Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (226 page)

“Then let me ask you, since you’re not mad at me,” I said. “Why does everyone seem so in awe of Quinn?”

“You really don’t know, and you’ve got the tiger by his tail?” Russell looked happily intrigued. “I don’t have time to tell you the whole story, because I want to be with my husband-to-be, but I’ll tell you what, Miss Sookie, your man has made a lot of people a lot of money.”

“Thanks,” I said, a bit bewildered, “and best wishes to you and, ah, Mr. Crowe. I hope you’ll be very happy together.” Since shaking hands was not a vampire custom, I bowed and tried to sort of back away quickly while we were still on such good terms with each other.

Rasul popped up at my elbow. He smiled when I jumped. Those vamps. Gotta love their sense of humor.

I’d only seen Rasul in SWAT gear, and he’d looked good in that. Tonight he was wearing another uniform, but it was also pretty military looking, in a kind of Cossack way. He wore a long-sleeved tunic and tailored pants in a deep plum with black trim and bright brass buttons. Rasul was deeply brown, quite naturally, and had the large, dark liquid eyes and black hair of someone from the Middle East.

“I knew you were supposed to be here, so it’s nice to run into you,” I said.

“She sent Carla and me ahead of time,” he said lightly in his exotic accent. “You are looking lovelier than ever, Sookie. How are you enjoying the summit?”

I ignored his pleasantries. “What’s with the uniform?”

“If you mean, whose uniform is it, it’s the new house uniform of our queen,” he said. “We wear this instead of the armor when we’re not out on the streets. Nice, huh?”

“Oh, you’re stylin’,” I said, and he laughed.

“Are you going to the ceremony?” he said.

“Yeah, sure. I’ve never seen a vampire wedding. Listen, Rasul, I’m sorry about Chester and Melanie.” They’d been on guard duty with Rasul in New Orleans.

For a second, all the humor left the vampire’s face. “Yes,” he said after a moment of stiff silence. “Instead of my comrades, now I have the Formerly Furred.” Jake Purifoy was approaching us, and he was wearing the same uniform as Rasul. He looked lonely. He hadn’t been a vampire long enough to maintain the calm face that seemed to be second nature to the undead.

“Hi, Jake,” I said.

“Hi, Sookie,” he said, sounding forlorn and hopeful.

Rasul bowed to both of us and set off in another direction. I was stuck with Jake. This was too much like grade school for my taste. Jake was the kid who’d come to school wearing the wrong clothes and packing a weird lunch. Being a combo vamp-Were had ruined his chances with either crowd. It was like trying to be a Goth jock.

“Have you had a chance to talk to Quinn yet?” I asked for lack of anything better to say. Jake had been Quinn’s employee before his change had effectively put him out of a job.

“I said hello in passing,” Jake said. “It’s just not fair.”

“What?”

“That he should be accepted no matter what he’s done, and I should be ostracized.”

I knew what
ostracized
meant, because it had been on my Word of the Day calendar. But my brain was just snagging on that word because the bigger meaning of Jake’s comment was affecting my equilibrium. “No matter what he’s done?” I asked. “What would that mean?”

“Well, of course, you know about Quinn,” Jake said, and I thought I might jump on his back and beat him around the head with something heavy.

“The wedding begins!” came Quinn’s magnified voice, and the crowd began streaming into the double doors he’d indicated earlier. Jake and I streamed right along with them. Quinn’s bouncy-boobed assistant was standing just inside the doors, passing out little net bags of potpourri. Some were tied with blue and gold ribbon, some with blue and red.

“Why the different colors?” the whore asked Quinn’s assistant. I appreciated her asking, because it meant I didn’t have to.

“Red and blue from the Mississippi flag, blue and gold from the Indiana,” the woman said with an automatic smile. She still had it pasted on her face when she handed me a red-and-blue tied bag, though it faded in an almost comical way when she realized who I was.

Jake and I worked our way to a good spot a bit to the right of center. The stage was bare except for a few props, and there were no chairs. They weren’t expecting this to take very long, apparently. “Answer me,” I hissed. “About Quinn.”

“After the wedding,” he said, trying not to smile. It had been a few months since Jake had had the upper hand on anyone, and he couldn’t hide the fact that he was enjoying it. He glanced behind us, and his eyes widened. I looked in that direction to see that the opposite end of the room was set up as a buffet, though the main feature of the buffet was not food but blood. To my disgust, there were about twenty men and women standing in a line beside the synthetic blood fountain, and they all had name tags that read simply, “Willing Donor.” I about gagged. Could that be legal? But they were all free and unrestrained and could walk out if they chose, and most of them looked pretty eager to begin their donation. I did a quick scan of their brains. Yep, willing.

I turned to the platform, only eighteen inches high, which Mississippi and Indiana had just mounted. They’d put on elaborate costumes, which I remembered seeing before in a photo album at the shop of a photographer who specialized in recording supernatural rituals. At least these were easy to put on. Russell was wearing a sort of heavy brocade, open-fronted robe that fit over his regular clothes. It was a splendid garment of gleaming gold cloth worked in a pattern of blue and scarlet. Bart, King of Indiana, was wearing a similar robe in a copper brown color, embroidered with a design in green and gold.

“Their formal robes,” Rasul murmured. Once again, he’d drifted to my side without me noticing. I jumped and saw a little smile twitch the corners of his generous mouth. To my left, Jake sidled a little closer to me, as if he were trying to hide from Rasul by concealing himself behind my body.

But I was more interested in this ceremony than I was in vampire one-upmanship. A giant ankh was the prop at the center of the group onstage. Off to one side, there was a table bearing two thick sheaves of paper with two plumed pens arranged between them. A female vampire was standing behind the table, and she was wearing a business suit with a knee-length skirt. Mr. Cataliades stood behind her, looking benevolent, his hands clasping each other across his belly.

Standing on the opposite side of the stage from the table, Quinn, my honey (whose background I was determined to learn pretty shortly), was still in his Aladdin’s genie outfit. He waited until the crowd’s murmur died to nothing and then he made a great gesture to stage right. A figure came up the steps and onto the platform. He was wearing a cloak of black velvet, and it was hooded. The hood was drawn well forward. The ankh symbol was embroidered in gold on the shoulders of the cloak. The figure took its position between Mississippi and Indiana, its back to the ankh, and raised its arms.

“The ceremony begins,” Quinn said. “Let all be silent and witness this joining.”

When someone tells a vampire to be quiet, you can be sure the silence is absolute. Vampires don’t have to fidget, sigh, sneeze, cough, or blow their nose like people do. I felt noisy just breathing.

The cloaked figure’s hood fell back. I sighed. Eric. His wheat-colored hair looked beautiful against the black of the cloak, and his face was solemn and commanding, which was what you want in an officiant.

“We are here to witness the joining of two kings,” he said, and every word carried to the corners of the room. “Russell and Bart have agreed, both verbally and by written covenant, to ally their states for a hundred years. For a hundred years, they may not marry any other. They may not form an alliance with any other, unless that alliance is mutually agreed and witnessed. Each must pay the other a conjugal visit at least once a year. The welfare of Russell’s kingdom shall come second only to his own in Bart’s sight, and the welfare of Bart’s kingdom shall come second only to his own in Russell’s sight. Russell Edgington, King of Mississippi, do you agree to this covenant?”

“Yes, I do,” Russell said clearly. He held out his hand to Bart.

“Bartlett Crowe, King of Indiana, do you agree to this covenant?”

“I do,” Bart said, and took Russell’s hand. Awwww.

Then Quinn stepped forward and knelt, holding a goblet under the joined hands, and Eric whipped out a knife and cut the two wrists with two movements too quick to separate.

Oh,
ick.
As the two kings bled into the chalice, I chided myself. I might have known that a vampire ceremony would include a blood exchange.

Sure enough, when the wounds closed, Russell took a sip from the chalice, and then handed it to Bart, who drained it dry. Then they kissed, Bart holding the smaller man tenderly. And then they kissed some more. Evidently the mingled blood was a real turn-on.

I caught Jake’s eye.
Get a room
, he mouthed, and I looked down to hide my smile.

Finally, the two kings moved on to the next step, a ceremonious signing of the contract they’d agreed upon. The business-suit woman turned out to be a vampire lawyer from Illinois, since a lawyer from another state had to draw up the contract. Mr. Cataliades had been a neutral lawyer, too, and he signed the documents after the kings and the vampire lawyer.

Eric stood in his black-and-gold glory while all this was done, and once the pens were back on their elaborate stands, he said, “The marriage is sacred for one hundred years!” and a cheer went up. Vampires aren’t big on cheering, either, so it was mostly the humans and the other supes in the crowd who did the hurrahing, but the vampires all made an appreciative murmur—not as good, but the best they could do, I guess.

I sure wanted to find out more about how Eric had qualified as a priest, or whatever they called the officiant, but first I was going to make Jake tell me about Quinn. He was trying to wriggle away in the crowd, but I caught up with him pretty quick. He wasn’t a good enough vampire yet to get away from me.

“Spill,” I said, and he tried to act like he didn’t know what I was talking about, but he saw from my face I wasn’t buying it.

So, while the crowd eddied around us, trying not to speed toward the open bar, I waited for Quinn’s story.

“I can’t believe he hasn’t told you this himself,” Jake said, and I was tempted to slap him upside the head.

I glared at him to let him know I was
waiting.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I heard all this when I was still a Were. Quinn is like a rock star in the shifter world, you know. He’s one of the last weretigers, and he’s one of the most ferocious.”

I nodded. So far, that paralleled my knowledge of Quinn.

“Quinn’s mom was captured one full moon when she changed. A bunch of hunters were out camping, set up a trap because they wanted a bear for their illegal dogfights. Something new to bet on, you know? A pack of dogs versus a bear. This was somewhere in Colorado, and snow was on the ground. His mom was out on her own, and somehow she fell into the trap, didn’t sense it.”

“Where was his dad?”

“He had died when Quinn was little. Quinn was about fifteen when this happened.”

I had a feeling worse was coming, and I was right.

“He changed, of course, the same night, soon as he found she was missing. He tracked them to the camp. His mom had turned back into a woman under the stress of the capture, and one of them was raping her.” Jake took a deep breath. “Quinn killed them all.”

I looked down at the floor. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“The campsite had to be cleaned up. There wasn’t a pack around to step in—course, tigers don’t hang in packs—and his mother was hurt bad and in shock, so Quinn went to the local vampire nest. They agreed to do the job, if he’d be indebted to them for three years.” Jake shrugged. “He agreed.”

“What exactly did he agree to do?” I asked.

“To fight in the pits for them. For three years or until he died, whichever came first.”

I began to feel cold fingers moving up my spine, and this time it wasn’t creepy Andre . . . it was just fear. “The pits?” I said, but if he hadn’t had vampire hearing, he wouldn’t have been able to make my words out.

“There’s a lot of bets placed on pit fighting,” Jake said. “It’s like the dogfights the hunters wanted the bear for. Humans aren’t the only ones who like to watch animals kill each other. Some vamps love it. So do some other supes.”

My lips curled in disgust. I felt almost nauseated.

Jake was looking at me, troubled by my reaction, but also giving me time to understand the sad story was not at an end. “Obviously Quinn survived his three years,” Jake said. “He’s one of the few who’ve lived that long.” He looked at me sideways. “He kept winning and winning. He was one of the most savage fighters anyone’s ever seen. He fought bears, lions, you name it.”

“Aren’t they all really rare?” I asked.

“Yeah, they are, but I guess even rare Were creatures need money,” Jake said with a toss of his head. “And you can make big bucks pit fighting, when you’ve earned enough to bet on yourself.”

“Why did he stop?” I asked. I regretted more than I could say that I had been curious about Quinn. I should have waited until he volunteered all this. He would have, I hoped. Jake caught a human servant walking by and snagged a glass of synthetic blood off the tray. He drained it in one gulp.

“His three years ended, and he had to take care of his sister.”

“Sister?”

“Yeah, his mom got pregnant that night, and the result was the dyed blonde who gave us the potpourri bags at the door. Frannie gets into trouble from time to time, and Quinn’s mother can’t handle her, so she sends her to stay with Quinn for a while. Frannie turned up here last night.”

I’d had as much as I could stomach. I turned in one quick movement and walked away from Jake. And to his credit, he didn’t try to stop me.