From Dead To Worse

Liar, liar, pants on fire, I thought. I hadn't talked to Pam in a couple of weeks, and our last conversation hadn't been girlish chatter about my social and work schedule. She'd been recovering from the wounds she'd sustained in Rhodes. Her recovery, and Eric's, and the queen's, had been the sole topic of our conversation.

"Of course," I said. "Well, good evening. I need to be leaving." I unlocked the door and carefully slid inside, trying to keep my eyes fixed on Jonathan so I'd be ready for a sudden move. He stood as still as a statue, inclining his head to me after I started the car and pulled off. At the next stop sign, I buckled my seat belt. I hadn't wanted to pin myself down while he was so close. I locked the car doors, and I looked all around me. No vampires in sight. I thought,That was really, really weird. In fact, I should probably call Eric and relate the incident to him.

You know what the weirdest part was? The withered man with the long blond hair had been standing in the shadows behind the vampire the whole time. Our eyes had even met once. His beautiful face had been quite unreadable. But I'd known he didn't want me to acknowledge his presence. I hadn't read his mind—I couldn't—but I'd known this nonetheless.

And weirdest of all, Jonathan hadn't known he was there. Given the acute sense of smell that all vampires possessed, Jonathan's ignorance was simply extraordinary.

I was still mulling over the strange little episode when I turned off Hummingbird Road and onto the long driveway through the woods that led back to my old house. The core of the house had been built more than a hundred and sixty years before, but of course very little of the original structure remained. It had been added to, remodeled, and reroofed a score of times over the course of the decades. A two-room farmhouse to begin with, it was now much larger, but it remained a very ordinary home.

Tonight the house looked peaceful in the glow of the outside security light that Amelia Broadway, my housemate, had left on for me. Amelia's car was parked in back, and I pulled alongside it. I kept my keys out in case she'd gone upstairs for the night. She'd left the screen door unlatched, and I latched it behind me. I unlocked the back door and relocked it. We were hell on security, Amelia and I, especially at night.

A little to my surprise, Amelia was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for me. We'd developed a routine after weeks of living together, and generally Amelia would have retired upstairs by this time. She had her own TV, her cell phone, and her laptop up there, and she'd gotten a library card, so she had plenty to read. Plus, she had her spell work, which I didn't ask questions about. Ever. Amelia is a witch.

"How'd it go?" she asked, stirring her tea as if she had to create a tiny whirlpool.

"Well, they got married. No one pulled a Jane Eyre. Glen's vampire customers behaved themselves, and Miss Caroline was gracious all over the place. But I had to stand in for one of the bridesmaids."

"Oh, wow! Tell me."

So I did, and we shared a few laughs. I thought of telling Amelia about the beautiful man, but I didn't. What could I say? "He looked at me"? I did tell her about Jonathan from Nevada.

"What do you think he really wanted?" Amelia said.

"I can't imagine." I shrugged.

"You need to find out. Especially since you'd never heard of the guy whose guest he said he was."

"I'm going to call Eric—if not tonight, then tomorrow night."

"Too bad you didn't buy a copy of that database Bill is peddling. I saw an ad for it on the Internet yesterday, on a vampire site." This might seem like a sudden change of subject, but Bill's database contained pictures and/or biographies of all the vampires he'd been able to locate all over the world, and a few he'd just heard about. Bill's little CD was making more money for his boss, the queen, than I could ever have imagined. But you had to be a vampire to purchase a copy, and they had ways of checking.

"Well, since Bill is charging five hundred dollars a pop, and impersonating a vampire is a dangerous risk..." I said.

Amelia waved her hand. "It'd be worth it," she said.

Amelia is a lot more sophisticated than I am . . . at least in some ways. She grew up in New Orleans, and she'd lived there most of her life. Now she was living with me because she'd made a giant mistake. She'd needed to leave New Orleans after her inexperience had caused a magical catastrophe. It was lucky she'd departed when she had, because Katrina followed soon after. Since the hurricane, her tenant was living in the top-floor apartment of Amelia's house. Amelia's own apartment on the bottom floor had sustained some damage. She wasn't charging the tenant rent because he was overseeing the repair of the house.

And here came the reason Amelia wasn't moving back to New Orleans any time soon. Bob padded into the kitchen to say hello, rubbing himself affectionately against my legs.

"Hey, my little honey bu

"I'm go

"Any progress?" I said, raising my head from Bob's fur. He'd had a bath this afternoon—I could tell from his fluffy factor.

"No," she said, her voice flat with discouragement. "I worked on him for an hour today, and I only gave him a lizard tail. Took everything I had to get it changed back."

Bob was really a guy, that is, a man. A sort of nerdy-looking man with dark hair and glasses, though Amelia had confided he had some outstanding attributes that weren't apparent when he was dressed for the street. Amelia wasn't supposed to be practicing transformational magic when she turned Bob into a cat; they were having what must have been very adventurous sex. I'd never had the nerve to ask her what she'd been trying to do. It was clear that it was something pretty exotic.

"The deal is," Amelia said suddenly, and I went on the alert. The real reason she'd stayed up to see me was about to be revealed. Amelia was a very clear broadcaster, so I picked it right up from her brain. But I let her go on and speak, because peoplereally don't like it if you tell them they don't have to actually speak to you, especially when the topic is something they've had to build up to. "My dad is going to be in Shreveport tomorrow, and he wants to come by Bon Temps to see me," she said in a rush. "It'll be him and his chauffeur, Marley. He wants to come for supper."

The next day would be Sunday. Merlotte's would be open only in the afternoon, but I wasn't scheduled to work anyway, I saw with a glance at my calendar. "So I'll just go out," I said. "I could go visit JB and Tara. No big."

"Please be here," she said, and her face was naked with pleading. She didn't spell out why. But I could read the reason easy enough. Amelia had a very conflicted relationship with her dad; in fact, she'd taken her mother's last name, Broadway, though in part that was because her father was so well-known. Copley Carmichael had lots of political clout and he was rich, though I didn't know how Katrina had affected his income. Carmichael owned huge lumberyards and was a builder, and Katrina might have wiped out his businesses. On the other hand, the whole area needed lumber and rebuilding.

"What time's he coming?" I asked.

"Five."

"Does the chauffeur eat at the same table as him?" I'd never dealt with employees. We just had the one table here in the kitchen. I sure wasn't going to make the man sit on the back steps.

"Oh, God," she said. This had clearly never occurred to her. "What will we do about Marley?"

"That's what I'm asking you." I may have sounded a little too patient.

"Listen," Amelia said. "You don't know my dad. You don't know how he is."