Шарлин Харрис - Dead to the World

"You draw from a power that most people never tap into. Being a witch isn't being wicked, or at least it isn't supposed to be. If you're a Wiccan, you follow a religion, a pagan religion. We follow the ways of the Mother, and we have our own calendar of holy days. You can be both a Wiccan and a witch; or more one, or more the other. It's very individualized. I practice a little witchcraft, but I'm more interested in the Wiccan life. We believe that your actions are okay if you don't hurt anyone else."

Oddly, my first feeling was one of embarrassment, when I heard Holly tell me that she was a non-Christian. I'd never met anyone who didn't at least pretend to be a Christian or who didn't give lip service to the basic Christian precepts. I was pretty sure there was a synagogue in Shreveport, but I'd never even met a Jew, to the best of my knowledge. I was certainly on a learning curve.

"I understand. Do you know lots of witches?"

"I know a few." Holly nodded repeatedly, still avoiding my eyes.

I spotted an old computer on the rickety table in the corner. "Do you have, like, a chat room online, or a bulletin board, or something?"

"Oh, sure."

"Have you heard of a group of witches that's come into Shreveport lately?"

Holly's face became very serious. Her straight dark brows drew together in a frown. "Tell me you're not involved with them," she said.

"Not directly. But I know someone they've hurt, and I'm afraid they might've taken Jason."

"Then he's in bad trouble," she said bluntly. "The woman who leads this group is out-and-out ruthless. Her brother is just as bad. That group, they're not like the rest of us. They're not trying to find a better way to live, or a path to get in touch with the natural world, or spells to increase their inner peace. They're Wiccans. They're evil."

"Can you give me any clues about where I might track them down?" I was doing my best to keep my face in line. I could hear with my other sense that Holly was thinking that if the newly arrived coven had Jason, he'd be hurt badly, if not killed.

Holly, apparently in deep thought, looked out the front window of her apartment. She was afraid that they'd trace any information she gave me back to her, punish her—maybe through Cody. These weren't witches who believed in doing harm to no one else. These were witches whose lives were planned around the gathering of power of all kinds.

"They're all women?" I asked, because I could tell she was on the verge of resolving to tell me nothing.

"If you're thinking Jason would be able to charm them with his ways because he's such a looker, you can think again," Holly told me, her face grim and somehow stripped down to basics. She wasn't trying for any effect; she wanted me to understand how dangerous these people were. "There are some men, too. They're . . . these aren't normal witches. I mean, they weren't even normal people. "

I was willing to believe that. I'd had to believe stranger things since the night Bill Compton had walked into Merlotte's Bar.

Holly spoke like she knew far more about this group of witches than I'd ever suspected . . . more than the general background I'd hoped to glean from her. I prodded her a little. "What makes them different?"

"They've had vampire blood." Holly glanced to the side, as if she felt someone listening to her. The motion creeped me out. "Witches—witches with a lot of power they're willing to use for evil—they're bad enough. Witches that strong who've also had vampire blood are . . . Sookie, you have no idea how dangerous they are. Some of them are Weres. Please, stay away from them."

Werewolves? They were not only witches, but Weres? And they drank vampire blood? I was seriously scared. I didn't know how could you get any worse. "Where are they?"

"Are you listening to me?"

"I am, but I have to know where they are!"

"They're in an old business not awful far from Pierre Bossier Mall," she said, and I could see the picture of it in her head. She'd been there. She'd seen them. She had this all in her head, and I was getting a lot of it.

"Why were you there?" I asked, and she flinched.

"I was worried about talking to you," Holly said, her voice angry. "I shouldn't have even let you in. But I'd dated Jason. . . . You're gonna get me killed, Sookie Stackhouse. Me and my boy."

"No, I won't."

"I was there because their leader sent out a call for all the witches in the area to have, like, a summit. It turned out that what she wanted to do was impose her will on all of us. Some of us were pretty impressed with her commitment and her power, but most of us smaller-town Wiccans, we didn't like her drug use—that's what drinking vampire blood amounts to—or her taste for the darker side of witchcraft. Now, that's all I want to say about it."

"Thanks, Holly." I tried to think of something I could tell her that would relieve her fear. But she wanted me to leave more than anything in the world, and I'd caused her enough upset. Holly's just letting me in the door had been a big concession, since she actually believed in my mind-reading ability. No matter what rumors they heard, people really wanted to believe that the contents of their heads were private, no matter what proof they had to the contrary.

I did myself.

I patted Holly on the shoulder as I left, but she didn't get up from the old couch. She stared at me with hopeless brown eyes, as if any moment someone was going to come in the door and cut off her head.

That look frightened me more than her words, more than her ideas, and I left the Kingfisher Arms as quickly as I could, trying to note the few people who saw me turn out of the parking lot. I didn't recognize any of them.

I wondered why the witches in Shreveport would want Jason, how they could have made a connection between the missing Eric and my brother. How could I approach them to find out? Would Pam and Chow help, or had they taken their own steps?

And whose blood had the witches been drinking?

Since vampires had made their presence known among us, nearly three years ago now, they'd become preyed upon in a new way. Instead of fearing getting staked through the heart by wanna-be Van Helsings, vampires dreaded modern entrepreneurs called Drainers. Drainers traveled in teams, singling out vampires by a variety of methods and binding them with silver chains (usually in a carefully planned ambush), then draining their blood into vials. Depending on the age of the vampire, a vial of blood could fetch from $200 to $400 on the black market. The effect of drinking this blood? Quite unpredictable, once the blood had left the vampire. I guess that was part of the attraction. Most commonly, for a few weeks, the drinker gained strength, visual acuity, a feeling of robust health, and enhanced attractiveness. It depended on the age of the drained vampire and the freshness of the blood.

Of course, those effects faded, unless you drank more blood.

A certain percentage of people who experienced drinking vampire blood could hardly wait to scratch up money for more. These blood junkies were extremely dangerous, of course. City police forces were glad to hire vampires to deal with them, since regular cops would simply get pulped.

Every now and then, a blood drinker simply went mad—sometimes in a quiet, gibbering kind of way, but sometimes spectacularly and murderously. There was no way to predict who would be stricken this way, and it could happen on the first drinking.

So there were men with glittering mad eyes in padded cells and there were electrifying movie stars who equally owed their condition to the Drainers. Draining was a hazardous job, of course. Sometimes the vampire got loose, with a very predictable result. A court in Florida had ruled this vampire retaliation justifiable homicide, in one celebrated case, because Drainers notoriously discarded their victims. They left a vampire, all but empty of blood, too weak to move, wherever the vamp happened to fall. The weakened vampire died when the sun came up, unless he had the good fortune to be discovered and helped to safety during the hours of darkness. It took years to recover from a draining, and that was years of help from other vamps. Bill had told me there were shelters for drained vamps, and that their location was kept very secret.