“All right,” he said, after listening for a moment to the voice on the other end. “All right, I’ll be there.”
He snapped the tiny phone shut. “Jake is asking for me,” he said.
I was so at sea with a strange combination of lust and relief that it took me a moment to connect the dots. Jake Purifoy, Quinn’s employee, was experiencing his second night as a vampire. Having been fed some volunteer, he was enough himself to want to talk to Quinn. He’d been in suspended animation in a closet for weeks, and there was a lot he would need to catch up on.
“Then you have to go,” I said, proud that my voice was practically rock steady. “Maybe he’ll remember who attacked him. Tomorrow, I have to tell you about what I saw here tonight.”
“Would you have said yes?” he asked. “If we’d been undisturbed for another minute?”
I considered for a minute. “If I had, I would’ve been sorry I did,” I said. “Not because I don’t want you. I do. But I had my eyes opened in the past couple of days. I know that I’m pretty easy to fool.” I tried to sound matter-of-fact, not pitiful, when I said that. No one likes a whiny woman, least of all me. “I’m not interested in starting that up with someone who’s just horny at the moment. I never set out to be a one-night-stand kind of woman. I want to be sure, if I have sex with you, that it’s because you want to be around for a while and because you like me for who I am, not what I am.”
Maybe a million women had made approximately the same speech. I meant it as sincerely as any one of those million.
And Quinn gave a perfect answer. “Who would want just one night with you?” he said, and then he left.
19
I SLEPT THE SLEEP OF THE DEAD. WELL, PROBABLY not, but as close as a human would ever come. As if in a dream, I heard the witches come carousing back into the courtyard. They were still congratulating one another with alcohol-lubricated vigor. I’d found some real, honest cotton sheets among the linens (Why are they still called linens? Have you seen a linen sheet in your life?) and I’d tossed the black silky ones into the washer, so it was very easy to slip back into sleep.
When I got up, it was after ten in the morning. There was a knocking at the door, and I stumbled down the hall to unlock it after I’d pulled on a pair of Hadley’s spandex exercise pants and a hot pink tank top. I saw boxes through the peephole, and I opened the door feeling really happy.
“Miss Stackhouse?” said the young black man who was holding the flattened boxes. When I nodded, he said, “I got orders to bring you as many boxes as you want. Will thirty do to start with?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Oh, that’ll be great.”
“I also got instructions,” he said precisely, “to bring you anything related to moving that you might need. I have here strapping tape, masking tape, some Magic Markers, scissors, and stick-on labels.”
The queen had given me a personal shopper.
“Did you want colored dots? Some people like to put living room things in boxes with an orange dot, bedroom things in boxes with a green dot, and so on.”
I had never moved, unless you counted taking a couple of bags of clothes and towels over to Sam’s furnished duplex after the kitchen burned, so I didn’t know the best way to go about it. I had an intoxicating vision of rows of neat boxes with colored dots on each side, so there couldn’t be any mistake from any angle. Then I snapped back to reality. I wouldn’t be taking that much back to Bon Temps. It was hard to form an estimate, since this was unknown territory, but I knew I didn’t want much of the furniture.
“I don’t think I’ll need the dots, thanks anyway,” I said. “I’ll start working on these boxes, and then I can call you if I need any more, okay?”
“I’ll assemble them for you,” he said. He had very short hair and the curliest eyelashes I’d ever seen on a person. Cows had eyelashes that pretty, sometimes. He was wearing a golf-type shirt and neatly belted khakis, along with high-end sneakers.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” I said, as he whipped a roll of