Dead Reckoning (Sookie Stackhouse #11)(23)
Author: Charlaine Harris

"I have my uses," I said, suppressing the jolt of fear that the idea of Eric and Pam going fairy-struck on me evinced.

"And you’re Eric’s wife," Pam observed quietly.

Eric glared at her in the rearview mirror.

The silence that fell was so thick I wished I’d had a knife. This Pam-and-Eric secret quarrel was both upsetting and frustrating. And that was the understatement of the year.

"Is there something you want to tell me?" I asked, frightened of the answer. But anything was better than not knowing.

"Eric got a letter–" Pam began, and before I could register that he’d moved, Eric had whipped around, reached over the seat, and seized her throat. Since he was still driving, I squawked in terror.

"Eyes ahead, Eric! Not with the fighting again," I said. "Look, just go on and tell me!"

With his right hand, Eric was still holding Pam in a grip that would have choked her if she’d been a breather. He was steering with his left hand, and we coasted to a stop on the side of the road. I couldn’t see any oncoming traffic, and there were no lights behind us, either. I didn’t know if the isolation made me feel good or bad. Eric looked back at his child, and his eyes were so bright they were practically throwing sparks. He said, "Pam, don’t speak. That’s an order. Sookie, leave this be."

I could have said several things. I could have said, "I’m not your vassal, and I’ll say what I want to say," or I could have said, "Fuck you, let me out," and called my brother to come get me.

But I sat in silence.

I am ashamed to say that at that moment I was scared of Eric, this desperate and determined vampire who was attacking his best friend because he didn’t want me to know . . . something. Through the tie I felt with him, I got a confused bundle of negative emotions: fear, anger, grim resolve, frustration.

"Take me home," I said.

In an eerie echo, the limp Miriam whispered, "Take me home. . . ."

After a long moment, Eric let go of Pam, who collapsed in the backseat like a sack of rice. She hunched over Miriam protectively. In a frozen silence, Eric took me back to my house. There was no further mention of the sex we’d been scheduled to have after this "fun" evening. At that point, I would rather have had sex with Luis and Antonio. Or Pam. I said good-bye to Pam and Miriam, got out, and walked into my house without a backward glance.

I guess Eric and Pam and Miriam drove back to Shreveport together, and I guess at some point he permitted Pam to speak again, but I don’t know.

I couldn’t sleep after I’d washed my face and hung up the pretty dress. I hoped I’d get to wear it on a happier evening, sometime in the future. I’d looked too good to be this miserable. I wondered if Eric would have handled the evening with such sangfroid if it had been me Victor had captured and drugged and put out there on that banquette for the entire world to gape at.

And there was another thing troubling me. Here’s what I would have asked Eric if he hadn’t been playing dictator. I would have said, "Where did Victor get the fairy blood?"

That’s what I would have asked.

Chapter 4

I rose the next day feeling pretty grim in general, but I brightened when I saw that Claude and Dermot had returned to the house the night before. The evidence was clear. Claude’s shirt was tossed over the back of a kitchen chair, and Dermot’s shoes were at the foot of the stairs. Plus, after I’d had my coffee and my shower, and emerged from my room in shorts and a green T-shirt, the two were waiting for me in the living room.

"Good morning, guys," I said. Even to my own ears, I didn’t sound too perky. "Did you remember that today was the day the antiques dealers come? They should be here in an hour or two." I braced myself for the talk we had to have.

"Good, then this room will not look like a junk shop," Claude said in his charming way.

I just nodded. Today, we had Obnoxious Claude, as opposed to the more rarely seen Tolerable Claude.

"We did promise you a talk," Dermot said.

"And then you didn’t come home that night." I sat back in an old rocker from the attic. I didn’t feel particularly ready for this conversation, but I was also anxious for some answers.

"Things were happening at the club," Claude said evasively.

"Uh-huh. Let me guess, one of the fairies is missing."

That made them sit up and take notice. "What? How did you know?" Dermot recovered first.

"Victor has him. Or her," I added. I told them the story about last night.

"It’s not enough that we have to handle our own race’s problems," Claude said. "Now we’re sucked into the f**king vampire struggles, too."

"No," I said, feeling I was walking uphill in this conversation. "You as a group weren’t sucked into the vampire struggles. One of you was taken for a specific purpose. Different scenario. Let me point out that at the very least, that fairy who was taken has been bled, because that was what the vamps needed, the blood. I’m not saying your missing comrade couldn’t be alive, but you know how the vamps lose control when a fairy is around, much less a bleeding fairy."

"She’s right," Dermot told Claude. "Cait must be dead. Are any of the fairies at the club her kin? We need to ask if they’ve had a death vision."

"A female," Claude said. His handsome face was set in stone. "One we couldn’t afford to lose. Yes, we have to find out."

For a second I was confused, because Claude didn’t think that much about women in terms of his personal life. Then I remembered that there were fewer and fewer female fairies. I didn’t know about the rest of the fae, but it seemed the fairies were on the wane. It wasn’t that I lacked concern about the missing Cait (though I didn’t think there was a snowball’s chance in hell that she was alive), but I had other, selfish questions to ask, and I was not going to be diverted. As soon as Dermot had called Hooligans and asked Bellenos to call the fae together to ask about Cait’s kin, I got back on my own track.

"While Bellenos is busy, you have some free time, and since the appraisers are coming soon, I really need you to answer my questions," I said.

Dermot and Claude looked at each other. Dermot seemed to lose the conversational coin toss, because he took a deep breath and began, "You know when one of your Caucasians marries one of your Negroes, sometimes the babies turn out looking much more like one race than another, seemingly at random. That likeness can vary even between children of the same couple."

"Yes," I said. "I’ve heard that."

"When Jason was a baby, our great-grandfather Niall checked on him."