“You want to know if she got the blood from one of us?”
“I do.”
Bel enos said, “It’s possible a fairy sold blood without knowing what it would be used for.”
I thought that was bul shit, but in the interests of getting an answer, I said, “Certainly.”
“I’l inquire,” he said. “And you send the letter.”
Without further ado, he rose and glided out of the bar, receiving only a casual glance or two. I went back to the calendar to check, the one posted behind the bar. Danny had final y left to return to work, and Kennedy was actual y singing to herself as she aimlessly shifted bottles and glasses around. She grinned at me as she “worked.”
I was just bending closer to look at the June page when my cel rang. I whipped it out of my pocket. JB!
“What happened?” I asked.
“We got a boy and a girl!” he yel ed. “They’re fine! Tara’s fine! They got al their fingers and toes! They’re big enough! They’re perfect!”
“Oh, I’m so happy! You give Tara a hug for me. I’l try to get over to the hospital to see those little ones. The minute you’re home I’l bring supper over, you hear?”
“I’l tel her,” he said, but he was in such a daze I knew he’d forget the minute he hung up. That was okay.
Grinning like a baboon, I told Kennedy the good news. I cal ed Jason, because I wanted to share the happiness.
“That’s good,” he said absently. “I’m real glad for ’em. Listen, Sook, we may be closing in on a wedding date. There any day you just couldn’t be there?”
“Probably not. If you pick a weekday, I might have to change my work schedule, but I can usual y swing that.” Especial y now that I owned a piece of the bar, though I’d kept that to myself. As far as I knew, Jannalynn was the only person Sam had told, and even that had surprised me a little.
“Great! We’re going to pin it down tonight. We’re thinking in a couple of weeks.”
“Wow, that’s quick. Sure, just let me know.”
There were so many happy events going on. After Bel enos’s unexpected visit, it was impossible to forget that I had worries … but it was fairly easy to put them on the back burner and revel in the good things.
The hot afternoon drew to an end. In the summer, fewer people came in to drink after work. They headed home to mow their yards, hop in the aboveground pool, and take their kids to sports events.
One of our alcoholics, Jane Bodehouse, showed up around five o’clock. When she’d gotten cut from flying glass during the firebombing a few weeks before, Jane had gotten sewed up and had returned to the bar within twenty-four hours. For a few days, she got to enjoy painkil ers and alcohol. I’d wondered if Jane’s son might be angry that his mom had gotten hurt at Merlotte’s, but as far as I could tel , the poor guy had only a mild regret that she’d survived. After the bombing, Jane had abandoned her barstool in favor of the table by the window where she’d been sitting when the bottle came through the window. It was like she’d enjoyed the excitement and was ready for another Molotov cocktail. When I went over to give her a bowl of snack mix or replenish her drink, she always had a plaintive murmur about the heat or the boredom.
Since the bar was stil almost empty, I sat down to have a conversation with Jane when I served her the first drink of the day. Maybe. Kennedy joined us after she’d made sure the two guys at the bar had ful glasses. To make them even happier, she turned the TV to ESPN.
Any conversation with Jane was rambling and tended to bounce back and forth between decades with no warning. When Kennedy mentioned her own pageant days, Jane said, “I was Miss Red River Val ey and Miss Razorback and Miss Renard Parish when I was in my teens.”
So we had a pleasant reminiscence about those days, and it was good to see Jane perk up and share some common ground with Kennedy. On the other hand, Kennedy was a little freaked out at the idea someone who’d started out like her had ended up a barfly. She was thinking some anxious thoughts.
After a few minutes, Kennedy had to get back behind the bar, and I rose to greet my replacement, Hol y. I’d opened my mouth to tel Jane good-bye when she said, “Do you think it’l happen again?”
She was looking out the smoky glass of the big front window.
I started to ask her what she meant, but then from her addled brain, I got it. “I hope not, Jane,” I said. “I hope no one ever decides to attack the bar again.”
“I did pretty good that day,” she told me. “I moved real fast, and Sam got me going down that hal at a pretty good clip. Those EMTs were real nice to me.” She was smiling.
“Yes, Jane, you did real good. We al thought so,” I told her. I patted her shoulder and walked away.
The firebombing of Merlotte’s, which was a terrible night in my memory, had turned into a pleasurable reminiscence for Jane. I shook my head as I col ected my purse and left the bar. My gran had always told me it was an il wind that blew nobody good. Once again, she was proved right.
Even the break-in at Splendide had served a purpose. Now I knew for sure that someone, almost certainly one of the fae, knew my grandmother had had possession of the cluviel dor.
Chapter 8
An hour later, having come home to a blessedly cool and empty house, I was sitting at my kitchen table with my best stationery and a black pen. I was trying to decide how to begin the letter, the one I’d promised Bel enos I’d attempt to send to Faery. I had doubts about how wel this was going to go.
The last time I’d fed something into the portal, it had been eaten. Granted, it had been a human body.
My first attempt had run on for five handwritten pages. It was now in the kitchen trash can. I had to condense what I needed to convey. Urgency!
That was the message.
Dear Great-Grandfather, I began. I hesitated. And Claude, I added. Bellenos and Dermot are worried that the fae at Hooligans are getting too restless to stay confined to the building. They miss Claude and his leadership. We are all afraid something bad will happen if this situation doesn’t change soon. Please let us know what’s going on. Can you send a return letter through this portal? Or send Claude back? Love, Sookie I read it over, decided it was as close as I was going to get to what I wanted to say ( Claude, get your butt back here now! ). I wrote both Nial ’s and Claude’s names on the envelope, which was real pretty—cream with pink and red roses on the border. I almost put a stamp on the upper right corner before I realized it would be a ridiculous waste.
Between the heat, the bugs, and the burgeoning undergrowth, my jaunt into the woods to “mail” my letter was not as pleasant as my previous rambles had been. Sweat poured down my face, and my hair was sticking to my neck. A devil’s walking stick scratched me deeply enough to make me bleed. I paused by a big clump of the plumy bushes that only seem to grow big out in the sun—Gran would have had a name for them, but I didn’t—and I heard a deer moving around inside the dense growth. At least Bellenos left me one, I thought, and told myself I was being ridiculous.
We had plenty of deer. Plenty.
To my relief, the portal was stil in the little clearing where I’d last seen it, but it looked smal er. Not that it’s easy to define the size of a patch of shimmery air—but last time it had been large enough to admit a very smal human body. Now, that wouldn’t be possible without taking a chainsaw to the body beforehand.
Either the portal was shrinking natural y, or Nial had decided a size reduction would prevent me from popping anything else unauthorized into Faery. I knelt before the patch of wavery air, which hovered about knee-high just above the blackberry vines and the grasses. I popped the letter into the quavering patch, and it vanished.