I couldn’t get the words out.

“You can tell me later,” he suggested. “When are you through?”

“Just as soon as Susie gets here.”

“Come to my house.”

“Okay.” I smiled up at him, feeling radiant and light-headed.

And Bill smiled back, though since my nearness had affected him, his fangs were showing, and maybe to anyone else but me the effect was a little—unsettling.

He bent to kiss me, just a light touch on the cheek, and he turned to leave. But just at that moment, the evening went all to hell.

Malcolm and Diane came in, flinging the door open as if they were making a grand entrance, and of course, they were. I wondered where Liam was. Probably parking the car. It was too much to hope they’d left him at home.

Folks in Bon Temps were getting accustomed to Bill, but the flamboyant Malcolm and the equally flamboyant Diane caused quite a stir. My first thought was that this wasn’t going to help people get used to Bill and me.

Malcolm was wearing leather pants and a kind of chain-mail shirt. He looked like something on the cover of a rock album. Diane was wearing a one-piece lime green bodysuit spun out of Lycra or some other very thin, stretchy cloth. I was sure I could count her pubic hairs if I so desired. Blacks didn’t come into Merlotte’s much, but if any black was absolutely safe there, it was Diane. I saw Lafayette goggling through the hatch in open admiration, spiced by a dollop of fear.

The two vampires shrieked with feigned surprise when they saw Bill, like demented drunks. As far as I could tell, Bill was not happy about their presence, but he seemed to handle their invasion calmly, as he did almost everything.

Malcolm kissed Bill on the mouth, and so did Diane. It was hard to tell which greeting was more offensive to the customers in the bar. Bill had better show distaste, and quick, I thought, if he wanted to stay in good with the human inhabitants of Bon Temps.

Bill, who was no fool, took a step back and put his arm around me, dissociating himself from the vampires and aligning himself with the humans.

“So your little waitress is still alive,” Diane said, and her clear voice was audible through the whole bar. “Isn’t that amazing.”

“Her grandmother was murdered last week,” Bill said quietly, trying to subdue Diane’s desire to make a scene.

Her gorgeous lunatic brown eyes fixed on me, and I felt cold.

“Is that right?” she said and laughed.

That was it. No one would forgive her now. If Bill had been trying to find a way to entrench himself, this would be the scenario I would write. On the other hand, the disgust I could feel massing from the humans in the bar could backlash and wash over Bill as well as the renegades.

Of course . . . to Diane and her friends, Bill was the renegade.

“When’s someone going to kill you, baby?” She ran a fingernail under my chin, and I knocked her hand away.

She would have been on me if Malcolm hadn’t grabbed her hand, lazily, almost effortlessly. But I saw the strain show in the way he was standing.

“Bill,” he said conversationally, as if he wasn’t exerting every muscle he had to keep Diane still, “I hear this town is losing its unskilled service personnel at a terrible rate. And a little bird in Shreveport tells me you and your friend here were at Fangtasia asking questions about what vampire the murdered fang-bangers might have been with.”

“You know that’s for us to know, no one else,” Malcolm continued, and all of a sudden his face was so serious it was truly terrifying. “Some of us don’t want to go to—baseball—games and . . .” (here he was searching his memory for something disgustingly human, I could tell) “barbecues! We are Vampire!” He invested the word with majesty, with glamor, and I could tell a lot of the people in the bar were falling under his spell. Malcolm was intelligent enough to want to erase the bad impression he knew Diane had made, all the while showering contempt on those of us it had been made on.

I stomped on his instep with every ounce of weight I could muster. He showed his fangs at me. The people in the bar blinked and shook themselves.

“Why don’t you just get outta here, mister,” Rene said. He was slouched at the bar with his elbows flanking a beer.

There was moment when