Dead Ever After

head, not to raise questions (or answer questions) that might lay a burden on him he shouldn’t have to assume.
    “It was a gift, which means I could use it as I chose,” I said, trying to sound brisk and matter-of-fact. “And I chose to start your heart again.”
    Sam sat down in his dilapidated armchair, the only item in the trailer that looked as though it needed to be kicked to the curb.
    Bernie said, “Have a seat, Sookie.” She came farther into the room and stared down at her oldest son, the only family member who had received the shifter gene. “I see you looking at the old chair,” she said conversationally, when Sam didn’t speak. “That was my husband’s. It was the only thing of his I gave away when he died, because it just reminded me of him too much. Maybe I should have kept it, and maybe if I’d looked at it every day, I wouldn’t have married Don.”
    Maybe Bernie’s problem wasn’t so much marrying Don as not telling him before the wedding that she could turn into an animal. But Don shouldn’t have shot her when he found out, either. You don’t just haul off and shoot the one you love.
    “ ‘Maybe’ is such a bad word,” I said. “You can ‘maybe’ yourself back to Adam and Eve and the serpent.”
    Bernie laughed, and Sam looked up. I could see a glimmer of his former self in that look. The bitter truth welled up in my throat like bile. The price of bringing back Sam from death was that he wasn’t quite the same man anymore. The experience of death had changed him, maybe forever. And maybe resurrecting him had changed me.
    “How are you feeling physically?” I said. “You seem a little shook up.”
    “That’s one way to put it,” he said. “The first day Mom was here, she had to help me walk. It’s weird. I was okay riding back with you that night, and I drove home okay next morning. But after that it was like my body had to relearn things. Sort of like . . . after a long sickness. I’ve felt so bad, and I can’t figure out why.”
    “I guess part of it is that process of grief.”
    “Grief?”
    “Well, it would only be natural,” I said. “You know. Jannalynn?”
    Sam looked at me. His expression was not what I expected; it was compounded of confusion and embarrassment. “What about her?” he asked, and I could swear his puzzlement was genuine.
    I cut my eyes toward Bernie, who was every bit (and more understandably) as unenlightened as Sam. Of course, she hadn’t been at the pack meeting, and she hadn’t talked to anyone else who’d been there until now. She’d met Jannalynn, though I wasn’t sure she’d known how involved Sam had been with the werewolf. There’d been sides of Jannalynn that few men would want their moms to see.
    “That Were that showed up at the house?” Bernie said. “The one Sam didn’t want me to know he’d been seeing?”
    I felt horribly awkward. “Yes, that Jannalynn,” I said.
    “I have been wondering why I hadn’t heard from her,” Sam said readily. “But considering all the bad things she was accused of—and the fact that I believed she’d done them—I hadn’t planned on seeing her again. Someone told me she’d gone to Alaska.”
    There wasn’t a psychologist hotline at hand. I didn’t know how to handle this.
    “Sam, do you remember what happened to you that night? You remember why we were there?” Begin at the beginning.
    “Not exactly,” he admitted. “It’s pretty hazy. Jannalynn was accused of doing something to Alcide, right? I remember feeling mad and pretty miserable, because I’d liked her so much when we started dating. But I wasn’t exactly surprised, so I guess I’d figured out that she wasn’t basically . . . a good person. I remember driving to Alcide’s farm with you, and I remember seeing Eric and Alcide and the pack, and I think I remember—there was a swimming pool? And some sand?”
    I nodded. “Yeah, a swimming pool and a sand volleyball area. Remember anything else?”
    Sam began to look uneasy. “I remember the pain,” he said. He sounded hoarse. “And something about the sand. It was all . . . I remember riding back in the truck, with you driving.”
    Well, shit. I hated to be the designated revelator. “You’ve forgotten a few things, Sam,” I said, as gently as I could. I’d heard of people forgetting traumatic stuff, especially when they’d been badly injured: people in car wrecks, people who’d gotten attacked. I figured Sam was entitled to blank out on a