Deadlocked: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel

“Diantha, do you think you could assume his appearance?”
    Diantha made a disgusted face but quickly bent to Donald Callaway’s face and stared into it. She plucked a hair from his head, closed her eyes. Her lips moved, and the air had that magic feel I’d noticed when my friend Amelia had performed one of her spells.
    In a moment, to my shock, Donald Callaway was standing in front of us staring down at his own body.
    It was Diantha, completely transformed. She was even wearing Callaway’s clothes, or at least that was the way she appeared to my eyes.
    “Fuckthisshit,” Callaway said, and I knew Diantha was in charge. But it was beyond strange to see Mr. Cataliades and Donald Callaway carrying out Callaway’s body to his car, unlocked with the keys extracted from the corpse’s pocket.
    I followed them out, watching carefully to make sure nothing fell or leaked from the body.
    “Diantha, drive to the airport in Shreveport and park the car there. Call a cab to pick you up, and have it drop you off at … at the police station. From there, find a good place to change back, so they’ll lose the trail.”
    She nodded with a jerk and climbed into the car.
    “Diantha can keep his appearance all the way to Shreveport?” I said, as she turned the car around with a grind of the wheel. She (he) waved gaily as she took off like a rocket. I hoped she made it back to Shreveport without getting a ticket.
    “She won’t get a ticket,” Mr. Cataliades answered my thought.
    But here came Jason in his pickup.
    “Oh, hell,” I said. “His sweet potatoes aren’t ready.”
    “I need say good-bye, anyway,” Mr. Cataliades said. “I know there are some things I haven’t told you, but I must go now. I may have taken care of the hellhounds, but yours aren’t my only secrets.”
    “But …”
    I might as well not have spoken. With the startling speed he’d shown when the hellhounds were chasing him, my “sponsor” disappeared into the woods.
    “Hey, Sis!” Jason bounded out of his truck. “Did you just have a visitor? I passed a car. You got my sweet potatoes ready?”
    “Ah, not quite,” I said. “That was a drop-in I didn’t expect, a guy wanting to sell me life insurance. You come in and sit, and they’ll be ready in about forty-five minutes.” That was an exaggeration, but I wanted Jason to stay. I was scared to be alone. That was not a familiar feeling, or one I liked.
    Jason was willing enough to come in and gossip with me while I stood at the kitchen counter adding ingredients to the sweet potatoes, mashing them, pouring them over the prepared crust, and putting the dish in the oven.
    “How come there’s water everywhere?” Jason said, getting up from the chair to mop it off with a dry dish towel.
    “I dropped a pitcher,” I said, and that was the end of Jason’scuriosity. We talked about the suggested wedding dates, the du Rone babies, Hoyt and Holly’s marriage and Hoyt’s idea that they have a double ceremony (I was sure Holly and Michele would nix that), and the big reconciliation between Danny and Kennedy, who had been spotted kissing passionately in public at the Sonic.
    As I was pulling the casserole out of the oven and preparing to add the final layer, Jason said, “Hey, I guess you heard that all our old furniture got busted up? That stuff the antiques dealer took? What was her name, Brenda? I hope you got money up front. It wasn’t on consignment or nothing, right?”
    I’d frozen after lifting out the dish halfway, but I made myself continue with my task. It helped that Dermot came in then, and since he and Jason looked so much alike, Jason got the biggest kick out of telling Dermot how good he was looking, every single time he saw our great-uncle.
    “No, I already got cash for that stuff,” I said, when the mutual admiration society had had its moment. And I got the distinct impression from Jason’s head that he’d already forgotten that he’d asked me.
    By the time I’d finished my work and sent Jason on his way with the hot dish, Dermot had volunteered to fix hamburgers for our supper. Cooking was something else that he was interested in now, thanks to the Food Network and Bravo. While Dermot was frying the burgers and getting out anything we might want to put on the buns, I looked around the kitchen very carefully to make sure there weren’t any traces of the incident.
    Oh, come on, I said to myself. Donald Callaway’s murder. “Incident,” my round, rosy ass. It