Dead and Gone

I wasn't in a hospital.

But I was in a bed, not my own. And I was a little cleaner than I had been, and bandaged, and in a lot of pain; in fact, a dreadful amount of pain. The part where I was cleaner and bandaged - oh, a wholly desirable state. The other part, the pain - well, that was expected, understandable, and finite. At least no one was trying to hurt me any worse than I'd already been hurt. So I decided I was excellent.

I had a few holes in my memory. I couldn't remember what had happened between being in the decrepit shack and being here; I could recall flashes of action, the sound of voices, but I had no coherent narrative to connect them. I remembered One's head becoming detached, and I knew someone had bitten Two. I hoped she was as dead as One. But I wasn't sure. Had I really seen Bill? What about the shadow behind him?

I heard a click, click, click . I turned my head very slightly. Claudine, my fairy godmother, was sitting by the bed, knitting.

The sight of Claudine knitting was just as surrealistic as the sight of Bill appearing in the cave. I decided to go back to sleep - a cowardly retreat, but I thought I was entitled.

"She's going to be all right," Dr. Ludwig said. Her head came up past the side of my bed, which told me for sure that I wasn't in a modern hospital bed.

Dr. Ludwig takes care of the cases who can't go to the regular human hospital because the staff would flee screaming at the sight of them or the lab wouldn't be able to analyze their blood. I could see Dr. Ludwig's coarse brown hair as she walked around the bed to the door. Dr. Ludwig had a deep voice. I suspected she was a hobbit - not really, but she sure did look like one. Though she wore shoes, right? I spent some moments trying to remember if I'd ever caught a glimpse of Dr. Ludwig's feet.

"Sookie," she said, her eyes appearing at my elbow. "Is the medicine working?"

I didn't know if this was a second visit of hers, or if I'd blanked out for a few moments. "I'm not hurting as much," I said, and my voice was very rough and whispery. "I'm starting to feel a little numb. That's just ... excellent."

She nodded. "Yes," she said. "Considering you're human, you're very lucky."

Funny. I felt better than when I'd been in the shack, but I couldn't say I felt lucky. I tried to scrape together some appreciation of my good fortune. There wasn't any there to gather up. I was all out. My emotions were as crippled as my body.

"No," I said. I tried to shake my head, but even the pain-killers couldn't disguise the fact that my neck was too sore to twist. They'd choked me repeatedly.

"You're not dead," Dr. Ludwig pointed out.

But I'd come pretty damn close; I'd sort of stepped over the line. There'd been an optimum rescue time. If I'd been liberated before that time, I would have laughed all the way to the secret supernatural clinic, or wherever I was. But I'd looked at death too closely - close enough to see all the pores in Death's face - and I'd suffered too much. I wouldn't bounce back this time.

My emotional and physical state had been sliced and gouged and pinched and bitten to a rough, raw surface. I didn't know if I could spackle myself back into my pre-kidnap smoothness. I said this, in much simpler words, to Dr. Ludwig.

"They're dead, if that helps," she said.

Yes indeedy, that helped quite a bit. I'd been hoping I hadn't imagined that part; I'd been a little afraid their deaths had been a delightful fantasy.

"Your great-grandfather beheaded Lochlan," she said. So he'd been One. "And the vampire Bill Compton tore the throat out of Lochlan's sister, Neave." She'd been Two.

"Where's Niall now?" I said.

"Waging war," she said grimly. "There's no more negotiation, no more jockeying for advantage. There's only killing now."

"Bill?"

"He was badly hurt," the little doctor said. "She got him with her blade before she bled to death. And she bit him back. There was silver in her knife and silver caps on her teeth. It's in his system."

"He'll get better," I said.

She shrugged.

I thought my heart was going to plunge down out of my chest, through the bed. I could not look this misery in the face.

I struggled to think of something besides Bill. "And Tray? He's here?"

She regarded me silently for a moment. "Yes," she said finally.

"I need to see him. And Bill."

"No. You can't move. Bill's in his daytime sleep for now. Eric is coming tonight, actually in a couple of hours, and he'll bring at least one other vampire with him. That'll help. The Were is too badly wounded for you to disturb."

I didn't absorb that. My mind was racing ahead. It was a mighty slow race, but I was thinking a little more clearly. "Has someone told Sam, do you know?" How long had I been out? How much work had I missed?

Dr. Ludwig shrugged. "I don't know. I imagine so. He seems to hear everything."

"Good." I tried to shift positions, gasped. "I'm going to have to get up to use the bathroom," I warned her.

"Claudine," Dr. Ludwig said, and my cousin put away her knitting and rose from the rocking chair. For the first time, I registered that my beautiful fairy godmother looked like someone had tried to push her through a wood chipper. Her arms were bare and covered with scratches, scrapes, and cuts. Her face was a mess. She smiled at me, but it was painful.

When she lifted me in her arms, I could feel her effort. Normally Claudine could heft a large calf without any trouble if she chose to.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I can walk. I'm sure."

"Don't think of it," Claudine said. "See, we're already there."

When our mission was accomplished, she scooped me up and took me back to bed.

"What happened to you?" I asked her. Dr. Ludwig had departed without another word.

"I got ambushed," she said in her sweet voice. "Some stupid brownies and one fairy. Lee, his name was."

"I guess they were allied with this Breandan?"

She nodded, fished out her bundle of knitting. The item she was working on appeared to be a tiny sweater. I wondered if it was for an elf. "They were," she said. "They are bits of bone and flesh now." She sounded quite pleased.

Claudine would never become an angel at this rate. I wasn't quite sure how the progression worked, but reducing other beings to their component parts was probably not the route of choice. "Good," I said. The more of Breandan's followers who met their match, the better. "Have you seen Bill?"

"No," Claudine said, clearly not interested.

"Where is Claude?" I asked. "Is he safe?"

"He's with Grandfather," she said, and for the first time, she looked worried. "They're trying to find Breandan. Grandfather figures that if he takes out the source, Breandan's followers will have no choice but to stop the war and pledge an oath to him."

"Oh," I said. "And you didn't go, because ... ?"

"I'm guarding you," she said simply. "And lest you think I chose the path of least danger, I'm sure Breandan is trying to find this place. He must be very angry. He's had to enter the human world, which he hates so much, now that his pet killers are dead. He loved Neave and Lochlan. They were with him for centuries, and both his lovers."

"Yuck," I said from the heart, or maybe from the pit of my stomach. "Oh, yuck ." I couldn't even think about what kind of "love" they would make. What I'd seen hadn't looked like love. "And I would never accuse you of taking the path of least danger," I said after I'd gotten over being nauseated. "This whole world is dangerous." Claudine gave me a sharp look. "What kind of name is Breandan?" I asked after a moment of watching her knitting needles flash with great speed and panache. I wasn't sure how the fuzzy green sweater would turn out, but the effect was good.

"Irish," she said. "All the oldest ones in this part of the world are Irish. Claude and I used to have Irish names. It seemed stupid to me. Why shouldn't we please ourselves? No one can spell those names or pronounce them correctly. My former name sounds like a cat coughing up a fur ball."

We sat in silence for a few minutes.

"Who's the little sweater for? Are you going to have a bundle of joy?" I asked in my wheezy, whispery new voice. I was trying to sound teasing, but instead, I just sounded creepy.

"Yes," she said, raising her head to look at me. Her eyes were glowing. "I'm going to have a baby. A pure fairy child."

I was startled, but I tried to cover that with the biggest smile I could paste on my face. "Oh. That's great!" I said. I wondered if it would be tacky to inquire as to the identity of the father. Probably.

"Yes," she said seriously. "It's wonderful. We're not really a very fertile race, and the huge amount of iron in the world has reduced our birthrate. Our numbers decline every century. I am very lucky. It's one of the reasons I never take humans to bed, though from time to time I would love to; they are so delicious, some of them. But I'd hate to waste a fertile cycle on a human."

I'd always assumed it was her desired ascension to angel status that had kept Claudine from bedding any of her numerous admirers. "So, the dad's a fairy," I said, kind of pussyfooting around the topic of the paternal identity. "Did you date for a while?"

Claudine laughed. "I knew it was my fertile time. I knew he was a fertile male; we were not too closely related. We found each other desirable."

"Will he help you raise the baby?"

"Oh, yes, he'll be there to guard her during her early years."

"Can I meet him?" I asked. I was really delighted at Claudine's happiness, in an oddly remote way.

"Of course - if we win this war and passage between the worlds is still possible. He stays mostly in Faery," Claudine said. "He is not much for human companionship." She said this in much the same way she would say he was allergic to cats. "If Breandan has his way, Faery will be sealed off, and all we have built in this world will be gone. The wonderful things that humans have invented that we can use, the money we made to fund those inventions ... that'll all be gone. It's so intoxicating being with humans. They give off so much energy, so much delicious emotion. They're simply ... fun."

This new topic was a fine distraction, but my throat hurt, and when I couldn't respond, Claudine lost interest in talking. Though she returned to her knitting, I was alarmed to notice that after a few minutes she became increasingly tense and alert. I heard noises in the hall, as if people were moving around the building in a hurry. Claudine got up and went over to the room's narrow door to look out. After the third time she did this, she shut the door and she locked it. I asked her what she was expecting.

"Trouble," she said. "And Eric."

One and the same,I thought. "Are there other patients here? Is this, like, a hospital?"

"Yes," she said. "But Ludwig and her aide are evacuating the patients who can walk."

I'd assumed I'd had as much fear as I could handle, but my exhausted emotions began to revive as I absorbed some of her tension.

About thirty minutes later, she raised her head and I could tell she was listening. "Eric is coming," she said. "I'll have to leave you with him. I can't cover my scent like Grandfather can." She rose and unlocked the door. She swung it open.

Eric came in very quietly; one moment I was looking at the door, and the next minute, he filled it. Claudine gathered up her paraphernalia and left the room, keeping as far from Eric as the room permitted. His nostrils flared at the delicious scent of fairy. Then she was gone, and Eric was by the bed, looking down at me. I didn't feel happy or content, so I knew that even the bond was exhausted, at least temporarily. My face hurt so much when I changed expressions that I knew it was covered with bruises and cuts. The vision in my left eye was awfully blurry. I didn't need a mirror to tell me how terrible I looked. At the moment, I simply couldn't care.

Eric tried hard to keep the rage from his face, but it didn't work.

"Fucking fairies ," he said, and his lip curled in a snarl.

I couldn't remember hearing Eric curse before.

"Dead now," I whispered, trying to keep my words to a minimum.

"Yes. A fast death was too good for them."

I nodded (as much as I could) in wholehearted agreement. In fact, it would almost be worth bringing them back to life just to kill them again more slowly.

"I'm going to look at your wounds," Eric said. He didn't want to startle me.

"Okay," I whispered, but I knew the sight would be pretty gross. What I'd seen when I pulled up my gown in the bathroom had looked so awful I hadn't had any desire to examine myself further.

With a clinical neatness, Eric folded down the sheets and the blanket. I was wearing a classic hospital gown - you'd think a hospital for supes would come up with something more exotic - and of course, it was scooted up above my knees. There were bite marks all over my legs - deep bite marks. Some of the flesh was missing. Looking at my legs made me think of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.

Ludwig had bandaged the worst ones, and I was sure there were stitches under the white gauze. Eric stood absolutely still for a long moment. "Pull up the gown," he said, but when he realized that my hands and arms were too weak to cooperate, he did it.

They'd enjoyed the soft spots the most, so this was really unpleasant, actually disgusting. I couldn't look after one quick glance. I kept my eyes shut, like a child who's wandered into a horror film. No wonder the pain was so bad. I would never be the same person again, physically or mentally.

After a long time, Eric covered me and said, "I'll be back in a minute," and I heard him leave the room. He was back quickly with a couple of bottles of TrueBlood. He put them on the floor by the bed.

"Move over," he said, and I glanced up at him, confused. "Move over," he said again with impatience. Then he realized I couldn't, and he put an arm behind my back and another under my knees and shifted me easily to the other side of the bed. Fortunately, it was much larger than a real hospital bed, and I didn't have to turn on my side to make room for him.

Eric said, "I'm going to feed you."

"What?"

"I'm going to give you blood. You'll take weeks to heal otherwise. We don't have that kind of time."

He sounded so briskly matter-of-fact that I felt my shoulders finally relax. I hadn't realized how tightly wound I'd been. Eric bit into his wrist and put it in front of my mouth. "Here," he said, as if there was no question I'd take it.

He slid his free arm under my neck to raise my head. This was not going to be fun or erotic, like a nip during sex. And for a moment I wondered at my own unquestioning acquiescence. But he'd said we didn't have time. On one level I knew what that meant, but on another I was too weak to do more than consider the time factor as a fleeting and nearly irrelevant fact.

I opened my mouth and swallowed. I was in so much pain and I was so appalled by the damage done to my body that I didn't think more than once about the wisdom of what I was doing. I knew how quick the effects of ingesting vampire blood would be. His wrist healed once, and he reopened it.

"Are you sure you should do this?" I asked as he bit himself for the second time. My throat rippled with pain, and I regretted trying a whole sentence.

"Yes," he said. "I know how much is too much. And I fed well before I came here. You need to be able to move." He was behaving in such a practical way that I began to feel a little better. I couldn't have stood pity.

"Move?" The idea filled me with anxiety.

"Yes. At any moment, Breandan's followers may - will - find this place. They'll be tracking you by scent now. You smell of the fairies who hurt you, and they know now Niall loves you enough to kill his own kind for you. Hunting you down would make them very, very happy."

At the thought of any more trouble, I stopped drinking and began crying. Eric's hand stroked my face gently, but he said, "Stop that now. You must be strong. I'm very proud of you, you hear me?"

"Why?" I put my mouth on his wrist and drank again.

"You are still together; you are still a person. Lochlan and Neave have left vampires and fairies in rags - literally, rags ... but you survived and your personality and soul are intact."

"I got rescued." I took a deep breath and bent back to his wrist.

"You would have survived much more." Eric leaned over to get the bottle of TrueBlood, and he drank it down quickly.

"I wouldn't have wanted to." I took another deep breath, aware that my throat was aching still but not as sharply. "I hardly wanted to live after ..."

He kissed my forehead. "But you did live. And they died. And you are mine, and you will be mine. They will not get you."

"You really think they're coming?"

"Yes. Breandan's remaining forces will find this place sooner or later, if not Breandan himself. He has nothing to lose, and his pride to retain. I'm afraid they'll find us shortly. Ludwig has removed almost all the other patients." He turned a little, as if he were listening. "Yes, most of them are gone."

"Who else is here?"

"Bill is in the next room. He's been getting blood from Clancy."

"Were you not going to give him any?"

"If you were irreparable ... no, I would have let him rot."

"Why?" I asked. "He actually came to rescue me. Why get mad at him? Where were you?" Rage bubbled up my throat.

Eric flinched almost a half inch, a big reaction from a vampire his age. He looked away. I could not believe I was saying these things.

"It's not like you were obliged to come find me," I said, "but I hoped the whole time - I hoped you would come, I prayed you would come, I thought over and over you might hear me... ."

"You're killing me," he said. "You're killing me." He shuddered beside me, as if he could scarcely endure my words. "I'll explain," he said in a muted voice. "I will. You will understand. But now, we don't have enough time. Are you healing yet?"

I thought about it. I didn't feel as miserable as I had before the blood. The holes in my flesh were itching almost intolerably, which meant they were healing. "I'm beginning to feel like I'll be better sometime," I said carefully. "Oh, is Tray Dawson still here?"

He looked at me with a very serious expression. "Yes; he can't be moved."

"Why not? Why didn't Dr. Ludwig take him?"

"He would not survive being moved."

"No," I said, shocked even after all that I'd been through.

"Bill told me about the vampire blood he ingested. They hoped he'd go crazy enough to hurt you, but his leaving you alone was good enough. Lochlan and Neave were delayed; a pair of Niall's warriors found them, attacked them, and they had to fight. Afterward, they decided to stake out your house. They wanted to be sure Dawson wouldn't come to help you. Bill called me to tell me that you and he went to Dawson's house. By that time, they already had Dawson. They had fun with him before they had ... before they caught you."

"Dawson's that hurt? I thought the effects of the bad vamp blood would wear off by now." I couldn't imagine the big man, the toughest Were I knew, being defeated.

"The vampire blood they used was just a vehicle for the poison. They'd never tried it on a Were, I suppose, because it took a long time to act. And then they practiced their arts on him. Can you rise?"

I tried to gather my muscles to make the effort. "Maybe not yet."

"I'll carry you."

"Where?"

"Bill wants to talk to you. You have to be brave."

"My purse," I said. "I need something from it."

Wordlessly Eric put the soft cloth purse, now spoiled and stained, on the bed beside me. With great concentration, I was able to open it and slide my hand inside. Eric raised his eyebrows when he saw what I'd pulled out of the purse, but he heard something outside that made him looked alarmed. Eric was up and sliding his arms under me, and then he straightened as easily as if I'd been a plate of spaghetti. At the door he paused, and I managed to turn the knob for him. He used his foot to push it open, and out we went into the corridor. I was able to see that we were in an old building, some kind of small business that had been converted to its present purpose. There were doors up and down the hall, and there was a glass-enclosed control room of some kind about midway down. Through the glass on its opposite side, I could see a gloomy warehouse. There were a few lights on in it, just enough to disclose that it was empty except for some discards, like dilapidated shelving and machine parts.

We turned right to enter the room at the end of the hall. Again, I performed the honors with the knob, and this time it wasn't quite as agonizing to grip the knob and turn it.

There were two beds inside this room.

Bill was in the right-hand bed, and Clancy was sitting in a plastic chair pulled up right against the side. He was feeding Bill the same way Eric had fed me. Bill's skin was gray. His cheeks had caved in. He looked like death.

Tray Dawson was in the next bed. If Bill looked like he was dying, Tray looked like he was already dead. His face was bruised blue. One of his ears had been bitten off. His eyes were swollen shut. There was crusted blood everywhere. And this was just what I could see of his face. His arms were lying on top of the sheet, and they were both splinted.

Eric laid me down beside Bill. Bill's eyes opened, and at least they were the same: dark brown, fathomless. He stopped drinking from Clancy, but he didn't move or look better.

"The silver is in his system," Clancy said quietly. "Its poison has traveled to every part of his body. He'll need more and more blood to drive it out."

I wanted to say, "Will he get better?" But I couldn't, not with Bill lying there. Clancy rose from beside the bed, and he and Eric began having a whispered conversation - a very unpleasant one, if Eric's expression was any indication.

Bill said, "How are you, Sookie? Will you heal?" His voice faltered.

"Exactly what I want to ask you," I said. Neither of us had the strength or energy to hedge our conversation.

"You will live," he said, satisfied. "I can smell that Eric has given you blood. You would have healed anyway, but that will help the scarring. I'm sorry I didn't get there faster."

"You saved my life."

"I saw them take you," he said.

"What?"

"I saw them take you."

"You ..." I wanted to say, "You didn't stop them?" But that seemed too horrendously cruel.

"I knew I couldn't defeat the two of them together," he said simply. "If I'd tried to take them on and they'd killed me, you would have been as good as dead. I know very little about fairies, but even I had heard of Neave and her brother." These few sentences seemed to exhaust Bill. He tried to turn his head on the pillow so he could look directly into my face, but he managed to turn only an inch. His dark hair looked lank and lusterless, and his skin no longer had the shine that had seemed so beautiful to me when I'd seen it the first time.

"So you called Niall?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, his lips barely moving. "Or at least, I called Eric, told him what I'd seen, told him to call Niall."

"Where was the old house?" I asked.

"North of here, in Arkansas," he said. "It took a while to track you. If they'd gotten in a car ... but they moved through the fae world, and with my sense of smell and Niall's knowledge of fae magic, we were able to find you. Finally. At least your life was saved. I think it was too late for the Were."

I hadn't known Tray was in the shack. Not that the knowledge would have made any difference, but maybe I would have felt a little less lonely.

Of course, that was probably why the two fairies hadn't let me see him. I was willing to bet there wasn't much about the psychology of torture that Neave and Lochlan hadn't known.

"Are you sure he's ..."

"Sweetheart, look at him."

"I haven't passed yet," Tray mumbled.

I tried to get up, to go over to him. That was still a little out of my reach, but I turned on my side to face him. The beds were so close together that I could hear him easily. I think he could sort of see where I was.

"Tray," I said, "I'm so sorry."

He shook his head wordlessly. "My fault. I should have known ... the woman in the woods ... wasn't right."

"You did your best. If you had resisted her, you would have been killed."

"Dying now," he said. He made himself try to open his eyes. He almost managed to look right at me. "My own damn fault," he said.

I couldn't stop crying. He seemed to fall unconscious. I slowly rolled over to face Bill. His color was a little better.

"I would not, for anything, have had them hurt you," he said. "Her dagger was silver, and she had silver caps on her teeth... . I managed to rip her throat out, but she didn't die fast enough... . She fought to the end."

"Clancy's given you blood," I said. "You'll get better."

"Maybe," he said, and his voice was as cool and calm as it had always been. "I'm feeling some strength now. It will get me through the fight. That will be time enough."

I was shocked almost beyond speech. Vampires died only from staking, decapitation, or from a rare severe case of Sino-AIDS. Silver poisoning?

"Bill," I said urgently, thinking of so many things I wanted to say to him. He'd closed his eyes, but now he opened them to look at me.

"They're coming," Eric said, and all those words died in my throat.

"Breandan's people?" I said.

"Yes," Clancy said briefly. "They've found your scent." He was scornful even now, as if I'd been weak in leaving a scent to track.

Eric drew a long, long knife from a sheath on his thigh. "Iron," he said, smiling.

And Bill smiled, too, and it wasn't a pleasant smile. "Kill as many as you can," he said in a stronger voice. "Clancy, help me up."

"No," I said.

"Sweetheart," Bill said, very formally, "I have always loved you, and I will be proud to die in your service. When I'm gone, say a prayer for me in a real church."

Clancy bent to help Bill out of the bed, giving me a very unfriendly look while he did so. Bill swayed on his feet. He was as weak as a human. He threw off the hospital gown to stand there clad only in drawstring pajama pants.

I didn't want to die in a hospital gown, either.

"Eric, have you a knife to spare for me?" Bill asked, and without turning from the door, Eric passed Bill a shorter version of his own knife, which was halfway to being a sword, according to me. Clancy was also armed.

No one said a word about trying to shift Tray. When I glanced over at him, I thought he might have already died.

Eric's cell phone rang, which made me jump a couple of inches. He answered it with a curt, "Yes?" He listened and then clicked it shut. I almost laughed, the idea of the supes communicating by cell phones seemed so funny. But when I looked at Bill, gray in the face, leaning against the wall, I didn't think anything in the world would ever be funny again.

"Niall and his fae are on the way," Eric told us, his voice as calm and steady as if he were reading us a story about the stock market. "Breandan's blocked all the other portals to the fae land. There is only one opening now. Whether they'll come in time, I don't know."

"If I live through this," Clancy said, "I'll ask you to release me from my vow, Eric, and I'll seek another master. I find the idea of dying in the defense of a human woman to be disgusting, no matter what her connection to you is."

"If you die," Eric said, "you'll die because I, your sheriff, ordered you into battle. The reason is not pertinent."

Clancy nodded. "Yes, my lord."

"But I will release you, if you should live."

"Thank you, Eric."

Geez Louise. I hoped they were happy now they'd gotten that settled.

Bill was swaying on his feet, but neither Eric nor Clancy regarded him with anything but approval. I couldn't hear what they were hearing, but the tension in the room mounted almost unbearably as our enemies came closer.

As I watched Bill, waiting with apparent calm for death to come to him, I had a flash of him as I'd known him: the first vampire I'd ever met, the first man I'd ever gone to bed with, the first suitor I'd ever loved. Everything that followed had tainted those memories, but for one moment I saw him clearly, and I loved him again.

Then the door splintered, and I saw the gleam of an ax blade, and I heard high-pitched shouts of encouragement from the other fairies to the ax wielder.

I resolved to get up myself, because I'd rather perish on my feet than in a bed. I had at least that much courage left in me. Maybe, since I'd had Eric's blood, I was feeling the heat of his battle rage. Nothing got Eric going like the prospect of a good fight. I struggled to my feet. I found I could walk, at least a little bit. There were some wooden crutches leaning against the wall. I couldn't remember ever seeing wooden crutches, but none of the equipment at this hospital was standard human-hospital issue.

I took a crutch by the bottom, hefted it a little to see if I could swing it. The answer was "Probably not." There was a good chance I'd fall over when I did, but active was better than passive. In the meantime, I had the weapons in my hand that I'd retrieved from my purse, and at least the crutch would hold me up.

All this happened quicker than I can tell you about it. Then the door was splintering, and the fairies were yanking hanging bits of wood away. Finally the gap was large enough to admit one, a tall, thin male with gossamer hair, his green eyes glowing with the joy of the fight. He struck at Eric with a sword, and Eric parried and managed to slash his opponent's abdomen. The fairy shrieked and doubled over, and Clancy's blow caught him on the back of the neck and severed his head.

I pressed my back against the wall and tucked the crutch under one arm. I gripped my weapons, one in each hand. Bill and I were side by side, and then he slowly and deliberately stepped in front of me. Bill threw his knife at the next fairy through the door, and the point went right into the fairy's throat. Bill reached back and took my grandmother's trowel.

The door was almost demolished by now, and the assaulting fairies seemed to move back. Another male stepped in through the splinters and over the body of the first fae, and I knew this must be Breandan. His reddish hair was pulled back in a braid and his sword slung a spray of blood from its blade as he raised it to swing at Eric.

Eric was the taller, but Breandan had a longer sword. Breandan was already wounded, for his shirt was drenched with blood on one side. I saw something bright, a knitting needle, protruding from Breandan's shoulder, and I was sure the blood on his sword was Claudine's. A rage went through me, and that held me up when I would have collapsed.

Breandan leaped sideways, despite Eric's attempts to keep him engaged, and a very tall female warrior jumped into the spot Breandan had occupied and swung a mace - a mace, for God's sake - at Eric. Eric ducked, and the mace continued its path and hit Clancy in the side of the head. Instantly his red hair was even redder, and he went down like a bag of sand. Breandan leaped over Clancy to face Bill, his sword slicing off Clancy's head as he cleared the body. Breandan's grin grew brighter. "You're the one," he said. "The one who killed Neave."

"I took out her throat," Bill said, and his voice seemed as strong as it ever had been. But he swayed on his feet.

"I see she's killed you, too," Breandan said, and smiled, his guard relaxing slightly. "I'll only be the one to make you realize it."

Behind him, forgotten on the corner bed, Tray Dawson made a superhuman effort and gripped the fairy's shirt. With a negligent gesture, Breandan twisted slightly and brought the gleaming sword down on the defenseless Were, and when he pulled the sword back, it was freshly coated with red. But in the moment it took Breandan to do this, Bill thrust my trowel under Breandan's raised arm. When Breandan turned back, his expression was startled. He looked down at the hilt as if he couldn't imagine how it came to be sticking out of his side, and then blood ran from the corner of his mouth.

Bill began to fall.

Everything stood still for a moment, but only in my mind. The space in front of me was clear, and the woman abandoned her fight with Eric and leaped on top of the body of her prince. She screamed, long and loud, and since Bill was falling she aimed the thrust of her sword at me.

I squirted her with the lemon juice in my water pistol.

She screamed again, but this time in pain. The juice had fallen on her in a spray, across her chest and upper arms, and where the lemon had touched her smoke began to rise from her skin. A drop had hit her eyelid, I realized, because she used her free hand to rub at the burning eye. And while she did that, Eric swung his long knife and severed her arm, and then he stabbed her.

Then Niall filled the doorway of the room, and my eyes hurt to see him. He wasn't wearing the black suit he wore when he met me in the human world but a sort of long tunic and loose pants tucked into boots. Everything about him was white, and he shone ... except where he was splashed with blood.

Then there was a long silence. There was no one left to kill.

I slid to the floor, my legs as weak as Jell-O. I found myself slumped against the wall by Bill. I couldn't tell if he was alive or dead. I was too shocked to weep and too horrified to scream. Some of my cuts had reopened, and the scent of the blood and the reek of fairy lured Eric, pumped full of the excitement of battle. Before Niall could reach me, Eric was on his knees beside me, licking the blood from a slice on my cheek. I didn't mind; he'd given me his. He was recycling.

"Off her, vampire," said my great-grandfather in a very soft voice.

Eric raised his head, his eyes shut with pleasure, and shuddered all over. But then he collapsed beside me. He stared at Clancy's body. All the exultation drained from his face and a red tear made its way down his cheek.

"Is Bill alive?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. He looked down at his arm. He'd been wounded, too: a bad slash on his left forearm. I hadn't even seen it happen. Through the torn sleeve, I watched the cut begin to heal.

My great-grandfather squatted in front of me.

"Niall," I said, my lips and mouth working with great effort. "Niall, I didn't think you would come in time."

Truthfully, I was so stunned I hardly knew what I was saying or even which crisis I was referring to. For the first time, keeping on living seemed so difficult I wasn't sure it was worth the trouble.

My great-grandfather took me in his arms. "You are safe now," he said. "I am the only living prince. No one can take that away from me. Almost all of my enemies are dead."

"Look around," I said, though I lay my head on his shoulder. "Niall, look at all that's been taken." Tray Dawson's blood trickled slowly down the soaked sheet to patter on the floor. Bill was crumpled against my right thigh. As my great-grandfather held me close and stroked my hair, I looked past his arm at Bill. He'd lived for so many years, survived by hook or by crook. He'd been ready to die for me. There is no female - human, fairy, vamp, Were - who wouldn't be affected by that. I thought of the nights we'd spent together, the times we'd talked lying together in bed - and I cried, though I felt almost too tired to produce tears.

My great-grandfather sat back on his heels and looked at me. "You need to go home," he said.

"Claudine?"

"She's in the Summerland."

I couldn't stand any more bad news.

"Fairy, I leave cleaning this place to you," Eric said. "Your great-granddaughter is my woman, mine and mine alone. I'll take her to her home."

Niall glared at Eric. "Not all the bodies are fae," Niall said with a pointed glance at Clancy. "And what must we do with that one?" He jerked his head toward Tray.

"That one needs to go back into his house," I said. "He has to be given a proper burial. He can't just vanish." I had no idea what Tray would have wanted, but I couldn't let the fairies shovel his body into a pit somewhere. He deserved far better than that. And there was Amelia to tell. Oh, God. I tried to pull my legs up preparatory to standing, but my stitches yanked and pain shot through me."Ahh," I said, and clenched my teeth.

I stared down at the floor while I got my breath back. And while I was staring, one of Bill's fingers twitched.

"He's alive, Eric," I said, and though it hurt like the dickens, I could smile about that. "Bill's alive."

"That's good," Eric said, though he sounded too calm. He flipped open his cell phone and speed-dialed someone. "Pam," he said. "Pam, Sookie lives. Yes, and Bill, too. Not Clancy. Bring the van."

Though I lost a little time somewhere in there, eventually Pam arrived with a huge van. It had a mattress in the back, and Bill and I were loaded in by Pam and Maxwell Lee, a black businessman who just happened to be a vampire. At least, that was the impression Maxwell always gave. Even on this night of violence and conflict, Maxwell looked neat and unruffled. Though he was taller than Pam, they got us into the back with gentleness and grace, and I appreciated it very much. Pam even forewent making any jokes, which was a welcome change.

As we drove back to Bon Temps, I could hear the vampires talking quietly about the end of the fairy war.

"It will be too bad if they leave this world," Pam said. "I love them so much. They're so hard to catch."

Maxwell Lee said, "I never had a fairy."

"Yum," Pam said, and it was the most eloquent "yum" I've ever heard.

"Be quiet," Eric said, and they both shut up.

Bill's fingers found mine, gripped them.

"Clancy lives on in Bill," Eric told the other two.

They received this news in a silence that seemed respectful to me.

"As you live on in Sookie," Pam said very quietly.

My great-grandfather came to see me two days later. After she let him in, Amelia went upstairs to cry some more. She knew the truth, of course, though the rest of our community was shocked that someone had broken into Tray's house and tortured him. Popular opinion said that his assailants must have believed Tray was a drug dealer, though there was absolutely no drug paraphernalia found in an intensive search of his house and shop. Tray's ex-wife and his son were making the funeral arrangements, and Tray would be buried at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church. I was going to try to go to support Amelia. I had another day to get better, but today I was content to lie on my bed, dressed in a nightgown. Eric couldn't give me any more blood to complete my healing. For one thing, in the past few days he'd already given me blood twice, to say nothing of the nips we'd exchanged during lovemaking, and he said we were dangerously close to some undefined limit. For another thing, Eric needed all his blood to heal himself, and he took some of Pam's, too. So I itched and healed, and saw that the vampire blood had filled in the bitten-out flesh of my legs.

That made my explanation of my injuries (a car accident; I'd been hit by a stranger who'd driven away) just feasible if not too many people examined the wounds. Of course, Sam had known right away that wasn't the truth. I had ended up telling him what had happened the first time he came to see me. The patrons of Merlotte's were very sympathetic, he reported when he came the second time. He had brought me daisies and a chicken basket from Dairy Queen. When he'd thought I wasn't watching, Sam had looked at me with grim eyes.

After Niall pulled a chair close to the bed, he took my hand. Maybe the events of the past few days had made the fine wrinkles in his skin a fraction deeper. Maybe he looked a little sad. But my royal great-grandfather was still beautiful, still regal, still strange, and now that I knew what his race could do ... he looked frightening.

"Did you know Lochlan and Neave killed my parents?" I asked.

Niall nodded after a perceptible pause. "I suspected," he said. "When you told me your parents had drowned, I had to consider it possible. They all had an affinity to water, Breandan's people."

"I'm glad they're dead," I said.

"Yes, I am, too," he said simply. "And most of Breandan's followers are dead, as well. I spared two females, since we need them so much, and though one of them was the mother of Breandan's child, I let her live."

He seemed to want my praise for that. "What about the child?" I asked.

Niall shook his head, and the sheet of pale hair moved with the gesture.

He loved me, but he was from a world even more savage than mine.

As if he had heard my thoughts, Niall said, "I'm going to finish blocking the passage to our land."

"But that's what the war was over," I said, bewildered. "That was what Breandan wanted."

"I have come to think that he was right, though for the wrong reason. It isn't the fae who need to be protected from the human world. It's the humans who need to be protected from us."

"What will that mean? What are the consequences?"

"Those of us who've been living among the humans will have to choose."

"Like Claude."

"Yes. He'll have to cut his ties with our secret land, if he wants to live out here."

"And the rest? The ones who live there already?"

"We won't be coming out anymore." His face was luminous with grief.

"I won't get to see you?"

"No, dear heart. It's better not."

I tried to summon up a protest, to tell him that it was not better, it was awful, since I had so few relatives, that I would not talk to him again. But I just couldn't make the words come out of my mouth. "What about Dermot?" I said instead.

"We can't find him," Niall said. "If he's dead, he went to ash somewhere we haven't discovered. If he's here, he's being very clever and very quiet. We'll keep trying until the door closes."

I hoped devoutly that Dermot was on the fairy side of that door.

At that moment, Jason came in.

My great-grandfather - our great-grandfather - leaped to his feet. But after a moment, he relaxed. "You must be Jason," he said.

My brother stared at him blankly. Jason had not been himself since the death of Mel. The same edition of our local paper that had carried the story about the awful discovery of the body of Tray Dawson had carried another story about the disappearance of Mel Hart. There was wide conjecture that maybe the two events were connected somehow.

I didn't know how the werepanthers had covered up the scene in back of Jason's house, and I didn't want to know. I didn't know where Mel's body was, either. Maybe it had been eaten. Maybe it was at the bottom of Jason's pond. Maybe it lay in the woods somewhere.

The last was what I suspected. Jason and Calvin had told the police that Mel had said he was going hunting by himself, and Mel's truck was found parked at a hunting preserve where he had a share. There were some bloodstains discovered in the back of the truck that made police suspect Mel might know something about Crystal Stackhouse's awful death, and now Andy Bellefleur had been heard to say he wouldn't be surprised if old Mel hadn't killed himself out in the woods.

"Yeah, I'm Jason," my brother said heavily. "You must be ... my great-grandfather?"

Niall inclined his head. "I am. I've come to bid your sister good-bye."

"But not me, huh? I'm not good enough."

"You are too much like Dermot."

"Well, crap." Jason threw himself down on the foot of the bed. "Dermot didn't seem too bad to me,Great-grandfather . Least, he came to warn me about Mel, let me know that Mel had killed my wife."

"Yes," Niall said remotely. "Dermot may have been partial to you because of the resemblance. I suppose you know that he helped to kill your parents?"

We both stared at Niall.

"Yes, the water fae who followed Breandan had pulled the truck into the stream, as I hear it, but only Dermot was able to touch the door and pull your parents out. Then the water nymphs held them underwater."

I shuddered.

"Ask me, I'm glad you're saying good-bye," Jason said. "I'm glad you're leaving. I hope you never come back, not a one of you."

Pain flitted over Niall's face. "I can't dispute your feeling," he said. "I only wanted to know my great-granddaughter. But I've brought Sookie nothing but grief."

I opened my mouth to protest, and then I realized he was telling the truth. Just not all the truth.

"You brought me the reassurance that I had family who loved me," I said, and Jason made a choking sound. "You sent Claudine to save my life, and she did, more than once. I'll miss you, Niall."

"The vampire is not a bad man, and he loves you," Niall said. He rose. "Good-bye." He bent and kissed my cheek. There was power in his touch, and I suddenly felt better. Before Jason could gather himself to object, Niall kissed his forehead, and Jason's tense muscles relaxed.

Then my great-grandfather was gone before I could ask him which vampire he meant.