Living Dead in Dallas

wasn’t laughing now, wasn’t even close to it. He was awful close to me. I could practically feel the heat radiating from his skin, electricity crackling through the small fine hairs on his arms.
    I took a deep breath. “I’m worried she’ll turn her attention to you,” I explained. “What do maenads want as tribute, Sam?”
    “My mother used to tell my father that they love a proud man,” he said, and for a moment I thought he was still teasing me. But I looked at his face, and he was not. “Maenads love nothing more than to tear a proud man down to size. Literally.”
    “Yuck,” I said. “Anything else satisfy them?”
    “Large game. Bears, tigers, so on.”
    “Hard to find a tiger in Louisiana. Maybe you could find a bear, but how’d you get it to the maenad’s territory?” I pondered this for a while, but didn’t come to any answer. “I assume she’d want it alive,” I said, a question in my voice.
    Sam, who seemed to have been watching me instead of thinking over the problem, nodded, and then he leaned forward and kissed me.
    I should have seen it coming.
    He was so warm after Bill, whose body never got up to warm. Tepid, maybe. Sam’s lips actually felt hot, and his tongue, too. The kiss was deep, intense, unexpected; like the excitement you feel when someone gives you a present you didn’t know you wanted. His arms were around me, mine were around him, and we were giving it everything we had, until I came back to earth.
    I pulled away a little, and he slowly raised his head from mine.
    “I do need to get out of town for a little while,” I said.
    “Sorry, Sookie, but I’ve been wanting to do that for years.”
    There were a lot of ways I could go from that statement, but I ratcheted up my determination and took the high road. “Sam, you know I am . . .”
    “In love with Bill,” he finished my sentence.
    I wasn’t completely sure I was in love with Bill, but I loved him, and I had committed myself to him. So to simplify the matter, I nodded in agreement.
    I couldn’t read Sam’s thoughts clearly, because he was a supernatural being. But I would have been a dunce, a telepathic null, not to feel the waves of frustration and longing that rolled off of him.
    “The point I was trying to make,” I said, after a minute, during which time we disentangled and stepped away from each other, “is that if this maenad takes a special interest in bars, this is a bar run by someone whois not exactly run-of-the-mill human, like Eric’s bar in Shreveport. So you better watch out.”
    Sam seemed to take heart that I was warning him, seemed to get some hope from it. “Thanks for telling me, Sookie. The next time I change, I’ll be careful in the woods.”
    I hadn’t even thought of Sam encountering the maenad in his shapeshifting adventures, and I had to sit down abruptly as I pictured that.
    “Oh, no,” I told him emphatically. “Don’t change at all.”
    “It’s full moon in four days,” Sam said, after a glance at the calendar. “I’ll have to. I’ve already got Terry scheduled to work for me that night.”
    “What do you tell him?”
    “I tell him I have a date. He hasn’t looked at the calendar to figure out that every time I ask him to work, it’s a full moon.”
    “That’s something. Did the police come back any more about Lafayette?”
    “No.” Sam shook his head. “And I hired a friend of Lafayette’s, Khan.”
    “As in Sher Khan?”
    “As in Chaka Khan.”
    “Okay, but can he cook?”
    “He’s been fired from the Shrimp Boat.”
    “What for?”
    “Artistic temperament, I gather.” Sam’s voice was dry.
    “Won’t need much of that around here,” I observed, my hand on the doorknob. I was glad Sam and I had had a conversation, just to ease down from our tense and unprecedented situation. We had never embraced each other at work. In fact, we’d only kissed once, when Sam brought me home after our single date months before. Sam was my boss, and starting something with your bossis always a bad idea. Starting something with your boss when your boyfriend is a vampire is another bad idea, possibly a fatal idea. Sam needed to find a woman. Quickly.
    When I’m nervous, I smile. I was beaming when I said, “Back to work,” and stepped through the door, shutting it behind me. I had a muddle of feelings about everything that had happened in Sam’s office, but I pushed it all away, and prepared to hustle some drinks.
    There was nothing unusual about the