Club Dead

been exciting. How not? He was gorgeous, and he’d had several hundred years to work on his smooching technique.
    Eric got closer and closer. I wasn’t sure if he was going to bite me or kiss me. His fangs had run out. He was angry, or horny, or hungry, or all three. New vampires tended to lisp while they talked until they got used to their fangs; you couldn’t even tell, with Eric. He’d had centuries of perfecting that technique, too.
    “Somehow, that torture plan didn’t make me feel very sexy,” I told him.
    “It did something for Chow, though,” Eric whispered in my ear.
    I wasn’t shaking, but I should have been. “Could you cut to the chase here?” I asked. “Are you gonna torture me, or not? Are you my friend, or my enemy? Are you gonna find Bill, or let him rot?”
    Eric laughed. It was short and unfunny, but it was better than him getting closer, at least at the moment. “Sookie, you are too much,” he said, but not as though he found that particularly endearing. “I’m not going to torture you. For one thing, I would hate to ruin that beautiful skin; one day, I will see all of it.”
    I just hoped it was still on my body when that happened.
    “You won’t always be so afraid of me,” he said, as if he were absolutely certain of the future. “And you won’t always be as devoted to Bill as you are now. There is something I must tell you.”
    Here came the Big Bad. His cool fingers twined with mine, and without wanting to, I held his hand hard. I couldn’t think of a word to say, at least a word that was safe. My eyes fixed on his.
    “Bill was summoned to Mississippi,” Eric told me, “by a vampire—a female—he’d known many years ago. I don’t know if you’ve realized that vampires almost never mate with other vampires, for any longer than a rare one-night affair. We don’t do this because it gives us power over each other forever, the mating and sharing of blood. This vampire . . .”
    “Her name,” I said.
    “Lorena,” he said reluctantly. Or maybe he wanted to tell me all along, and the reluctance was just for show. Who the heck knows, with a vampire.
    He waited to see if I would speak, but I did not.
    “She was in Mississippi. I am not sure if she regularly lives there, or if she went there to ensnare Bill. She had been living in Seattle for years, I know, because she and Bill lived there together for many years.”
    I had wondered why he’d picked Seattle as his fictitious destination. He hadn’t just plucked it out of the air.
    “But whatever her intention in asking him to meet her there . . . what excuse she gave him for not coming here . . . maybe he was just being careful of you . . .”
    I wanted to die at that moment. I took a deep breath and looked down at our joined hands. I was too humiliated to look in Eric’s eyes.
    “He was—he became—instantly enthralled with her, all over again. After a few nights, he called Pam to say that he was coming home early without telling you, so he could arrange your future care before he saw you again.”
    “Future care?” I sounded like a crow.
    “Bill wanted to make a financial arrangement for you.”
    The shock of it made me blanch. “Pension me off,” I said numbly. No matter how well he had meant, Bill could not have offered me any greater offense. When he’d been in my life, it had never occurred to him to ask me how my finances were faring—though he could hardly wait to help his newly discovered descendants, the Bellefleurs.
    But when he was going to be out of my life, and felt guilty for leaving pitiful, pitiable me—then he started worrying.
    “He wanted . . .” Eric began, then stopped and looked closely at my face. “Well, leave that for now. I would not have told you any of this, if Pam hadn’t interfered. I would have sent you off in ignorance, because then it wouldn’t have been words from my mouth that hurt you so badly. And I would not have had to plead with you, as I’m going to plead.”
    I made myself listen. I gripped Eric’s hand as if it were a lifeline.
    “What I’m going to do—and you have to understand, Sookie, my hide depends on this, too . . .”
    I looked him straight in the face, and he saw the rush of my surprise.
    “Yes, my job, and maybe my life, too, Sookie—not just yours, and Bill’s. I’m sending you a contact tomorrow. He lives in Shreveport, but he has a second apartment in Jackson. He has friends among the supernatural community there, the vampires,