Dead as a Doornail (Sookie Stackhouse #5)(25)
Author: Charlaine Harris

"Is there anything else you can think of you might need?" I asked. My grandmother brought me up right, though I don’t think she ever imagined I’d have to be hostess to a bunch of vampires.

"No, thank you, Miss Sookie," Charles said politely. His long white fingers tapped his eye patch, an odd habit of his that gave me the cold gruesomes.

"Then, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll say good night." I was tired, and it was exhausting work making conversation with a near stranger.

"Of course. Rest easy, Sookie. If I want to roam in the woods… ?"

"Feel free," I said immediately. I had an extra key to the back door, and I got it out of the drawer in the kitchen where I kept all the keys. This had been the odds and ends drawer for perhaps eighty years, since the kitchen had been added onto the house. There were at least a hundred keys in it. Some, those that were old when the kitchen was added, were mighty strange looking. I’d labeled the ones from my generation, and I’d put the back door key on a bright pink plastic key ring from my State Farm insurance agent. "Once you’re in for the night – well, for good – shoot the dead bolt, please."

He nodded and took the key.

It was usually a mistake to feel sympathy for a vampire, but I couldn’t help but think there was something sad about Charles. He struck me as lonely, and there’s always something pathetic about loneliness. I’d experienced it myself. I would ferociously deny I was pathetic, but when I viewed loneliness in someone else, I could feel the tug of pity.

I scrubbed my face and pulled on some pink nylon pajamas. I was already half-asleep as I brushed my teeth and crawled into the high old bed my grandmother had slept in until she died. My great-grandmother had made the quilt I pulled over me, and my great-aunt Julia had embroidered the pattern on the edges of the bedspread. Though I might actually be alone in the world – with the exception of my brother, Jason – I went to sleep surrounded by my family.

My deepest sleep is around three a.m., and sometime during that period I was awakened by the grip of a hand on my shoulder.

I was shocked into total awareness, like a person being thrown into a cold pool. To fight off the shock that was close to paralyzing me, I swung my fist. It was caught in a chilly grip.

"No, no, no, ssshhh" came a piercing whisper out of the darkness. English accent. Charles. "Someone’s creeping around outside your house, Sookie."

My breath was as wheezy as an accordion. I wondered if I was going to have a heart attack. I put a hand over my heart, as if I could hold it in when it seemed determined to pound its way out of my chest.

"Lie down!" he said right into my ear, and then I felt him crouch beside my bed in the shadows. I lay down and closed my eyes almost all the way. The headboard of the bed was situated between the two windows in the room, so whoever was creeping around my house couldn’t really get a good look at my face. I made sure I was lying still and as relaxed as I could get. I tried to think, but I was just too scared. If the creeper was a vampire, he or she couldn’t come in – unless it was Eric. Had I rescinded Eric’s invitation to enter? I couldn’t remember. That’s the kind of thing I need to keep track of, I babbled to myself.

"He’s passed on," Charles said in a voice so faint it was almost the ghost of a voice.

"What is it?" I asked in a voice I hoped was nearly as soundless.

"It’s too dark outside to tell." If a vampire couldn’t see what was out there, it must be really dark. "I’ll slip outside and find out."

"No," I said urgently, but it was too late.

Jesus Christ, shepherd of Judea! What if the prowler was Mickey? He’d kill Charles – I just knew it.

"Sookie!" The last thing I expected – though frankly, I was way beyond consciously expecting anything – was for Charles to call to me. "Come out here, if you please!"

I slid my feet into my pink fuzzy slippers and hurried down the hall to the back door; that was where the voice had been coming from, I thought.

"I’m turning on the outside light," I yelled. Didn’t want anyone to be blinded by the sudden electricity. "You sure it’s safe out there?"

"Yes," said two voices almost simultaneously.

I flipped the switch with my eyes shut. After a second, I opened them and stepped to the door of the screened-in back porch, in my pink jammies and slippers. I crossed my arms over my chest. Though it wasn’t cold tonight, it was cool.

I absorbed the scene in front of me. "Okay," I said slowly. Charles was in the graveled area where I parked, and he had an elbow around the neck of Bill Compton, my neighbor. Bill is a vampire, has been since right after the Civil War. We have a history. It’s probably just a pebble of a history in Bill’s long life, but in mine, it’s a boulder.

"Sookie," Bill said between clenched teeth. "I don’t want to cause this foreigner harm. Tell him to get his hands off me."

I mulled that over at an accelerated rate. "Charles, I think you can let him go," I said, and as fast as I could snap my fingers, Charles was standing beside me.

"You know this man?" Charles’s voice was steely.

Just as coldly, Bill said, "She does know me, intimately."

Oh, gack.

"Now, is that polite?" I may have had a little cold steel in my own voice. "I don’t go around telling everyone the details of our former relationship. I would expect the same of any gentleman."

To my gratification, Charles glared at Bill, raising one eyebrow in a very superior and irritating way.

"So this one is sharing your bed now?" Bill jerked his head toward the smaller vampire.

If he’d said anything else, I could’ve held on to my temper. I don’t lose it a lot, but when I do, it’s well and truly lost. "Is that any of your business?" I asked, biting off each word. "If I sleep with a hundred men, or a hundred sheep, it’s not any of your business! Why are you creeping around my house in the middle of the night? You scared me halfway to death."

Bill didn’t look remotely repentant. "I’m sorry you wakened and were frightened," he said insincerely. "I was checking on your safety."

"You were roaming around the woods and smelled another vampire," I said. He’d always had an extremely acute sense of smell. "So you came over here to see who it was."

"I wanted to be sure you weren’t being attacked," Bill said. "I thought I caught a sniff of human, too. Did you have a human visitor today?"

I didn’t believe for a minute Bill was only concerned with my safety, but I didn’t want to believe jealousy brought him to my window, or some kind of prurient curiosity. I just breathed in and out for a minute, calming down and considering.