I tried to glide toward the spangled bartender as if I were entranced. Since that’s something vamps can’t do to me, and Dracula obviously never doubted his own powers, I got away with it.
“Master, how did you escape from your tomb at Târgovis¸te?” I asked, doing my best to sound admiring and dreamy. I kept my hands down by my sides so the folds of rosy chiffon would conceal them.
“Many have asked me that,” the Dark Prince said, inclining his head graciously as Eric’s own head jerked up, his brows drawn together. “But that story must wait. My beautiful one, I am so glad you left your neck bare tonight. Come closer to me . . . ERRRK! ”
“That’s for the bad dialogue!” I said, my voice trembling as I tried to shove the stake in even harder.
“And that’s for the embarrassment,” Eric said, giving the end a tap with his fist, just to help, as the “Prince” stared at us in horror. The stake obligingly disappeared into his chest.
“You dare . . . you dare,” the short vampire croaked. “You shall be executed.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. His face went blank, and his eyes were empty. Flakes began to drift from his skin as he crumpled.
But as the self-proclaimed Dracula sank to the floor and I looked around me, I wasn’t so sure. Only the presence of Eric at my side kept the assemblage from falling on me and taking care of business. The vampires from out of town were the most dangerous; the vampires that knew me would hesitate.
“He wasn’t Dracula,” I said as clearly and loudly as I could. “He was an impostor.”
“Kill her!” said a thin female vamp with short brown hair. “Kill the murderess!” She had a heavy accent, I thought Russian. I was about tired of the new wave of vamps.
Pot calling the kettle black, I thought briefly. I said, “You-all really think this goober was the Prince of Darkness?” I pointed to the flaking mess on the floor, held together by the spangled jumpsuit.
“He is dead. Anyone who kills Dracula must die,” said Indira quietly, but not like she was going to rush over and rip my throat out.
“Any vampire who kills Dracula must die,” Pam corrected. “But Sookie is not a vampire, and this was not Dracula.”
“She killed one impersonating our founder,” Eric said, making sure he could be heard throughout the club. “Milos was not the real Dracula. I would have staked him myself if I had had my wits about me.” But I was standing right by Eric, my hand on his arm, and I knew he was shaking.
“How do you know that? How could she tell, a human who had only a few moments in his presence? He looked just like the woodcuts!” This from a tall, heavy man with a French accent.
“Vlad Tepes was buried at the monastery on Snagov,” Pam said calmly, and everyone turned to her. “Sookie asked him how he’d escaped from his tomb at Târgovişte.”
Well, that hushed them up, at least temporarily. I began to think I might live through this night.
“Recompense must be made to his maker,” pointed out the tall, heavy vampire. He’d calmed down quite a bit in the last few minutes.
“If we can determine his maker,” Eric said, “certainly.”
“I’ll search my database,” Bill offered. He was standing in the shadows, where he’d lurked all evening. Now he took a step forward, and his dark eyes sought me out like a police helicopter searchlight catches the fleeing felon on Cops. “I’ll find out his real name, if no one here has met him before.”
All the vamps present glanced around. No one stepped forward to claim Milos/Dracula’s acquaintance.
“In the meantime,” Eric said smoothly, “let’s not forget that this event should be a secret amongst us until we can find out more details.” He smiled with a great show of fang, making his point quite nicely. “What happens in Shreveport, stays in Shreveport.”
There was a murmur of assent.
“What do you say, guests?” Eric asked the non-vamp attendees.
Colonel Flood said, “Vampire business is not pack business. We don’t care if you kill each other. We won’t meddle in your affairs.”
Calvin shrugged. “Panthers don’t mind what you do.”
The goblin said, “I’ve already forgotten the whole thing,” and the madwoman beside him nodded and laughed. The few other non-vamps hastily agreed.
No one solicited my answer. I guess they were taking my silence for a given, and they were right.
Pam drew me aside. She made an annoyed sound, like “tchk,” and brushed at my dress. I looked down to see a fine spray of blood had misted across the chiffon skirt. I knew immediately that I’d never wear my beloved bargain dress again.
“Too bad, you look good in pink,” Pam said.
I started to offer the dress to her, then thought again. I would wear it home and burn it. Vampire blood on my dress? Not a good piece of evidence to leave hanging around someone’s closet. If experience has taught me anything, it’s to dispose of bloodstained clothing instantly.
“That was a brave thing you did,” Pam said.
“Well, he was going to bite me,” I said. “To death.”
“Still,” she said.
I didn’t like the calculating look in her eyes.
“Thank you for helping Eric when I couldn’t,” Pam said. “My maker is a big idiot about the prince.”
“I did it because he was going to suck my blood,” I told her.
“You did some research on Vlad Tepes.”
“Yes, I went to the library after you told me about the original Dracula, and I Googled him.”
Pam’s eyes gleamed. “Legend has it that the original Vlad III was beheaded before he was buried.”
“That’s just one of the stories surrounding his death,” I said.
“True. But you know that not even a vampire can survive a beheading.”
“I would think not.”
“So you know the whole thing may be a crock of shit.”
“Pam,” I said, mildly shocked. “Well, it might be. And it might not. After all, Eric talked to someone who said he was the real Dracula’s gofer.”
“You knew that Milos wasn’t the real Dracula the minute he stepped forth.”
I shrugged.
Pam shook her head at me. “You’re too soft, Sookie Stackhouse. It’ll be the death of you some day.”
“Nah, I don’t think so,” I said. I was watching Eric, his golden hair falling forward as he looked down at the rapidly disintegrating remains of the self-styled Prince of Darkness. The thousand years of his life sat on him heavily, and for a second I saw every one of them. Then, by degrees, his face lightened, and when he looked up at me, it was with the expectancy of a child on Christmas Eve.
“Maybe next year,” he said.
ONE WORD ANSWER
“One Word Answer” is one of the first short stories I ever wrote. The idea was born when I pictured a car sweeping up to our favorite barmaid’s humble house back in the woods of Louisiana—at night, of course. It took some serious thinking for me to imagine who might be in the car and what we could learn about Sookie and her world from this encounter. Since Hadley is essential to the narrative of the books, I afterward discovered it was a mistake to introduce her in a short story. Ever since, readers have asked me, “Did I miss something?” All around, this story was a learning experience. But I was aiming for creepy and mysterious, and I hope I got there.
“One Word Answer” is set after Dead as a Doornail.
BUBBA THE VAMPIRE and I were raking up clippings from my newly trimmed bushes about midnight when the long black car pulled up. I’d been enjoying the gentle scent of the cut bushes and the songs of the crickets and frogs celebrating spring. Everything hushed with the arrival of the black limousine. Bubba vanished immediately, because he didn’t recognize the car. Since he changed over to the vampire persuasion, Bubba’s been on the shy side.
I leaned against my rake, trying to look nonchalant. In reality, I was far from relaxed. I live pretty far out in the country, and you have to want to be at my house to find the way. There’s not a sign out at the parish road that points down my driveway reading “Stackhouse home.” My home is not visible from the road, because the driveway meanders through some woods to arrive in the clearing where the core of the house has stood for a hundred and sixty years.
Visitors are not real frequent, and I didn’t remember ever seeing a limousine before. No one got out of the long black car for a couple of minutes. I began to wonder if maybe I should have hidden myself, like Bubba. I had the outside lights on, of course, since I couldn’t see in the dark like Bubba, but the limousine windows were heavily smoked. I was real tempted to whack the shiny bumper with my rake to find out what would happen. Fortunately, the door opened while I was still thinking about it.
A large gentleman emerged from the rear of the limousine. He was six feet tall, and he was made up of circles. The largest circle was his belly. The round head above it was almost bald, but a fringe of black hair circled it right above his ears. His little eyes were round, too, and black as his hair and his suit. His shirt was gleaming white, but his tie was black without a pattern. He looked like the director of a funeral home for the criminally insane.
“Not too many people do their yard work at midnight,” he commented, in a surprisingly melodious voice. The true answer—that I liked to rake when I had someone to talk to, and I had company that night with Bubba, who couldn’t come out in the sunlight—was better left unsaid. I just nodded. You couldn’t argue with his statement.
“Would you be the woman known as Sookie Stackhouse?” asked the large gentleman. He said it as if he often addressed creatures that weren’t men or women, but something else entirely.
“Yes, sir, I am,” I said politely. My grandmother, God rest her soul, had raised me well. But she hadn’t raised a fool; I wasn’t about to invite him in. I wondered why the driver didn’t get out.
“Then I have a legacy for you.”
“Legacy” meant someone had died. I didn’t have anyone left except for my brother, Jason, and he was sitting down at Merlotte’s Bar with his girlfriend, Crystal. At least that’s where he’d been when I’d gotten off my barmaid’s job a couple of hours before.
The little night creatures were beginning to make their sounds again, having decided the big night creatures weren’t going to attack.
“A legacy from who?” I said. What makes me different from other people is that I’m telepathic. Vampires, whose minds are simply silent holes in a world made noisy to me by the cacophony of human brains, make restful companions for me, so I’d been enjoying Bubba’s chatter. Now I needed to rev up my gift. This wasn’t a casual drop-in. I opened my mind to my visitor. While the large, circular gentleman was wincing at my ungrammatical question, I attempted to look inside his head. Instead of a stream of ideas and images (the usual human broadcast), his thoughts came to me in bursts of static. He was a supernatural creature of some sort.
“Whom,” I corrected myself, and he smiled at me. His teeth were very sharp.
“Do you remember your cousin Hadley?”
Nothing could have surprised me more than this question. I leaned the rake against the mimosa tree and shook the plastic garbage bag that we’d already filled. I put the plastic band around the top before I spoke. I could only hope my voice wouldn’t choke when I answered him. “Yes, I do.” Though I sounded hoarse, my words were clear.
Hadley Delahoussaye, my only cousin, had vanished into the underworld of drugs and prostitution years before. I had her high school junior picture in my photo album. That was the last picture she’d had taken, because that year she’d run off to New Orleans to make her living by her wits and her body. My aunt Linda, her mother, had died of cancer during the second year after Hadley’s departure.
“Is Hadley still alive?” I said, hardly able to get the words out.
“Alas, no,” said the big man, absently polishing his black-framed glasses on a clean white handkerchief. His black shoes gleamed like mirrors. “Your cousin Hadley is dead, I’m afraid.” He seemed to relish saying it. He was a man—or whatever—who enjoyed the sound of his own voice.
Underneath the distrust and confusion I was feeling about this whole weird episode, I was aware of a sharp pang of grief. Hadley had been fun as a child, and we’d been together a lot, naturally. Since I’d been a weird kid, Hadley and my brother, Jason, had been the only children I’d had to play with for the most part. When Hadley hit puberty, the picture changed; but I had some good memories of my cousin.
“What happened to her?” I tried to keep my voice even, but I knew it wasn’t.
“She was involved in an Unfortunate Incident,” he said.
That was the euphemism for a vampire killing. When it appeared in newspaper reports, it usually meant that some vampire had been unable to restrain his bloodlust and had attacked a human. “A vampire killed her?” I was horrified.
“Ah, not exactly. Your cousin Hadley was the vampire. She got staked.”
This was so much bad and startling news that I couldn’t take it in. I held up a hand to indicate he shouldn’t talk for a minute, while I absorbed what he’d said, bit by bit.
“What is your name, please?” I asked.
“Mr. Cataliades,” he said. I repeated that to myself several times since it was a name I’d never encountered. Emphasis on the tal, I told myself. And a long e.
“Where might you hail from?”
“For many years, my home has been New Orleans.”
New Orleans was at the other end of Louisiana from my little town, Bon Temps. Northern Louisiana is pretty darn different from southern Louisiana in several fundamental ways: it’s the Bible Belt without the pizzazz of New Orleans; it’s the older sister who stayed home and tended the farm while the younger sister went out partying. But it shares other things with the southern part of the state, too: bad roads, corrupt politics, and a lot of people, both black and white, who live right on the poverty line.
“Who drove you?” I asked pointedly, looking at the front of the car.
“Waldo,” called Mr. Cataliades, “the lady wants to see you.”
I was sorry I’d expressed an interest after Waldo got out of the driver’s seat of the limo and I’d had a look at him. Waldo was a vampire, as I’d already established in my own mind by identifying a typical vampire brain signature, which to me is like a photographic negative, one I “see” with my brain. Most vampires are good-looking or extremely talented in some way or another. Naturally, when a vamp brings a human over, the vamp is likely to pick a human who attracted him or her by beauty or some necessary skill. I didn’t know who the heck had brought over Waldo, but I figured it was somebody crazy. Waldo had long, wispy white hair that was almost the same color as his skin. He was maybe five foot eight, but he looked taller because he was very thin. Waldo’s eyes looked red under the light I’d had mounted on the electric pole. The vampire’s face looked corpse white with a faint greenish tinge, and his skin was wrinkled. I’d never seen a vampire who hadn’t been taken in the prime of life.
“Waldo,” I said, nodding. I felt lucky to have had such long training in keeping my face agreeable. “Can I get you anything? I think I have some bottled blood. And you, Mr. Cataliades? A beer? Some soda?”
The big man shuddered and tried to cover it with a graceful half bow. “Much too hot for coffee or alcohol for me, but perhaps we’ll take refreshments later.” It was maybe sixty-two degrees, but Mr. Cataliades was indeed sweating, I noticed. “May we come in?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said, without a bit of apology in my voice. “I think not.” I was hoping that Bubba had had the sense to rush across the little valley between our properties to fetch my nearest neighbor, my former lover Bill Compton, known to the residents of Bon Temps as
Vampire Bill.
“Then we’ll conduct our business out here in your yard,” Mr. Cataliades said coldly. He and Waldo came around the body of the limousine. I felt uneasy when it wasn’t between us anymore, but they kept their distance. “Miss Stackhouse, you are your cousin’s sole heir.”
I understood what he said, but I was incredulous. “Not my brother, Jason?” Jason and Hadley, both three years older than I, had been great buddies.
“No. In this document, Hadley says she called Jason Stackhouse once for help when she was very low on funds. He ignored her request, so she’s ignoring him.”
“When did Hadley get staked?” I was concentrating very hard on not getting any visuals. Since she was older than I by three years, Hadley had been a mere twenty-nine when she’d died. She’d been my physical opposite in most ways. I was robust and blond, she was thin and dark. I was strong, she was frail. She’d had big, thickly lashed brown eyes, mine were blue; and now, this strange man was telling me, she had closed those eyes for good.
“A month ago.” Mr. Cataliades had to think about it. “She died about a month ago.”
“And you’re just now letting me know?”
“Circumstances prevented.”
I considered that.
“She died in New Orleans?”
“Yes. She was a handmaiden to the queen,” he said, as though he were telling me she’d gotten her partnership at a big law firm or managed to buy her own business.
“The Queen of Louisiana,” I said cautiously.
“I knew you would understand,” he said, beaming at me. “‘This is a woman who knows her vampires,’ I said to myself when I met you. ”
“She knows this vampire,” Bill said, appearing at my side in that disconcerting way he had.
A flash of displeasure went across Mr. Cataliades’s face like quick lightning across the sky.