All Together Dead

so he won’t connect you to this.” In fact, the hotelier had been absorbed in the queen and her conversation, or his vampire hearing would have tipped him off that we were talking about him.
    Though I was exhausted, I had the gratifying feeling that I was earning the money they were paying me for this trip. And it was a load off my mind to feel that the Dr Pepper thing was solved. Christian Baruch would not be doing any more bomb planting now that the queen was on to him. The threat the splinter group of the Fellowship posed…well, I’d only heard of that from hearsay, and I didn’t have any evidence of what form it would take. Despite the death of the woman at the archery place, I felt more relaxed than I had since I’d walked into the Pyramid of Gizeh, because I was inclined to attribute the killer archer to Baruch, too. Maybe when he saw that Henrik would actually take Arkansas from the queen, he’d gotten greedy and had the assassin take out Henrik, so the queen would get everything. There was something confusing and wrong about that scenario, but I was too tired to think it through, and I was content to let the whole tangled web lie until I was rested.
    I crossed the little lobby to the elevator and pressed the button. When the doors dinged open, Bill stepped out, his hands full of order forms.
    “You did well this evening,” I said, too tired to hate him. I nodded at the forms.
    “Yes, we’ll all make a lot of money from this,” he said, but he didn’t sound particularly excited.
    I waited for him to step out of my way, but he didn’t do that, either.
    “I would give it all away if I could erase what happened between us,” he said. “Not the times we spent loving each other, but…”
    “The times you spent lying to me? The times you pretended you could hardly wait to date me when it turns out you were under order to? Those times?”
    “Yes,” he said, and his deep brown eyes didn’t waver. “Those times.”
    “You hurt me too much. That’s not ever gonna happen.”
    “Do you love any man? Quinn? Eric? That moron JB?”
    “You don’t have the right to ask me that,” I said. “You don’t have any rights at all where I’m concerned.”
    JB? Where’d that come from? I’d always been fond of the guy, and he was lovely, but his conversation was about as stimulating as a stump’s. I was shaking my head as I rode down in the elevator to the human floor.
    Carla was out, as usual, and since it was five in the morning the chances seemed good that she’d stay out. I put on my pink pajamas and put my slippers beside the bed so I wouldn’t have to grope around for them in the darkened room in case Carla came in before I awoke.

Chapter 17
    My eyes snapped open like shades that were wound too tight.
    Wake up, wake up, wake up! Sookie, something’s wrong.
    Barry, where are you?
    Standing at the elevators on the human floor.
    I’m coming. I pulled on last night’s outfit, but without the heels. Instead, I slid my feet into my rubber-soled slippers. I grabbed the slim wallet that held my room key, driver’s license, and credit card, and stuffed it in one pocket, jammed my cell phone into the other, and hurried out of the room. The door slammed behind me with an ominous thud. The hotel felt empty and silent, but my clock had read 9:50.
    I had to run down a long corridor and turn right to get to the elevators. I didn’t meet a soul. A moment’s thought told me that was not so strange. Most humans on the floor would still be asleep, because they kept vampire hours. But there weren’t even any hotel employees cleaning the halls.
    All the little tracks of disquiet that had crawled through my brain, like slug tracks on your back doorstep, had coalesced into a huge throbbing mass of uneasiness.
    I felt like I was on the Titanic, and I’d just heard the hull scrape against the iceberg.
    I finally spotted someone, lying on the floor. I’d been woken so suddenly and sharply that everything I did had a dreamlike quality to it, so finding a body in the hall was not such a jolt.
    I let out a cry, and Barry came bounding around the corner. He crouched down with me. I rolled over the body. It was Jake Purifoy, and he couldn’t be roused.
    Why isn’t he in his room? What was he doing out so late? Even Barry’s mental voice sounded panicked.
    Look, Barry, he’s lying sort of pointing toward my room. Do you think he was coming to see me?
    Yes, and he didn’t make it.
    What could have been so