Definitely Dead

to me.
    After poring over the pictures for a minute, her gaze stopped roaming over the cards and fixed on the table. Her face reddened, and she closed her eyes as if she were feeling mortified. Of course, she was.
    “Okay,” she said at last, her voice calm and flat. “What are you?”
    “Telepath.”
    “I’m always making assumptions! Why don’t I learn!”
    “No one thinks of me as scary,” I said, trying to sound gentle, and she winced.
    “Well, I won’t make that mistake again,” she said. “You did seem more knowledgeable about supes than the ordinary person.”
    “And learning more every day.” Even to myself, my voice sounded grim.
    “Now I’ll have to tell my advisor that I blew it,” my landlady said. She looked as gloomy as it was possible for her to look. Not very.
    “You have a . . . mentor?”
    “Yeah, an older witch who kind of monitors our progress the first three years of being a professional.”
    “How do you know when you’re a professional?”
    “Oh, you have to pass the exam,” Amelia explained, getting to her feet and going over to the sink. In a New York minute, she had washed the coffeepot and the filter apparatus, put them neatly in the drainer, and wiped out the sink.
    “So we’ll start packing up stuff tomorrow?” I said.
    “What’s wrong with right now?”
    “I’d like to go through Hadley’s things by myself, first,” I said, trying not to sound irritated.
    “Oh. Well, sure you would.” She tried to look as if she’d thought of that already. “And I guess you have to go over to the queen’s tonight, huh?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Oh, I’ll bet they’re expecting you. Was there a tall, dark, and handsome vamp out there with you last night? He sure looked familiar.”
    “Bill Compton,” I said. “Yes, he’s lived in Louisiana for years and he’s done some work for the queen.”
    She looked at me, her clear blue eyes surprised. “Oh, I thought he knew your cousin.”
    “No,” I said. “Thanks for getting me up so I could start work, and thanks for being willing to help me.”
    She was pleased that she was leaving, because I hadn’t been what she’d expected, and she wanted to think about me some and make some phone calls to sisters in the craft in the Bon Temps area. “Holly Cleary,” I said. “She’s the one I know best.”
    Amelia gasped and said a shaky good-bye. She left as unexpectedly as she’d arrived.
    I felt old all of a sudden. I’d just been showing off, and I’d reduced a confident, happy young witch to an anxious woman in the space of an hour.
    But as I got out a pad and pencil—right where they should be, in the drawer closest to the telephone—to figure out my plan of action, I consoled myself with the thought that Amelia had needed the mental slap in the face pretty badly. If it hadn’t come from me, it might have come from someone who actually meant her harm.

Chapter 15
    I NEEDED BOXES, THAT WAS FOR SURE. SO I’D ALSO need strapping tape, lots of it, and a Magic Marker, and probably scissors. And finally, I’d need a truck to take whatever I salvaged back to Bon Temps. I could ask Jason to drive down, or I could rent a truck, or I could ask Mr. Cataliades if he knew of a truck I could borrow. If there was a lot of stuff, maybe I would rent a car and a trailer. I’d never done such a thing, but how hard could it be? Since I didn’t have a ride right now, there was no way to obtain the supplies. But I might as well start sorting, since the sooner I finished, the sooner I could get back to work and away from the New Orleans vampires. I was glad, in a corner of my mind, that Bill had come, too. As angry as I sometimes felt with him, he was familiar. After all, he’d been the first vampire I’d ever met, and it still seemed almost miraculous to me how it had happened.
    He’d come into the bar, and I’d been fascinated with the discovery that I couldn’t hear his thoughts. Then later the same evening, I’d rescued him from drainers. I sighed, thinking how good it had been until he’d been recalled by his maker, Lorena, now also definitely dead.
    I shook myself. This wasn’t the time for a trip down memory lane. This was the time for action and decision. I decided to start with the clothes.
    After fifteen minutes, I realized that the clothes were going to be easy. I was going to give most of them away. Not only was my taste radically different from my cousin’s, but her hips and breasts had been smaller