. Drink it
now
.”
He struck.
In his hunger, he made no attempt to spare me anything, and it hurt like the six shades of hell.
“Bill, it’s me,” I said, starting to cry. “Bill, it’s me. Don’t do this, honey. Bill, it’s Sookie. There’s TrueBlood in here.”
But he didn’t stop. I kept talking, and he kept sucking, and I was becoming even colder, and very weak. His arms were clamping me to him, and struggling was no use, it would only excite him more. His leg was slung over my legs.
“Bill,” I whispered, thinking it was already maybe too late. With the little strength I had left, I pinched his ear with the fingers of my right hand. “Please listen, Bill.”
“Ow,” he said. His voice sounded rough; his throat was sore. He had stopped taking blood. Now another need was on him, one closely related to feeding. His hands pulled down my sweatpants, and after a lot of fumbling and rearranging and contorting, he entered me with no preparation at all. I screamed, and he clapped a hand over my mouth. I was crying, sobbing, and my nose was all stopped up, and I needed to breathe through my mouth. All restraint left me and I began fighting like a wildcat. I bit and scratched and kicked, not caring about the air supply, not caring that I would enrage him. I just had to have air.
After a few seconds, his hand fell away. And he stopped moving. I drew air in with a deep, shuddering gasp. I was crying in earnest, one sob after another.
“Sookie?” Bill said uncertainly. “Sookie?”
I couldn’t answer.
“It’s you,” he said, his voice hoarse and wondering. “It’s you. You were really there in that room?”
I tried to gather myself, but I felt very fuzzy and I was afraid I was going to faint. Finally, I was able to say, “Bill,” in a whisper.
“It is you. Are you all right?”
“No,” I said almost apologetically. After all, it was Bill who’d been held prisoner and tortured.
“Did I . . .” He paused, and seemed to brace himself. “Have I taken more blood than I should?”
I couldn’t answer. I laid my head on his arm. It seemed too much trouble to speak.
“I seem to be having sex with you in a closet,” Bill said in a subdued voice. “Did you, ah, volunteer?”
I turned my head from side to side, then let it loll on his arm again.
“Oh, no,” he whispered. “Oh, no.” He pulled out of me and fumbled around a lot for the second time. He was putting me back to rights; himself, too, I guess. His hands patted our surroundings. “Car trunk,” he muttered.
“I need air,” I said, in a voice almost too soft to hear.
“Why didn’t you say so?” Bill punched a hole in the trunk. He
was
stronger. Good for him.
Cold air rushed in and I sucked it deep. Beautiful, beautiful oxygen.
“Where are we?” he asked, after a moment.
“Parking garage,” I gasped. “Apartment building. Jackson.” I was so weak, I just wanted to let go and float away.
“Why?”
I tried to gather enough energy to answer him. “Alcide lives here,” I managed to mutter, eventually.
“Alcide who? What are we supposed to do now?”
“Eric’s . . . coming. Drink the bottled blood.”
“Sookie? Are you all right?”
I couldn’t answer. If I could have, I might have said, “Why do you care? You were going to leave me anyway.” I might have said, “I forgive you,” though that doesn’t seem real likely. Maybe I would have just told him that I’d missed him, and that his secret was still safe with me; faithful unto death, that was Sookie Stackhouse.
I heard him open a bottle.
As I was drifting off in a boat down a current that seemed to be moving ever faster, I realized that Bill had never revealed my name. I knew they had tried to find it out, to kidnap me and bring me to be tortured in front of him for extra leverage. And he hadn’t told.
The trunk opened with a noise of tearing metal.
Eric stood outlined by the fluorescent lights of the garage. They’d come on when it got dark. “What are you two doing in here?” he asked.
But the current carried me away before I could answer.
“
S
HE’S COMING AROUND,” Eric observed. “Maybe that was enough blood.” My head buzzed for a minute, went silent again.
“She really is,” he was saying next, and my eyes flickered open to register three anxious male faces hovering above me: Eric’s, Alcide’s, and Bill’s. Somehow, the sight made me want to laugh. So many men at home were scared of me, or didn’t want to think about me, and here were the three men in the world who wanted to have sex with me, or who at least had thought about it seriously; all crowding around the bed. I giggled, actually giggled, for the first time in maybe ten years. “The Three Musketeers,” I said.
“Is she hallucinating?” Eric asked.
“I think she’s laughing at us,” Alcide said. He didn’t sound unhappy about that. He put an empty TrueBlood bottle on the vanity table behind him. There was a large pitcher beside it, and a glass.
Bill’s cool fingers laced with mine. “Sookie,” he said, in that quiet voice that always sent shivers down my spine. I tried to focus on his face. He was sitting on the bed to my right.
He looked better. The deepest cuts were scars on his face, and the bruises were fading.
“They said, was I coming back for the crucifixion?” I told him.
“Who said that to you?” He bent over me, his face intent, dark eyes wide.
“Guards at the gate.”
“The guards at the gates of the mansion asked you if you were coming back for a crucifixion tonight? This night?”
“Yes.”
“Whose?”
“Don’t know.”
“I would have expected you to say, ‘Where am I? What happened to me?’ ” Eric said. “Not ask whose crucifixion would be taking place—perhaps is taking place,” he corrected himself, glancing at the clock by the bed.
“Maybe they meant mine?” Bill looked a little stunned by the idea. “Maybe they decided to kill me tonight?”
“Or perhaps they caught the fanatic who tried to stake Betty Joe?” Eric suggested. “He would be a prime candidate for crucifixion.”
I thought it over, as much as I was able to reason through the weariness that kept threatening to overwhelm me. “Not the picture I got,” I whispered. My neck was very, very sore.
“You were able to read something from the Weres?” Eric asked.
I nodded. “I think they meant Bubba,” I whispered, and everyone in the room froze.
“That cretin,” Eric said savagely, after he’d had time to process that. “They caught him?”
“Think so.” That was the impression I’d gotten.
“We’ll have to retrieve him,” Bill said. “If he’s still alive.”
It was very brave for Bill to say he would go back in that compound. I would never have said that, if I’d been him.
The silence that had fallen was distinctly uneasy.
“Eric?” Bill’s dark eyebrows arched; he was waiting for a comment.
Eric looked royally angry. “I guess you are right. We have the responsibility of him. I can’t believe his home state is willing to execute him! Where is their loyalty?”
“And you?” Bill’s voice was considerably cooler as he asked Alcide.
Alcide’s warmth filled the room. So did the confused tangle of his thoughts. He’d spent part of last night with Debbie, all right.
“I don’t see how I can,” Alcide said desperately. “My business, my father’s, depends on my being able to come here often. And if I’m on the outs with Russell and his crew, that would be almost impossible. It’s going to be difficult enough when they realize Sookie must be the one who stole their prisoner.”
“And killed Lorena,” I added.
Another pregnant silence.
Eric began to grin. “You offed Lorena?” He had a good grasp of the vernacular, for a very old vampire.
It was hard to interpret Bill’s expression. “Sookie staked her,” he said. “It was a fair kill.”
“She killed Lorena in a fight?” Eric’s grin grew even broader. He was as proud as if he’d heard his firstborn reciting Shakespeare.
“Very
short
fight,” I said, not wanting to take any credit that was not due me. If you could term it credit.
“Sookie killed a vampire,” Alcide said, as if that raised me in his evaluation, too. The two vampires in the room scowled.
Alcide poured and handed me a big glass of water. I drank it, slowly and painfully. I felt appreciably better after a minute or two.
“Back to the original subject,” Eric said, giving me another meaningful look to show me he had more to say about the killing of Lorena. “If Sookie has not been pegged as having helped Bill escape, she is the best choice to get us back on the grounds without setting off alarms. They might not be expecting her, but they won’t turn her away, either, I’m sure. Especially if she says she has a message for Russell from the queen of Louisiana, or if she says she has something she wants to return to Russell . . .” He shrugged, as if to say surely we could make up a good story.
I didn’t want to go back in there. I thought of poor Bubba, and tried to worry about his fate—which he might have already met—but I was just too weak to worry about it.