Шарлин Харрис - From Dead To Worse

"We didn't know if we should wake you," Octavia said. She looked anxious.

"But I thought we ought to, because a message from a magical source is clearly important," Amelia said. She appeared to have said it many times in the past few minutes, from the expression on Octavia's face.

"What message?" I asked, deciding to ignore the argument part of this conversation.

"This one," Octavia said, handing me a large buff envelope. It was made of heavy paper, like a super-fancy wedding invitation. My name was on the outside. No address, just my name. Furthermore, it was sealed with wax. The imprint in the wax was the head of a unicorn.

"Okey-dokey," I said. This was going to be an unusual letter.

I walked into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee and a knife, in that order, both the witches trailing behind me like a Greek chorus. Having poured the coffee and pulled out a chair to sit at the table, I slid the knife under the seal and detached it gently. I opened the flap and pulled out a card. On the card was a handwritten address: 1245 Bienville, Red Ditch, Louisiana. That was all.

"What does it mean?" Octavia said. She and Amelia were naturally standing right behind me so they could get a good view.

"It's the location of someone I've been searching for," I said, which was not exactly the truth but close enough.

"Where's Red Ditch?" Octavia said. "I've never heard of it." Amelia was already fetching the Louisiana map from the drawer under the telephone. She looked up the town, running her finger down the columns of names.

"It's not too far," she said. "See?" She put her finger on a tiny dot about an hour and a half's drive southeast of Bon Temps.

I drank my coffee as fast as I could and scrambled into some jeans. I slapped a little makeup on and brushed my hair and headed out the front door to my car, map in hand.

Octavia and Amelia followed me out, dying to know what I was going to do and what significance the message had for me. But they were just going to have to wonder, at least for right now. I wondered why I was in such a hurry to do this. It wasn't like he was going to vanish, unless Remy Savoy was a fairy, too. I thought that highly unlikely.

I had to be back for the evening shift, but I had plenty of time.

I drove with the radio on, and this morning I was in a country-and-western kind of mood. Travis Tritt and Carrie Underwood accompanied me, and by the time I drove into Red Ditch, I was feeling my roots. There was even less to Red Ditch than there was to Bon Temps, and that's saying something.

I figured it would be easy to find Bienville Street, and I was right. It was the kind of street you can find anywhere in America. The houses were small, neat, boxy, with room for one car in the carport and a small yard. In the case of 1245, the backyard was fenced in and I could see a lively little black dog running around. There wasn't a doghouse, so the pooch was an indoor-outdoor animal. Everything was neat, but not obsessively so. The bushes around the house were trimmed and the yard was raked. I drove by a couple of times, and then I wondered what I was going to do. How would I find out what I wanted to know?

There was a pickup truck parked in the garage, so Savoy was probably at home. I took a deep breath, parked across from the house, and tried to send my extra ability hunting. But in a neighborhood full of the thoughts of the living people in these houses, it was hard. I thought I was getting two brain signatures from the house I was watching, but it was hard to be absolutely sure.

"Fuck it," I said, and got out of the car. I popped my keys in my jacket pocket and went up the sidewalk to the front door. I knocked.

"Hold on, son," said a man's voice inside, and I heard a child's voice say, "Daddy, me! I get it!"

"No, Hunter," the man said, and the door opened. He was looking at me through a screen door. He unhooked it and pushed it open when he saw I was a woman. "Hi," he said. "Can I help you?"

I looked down at the child who wiggled past him to look up at me. He was maybe four years old. He had dark hair and eyes. He was the spitting image of Hadley. Then I looked at the man again. Something in his face had changed during my protracted silence.

"Who are you?" he said in an entirely different voice.

"I'm Sookie Stackhouse," I said. I couldn't think of any artful way to do this. "I'm Hadley's cousin. I just found out where you were."

"You can't have any claim on him," said the man, keeping a very tight rein on his voice.

"Of course not," I said, surprised. "I just want to meet him. I don't have much family."

There was another significant pause. He was weighing my words and my demeanor and he was deciding whether to slam the door or let me in.

"Daddy, she's pretty," said the boy, and that seemed to tip the balance in my favor.

"Come on in," Hadley's ex-husband said.

I looked around the small living room, which had a couch and a recliner, a television and a bookcase full of DVDs and children's books, and a scattering of toys.

"I worked Saturday, so I have today off," he said, in case I imagined he was unemployed. "Oh, I'm Remy Savoy. I guess you knew that."

I nodded.

"This is Hunter," he said, and the child got a case of the shys. He hid behind his father's legs and peeked around at me. "Please sit down," Remy added.

I shoved a newspaper to one end of the couch and sat, trying not to stare at the man or the child. My cousin Hadley had been very striking, and she'd married a good-looking man. It was hard to peg down what left that impression. His nose was big, his jaw stuck out a little, and his eyes were a little wide-spaced. But the sum of all this was a man most women would look at twice. His hair was that medium shade between blond and brown, and it was thick and layered, the back hanging over his collar. He was wearing a flannel shirt unbuttoned over a white Hanes T-shirt. Jeans. No shoes. A dimple in his chin.

Hunter was wearing corduroy pants and a sweatshirt with a big football on the front. His clothes were brand-new, unlike his dad's.

I'd finished looking at them before Remy'd finished looking at me. He didn't think I had any trace of Hadley in my face. My body was plumper and my coloring was lighter and I wasn't as hard. He thought I looked like I didn't have a lot of money. He thought I was pretty, like his son did. But he didn't trust me.

"How long has it been since you heard from her?" I asked.

"I haven't heard from Hadley since a few months after he was born," Remy said. He was used to that, but there was sadness in his thoughts, too.

Hunter was sitting on the floor, playing with some trucks. He loaded some Duplos into the back of a dump truck, which backed up to a fire engine very slowly, guided by Hunter's small hands. To the astonishment of the Duplo man sitting in the cab of the fire engines, the dump truck let go of its load all over the fire engine. Hunter got a big kick out of this, and he said, "Daddy, look!"

"I see it, son." Remy looked at me intently. "Why are you here?" he asked, deciding to get right to the point.

"I only found out there might be a baby a couple of weeks ago," I said. "Wasn't any point in tracking you down until I heard that."

"I never met her family," he said. "How'd you know she was married? Did she tell you?" Then, reluctantly, he said, "Is she okay?"

"No," I said very quietly. I didn't want Hunter to become interested. The boy was loading all the Duplos back into the dump truck. "She's been dead since before Katrina."

I could hear the shock detonate like a little bomb in his head. "She was already a vamp, I heard," he said uncertainly, his voice wavering. "That kind of dead?"

"No. I mean really, finally."

"What happened?"

"She was attacked by another vampire," I said. "He was jealous of Hadley's relationship with her, ah, her..."