“This is Eric,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind me bringing a friend?”
“Oh, the more the merrier,” she said with undoubted sincerity. Her eyes never rose to Eric’s face. “Eric, what can I get you to drink?”
“Blood?” Eric asked hopefully.
“Yeah, I think I’ve got some O here,” she said, unable to tear her gaze away from the Lycra. “Sometimes we . . . pretend.” She raised her eyebrows significantly, and kind of leered at Eric.
“No need to pretend anymore,” he said, giving her back look for look. On his way to join her at the refrigerator, he managed to stroke Eggs’s shoulder, and Eggs’s face lit up.
Oh. Well, I’d known I’d learn some things. Tara, beside him, was sulking, her dark brows drawn down over dark eyes. Tara was wearing a bra and panties of shrieking red, and she looked pretty good. Her toenails and fingernails were painted so they matched, and so did her lipstick. She’d come prepared. I met her eyes, and she looked away. It didn’t take a mind reader to recognize shame.
Mike Spencer and Cleo Hardaway were on a dilapidated couch against the left-hand wall. The whole cottage, basically one large room with a sink and stove against the right-hand wall and a walled-in bathroom in the far corner, was furnished in cast-offs, because in Bon Temps that was what you did with your old furniture. However, most lake cabins would not have featured such a thick soft rug and such a lot of pillows tossed around at random, and there would not have been such thick shades drawn at all the windows. Plus, the knickknacks strewn around on that soft rug were simply nasty. I didn’t even know what some of them were.
But I pasted a cheerful smile on my face, and hugged Cleo Hardaway, as I usually did when I saw her. Granted, she had always been wearing more clothes when she ran the high school cafeteria. But panties were more than Mike was wearing, which was not a stitch.
Well, I’d known it would be bad, but I guess you just can’t prepare yourself for some sights. Cleo’s huge milk-chocolate brown boobs were glistening with some kind of oil, and Mike’s private parts were equally shiny. I didn’t even want to think about that.
Mike tried to grab my hand, probably to assist with the oil, but I slithered away and edged over to Eggs and Tara.
“I sure never thought you’d come,” Tara said. She was smiling, too, but not real happily. In fact, she looked pretty damn miserable. Maybe the fact that Tom Hardaway was kneeling in front of her smooching up the inside of her leg had something to do with that. Maybe it was Eggs’s obvious interest in Eric. I tried to meet Tara’s eyes, but I felt sick.
I’d only been here five minutes, but I was willing to bet this was the longest five minutes of my life.
“Do you do this real often?” I asked Tara, absurdly. Eggs, his eyes on Eric’s bottom while Eric stood talking at the refrigerator with Jan, began fumbling with the button on my shorts. Eggs had been drinking again. I could smell it. His eyes were glassy and his jaw was slack. “Your friend is really big,” he said, as if his mouth were watering, and maybe it was.
“Lots bigger than Lafayette,” I whispered, and his gaze jerked up to meet mine. “I figured he’d be welcome.”
“Oh, yes,” Eggs said, deciding not to confront my statement. “Yes, Eric’s . . . very large. It’s good to have some diversity.”
“This is as rainbow as Bon Temps gets,” I said, trying hard not to sound perky. I endured Eggs’s continued struggle with the button. This had been a big mistake. Eggs was just thinking about Eric’s butt. And other things about Eric.
Speaking of the devil, he snugged up behind me and ran his arms around me, pulling me to him and removing me from Eggs’s clumsy fingers. I leaned back into Eric, really glad he was there. I realized that was because Iexpected Eric to misbehave. But seeing people you’d known all your life act like this, well, it was deeply disgusting. I wasn’t too sure I could keep my face from showing this, so I wiggled against Eric, and when he made a happy sound, I turned in his arms to face him. I put my arms up around his neck and raised my face. He happily complied with my silent suggestion. With my face concealed, my mind was free to roam. I opened myself up mentally, just as Eric parted my lips with his tongue, so I felt completely unguarded. There were some strong “senders” in that room, and I no longer felt like myself, but like a pipeline for other people’s overwhelming needs.
I could taste the flavor of Eggs’s thoughts. He was remembering Lafayette, thin brown body, talented fingers, and heavily made up eyes. He was remembering Lafayette’s whispered suggestions. Then he was choking those happy memories off with more unpleasant ones, Lafayette protesting violently, shrilly . . .
“Sookie,” Eric said in my ear, so low that I don’t think another person in the room could’ve heard him. “Sookie, relax. I have you.”
I made my hand stroke his neck. I found that someone else was behind Eric, sort of making out with him from behind.
Jan’s hand reached around Eric and began rubbing my rear. Since she was touching me, her thoughts were absolutely clear; she was an exceptional “sender.” I flicked through her mind like the pages of a book, and read nothing of interest. She was only thinking of Eric’s anatomy, and worrying about her own fascination with Cleo’s chest. Nothing there for me.
I reached in another direction, wormed into the head of Mike Spencer, found the nasty tangle I’d expected, found that as he rolled Cleo’s breasts in his hands he was seeing other brown flesh, limp and lifeless. His own flesh rose as he remembered this. Through his memories I saw Jan asleep on the lumpy couch, Lafayette’s protest that if they didn’t stop hurting him he would tell everyone what he’d done and with whom, and then Mike’s fists descending, Tom Hardaway kneeling on the thin dark chest . . .
I had to get out of here. I couldn’t bear it, even if I hadn’t just learned what I needed to know. I didn’t see how Portia could have endured it, either, especially since she would have had to stay to learn anything, not having the “gift” I had.
I felt Jan’s hand massaging my ass. This was the most joyless excuse for sex I had ever seen: sex separated from mind and spirit, from love or affection. Even simple liking.
According to my four-times-married friend Arlene, men had no problem with this. Evidently, some women didn’t either.
“I have to get out,” I breathed into Eric’s mouth. I knew he could hear me.
“Go along with me,” he replied, and it was almost as if I was hearing him in my head.
He lifted me and slung me over his shoulder. My hair trailed down almost to the middle of his thigh.
“We’re going outside for a minute,” he told Jan, and I heard a big smacking noise. He’d given her a kiss.
“Can I come, too?” she asked, in a breathless Marlene Dietrich voice. It was lucky my face wasn’t showing.
“Give us a minute. Sookie is still a little shy,” Eric said in a voice as full of promise as a tub of a new flavor of ice cream.
“Warm her up good,” Mike Spencer said in a muffled voice. “We all want to see our Sookie fired up.”
“She will be hot,” Eric promised.
“Hot damn,” said Tom Hardaway, from between Tara’s legs.
Then, bless Eric, we were out the door and he laid me out on the hood of the Corvette. He lay on top of me, but most of his weight was supported by his hands resting on the hood on either side of my shoulders.
He was looking down at me, his face clamped down like a ship’s deck during a storm. His fangs were out. His eyes were wide. Since the whites were so purely white, I could see them. It was too dark to see the blue of his eyes, even if I’d wanted to.
I didn’t want. “That was . . .” I began, and had to stop. I took a deep breath. “You can call me a goody two-shoes if you want to, and I wouldn’t blame you, after all this was my idea. But you know what I think? I think that’s awful. Do men really like that? Do women, for that matter? Is it fun to have sex with someone you don’t even like?”
“Do you like me, Sookie?” Eric asked. He res
ted more heavily on me and moved a little.
Uh-oh. “Eric, remember why we’re here?”
“They’re watching.”
“Even if they are, remember?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“So we need to go.”
“Do you have any evidence? Do you know what you wanted to find out?”
“I don’t have any more evidence than I had before tonight, not evidence you can hand out in court.” I made myself put my arms around his ribs. “But I know who did it. It was Mike, Tom, and maybe Cleo.”
“This is interesting,” Eric said, with a complete lack of sincerity. His tongue flicked into my ear. I happen to particularly like that, and I could feel my breathing speed up. Maybe I wasn’t as immune to uninvolved sex as I’d thought. But then, I liked Eric, when I wasn’t afraid of him.
“No, I just hate this,” I said, reaching some inner conclusion. “I don’t like any part of this.” I shoved Eric hard, though it didn’t make a bit of difference. “Eric, you listen to me. I’ve done everything for Lafayette and Andy Bellefleur I can, though it’s precious little. He’ll just have to go from here on the little snatches I caught. He’s a cop. He can find court evidence. I’m not selfless enough to go any further with this.”
“Sookie,” Eric said. I didn’t think he’d heard a word. “Yield to me.”
Well, that was pretty direct.
“No,” I said, in the most definite voice I could summon. “No.”
“I will protect you from Bill.”
“You’re the one that’s gonna need protection!” When I reflected on that sentence, I was not proud of it.
“You think Bill is stronger than me?”
“I am not having this conversation.” Then I proceeded to have it. “Eric, I appreciate your offering to help me, and I appreciate your willingness to come to an awful place like this.”
“Believe me, Sookie, this little gathering of trash is nothing, nothing, compared to some of the places I have been.”
And I believed him utterly. “Okay, but it’s awful to me. Now, I realize that I should’ve known this would, ah, rouse your expectations, but you know I did not come out here tonight to have sex with anyone. Bill is my boyfriend.” Though the wordsboyfriend andBill sounded ludicrous in the same sentence, “boyfriend” was Bill’s function in my world, anyway.
“I am glad to hear it,” said a cool, familiar voice. “This scene would make me wonder, otherwise.”
Oh, great.
Eric rose up off of me, and I scrambled off the hood of the car and stumbled in the direction of Bill’s voice.
“Sookie,” he said, when I drew near, “it’s getting to where I just can’t let you go anywhere alone.”
As far as I could tell in the poor lighting, he didn’t look very glad to see me. But I couldn’t blame him for that. “I sure made a big mistake,” I said, from the bottom of my heart. I hugged him.
“You smell like Eric,” he said into my hair. Well, hell, I was forever smelling like other men to Bill. I felt a flood of misery and shame, and I realized things were about to happen.
But what happened was not what I expected.
Andy Bellefleur stepped out of the bushes with a gun in his hand. His clothes looked torn and stained, and the gun looked huge.
“Sookie, step away from the vampire,” he said.
“No.” I wrapped myself around Bill. I didn’t know if I was protecting him or he was protecting me. But if Andy wanted us separated, I wanted us joined.
There was a sudden surge of voices on the porch of the cabin. Someone clearly had been looking out of the window—I had kind of wondered if Eric had made that up—because, though no voices had been raised, the showdown in the clearing had attracted the attention of the revelers inside. While Eric and I had been in the yard, the orgy had progressed. Tom Hardaway was naked, and Jan, too. Eggs Tallie looked drunker.
“You smell like Eric,” Bill repeated, in a hissing voice.
I reared back from him, completely forgetting about Andy and his gun. And I lost my temper.
This is a rare thing, but not as rare as it used to be. It was kind of exhilarating. “Yeah, uh-huh, and I can’t even tell what you smell like! For all I know you’ve been with six women! Hardly fair, is it?”
Bill gaped at me, stunned. Behind me, Eric started laughing. The crowd on the sundeck was silently enthralled. Andy didn’t think we should all be ignoring the man with the gun.
“Stand together in a group,” he bellowed. Andy had had a lot to drink.
Eric shrugged. “Have you ever dealt with vampires, Bellefleur?” he asked.
“No,” Andy said. “But I can shoot you dead. I have silver bullets.”
“That’s—” I started to say, but Bill’s hand covered my mouth. Silver bullets were only definitely fatal to werewolves, but vampires also had a terrible reaction to silver, and a vampire hit in a vital place would certainly suffer.
Eric raised an eyebrow and sauntered over to the orgiasts on the deck. Bill took my hand, and we joined them. For once, I would have loved to know what Bill was thinking.
“Which one of you was it, or was it all of you?” Andy bellowed.
We all kept silent. I was standing by Tara, who was shivering in her red underwear. Tara was scared, no big surprise. I wondered if knowing Andy’s thoughts would help any, and I began to focus on him. Drunks don’t make for good reading, I can tell you, because they only think about stupid stuff, and their ideas are quite unreliable. Their memories are shaky, too. Andy didn’t have too many thoughts at the moment. He didn’t like anyone in the clearing, not even himself, and he was determined to get the truth out of someone.
“Sookie, come here,” he yelled.
“No,” Bill said very definitely.
“I have to have her right here beside me in thirty seconds, or I shoot—her!” Andy said, pointing his gun right at me.
“You will not live thirty seconds after, if you do,” Bill said.
I believed him. Evidently Andy did, too.
“I don’t care,” Andy said. “She’s not much loss to the world.”
Well, that made me mad all over again. My temper had begun to die down, but that made it flare up in a big way.
I yanked free from Bill’s hand and stomped down the steps to the yard. I wasn’t so blind with anger that I ignored the gun, though I was sorely tempted to grab Andy by his balls and squeeze. He’d still shoot me, but he’d hurt, too. However, that was as self-defeating as drinking was. Would the moment of satisfaction be worth it?
“Now, Sookie, you read the minds of those people and you tell me which one did it,” Andy ordered. He gripped the back of my neck with his big hands, like I was an untrained puppy, and swiveled me around to face the deck.
“What the hell do you think I was doing here, you stupid shit? Do you think this is the way I like to spend my time, with assholes like these?”
Andy shook me by my neck. I am very strong, and there was a good chance that I could break free from him and grab the gun, but it was not close enough to a sure thing to make me comfortable. I decided to wait for a minute. Bill was trying to tell me something with his face, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Eric was trying to cop a feel from Tara. Or Eggs. It was hard to tell.
A dog whined at the edge of the woods. I rolled my eyes in that direction, unable to turn my head. Well, great. Just great.
“That’s my collie,” I told Andy. “Dean, remember?” I could have used some human-shaped help, but since Sam had arrived on the scene in his collie persona, he’d have to stay that way or risk exposure.
“Yeah. What’s your dog doing out here?”
“I don’t know. Don’t shoot him, okay?”
“I’d never shoot a dog,” he said, sounding genuinely shocked.
“Oh, but me, it’s okay,” I said bitterly.
The collie padded over to where we were standing. I wondered what was on Sam’s mind. I wondered if he retained much human thinking while he
was in his favorite form. I rolled my eyes toward the gun, and Sam/Dean’s eyes followed mine, but how much comprehension was in there, I just couldn’t estimate.
The collie began to growl. His teeth were bared and he was glaring at the gun.
“Back up, dog,” Andy said, annoyed.
If I could just hold Andy still for a minute, the vampires could get him. I tried to work out all the moves in my mind. I’d have to grab his gun hand with both of my hands and force it up. But with Andy holding me out from him like this, that wasn’t going to be easy.
“No, sweetheart,” Bill said.
My eyes flashed over to him. I was considerably startled. Bill’s eyes moved from my face to behind Andy. I could take a hint.
“Oh, who is being held like a little cub?” inquired a voice behind Andy.
Oh, this was justpeachy.
“It is my messenger!” The maenad sauntered around Andy in a wide circle and came to stand to his right, a few feet before him. She was not between Andy and the group on the deck. She was clean tonight, and wearing nothing at all. I guessed she and Sam had been out in the woods making whoopee, before they heard the crowd. Her black hair fell in a tangled mass all the way to her hips. She didn’t seem cold. The rest of us (except the vampires) were definitely feeling the nip in the air. We’d come dressed for an orgy, not an outdoors party.
“Hello, messenger,” the maenad said to me. “I forgot to introduce myself last time, my canine friend reminds me. I am Callisto.”
“Miss Callisto,” I said, since I had no idea what to call her. I would have nodded, but Andy had hold of my neck. It was sure beginning to hurt.
“Who is this stalwart brave gripping you?” Callisto moved a little closer.
I had no idea what Andy looked like, but everyone on the deck was enthralled and terrified, Eric and Bill excepted. They were easing back, away from the humans. This wasn’t good.
“This is Andy Bellefleur,” I croaked. “He has a problem.”
I could tell from the way my skin crawled that the maenad had eased forward a little.