Dead to the World

from $200 to $400 on the black market. The effect of drinking this blood? Quite unpredictable, once the blood had left the vampire. I guess that was part of the attraction. Most commonly, for a few weeks, the drinker gained strength, visual acuity, a feeling of robust health, and enhanced attractiveness. It depended on the age of the drained vampire and the freshness of the blood.
    Of course, those effects faded, unless you drank more blood.
    A certain percentage of people who experienced drinking vampire blood could hardly wait to scratch up money for more. These blood junkies were extremely dangerous, of course. City police forces were glad to hire vampires to deal with them, since regular cops would simply get pulped.
    Every now and then, a blood drinker simply went mad—sometimes in a quiet, gibbering kind of way, but sometimes spectacularly and murderously. There was no way to predict who would be stricken this way, and it could happen on the first drinking.
    So there were men with glittering mad eyes in padded cells and there were electrifying movie stars who equally owed their condition to the Drainers. Draining was a hazardous job, of course. Sometimes the vampire got loose, with a very predictable result. A court in Florida had ruled this vampire retaliation justifiable homicide, in one celebrated case, because Drainers notoriously discarded their victims. They left a vampire, all but empty of blood, too weak to move, wherever the vamp happened to fall. The weakened vampire died when the sun came up, unless he had the good fortune to be discovered and helped to safety during the hours of darkness. It took years to recover from a draining, and that was years of help from other vamps. Bill had told me there were shelters for drained vamps, and that their location was kept very secret.
    Witches with nearly the physical power of vampires—that seemed a very dangerous combination. I kept thinking of women when I thought of the coven that had moved into Shreveport, and I kept correcting myself. Men, Holly had said, were in the group.
    I looked at the clock at the drive-through bank, and I saw it was just after noon. It would be full dark by a few minutes before six; Eric had gotten up a little earlier than that, at times. I could certainly go to Shreveport and come back by then. I couldn’t think of another plan, and I just couldn’t go home and sit and wait. Even wasting gas was better than going back to my house, though worry for Jason crawled up and down my spine. I could take the time to drop off the shotgun, but as long as it was unloaded and the shells were in a separate location, it should be legal enough to drive around with it.
    For the first time in my life, I checked my rearview mirror to see if I was being followed. I am not up on spy techniques, but if someone was following me, I couldn’t spot him. I stopped and got gas and an ICEE, just to see if anyone pulled into the gas station behind me, but no one did. That was real good, I decided, hoping that Holly was safe.
    As I drove, I had time to review my conversation with Holly. I realized it was the first one I’d ever had with Holly in which Danielle’s name had not come up once. Holly and Danielle had been joined at the hip since grade school. They probably had their periods at the same time. Danielle’s parents, cradle members of the Free Will Church of God’s Anointed, would have a fit if they knew, so it wasn’t any wonder that Holly had been so discreet.
    Our little town of Bon Temps had stretched its gates open wide enough to tolerate vampires, and gay people didn’t have a very hard time of it anymore (kind of depending on how they expressed their sexual preference). However, I thought the gates might snap shut for Wiccans.
    The peculiar and beautiful Claudine had told me that she was attracted to Bon Temps for its very strangeness. I wondered what else was out there, waiting to reveal itself.

Chapter  5
    C ARLA RODRIGUEZ, MY MOST PROMISING LEAD, CAME first. I’d looked up the old address I had for Dovie, with whom I’d exchanged the odd Christmas card. I found the house with a little difficulty. It was well away from the shopping areas that were my only normal stops in Shreveport. The houses were small and close together where Dovie lived, and some of them were in bad repair.
    I felt a distinct thrill of triumph when Carla herself answered the door. She had a black eye, and she was hungover, both signs that she’d had a big