Dead in the Family (Sookie Stackhouse #10)(41)
Author: Charlaine Harris

I turned to go to the kitchen.

"I feel your anger," Ocella said.

"I don’t care," I said, without turning to face him. I heard Jason coming downstairs, a little more slowly now that he was carrying the table. "Jason, you want to come with me?" I said over my shoulder.

He was more than glad to leave the room. Though he was civil to Eric because he knew I loved him, Jason was not happy in the company of vamps. He put the table down in a corner of the kitchen.

"Sook, what’s going on here?"

"Come into my room for a second," I said after I’d gotten the bottles out of my refrigerator. I’d feel a lot better if I had more clothes on. Jason trailed after me. I shut the door once we were inside my bedroom.

"Watch the door. I don’t trust that old one," I said, and Jason obligingly turned his back and watched the door while I pulled off the robe, getting into my clothes as fast as I’ve ever dressed in my life.

"Whoa," Jason said, and I jumped. I turned to see that Alexei had opened the door and would have entered if Jason hadn’t been holding it.

"I’m sorry," Alexei said. His voice was a ghost of a voice, a voice that once had been. "I apologize to you, Sookie, and you, Jason."

"Jason, you can let him in. What are you sorry for, Alexei?" I asked. "Come on, let’s go to the kitchen and I’ll warm up the TrueBlood." We trailed into the kitchen. We were a little farther from the living room, and there was a chance Eric and Ocella wouldn’t hear us.

"My master is not always like this. His age, it turns him."

"Turns him into what? A total jerk? A sadist? A child molester?"

A faint smile crossed the boy’s face. "At times, all of those," he said succinctly. "But truthfully, I haven’t been well myself. That’s why we’re here."

Jason began to look angry. He likes kids, always has. Even though Alexei could have killed Jason in a second, Jason thought of Alexei as a child. My brother was building up a big mad, actually thinking of charging into the living room to confront Appius Livius Ocella.

"Listen, Alexei, you don’t have to stay with that dude if you don’t want to," Jason said. "You can stay with me or Sookie, if Eric won’t put you up. Nobody’s gonna make you stay with someone you don’t want to be with." Bless Jason’s heart, he sure didn’t know what he was talking about.

Alexei smiled, a faint smile that was simply heart-piercing. "Really, he is not so bad. He is a good man, I believe, but from a time you can’t imagine. I think you are used to knowing vampires who are trying to … mainstream. Master, he is not trying to do this. He is much happier in the shadows. And I must stay with him. Please don’t trouble yourselves, but I thank you for your concern. I’m feeling better already now that I’m with my brother. I don’t feel as if I’ll suddenly do something … regrettable."

Jason and I looked at each other. That was enough to make us both worried.

Alexei was looking around the kitchen as if he seldom saw one. I figured that was probably true.

I took the warm bottles out of the microwave and shook them. I put some napkins on the tray with the bottles. Jason got himself a Coke from the refrigerator.

I didn’t know what to think about Alexei. He apologized for Ocella like the Roman was his grumpy grandpa, but it was apparent that he was in Ocella’s sway. Of course he was; he was Ocella’s child in a very real sense.

It was an awfully strange situation, having a figure out of history sitting in your living room. I thought of the horrors he’d experienced, both before and after his death. I thought of his childhood as the tsarevitch, and I knew that despite his hemophilia, that childhood must have contained some glorious moments. I didn’t know whether the boy often longed for the love, devotion, and luxury that had surrounded him from birth until the rebellion, or (considering he’d been executed along with his whole immediate family) whether it was possible he saw being a vampire as an improvement over being buried in a pit in the woods in Russia.

Though with the hemophilia, his life expectancy in those days would have been pretty damn short anyway.

Jason added ice to his glass and looked in the cookie jar. I didn’t keep cookies anymore, because if I did, I’d eat ’em. He closed the jar sadly. Alexei was watching everything Jason did as if he were observing an animal he’d never seen before.

He noticed me looking at him. "Two men took care of me, two sailors," he said, as though he could read the questions in my mind. "They carried me around when the pain was bad. After the world turned upside down, one of them abused me when he had the chance. But the other died, simply because he was still kind to me. Your brother reminds me a little of that one."

"Sorry about your family," I said awkwardly, since I felt compelled to say something.

He shrugged. "I was glad when they found them and gave the burial," he said. But when I saw his eyes, I knew that his words were a thin layer of ice over a pit of pain.

"Who was that in your coffin?" I asked. Was I being tacky? What on earth else was there to talk about? Jason was looking from Alexei to me, mystified. Jason’s idea of history was remembering Jimmy Carter’s embarrassing brother.

"When the big grave was found, Master knew they would find my sister and me soon. We overestimated the searchers, perhaps. It took sixteen more years. But in the meantime, we revisited the place where I was buried."

I felt my eyes fill with tears. The place where I was buried …

He continued, "We had to provide some of my bones for it, because we had learned about DNA by then. Otherwise, of course, we could have found a boy about the right age… ."

I really couldn’t think of anything remotely normal to say. "So you cut out some of your own bones to put in the grave," I said, my voice clogged and shaky.

"In steps, over time. Everything grew back," he said reassuringly. "We had to burn my bones a little. They had burned Maria and me, and poured acid on us, too."

Finally, I managed, "Why was that necessary? To put your bones there?"

"Master wanted me to be at rest," he said. "He didn’t want any sightings. He reasoned that if my bones were found, there would be no more controversy. Of course, by now no one would expect me to be alive anyway, much less looking like I did then. Perhaps we weren’t thinking clearly. When you’ve been out of the world so long … And in the first five years after the revolution, I was seen by a couple of people who did recognize me. Master had to take care of them."

That, too, took a minute to sink in. Jason looked nauseated. I wasn’t far behind him. But this little chitchat had already taken long enough. I didn’t want "Master" to think we were plotting against him.