Dead Reckoning

a switch. I had a moment of unpleasant satisfaction.
    Pure fairy blood is intoxicating to vampires. There’s no telling what Pam or Eric would have done if they’d drunk from those glasses. And they’d have gulped it down as quickly as they could because the smell is just as entrancing as the actual substance.
    As poisoning attempts went, this one was subtle.
    “I don’t think that amount could have caused us to behave in an uncontrollable way,” Pam said. But she didn’t sound so confident.
    Eric raised his blond eyebrows. “It was a cautious experiment,” he said thoughtfully. “We might have attacked anyone in the club, or we might have gone for Sookie, since she has that interesting streak of fairy. We would have made public fools of ourselves, in any case. We might have been arrested. It was an excellent thing that you stopped us, Sookie.”
    “I have my uses,” I said, suppressing the jolt of fear that the idea of Eric and Pam going fairy-struck on me evinced.
    “And you’re Eric’s wife ,” Pam observed quietly.
    Eric glared at her in the rearview mirror.
    The silence that fell was so thick I wished I’d had a knife. This Pam-and-Eric secret quarrel was both upsetting and frustrating. And that was the understatement of the year.
    “Is there something you want to tell me?” I asked, frightened of the answer. But anything was better than not knowing.
    “Eric got a letter—” Pam began, and before I could register that he’d moved, Eric had whipped around, reached over the seat, and seized her throat. Since he was still driving, I squawked in terror.
    “Eyes ahead, Eric! Not with the fighting again,” I said. “Look, just go on and tell me!”
    With his right hand, Eric was still holding Pam in a grip that would have choked her if she’d been a breather. He was steering with his left hand, and we coasted to a stop on the side of the road. I couldn’t see any oncoming traffic, and there were no lights behind us, either. I didn’t know if the isolation made me feel good or bad. Eric looked back at his child, and his eyes were so bright they were practically throwing sparks. He said, “Pam, don’t speak. That’s an order. Sookie, leave this be .”
    I could have said several things. I could have said, “I’m not your vassal, and I’ll say what I want to say,” or I could have said, “Fuck you, let me out,” and called my brother to come get me.
    But I sat in silence.
    I am ashamed to say that at that moment I was scared of Eric, this desperate and determined vampire who was attacking his best friend because he didn’t want me to know . . . something. Through the tie I felt with him, I got a confused bundle of negative emotions: fear, anger, grim resolve, frustration.
    “Take me home,” I said.
    In an eerie echo, the limp Miriam whispered, “Take me home. . . .”
    After a long moment, Eric let go of Pam, who collapsed in the backseat like a sack of rice. She hunched over Miriam protectively. In a frozen silence, Eric took me back to my house. There was no further mention of the sex we’d been scheduled to have after this “fun” evening. At that point, I would rather have had sex with Luis and Antonio. Or Pam. I said good-bye to Pam and Miriam, got out, and walked into my house without a backward glance.
    I guess Eric and Pam and Miriam drove back to Shreveport together, and I guess at some point he permitted Pam to speak again, but I don’t know.
    I couldn’t sleep after I’d washed my face and hung up the pretty dress. I hoped I’d get to wear it on a happier evening, sometime in the future. I’d looked too good to be this miserable. I wondered if Eric would have handled the evening with such sangfroid if it had been me Victor had captured and drugged and put out there on that banquette for the entire world to gape at.
    And there was another thing troubling me. Here’s what I would have asked Eric if he hadn’t been playing dictator. I would have said, “Where did Victor get the fairy blood?”
    That’s what I would have asked.

Chapter 4
    I rose the next day feeling pretty grim in general, but I brightened when I saw that Claude and Dermot had returned to the house the night before. The evidence was clear. Claude’s shirt was tossed over the back of a kitchen chair, and Dermot’s shoes were at the foot of the stairs. Plus, after I’d had my coffee and my shower, and emerged from my room in shorts and a green T-shirt, the two were waiting for me in the