Dead in the Family

laughed heartily. “Who wants a bag of bones?” he said, with absolute sincerity. “I don’t want to hurt myself on the sharp edges of the woman I’m bedding.”
    That made me feel better than anything he’d said to me in a long time. “Did women . . . Were women curvier when you were human?” I asked.
    “We didn’t always have choices about how fat we were,” Eric said dryly. “In bad years, we were all skin and bones. In good years, when we could eat, we did.”
    I felt abashed. “Oh, sorry.”
    “This is a wonderful century to live in,” Eric said. “You can have food anytime you want.”
    “If you have the money to pay for it.”
    “Oh, you can steal it,” he said. “The point is, the food is here to be had.”
    “Not in Africa.”
    “I know people still starve in many parts of the world. But sooner or later, this prosperity will extend everywhere. It just got here first.”
    I found his optimism amazing. “You really think so?”
    “Yes,” he said simply. “Braid my hair for me, would you, Sookie?”
    I got my hairbrush and an elastic band. Color me silly, but I really enjoyed doing this. Eric sat on the stool in front of my vanity table, and I threw on a robe he’d given me, a beautiful peach-and-white-silk one. I began brushing Eric’s long hair. After he said he didn’t mind, I got some hair gel and slicked the blond strands back so there wouldn’t be any loose hairs ruining the look. I took my time, making the neatest braid I could, and then I tied off the end. Without his hair floating around his face, Eric looked more severe, but just as handsome. I sighed.
    “What is this sound coming from you?” he asked, turning from side to side to get several views of himself in the mirror. “Are you not happy with the result?”
    “I think you look great,” I said. Only the fact that he might accuse me of false modesty kept me from saying, “So what on earth are you doing with me?”
    “Now I’ll do your hair.”
    Something in me flinched. The night I’d had sex for the very first time, Bill had brushed my hair until the sensuality of the movement had turned into a very different kind of sensuality. “No, thanks,” I said brightly.
    I realized that I felt very odd, all of a sudden.
    Eric swung around to look up at me. “What’s making you so jumpy, Sookie?”
    “Hey, what happened to Alaska and Hawaii?” I asked at random. I still had the brush in my hand, and without meaning to, I dropped it. It clattered on the wooden floor.
    “What?” Eric looked down at the brush, then up at my face, in some confusion.
    “What section are they in? They both in Nakamura?”
    “Narayana. No. Alaska is lumped in with the Canadians. They have their own system. Hawaii is autonomous.”
    “That’s just not right.” I was genuinely indignant. Then I remembered there was something very important I had to tell Eric. “I guess Heidi reported back to you after she sniffed out my land? She told you about the body?” My hand jerked involuntarily.
    Eric was watching my every move, his eyes narrowed. “We already talked about Debbie Pelt. If you really want me to, I’ll move her.”
    I shivered all over. I wanted to tell him that the body was fresh. I’d started out to do that, but somehow I was having trouble formulating my sentence. I felt so peculiar. Eric cocked his head, his eyes locked on my face. “You’re behaving very strangely, Sookie.”
    “Do you think Alcide could tell from the smell that the corpse was Debbie?” I asked. What was wrong with me?
    “Not from the scent,” he said. “A body is a body. It doesn’t retain the distinctive scent that identified it as a particular person, especially after this long. Are you so worried about what Alcide thinks?”
    “Not as much as I used to be,” I said, babbling on. “Hey, I heard on the radio today that one of the senators from Oklahoma came out as a Were. He said he’d register with some government bureau the day they pried his fangs from his cold, dead corpse.”
    “I think the backlash from this will benefit vampires,” Eric said with some satisfaction. “Of course, we’d always realized the government would want to keep track of us somehow. Now it seems that if the Weres win their fight to be free of supervision, we may be able to do the same.”
    “You better get dressed,” I said. Something bad was going to happen soon, and Eric needed clothes.
    He turned and peered at himself in the mirror one last time.