From Dead to Worse

carefully.
    “Reports of your attractions were not exaggerated,” he said, which took me a minute to decipher. I was too scared to be at my most intelligent. I made out Jonathan the spy among the vampires in the yard.
    “Uh-huh,” I said, unimpressed. “You alone can come in.”
    “I’m delighted,” he said, bowing. He took a cautious step up and looked relieved. After that he crossed the porch so smoothly that all of a sudden he was right in front of me, his pocket handkerchief—I swear to God, a snowy white pocket handkerchief—almost touching my white T-shirt. It was all I could do to keep from flinching, but I managed to hold very still. I met his eyes and felt the pressure behind them. He was trying his mind tricks to see what might work on me.
    Not much would, in my experience. After I’d let him establish that, I moved back to give him room to enter.
    Victor stood quite still just inside the door. He gave everyone in the room a very cautious look, though his smile never faded. When he spotted Bill, the smile actually brightened. “Ah, Compton,” he said, and though I expected he’d follow up with a more illuminating remark, that didn’t happen. He gave Amelia a thorough scrutiny. “The source of the magic,” he muttered, and inclined his head to her. Frannie got a quicker evaluation. When Victor recognized her, he looked, for one second, severely displeased.
    I should have hidden her. I simply hadn’t thought about it. Now the Las Vegas group knew that Quinn had sent his sister ahead to warn us. I wondered if we’d survive this.
    If we lived until daytime, we three humans could leave in a car, and if the cars were disabled, well, we had cell phones and could call for a pickup. But there was no telling what other day-walking helpers the vampires of Las Vegas had . . . besides Quinn. And as far as Eric and Bill being able to fight their way through the line of vampires outside: they could try. I didn’t know how far they’d get.
    “Please have a seat,” I said, though I sounded about as welcoming as a church lady forced to entertain an atheist. We all moved to the couch and the chairs. We left Frannie where she was. It would be better to maintain every bit of calm we could manage. The tension in the room was almost palpable as it was.
    I switched on some lamps and asked the vampires if they would like a drink. They all looked surprised. Only Victor accepted. After a nod from me, Amelia went to the kitchen to heat up some TrueBlood. Eric and Bill were on the couch, Victor had taken the easy chair, and I perched on the edge of the recliner, my hands clenched in my lap. There was a long silence while Victor selected his opening line.
    “Your queen is dead, Viking,” he said.
    Eric’s head jerked. Amelia, entering, stopped in her tracks for a second before carrying the glass of TrueBlood to Victor. He accepted it with a little bow. Amelia stared down at him, and I noticed her hand was hidden in the folds of her robe. Just as I drew in breath to tell her not to be crazy, she moved away from him and came to stand by me.
    Eric said, “I had guessed that was the case. How many of the sheriffs?” I had to hand it to him. You couldn’t tell how he felt from his voice.
    Victor made a show of consulting his memory. “Let me see. Oh, yes! All of them.”
    I pressed my lips together hard so no sound would escape. Amelia pulled out the straight-backed chair we keep to one side of the hearth. She set it close to me and sank down on it like she was a bag of sand. Now that she was sitting, I could see she had a knife clutched in her hand, the filleting knife from the kitchen. It was real sharp.
    “What of their people?” Bill asked. Bill was doing the clean-slate imitation, too.
    "There are a few alive. A dark young man named Rasul ... a few servitors of Arla Yvonne. Cleo Babbitt’s crew died with her even after an offer of surrender, and Sigebert seems to have perished with Sophie-Anne.”
    “Fangtasia?” Eric had saved this for last because he could hardly bear to speak of it. I wanted to go over to him and put my arms around him, but he wouldn’t appreciate that at all. It would look weak.
    There was a long silence while Victor took a swallow of the TrueBlood.
    Then he said, “Eric, your people are all in the club. They have not surrendered. They say they won’t until they hear from you. We’re ready to burn it down. One of your minions escaped, and she—we think it is a female—is