“Dead things love you,” Dermot told me, and I made myself keep smiling.
“Eric the vampire? He says he does.”
“Other dead things, too. They’re pulling on you.”
That was a not-so-welcome revelation. Dermot was right. I’d been feeling Eric through our bond, as usual, but there were two other gray presences with me every moment after dark: Alexei and Appius Livius. It was a drain on me, and I hadn’t realized it until this moment.
“Tonight,” Dermot said, “you’ll receive visitors.”
So now he was a prophet. “Good ones?”
He shrugged. “That’s a matter of taste and expedience.”
“Hey, Uncle Dermot? Do you walk around this land very often?”
“Too scared of the other one,” he said. “But I try to watch you a little.”
I was figuring out if that was a good thing or a bad thing when he vanished. Poof! I saw a kind of blur and then nothing. His hands were on my shoulders, and then they weren’t. I assumed the tension of conversing with another person had gotten to Dermot.
Boy. That had been really, really weird.
I glanced around me, thinking I might see some other trace of his passage. He might even decide to return. But nothing happened. There wasn’t a sound except the prosaic growl of my stomach, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten lunch and that it was now suppertime. I went into the house on shaking legs and collapsed at the table. Conversation with a spy. Interview with an insane fairy. Oh, yes, phone Jason and tell him to be back on fairy watch. That was something I could do sitting down.
After that conversation, I remembered to carry in the newspapers when I got my legs to working again. While I baked a Marie Callender’s pot pie, I read the past two days’ papers.
Unfortunately, there was a lot of interest on the front page. There had been a gruesome murder in Shreveport, probably gang-related. The victim had been a young black man wearing gang colors, which was like a blinking arrow to the police, but he hadn’t been shot. He’d been stabbed multiple times, and then his throat had been slashed. Yuck. Sounded more personal than a gang killing to me. Then the next night the same thing had happened again, this time to a kid of nineteen who wore different gang colors. He’d died the same awful way. I shook my head over the stupidity of young men dying over what I considered nothing, and moved on to a story that I found electrifying and very worrisome.
The tension over the werewolf registration issue was rising. According to the newspapers, the Weres were the big controversy. The stories hardly mentioned the other two-natured, yet I knew at least one werefox, one werebat, two weretigers, a score of werepanthers, and a shapeshifter. Werewolves, the most numerous of the two-natured, were catching the brunt of the backlash. And they were sounding off about it, as they should have.
“Why should I register, as if I were an illegal alien or a dead citizen?” Scott Wacker, an army general, was quoted as saying. “My family has been American for six generations, all of us army people. My daughter’s in Iraq. What more do you want?”
The governor of one of the northwestern states said, “We need to know who’s a werewolf and who’s not. In the event of an accident, officers need to know, to avoid blood contamination and to aid in identification.”
I plunged my spoon into the crust to release some of the heat from the pot pie. I thought that over. Bullshit, I concluded.
“That’s bushwah,” General Wacker responded in the next paragraph. So Wacker and I had something in common. “For one thing, we change back to human form when we’re dead. Officers already glove up when they’re handling bodies. Identification is not going to be any more of a problem than with the one-natured. Why should it be?”
You go, Wacker.
According to the newspaper, the debate raged from the people in the streets (including some who weren’t simply people) to members of Congress, from military personnel to firefighters, from law experts to constitutional scholars.
Instead of thinking globally or nationally, I tried to evaluate the crowd at Merlotte’s since the announcement. Had revenue fallen off? Yes, there’d been a slight decrease at first, right after the bar patrons had watched Sam change into a dog and Tray become a wolf, but then people had started drinking as much as they had formerly.
So was this a created crisis, a nothing issue?
Not as much as I would have liked, I decided, having read a few more articles.
Some people really hated the idea that individuals they’d known all their lives had another side, a mysterious life unbeknownst (isn’t that a great word? It had been on my Word of the Day calendar the week before) to the general public. That was the impression I’d gotten before, and it seemed that still held true. No one was budging on that position; the Weres got angrier, and the public got more frightened. At least a very vocal part of the public.
There had been demonstrations and riots in Redding, California, and Lansing, Michigan. I wondered if there were going to be riots here or in Shreveport. I found that hard to believe and painful to picture. I looked through the kitchen window at the gathering dusk, as if I expected to see a crowd of villagers with torches marching to Merlotte’s.
It was a curiously empty evening. There wasn’t much to clean up after I’d eaten, my laundry was up to date, and there was nothing on television I wanted to watch. I checked my e-mail; no message from Judith Vardamon.
There was a message from Alcide. “Sookie, we’ve set the pack meeting for Monday night at eight at my house. We’ve been trying to find a shaman for the judging. I’ll see you and Jason then.” It had been nearly a week since we’d found Basim’s body in the woods, and this was the first I’d heard. The pack’s “day or two” had stretched into six. And that meant it had been a very long time since I’d heard from Eric.
I called Jason again and left voice mail on his cell phone. I tried not to worry about the pack meeting, but every time I’d been with the whole pack, something violent had happened.
I thought again about the dead man in the grave in the clearing. Who had put him there? Presumably, the killer had wanted Basim’s silence, but the body hadn’t been planted on my land by mistake.
I read for thirty minutes or so, and then it was full dark and I felt Eric’s presence, and then the lesser though undeniable company of the other two vampires. As soon as they woke, I felt tired. This made me so twitchy I broke my own resolution.
I knew that Eric realized I was unhappy and worried. It was impossible for him not to know that. Maybe he thought by keeping me away he was protecting me. Maybe he didn’t know that his maker and Alexei were both in my consciousness. I took a deep breath and called him. The phone rang, and I pressed it to my ear as though I were holding Eric himself. But I thought, and I wouldn’t have believed this possible a week ago, What if he doesn’t pick up?
The phone rang, and I held my breath. After the second ring, Eric answered. “The pack meeting has been set,” I blurted.
“Sookie,” he said. “Can you come here?”
On my drive to Shreveport, I wondered at least four times if I was doing the right thing. But I concluded that whether I was right or wrong (in running to see Eric when he asked me to) was simply a dead issue. We were both on the ends of the line stretched between us, a line spun from blood. It trumped how we felt about each other at any given moment. I knew he was tired and desperate. He knew I was angry, uneasy, hurt. I wondered, though. If I’d called him and said the same thing, would he have hopped into his car (or into the sky) and arrived on my doorstep?
They were all at Fangtasia, he’d said.
I was shocked to see how few cars were parked in front of the only vampire bar in Shreveport. Fangtasia was a huge tourist draw in a town that was boasting a tourist increase, and I’d expected it to be packed. There were almost as many cars parked in the employee parking at the back as there were at the main door. That had never happened before.