“You been taking tracking lessons from Heidi?” I asked weakly.
“As a matter of fact, I have,” she said. “There’s an art to drawing in air to sample it, since we no longer need to breathe.”
Eric was still waiting, and not patiently.
I remembered I’d bought them some bottled blood, and I went to the kitchen to heat it up with the two vampires trailing behind. While I was taking care of the hospitality portion of the evening, I gave them the Reader’s Digest version of my adventure.
Someone knocked on the back door.
The air turned electric. Pam glided over to the door onto the porch, unlocked it, went out to the back door. “Yes?” I heard her say.
There was a muffled answer in a deep voice. Bellenos.
“Sookie, you’re wanted!” Pam sang out. She seemed very amused by something.
I was curious as I stepped out on the porch, Eric right behind me.
“Oh, she’ll be so impressed,” Pam was saying, sounding as pleased as I did when someone brought me some fresh produce from his garden. “How very thoughtful.” She stepped aside so I could appreciate my presents.
Jesus Christ, Shepherd of Judea.
My great-uncle Dermot and Bellenos were standing in the dripping rain, each holding a severed head.
Let me just say here that normally I have quite a strong stomach, but the rain wasn’t the only thing that was dripping, and the heads were face forward so I got a good look at each face. The sight overcame me in a very drastic way. I turned and dashed for my bathroom, slamming the door behind me. I retched and ralphed and panted until I’d recovered a bit of my equilibrium. Naturally, I needed to brush my teeth and wash my face and comb my hair after losing everything in my stomach . . . though it hadn’t been much, because I simply couldn’t remember how long it had been since I’d eaten. I’d had the biscuit for breakfast. . . . Oh. No wonder I’d been sick. I hadn’t eaten anything since then. I’m a girl who likes her meals, so it hadn’t been a weight-loss tactic. I’d just been too busy bumping from crisis to crisis. Go on the Sookie Stackhouse Narrow Avoidance of Death Diet! Run for your life, and miss meals, too! Exercise plus starvation.
Pam and Eric were waiting in the kitchen.
“They left,” Pam said, holding up a bottle of blood in a toast. “They were sorry it was too much for your human sensibility. I’m assuming you didn’t want to keep the trophies?”
I felt a need to defend myself, but I bit it back. I refused to be ashamed of getting sick after seeing something so horrible. I’d seen a detached vampire head, but it hadn’t had the ghastly touches. I took a deep breath. “No, I didn’t want to keep the heads. Kelvin and Hod, rest in peace.”
“Those were their names? That’ll help in finding out who hired them,” Pam said, looking pleased.
“Um. Where are they?” I asked, trying not to look too anxious.
“Do you mean your great-uncle and his elf buddy, or do you mean the heads, or do you mean the bodies?” Eric asked.
“Both. All three.” I got myself some ice and poured some Diet Coke over it. People had told me for years that carbonated drinks settled your stomach. I was hoping they were right.
“Dermot and Bellenos have left for Monroe. Dermot got to anoint his wound with the blood of his enemies, which is a tradition among the fae. Bellenos, of course, got to take the heads off, which is an elf tradition. They were both very happy in consequence.”
“I’m glad for them,” I said automatically, and thought, What the hell am I saying? “I should tell Bill. I wonder if they found the car?”
“They found four-wheelers,” Pam said. “I think they had an excellent time driving them.” Pam looked envious.
I was almost able to smile, imagining that. “So, the bodies?”
“They’ve been dealt with,” Eric said. “Though I think the two of them took the heads back to Monroe to show the other fae. But they’ll destroy them there.”
“Oh,” Pam said suddenly, and leaped up. “Dermot left their papers.” She returned with two wet wallets and some odds and ends heaped in her hands. I spread a kitchen towel out on the table, and she dumped the items onto it. I tried not to notice the bloodstains on the bits of paper. I opened the leather billfold first and extracted a driver’s license. “Hod Mayfield,” I said. “From Clarice. He was twenty-four.” I pulled out a picture of a woman, presumably the Marge they’d been talking about. She was definitely queen-sized, and she was wearing her dark hair up in a teased style that was what you might call dated. Her smile was open and sweet.
No pictures of children, thank God.
A hunter’s license, a few receipts, an insurance card. “That means he had a regular job,” I said to the vampires, who never needed hospitalization or life insurance. And Hod had three hundred dollars.
“Gosh,” I said. “That seems like a lot.” All crisp twenties, too.
“Some of our employees don’t have a checking account,” Pam said. “They cash their paychecks every time and live on a cash basis.”
“Yeah, I know people who do that, too.” Terry Bellefleur, for example, who thought banks were run by a Communist cartel. “But this money is all twenties, right from the machine. Might be a payoff.”
Kelvin turned out to be a Mayfield, too. Cousin, brother? Kelvin was also from Clarice. He was older, twenty-seven. His billfold did contain pictures of children, three of them. Crap. Without comment, I laid the school shots out with the other items. Kelvin also had a condom, a free drink card for Vic’s Redneck Roadhouse, and a card for an auto body shop. A few worn dollar bills, and the same crisp three hundred that Hod had had.
These were guys I could have passed dozens of times when I’d been shopping in Clarice. I might have played softball against their sisters or wives. I might have served them drinks at Merlotte’s. What were they doing trying to kidnap me? “I guess they could have taken me up to Clarice through the woods, on the four-wheelers,” I said out loud. “But what would they have done with me then? I thought one of them . . . Through his thoughts I caught a glimpse of an idea about a car trunk.” It had only been fleeting, but I shuddered. I’d been in a car trunk before, and it hadn’t ended well for me. It was a memory I blocked out resolutely.
Possibly Eric was thinking about the same event because he glanced out the window toward Bill’s house. “Who do you think sent them, Sookie?” he asked, and he made a huge effort to keep his voice calm and patient.
“I sure can’t question them to find out,” I muttered, and Pam laughed.
I gathered my thoughts, such as they were. The fog of my two-hour nap had finally lifted, and I tried to make some sense out of the evening’s strange occurrences. “If Kelvin and Hod had been from Shreveport, I’d think that Sandra Pelt had hired them after she escaped from the hospital,” I said. “She doesn’t mind using up the lives of others, not a bit. I’m sure she hired the guys who came to the bar last Saturday. And I’m also sure she’s the one who threw the firebomb at Merlotte’s before that.”
“We’ve had eyes looking for her in Shreveport, but no one’s spotted her,” Eric said.
“So this Sandra’s goal,” Pam said, pulling her straight pale hair behind her shoulders to braid it, “is to destroy you, your place of work, and anything else that gets in her way.”
“That sounds about right. But evidently she’s not behind this. I have too many enemies.”
“Charming,” Pam said.
“How’s your friend?” I asked. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask before.”
Pam gave me a straight look. “She’s going to pass soon,” she said. “I’m running out of options, and I’m running out of hope that the process can be legal.”
Eric’s cell phone rang, and he got up to walk into the hall to take it. “Yes?” he said curtly. Then his voice changed. “Your Majesty,” he said, and he walked quickly into the living room so I couldn’t hear.
I wouldn’t have thought so much about it if I hadn’t seen Pam’s face. She was looking at me, and her expression was clearly one of . . . pity.