Living Dead in Dallas (Sookie Stackhouse #2)(24)
Author: Charlaine Harris

"You are content with him?"

"Yes."

"You love him?" Stan sounded amused.

"None of your business," I said, grinning. "Did you mention there were more people I needed to check?"

Following the same procedure I had with Bethany, I held a variety of hands and checked a boring bunch of brains. Bethany had definitely been the most observant person in the bar. These people – another barmaid, the human bartender, and a frequent patron (a fang-banger) who’d actually volunteered for this – had dull boring thoughts and limited powers of recollection. I did find out the bartender fenced stolen household goods on the side, and after the guy had left, I recommended to Stan that he get another employee behind the bar, or he’d be sucked into any police investigation. Stan seemed more impressed by this than I hoped he’d be. I didn’t want him to get too enamored of my services.

Bill returned as I finished up the last bar employee, and he looked just a little pleased, so I concluded he’d been successful. Bill had been spending most of his waking hours on the computer lately, which had not been too popular an idea with me.

"The tattooed vampire," Bill said when Stan and I were the only two left in the room, "is named Godric, though for the past century he’s gone by Godfrey. He’s a renouncer." I don’t know about Stan, but I was impressed. A few minutes on the computer, and Bill had done a neat piece of detective work.

Stan looked appalled, and I suppose I looked puzzled.

"He’s allied himself with radical humans. He plans to commit suicide," Bill told me in a soft voice, since Stan was wrapped in thought. "This Godfrey plans to meet the sun. His existence has turned sour on him."

"So he’s gonna take someone with him?" Godfrey would expose Farrell along with himself?

"He has betrayed us to the Fellowship," Stan said.

Betrayed is a word that packs a lot of melodrama, but I didn’t dream of smirking when Stan said it. I’d heard of the Fellowship, though I’d never met anyone who claimed to actually belong to it. What the Klan was to African Americans, the Fellowship of the Sun was to vampires. It was the fastest-growing cult in America.

Once again, I was in deeper waters than I could swim in.

Chapter 5

There were lots of humans who hadn’t liked discovering they shared the planet with vampires. Despite the fact that they had always done so – without knowing it – once they believed that vampires were real, these people were bent on the vampires’ destruction. They weren’t any choosier about their methods of murder than a rogue vampire was about his.

Rogue vampires were the backward-looking undead; they hadn’t wanted to be made known to humans any more than the humans wanted to know about them. Rogues refused to drink the synthetic blood that was the mainstay of most vampires’ diets these days. Rogues believed the only future for vampires lay in a return to secrecy and invisibility. Rogue vampires would slaughter humans for the fun of it, now, because they actually welcomed a return of persecution of their own kind. Rogues saw it as a means of persuading mainstream vampires that secrecy was best for the future of their kind; and then, too, persecution was a form of population control.

Now I learned from Bill that there were vampires who became afflicted with terrible remorse, or perhaps ennui, after a long life. These renouncers planned to "meet the sun," the vampire term for committing suicide by staying out past daybreak.

Once again, my choice of boyfriend had led me down paths I never would have trod otherwise. I wouldn’t have needed to know any of this, would never have even dreamed of dating someone definitely deceased, if I hadn’t been born with the disability of telepathy. I was kind of a pariah to human guys. You can imagine how impossible it is to date someone whose mind you can read. When I met Bill, I began the happiest time of my life. But I’d undoubtedly encountered more trouble in the months I’d known him than I had in my entire twenty-five years previously. "So, you’re thinking Farrell is already dead?" I asked, forcing myself to focus on the current crisis. I hated to ask, but I needed to know.

"Maybe," Stan said after a long pause.

"Possibly they’re keeping him somewhere," said Bill. "You know how they invite the press to these… ceremonies,"

Stan stared into space for a long moment. Then he stood. "The same man was in the bar and at the airport," he said, almost to himself. Stan, the geeky head vampire of Dallas, was pacing now, up and down the room. It was making me nuts, though saying so was out of the question. This was Stan’s house, and his "brother" was missing. But I’m not one for long, brooding silences. I was tired, and I wanted to go to bed.

"So," I said, doing my best to sound brisk, "how’d they know I was going to be there?"

If there’s anything worse than having a vampire stare at you, it’s having two vampires stare at you.

"To know you were coming ahead of time… there is a traitor," Stan said. The air in the room began to tremble and crackle with the tension he was producing.

But I had a less dramatic idea. I picked up a notepad lying on the table and wrote, "MAYBE YOU’RE BUGGED." They both glared at me as if I’d offered them a Big Mac. Vampires, who individually have incredible and various powers, are sometimes oblivious to the fact that humans have developed some powers of their own. The two men gave each other a look of speculation, but neither of them offered any practical suggestion.

Well, to heck with them. I’d only seen this done in movies, but I figured if someone had planted a bug in this room, they’d done it in a hurry and they’d been scared to death. So the bug would be close and not well hidden. I shrugged off the gray jacket and kicked off my shoes. Since I was a human and had no dignity to lose in Stan’s eyes, I dropped below the table and began crawling down its length, pushing the rolling chairs away as I went. For about the millionth time, I wished I’d worn slacks.

I’d gotten about two yards from Stan’s legs when I saw something odd. There was a dark bump adhering to the underside of the blond wood of the table. I looked at it as closely as I could without a flashlight. It was not old gum.

Having found the little mechanical device, I didn’t know what to do. I crawled out, somewhat dustier for the experience, and found myself right at Stan’s feet. He held out his hand and I took it reluctantly. Stan pulled gently, or it seemed gently, but suddenly I was on my feet facing him. He wasn’t very tall, and I looked more into his eyes than I really wanted. I held up my finger in front of my face to be sure he was paying attention. I pointed under the table.

Bill left the room in a flash. Stan’s face grew even whiter, and his eyes blazed. I looked anywhere but directly at him. I didn’t want to be the sight filling his eyes while he digested the fact that someone had planted a bug in his audience chamber. He had indeed been betrayed, just not in the fashion he’d expected.