All Together Dead

important that Jake wasn’t prepared for his day’s sleep? I stood up, thinking furiously. I’d never, ever heard of a vampire who didn’t know instinctively that the dawn was coming. I thought of the conversations I’d had with Jake, and the two men I’d seen leaving his room.
    “You bastard ,” I hissed through my teeth, and I kicked him as hard as I could.
    “Jesus, Sookie!” Barry grabbed my arm, horrified. But then he got the picture from my brain.
    “We need to find Mr. Cataliades and Diantha,” I said. “They can get up; they’re not vamps.”
    “I’ll get Cecile. She’s human, my roommate,” Barry said, and we both went off in different directions, leaving Jake to lie where he was. It was all we could do.
    We were back together in five minutes. It had been surprisingly easy to raise Mr. Cataliades, and Diantha had been sharing his room. Cecile proved to be a young woman with a no-nonsense haircut and a competent way about her, and I wasn’t surprised when Barry introduced her as the king’s new executive assistant.
    I’d been a fool to discount, even for a minute, the warning that Clovache had passed along. I was so angry at myself I could hardly stand to be inside my own skin. But I had to shove that aside and we had to act now.
    “Listen to what I think,” I said. I’d been putting things together in my head. “Some of the waiters have been avoiding Barry and me over the past couple of days, as soon as they found out what we were.”
    Barry nodded. He’d noticed, too. He looked oddly guilty, but that had to wait.
    “They know what we are. They didn’t want us to know what they’re about to do, I’m assuming. So I’m also assuming it must be something really, really bad. And Jake Purifoy was in on it.”
    Mr. Cataliades had been looking faintly bored, but now he began to look seriously alarmed. Diantha’s big eyes went from face to face.
    “What shall we do?” Cecile asked, which earned her high marks in my book.
    “It’s the extra coffins,” I said. “And the blue suitcase in the queen’s suite. Barry, you were asked to bring up a suitcase, too, right? And it didn’t belong to anyone?”
    Barry said, “Right. It’s still sitting in the foyer of the king’s suite, since everyone passes through there. We thought someone would claim it. I was going to take it back to the luggage department today.”
    I said, “The one I went down for is sitting in the living room of the queen’s suite. I think the guy who was in on it was Joe, the manager down in the luggage and delivery area. He’s the one who called me down to get the suitcase. No one else seemed to know anything about it.”
    “The suitcases will blow up?” Diantha said in her shrill voice. “The unclaimed coffins in the basement, too? If the basement goes, the building will collapse!” I’d never heard Diantha sound so human.
    “We have to wake them up,” I said. “We have to get them out.”
    “The building’s going to blow,” said Barry, trying to process the idea.
    “The vamps won’t wake up.” Cecile the practical. “They can’t.”
    “Quinn!” I said. I was thinking of so many things at once that I was standing rooted in place. Fishing my phone from my pocket, I punched his number on speed dial and heard his mumble at the other end. “Get out,” I said. “Quinn, get your sister and get out. There’s going to be an explosion.” I only waited to hear him sound more alert before I shut the phone.
    “We have to save ourselves, too,” Barry was saying.
    Brilliantly, Cecile ran down the hall to a red fixture and flipped the fire alarm. The clamor almost split our eardrums, but the effect was wonderful on the sleeping humans on this floor. Within seconds, they began to come out of the rooms.
    “Take the stairs,” Cecile directed them in a bellow, and obediently, they did. I was glad to see Carla’s dark head among them. But I didn’t see Quinn, and he was always easy to spot.
    “The queen is high up,” said Mr. Cataliades.
    “Can those glass panels be busted from the inside?” I asked.
    “They did it on Fear Factor ,” Barry said.
    “We could try sliding the coffins down.”
    “They’d break on impact,” Cecile said.
    “But the vamps would survive the explosion,” I pointed out.
    “To be burned up by the sun,” Mr. Cataliades said. “Diantha and I will go up and try to get out the queen’s party, wrapped up in blankets. We’ll take them…” He looked at me