Шарлин Харрис - Definitely Dead

Well… eff.

I was around the corner of the house and up the steps to the little deck faster than you could say Jack Robinson. I yanked open the screen door and pushed in the wooden door, and I leaped into the kitchen with the stun gun on. The small guy was still patting at his face with a towel while I zapped him, and he went down like a sack of bricks. Wow!

But the stun gun had to recharge, I discovered, when Sandra Pelt, who'd had the advantage of already being on her feet, charged into the kitchen, teeth bared. The stun gun didn't do a damn thing to her, and she was on me like an—well, like an enraged wolf.

However, she was still in the form of a girl, and I was desperate and desperately angry.

I've seen at least two dozen bar fights, ranging from halfhearted punches to rolling-on-the-ground biting, and I know how to fight. Right now I was willing to do whatever it took. Sandra was mean, but she was lighter and less experienced, and after some wrestling and punching and hair pulling that went by in a flash, I was on top of her and had her pinned to the floor. She snarled and snapped but she couldn't reach my neck, and I was prepared to head-butt her if I had to.

A voice in the background bellowed, "Let me in!" and I assumed it was Quinn behind some door. "Come on now!" I yelled in answer. "I need help!"

She was squirming underneath me, and I dared not let go to shift my grip. "Listen, Sandra," I panted, "hold still, dammit!"

"Fuck you," she said bitterly, and her efforts redoubled.

"This is actually kind of exciting," a familiar voice said, and I glanced up to see Eric looking down at us with wide blue eyes. He looked immaculate: neat as a pin in blue jeans that had a crease and a starched blue-and-white striped dress shirt. His blond hair was shining clean and (here was the most enviable part) dry. I hated his guts. I felt nasty to the nth degree.

"I could use some help here," I snapped, and he said, "Of course, Sookie, though I'm enjoying the wiggling around. Let go of the girl and stand up."

"Only if you're ready for action," I said, my breathing ragged with the effort of holding Sandra down.

"I'm always ready for action," Eric said, with a glowing smile. "Sandra, look at me."

She was too smart for that. Sandra squeezed her eyes shut and fought even harder. In a second, she freed one of her arms and swung it back to get momentum for her punch. But Eric dropped to his knees and caught the hand before it could fly at my head.

"That's enough," he said in an entirely different tone, and her eyes flew open in surprise. Though he still couldn't catch her with his eyes, I figured he had charge of her now. I rolled off the Were to lie on my back in what remained of the floor in the tiny kitchen. Mr. Small and Dark (and Burned and Stunned), who I figured owned this house, was crumpled by the table.

Eric, who was having almost as much trouble with Sandra as I'd had, took up a lot more of the available space. Exasperated with the Were, he adopted a simple solution. He squeezed the fist he'd caught, and she screamed. And shut up—and quit struggling.

"That's just not fair," I said, fighting a wave of weariness and pain.

"All's fair," he said quietly.

I didn't like the sound of that. "What are you talking about?" I asked. He shook his head. I tried again. "Where's Quinn?"

"The tiger has taken care of your two abductors," Eric said, with an unpleasant smile. "Would you like to go see?"

"Not particularly," I said, and closed my eyes again. "I guess they're dead?"

"I'm sure they wish they were," Eric said. "What did you do to the little man on the floor?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," I said.

"Try me."

"I scared him so bad he spilled hot coffee on himself. Then I hit him with a stun gun that I got out of the van."

"Oh." There was a kind of breathy sound, and I opened my eyes to see that Eric was laughing silently.

"The Pelts?" I asked.

"Rasul has them covered," Eric said. "You have another fan, it seems."

"Oh, it's because of the fairy blood," I said irritably. "You know, it's not fair. Human guys don't like me. I know about two hundred of 'em who wouldn't want to date me if I came with a Chevy truck. But because supes are attracted to the fairy smell, I get accused of being a guy magnet. How wrong is that?"

"You have fairy blood," Eric said, as if his own lightbulb had just lit up. "That explains a lot."

That hurt my feelings. "Oh no, you couldn't just like me," I said, tired and hurting beyond coherence. "Oh no, gosh, there has to be a reason . And it's not gonna be my sparkling personality, oh no! It's gonna be my blood, because it's special . Not me, I'm not special…"

And I would have gone on and on, if Quinn hadn't said, "I don't give a damn about fairies, myself." Any available room left in the kitchen vanished.

I scrambled to my feet. "You okay?" I asked in a wobbly voice.

"Yes," he said, in his deepest rumble. He was altogether human again, and altogether naked. I would've hugged him, but I felt a little embarrassed about embracing him in the altogether, in front of Eric.

"I left your clothes out there in the woods," I said. "I'll go get 'em."

"I can."

"No, I know where they are, and I couldn't get any wetter." Besides, I'm not sophisticated enough to be comfortable in a room with a naked guy, an unconscious guy, a real horrible girl, and another guy who's been my lover.

"Fuck you, bitch," the charming Sandra called after me, and shrieked again, as Eric made it clear he didn't care for name calling.

"Right back at you," I muttered, and trudged out into the rain.

Oh, yes, it was still raining.

I was still brooding over the fairy-blood thing as I scooped up the bundle of Quinn's sodden clothes. It would be easy to slide into a depressed trough if I thought the only reason anybody ever liked me was because I had fairy blood. Of course, there was always the odd vampire who had been ordered to seduce me… I was sure the fairy blood had just been a bonus, in that case… no, no, no, wasn't going there .

If I looked at it in a reasonable way, the blood was just as much a part of me as my eye color or the thickness of my hair. It hadn't done a thing for my half-fairy grandmother, assuming the gene had come to me through her and not one of my other grandparents. She'd married a human man who hadn't treated her any differently than he would have if her blood had been plain old grade A human. And she'd been killed by a human who hadn't known anything about her blood other than the color of it. Following the same assumption, fairy blood hadn't made a bit of difference to my father. He'd never in his life encountered a vampire who might be interested in him because of it—or if he had, he'd kept it mighty close. That didn't seem likely. And the fairy blood hadn't saved my father from the flash flood that had washed my parents' truck off the bridge and into the swollen stream. If the blood had come to me through my mother, well, she'd died in the truck, too. And Linda, my mother's sister, had died of cancer in her midforties, no matter what kind of heritage she had.

I didn't believe this wonderful fairy blood had done all that much for me, either. Maybe a few vampires had been a little more interested in me and friendly to me than they would have been otherwise, but I couldn't say that had been much of an advantage.

In fact, many people would say the vampire attention had been a big negative factor in my life. I might be one of those people. Especially since I was standing out here in the pouring rain holding someone else's wet clothes and wondering what the hell to do with them.

Having come full circle, I slogged back to the house. I could hear a lot of moaning coming from the front yard: Clete and George, presumably. I should have gone to check, but I couldn't muster up the energy.