Dead as a Doornail

He’d kill Charles—I just knew it.
    “Sookie!” The last thing I expected—though frankly, I was way beyond consciously expecting anything—was for Charles to call to me. “Come out here, if you please!”
    I slid my feet into my pink fuzzy slippers and hurried down the hall to the back door; that was where the voice had been coming from, I thought.
    “I’m turning on the outside light,” I yelled. Didn’t want anyone to be blinded by the sudden electricity. “You sure it’s safe out there?”
    “Yes,” said two voices almost simultaneously.
    I flipped the switch with my eyes shut. After a second, I opened them and stepped to the door of the screened-in back porch, in my pink jammies and slippers. I crossed my arms over my chest. Though it wasn’t cold tonight, it was cool.
    I absorbed the scene in front of me. “Okay,” I said slowly. Charles was in the graveled area where I parked, and he had an elbow around the neck of Bill Compton, my neighbor. Bill is a vampire, has been since right after the Civil War. We have a history. It’s probably just a pebble of a history in Bill’s long life, but in mine, it’s a boulder.
    “Sookie,” Bill said between clenched teeth. “I don’t want to cause this foreigner harm. Tell him to get his hands off me.”
    I mulled that over at an accelerated rate. “Charles, I think you can let him go,” I said, and as fast as I could snap my fingers, Charles was standing beside me.
    “You know this man?” Charles’s voice was steely.
    Just as coldly, Bill said, “She does know me, intimately.”
    Oh, gack .
    “Now, is that polite?” I may have had a little cold steel in my own voice. “I don’t go around telling everyone the details of our former relationship. I would expect the same of any gentleman.”
    To my gratification, Charles glared at Bill, raising one eyebrow in a very superior and irritating way.
    “So this one is sharing your bed now?” Bill jerked his head toward the smaller vampire.
    If he’d said anything else, I could’ve held on to my temper. I don’t lose it a lot, but when I do, it’s well and truly lost. “Is that any of your business?” I asked, biting off each word. “If I sleep with a hundred men, or a hundred sheep, it’s not any of your business! Why are you creeping around my house in the middle of the night? You scared me halfway to death.”
    Bill didn’t look remotely repentant. “I’m sorry you wakened and were frightened,” he said insincerely. “I was checking on your safety.”
    “You were roaming around the woods and smelled another vampire,” I said. He’d always had an extremely acute sense of smell. “So you came over here to see who it was.”
    “I wanted to be sure you weren’t being attacked,” Bill said. “I thought I caught a sniff of human, too. Did you have a human visitor today?”
    I didn’t believe for a minute Bill was only concerned with my safety, but I didn’t want to believe jealousy brought him to my window, or some kind of prurient curiosity. I just breathed in and out for a minute, calming down and considering.
    “Charles is not attacking me,” I said, proud I was speaking so levelly.
    Bill sneered. “Charles,” he repeated in tones of great scorn.
    “Charles Twining,” said my companion, bowing—if you could call a slight inclination of his curly brown head a bow.
    “Where did you come up with this one?” Bill’s voice had regained its calm.
    “Actually, he works for Eric, like you do.”
    “Eric’s provided you with a bodyguard? You need a bodyguard?”
    “Listen, bozo,” I said through clenched jaws, “my life goes on while you’re gone. So does the town. People are getting shot around here, among them Sam. We needed a substitute bartender, and Charles was volunteered to help us out.” That may not have been entirely accurate, but I was not in the accuracy business at the moment. I was in the Make My Point business.
    At least Bill was appropriately taken aback by the information.
    “Sam. Who else?”
    I was shivering, since it wasn’t nylon pajama weather. But I didn’t want Bill in the house. “Calvin Norris and Heather Kinman.”
    “Shot dead?”
    “Heather was. Calvin was pretty badly wounded.”
    “Have the police arrested anyone?”
    “No.”
    “Do you know who did it?”
    “No.”
    “You’re worried about your brother.”
    “Yes.”
    “He turned at the full moon.”
    “Yes.”
    Bill looked at me with what might have been pity. “I’m