“Sookie?” he murmured.
“Bill, thank God you’re awake.”
“You’re unclothed.”
Trust a man to mention that first. “Absolutely, and I’ll tell you why — ”
“Can’t get up yet,” he said. “Must be . . . overcast?”
“Right, big storm, dark as hell out there, and there’s people — ”
“’Kay, later.” And he was out again.
Crap! So I huddled by his corpse and listened. Had I left the front door unlocked? Of course I had. And the second I realized that, I heard a floorboard creak overhead. They were in the house.
“. . . no drips,” said a voice, probably from the foyer. I started to crawl to the hatch door so I could hear . . . but I paused. There was at least a chance that if they found the hatch and flipped it open, they still wouldn’t see Bill and me. We were way back in a corner, and this was a very big space. Maybe it had been sort of a cellar, as close to a cellar as you could get in a place that had such a high water table.
“Yeah, but the door was open. She must have come in here.” It was a nasal voice, and it was a little closer than it had been.
“And she flew across the floor, leaving no footprints? Raining as hard as it is out there?” The sarcastic voice was a bit deeper.
“We don’t know what she is.” Nasal guy.
“Not a vampire, Kelvin. We know that.”
Kelvin said, “Maybe she’s a werebird or something, Hod.”
“Werebird?” The snort of incredulity echoed in the dark house. Hod could really do sarcastic.
“Did you see the ears on that guy? That was pretty incredible. You can’t rule out nothing, these days,” Kelvin advised his buddy.
Ears? They were talking about Dermot. What had they done to him? I was ashamed. This was the first time I’d thought about what might have befallen my great-uncle.
“Yeah, and? He must be one of those science fiction geeks.” Hod didn’t sound like he was paying much attention to what he was saying. I heard cabinets open and close. No way I could have been in any of those places.
“Nah, man, I’m sure they were real. No scars or anything. Maybe I shoulda taken one.”
Taken one? I shivered.
Kelvin, who was closer to the pantry than Hod, added, “I’m gonna go upstairs, check out the rooms up there.” I heard the sound of his boots diminish, heard the distant creak of the stairs, his muffled footfalls up the carpeted treads. Very faintly, I followed some of his movements on the second floor. I knew when he was directly above me, in the room I figured was the master bedroom, where I’d slept when I was dating Bill.
While Kelvin was gone, Hod wandered to and fro, though he didn’t seem very purposeful to me.
“Right . . . there’s nobody here,” Kelvin announced when he returned to the former kitchen. “Wonder why there’s a hot tub in the house?”
“There’s a car outside,” Hod said thoughtfully. His voice was much closer, right outside the open pantry door. He was thinking about getting back to Shreveport and taking a hot shower, putting on dry clothes, maybe having sex with his wife. Ew. A few too many details along with that. Kelvin was more prosaic. He wanted to get paid, so he wanted to deliver me. To whom? Dammit, he wasn’t thinking about that. My heart sank, though I would have sworn it was already down to my toes. My bare toes. I was glad I’d painted my toenails recently. Irrelevant!
A bright line of light suddenly appeared in the thin, thin outline of the hatch or trapdoor or whatever Bill called it. The light had been switched on in the pantry. I held as still as a mouse, tried to breathe shallowly and silently. I thought how bad Bill would feel if they killed me right next to him. Irrelevant!
He would, though.
I heard a creak and realized one of the men was standing right above me. If I could have switched my mind off, I would have. I was so conscious of the life in other people’s minds that I had a hard time believing that anyone could ignore a conscious brain, especially one as jittery as mine.
“Just blood in here,” Hod said, so close that I jerked in surprise. “The bottled kind. Hey, Kelvin, this house must belong to a vampire!”
“Don’t make no difference as long as he’s not awake. Or she. Hey, you ever had a female vampire?”
“No, and don’t want to. I don’t like to hump dead people. Course, some nights, Marge ain’t much better.”
Kelvin laughed. “You better not let her hear you say that, bro.”
Hod laughed, too. “No danger of that.”
And he stepped out of the pantry. Didn’t switch off the light, wasteful asshole! Evidently the fact that Bill would know someone had been here was not a concern of Hod’s. So he was really stupid.
And then Bill woke up. This time he was a little more alert, and the second I felt him move, I crouched on top of him and put my hand over his mouth. His muscles tensed, and I had time to think Oh, no! before he smelled me, knew me. “Sookie?” he said, but not at full volume.
“Did you hear something?” said Hod above me.
A long moment of a lively, listening silence. “Shh,” I breathed, right into Bill’s ear.
A cold hand rose and ran down my leg. I could almost feel Bill’s surprise — again — as he realized I was naked . . . again. And I knew the second the fact that he’d heard a voice overhead penetrated his awareness.
Bill was putting it all together. I didn’t know what he was coming up with, but he knew that we were in trouble. He also knew there was a bare-naked woman on top of him, and something else twitched. Simultaneously exasperated and amused, I had to clamp my lips shut on a giggle. Irrelevant!
And then Bill went to sleep again.
Would the damn sun never set? His drifting in and out was making me nuts. It was like dating someone with short-term memory loss.
And I’d clean forgotten to listen and be terrified.
“Nah, I don’t hear nothing,” Kelvin said.
Lying on top of my involuntary host was like lying on top of a cold, hard cushion with hair.
And an erection. For what seemed like the tenth time, Bill had wakened.
I blew out a silent breath. This time Bill was completely awake. He put his arms around me, but he was gentlemanly enough not to move or explore, at least for now. We were both listening; he’d heard Kelvin speak.
Finally, two sets of footsteps crossed the wooden floors, and we heard the front door open and close. I sagged in relief. Bill’s arms tightened and he rolled me over so he was on top.
“Is it Christmas?” he asked, pressed against me. “Are you an early present?”
I laughed, but I still kept it quiet. “I’m sorry to intrude, Bill,” I said, very low. “But they were after me.” I explained very briefly, being careful to tell him where my clothes were and why they were there. I could feel his chest heave a little, and I knew he was laughing silently. “I’m really worried about Dermot,” I said. I’d been talking almost in a whisper, which made the darkness curiously intimate, to say nothing of the large area of skin we were sharing.
“You’ve been down here a while,” he said, his voice at normal level.
“Yes.”
“I’m going out to make sure they’re gone, since you’re not going to let me ‘open’ early,” Bill said, and it took me a minute to understand. I caught myself smiling in the darkness. Bill gently eased away from me, and I saw his whiteness moving silently through the gloom. After a second’s listening, he opened the hatch. Harsh electric light flooded down. It was such a contrast that I had to close my eyes to let them adjust. By the time they did, Bill had slithered out into the house.
I didn’t hear anything no matter how hard I listened. I got tired of waiting — I felt like I’d crouched on the bare ground forever — and I hauled myself out of the hatch with a lot less grace and a lot more noise than Bill. I turned off the lights Hod and Kelvin had left on, at least in part because the light made me feel about twice as naked. I peered cautiously out of a window in the dining room. In the dark it was hard to be sure, but I thought the trees weren’t tossing in the wind anymore. The rain continued unabated. I saw lightning off to the north. I didn’t see kidnappers or bodies or anything that didn’t belong in the soaked landscape.