Definitely Dead

I'd gone to bed with two other males, and both times it hadn't worked out well. I hadn't known enough about them. I'd acted on impulse. You should learn from your mistakes. For a second, I wasn't feeling especially smart.

Luckily for my decision-making ability, Qui

Qui

"Excuse me," he said, fury in his voice, and answered the damn phone.

"All right," he said, after listening for a moment to the voice on the other end. "All right, I'll be there."

He snapped the tiny phone shut. "Jake is asking for me," he said.

I was so at sea with a strange combination of lust and relief that it took me a moment to co

"Then you have to go," I said, proud that my voice was practically rock steady. "Maybe he'll remember who attacked him. Tomorrow, I have to tell you about what I saw here tonight."

"Would you have said yes?" he asked. "If we'd been undisturbed for another minute?"

I considered for a minute. "If I had, I would've been sorry I did," I said. "Not because I don't want you. I do. But I had my eyes opened in the past couple of days. I know that I'm pretty easy to fool." I tried to sound matter-of-fact, not pitiful, when I said that. No one likes a whiny woman, least of all me. "I'm not interested in starting that up with someone who's just horny at the moment. I never set out to be a one-night-stand kind of woman. I want to be sure, if I have sex with you, that it's because you want to be around for a while and because you like me for who I am, not what I am."

Maybe a million women had made approximately the same speech. I meant it as sincerely as any one of those million.

And Qui

Chapter 19

I slept the sleep of the dead. Well, probably not, but as close as a human would ever come. As if in a dream, I heard the witches come carousing back into the courtyard. They were still congratulating one another with alcohol-lubricated vigor. I'd found some real, honest cotton sheets among the linens (Why are they still called linens? Have you seen a linen sheet in your life?) and I'd tossed the black silky ones into the washer, so it was very easy to slip back into sleep.

When I got up, it was after ten in the morning. There was a knocking at the door, and I stumbled down the hall to unlock it after I'd pulled on a pair of Hadley's spandex exercise pants and a hot pink tank top. I saw boxes through the peephole, and I opened the door feeling really happy.

"Miss Stackhouse?" said the young black man who was holding the flattened boxes. When I nodded, he said, "I got orders to bring you as many boxes as you want. Will thirty do to start with?"

"Oh, yes," I said. "Oh, that'll be great."

"I also got instructions," he said precisely, "to bring you anything related to moving that you might need. I have here strapping tape, masking tape, some Magic Markers, scissors, and stick-on labels."

The queen had given me a personal shopper.

"Did you want colored dots? Some people like to put living room things in boxes with an orange dot, bedroom things in boxes with a green dot, and so on."

I had never moved, unless you counted taking a couple of bags of clothes and towels over to Sam's furnished duplex after the kitchen burned, so I didn't know the best way to go about it. I had an intoxicating vision of rows of neat boxes with colored dots on each side, so there couldn't be any mistake from any angle. Then I snapped back to reality. I wouldn't be taking that much back to Bon Temps. It was hard to form an estimate, since this was unknown territory, but I knew I didn't want much of the furniture.

"I don't think I'll need the dots, thanks anyway," I said. "I'll start working on these boxes, and then I can call you if I need any more, okay?"

"I'll assemble them for you," he said. He had very short hair and the curliest eyelashes I'd ever seen on a person. Cows had eyelashes that pretty, sometimes. He was wearing a golf-type shirt and neatly belted khakis, along with high-end sneakers.

"I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name," I said, as he whipped a roll of strapping tape from a large lumpy plastic shopping bag. He set to work.

"Oh, scuse me," he said, and it was the first time he'd sounded natural. "My name is Everett O'Dell Smith."

"Pleasure to meet you," I said, and he paused in his work so we could shake hands. "How did you come to be here?"

"Oh, I'm in Tulane Business School, and one of my professors got a call from Mr. Cataliades, who is, like, the most famous lawyer in the vampire area. My professor specializes in vampire law. Mr. Cataliades needed a day person; I mean, he can come out in the day, but he needed someone to be his gofer." He'd gotten three boxes done, already.

"And in return?"

"In return, I get to sit in court with him on his next five cases, and I get to earn some money I need real bad."

"Will you have time this afternoon to take me to my cousin's bank?"

"Sure will."

"You're not missing a class now, are you?"

"Oh, no, I got two hours before my second class."

He'd already been to a class and accumulated all this stuff before I'd even gotten up. Well, he hadn't been up half the night watching his dead cousin walk around.

"You can take these garbage bags of clothes to the nearest Goodwill or Salvation Army store." That would clear the gallery and make me feel productive all at the same time. I'd gone over the garments quite carefully to make sure Hadley hadn't hidden anything in them, and I wondered what the Salvation Army would make of them. Hadley had been into Tight and Skimpy; that was the nicest way to put it.

"Yes, ma'am," he said, whipping out a notebook and scribbling in it. Then he waited attentively. "Anything else?" he prompted me.

"Yes, there's no food in the house. When you come back this afternoon, can you bring me something to eat?" I could drink tap water, but I couldn't create food out of nothing.

Just then a call from the courtyard made me look over the railing. Qui

"Looks like the food angle is covered," I told Everett, waving Qui

"What can I do to help?" Qui

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 Qui