I was up and dressed by eight o’clock, early for me. Though I was moving and thinking, I felt as rumpled and wrinkled as my bedsheets. I wished someone could yank me smooth and orderly, the way I yanked the sheets. Amelia was home (I checked to see if her car was parked out back when I made the coffee) and I’d glimpsed Octavia shuffling into the hall bathroom, so it was shaping up to be a typical morning, as mornings went nowadays at my house.
The pattern was broken by a knocking at the front door. Usually I’m warned by the crunching of the gravel driveway, but in my heavier-than-usual morning fog, I’d missed it.
I looked through the peephole to see a man and a woman, both dressed in proper business suits. They didn’t look like Jehovah’s Witnesses or home invaders. I reached out to them mentally and found no hostility or anger, only curiosity.
I opened the door. I smiled brilliantly. “Can I help you?” I said. The cold air gusted around my bare feet.
The woman, who was probably in her early forties, smiled back. Her brown hair had a little gray in it and was cut in a simple chin-length style. She’d parted it very precisely. Her pantsuit was charcoal with a black sweater underneath, and her shoes were black. She carried a black bag, which wasn’t exactly like a purse, more like a laptop case.
She held out her hand to shake, and when I touched her, I knew more. It was hard to keep the shock off my face. “I’m from the New Orleans office of the FBI,” she said, which is a bombshell of an opener for your average conversation. “I’m Agent Sara Weiss. This is Special Agent Tom Lattesta from our Rhodes office.”
“You’re here about . . . ?” I kept my face pleasantly blank.
“May we come in? Tom’s come all the way from Rhodes to talk to you, and we’re letting all your warm air out.”
“Sure,” I said, though I was far from sure. I was trying hard to get a fix on their intent, but it wasn’t easy. I could only tell they weren’t there to arrest me or anything drastic like that.
“Is this a convenient time?” Agent Weiss asked. She implied she’d be delighted to come back later, though I knew that wasn’t true.
“This is as good as any,” I said. My grandmother would have given me a sharp look for my ungraciousness, but then, Gran had never been questioned by the FBI. This was not exactly a social call. “I do have to leave for work pretty soon,” I added to give myself an escape hatch.
“That’s bad news, about your boss’s mother,” Lattesta said. “Did the big announcement go well at your bar?” From his accent, I could tell he’d been born north of the Mason-Dixon Line, and from his knowledge of Sam’s whereabouts and identity, he’d done his homework, down to investigating the place I worked.
The sick feeling that had started up in my stomach intensified. I had a moment of wanting Eric there so badly it made me a little dizzy, and then I looked out the window at the sunshine and felt only anger at my own longing.This is what you get, I told myself.
“Having werewolves around makes the world more interesting, doesn’t it?” I said. The smile popped onto my face, the smile that said I was really strained. “I’ll take your coats. Please, have a seat.” I indicated the couch, and they settled on it. “Can I get you some coffee or some iced tea?” I said, thanking Gran’s training for keeping the words flowing.
“Oh,” Weiss said. “Some iced tea would be wonderful. I know it’s cold outside, but I drink it year-round. I’m a southern woman born and bred.”
And laying it on a little too thick, in my opinion. I didn’t think Weiss would become my best friend, and I didn’t plan to swap any recipes. “You?” I looked at Lattesta.
“Sure, great,” he said.
“Sweet or unsweet?” Lattesta thought it would be fun to have the famous southern sweet tea, and Weiss accepted sweet as a matter of bonding. “Let me tell my roommates we have company,” I said, and I called up the stairs, “Amelia! The FBI is here!”
“I’ll be down in a minute,” she called back, not sounding surprised at all. I knew she’d been standing at the top of the stairs listening to every word.
And here came Octavia in her favorite green pants and striped long-sleeved shirt, looking as dignified and sweet as an elderly white-haired black woman can look. Ruby Dee has nothing on Octavia.
“Hello,” she said, beaming. Though she looked like everyone’s favorite granny, Octavia was a powerful witch who could cast spells with almost surgical precision. She’d had a lifetime of practice in concealing her ability. “Sookie didn’t tell us she was expecting company, or we would have cleaned up the house.” Octavia beamed some more. She swept a hand to indicate the spotless living room. It would never be featured inSouthern Living , but it was clean, by golly.
“Looks great to me,” Weiss said respectfully. “I wish my house looked this neat.” She was telling the truth. Weiss had two teenagers and a husband and three dogs. I felt a lot of sympathy—and maybe some envy—for Agent Weiss.
“Sookie, I’ll bring tea for your guests while you talk,” Octavia said in her sweetest voice. “You just sit down and visit a spell.” The agents were settled on the couch and looking around the shabby living room with interest when she returned with napkins and two glasses of sweet tea, ice rattling in a pleasant way. I rose from the chair opposite the couch to put napkins in front of them, and Octavia placed the glasses on the napkins. Lattesta took a large swallow. The corner of Octavia’s mouth twitched just a little when he made a startled face and then did his best to amend his expression to pleased surprise.
“What did you-all want to ask me?” Time to get down to brass tacks. I smiled at them brightly, my hands folded in my lap, my feet parallel, and my knees clamped together.
Lattesta had brought in a briefcase, and now he put it on the coffee table and opened it. He extracted a picture and handed it to me. It had been taken in the middle of the afternoon in the city of Rhodes a few months before. The picture was clear enough, though the air around the people in it was blighted with the clouds of dust that had billowed up from the collapsed Pyramid of Gizeh.
I kept my eyes on the picture, I kept my face smiling, but I couldn’t stop my heart from sinking into my feet.
In the picture, Barry the Bellboy and I were standing together in the rubble of the Pyramid, the vampire hotel that a splinter Fellowship group had blown up the previous October. I was somewhat more recognizable than my companion, because Barry was standing in profile. I was facing the camera, unaware of it, my eyes on Barry’s face. We were both covered in dirt and blood, ash and dust.
“That’s you, Miss Stackhouse,” Lattesta said.
“Yes, it is.” Pointless to deny the woman in the picture was me, but I sure would have loved to have done so. Looking at the picture made me feel sick because it forced me to remember that day all too clearly.
“So you were staying at the Pyramid at the time of the explosion?”
“Yes, I was.”
“You were there in the employ of Sophie-Anne Leclerq, a vampire businesswoman. The so-called Queen of Louisiana.”
I started to tell him there had been no “so-called” about it, but discretion blocked those words. “I flew up there with her,” I said instead.
“And Sophie-Anne Leclerq sustained severe injuries in the blast?”
“I understand she did.”
“You didn’t see her after the explosion?”
“No.”
“Who is this man standing with you in the picture?”
Lattesta hadn’t identified Barry. I had to keep my shoulders stiff so they wouldn’t sag with relief. I shrugged. “He came up to me after the blast,” I said. “We were in better shape than most, so we helped search for survivors.” Truth, but not the whole truth. I’d known Barry for months before I’d encountered him at the convention at the Pyramid. He’d been there in the service of the King of Texas. I wondered how much about the vamp hierarchy the FBI actually knew.