Dead and Gone

so I figured he’d gone to the doctor, and I decided you must have been held up at work or something. I went back to the insurance agency, and I just got home about thirty minutes ago. What’s up?”
    “I’ll be there soon,” I said. “Lock the doors and don’t let anyone in.”
    “Doors are locked; no one’s knocking,” she said.
    “Don’t let me in,” I said, “unless I give you the password.”
    “Sure, Sookie,” she said, and I could tell she thought I’d gone over the edge. “What’s the password?”
    “Fairypants,” I said, and how I came up with that I have no idea. It simply seemed super unlikely that anyone else in the world would say it.
    “I got it,” Amelia said. “Fairypants.”
    Bill was back at the car. “I’ve got to go,” I said, and hung up. When he opened the door, the dome light showed his face. It looked grim.
    “He’s not there,” he said immediately. “But there’s been a fight.”
    “Blood?”
    “Yes.”
    “Lots?”
    “He could still be alive. From the way it smelled, I don’t think it was all his.”
    My shoulders slumped. “I don’t know what to do,” I confessed, and it felt almost good to say it out loud. “I don’t know where to go to find him or how to help him. He’s supposed to be working as my bodyguard. But he went out in the woods last night and met up with a woman who said she was your new girlfriend. She gave him a drink. It was bad vampire blood, and it made him sick as the flu.” I looked over at Bill. “Maybe she got it from Bubba. I haven’t seen him to ask. I’m kind of worried about him.” I knew Bill could see me far more clearly than I could see him. I spread my hands in query. Did he know this woman?
    Bill looked at me. His mouth curved up in a rather bitter little smile. “I’m not dating anyone,” he said.
    I decided to completely ignore the emotional slant. I didn’t have the time or the energy tonight. I’d been right when I’d discounted the mysterious woman’s identity. “So this was someone who could pretend to be a fangbanger, someone convincing enough to overcome Tray’s good sense, someone who could put him under a spell so he’d drink the blood.”
    “Bubba doesn’t have much good sense at all,” Bill said. “Even though some fairy magic doesn’t work on vampires, I don’t think he’d be hard to bespell.”
    “Have you seen him tonight?”
    “He came over to my place to put drinks in his cooler, but he seemed weak and disoriented. After he drank a couple of bottles of TrueBlood, he seemed to be better. The last I saw of him, he was walking across the cemetery toward your house.”
    “I guess we better go there next.”
    “I’ll follow you.” Bill went to his own car, and we set off to drive the short distance to my place. But Bill caught the light at the intersection of the highway and Hummingbird Road, and I was ahead of him by quite a few seconds. I pulled up in back of the house, which was well-lit. Amelia had never worried about an electric bill in her life; it just made me want to cry sometimes when I followed her around turning off switch after switch.
    I got out of the car and hurried for the back steps, all ready to say, “Fairypants!” when Amelia came to the door. Bill would be there in less than a minute, and we could make a plan on how to find Tray. When Bill got there, he’d check on Bubba; I couldn’t go out in the woods. I was proud of myself for not rushing into the trees to find the vampire.
    I had so much to think about that I didn’t think about the most obvious danger.
    There’s no excuse for my lack of attention to detail.
    A woman by herself always has to be alert, and a woman who’s had the experiences I’ve had has extra cause for alarm when blips are on her radar. The security light was still on at the house and and the backyard looked normal, it was true. I had even glimpsed Amelia in the kitchen through a window. I hurried to the back steps, my purse slung over my shoulder, my trowel and water guns inside it, my keys in my hand.
    But anything can be hiding in the shadows, and it takes only a moment’s inattention for a trap to spring.
    I heard a few words in a language I didn’t recognize, but for a second I thought, He’s mumbling , and I couldn’t imagine what a man behind me would be mumbling, and I was about to put my foot on the first step to the back porch.
    And then I didn’t know a thing.

Chapter 17
    I thought I was in a cave. It felt like a