Dead Ever After: A True Blood Novel

The closer to my house we got, the thicker the vegetation became. The area right at the edge of the yard might almost be a jungle.
    “You think he’s going to shoot?” I said with a smile. I swung Quinn’s hand like I was a child walking with her grandpa.
    “I don’t smell a gun,” he said. “Enough with the hand swinging. I need to be able to move quick.”
    I let go, somewhat embarrassed. “Let’s try to get into the house. Without getting killed.”
    But whoever was stalking us didn’t make a move. It was almost an anticlimax to walk across the enclosed back porch, wondering every second if something terrible would happen, and then to make it in the door and shut it behind us . . . and nothing happened. Nothing at all.
    Barry had decided to make hamburgers to cook on the grill in the backyard. He was putting chopped onion and seasoned salt and green peppers in the meat and forming the patties, and he was mighty startled when we bolted into the kitchen and ducked.
    “What the hell?” he said.
    “Someone was out there,” I said.
    He crouched, too. He closed his eyes and concentrated. “I have no idea,” he said, after a moment. “Whoever it was, he’s left, Sookie.”
    “Smelled like a fairy,” Quinn told Barry.
    “They’re all gone,” Barry said. “That’s what the Texas vampires told me. Said they’d cleaned out lock, stock, and barrel.”
    “They are all gone,” I said. “I know that for a fact. So either Quinn’s nose is wrong or we have a rogue.”
    “Or a reject,” Barry said quietly.
    “Or an escapee. Whatever he is, why is he skulking in the woods?” Quinn asked.
    But I didn’t have any answer. And when nothing else happened, we three began to think nothing would. Quinn decided to delay his search of the woods until the evening. There wasn’t any point going out there now.
    Though it felt anticlimactic, I began slicing tomatoes for the hamburgers, and then I cut up a watermelon. Quinn volunteered to make some home fries. Since he’d put a ten-pound bag of potatoes in the cart today, I was glad he had a plan to use them up.
    With all three of us working in the kitchen, supper came together. I pretended not to see when Quinn ate one burger before it was cooked, and Barry hastily volunteered to take the others out to the grill. I put together a baked bean casserole, and Quinn began frying the potatoes. I set the table and washed the preparation dishes.
    It was almost like running a boardinghouse, I thought, when I called everyone down for dinner.

Chapter 13
    Amazingly, the meal went well. There was just enough room for us at the kitchen table when I opened two folding chairs my gran had kept in the living room closet.
    Amelia had obviously been crying, but she was calm now. Bob touched her every chance he got. Mr. Cataliades explained that he and Diantha had recalled an errand in town, and after we’d shared hamburgers and French fries and beans and watermelon, they took off.
    We all helped clear away the kitchen. After dinner, Barry sat in a living room armchair with his feet propped up, focusing on his e-reader. Bob and Amelia cuddled on the couch watching a rebroadcast of The Terminator. Cheerful. After consuming three cooked hamburgers and a quart of French fries, Quinn loped outside to conduct a fruitless search of the woods. After an hour, discouraged and filthy, he returned to the house to tell me that he had smelled two vampires (presumably Bill and Karin) and a faint trace of fairy in the place we’d been when we were followed. But there was nothing else to find. He was leaving for a motel by the interstate.
    I felt hostess guilt over not having a bed to offer him. I did tell him I’d be glad to pay for his hotel room, and he gave me a look that would’ve made paint peel.
    The two part-demons returned after dark, while I was reading, and they didn’t look happy. They said good night very politely and clattered up the stairs to their room. With everyone in for the night, I decided my day could officially come to a close. It had been a pretty damn long one.
    It’s always possible for human beings to spoil their own peace of mind, and I did a good job of it that night. Despite the friends who had shown up with no expectation of reward, the friends who’d come a long way to help me, I worried about the friend who hadn’t tried. I just couldn’t figure Sam out any more than I could figure out why Eric had posted my bail when I was no longer his wife, or even