Dead Until Dark

blacktop. “My blood is supposed to improve your sex life and your health.”
    “I’m healthy as a horse,” I told him honestly. “And I have no sex life to speak of. You do what you want with it.”
    “You could sell it,” he suggested, but I thought he was just waiting to see what I’d say about that.
    “I wouldn’t touch it,” I said, insulted.
    “You’re different,” he said. “What are you?” He seemed to be going through a list of possibilities in his head from the way he was looking at me. To my pleasure, I could not hear a one of them.
    “Well. I’m Sookie Stackhouse, and I’m a waitress,” I told him. “What’s your name?” I thought I could at least ask that without being presuming.
    “Bill,” he said.
    Before I could stop myself, I rocked back onto my butt with laughter. “The vampire Bill!” I said. “I thought it might be Antoine, or Basil, or Langford! Bill!” I hadn’t laughed so hard in a long time. “Well, see ya, Bill. I got to get back to work.” I could feel the tense grin snap back into place when I thought of Merlotte’s. I put my hand on Bill’s shoulder and pushed up. It was rock hard, and I was on my feet so fast I had to stop myself from stumbling. I examined my socks to make sure their cuffs were exactly even, and I looked up and down my outfit to check for wear and tear during the fight with the Rats. I dusted off my bottom since I’d been sitting on the dirty pavement and gave Bill a wave as I started off across the parking lot.
    It had been a stimulating evening, one with a lot of food for thought. I felt almost as cheerful as my smile when I considered it.
    But Jason was going to be mighty angry about the chain.
     
     
    AFTER WORK THAT night, I drove home, which is only about four miles south from the bar. Jason had been gone (and so had DeeAnne) when I got back to work, and that had been another good thing. I was reviewing the evening as I drove to my grandmother’s house, where I lived. It’s right before Tall Pines Cemetery, which lies off a narrow two-lane parish road. My great-great-great grandfather had started the house, and he’d had ideas about privacy, so to reach it you had to turn off the parish road into the driveway, go through some woods, and then you arrived at the clearing in which the house stood.
    It’s sure not any historic landmark, since most of the oldest parts have been ripped down and replaced over the years, and of course it’s got electricity and plumbing and insulation, all that good modern stuff. But it still has a tin roof that gleams blindingly on sunny days. When the roof needed to be replaced, I wanted to put regular roofing tiles on it, but my grandmother said no. Though I was paying, it’s her house; so naturally, tin it was.
    Historical or not, I’d lived in this house since I was about seven, and I’d visited it often before then, so I loved it. It was just a big old family home, too big for Granny and me, I guess. It had a broad front covered by a screened-in porch, and it was painted white, Granny being a traditionalist all the way. I went through the big living room, strewn with battered furniture arranged to suit us, and down the hall to the first bedroom on the left, the biggest.
    Adele Hale Stackhouse, my grandmother, was propped up in her high bed, about a million pillows padding her skinny shoulders. She was wearing a long-sleeved cotton nightgown even in the warmth of this spring night, and her bedside lamp was still on. There was a book propped in her lap.
    “Hey,” I said.
    “Hi, honey.”
    My grandmother is very small and very old, but her hair is still thick, and so white it almost has the very faintest of green tinges. She wears it kind of rolled against her neck during the day, but at night it’s loose or braided. I looked at the cover of her book.
    “You reading Danielle Steele again?”
    “Oh, that woman can sure tell a story.” My grandmother’s great pleasures were reading Danielle Steele, watching her soap operas (which she called her “stories”) and attending meetings of the myriad clubs she’d belonged to all her adult life, it seemed. Her favorites were the Descendants of the Glorious Dead and the Bon Temps Gardening Society.
    “Guess what happened tonight?” I asked her.
    “What? You got a date?”
    “No,” I said, working to keep a smile on my face. “A vampire came into the bar.”
    “Ooh, did he have fangs?”
    I’d seen them glisten in the parking lot lights