Dead Ever After

chapter 2

The night of my second day of solitude, I faced the fact that I had to go to see Eric. Sure, he really should have visited me. He’d been the one to skedaddle when I’d raised Sam from the dead, because (I figured) he was sure it meant I loved Sam more than I loved him. But I would go to Shreveport, and we would talk, because Eric’s silence was painful to me. I watched some of the fireworks go up in the city park—today was the Fourth of July—but then I went inside to dress. I was giving in to my impulse. I was going to Fangtasia.

I wanted to look as good as I could, but I didn’t want to overdo it. I didn’t know who I’d be seeing, though I wanted to talk to Eric by himself.

I hadn’t heard from any of the vampires I knew who frequented Fangtasia. I didn’t know if Felipe de Castro, King of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Nevada, was still in Shreveport, meddling in Eric’s affairs, making Eric’s life difficult. Felipe had brought his girlfriend, Angie, and his second-in-command, Horst, with him, just to compound Eric’s vexation. Felipe was treacherous and wily, and his little entourage was much of a kind with their leader.

I also didn’t know if Freyda, Queen of Oklahoma, was still in town. Eric’s maker, Appius Livius Ocella, had signed a contract with Freyda that (to my mind) basically sold Eric into slavery with Freyda, but in a really cushy way: as her consort, with all the benefits you might imagine would pertain to such a job. Only thing was, Appius hadn’t checked with Eric first. Eric was torn, to put it mildly. Leaving his job as sheriff was not something he’d ever planned to do. If ever there was a vampire who enjoyed being a big fish in a small pond, that vampire was Eric. He’d always been a hard worker, and he’d made plenty of money for the ruler of Louisiana, whoever that happened to be. Since the vampires had come out of the coffin, he’d done much more than make money. Tall, handsome, articulate, dynamic, Eric was a great poster boy for mainstreaming vampires. And he’d even married a human: me. Though not in a human ritual.

Of course, he had his darker side. He was a vampire, after all.

All the way to Shreveport from Bon Temps, I wondered for the fiftieth time if I was making a huge mistake. By the time I’d pulled up to the back door of Fangtasia, I was so tense I was shaking. I’d put on my favorite pink dotted sundress, and I yanked the halter into place and took a few deep breaths before I knocked. The door swung open. Pam was leaning against the wall in the hallway, her arms crossed on her chest, looking broody.

“Pam,” I said, by way of greeting.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

Granted, I knew that her first allegiance was to Eric, and it always would be. Nonetheless, I’d thought Pam liked me a bit, as much as she ever would a human, and her words smarted like a slap in the face. I didn’t need to hurt any worse than I already did, but I’d come here to see if I could smooth things over with Eric a little, tell him that he was wrong about Sam and me, find out what he’d decided about Freyda.

“I need to talk to Eric,” I said. I didn’t try to enter. I knew better.

At that moment, the door to Eric’s office flew open. He stood framed in the doorway. Eric was big and golden and all male, and normally when he saw me, he started smiling.

Not tonight.

“Sookie, I can’t talk to you now,” he said. “Horst will be here any second, and he doesn’t need to be reminded you exist. They’ve called in a lawyer to go over the contract.”

It was like he was talking to a stranger, and furthermore, a stranger who had very little business appearing on his doorstep. In fact, Eric seemed both angry and wounded.

I had a mouthful—and heart full—of things I wanted to say. More than almost anything else in the world, I wanted to put my arms around him and tell him how much he meant to me. But as I took a half step in his direction, Eric moved back and shut the office door.

I froze for a moment, trying to absorb the shock and hurt, and keep my face from crumpling. Pam glided toward me and put one hand on my shoulder to spin me around and guide me away from the door. After it clanged shut behind us, she said into my ear, “Don’t come here again. It’s too dangerous. There’s too much going on, too many visitors.” And then she raised her voice and said, “And don’t come back until he calls you!” She gave me a little shove that propelled me into the side of my car. And then she zipped back inside and closed the door with that quick vampiric movement that always seemed like magic, or a really good video game.

So I went home, brooding over Pam’s warning and Eric’s words and demeanor. I thought about crying but didn’t have the energy. I was too tired of being sad to make myself even sadder. Obviously, there was a lot of upheaval at Fangtasia and a lot of things hanging in the balance. There was nothing I could do about it except stay out of the way in the hope that I’d live through the change in regime, whatever that turned out to be. It was like waiting for the Titanic to sink.

Another morning went by, another day I passed holding my emotional breath, waiting for something to happen . . . something conclusive, or terrible.

I didn’t feel as though I were waiting for the other shoe to drop; I felt as though I were waiting for an anvil to fall on my head. If I hadn’t met with such a crushing reception when I went to Fangtasia, I might have tried to shake things up on my own, but I was discouraged, to put it in the mildest possible way. I took a very long, hot walk through the woods to put a basket of tomatoes on the Prescotts’ back porch. I mowed my meadowlike lawn. I found I always felt better when I was outside: more whole, somehow. (And that was good, because there was a shitload of yard work to do.) But I brought my cell phone with me every step I took.

I waited for Sam to call me. But he didn’t. Neither did Bernie.

I thought Bill might come over to let me know what was going on. He didn’t.

And so ended another day of noncommunication.

The next day, when I got up, I had a message of sorts from Eric. He had texted me—texted me!—and not even personally, but through Pam. She relayed a stiff message, informing me that he’d talk to me later in the week. I had cherished a hope that perhaps Pam herself would show up to bawl me out or to enlighten me about how Eric was faring . . . but no.

As I sat on the front porch with a glass of iced tea, I examined myself to see if my heart was broken. I was so emotionally exhausted, I couldn’t tell. As I saw it, maybe melodramatically, Eric and I were struggling with the chains of the love that had bound us together, and it didn’t seem we could either break free of those chains or resume them.

I had a dozen questions and conjectures, and I dreaded the answers to all of them. Finally, I got out the weed whacker, my least favorite yard tool.

My gran used to say, “You pays your money, and you takes your choice.” I didn’t know where the saying had originated, but now I understood what it meant.

“Of course,” I said out loud, because the radio was playing and I couldn’t hear myself think over it, “if you make a decision, you have to abide by the consequences.” I hadn’t even made a conscious decision to use the cluviel dor to save Sam; I’d acted instinctively when I saw him die.

Finally, I’d reached my saturation limit on this retroactive second-guessing. I threw down the weed whacker and screamed out loud. Screw all this brooding.

I was sick of thinking about it.

So I was delighted, after I’d put away all the yard tools and showered, to hear a car crunching up my gravel driveway. I recognized Tara’s minivan. As she drove past the kitchen window, I peered out to see if the twins were strapped into their car seats, but the windows were tinted too dark. (Seeing Tara in a minivan was still a shock, but during Tara’s pregnancy she and JB had vowed to be model parents, and part of that picture was a minivan.) Tara’s shoulders were rigid as she walked to the door, but at least she was coming to the back door as friends should. She didn’t fool with knocking. She opened the back door onto the laundry room/porch and yelled, “Sookie! You better be here! Are you decent?”

“I’m here,” I said, turning to face her as she came into the kitchen. Tara was wearing some stretchy brown pants and a loose white blouse, her dark hair in a braid down her back. Her makeup was minimal. She was lovely as always, yet I couldn’t help but notice she’d let her eyebrows stray all over. Motherhood could sure wreak havoc on a woman’s grooming. Of course, having two at one time would make “me time” extra hard to come by. “Where are the babies?” I asked.

“JB’s mom’s got ’em,” she said. “She was drooling at the chance to keep ’em for a few hours.”

“So . . . ?”

“How come you’re not going to work? How come you’re not answering your e-mail or picking up your mail at the end of the driveway?” She tossed a bundle of envelopes of all sizes and a magazine or two onto the kitchen table. She glared at me as she continued, “You know how nervous that makes people? People like me?”

I was a little embarrassed at the chunk of truth in her accusation that I’d been selfish in staying out of touch while I’d been trying to understand myself and figure out my life and my future. “Excuse me,” I said sharply. “I did call in sick to work, and I’m surprised you want to risk taking my germs back to the babies!”

“You look fine to me,” she said, without a speck of sympathy. “What happened to you and Sam?”

“He’s all right, isn’t he?” My anger faltered and disappeared.

“He’s had Kennedy working in his place for days. He talks to her by phone. He doesn’t come over to the bar.” She was still glaring at me, but her stance was softening. I could tell from her thoughts that she was genuinely concerned. “Kennedy’s real happy to do extra bartending, since she and Danny are saving up to rent a house together. But that business can’t run itself, Sookie, and Sam hasn’t missed four days at the bar, if he was in Bon Temps, since he bought the place.”

That last part was mostly a muted blahblahblah. Sam was all right.

I sat in one of the kitchen chairs a little too hastily.

“Okay, tell me what happened,” Tara said, and sat opposite me. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. But I guess now you better tell me.”

I did want to talk to someone about what had happened at Alcide Herveaux’s country place. But I couldn’t tell Tara the whole story: the captive rogue Weres, Jannalynn’s betrayal of her pack and her leader, the horrible things she’d done. I couldn’t imagine how Sam was feeling. Not only had he learned the true nature of his girlfriend—though evidence suggested that he’d always suspected Jannalynn was playing a deeper game—but he had to absorb her death, which had been truly gruesome. Jannalynn had been trying to kill Alcide, her packleader, but she’d given Sam a mortal wound instead. Then Mustapha Khan had executed her.

I opened my mouth to try to begin the story, and found I didn’t know where to start. I looked at my friends-since-childhood buddy helplessly. She waited, with a look that said she intended to sit right there in my kitchen until I answered her. Finally, I said, “The gist of it is that Jannalynn is now completely and permanently out of the picture, and I saved Sam’s life. Eric feels that I should have done something for him, instead. Something significant, that I was aware of.” I left off the punch line.

“So Jannalynn hasn’t gone to Alaska to visit her cousin.” Tara was compressing her lips to keep from looking as freaked as she felt. But there was a hint of triumph, too. She was thinking she had known something was fishy about that story.

“Not unless Alaska has gotten a lot hotter.”

Tara giggled; but then, she hadn’t been there. “She did something that bad? I read in the paper that someone had confessed over the telephone to the officer in charge of Kym Rowe’s murder and then vanished. Would that be Jannalynn, by any chance?”

I nodded. Tara didn’t seem shocked. Tara knew all about people who did bad things. Two of them had been her parents.

“So you haven’t talked to Sam since then,” she said.

“Not since the next morning.” I hoped Tara would say she’d seen him, talked to him, but instead she moved on to a topic she considered more interesting.

“What about the Viking? Why is he pissed? His life didn’t need saving. He’s already dead.”

I held my hands palms up and open, trying to think how to phrase it. Well, I might as well be honest, if not graphic. “It’s like . . . I had a magic wish. I could have used it for Eric’s benefit, to get him out of a bad situation. And it would have changed his future. But instead, I used it to save Sam.” And then I’d waited for the repercussions. Because using strong magic always had consequences.

Tara, who had had bad experiences with vampires, smiled broadly. Though Eric had saved her life once upon a time, she included him in her generic dislike of the undead. “Did a genie grant you three wishes or something?” she said, trying to keep the pleasure out of her voice.

Actually, though she was joking, that was almost the truth. Substitute “fairy” for “genie” and “one wish” for “three wishes,” and you’d have the story in a nutshell. Or in a cluviel dor.

“Kind of like that,” I said. “Eric does have a lot on his plate right now. Stuff that will completely transform his life.” Though what I said was absolutely true, it came out sounding like a weak excuse. Tara tried not to sneer.

“Has anyone from his posse called you? What about Pam?” Tara was thinking I had reason to worry if the area vampires had decided I was nothing to them. And she was right to be concerned. “Just because you break up with the big guy doesn’t mean they hate you, right?” She was thinking they probably did.

“I don’t think we’ve exactly broken up,” I said. “But he’s pissed off. Pam passed along a message from him. A text message.”

“Better than a Post-it note. Who have you heard from?” Tara asked impatiently. “All this weird shit has happened, and no one’s calling you to talk about it? Sam’s not over here scrubbing your floors and kissing your feet? This house should be full of flowers, candy, and male strippers.”

“Ah,” I said intelligently. “Well, the yard’s strangely full of flowers. And tomatoes.”

“I spit on the supes who’ve let you down,” Tara said, fortunately not suiting action to words. “Listen, Sook, stick with your human buds and leave the others by the side of the road.” She meant it all the way down to her bones.

“Too late for that,” I said. I smiled, but it didn’t feel as though it fit my face right.

“Then come shopping. I need some new bras, since I’m Elsie the Cow these days. I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up.”

Tara, breastfeeding twins, was notably more bosomy. Maybe more than a bit curvier, too. But I was hardly one to point fingers, and I welcomed the change of focus in our conversation. “How are the kids doing?” I said, smiling more genuinely. “I’m gonna have to babysit them some night so you and JB can go to the movies. How long has it been since you went out together?”

“Since six weeks before I was due,” she said. “Mama du Rone has kept them twice during the day so I could go to the store, but she doesn’t want to keep ’em at night when Papa du Rone is home. If I can pump enough milk to get ahead of the little monsters, JB would take me to the Outback. We could eat steak.” There was an avid look to her mouth. Tara had been craving red meat ever since she’d started nursing. “Besides, since Hooligans closed, JB doesn’t have to work at night anymore.”

JB had been employed at Hooligans as well as at a health club, where he was a trainer. At Hooligans, he’d been doing the (nearly) full monty on ladies’ night to raise extra money for the twins’ birth. I hadn’t spared a moment to think about the fate of the building and business since the owner, my cousin Claude, had vanished from the human world. That was definitely something to worry about when I ran out of other, more important stuff.

“Just let me know next time you’re in a steak mood,” I assured Tara, pleased at the prospect of doing her a good turn. “Where were you thinking of shopping today?” Suddenly, I was anxious to get out of the house.

“Let’s go to Shreveport. I like the maternity and baby shop there, and I want to drop by that consignment shop on Youree, too.”

“Sure. Let me put on some makeup.” In fifteen minutes I was dressed in clean white shorts and a sky blue T-shirt, my hair in a neat ponytail and my skin thoroughly moisturized. I felt more like myself than I had in several days.

Tara and I talked all the way over to Shreveport. Mostly about the babies, of course, because what’s more important than babies? But included in the conversation were Tara’s mother-in-law (a great woman); Tara’s shop (not faring too well this summer); Tara’s assistant, McKenna (whom Tara was trying to fix up with a friend of JB’s); and other items of interest in the Taraverse.

On this very hot summer day in July, it felt comfortingly normal to be having this gossip session while we took a gal-pal road trip.

Though Tara owned and operated an upscale boutique, it didn’t carry specialty clothes like maternity and new-mom wear. She said, “I want me some breastfeeding bras and a breastfeeding nightgown from Moms ’N More, and at the consignment place I want to pick up a couple of pairs of shorts, since I can’t get my fat baby ass into my pre-baby shorts. You need anything, Sookie?”

“I do have to get a dress for Jason and Michele’s wedding,” I said.

“Are you in it? They set a date yet?”

“I’m the only attendant as of now. They narrowed it to a couple of dates, but they’re waiting to pick one after they hear from Michele’s sister. She’s in the army, and she may or may not be able to get leave on those dates.” I laughed. “I’m sure Michele will ask her, too, but I’m a sure thing.”

“What color you need to wear?”

“Any color I like. She says she doesn’t look good in white, and besides, she went that route for her first wedding. Jason’s wearing a tan suit, and Michele’s wearing chocolate brown. It’s a cocktail dress, and she says it looks great on her.”

Tara looked skeptical. “Chocolate brown?” she said. (Tara did not think that was suitable for a wedding.) “You should look today,” she continued more cheerfully. “Of course, you’re welcome to look at my shop, but if you see something today at the consignment shop, that would be perfect. You’re only going to wear it once, right?”

Tara carried pretty clothes, but they were expensive, and her selection was limited by the size of the shop. Her suggestion was really practical.

We stopped at Moms ’N More first. The maternity and new-mom shop held little interest for me. I’d been dating vampires for so long that pregnancy was not something I thought about, at least not very often. While Tara talked lactation with the saleswomen, I looked at the diaper bags and the adorable baby items. New mothers were certainly beasts of burden. Hard to believe that once upon a time, babies had been raised without diaper bags, breast pumps, special trash cans for disposable diapers, plastic keys, walkers, premade baby food, plastic pads for changing, special detergent to wash baby clothes . . . and on and on and on. I touched a tiny green-and-white-striped sleeper with a lamb on the chest. Something deep inside me shivered with longing.

I was glad when Tara completed her purchase and we left the store.

The consignment shop was only a mile away. Since “fancy used clothes” didn’t sound very enticing, the owners had gone for Second Time’s the Charm. Tara seemed slightly embarrassed at visiting a used-clothing store, no matter how upscale it looked.

“I have to look nice since I’ve got a clothing store,” she told me. “But I don’t want to spend a lot on bigger pants, since I hope I won’t be wearing a size up for long.” Tara was actually two sizes up, her head told me.

This is one of the things I hate about being telepathic.

“Only makes sense,” I said soothingly. “And maybe I’ll see something for the wedding.” It seemed highly unlikely that the original owner of the dress would turn up at Jason’s wedding, and that was my only qualm about purchasing a garment someone else had worn a time or two.

Tara knew the owner, a bony redhead, whose name appeared to be Allison. After a hug of greeting, Tara hauled out pictures of the twins . . . maybe a hundred pictures. I was completely unsurprised.

I’d seen the real thing, so I wandered away to check out the “better” dresses. I found my size and began to slide the hangers along the rack one by one, taking my time about it. I was more relaxed than I had been in a week.

I was glad Tara had winkled me out of the house. There was something wonderfully normal and reassuring about our shopping expedition. The air-conditioned shop was peaceful, since the music was turned down very, very low. The prices were higher than I’d expected, but when I read the labels, I understood why. Everything here was good quality.

I scooted aside a hanger holding a terrible purple-and-green garment, and I came to a complete stop, enraptured. The next dress was a rich yellow. It was sleeveless, lined, and scoop-necked, with a large, flat bow curving around the middle of the back. It was beautiful.

“I love this dress,” I said out loud, feeling profoundly happy. This was shallow, all right? I knew that. But I’ll take joy where I find it.

“I’m going to try this on,” I called, holding it up. The owner, deep in Tara’s delivery story, didn’t even turn around. She raised her hand and waved it in acknowledgment. “Rosanne will be right with you,” she called.

The dress and I went past the curtain into the changing area. There were four cubicles, and since no one else had entered the store, I wasn’t surprised to find them all empty. I wriggled out of my shorts and my T-shirt in record time. Holding my breath with suspense, I slid the dress off its hanger and over my head. It settled on my hips like it was happy to be there. I reached behind me to zip it up. I got the zipper halfway to its destination, but my arms can only bend so far. I stepped out to see if I could detach Tara from her fascinating conversation. A young woman, presumably Rosanne, was standing right outside, waiting for me to emerge. When I saw her, I felt a faint buzz of familiarity. Rosanne was in her late teens, a sturdy kid with her brown hair braided and rolled in a bun. She was wearing a neat pants outfit in French blue and cream. Surely I’d seen her before?

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t on the floor to help you!” she said. “What can I do for you? You need help with that zipper?” She’d started speaking almost as soon as I’d emerged from the curtain, and it wasn’t until she finished that she took a good look at my face.

“Oh, shit!” Rosanne said, so sharply that the shop owner turned around to look.

I gave the elegant Allison an “everything’s all right here” smile, hoping I wasn’t lying.

“What’s the matter with you?” I whispered to Rosanne. I looked down at myself, searching for something that would explain her alarm. Had I started my period? What? When I didn’t see anything alarming, I looked up at her anxiously, waiting for her to tell me why she was so agitated.

“It’s you,” she breathed. “You’re the one.”

“I’m the one what?”

“The one who has such big magic. The one who raised that twoey from the dead.”

“Oh.” Revelation. “You’re in the Long Tooth pack, I guess? I thought I’d seen you somewhere before.”

“I was there,” she said, with an unblinking, unnerving intensity. “At Alcide’s farm.”

“That was kind of awful, huh?” I said. And it was the last thing I wanted to talk about. Back to the matter at hand. I smiled at Rosanne the werewolf. “Hey, can you zip me up?” I turned my back to her, not without trepidation. In the full-length mirror, I saw her looking at me. It didn’t take a telepath to interpret that expression. She was afraid to touch me.

The remnants of my good mood crashed and burned.

When I’d been a child, some people had regarded me with a blend of unease and disgust. Telepathic children can say the worst things at the worst times, and no one likes them for it or forgets that they blurted out something private and secret. Telepathy in a child is nothing short of terrible. Even I, the actual telepath, had felt that way. Some people had been absolutely frightened by my ability, which I hadn’t had the skill to conceal. After I’d gained some control over what I said when I “overheard” something startling or awful from the thoughts of a neighbor, I’d seldom seen that expression. I’d forgotten how painful it could be.

“You’re scared of me,” I said, stating the obvious because I simply couldn’t think of what else to do. “But you have nothing to fear from me. You’re the one with claws and fangs.”

“Hush, Allison’ll hear you,” she whispered.

“You’re still in the closet?”

“Here at work I am,” she said, her voice deeper and rougher. At least she didn’t look frightened any longer, which had been my goal. “You know how hard it is for two-natured girls, when they start changing? Harder than it is for the boys. One in twenty of us ends up a permanent psycho bitch. But if you can get through your teens, you’re pretty nearly home free, and I’m almost there. Allison is nice, and this is a low-stress place. I’ve worked here every summer. I want to keep this job.” She looked at me pleadingly.

“Then zip me up, okay? I have no intention of talking about you. I just need a frickin’ dress,” I told her, really exasperated. I wasn’t unsympathetic, but I truly felt I had enough problems at the moment.

She hesitantly reached up with her left hand to grip the top of the dress, held the zipper with her right, and in a second I was enclosed properly. The bow covered the zipper and was held in place by snaps. Since summer is prime tanning time, I was a lovely brown, and the deep yellow looked . . . wonderful. The dress wasn’t cut too low at the top, and it was just high enough at the hem. A little dab of my previous good mood returned.

While I hadn’t enjoyed Rosanne’s assumption that I’d “out” her simply for my own pleasure, I could understand her worries. Sort of. I’d met two or three women who hadn’t made it through their supe adolescence with their personality intact; this condition was something to fear, all right. With an effort, I shoved the whole exchange away. When I could focus on my image in the mirror, I felt a flutter of sheer gratification. “Wow, it’s so pretty,” I said. I smiled at her reflection, inviting her to lighten up with me.

But Rosanne was silent, her face still unhappy. She was not going along with my “we’re all happy girls” program. “You did do that, right?” she said. “Bring the shifter back from the dead.”

I could see I wasn’t going to get to enjoy the thrill of shopping victory. “It was a one-time-only event,” I said, my smile vanishing. “I can’t do it again. I don’t even want to do it again.” I realized I might not have used the cluviel dor if I’d had time to think about it. I might have doubted it would work, and that doubt would have weakened my will. My witch friend Amelia had told me once that magic was all about will.

I’d had plenty of will when I’d felt Sam’s heart quit beating.

“Is Alcide doing all right?” I asked, making another effort to shift the topic.

“The packmaster is well,” she said formally. Though she was a Were, I could see into her mind clearly enough to tell that though she’d overcome her initial fear, she had deep reservations about me. I wondered if the whole pack now shared that distrust. Did Alcide believe I was some kind of super witch?

Nothing could be further from the truth. I’d never been super anything.

“Glad to hear he’s okay. I’ll take the dress,” I said. At least, I figured, I can salvage something from this encounter. When I went to the checkout counter, I saw that while Rosanne and I had had our uncomfortable heart-to-heart, Tara had found a couple of pairs of shorts and a pair of jeans, very good labels. She seemed pleased, and Allison did, too—because she wouldn’t have to look at any more baby pictures.

As I left the shop, the dress in a bag over my arm, I looked back to see the young Were watching me through the front window, a mixture of respect and fear on her face.

I’d been so absorbed in my own reaction to what I’d done to Sam—for Sam—that I’d never worried about how other witnesses might react.

“So what was with you and that girl?” Tara said abruptly.

“What? Nothing.”

Tara gave me a massively skeptical look. I was going to have to explain. “She’s a Were from Alcide’s pack, but she’s keeping her second nature a secret from her employer,” I said. “You don’t feel obliged to tell Allison, I hope?”

“No, who Allison hires is up to her.” Tara shrugged. “Rosanne’s been there since she was a kid, coming in after school. As long as she does the work, what difference does it make?”

“Good. We’ll keep it under our hats, then.”

“Rosanne didn’t look happy with you,” Tara said, after a long moment.

“No . . . no, she wasn’t. She thinks . . . I’m a witch, a really terrible witch. Terrible in the sense of being very powerful and scary.”

Tara snorted. “I can tell she doesn’t know you worth a damn.”

I smiled, but it was a weak effort. “I hope it’s not a widespread opinion.”

“I would have thought they could smell if you were bad or not.”

I tried to look indifferent. “They should know better, but since they don’t, I’m just going to have to weather it out.”

“Sook, don’t you worry. If you need us, you call JB and me. We’ll strap those babies into their car seats, and we’ll be right over. I know I’ve failed you some . . . disappointed you some . . . in the past couple of years. But I swear I’ll help you, no matter what.”

I was taken aback by her vehemence. I looked sharply at my friend. There were tears in her eyes, even while she pulled out into traffic and turned the car back toward Bon Temps.

“Tara? What’re you talking about?”

“I did fail you,” she said, her face grim. “In so many ways. And I failed myself. I made some really dumb decisions. I was trying so hard to escape the way I was brought up. For a couple of years, I would have done anything to make sure I never had to live like I had at my folks’ house again. So I looked for protection, and you know how that turned out. When that was over, I hated vampires so much I couldn’t listen to your problems. I’ve grown up now, though.” She gave a sharp and decisive nod, as though in her opinion she’d taken the final step in spiritual growth.

This was the last thing in the world I’d expected: a declaration of reconciliation by my oldest friend. I started to deny every negative thing she’d said about herself. But she’d been so honest that I had to be honest in return—at least, in a tactful kind of way. “Tara, we’ve always been friends. We’ll always be friends,” I said. “If you’ve made mistakes, I have, too. We just got to do the best we can. We’re coming out the other side of a lot of trouble, both of us.” Maybe.

She pulled a Kleenex out of her purse and blotted her face with one hand. “I know we’ll be okay,” she said. “I know it.”

I wasn’t convinced of that, at least about my own future, but I wasn’t going to ruin Tara’s moment. “Sure we will,” I said. I patted her hand on the steering wheel.

For a few miles we drove in silence. I looked out the window at the fields and ditches, choked with growth, the heat hovering over them like a giant blanket. If weeds could flourish with such vigor, maybe I could, too.