All Together Dead (Sookie Stackhouse #7)(10)
Author: Charlaine Harris

"What?" Quinn asked. "Why the look?" He was smiling quizzically.

I smiled. "I was just thinking of your temperature," I said.

"Hey, you knew I was hot," he said with a grin. "What about the thought reading?" he said more seriously. "How did that work out?"

I thought it was great that he’d even wondered. "I can’t call your thoughts any trouble," I said, unable to suppress a huge grin. "It might be a stretch to count ‘yesyesyesyespleasepleaseplease’ as a thought."

"Not a problem then," he said, totally unembarrassed.

"Not a problem. As long as you’re wrapped in the moment and you’re happy, I’m gonna be happy."

"Well, hot damn." Quinn turned back to the stove. "That’s just great."

I thought it was, too.

Just great.

Amelia ate her sandwich with a good appetite and then picked Bob up to feed him little bits of bacon she’d saved. The big black-and-white cat purred up a storm.

"So," said Quinn, after his first sandwich had disappeared with amazing quickness, "this is the guy you changed by accident?"

"Yeah," said Amelia, scratching Bob’s ears. "This is the guy." Amelia was sitting cross-legged in the kitchen chair, which is something I simply couldn’t do, and she was focused on the cat. "The little fella," she crooned. "My fuzzy wuzzy honey, isn’t he? Isn’t he?" Quinn looked mildly disgusted, but I was just as guilty of talking baby talk to Bob when I was alone with him. Bob the witch had been a skinny, weird guy with a kind of geeky charm. Amelia had told me Bob had been a hairdresser; I’d decided if that were true, he’d fixed hair at a funeral parlor. Black pants, white shirt, bicycle? Have you ever known a hairdresser who presented himself that way?

"So," Quinn said. "What are you doing about it?"

"I’m studying," Amelia said. "I’m trying to figure out what I did wrong, so I can make it right. It would be easier if I could…" Her voice trailed off in a guilty kind of way.

"If you could talk to your mentor?" I said helpfully.

She scowled at me. "Yeah," she said. "If I could talk to my mentor."

"Why don’t you?" Quinn asked.

"One, I wasn’t supposed to use transformational magic. That’s pretty much a no-no. Two, I’ve looked for her online since Katrina, on every message board witches use, and I can’t find any news of her. She might have gone to a shelter somewhere, she might be staying with her kids or some friend, or she might have died in the flooding."

"I believe you had your main income from your rental property. What are your plans now? What’s the state of your property?" Quinn asked, carrying his plate and mine to the sink. He wasn’t being bashful with the personal questions tonight. I waited with interest to hear Amelia’s answers. I’d always wanted to know a lot of things about Amelia that were just plain rude to ask: like, What was she living on now? Though she had worked part-time for my friend Tara Thornton at Tara’s Togs while Tara’s help was sick, Amelia’s outgo far exceeded her visible income. That meant she had good credit, some savings, or another source of income besides the tarot readings she’d done in a shop off Jackson Square and her rent money, which now wasn’t coming in. Her mom had left her some money. It must have been a chunk.

"Well, I’ve been back into New Orleans once since the storm," Amelia said. "You’ve met Everett, my tenant?"

Quinn nodded.

"When he could get to a phone, he reported some damage to the bottom floor, where I live. There were trees and branches down, and of course there wasn’t electricity or water for a couple of weeks. But the neighborhood didn’t suffer as badly as some, thank God, and when the electricity was back on, I snuck down there." Amelia took a deep breath. I could hear right from her brain that she was scared to venture into the territory she was about to reveal to us. "I, um, went to talk to my dad about fixing the roof. Right then, we had a blue roof like half the people around us." The blue plastic that covered damaged roofs was the new norm in New Orleans.

This was the first time Amelia had mentioned her family to me, in more than a very general way. I’d learned more from her thoughts than I’d learned from her conversation, and I had to be careful not to mix the two sources when we talked. I could see her dad’s presence in her head, love and resentment mixing in her thoughts to form a confused mishmash.

"Your dad is going to repair your house?" Quinn asked casually. He was excavating in my Tupperware box in which I stored any cookies that happened to cross my threshold – not a frequent occurrence, since I have a tendency to put on weight when sweets are in the house. Amelia had no such problem, and she’d stocked the box with a couple of kinds of Keebler cookies and told Quinn he was welcome to help himself.

Amelia nodded, much more fascinated by Bob’s fur than she had been a moment before. "Yeah, he’s got a crew on it," she said.

This was news to me.

"So who is your dad?" Quinn was keeping up the directness. So far it had worked for him.

Amelia squirmed on the kitchen chair, making Bob raise his head in protest.

"Copley Carmichael," she muttered.

We were both silent with shock. After a minute, she looked up at us. "What?" she said. "Okay, so he’s famous. Okay, so he’s rich. So?"

"Different last name?" I said.

"I use my mom’s. I got tired of people being weird around me," Amelia said pointedly.

Quinn and I exchanged glances. Copley Carmichael was a big name in the state of Louisiana. He had fingers in all kinds of financial pies, and all those fingers were pretty dirty. But he was an old-fashioned human wheeler-dealer: no whiff of the supernatural around Copley Carmichael.

"Does he know you’re a witch?" I asked.

"He doesn’t believe it for a minute," Amelia said, sounding frustrated and forlorn. "He thinks I’m a deluded little wannabe, that I’m hanging with weird little people and doing weird little jobs to stick my tongue out at him. He wouldn’t believe in vampires if he hadn’t seen them over and over."

"What about your mom?" Quinn asked. I got myself a refill on my tea. I knew the answer to this one.

"Dead," Amelia told him. "Three years ago. That’s when I moved out of my dad’s house and into the bottom floor of the house on Chloe. He’d given it to me when I graduated from high school so I’d have my own income, but he made me manage it myself so I’d have the experience."

That seemed like a pretty good deal to me. Hesitantly I said, "Wasn’t that the right thing to do? Get you to learn by doing?"