I’d pulled on that morning after Jason had called me.

I stood in the pouring warm rain, my hair plastered to my skull and my dress clinging wetly to my skin. I turned left to the woods and began to make my way through them, slowly and carefully at first. As Sam’s calming influence began to evaporate, I began to run, tearing my cheeks on branches, scratching my legs on thorny vines. I came out of the woods and began to dash through the cemetery, the beam of the flashlight bobbing before me. I had thought I was going to the house on the other side, the Compton house: but then I knew Bill must be here, somewhere in this six acres of bones and stones. I stood in the center of the oldest part of the graveyard, surrounded by monuments and modest tombstones, in the company of the dead.

I screamed, “Bill Compton! Come out now!”

I turned in circles, looking around in the near-blackness, knowing even if I couldn’t see him, Bill would be able to see me, if he could see anything—if he wasn’t one of those blackened, flaking atrocities I’d seen in the front yard of the house outside Monroe.

No sound. No movement except the falling of the gentle drenching rain.

“Bill! Bill! Come out!”

I felt, rather than heard, movement to my right. I turned the beam of the flashlight in that direction. The ground was buckling. As I watched, a white hand shot up from the red soil. The dirt began to heave and crumble. A figure climbed out of the ground.

“Bill?”

It moved toward me. Covered with red streaks, his hair full of dirt, Bill took a hesitant step in my direction.

I couldn’t even go to him.

“Sookie,” he said, very close to me, “why are you here?” For once, he sounded disoriented and uncertain.

I had to tell him, but I couldn’t open my mouth.

“Sweetheart?”

I went down like a stone. I was abruptly on my knees in the sodden grass.

“What happened while I slept?” He was kneeling by me, bare and streaming with rain.

“You don’t have clothes on,” I murmured.

“They’d just get dirty,” he said sensibly. “When I’m going to sleep in the soil, I take them off.”

“Oh. Sure.”

“Now you have to tell me.”

“You have to not hate me.”

“What have you done?”

“Oh my God, it wasn’t me! But I could have warned you more, I could have grabbed you and made you listen. I tried to call you, Bill!”

“What has happened?”

I put one hand on either side of his face, touching his skin, realizing how much I would have lost, how much I might yet lose.

“They’re dead, Bill, the vampires from Monroe. And someone else with them.”

“Harlen,” he said tonelessly. “Harlen stayed over last night, he and Diane really hit if off.” He waited for me to finish, his eyes fixed on mine.

“They were burned.”

“On purpose.”

“Yes.”

He squatted beside me in the rain, in the dark, his face not visible to me. The flashlight was gripped in my hand, and all my strength had ebbed away. I could feel his anger.

I could feel his cruelty.

I could feel his hunger.

He had never been more completely vampire. There wasn’t anything human in him.

He turned his face to the sky and howled.

I thought he might kill someone, the rage rolling off him was so great. And the nearest person was me.

As I comprehended my own danger, Bill gripped my upper arms. He pulled me to him, slowly. There was no point in struggling, in fact I sensed that would only excite Bill more. Bill held me about an inch from him, I could almost smell his skin, and I could feel the turmoil in him, I could taste his rage.

Directing that energy in another way might save me. I leaned that inch, put my mouth on his chest. I licked the rain off, rubbed my cheek against his nipple, pressed myself against him.

The next moment his teeth grazed my shoulder, and his body, hard and rigid and ready, shoved me so forcefully I was suddenly on my back in the mud. He slid directly into me as if he were trying to reach through me to the soil. I shrieked, and he growled in response, as though we were truly mud people, primitives from caves. My hands, gripping the flesh of his back, felt the rain pelting down and the blood under my nails, and his relentless movement. I thought I would be plowed into this mud, into my grave. His fangs sank into