Dead and Gone (Sookie Stackhouse #9) - Page 18
I wasn't in a hospital.
But I was in a bed, not my own. And I was a little cleaner than I had been, and bandaged, and in a lot of pain; in fact, a dreadful amount of pain. The part where I was cleaner and bandaged – oh, a wholly desirable state. The other part, the pain – well, that was expected, understandable, and finite. At least no one was trying to hurt me any worse than I'd already been hurt. So I decided I was excellent.
I had a few holes in my memory. I couldn't remember what had happened between being in the decrepit shack and being here; I could recall flashes of action, the sound of voices, but I had no coherent narrative to connect them. I remembered One's head becoming detached, and I knew someone had bitten Two. I hoped she was as dead as One. But I wasn't sure. Had I really seen Bill? What about the shadow behind him?
I heard a click, click, click . I turned my head very slightly. Claudine, my fairy godmother, was sitting by the bed, knitting.
The sight of Claudine knitting was just as surrealistic as the sight of Bill appearing in the cave. I decided to go back to sleep – a cowardly retreat, but I thought I was entitled.
"She's going to be all right," Dr. Ludwig said. Her head came up past the side of my bed, which told me for sure that I wasn't in a modern hospital bed.
Dr. Ludwig takes care of the cases who can't go to the regular human hospital because the staff would flee screaming at the sight of them or the lab wouldn't be able to analyze their blood. I could see Dr. Ludwig's coarse brown hair as she walked around the bed to the door. Dr. Ludwig had a deep voice. I suspected she was a hobbit – not really, but she sure did look like one. Though she wore shoes, right? I spent some moments trying to remember if I'd ever caught a glimpse of Dr. Ludwig's feet.
"Sookie," she said, her eyes appearing at my elbow. "Is the medicine working?"
I didn't know if this was a second visit of hers, or if I'd blanked out for a few moments. "I'm not hurting as much," I said, and my voice was very rough and whispery. "I'm starting to feel a little numb. That's just … excellent."
She nodded. "Yes," she said. "Considering you're human, you're very lucky."
Funny. I felt better than when I'd been in the shack, but I couldn't say I felt lucky. I tried to scrape together some appreciation of my good fortune. There wasn't any there to gather up. I was all out. My emotions were as crippled as my body.
"No," I said. I tried to shake my head, but even the pain-killers couldn't disguise the fact that my neck was too sore to twist. They'd choked me repeatedly.
"You're not dead," Dr. Ludwig pointed out.
But I'd come pretty damn close; I'd sort of stepped over the line. There'd been an optimum rescue time. If I'd been liberated before that time, I would have laughed all the way to the secret supernatural clinic, or wherever I was. But I'd looked at death too closely – close enough to see all the pores in Death's face – and I'd suffered too much. I wouldn't bounce back this time.
My emotional and physical state had been sliced and gouged and pinched and bitten to a rough, raw surface. I didn't know if I could spackle myself back into my pre-kidnap smoothness. I said this, in much simpler words, to Dr. Ludwig.
"They're dead, if that helps," she said.
Yes indeedy, that helped quite a bit. I'd been hoping I hadn't imagined that part; I'd been a little afraid their deaths had been a delightful fantasy.
"Your great-grandfather beheaded Lochlan," she said. So he'd been One. "And the vampire Bill Compton tore the throat out of Lochlan's sister, Neave." She'd been Two.
"Where's Niall now?" I said.
"Waging war," she said grimly. "There's no more negotiation, no more jockeying for advantage. There's only killing now."
"Bill?"
"He was badly hurt," the little doctor said. "She got him with her blade before she bled to death. And she bit him back. There was silver in her knife and silver caps on her teeth. It's in his system."
"He'll get better," I said.
She shrugged.
I thought my heart was going to plunge down out of my chest, through the bed. I could not look this misery in the face.
I struggled to think of something besides Bill. "And Tray? He's here?"
She regarded me silently for a moment. "Yes," she said finally.
"I need to see him. And Bill."
"No. You can't move. Bill's in his daytime sleep for now. Eric is coming tonight, actually in a couple of hours, and he'll bring at least one other vampire with him. That'll help. The Were is too badly wounded for you to disturb."
I didn't absorb that. My mind was racing ahead. It was a mighty slow race, but I was thinking a little more clearly. "Has someone told Sam, do you know?" How long had I been out? How much work had I missed?
Dr. Ludwig shrugged. "I don't know. I imagine so. He seems to hear everything."
"Good." I tried to shift positions, gasped. "I'm going to have to get up to use the bathroom," I warned her.
"Claudine," Dr. Ludwig said, and my cousin put away her knitting and rose from the rocking chair. For the first time, I registered that my beautiful fairy godmother looked like someone had tried to push her through a wood chipper. Her arms were bare and covered with scratches, scrapes, and cuts. Her face was a mess. She smiled at me, but it was painful.
When she lifted me in her arms, I could feel her effort. Normally Claudine could heft a large calf without any trouble if she chose to.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I can walk. I'm sure."
"Don't think of it," Claudine said. "See, we're already there."
When our mission was accomplished, she scooped me up and took me back to bed.
"What happened to you?" I asked her. Dr. Ludwig had departed without another word.
"I got ambushed," she said in her sweet voice. "Some stupid brownies and one fairy. Lee, his name was."
"I guess they were allied with this Breandan?"
She nodded, fished out her bundle of knitting. The item she was working on appeared to be a tiny sweater. I wondered if it was for an elf. "They were," she said. "They are bits of bone and flesh now." She sounded quite pleased.
Claudine would never become an angel at this rate. I wasn't quite sure how the progression worked, but reducing other beings to their component parts was probably not the route of choice. "Good," I said. The more of Breandan's followers who met their match, the better. "Have you seen Bill?"
"No," Claudine said, clearly not interested.
"Where is Claude?" I asked. "Is he safe?"
"He's with Grandfather," she said, and for the first time, she looked worried. "They're trying to find Breandan. Grandfather figures that if he takes out the source, Breandan's followers will have no choice but to stop the war and pledge an oath to him."
"Oh," I said. "And you didn't go, because … ?"
"I'm guarding you," she said simply. "And lest you think I chose the path of least danger, I'm sure Breandan is trying to find this place. He must be very angry. He's had to enter the human world, which he hates so much, now that his pet killers are dead. He loved Neave and Lochlan. They were with him for centuries, and both his lovers."
"Yuck," I said from the heart, or maybe from the pit of my stomach. "Oh, yuck ." I couldn't even think about what kind of "love" they would make. What I'd seen hadn't looked like love. "And I would never accuse you of taking the path of least danger," I said after I'd gotten over being nauseated. "This whole world is dangerous." Claudine gave me a sharp look. "What kind of name is Breandan?" I asked after a moment of watching her knitting needles flash with great speed and panache. I wasn't sure how the fuzzy green sweater would turn out, but the effect was good.
"Irish," she said. "All the oldest ones in this part of the world are Irish. Claude and I used to have Irish names. It seemed stupid to me. Why shouldn't we please ourselves? No one can spell those names or pronounce them correctly. My former name sounds like a cat coughing up a fur ball."
We sat in silence for a few minutes.
"Who's the little sweater for? Are you going to have a bundle of joy?" I asked in my wheezy, whispery new voice. I was trying to sound teasing, but instead, I just sounded creepy.
"Yes," she said, raising her head to look at me. Her eyes were glowing. "I'm going to have a baby. A pure fairy child."
I was startled, but I tried to cover that with the biggest smile I could paste on my face. "Oh. That's great!" I said. I wondered if it would be tacky to inquire as to the identity of the father. Probably.
"Yes," she said seriously. "It's wonderful. We're not really a very fertile race, and the huge amount of iron in the world has reduced our birthrate. Our numbers decline every century. I am very lucky. It's one of the reasons I never take humans to bed, though from time to time I would love to; they are so delicious, some of them. But I'd hate to waste a fertile cycle on a human."
I'd always assumed it was her desired ascension to angel status that had kept Claudine from bedding any of her numerous admirers. "So, the dad's a fairy," I said, kind of pussyfooting around the topic of the paternal identity. "Did you date for a while?"
Claudine laughed. "I knew it was my fertile time. I knew he was a fertile male; we were not too closely related. We found each other desirable."
"Will he help you raise the baby?"
"Oh, yes, he'll be there to guard her during her early years."
"Can I meet him?" I asked. I was really delighted at Claudine's happiness, in an oddly remote way.
"Of course – if we win this war and passage between the worlds is still possible. He stays mostly in Faery," Claudine said. "He is not much for human companionship." She said this in much the same way she would say he was allergic to cats. "If Breandan has his way, Faery will be sealed off, and all we have built in this world will be gone. The wonderful things that humans have invented that we can use, the money we made to fund those inventions … that'll all be gone. It's so intoxicating being with humans. They give off so much energy, so much delicious emotion. They're simply … fun."
This new topic was a fine distraction, but my throat hurt, and when I couldn't respond, Claudine lost interest in talking. Though she returned to her knitting, I was alarmed to notice that after a few minutes she became increasingly tense and alert. I heard noises in the hall, as if people were moving around the building in a hurry. Claudine got up and went over to the room's narrow door to look out. After the third time she did this, she shut the door and she locked it. I asked her what she was expecting.
"Trouble," she said. "And Eric."
One and the same,I thought. "Are there other patients here? Is this, like, a hospital?"
"Yes," she said. "But Ludwig and her aide are evacuating the patients who can walk."
I'd assumed I'd had as much fear as I could handle, but my exhausted emotions began to revive as I absorbed some of her tension.
About thirty minutes later, she raised her head and I could tell she was listening. "Eric is coming," she said. "I'll have to leave you with him. I can't cover my scent like Grandfather can." She rose and unlocked the door. She swung it open.
Eric came in very quietly; one moment I was looking at the door, and the next minute, he filled it. Claudine gathered up her paraphernalia and left the room, keeping as far from Eric as the room permitted. His nostrils flared at the delicious scent of fairy. Then she was gone, and Eric was by the bed, looking down at me. I didn't feel happy or content, so I knew that even the bond was exhausted, at least temporarily. My face hurt so much when I changed expressions that I knew it was covered with bruises and cuts. The vision in my left eye was awfully blurry. I didn't need a mirror to tell me how terrible I looked. At the moment, I simply couldn't care.
Eric tried hard to keep the rage from his face, but it didn't work.
"Fucking fairies ," he said, and his lip curled in a snarl.
I couldn't remember hearing Eric curse before.
"Dead now," I whispered, trying to keep my words to a minimum.
"Yes. A fast death was too good for them."
I nodded (as much as I could) in wholehearted agreement. In fact, it would almost be worth bringing them back to life just to kill them again more slowly.
"I'm going to look at your wounds," Eric said. He didn't want to startle me.
"Okay," I whispered, but I knew the sight would be pretty gross. What I'd seen when I pulled up my gown in the bathroom had looked so awful I hadn't had any desire to examine myself further.
With a clinical neatness, Eric folded down the sheets and the blanket. I was wearing a classic hospital gown – you'd think a hospital for supes would come up with something more exotic – and of course, it was scooted up above my knees. There were bite marks all over my legs – deep bite marks. Some of the flesh was missing. Looking at my legs made me think of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.
Ludwig had bandaged the worst ones, and I was sure there were stitches under the white gauze. Eric stood absolutely still for a long moment. "Pull up the gown," he said, but when he realized that my hands and arms were too weak to cooperate, he did it.
They'd enjoyed the soft spots the most, so this was really unpleasant, actually disgusting. I couldn't look after one quick glance. I kept my eyes shut, like a child who's wandered into a horror film. No wonder the pain was so bad. I would never be the same person again, physically or mentally.
After a long time, Eric covered me and said, "I'll be back in a minute," and I heard him leave the room. He was back quickly with a couple of bottles of TrueBlood. He put them on the floor by the bed.
"Move over," he said, and I glanced up at him, confused. "Move over," he said again with impatience. Then he realized I couldn't, and he put an arm behind my back and another under my knees and shifted me easily to the other side of the bed. Fortunately, it was much larger than a real hospital bed, and I didn't have to turn on my side to make room for him.
Eric said, "I'm going to feed you."
"What?"
"I'm going to give you blood. You'll take weeks to heal otherwise. We don't have that kind of time."
He sounded so briskly matter-of-fact that I felt my shoulders finally relax. I hadn't realized how tightly wound I'd been. Eric bit into his wrist and put it in front of my mouth. "Here," he said, as if there was no question I'd take it.
He slid his free arm under my neck to raise my head. This was not going to be fun or erotic, like a nip during sex. And for a moment I wondered at my own unquestioning acquiescence. But he'd said we didn't have time. On one level I knew what that meant, but on another I was too weak to do more than consider the time factor as a fleeting and nearly irrelevant fact.
I opened my mouth and swallowed. I was in so much pain and I was so appalled by the damage done to my body that I didn't think more than once about the wisdom of what I was doing. I knew how quick the effects of ingesting vampire blood would be. His wrist healed once, and he reopened it.
"Are you sure you should do this?" I asked as he bit himself for the second time. My throat rippled with pain, and I regretted trying a whole sentence.
"Yes," he said. "I know how much is too much. And I fed well before I came here. You need to be able to move." He was behaving in such a practical way that I began to feel a little better. I couldn't have stood pity.
"Move?" The idea filled me with anxiety.
"Yes. At any moment, Breandan's followers may – will – find this place. They'll be tracking you by scent now. You smell of the fairies who hurt you, and they know now Niall loves you enough to kill his own kind for you. Hunting you down would make them very, very happy."
At the thought of any more trouble, I stopped drinking and began crying. Eric's hand stroked my face gently, but he said, "Stop that now. You must be strong. I'm very proud of you, you hear me?"
"Why?" I put my mouth on his wrist and drank again.
"You are still together; you are still a person. Lochlan and Neave have left vampires and fairies in rags – literally, rags … but you survived and your personality and soul are intact."
"I got rescued." I took a deep breath and bent back to his wrist.
"You would have survived much more." Eric leaned over to get the bottle of TrueBlood, and he drank it down quickly.
"I wouldn't have wanted to." I took another deep breath, aware that my throat was aching still but not as sharply. "I hardly wanted to live after …"
He kissed my forehead. "But you did live. And they died. And you are mine, and you will be mine. They will not get you."
"You really think they're coming?"
"Yes. Breandan's remaining forces will find this place sooner or later, if not Breandan himself. He has nothing to lose, and his pride to retain. I'm afraid they'll find us shortly. Ludwig has removed almost all the other patients." He turned a little, as if he were listening. "Yes, most of them are gone."
"Who else is here?"
"Bill is in the next room. He's been getting blood from Clancy."
"Were you not going to give him any?"
"If you were irreparable … no, I would have let him rot."
"Why?" I asked. "He actually came to rescue me. Why get mad at him? Where were you?" Rage bubbled up my throat.
Eric flinched almost a half inch, a big reaction from a vampire his age. He looked away. I could not believe I was saying these things.
"It's not like you were obliged to come find me," I said, "but I hoped the whole time – I hoped you would come, I prayed you would come, I thought over and over you might hear me… ."
"You're killing me," he said. "You're killing me." He shuddered beside me, as if he could scarcely endure my words. "I'll explain," he said in a muted voice. "I will. You will understand. But now, we don't have enough time. Are you healing yet?"
I thought about it. I didn't feel as miserable as I had before the blood. The holes in my flesh were itching almost intolerably, which meant they were healing. "I'm beginning to feel like I'll be better sometime," I said carefully. "Oh, is Tray Dawson still here?"
He looked at me with a very serious expression. "Yes; he can't be moved."
"Why not? Why didn't Dr. Ludwig take him?"
"He would not survive being moved."
"No," I said, shocked even after all that I'd been through.
"Bill told me about the vampire blood he ingested. They hoped he'd go crazy enough to hurt you, but his leaving you alone was good enough. Lochlan and Neave were delayed; a pair of Niall's warriors found them, attacked them, and they had to fight. Afterward, they decided to stake out your house. They wanted to be sure Dawson wouldn't come to help you. Bill called me to tell me that you and he went to Dawson's house. By that time, they already had Dawson. They had fun with him before they had … before they caught you."
"Dawson's that hurt? I thought the effects of the bad vamp blood would wear off by now." I couldn't imagine the big man, the toughest Were I knew, being defeated.
"The vampire blood they used was just a vehicle for the poison. They'd never tried it on a Were, I suppose, because it took a long time to act. And then they practiced their arts on him. Can you rise?"
I tried to gather my muscles to make the effort. "Maybe not yet."
"I'll carry you."
"Where?"
"Bill wants to talk to you. You have to be brave."
"My purse," I said. "I need something from it."
Wordlessly Eric put the soft cloth purse, now spoiled and stained, on the bed beside me. With great concentration, I was able to open it and slide my hand inside. Eric raised his eyebrows when he saw what I'd pulled out of the purse, but he heard something outside that made him looked alarmed. Eric was up and sliding his arms under me, and then he straightened as easily as if I'd been a plate of spaghetti. At the door he paused, and I managed to turn the knob for him. He used his foot to push it open, and out we went into the corridor. I was able to see that we were in an old building, some kind of small business that had been converted to its present purpose. There were doors up and down the hall, and there was a glass-enclosed control room of some kind about midway down. Through the glass on its opposite side, I could see a gloomy warehouse. There were a few lights on in it, just enough to disclose that it was empty except for some discards, like dilapidated shelving and machine parts.
We turned right to enter the room at the end of the hall. Again, I performed the honors with the knob, and this time it wasn't quite as agonizing to grip the knob and turn it.
There were two beds inside this room.
Bill was in the right-hand bed, and Clancy was sitting in a plastic chair pulled up right against the side. He was feeding Bill the same way Eric had fed me. Bill's skin was gray. His cheeks had caved in. He looked like death.
Tray Dawson was in the next bed. If Bill looked like he was dying, Tray looked like he was already dead. His face was bruised blue. One of his ears had been bitten off. His eyes were swollen shut. There was crusted blood everywhere. And this was just what I could see of his face. His arms were lying on top of the sheet, and they were both splinted.
Eric laid me down beside Bill. Bill's eyes opened, and at least they were the same: dark brown, fathomless. He stopped drinking from Clancy, but he didn't move or look better.
"The silver is in his system," Clancy said quietly. "Its poison has traveled to every part of his body. He'll need more and more blood to drive it out."
I wanted to say, "Will he get better?" But I couldn't, not with Bill lying there. Clancy rose from beside the bed, and he and Eric began having a whispered conversation – a very unpleasant one, if Eric's expression was any indication.
Bill said, "How are you, Sookie? Will you heal?" His voice faltered.
"Exactly what I want to ask you," I said. Neither of us had the strength or energy to hedge our conversation.
"You will live," he said, satisfied. "I can smell that Eric has given you blood. You would have healed anyway, but that will help the scarring. I'm sorry I didn't get there faster."
"You saved my life."
"I saw them take you," he said.
"What?"
"I saw them take you."
"You …" I wanted to say, "You didn't stop them?" But that seemed too horrendously cruel.
"I knew I couldn't defeat the two of them together," he said simply. "If I'd tried to take them on and they'd killed me, you would have been as good as dead. I know very little about fairies, but even I had heard of Neave and her brother." These few sentences seemed to exhaust Bill. He tried to turn his head on the pillow so he could look directly into my face, but he managed to turn only an inch. His dark hair looked lank and lusterless, and his skin no longer had the shine that had seemed so beautiful to me when I'd seen it the first time.
"So you called Niall?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, his lips barely moving. "Or at least, I called Eric, told him what I'd seen, told him to call Niall."
"Where was the old house?" I asked.
"North of here, in Arkansas," he said. "It took a while to track you. If they'd gotten in a car … but they moved through the fae world, and with my sense of smell and Niall's knowledge of fae magic, we were able to find you. Finally. At least your life was saved. I think it was too late for the Were."
I hadn't known Tray was in the shack. Not that the knowledge would have made any difference, but maybe I would have felt a little less lonely.
Of course, that was probably why the two fairies hadn't let me see him. I was willing to bet there wasn't much about the psychology of torture that Neave and Lochlan hadn't known.
"Are you sure he's …"
"Sweetheart, look at him."
"I haven't passed yet," Tray mumbled.
I tried to get up, to go over to him. That was still a little out of my reach, but I turned on my side to face him. The beds were so close together that I could hear him easily. I think he could sort of see where I was.
"Tray," I said, "I'm so sorry."
He shook his head wordlessly. "My fault. I should have known … the woman in the woods … wasn't right."
"You did your best. If you had resisted her, you would have been killed."
"Dying now," he said. He made himself try to open his eyes. He almost managed to look right at me. "My own damn fault," he said.
I couldn't stop crying. He seemed to fall unconscious. I slowly rolled over to face Bill. His color was a little better.
"I would not, for anything, have had them hurt you," he said. "Her dagger was silver, and she had silver caps on her teeth… . I managed to rip her throat out, but she didn't die fast enough… . She fought to the end."
"Clancy's given you blood," I said. "You'll get better."
"Maybe," he said, and his voice was as cool and calm as it had always been. "I'm feeling some strength now. It will get me through the fight. That will be time enough."
I was shocked almost beyond speech. Vampires died only from staking, decapitation, or from a rare severe case of Sino-AIDS. Silver poisoning?
"Bill," I said urgently, thinking of so many things I wanted to say to him. He'd closed his eyes, but now he opened them to look at me.
"They're coming," Eric said, and all those words died in my throat.
"Breandan's people?" I said.
"Yes," Clancy said briefly. "They've found your scent." He was scornful even now, as if I'd been weak in leaving a scent to track.
Eric drew a long, long knife from a sheath on his thigh. "Iron," he said, smiling.
And Bill smiled, too, and it wasn't a pleasant smile. "Kill as many as you can," he said in a stronger voice. "Clancy, help me up."
"No," I said.
"Sweetheart," Bill said, very formally, "I have always loved you, and I will be proud to die in your service. When I'm gone, say a prayer for me in a real church."
Clancy bent to help Bill out of the bed, giving me a very unfriendly look while he did so. Bill swayed on his feet. He was as weak as a human. He threw off the hospital gown to stand there clad only in drawstring pajama pants.
I didn't want to die in a hospital gown, either.
"Eric, have you a knife to spare for me?" Bill asked, and without turning from the door, Eric passed Bill a shorter version of his own knife, which was halfway to being a sword, according to me. Clancy was also armed.
No one said a word about trying to shift Tray. When I glanced over at him, I thought he might have already died.
Eric's cell phone rang, which made me jump a couple of inches. He answered it with a curt, "Yes?" He listened and then clicked it shut. I almost laughed, the idea of the supes communicating by cell phones seemed so funny. But when I looked at Bill, gray in the face, leaning against the wall, I didn't think anything in the world would ever be funny again.
"Niall and his fae are on the way," Eric told us, his voice as calm and steady as if he were reading us a story about the stock market. "Breandan's blocked all the other portals to the fae land. There is only one opening now. Whether they'll come in time, I don't know."
"If I live through this," Clancy said, "I'll ask you to release me from my vow, Eric, and I'll seek another master. I find the idea of dying in the defense of a human woman to be disgusting, no matter what her connection to you is."
"If you die," Eric said, "you'll die because I, your sheriff, ordered you into battle. The reason is not pertinent."
Clancy nodded. "Yes, my lord."
"But I will release you, if you should live."
"Thank you, Eric."
Geez Louise. I hoped they were happy now they'd gotten that settled.
Bill was swaying on his feet, but neither Eric nor Clancy regarded him with anything but approval. I couldn't hear what they were hearing, but the tension in the room mounted almost unbearably as our enemies came closer.
As I watched Bill, waiting with apparent calm for death to come to him, I had a flash of him as I'd known him: the first vampire I'd ever met, the first man I'd ever gone to bed with, the first suitor I'd ever loved. Everything that followed had tainted those memories, but for one moment I saw him clearly, and I loved him again.
Then the door splintered, and I saw the gleam of an ax blade, and I heard high-pitched shouts of encouragement from the other fairies to the ax wielder.
I resolved to get up myself, because I'd rather perish on my feet than in a bed. I had at least that much courage left in me. Maybe, since I'd had Eric's blood, I was feeling the heat of his battle rage. Nothing got Eric going like the prospect of a good fight. I struggled to my feet. I found I could walk, at least a little bit. There were some wo