From Dead to Worse

stuff. I didn’t even notice when the new king’s rep and Mr. Carmichael left. Then it was time to close everything out and get my tables ready for Terry Bellefleur to come in and clean early in the morning. By the time I really looked around me, everyone was gone but Sam and me.
    “Hey, you through?” he said.
    “Yeah,” I said after another look around.
    “You got a minute?”
    I always had a minute for Sam.

Chapter 16
    He sat in the chair behind his desk and tilted it back at the usual dangerous angle. I sat in one of the chairs in front of the desk, the one with the most padding in the seat. Most of the lights in the building were out except the one that stayed on over the bar area and the one in Sam’s office. The building rang with silence after the cacophony of voices rising over the jukebox and the sounds of cooking, washing, footsteps.
    “That Sandy Sechrest,” he said. “She’s got a whole new job.”
    “Yeah? What the king’s rep supposed to do?”
    “Well, as far as I can tell, she’ll travel the state pretty much constantly, seeing if the citizens have problems with any vampires, seeing if the sheriffs have everything in order and under control in their own fiefs, and reporting in to the king. She’s like an undead troubleshooter.”
    “Oh.” I thought that over. I couldn’t see that the job would detract from Eric’s. If Eric was okay, his crew would be okay. Other than that, I didn’t care what the vampires did. “So, she decided to meet you because...?”
    “She understood I had associations in the regional supernatural community,” Sam said dryly. “She wanted me to know she was available to consult in the event ‘problems arose.’ I have her business card.” He held it up. I don’t know if I expected it to drip with blood or what, but it was only a regular business card.
    “Okay.” I shrugged.
    “What did Claudine and her brother want?” Sam asked.
    I was feeling very bad about concealing my new great-grandfather from Sam, but Niall had told me to keep him a secret. “She hadn’t heard from me since the fight in Shreveport,” I said. “She just wanted to check up, and she got Claude to come with her.”
    Sam looked at me a little sharply but he didn’t comment. “Maybe,” he said after a minute, “this will be a long era of peace.
    Maybe we can just work in the bar and nothing will happen in the supe community. I’m hoping so, because the time is coming closer and closer when the Weres are going to go public.”
    “You think it’s soon?” I had no idea how America would react to the news that vampires were not the only things out there in the night. “You think all the other shifters will announce the same night?”
    “We’ll have to,” Sam said. “We’re talking on our website about it.”
    Sam did have a life that was unknown to me. That sparked a thought. I hesitated, then plowed ahead. There were too many questions in my own life. I wanted to get at least some of them answered.
    “How’d you come to settle here?” I asked.
    “I’d passed through the area,” he said. “I was in the army for four years.”
    “You were?” I couldn’t believe I hadn’t known that.
    “Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do in my life, so I joined when I was eighteen. My mom cried and my dad swore since I’d been accepted to a college, but I’d made up my mind. I was about the stubbornest teenager on the planet.”
    “Where’d you grow up?”
    “At least partly in Wright, Texas,” he said. “Outside of Fort Worth. Way outside of Fort Worth. It wasn’t any bigger than Bon Temps. We moved around all during my childhood, though, because my dad was in the service himself. He got out when I was about fourteen, and my mom’s family was in Wright, so that’s where we went.”
    “Was it hard settling down after moving so much?” I’d never lived anywhere but Bon Temps.
    “It was great,” he said. “I was so ready to stay in one place. I hadn’t realized how hard it would be to find my own niche in a group of kids who’d grown up together, but I was able to take care of myself. I played baseball and basketball, so I found my place. Then I joined the army. Go figure.”
    I was fascinated. “Are your mom and dad still in Wright?” I asked. “It must have been hard for him in the military, with him being a shifter.” Since Sam was a shapeshifter, I knew without him having to tell me that he was the first-born child of