Sookie 09 Dead and Gone (20 page)

I moved into the living room and looked at him more closely. Though it was early, I had my second stab of anxiety for the day. “What’s up?” I asked. “You look like you’ve been fighting.”

He hesitated for a long moment, as if he was trying to pick among several items of news. “Breandan has retaliated for the death of Murry,” Niall said.

“What has he done?” I scrubbed my dry hands across my face.

“He caught Enda last night, and now she is dead,” he said. I could tell from his voice that her death had not been a quick one. “You didn’t meet her; she was very shy of humans.” He pushed back a long strand of his pale hair so blond it looked white.

“Breanden killed a fairy woman? There aren’t that many fairy women, right? So doing that . . . isn’t that extra awful?”

“It was intended to be,” Niall said. His voice was bleak.

For the first time, I noticed that my great-grandfather’s slacks were soaked with blood around the knees, which was probably why he hadn’t come closer to hug me.

“You need to get out of those clothes,” I said. “Please, Niall, go climb in the shower, and I’ll put your stuff in the washing machine.”

“I have to go,” he said, and I could tell my words hadn’t registered. “I came here to warn you in person, so you would take the situation very seriously. Powerful magic surrounds this house. I could appear here only because I’d been in here before. Is it true that the vampires and the Weres are looking out for you? You have extra protection; I can feel it.”

“I have a bodyguard night and day,” I lied, because he didn’t need to be worrying about me. He was hip-deep in alligators himself. “And you know that Amelia is a strong witch. Don’t worry about me.”

He stared at me, but I didn’t think he was seeing me at all. “I have to go,” he said abruptly. “I wanted to be sure of your well-being.”

“Okay . . . thanks a lot.” I was trying to think of an improvement on this limp response when Niall poofed right out of my living room.

I’d told Tray I was going to call Jason. I wasn’t sure how sincere I’d been about that, but now I knew I had to. The way I saw it, Alcide’s favor to me had expired; he’d asked Tray to help, and now Tray was out of commission in the course of duty. I sure wasn’t going to request that Alcide himself come guard me, and I wasn’t close to any of his pack members. I took a deep breath and called my brother.

“Jason,” I said when he answered the phone.

“Sis. What’s up?” He sounded oddly jazzed, as if he’d just experienced something exciting.

“Tray had to leave, and I think I need some protection today,” I said. There was a long silence. He didn’t rush into questioning me, which was strange. “I was hoping you could go around with me? What I plan on doing today,” I began, and then tried to figure out what that was. It was hard to have a good crisis when real life kept asking to be lived. “Well, I need to go to the library. I need to pick up a pair of pants at the dry cleaners.” I hadn’t checked the label before that particular purchase. “I have to work the day shift at Merlotte’s. I guess that’s it.”

“Okay,” Jason said. “Though those errands don’t sound exactly urgent.” There was a long pause. Suddenly he said, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said cautiously. “Should I not be?”

“The weirdest thing happened this morning. Mel slept at my place last night, since he was the worse for wear after he met me at the Bayou. So early this morning, there was a knock at the door. I answered it, and this guy was there, and he was, I don’t know, nuts or something. The strangest part was, this guy looked a lot like me.”

“Oh, no.” I sat on the stool abruptly.

“He wasn’t right, sis,” Jason said. “I don’t know what was wrong with him, but he wasn’t right. He just started talking when Mel answered the door, like we knew who he was. He was saying crazy stuff. Mel tried to get between him and me, and he threw Mel clear across the room and called him a killer. Mel might’ve broken his neck if he hadn’t landed on the couch.”

“Mel’s okay, then.”

“Yeah, he’s okay. Pretty mad, but you know . . .”

“Sure.” Mel’s feelings were not the most important issue here. “So what did he do next?”

“He said some shit about now that he was face-to-face with me he could see why my great-grandfather didn’t want me around, and crossbreeds should all die, but I was clearly blood of his blood, and he’d decided I should know what’s going on around me. He said I was ignorant. I didn’t understand a lot of it, and I still don’t get what he was. He wasn’t a vamp, and I know he wasn’t a shifter of any kind or I’d’ve smelled him.”

“You’re okay—that’s the big thing, right?” Had I been wrong all along about keeping Jason out of the fairy loop?

“Yeah,” he said, his voice abruptly going all cautious and wary. “You’re not going to tell me what this is all about, are you?”

“Come over here, and we’ll talk about it. Please, please, don’t open the door unless you know who’s there. This guy is bad, Jason, and he’s not picky about who he hurts. I think you and Mel were real lucky.”

“You got someone there with you?”

“Not since Tray left.”

“I’m your brother. I’ll come over if you need me,” Jason said with unexpected dignity.

“I really appreciate that,” I said.

I got two for the price of one. Mel came with Jason. This was awkward, because I had some family stuff to tell Jason, and I couldn’t with Mel around. With unexpected tact, Mel told Jason that he had to run home and get an ice pack for his shoulder, which was badly bruised. While Mel was gone, I sat Jason down on the other side of the kitchen table, and I said, “I got some things to tell you.”

“About Crystal?”

“No, I haven’t heard anything about that yet. This is about us. This is about Gran. You’re going to have a hard time believing this.” I’d given him fair warning. I remembered how upset I’d been when my great-grandfather had told me about how my half-fairy grandfather, Fintan, had met my grandmother, and how she’d ended up having two children with him, our dad and our aunt Linda.

Now Fintan was dead—murdered—and our grandmother was dead, and our father and his sister were dead. But we were living, and just a small part fairy, and that made us a target for our great-grandfather’s enemies.

“And one of those enemies,” I said after I’d told him our family history, “is our half-human great-uncle, Fintan’s brother, Dermot. He told Tray and Amelia that his name was Drake, I guess because it sounded more modern. Dermot looks like you, and he’s the one who showed up at your house. I don’t know what his deal is. He joined up with Breandan, Niall’s big enemy, even though he’s half-human himself and, therefore, exactly what Breandan hates. So when you said he was crazy, I guess there’s your explanation. He seems to want to connect with you, but he hates you, too.”

Jason sat staring at me. His face was completely vacant. His thoughts had gotten caught in a traffic jam. Finally he said, “You tell me he was trying to get Tray and Amelia to introduce you? And neither of them knew what he was?”

I nodded. There was some more silence.

“So why did he want to meet you? Did he want to kill you? Why’d he need to meet you first?”

Good question. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he just wanted to see what I was like. Maybe he doesn’t know what he really wants.” I couldn’t figure this out, and I wondered if Niall would come back to explain it to me. Probably not. He had a war on his hands, even if it was a war being fought mostly away from human view. “I don’t get it,” I said out loud. “Murry came right here to attack me, and he was all fairy. Why is Dermot, who’s on the same side, being all . . . indirect?”

“Murry?” Jason asked, and I closed my eyes. Shit.

“He was a fairy,” I said. “He tried to kill me. He’s not a problem now.”

Jason gave me an approving nod. “You go, Sookie,” he said. “Okay, let me see if I’m getting this straight. My great-grandfather didn’t want to meet me because I look a lot like Dermot, who’s my . . . great-uncle, right?”

“Right.”

“But Dermot apparently likes me a little better, because he actually came to my house and tried to talk to me.”

Trust Jason to interpret the situation in those terms. “Right,” I said.

Jason hopped to his feet and took a turn around the kitchen. “This is all the vampires’ fault,” he said. He glared at me.

“Why do you think so?” This was unexpected.

“If they hadn’t come out, none of this would be happening. Look at what’s happened since they went on TV. Look at how the world has changed. Now
we’re
out. Next, the fucking fairies. And the fae are bad news, Sookie; Calvin warned me about ’em. You think they’re all pretty and sweetness and light, but they’re not. He’s told me stories about them that would make your hair curl. Calvin’s dad knew a fairy or two. From what he’s said, it would be a good thing if they died out.”

I couldn’t decide if I was surprised or angry. “Why are you being so mean, Jason? I don’t need you arguing with me or saying bad things about Niall. You don’t know him. You don’t . . . Hey, you’re part fairy, remember!” I had an awful feeling that some of what he’d said was absolutely true, but it sure wasn’t the time to have this discussion.

Jason looked grim, every plane of his face tense. “I’m not claiming kin to any fairy,” he said. “He don’t want me; I don’t want him. And if I see that crazy half-and-half again, I’ll kill the son of a bitch.”

I don’t know what I would have said, but at that moment Mel came in without knocking, and we both turned to look at him.

“I’m sorry!” he said, obviously flustered and disturbed by Jason’s anger. He seemed, for a second, to think Jason had been talking about him. When neither of us gave him a guilty reaction, he relaxed. “Excuse me, Sookie. I forgot my manners.” He was carrying an ice bag in his hand, and he was moving a little slowly and painfully.

“I’m sorry you got hurt by Jason’s surprise visitor,” I said. You’re always supposed to put your company at ease. I hadn’t put a whole lot of thought into Mel, but right at that second I realized I would have been happier if Jason’s former BFF, Hoyt, had been here instead of the werepanther. It wasn’t that I disliked Mel, I thought. It was just that I didn’t know him very well, and I didn’t feel an automatic trust in him the way you feel about people from time to time. Mel was different. Even for a werepanther, he was hard to read, but that didn’t mean he was impossible.

After offering Mel something to drink, which was only polite, I asked Jason if he was going to stay the day, run around on my errands with me. I had serious doubts he would say yes. Jason was feeling rejected (by a fairy great-grandfather he’d never met and didn’t want to acknowledge), and that was a state of affairs Jason didn’t handle well.

“I’ll go around with you,” he said, unsmiling and stiff. “First, let me run over to the house and check out my rifle. I’ll need it, and it hasn’t been sighted in a coon’s age. Mel? You coming with me?” Jason simply wanted to be out of my presence to calm down. I could read it as easily as if he’d written it on the grocery list pad by the telephone.

Mel rose to go with Jason.

“Mel, what did you make of Jason’s visitor this morning?” I asked.

“Aside from the fact that he could throw me across the room and looked enough like Jason to make me turn to make sure your brother was coming out of his bedroom? Not much,” Mel said. Mel had managed to dress in his usual khakis and polo shirt, but the blue bruises on his arms kind of ruined his neat appearance. He shrugged on a jacket with great care.

“See you in a while, Sookie. Come around to get me,” Jason said. Of course, he’d want to ride in my car and burn up my gas, since we were running my errands. “In the meantime, you got my cell number.”

“Sure. I’ll see you in an hour or so.”

Since being alone hadn’t been a normal state of affairs for me lately, I would have actually enjoyed the feeling of having the house to myself if I hadn’t been worried that a supernatural killer was after me.

Nothing happened. I ate a bowl of cereal. Finally, I decided to risk taking a shower despite my
Psycho
memories. I made sure all the outside doors were locked, and I locked the bathroom door, too. I took the quickest shower on record.

Nobody had tried to kill me yet. I dried off, put on some makeup, and dressed for work.

When it was time to go, I stood on the back porch and eyeballed the distance between the steps and my car door, over and over. I figured I’d have to take ten steps. I unlocked the car with the keypad. I took a few deep breaths and unlocked the screen door. I pushed it open and fairly leaped off the porch, bypassing the steps entirely. In an undignified scramble, I yanked open the car door, slid inside, and slammed and locked the door. I looked around me.

Nothing moved.

I laughed a little breathlessly. Silly me!

Being so tense was making all the scary movies I’d ever seen pop into my head. I was thinking of
Jurassic Park
and dinosaurs—maybe my thought link was that fairies were the dinosaurs of the supernatural world—and I half expected a piece of goat to fall on my windshield.

That didn’t happen, either. Okay . . .

I inserted the key and turned it, and the motor turned over. I didn’t blow up. There was no Tyrannosaurus in my rearview mirror.

So far, so good. I felt better once I’d begun going slowly down the driveway through the woods, but I was sure keeping my eyes busy. I felt a compulsion to get in touch with someone, to let someone know where I was and what I was doing.

I whipped my cell phone out of my purse and called Amelia. When she answered, I said, “I’m driving over to Jason’s. Since Tray is so sick, Jason’s going around with me today. Listen, you know Tray was spelled by a fairy into drinking rotten vampire blood?”

“I’m at work here,” Amelia said, caution in her voice. “Yes, he called ten minutes ago, but he had to go throw up. Poor Tray. At least the house was okay.”

Amelia’s point was that her wards had held. Well, she had a right to be proud of that.

“You’re great,” I said.

“Thanks. Listen, I’m really worried about Tray. I tried calling him back after a few minutes, but he didn’t answer. I hope he’s just sleeping it off, but I’m going over there after I leave work. Why don’t you meet me there? We can figure out what to do about getting you some more security.”