None of my friends seemed to notice anything different about Bel enos, either—but he didn’t look like a regular man to me. His head of auburn hair was smooth and peltlike, his far-apart eyes were slanting and dark, his freckles were larger than human freckles, and the points of his needle-sharp inch-long teeth gleamed in the dim house lights. When I’d first met Bel enos, he’d been unable to mask himself as human. Now he could.
“Enjoy, ladies,” Bel enos had told us in his deep voice. “We’ve had this table reserved for you.” He’d given me a particular smile as he turned to go back to the entrance.
We were seated right by the stage. A hand-lettered sign in the middle of the tablecloth read, “Bon Temps Party.”
“I hope I get to thank Claude real personal y,” Kennedy said, with a sultry leer. She was definitely fighting with Danny; I could tel . Michele giggled and poked Tara’s shoulder.
Final y, knowing Claude was a perk.
“That redhead who showed us to the table thought you were cute, Sookie,” Tara said uneasily. I could tel she was thinking of my ful -time boyfriend and vampire husband, Eric Northman. She figured he wouldn’t be too happy about a stranger ogling me.
“He was just being polite because I’m Claude’s cousin,” I said.
“Like hel ! He was looking at you like you were chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream,” she said. “He wanted to eat you up.”
I was pretty sure she was right, but maybe not in the sense she meant; not that I could read Bel enos’s mind, any more than that of any other supernatural creature …but elves are what you’d cal unrestricted in their diet. I hoped Claude was keeping a close watch on the mixed bag of fae he’d accumulated here at Hooligans.
Meanwhile, Tara was complaining that her hair had lost al its body during her pregnancy, and Kennedy said, “Have a conditioning session at Death by Fashion in Shreveport. Immanuel’s the best.”
“He cut my hair once,” I said, and they al looked at me in astonishment. “You remember? When my hair got singed?”
“When the bar was bombed,” Kennedy said. “That was Immanuel? Wow, Sookie, I didn’t know you knew him.”
“A little,” I said. “I thought about getting some highlights, but he left town. The shop’s stil open.” I shrugged.
“Al the big talent leaves the state,” Hol y said, and while they talked that over, I tried to arrange my rump in a comfortable position on the folding metal chair wedged between Hol y and Tara. I careful y bent down to tuck my purse between my feet.
As I looked around me at al the excited customers, I began to relax. Surely I could enjoy this a little bit? I’d known the club was ful of displaced fae since my last visit here, after al . I was with my friends, and they were al ready to have a good time. Surely I could al ow myself to have a good time with them? Claude and Dermot were my kin, and they wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me. Right? I managed to smile at Bel enos when he came around to light the candle on our table, and I was laughing at a dirty joke of Michele’s when a waitress hustled over to take our drink orders.
My smile faded. I remembered her from my previous visit.
“I’m Gift, and I’l be your server tonight,” she said, just as perky as you please. Her hair was a bright blond, and she was very pretty. But since I was part fae (due to a massive indiscretion of my grandmother’s), I could see past the blonde’s cute exterior. Her skin wasn’t the honey tan everyone else was seeing. It was a pale, pale green. Her eyes had no pupils …or perhaps the pupils and irises were the same black? She fluttered her eyelids at me when no one else was looking. She might have two. Eyelids, that is. On each eye. I had time to notice because she bent so close to me.
“Welcome, Sister,” she murmured in my ear, and then straightened to beam at the others. “What y’al having tonight?” she asked with a perfect Louisiana accent.
“Wel , Gift, I want you to know up front that most of us are in the serving business, too, so we’re not going to give you a hard time,” Hol y said.
Gift twinkled back at her. “I’m so glad to hear that! Not that you gals look like a hard time, anyway. I love Ladies Only night.”
While my friends ordered their drinks and baskets of fried pickles or tortil a chips, I glanced around the club to confirm my impression. None of the servers were human. The only humans here were the customers.
When it was my turn, I told Gift I wanted a Bud Light. She bent closer again to say, “How’s the vampire cutie, girlfriend?”
“He’s fine,” I said stiffly, though that was far from true.
Gift said, “You’re so cute!” and tapped me on the shoulder as if I’d said something witty. “Ladies, you doing al right? I’m going to go put your food orders in and get your drinks.” Her bright head gleamed like a lighthouse as she maneuvered expertly through the crowd.
“I didn’t know you knew al the staff here. How is Eric? I haven’t seen him since the fire at Merlotte’s,” Kennedy said. She’d clearly overheard Gift’s query. “Eric is one fine hunk of man.” She nodded wisely.
There was a chorus of agreement from my friends. Truly, Eric’s hunkiness was undeniable. The fact that he was dead weighed against him, especial y in Tara’s eyes. She’d met Claude, and she hadn’t picked up on the fact that there was something different about him; but Eric, who never tried to pass for human, would always be on her blacklist. Tara had had a bad experience with a vampire, and it had left an indelible mark on her.
“He has a hard time getting away from Shreveport. He’s pretty busy with work,” I said. I stopped there. Talking about Eric’s business was always unwise.
“He’s not mad you’re going to watch another guy take off his clothes? You sure you told him?” Kennedy asked, her smile hard and bright. There was definitely trouble in Kennedy-and-Danny land. Oh, I didn’t want to know about it.
“I think Eric is so confident he looks good naked that he doesn’t worry about me seeing someone else that way,” I said. I’d told Eric I was going to Hooligans. I hadn’t asked his permission; as Kennedy had said about Danny, he was not the boss of me. But I had sort of floated the idea by him to see how he reacted. Things between us hadn’t been comfortable for a few weeks. I didn’t want to upset our fragile boat—not for such a frivolous reason.
As I’d expected, Eric had not taken our proposed girls’ night out very seriously. For one thing, he thought modern American attitudes about nudity were amusing. He’d seen a thousand years of long nights, and he’d lost his own inhibitions somewhere along the way. I suspected he’d never had that many.
My honey not only was calm about my viewing other men’s naked bodies; he wasn’t concerned about our destination. He didn’t seem to imagine there’d be any danger in the Monroe strip club. Even Pam, his second-in-command, had only shrugged when Eric had told her what we human females were going to do for entertainment. “Won’t be any vampires there,” she’d said, and after a token jab at Eric about my wanting to see other men in the buff, she’d dismissed the subject.
My cousin Claude had been welcoming al sorts of displaced fae to Hooligans since the portals to Faery had been shut by my great-grandfather Nial . He’d shut the portals on an impulse, a sudden reversal of his previous policy that human and fae should mix freely. Not al the fairies and other fae living in our world had had time to get on the Faery side before the portals closed. A very smal one, located in the woods behind my house, remained open a crack. From time to time, news passed through.