and on one of the metal chairs was a folded blanket. Without asking me, Bill picked it up and shook it out, spreading it on the grass downslope from the patio. I sat on it reluctantly, thinking the blanket wasn’t safe for the same reasons meeting him in either home wasn’t safe. When I was close to Bill, what I thought about was being even closer to him.
I hugged my knees to me and stared off across the water. There was a security light on the other side of the pond, and I could see it reflected in the still water. Bill lay on his back next to me. I could feel his eyes on my face. He laced his fingers together across his ribs, ostentatiously keeping his hands to himself.
“Last night frightened you,” he said neutrally.
“Weren’t you just a little scared?” I asked, more quietly than I’d thought I would.
“For you. A little for myself.”
I wanted to lie on my stomach but worried about getting that close to him. When I saw his skin glow in the moonlight, I yearned to touch him.
“It scared me that Eric can control our lives while we’re a couple.”
“Do you not want to be a couple anymore?”
The pain in my chest was so bad I put my hand over it, pressing the area above my breast.
“Sookie?” He was kneeling by me, an arm around me.
I couldn’t answer. I had no breath.
“Do you love me?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Why do you talk of leaving me?”
The pain made its way out through my eyes in the form of tears.
“I’m too scared of the other vampires and the way they are. What will he ask me to do next? He’ll try to make me do something else. He’ll tell me he’ll kill you otherwise. Or he’ll threaten Jason. And he can do it.”
Bill’s voice was as quiet as the sound of a cricket in the grass. A month ago, I might not have been able to hear it. “Don’t cry,” he told me. “Sookie, I have to tell you unwelcome facts.”
The only welcome thing he could have told me at that point was that Eric was dead.
“Eric is intrigued by you now. He can tell you have mental powers that most humans don’t have, or ignore if they know they possess them. He anticipates your blood is rich and sweet.” Bill’s voice got hoarse when he said that, and I shivered. “And you’re beautiful. You’re even more beautiful now. He doesn’t realize you have had our blood three times.”
“You know that Long Shadow bled onto me?”
“Yes. I saw.”
“Is there anything magic about three times?”
He laughed, that low, rumbly, rusty laugh. “No. But the more vampire blood you drink, the more desirable you become to our kind, and actually, more desirable to anyone. And Desiree thought she was a vintage! I wonder what vampire said that to her.”
“One that wanted to get in her pants,” I said flatly, and he laughed again. I loved to hear him laugh.
“With all this telling me how lovely I am, are you saying that Eric, like, lusts for me?”
“Yes.”
“What’s to stop him from taking me? You say he’s stronger than you.”
“Courtesy and custom, first of all.”
I didn’t snort, but I came close.
“Don’t discount that. We’re all observant of custom, we vampires. We have to live together for centuries.”
“Anything else?”
“I am not as strong as Eric, but I’m not a new vampire. He might get badly hurt in a fight with me, or I might even win if I got lucky.”
“Anything else?”
“Maybe,” Bill said carefully, “you yourself.”
“How so?”
“If you can be valuable to him otherwise, he may leave you alone if he knows that is your sincere wish.”
“But I don’t want to be valuable to him! I don’t want to ever see him again!”
“You promised Eric you’d help him again,” Bill reminded me.
“If he turned the thief over to the police,” I said. “And what did Eric do? He staked him!”
“Possibly saving your life in the process.”
“Well, I found his thief!”
“Sookie, you don’t know much about the world.”
I stared at him, surprised. “I guess that’s so.”
“Things don’t turn out . . . even.” Bill stared out into the darkness. “Even I think sometimes I don’t know much, anymore.” Another gloomy pause. “I have only once before seen one vampire stake another. Eric is going beyond the limits of our world.”
“So, he’s not too likely to take much notice of that custom and courtesy you were bragging about earlier.”