Living Dead in Dallas

considerable business acumen. “Oh, Bill. What’s happened? Oh, yum, she’s bleeding.”
    “Get Eric,” Bill said.
    “He’s been waiting in here,” she began, but Bill strode right by her with me bouncing on his shoulder like a bag of bloody game. I was so out of it by that time that I wouldn’t have cared if he’d carried me onto the dance floor of the bar out front, but instead, Bill blew into Eric’s office laden with me and rage.
    “This is on your account,” Bill snarled, and I moaned as he shook me as though he were drawing Eric’s attention to me. I hardly see how Eric could have been looking anywhere else, since I was a full-grown female and probably the only bleeding woman in his office.
    I would have loved to faint, to pass right out. But I didn’t. I just sagged over Bill’s shoulder and hurt. “Go to hell,” I mumbled.
    “What, my darling?”
    “Go to hell .”
    “We must lay her on her stomach on the couch,” Eric said. “Here, let me . . .” I felt another pair of hands grip my legs, Bill sort of turned underneath me, and together they deposited me carefully on the broad couch that Eric had just bought for his office. It had that new smell, and it was leather. I was glad, staring at it from the distance of half an inch, that he hadn’t gotten cloth upholstery. “Pam, call the doctor.” I heard footsteps leave the room, and Eric crouched down to look into my face. It was quite a crouch, because Eric, tall and broad, looks exactly like what he is, a former Viking.
    “What has happened to you?” he asked.
    I glared at him, so incensed I could hardly speak. “Iam a message to you,” I said, almost in a whisper. “This woman in the woods made Bill’s car stop, and maybe even made us argue, and then she came up to me with this hog.”
    “A pig ?” Eric could not have been more astonished if I’d said she had a canary up her nose.
    “Oink, oink. Razorback. Wild pig. And she said she wanted to send you a message, and I turned in time to keep her from getting my face, but she got my back, and then she left.”
    “Your face. She would have gotten your face,” Bill said. I saw his hands clenching by his thighs, and the back of him as he began pacing around the office. “Eric, her cuts are not so deep. What’s wrong with her?”
    “Sookie,” Eric said gently, “what did this woman look like?”
    His face was right by mine, his thick golden hair almost touching my face.
    “She looked nuts, I’ll tell you how she looked. And she called you Eric Northman.”
    “That’s the last name I use for human dealings,” he said. “By looking nuts, you mean she looked . . . how?”
    “Her clothes were all ragged and she had blood around her mouth and in her teeth, like she’d just eaten something raw. She was carrying this kind of wand thing, with something on the end of it. Her hair was long and tangled . . . look, speaking of hair, my hair is getting stuck to my back.” I gasped.
    “Yes, I see.” Eric began trying to separate my long hair from my wounds, where blood was acting as an adherent as it thickened.
    Pam came in then, with the doctor. If I had hoped Eric meant a regular doctor, like a stethoscope and tongue depressor kind of person, I was once again doomed to disappointment. This doctor was a dwarf, who hardly had to bend over to look me in the eyes.Bill hovered, vibrating with tension, while the small woman examined my wounds. She was wearing a pair of white pants and a tunic, just like doctors at the hospital; well, just like doctors used to, before they started wearing that green color, or blue, or whatever crazy print came their way. Her face was full of her nose, and her skin was olive. Her hair was golden brown and coarse, incredibly thick and wavy. She wore it clipped fairly short. She put me in mind of a hobbit. Maybe she was a hobbit. My understanding of reality had taken several raps to the head in the past few months.
    “What kind of doctor are you?” I asked, though it took some time for me to collect myself enough.
    “The healing kind,” she said in a surprisingly deep voice. “You have been poisoned.”
    “So that’s why I keeping thinking I’m gonna die,” I muttered.
    “You will, quite soon,” she said.
    “Thanks a lot, Doc. What can you do about that?”
    “We don’t have a lot of choices. You’ve been poisoned. Have you ever heard of Komodo dragons? Their mouths are teeming with bacteria. Well, maenad wounds have the same