Dead in the Family (Sookie Stackhouse #10)(67)
Author: Charlaine Harris

I had to stop underestimating my brother’s shrewdness. "Maybe Victor thought that if I got arrested for murder – since someone tipped off the law that there was a body on my land – Eric would go down with me. Maybe Victor thought that would be enough for their mutual boss to take Eric out of his position."

"Wouldn’t it have been better to put the body in Eric’s house and call the police?"

"That’s a good point. But finding a body in Eric’s house would mean bad press for all vampires. Another idea I had, maybe the killer was Annabelle, who was screwing both Basim and Alcide. Maybe she got jealous, or maybe Basim said he was going to tell. So she killed him, and since they’d just been on my land, she thought of it as a good place to bury a body."

"That’s a long way to drive with a body in the trunk," Jason said. He was clearly going to play devil’s advocate.

"Sure, it’s easy to punch holes in all my ideas," I said, sounding exactly like his little sister. "Once I go to all the work of coming up with them! But you’re right. That’d be a risk I wouldn’t want to take," I added, on a more mature level.

"Alcide could’ve done it," Jason said.

"Yeah. He could’ve. But you were there. Did it seem to you – remotely – like he knew it was going to be Basim?"

"No," he said. "I thought he got a huge shock. But I wasn’t looking at Annabelle."

"I wasn’t, either. So I don’t know how she reacted."

"So you got any other ideas?"

"Yeah," I said. "And this is my least favorite. You know I told you that Heidi the vampire scented fairies in the woods?"

"I did, too," Jason said.

"Maybe I should get you to check out the woods on a regular basis," I said. "Anyway, Claude said it wasn’t him, and Heidi confirmed that. But what if Basim saw Claude meeting with another fairy? In the area around the house, where Claude’s scent would be natural?"

"When would this have happened?"

"The night the pack was on the property. Claude hadn’t moved in then, but he’d come around to see me."

I could see Jason trying to figure out the sequence. "So Basim warned you about the fairies he tracked, but he didn’t tell you he’d seen some? I don’t think that holds together, Sook."

"You’re right," I admitted. "And we still don’t know who the other fairy would be. If there are two, and one of them isn’t Claude, and the other one is Dermot …"

"That leaves one fairy we don’t know about."

"Dermot’s seriously messed up, Jason."

Jason said, "I’m worried about all of ’em."

"Even Claude?"

"Look, how come he showed up now? When you have other fairies in the woods? And does that sound crazy when you say it out loud, or what?"

I laughed. Just a little. "Yeah, it sounds nuts. And I get your point. I don’t entirely trust Claude, even if he is a little bit family. I wish I hadn’t said yes to him moving in. On the other hand, I don’t believe he means to hurt me or you. And he’s not quite as much of an ass**le as I thought he was."

We tried to put together a few more theories about Basim’s death, but we could punch too many holes in all of our theories. It passed the time until we arrived.

The house Alcide had moved into when his dad died was a large two-story brick home on large grounds, enhanced with impressive landscaping. The – estate? manor house? – was in a very nice area of Shreveport, of course. In fact, it wasn’t too far from Eric’s neighborhood. That gnawed at me, thinking of Eric so close to me but in so much trouble.

The confusion of what I was feeling through our blood bond was making me more jittery with every passing night. There were so many people sharing in that bond now, so much feeling going back and forth. It wore me out emotionally. Alexei was the worst. He was a very dead little boy, that was the only way I could put it: a child locked in a permanent grayness, a child who experienced only occasional flashes of pleasure and color in his new "life." After days of experiencing what amounted to an echo of him living in my head, I’d decided the boy was like a tick sucking on the life of Appius Livius, Eric, and now me. He siphoned off a little every day.

Apparently, Appius Livius was so used to Alexei’s draining him that he accepted it as part of his existence. Maybe – possibly – the Roman felt responsible for the trouble Alexei caused, since he’d brought him over. If that was Appius Livius’s conviction, I thought he was absolutely correct. I was sure that bringing Alexei to Eric, thinking the presence of another "child" would soothe Alexei’s psychosis, was a last-ditch effort to cure the boy. And Eric, my lover, was caught in the middle of all this along with all the problems he was staving off involving Victor.

I felt less and less like a good person every day. As we walked from the driveway to Alcide’s front door, I admitted to myself that since my visit to Fangtasia, I found myself wishing that all of them would die – Appius Livius, Alexei, Victor.

I had to shove all that into a mental corner, because I had to be on my game to enter a house full of Weres. Jason put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a half hug. "Sometime you’ll have to explain to me how come we’re doing this," he said. "Because I think I kind of forgot."

I laughed, which was what he’d wanted. I put up a hand to ring the bell, but the door swung open before my fingertip made contact. Jannalynn was standing there in a sports bra and running shorts. (She always came up with wardrobe choices that startled me.) The running shorts showed concave dips by her hipbones, and I sighed. "Concave" was not a word I’d ever used in relation to my body.

"Getting into the new job?" Jason asked her, stepping forward. Jannalynn had to either back up or block his way, and she chose to back up.

"I was born for this job," the young Were said.

I had to agree. Jannalynn seemed to love doling out violence. At the same time, I wondered what job she could hold in the real world. She’d been bartending at a Were-owned bar in Shreveport when I’d first seen her, and I knew the owner of that bar had died in the struggle between the packs. "Where are you working now, Jannalynn?" I asked, since there shouldn’t be any need to keep that secret that I could see.

"I manage the Hair of the Dog. The ownership passed to Alcide, and he felt I could handle the job. I have some help," she said, which was a confession that surprised me.

Ham, his arm around a pretty brunette in a sundress, was waiting across the foyer by the opened doors to the living room. He patted my shoulder and introduced his companion as Patricia Crimmins. I recognized her as one of the women who’d joined the Long Tooth pack in surrender after the Were war, and I tried to focus on her. But my attention kept straying. Patricia laughed and said, "It’s quite a place, isn’t it?"