Dead Reckoning: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel

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    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
     
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    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
     
    Harris, Charlaine.
Dead reckoning : a Sookie Stackhouse novel / Charlaine Harris. p. cm.—(Sookie Stackhouse / True blood ; 11)
    eISBN : 978-1-101-51438-2
    1. Stackhouse, Sookie (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Vampires—Fiction.
    3. Werewolves—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.A6427D433 2011
813’.54—dc22
2010054261
     
    http://us.penguingroup.com

I have to dedicate this book to
the memory of my mother.
     
    She would not have thought it strange
to have an urban fantasy novel dedicated to her.
She was my biggest fan and my most faithful reader.
There was so much to admire about my mother.
I miss her every day.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    I am afraid I’ll skip someone this time around, because I am fortunate enough to have a lot of great help as I work on these books. Let me thank my assistant and best friend, Paula Woldan, first and foremost, for allowing me the peace of mind to work without worry; my friends and readers Toni L. P. Kelner and Dana Cameron, who help me focus on the important aspects of the work at hand; Victoria Koski, who tries to keep the huge world of Sookie in order; and my agent, Joshua Bilmes, and my editor, Ginjer Buchanan, who work so hard to keep my professional train on the tracks. For this book, I had the excellent advice of Ellen Dugan, writer, mother, and witch.

Chapter 1
    The attic had been kept locked until the day after my grandmother died. I’d found her key and opened it that awful day to look for her wedding dress, having the crazy idea she should be buried in it. I’d taken one step inside and then turned and walked out, leaving the door unsecured behind me.
    Now, two years later, I pushed that door open again. The hinges creaked as ominously as if it were midnight on Halloween instead of a sunny Wednesday morning in late May. The broad floorboards protested under my feet as I stepped over the threshold. There were dark shapes all around me, and a very faint musty odor—the smell of old things long forgotten.
    When the second story had been added to the original Stackhouse home decades before, the new floor had been divided into bedrooms, but perhaps a third of it had been relegated to storage space after the largest generation of Stackhouses had thinned out. Since Jason and I had come to live with my grandparents after our parents had died, the attic door had been kept locked. Gran hadn’t wanted to clean up after us if we decided the attic was a great place to play.
    Now I owned the house, and the key was on a ribbon around my neck. There were only three Stackhouse descendants—Jason, me, and my deceased cousin Hadley’s son,