All Together Dead

the open door and shut it behind me. I marched off quite briskly and grabbed the elevator with hardly any wait. In two minutes, I was unlocking my door.
    End of problem.
    I felt quite proud of myself.
    Carla was in our room, naked again.
    “Hi,” I said. “Please put on a robe.”
    “Well, hey, if it bothers you,” she said in a fairly relaxed manner, and pulled on a robe. Wow. End of another problem. Direct action, straightforward statements; obviously, those were the keys to improving my life.
    “Thanks,” I said. “Not going to the judicial stuff?”
    “Human dates aren’t invited,” she said. “It’s Free Time for us. Gervaise and I are going out nightclubbing later. Some really extreme place called Kiss of Pain.”
    “You be careful,” I said. “Bad things can happen if there are lots of vamps together and a bleeding human or two.”
    “I can handle Gervaise,” Carla said.
    “No, you can’t.”
    “He’s nuts about me.”
    “Until he stops being nuts. Or until a vamp older than Gervaise takes a shine to you, and Gervaise gets all conflicted.”
    She looked uncertain for a second, an expression I felt sure Carla didn’t wear too often.
    “What about you? I hear you’re tied to Eric now.”
    “Only for a while,” I said, and I meant it. “It’ll wear off.”
    I will never go anywhere with vampires again, I promised myself. I let the lure of the money and the excitement of the travel pull me in. But I won’t do that again. As God is my witness… Then I had to laugh out loud. Scarlett O’Hara, I wasn’t. “I’ll never be hungry again,” I told Carla.
    “Why, did you eat a big supper?” she asked, focused on the mirror because she was plucking her eyebrows.
    I laughed. And I couldn’t stop.
    “What’s up with you?” Carla swung around to eye me with some concern. “You’re not acting like yourself, Sookie.”
    “Just had a bad shock,” I said, gasping for breath. “I’ll be okay in a minute.” It was more like ten before I gathered my control back around me. I was due at the judicial meeting, and frankly, I wanted to have something to occupy my mind. I scrubbed my face and put on some makeup, changed into a bronze silk blouse and tobacco-colored pants with a matching cardigan, and put on some brown leather pumps. With my room key in my pocket and a relieved good-bye from Carla, I was off to find the judicial sessions.

Chapter 16
    The vampire Jodi was pretty formidable. She put me in mind of Jael, in the Bible. Jael, a determined woman of Israel, put a tent peg through the head of Sisera, an enemy captain, if I was remembering correctly. Sisera had been asleep when Jael did the deed, just as Michael had been when Jodi broke off his fang. Even though Jodi’s name made me snicker, I saw in her a steely strength and resolve, and I was immediately on her side. I hoped the panel of judges could see past the vampire Michael’s whining about his damn tooth.
    This wasn’t set up like the previous evening, though the session took place in the same room. The panel of judges, I guess you’d call them, were on the stage and seated at a long table facing the audience. There were three of them, all from different states: two men and a woman. One of the males was Bill, who was looking (as always) calm and collected. I didn’t know the other guy, a blond. The female was a tiny, pretty vamp with the straightest back and longest rippling black hair I ever saw. I heard Bill address her as “Dahlia.” Her round little face whipped back and forth as she listened to the testimony of first Jodi, then Michael, just as if she was watching a tennis match. Centered on the white tablecloth before the judges was a stake, which I guess was the vampire symbol of justice.
    The two complaining vampires were not represented by lawyers. They said their piece, and then the judges got to ask questions before they decided the verdict by a majority vote. It was simple in form, if not in fact.
    “You were torturing a human woman?” Dahlia asked Michael.
    “Yes,” he said without blinking an eye. I glanced around. I was the only human in the audience. No wonder there was a certain simplicity to the proceedings. The vampires weren’t trying to dress it up for a warm-blooded audience. They were behaving as they would if they were by themselves. I was sitting by those of my party who’d attended—Rasul, Gervaise, Cleo—and maybe their closeness masked my scent, or maybe one tame human didn’t