Dead Ever After

clenching the material tightly. Her face turned slightly from side to side as if she sought a better view; the effect was indescribably eerie. And believe me, seeing inside her head was eerie, too.
    “I’ve killed women,” she said suddenly, in a voice that was not her own. I jumped, and I wasn’t the only one. We all took a step back from Delphine Oubre.
    “I’ve killed whores,” she said gloatingly. “This one’s close enough. She’s so scared. That makes it sweeter.”
    We were frozen, like we’d drawn a collective breath and were holding it.
    “My friend there,” said Oubre, still in the slightly accented voice, “he’s squeamish, just a bit. But it’s his choice, you know?”
    I almost recognized that voice. I associated it with . . . trouble. Disaster.
    I turned to look at Barry, at the same moment he took my hand in his.
    “Johan Glassport,” I whispered.
    My comfort level had just shot out of the uneasy area and into the blood-pressure-medication zone. Barry had mentioned seeing Glassport in New Orleans, and Quinn had seen him at an area motel; but I couldn’t figure out why. Glassport had no reason to dislike me that I knew of, but I didn’t believe that reasons were a big part of his operating system when he wasn’t on the clock as a lawyer.
    When I’d met Glassport, we’d been on an airplane flight to Rhodes, both hired by the then-queen of Louisiana, Sophie-Anne. I was supposed to listen in to human brains at the vampire summit, and Glassport’s job was to defend her against charges brought by a contingent of Arkansas vamps.
    I hadn’t seen Glassport since the Pyramid of Gizeh had been blown up by human supremacists who wanted to make a statement about vampires—namely, that they all ought to die.
    I’d thought about Glassport from time to time, always with distaste. I had happily assumed I’d never see him again in my life. But here he was, speaking through the mouth of a Louisiana rancher named Delphine Oubre.
    “Whose choice?” Bob said, in a very quiet voice.
    But Delphine didn’t respond in the Glassport voice. Instead, her body changed subtly, and she swayed from side to side, as if she were riding an invisible roller coaster. It slowed down and then stopped. After a long minute, she opened her eyes.
    “What I see is this,” she said in her own voice. She spoke rapidly, as if trying to get it all told before she forgot. “I see a man, a white man, and he’s bad most of the way through, but he keeps a good façade. He enjoys killing the helpless. He killed that woman, the red-headed one, on assignment. She not his usual style. She not some random pickup. She knew him. She knew the man with him. She couldn’t believe they were killing her. She thought the other man was good. She was thinking, ‘I done everything they ask me. Why they not killing Snookie?’ ”
    We hadn’t introduced ourselves. “Sookie,” I corrected her absently. “She wanted to know why they were killing her instead of Sookie.”
    “That you?” Delphine asked.
    Catching Bob’s eyes on me and his warning shake of the head, I said, “No.”
    “You lucky if you’re not Sookie. Whoever she is, they’d sure like to kill her.”
    Damn.
    Delphine stood up, shook herself a little, took another swallow of water, and walked out the door to get into her pickup to go home to feed her cows.
    Everyone carefully avoided looking at me. I was the one with the big X on her forehead.
    “I have to go to work,” I said, when the silence had lasted long enough. I didn’t give a damn about what Sam thought about it. I had to get out and do something.
    Mr. Cataliades said, “Diantha will go with you.”
    “I would be extremely glad to have her with me,” I said with absolute truth. “I’m just not sure how to explain her being there.”
    “Why do you have to?” Bob said.
    “Well, I have to say something , don’t I?”
    “Why?” Barry asked. “Don’t you own part of the bar?”
    “Yes,” I admitted.
    “Then you don’t have to explain diddly-squat,” Amelia said, with such an air of magnificent indifference that we all laughed, even me.
    So Diantha and I walked into Merlotte’s, and I didn’t explain her presence to anyone but Sam. The part-demon girl was wearing a relatively quiet outfit: yellow miniskirt, kingfisher blue tank top, and rainbow platform flip-flops. This month her hair was a platinum blond, but there were a lot of artificially platinum blondes around Bon Temps, though not