Dead and Gone

regime was important to Eric, obviously. I wasn’t yet sure how much of that was my problem. But I was thumbs-up with Felipe de Castro by a happy accident, and I wanted to keep it that way.
    “I might be able to get there by seven,” I said after some inner computation. I tried not to think about how much it would please me to lay eyes on Eric. At least ten times in the past few weeks, I’d caught myself before I’d gotten in my car to drive over to see him. But I’d successfully resisted the impulses, because I’d been able to tell that he was struggling to maintain his position under the new king. “I’ve got to brief the new gal. . . . Yeah, seven is just about doable.”
    “He’ll be so relieved,” Bobby said, managing to work in a sneer.
    Keep it up, asshole, I thought. And possibly the way I was looking at him conveyed that thought, because Bobby said, “Really, he will be,” in as sincere a tone as he could manage.
    “Okay, message delivered,” I said. “I got to get back to work.”
    “Where’s your boss?”
    “He had a family problem in Texas.”
    “Oh, I thought maybe the dogcatcher got him.”
    What a howl. “Good-bye, Bobby,” I said, and turned my back on him to go in the back door.
    “Here,” he said, and I turned around, irritated. “Eric said you would need this.” He handed me a bundle wrapped in black velvet. Vampires couldn’t give you anything in a Wal-Mart bag or wrapped in Hallmark paper, oh, no. Black velvet. The bundle was secured with a gold tasseled cord, like you’d use to tie back a curtain.
    Just holding it gave me a bad feeling. “And what would this be?”
    “I don’t know. I wasn’t tasked with opening it.”
    I hate the word “tasked,” with “gifted” running close behind. “What am I supposed to do with this?” I said.
    “Eric said, ‘Tell her to give it to me tonight, in front of Victor.’ ”
    Eric did nothing without a reason. “All right,” I said reluctantly. “Consider me messaged .”
    I got through the next shift okay. Everyone was pitching in to help, and that was pleasing. The cook had been working hard all day; this was maybe the fifteenth short-order cook we’d had since I’d begun working at Merlotte’s. We’d had every variation on a human being you could imagine: black, white, male, female, old, young, dead (yes, a vampire cook), lycanthropically inclined (a werewolf), and probably one or two I’d completely forgotten. This cook, Antoine Lebrun, was real nice. He’d come to us out of Katrina. He’d outstayed most of the other refugees, who’d moved back to the Gulf Coast or moved on.
    Antoine was in his fifties, his curly hair showing a strand or two of gray. He’d worked concessions at the Superdome, he’d told me the day he got hired, and we’d both shuddered. Antoine got along great with D’Eriq, the busboy who doubled as his assistant.
    When I went in the kitchen to make sure he had everything he needed, Antoine told me he was really proud to be working for a shapeshifter, and D’Eriq wanted to go over and over his reaction to Sam’s and Tray’s transformations. After he’d left work, D’Eriq had gotten a phone call from his cousin in Monroe, and now D’Eriq wanted to tell us all about his cousin’s wife being a werewolf.
    D’Eriq’s reaction was what I hoped was typical. Two nights before, many people had discovered that someone they knew personally was a were of some kind. Hopefully, if the were had never shown signs of insanity or violence, these people would be willing to accept that shape-changing was an unthreatening addition to their knowledge of the world. It was even exciting.
    I hadn’t had time to check reactions around the world, but at least as far as local stuff went, the revelation seemed to be going smoothly. I didn’t get the feeling anyone was going to be firebombing Merlotte’s because of Sam’s dual nature, and I thought Tray’s motorcycle repair business was safe.
    Tanya was twenty minutes early, which raised her up in my estimation, and I gave her a genuine smile. After we ran over a few of the basics like hours, pay, and Sam’s house rules, I said, “You like being out there in Hotshot?”
    “Yeah, I do,” she said, sounding a little surprised. “The families out in Hotshot, they really get along well. If something goes wrong, they have a meeting and discuss it. Those that don’t like the life, they leave, like Mel Hart did.” Almost everyone in Hotshot was either