Dead in the Family

It’s a silver dagger.”
    I remembered Bill’s gray skin and the slow way he moved after silver poisoning. I shuddered, but I was angry with myself for my squeamishness. I slid the dagger from the leather sheath.
    “We have to get out, huh?” I said. I tried to smile. “Okay, showtime.”
    “Sookie, be brave and ruthless,” Pam said, and she opened her door and disappeared from sight. I sent a last waft of love toward Eric by way of good-bye while I was sticking the dagger through my skirt’s waistband at the back. I got out of the car into the pelting darkness, holding my hands out to show they were empty.
    I was drenched in seconds. I shoved my hair behind my ears so it wouldn’t hang in my eyes. Though the Lexus’s headlights were on, it was very dark. The only other light came from oncoming headlights from both sides of the interstate, and the brightly lit truck stop a mile away. Otherwise, we were nowhere, an anonymous stretch of divided interstate with woods on either side. The vampires could see a lot better than I could. But I knew where everyone was because I cast out that other sense of mine and felt for their brains. Vampires register as holes to me, almost black spots in the atmosphere. It’s negative tracking.
    No one spoke, and the only noise was the pelting of the rain drumming on the cars. I couldn’t hear an oncoming vehicle. “Hi, Bruno,” I called, and I sounded perky in a crazy way. “Who’s your buddy?”
    I walked over to him. Across the median, a car whizzed by going west. If the driver caught a glimpse of us, it probably looked as though two Good Samaritans had stopped to help some people with car trouble. Humans see what they want to see . . . what they expect to see.
    Now that I was closer to Bruno, I could tell that his short brown hair was plastered to his head. I’d seen Bruno only once before, and he was wearing the same serious expression on his face that he’d worn the night he’d been standing in my front yard ready to move in and burn down my house with me in it. Bruno was a serious kind of guy in the same way I’m a perky kind of woman. It was a fallback position.
    “Hello, Miss Stackhouse,” Bruno said. He wasn’t any taller than me, but he was a burly man. The vampire Pam had called Corinna loomed up on Bruno’s right. Corinna was—had been—African-American, and the water was dripping off the tips of her intricately braided hair. The beads worked into the braids clicked together, a sound I could just pick up under the drumming of the rain. She was thin and tall, and she’d added to her height with three-inch heels. Though she was wearing a dress that had probably been very expensive, her whole ensemble had suffered by the drenching it had taken. She looked like a very elegant drowned rat.
    Since I was almost out of my head with alarm anyway, I started laughing.
    “You got a flat tire or something, Bruno?” I asked. “I can’t imagine what else you’d be doing out here in the middle of nowhere in the pouring rain.”
    “I was waiting for you, bitch.”
    I wasn’t sure where Pam was, and I couldn’t spare the brainpower to search for her. “Language, Bruno! I don’t think you know me well enough to call me that. I guess you-all have someone watching Eric’s house.”
    “We do. When we saw you two leaving together, it seemed like a good time to take care of a few things.”
    Corinna hadn’t spoken still, but she was looking around her warily, and I realized she didn’t know where Pam had gone. I grinned. “For the life of me, I don’t know why you’re doing all this. It seems like Victor should be glad to have someone as smart as Eric working for him. Why can’t he appreciate that?” And leave us alone.
    Bruno took a step closer to me. The light was too poor for me to make out his eye color, but I could tell he was still looking serious. I thought it was strange when Bruno took the time to answer me, but anything that bought us more time was good. “Eric is a great vampire. But Eric will never bow to Victor, not really. And he’s accumulating his own power at a pace that makes Victor anxious. He’s got you, for one thing. Your great-grandfather may have sealed himself away, but who’s to say he won’t come back? And Eric can use your stupid ability whenever he chooses. Victor doesn’t want Eric to have that advantage.” And then Bruno had his hands around my neck. He’d moved so quickly I couldn’t possibly react, and I knew