Dead Reckoning: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel

it. “Yes?” he said curtly. Then his voice changed. “Your Majesty,” he said, and he walked quickly into the living room so I couldn’t hear.
    I wouldn’t have thought so much about it if I hadn’t seen Pam’s face. She was looking at me, and her expression was clearly one of . . . pity.
    “What?” I said, the hair on the back of my neck rising. “What’s up? If he said ‘Your Majesty,’ that’s Felipe calling, huh? That should be good . . . right?”
    “I can’t tell you,” she said. “He’d kill me. He doesn’t even want you to know there’s anything to know, if you can pick up what I’m putting down.”
    “Pam. Tell me. ”
    “I can’t,” she repeated. “You need to be looking out for yourself, Sookie.”
    I looked at her with fierce intensity. I couldn’t will her mouth to open, and I didn’t have the strength to hold her down on the kitchen table and demand the facts from her.
    Where could reason get me? Okay, Pam liked me. The only people she liked better were Eric and her Miriam. If there was something she couldn’t tell me, it had to be associated with Eric. If Eric had been human, I would’ve thought he had some dread disease. If Eric had lost all his assets in the stock market or some such financial calamity, Pam knew that money was not my ruling concern. What was the only thing I valued?
    His love.
    Eric had someone else.
    I stood up without knowing I was standing, the chair clattering to the floor behind me. I wanted to reach into Pam’s brain and yank out the details. Now I understood very clearly why Eric had gone for her in this same room the night he’d brought Immanuel over. She’d wanted to tell me then and he’d forbidden her to speak.
    Alarmed by the noise of the chair bouncing on the floor, Eric came running into the room, the phone still held to his ear. I was standing with my fists clenched, glaring at him. My heart was lurching around in my chest like a frog on a griddle.
    “Excuse me,” he said into the phone. “There is a crisis. I’ll return your call later.” He snapped his phone shut.
    “Pam,” he said. “I am very angry with you. I am seriously angry with you. Leave this house now and remain silent.”
    With a posture I had never seen before, hunched and humbled, Pam scrambled up from her chair and out the back door. I wondered if she’d see Bubba in the woods. Or Bill. Or maybe there’d be fairies. Or some more kidnappers. A homicidal maniac! You never knew what you’d find in my woods.
    I didn’t say a word. I waited. I felt like my eyes were shooting flames.
    “I love you,” he said.
    I waited.
    “My maker, Appius Livius Ocella”—the dead Appius Livius Ocella—“was in the process of making a match for me before he died,” Eric said. “He mentioned it to me during his stay, but I didn’t realize the process had gone as far as it had when he died. I thought I could ignore it. That his death canceled it out.”
    I waited. I could not read his face, and without the bond, I could only see that he was covering his emotion with a hard face.
    “This isn’t much done anymore, though it used to be the norm. Makers used to find matches for their children. They’d receive a fee if it was an advantageous union, if each half could supply something the other lacked. It was mostly a business arrangement.”
    I raised my eyebrows. At the only vampire wedding I’d witnessed, there’d been plenty of evidence of physical passion, though I’d been told the couple wouldn’t be spending all their time together.
    Eric looked abashed, an expression I’d never thought to see on his face.
    “Of course, it has to be consummated,” he said.
    I waited for the coup de grace. Maybe the ground would open up and swallow him first. It didn’t.
    “I’d have to put you aside,” he admitted. “It’s not done, to have a human wife and a vampire wife. Especially if the wife is the Queen of Oklahoma. The vampire wife must be the only one.” He looked away, his face stiff with a resentment he’d never expressed before. “I know you’ve always insisted that you weren’t my true wife, so presumably that would not be so difficult for you.”
    Like hell .
    He looked at my face as if he were reading a map. “Though I believe it would be,” he said softly. “Sookie, I swear to you that since I received the letter, I have done everything I could to stop this. I have pleaded that Ocella’s death should cancel the arrangement; I have said that I’m