Definitely Dead

so I brought some beignets and some coffee so strong it’ll make you grow hair on your chest.”
    I’d heard that quite a few times, but it still made me smile. “Oh, that’s my goal,” I said. “Bring it on. There’s actually coffee here, but I didn’t have a chance to make it because Everett here is such a take-charge kind of guy.”
    Everett smiled up from his tenth box. “You know that’s not true, but it’s good to hear you say it,” he said. I introduced the two men, and after Quinn handed me my bag, he began to help Everett assemble boxes. I sat at the glass-topped dining table and ate every crumb of the beignets that were in the bag and drank every drop of the coffee. I got powdered sugar all over me, and I didn’t care a bit. Quinn turned to look at me and tried to hide his smile. “You’re wearing your food, babe,” he said.
    I looked down at the tank top. “No hair on my chest, though,” I said, and he said, “Can I check?”
    I laughed and went to the back to brush my teeth and hair, both essential tasks. I checked out Hadley’s clothes that I’d wriggled into. The black spandex workout pants came to midthigh. Hadley probably had never worn them, because they would have been too big, to her taste. On me, they were very snug, but not the snug Hadley liked, where you could count the . . . oh, never mind. The hot pink tank top left my pale pink bra straps showing, to say nothing of a couple of inches of my middle, but thanks to Peck’s Tan-a-Lot (located inside Peck’s Bunch-o-Flicks, a video rental place in Bon Temps), that middle was nice and brown. Hadley would have put a piece of jewelry in her belly button. I looked at myself in the mirror, trying to picture myself with a gold stud or something. Nah. I slipped on some sandals decorated with crystal beads and felt quite glamorous for about thirty seconds.
    I began talking to Quinn about what I planned to do that day, and rather than yell, I stepped from the bedroom into the hall with my brush and my elastic band. I bent over at the waist, brushed my hair while I was inverted, and gathered it into a ponytail on top of my head. I was sure it was centered, because the movements were just automatic after all these years. My ponytail came down past my shoulder blades now. I looped the band, ran the ponytail through, and I straightened, ponytail flying back over my shoulders to bounce in the middle. Quinn and Everett had stopped their task to stare. When I looked back at them, the two men hastily bent back to their tasks.
    Okay, I didn’t get that I’d done anything interesting, but apparently I had. I shrugged and vanished into the master bathroom to slap on some makeup. After another glance in the mirror, it occurred to me that maybe anything I did in that outfit was fairly interesting, if you were a fully functional guy.
    When I came out, Everett had gone and Quinn gave me a slip of paper with Everett’s cell number on it. “He says to call him when you need some more boxes,” Quinn said. “He took all the bagged clothes. Looks like you don’t need me at all.”
    “No comparison,” I said, smiling. “Everett didn’t bring me grease and caffeine this morning, and you did.”
    “So what’s the plan, and how can I help?”
    “Okay, the plan is . . .” I didn’t exactly have one more specific than “go through this stuff and sort it out,” and Quinn couldn’t do that for me.
    “How’s this?” I asked. “You get everything out of the kitchen cabinets, and set it out where I can see it all, and I’ll make a ‘keep or toss’ decision. You can pack what I want to keep, and put what I want to toss out on the gallery. I hope the rain stays away.” The sunny morning was clouding over, fast. “While we work, I’ll fill you in on what happened here last night.”
    Despite the threat of bad weather, we worked all morning, called in a pizza for lunch, and resumed work in the afternoon. The stuff I didn’t want went into garbage bags, and Quinn furthered his muscular development by carrying all the garbage bags down to the courtyard and putting them in the little shed that had held the lawn chairs, still set up on the grass. I tried to admire his muscles only when he wasn’t looking, and I think I was successful. Quinn was very interested to hear about the ectoplasmic reconstruction, and we talked about what it might all mean without reaching any conclusions. Jake didn’t have any enemies among the vampires that Quinn