Шарлин Харрис: Dead and Gone

“You’ll have to take her on your lunch hour,” I said, barely managing not to snap at Amelia. “I got a full plate today. And here comes more trouble,” I said as a car pulled up beside mine in the employee parking lot. “Here’s Eric’s daytime guy, Bobby Burnham.”

“Oh, I meant to tell you. Octavia said Eric tried to call you at home twice. So she finally told Bobby where you were this morning,” Amelia said. “She figured it might be important. Lucky you. Okay, I’ll take care of Octavia. Somehow.”

“Good,” I said, trying not to sound as brusque as I felt. “Talk to you later.”

Bobby Burnham got out of his Impala and strode up to me. His boss, Eric, was bound to me in a complicated relationship that was based not only on our past history but also on the fact that we’d swapped blood several times.

This hadn’t been an informed decision on my part.

Bobby Burnham was an asshole. Maybe Eric had gotten him on sale?

“Miss Stackhouse,” he said, laying the courtliness on thick. “My master asks that you come to Fangtasia tonight for a sit-down with the new king’s lieutenant.”

This was not the summons I’d expected or the kind of conversation I’d foreseen with the vampire sheriff of Area Five. Given the fact that we had some personal issues to discuss, I’d imagined Eric would call me when things had settled down with the new regime, and we’d make some kind of appointment—or date—to talk about the several items on our mutual plate. I wasn’t pleased by this impersonal summons by a flunky.

“You ever hear of a phone?” I said.

“He left you messages last night. He told me to talk to you today, without fail. I’m just following orders.”

“Eric told you to spend your time driving over here and asking me to come to his bar tonight.” Even to my own ears, I sounded unbelieving.

“Yes. He said, ‘Track her down, deliver the message in person, and be polite.’ Here I am. Being polite.”

He was telling me the truth, and it was just killing him. That was almost enough to make me smile. Bobby really didn’t like me. The closest I could come to defining why was that Bobby didn’t think I was worthy of Eric’s notice. He didn’t like my less-than-reverent attitude toward Eric, and he couldn’t understand why Pam, Eric’s right-hand vampire, was fond of me, when she wouldn’t give Bobby the time of day.

There was nothing I could do to change this, even if Bobby’s dislike had worried me . . . and it didn’t. But Eric worried me plenty. I had to talk to him, and I might as well get it over with. It had been late October when I’d last seen him, and it was now mid-January. “It’ll have to be when I get off here. I’m temporarily in charge,” I said, sounding neither pleased nor gracious.

“What time? He wants you there at seven. Victor will be there then.”

Victor Madden was the representative of the new king, Felipe de Castro. It had been a bloody takeover, and Eric was the only sheriff of the old regime still standing. Staying in the good graces of the new regime was important to Eric, obviously. I wasn’t yet sure how much of that was my problem. But I was thumbs-up with Felipe de Castro by a happy accident, and I wanted to keep it that way.

“I might be able to get there by seven,” I said after some inner computation. I tried not to think about how much it would please me to lay eyes on Eric. At least ten times in the past few weeks, I’d caught myself before I’d gotten in my car to drive over to see him. But I’d successfully resisted the impulses, because I’d been able to tell that he was struggling to maintain his position under the new king. “I’ve got to brief the new gal. . . . Yeah, seven is just about doable.”

“He’ll be so relieved,” Bobby said, managing to work in a sneer.

Keep it up, asshole, I thought. And possibly the way I was looking at him conveyed that thought, because Bobby said, “Really, he will be,” in as sincere a tone as he could manage.

“Okay, message delivered,” I said. “I got to get back to work.”

“Where’s your boss?”

“He had a family problem in Texas.”

“Oh, I thought maybe the dogcatcher got him.”

What a howl. “Good-bye, Bobby,” I said, and turned my back on him to go in the back door.

“Here,” he said, and I turned around, irritated. “Eric said you would need this.” He handed me a bundle wrapped in black velvet. Vampires couldn’t give you anything in a Wal-Mart bag or wrapped in Hallmark paper, oh, no. Black velvet. The bundle was secured with a gold tasseled cord, like you’d use to tie back a curtain.

Just holding it gave me a bad feeling. “And what would this be?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t tasked with opening it.”

I hate the word “tasked,” with “gifted” running close behind. “What am I supposed to do with this?” I said.

“Eric said, ‘Tell her to give it to me tonight, in front of Victor.’ ”

Eric did nothing without a reason. “All right,” I said reluctantly. “Consider me messaged .”

I got through the next shift okay. Everyone was pitching in to help, and that was pleasing. The cook had been working hard all day; this was maybe the fifteenth short-order cook we’d had since I’d begun working at Merlotte’s. We’d had every variation on a human being you could imagine: black, white, male, female, old, young, dead (yes, a vampire cook), lycanthropically inclined (a werewolf), and probably one or two I’d completely forgotten. This cook, Antoine Lebrun, was real nice. He’d come to us out of Katrina. He’d outstayed most of the other refugees, who’d moved back to the Gulf Coast or moved on.

Antoine was in his fifties, his curly hair showing a strand or two of gray. He’d worked concessions at the Superdome, he’d told me the day he got hired, and we’d both shuddered. Antoine got along great with D’Eriq, the busboy who doubled as his assistant.

When I went in the kitchen to make sure he had everything he needed, Antoine told me he was really proud to be working for a shapeshifter, and D’Eriq wanted to go over and over his reaction to Sam’s and Tray’s transformations. After he’d left work, D’Eriq had gotten a phone call from his cousin in Monroe, and now D’Eriq wanted to tell us all about his cousin’s wife being a werewolf.

D’Eriq’s reaction was what I hoped was typical. Two nights before, many people had discovered that someone they knew personally was a were of some kind. Hopefully, if the were had never shown signs of insanity or violence, these people would be willing to accept that shape-changing was an unthreatening addition to their knowledge of the world. It was even exciting.

I hadn’t had time to check reactions around the world, but at least as far as local stuff went, the revelation seemed to be going smoothly. I didn’t get the feeling anyone was going to be firebombing Merlotte’s because of Sam’s dual nature, and I thought Tray’s motorcycle repair business was safe.

Tanya was twenty minutes early, which raised her up in my estimation, and I gave her a genuine smile. After we ran over a few of the basics like hours, pay, and Sam’s house rules, I said, “You like being out there in Hotshot?”

“Yeah, I do,” she said, sounding a little surprised. “The families out in Hotshot, they really get along well. If something goes wrong, they have a meeting and discuss it. Those that don’t like the life, they leave, like Mel Hart did.” Almost everyone in Hotshot was either a Hart or a Norris.

“He’s really taken up with my brother lately,” I said, because I was a little curious about Jason’s new friend.

“Yeah, that’s what I hear. Everyone’s glad he’s found someone to hang with after being on his own so long.”