Club Dead

met Tara at a gathering in Ruston.”
    Gradually we progressed through the social do-si-do of getting seated, explaining to the men how Tara and I had attended high school together, and ordering drinks. All the vampires, of course, ordered synthetic blood, and Talbot, Tara, Alcide, and I got mixed drinks. I decided another champagne cocktail would be good. The waitress, a shifter, was moving in an odd, almost slinking manner, and she didn’t seem inclined to talk much. The night of the full moon was making itself felt in all kinds of ways.
    There were far fewer of the two-natured in the bar this night of the moon cycle. I was glad to see Debbie and her fiancé were missing, and there were only a couple of the Were bikers. There were more vampires, and more humans. I wondered how the vampires of Jackson kept this bar a secret. Among the humans who came in with Supe dates, surely one or two were inclined to talk to a reporter or just tell a group of friends about the bar’s existence?
    I asked Alcide, and he said quietly, “The bar’s spell-bound. You wouldn’t be able to tell anyone how to get here if you tried.”
    I’d have to experiment with that later, see if it worked. I wonder who did the spell casting, or whatever it was called. If I could believe in vampires and werewolves and shape-shifters, it was not too far a stretch to believe in witches.
    I was sandwiched between Talbot and Alcide, so by way of making conversation I asked Talbot about secrecy. Talbot didn’t seem averse to chatting with me, and Alcide and Franklin Mott had found they had acquaintances in common. Talbot had on too much cologne, but I didn’t hold that against him. Talbot was a man in love, and furthermore, he was a man addicted to vampiric sex . . . the two states are not always combined. He was a ruthless, intelligent man who could not understand how his life had taken such an exotic turn. (He was a big broadcaster, too, which was why I could pick up so much of his life.)
    He repeated Alcide’s story about the spell on the bar. “But the way what happens here is kept a secret, that’s different,” Talbot said, as if he was considering a long answer and a short answer. I looked at his pleasant, handsome face and reminded myself that he knew Bill was being tortured, and he didn’t care. I wished he would think about Bill again, so I could learn more; at least I would know if Bill was dead or alive. “Well, Miss Sookie, what goes on here is kept secret by terror and punishment.”
    Talbot said that with relish. He liked that. He liked that he had won the heart of Russell Edgington, a being who could kill easily, who deserved to be feared. “Any vampire or Were—in fact, any sort of supernatural creature, and you haven’t seen quite a few of them, believe me—who brings in a human is responsible for that human’s behavior. For example, if you were to leave here tonight and call a tabloid, it would be Alcide’s bounden duty to track and kill you.”
    “I see.” And indeed, I did. “What if Alcide couldn’t bring himself to do that?”
    “Then his life would be forfeit, and one of the bounty hunters would be commissioned to do the job.”
    Jesus Christ, Shepherd of Judea. “There are bounty hunters?” Alcide could have told me a lot more than he had; that was an unpleasant discovery. My voice may have been a little on the croaky side.
    “Sure. The Weres who wear the motorcycle gear, in this area. In fact, they’re asking questions around the bar tonight because . . .” His expression sharpened, became suspicious. “The man who was bothering you . . . did you see him again last night? After you left the bar?”
    “No,” I said, speaking the technical truth. I hadn’t seen him again—last night. I knew what God thought about technical truths, but I also figured he expected me to save my own life. “Alcide and I, we went right back to the apartment. I was pretty upset.” I cast my eyes down like a modest girl unused to approaches in bars, which was also a few steps away from the truth. (Though Sam keeps such incidents down to a minimum, and it was widely known I was crazy and therefore undesirable, I certainly had to put up with the occasional aggressive advance, as well as a certain amount of half-hearted passes from guys who got too drunk to care that I was supposed to be crazy.)
    “You were sure plucky when it looked like there was going to be a fight,” Talbot observed. Talbot was thinking that my