“Why’d you leave the hospital last night?” Her face was tight with resentment. “You should have told me. I hauled myself up these stairs last night to look for you, and there you were. And you’d barricaded the door. So I had to go back down the damn stairs again to get my keys, and let myself in the French windows, and hurry—on this leg—to the alarm system to turn it off. And then this doofus was sitting by your bed, and she could have done all of that.”
“You couldn’t open the windows with magic?” I asked.
“I was too tired,” she said with dignity. “I had to recharge my magical batteries, so to speak.”
“So to speak,” I said, my voice dry. “Well, last night, I found out . . .” and I stopped dead. I simply couldn’t speak of it.
“Found out what?” Amelia was exasperated, and I couldn’t say as I blamed her.
“Bill, her first lover, was planted in Bon Temps to seduce her and gain her trust,” Claudine said. “Last night, he admitted that to her face, and in front of her only other lover, another vampire.”
As a synopsis, it was flawless.
“Well . . . that sucks,” Amelia said faintly.
“Yeah,” I said. “It does.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t kill him for you,” Claudine said. “I’d have to take too many steps backward.”
“That’s okay,” I told her. “He’s not worth your losing any brownie points.”
“Oh, I’m not a brownie,” Claudine explained kindly. “I thought you understood. I’m a full-blooded fairy.”
Amelia was trying not to laugh, and I glared at her. “Just let it go, witch,” I said.
“Yes, telepath.”
“So what next?” I asked, in general. I would not talk any more about my broken heart and my demolished self-worth.
“We figure out what happened,” the witch said.
“How? Call CSI?”
Claudine looked confused, so I guessed fairies didn’t watch television.
“No,” Amelia said, with elaborate patience. “We do an ectoplasmic reconstruction.”
I was sure that my expression matched Claudine’s, now.
“Okay, let me explain,” Amelia said, grinning all over. “This is what we do.”
Amelia, in seventh heaven at this exhibition of her wonderful witch powers, told Claudine and me at length about the procedure. It was time- and energy-consuming, she said, which was why it wasn’t done more often. And you had to gather at least four witches, she estimated, to cover the amount of square footage involved in Jake’s murder.
“And I’ll need real witches,” Amelia said. “Quality workers, not some hedgerow Wiccan.” Amelia went off on Wiccans for a good long while. She despised Wiccans (unfairly) as tree-hugging wannabes—that came out of Amelia’s thoughts clearly enough. I regretted Amelia’s prejudice, as I’d met some impressive Wiccans.
Claudine looked down at me, her expression doubtful. “I’m not sure we ought to be here for this,” she said.
“You can go, Claudine.” I was ready to experiment with anything, just to take my mind off the big hole in my heart. “I’m going to stay to watch. I have to know what happened here. There are too many mysteries in my life, right now.”
“But you have to go to the queen’s tonight,” Claudine said. “You missed last night. Visiting the queen is a dress-up occasion. I have to take you shopping. You don’t want to wear any of your cousin’s clothes.”
“Not that my butt could get into them,” I said.
“Not that your butt should want to,” she said, equally harshly. “You can cut that out right now, Sookie Stackhouse.”
I looked up at her, letting her see the pain inside me.
“Yeah, I get that,” she said, her hand patting me gently on the cheek. “And that sucks big-time. But you have to write it off. He’s only one guy.”
He’d been the first guy. “My grandmother served him lemonade,” I said, and somehow that triggered the tears again.
“Hey,” Amelia said. “Fuck him, right?”
I looked at the young witch. She was pretty and tough and off-the-wall nuts, I thought. She was okay. “Yeah,” I said. “When can you do the ecto thing?”
She said, “I have to make some phone calls, see who I can get together. Night’s always better for magic, of course. When will you go pay your call to the queen?”
I thought for a moment. “Just at full dark,” I said. “Maybe about seven.”
“Should take about two hours,” Amelia said, and Claudine nodded. “Okay, I’ll ask them to be here at ten, to have a little wiggle room. You know, it would be great if the queen would pay for this.”