Dead as a doornail - By Charlaine Harris Page 0,82
be, ah, completely used.”
I was disgusted and showed it. “You mean drained,” I said.
“Sookie, you have to understand that for hundreds, thousands, of years we have considered ourselves better than humans, separate from humans.” He thought for a second. “Very much in the same relationship to humans as humans have to, say, cows. Edible like cows, but cute, too.”
I was knocked speechless. I had sensed this, of course, but to have it spelled out was just . . . nauseating. Food that walked and talked, that was us. McPeople.
“I’ll just go to Bill. He knows Tara, and she rents her business premises from him, so I bet he’ll feel obliged to help her,” I said furiously.
“Yes. He’d be obliged to try to kill Salome’s underling. Bill doesn’t rank any higher than Mickey, so he can’t order him to leave. Who do you think would survive the fight?”
The idea paralyzed me for a minute. I shuddered. What if Mickey won?
“No, I’m afraid I’m your best hope here, Sookie.” Eric gave me a brilliant smile. “I’ll talk to Salome and ask her to call her dog off. Franklin is not her child, but Mickey is. Since he’s been poaching in my area, she’ll be obliged to recall him.”
He raised a blond eyebrow. “And since you’re asking me to do this for you, of course, you owe me.”
“Gosh, I wonder what you want in return?” I asked, maybe a little on the dry and sarcastic side.
He grinned at me broadly, giving me a flash of fang. “Tell me what happened while I was staying with you. Tell me completely, leaving out nothing. After that, I’ll do what you want.” He put both feet on the floor and leaned forward, focused on me.
“All right.” Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place. I looked down at my hands clasped in my lap.
“Did we have sex?” he asked directly.
For about two minutes, this might actually be fun. “Eric,” I said, “we had sex in every position I could imagine, and some I couldn’t. We had sex in every room in my house, and we had sex outdoors. You told me it was the best you’d ever had.” (At the time he couldn’t recall all the sex he’d ever had. But he’d paid me a compliment.) “Too bad you can’t remember it,” I concluded with a modest smile.
Eric looked like I’d hit him in the forehead with a mallet. For all of thirty seconds his reaction was completely gratifying. Then I began to be uneasy.
“Is there anything else I should know?” he said in a voice so level and even that it was simply scary.
“Um, yes.”
“Then perhaps you’ll enlighten me.”
“You offered to give up your position as sheriff and come to live with me. And get a job.”
Okay, maybe this wasn’t going so well. Eric couldn’t get any whiter or stiller. “Ah,” he said. “Anything else?”
“Yes.” I ducked my head because I’d gotten to the absolutely un-fun part. “When we came home that last night, the night we’d had the battle with the witches in Shreveport, we came in the back door, right, like I always do. And Debbie Pelt—you remember her. Alcide’s—oh, whatever she was to him . . . Debbie was sitting at my kitchen table. And she had a gun and was gonna shoot me.” I risked a glance and found Eric’s brows had drawn in together in an ominous frown. “But you threw yourself in front of me.” I leaned forward very quickly and patted him on the knee. Then I retreated into my own space. “And you took the bullet, which was really, really sweet of you. But she was going to shoot again, and I pulled out my brother’s shotgun, and I killed her.” I hadn’t cried at all that night, but I felt a tear run down my cheek now. “I killed her,” I said, and gasped for breath.
Eric’s mouth opened as though he was going to ask a question, but I held up a hand in a wait gesture. I had to finish. “We gathered up the body and bagged it, and you took it and buried her somewhere while I cleaned the kitchen. And you found her car and you hid it. I don’t know where. It took me hours to get the blood out of the kitchen. It was on everything.” I grabbed desperately at my self-possession. I rubbed my eyes with the back of my wrist. My shoulder ached, and I shifted