A Touch of Dead

holiday plans, they would have included me on their guest list in a heartbeat. In a fit of perversity, I hadn’t wanted to be pitied for being alone. I guess I wanted to manage that all by myself.
    Sam had gotten a substitute bartender, but Merlotte’s Bar closes at two o’clock in the afternoon on Christmas Eve and remains closed until two o’clock the day after Christmas, so I didn’t even have work to break up a lovely uninterrupted stretch of misery.
    My laundry was done. The house was clean. The week before, I’d put up my grandmother’s Christmas decorations, which I’d inherited along with the house. Opening the boxes of ornaments made me miss my
grandmother with a sharp ache. She’d been gone almost two years, and I still wished I could talk to her. Not only had Gran been a lot of fun, she’d been really shrewd and she’d given good advice—if she decided you really needed some. She’d raised me from the age of seven, and she’d been the most important figure in my life.
    She’d been so pleased when I’d started dating the vampire Bill Compton. That was how desperate Gran had been for me to get a beau; even Vampire Bill was welcome. When you’re telepathic like I am, it’s hard to date a regular guy; I’m sure you can see why. Humans think all kinds of things they don’t want their nearest and dearest to know about, much less a woman they’re taking out to dinner and a movie. In sharp contrast, vampires’ brains are lovely silent blanks to me, and werewolf brains are nearly as good as vampires’, though I get a big waft of emotions and the odd snatch of thought from my occasionally furred acquaintances.
    Naturally, after I’d thought about Gran welcoming Bill, I began wondering what Bill was doing. Then I rolled my eyes at my own idiocy. It was mid-afternoon, daytime. Bill was sleeping somewhere in his house,
which lay in the woods to the south of my place, across the cemetery. I’d broken up with Bill, but I was sure he’d be over like a shot if I called him—once darkness fell, of course.
    Damned if I would call him. Or anyone else.
    But I caught myself staring longingly at the telephone every time I passed by. I needed to get out of the house or I’d be phoning someone, anyone.
    I needed a mission. A project. A task. A diversion.
    I remembered having awakened for about thirty seconds in the wee hours of the morning. Since I’d worked the late shift at Merlotte’s, I’d only just sunk into a deep sleep. I’d stayed awake only long enough to wonder what had jarred me out of that sleep. I’d heard something out in the woods, I thought. The sound hadn’t been repeated, and I’d dropped back into slumber like a stone into water.
    Now I peered out the kitchen window at the woods. Not too surprisingly, there was nothing unusual about the view. “The woods are snowy, dark, and deep,” I said, trying to recall the Frost poem we’d all had to memorize in high school. Or was it “lovely, dark, and deep”?
    Of course, my woods weren’t lovely or snowy—they
never are in Louisiana at Christmas, even northern Louisiana. But it was cold (here, that meant the temperature was about thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit). And the woods were definitely dark and deep—and damp. So I put on my lace-up work boots that I’d bought years before when my brother, Jason, and I had gone hunting together, and I shrugged into my heaviest “I don’t care what happens to it” coat, really more of a puffy quilted jacket. It was pale pink. Since a heavy coat takes a long time to wear out down here, the coat was several years old, too; I’m twenty-seven, definitely past the pale pink stage. I bundled all my hair up under a knit cap, and I pulled on the gloves I’d found stuffed into one pocket. I hadn’t worn this coat for a long, long time, and I was surprised to find a couple of dollars and some ticket stubs in the pockets, plus a receipt for a little Christmas gift I’d given Alcide Herveaux, a werewolf I’d dated briefly.
    Pockets are like little time capsules. Since I’d bought Alcide the sudoku book, his father had died in a struggle for the job of packmaster, and after a series of violent events, Alcide himself ascended to the leadership. I wondered how pack affairs were going in Shreveport. I hadn’t talked to any of the Weres in
two months. In fact, I’d lost track of when the last full moon had been. Last night?
    Now I’d thought about Bill and Alcide. Unless I took action, I’d