Dead and Gone

I drove home more confused than ever. Though I loved mygreat-grandfather as much as I could on our short acquaintance ... and I was absolutely ready to love him even more, and I was willing to back him up to the limit because we were kin ... I still didn't know how to fight this war, or how to dodge it, either. Fairies did not want to be known to the human world, and they never would. They weren't like the wereanimals or the vampires, who wanted to share in the planet with us. There was much less reason for the fairies to keep in line with human policies and rules. They could do anything they wished and vanish back into their secret place.



For about the millionth time, I wished I had a normal great-grandfather instead of this improbable, glorious, and inconvenient fairy prince version.



Then I was ashamed of myself. I should be happy for what I'd been given. I hoped God hadn't noticed my lapse of appreciation.



I'd already had a busy day, and it was only two o'clock. This wasn't shaping up to be my normal day off. Usually I did laundry, cleaned house, went to the store, read, paid bills... . But today was so pretty I wanted to stay outside. I wanted to work on something that would allow me to think at the same time. There sure was plenty to mull over.



I looked at the flower beds around the house and decided to weed. This was my least-favorite chore, maybe because it was the one I'd often been assigned as a child. Gran had believed we should be brought up to work. It was in her honor that I tried to keep the flower beds looking nice, and now I sighed and made up my mind to get the job done. I'd start with the bed by the driveway, on the south side of the house.



I went over to our metal toolshed, the latest in a series of toolsheds that had served the Stackhouse family over the generations we'd lived on this spot. I opened the door with the familiar mingled feelings of pleasure and horror, because someday I was going to have to put in some serious work cleaning out the interior. I still had my grandmother's old trowel; there was no telling who'd used it before her. It was ancient but so well taken care of that it was better than any modern substitute. I stepped into the shadowy shed and found my gardening gloves and the trowel.



I knew from watching   Antiques Roadshow that there were people who collected old farm implements. This toolshed would be an Aladdin's cave to such a collector. My family didn't believe in letting things go if they still worked. Though chock-full, the shed was orderly, because that had been my grandfather's way. When we'd come to live with him and Gran, he'd drawn an outline for every commonly used tool. That was where he'd wanted that tool to be replaced every time it was used, and that was where it was still kept now. I could reach unerringly for the trowel, which was maybe the oldest tool in the shed. It was heavy, sharper, and narrower than its modern counterparts, but its shape was familiar to my hand.



If it had been really, truly spring, I'd have changed back into my bikini to combine business with pleasure. But though the sun was still shining, I wasn't in a carefree mood any longer. I pulled my gardening gloves on, because I didn't want to ruin my fingernails. Some of these weeds seemed to fight back. One grew on a thick, fleshy stalk, and it had sharp points on its leaves. If you let it grow long enough, it blossomed. It was really ugly and prickly, and it had to be removed by its roots. There were quite a few of them springing up among the emerging cannas.



Gran would have had a fit.



I crouched and set to work. With my right hand, I sank the trowel in the soft dirt of the flower bed, loosening the roots of the nasty weed, and pulled it up with my left hand. I shook the stalk to get the dirt off the roots and then tossed it aside. Before I'd started I'd put a radio out on the back porch. In no time at all, I was singing along with LeAnn Rimes. I began to feel less troubled. In a few minutes, I had a respectable pile of uprooted weeds and a glow of virtue.



If he hadn't spoken, it would have ended differently. But since he was full of himself, he had to open his mouth. His pride saved my life.



Also, he picked some unwise words. Saying, "I'll enjoy killing you for my lord," is just not the way to make my acquaintance.



I have good reflexes, and I erupted from my squatting position with the trowel in my hand and I drove it upward into his stomach. It slid right in, as if it were designed to be a fairy-killing weapon.



And that was exactly what it turned out to be, because the trowel was iron and he was a fairy.



I leaped back and dropped into a half crouch, still gripping the bloody trowel, and waited to see what he'd do. He was looking down at the blood seeping through his fingers with an expression of absolute amazement, as if he couldn't believe I'd ruined his ensemble. Then he looked at me, his eyes pale blue and huge, and there was a big question on his face, as if he were asking me if I'd really done that to him, if it wasn't some kind of mistake.



I began backing up to the porch steps, never taking my eyes from him, but he wasn't a threat any longer. As I reached behind me to open the screen door, my would-be murderer crumpled to the ground, still looking surprised.



I retreated into the house and locked the door. Then I walked on trembling legs over to the window above the kitchen sink and peered out, leaning as far over the sink as I could. From this angle I could see only a bit of the crumpled body. "Okay," I said out loud."Okay." He was dead, looked like. It had been so quick .



I started to pick up the wall phone, noticed how my hands were shaking, and spotted my cell phone on the counter where I'd been charging it. Since this was a crisis that definitely called for the head honcho, I speed-dialed my great-grandfather's big, secret emergency number. I thought the situation qualified. A male voice, not Niall's, answered. "Yes?" the voice said with a cautious tone.



"Ah, is Niall there?"



"I can reach him. Can I help you?"



Steady,I told myself.Steady . "Would you please tell him I've killed a fairy and he's laid out in my yard and I don't know what to do with the body?"



There was a moment of silence.



"Yes, I'll tell him that."



"Pretty soon, you think? Because I'm alone and I'm kind of freaked out."



"Yes. Quite soon."



"And someone will come?" Geez Louise, I sounded whiny. I made my spine stiffen. "I mean, I can load him in my car trunk, I guess, or I could call the sheriff." I wanted to impress this unknown with the fact that I wasn't completely needy and helpless. "But there's the whole thing with you guys being secret, and he didn't seem to have a weapon, and obviously I can't prove this guy said he'd enjoy killing me."



"You ... have killed a fairy."



"Is aid that. Way back." Mr. Slow-on-the-Uptake. I peered out the window again. "Yeah, he's still not moving. Dead and gone."



This time the silence lasted so long that I thought I must have blanked out and missed something. I said, "I'm sorry?"



"Are you really? We'll be there very soon." And he hung up.



I couldn't not look, and I couldn't bear to look. I'd seen the dead before, both human and nonhuman. And since the night I'd met Bill Compton in Merlotte's, I'd seen more than my share of bodies. Not that that was Bill's fault, of course.



I had goose pimples all over.



In about five minutes, Niall and another fairy walked out of the woods. There must be some kind of portal out there. Maybe Scotty had beamed them up. Or down. And maybe I wasn't thinking too clearly.



The two fairies stopped when they saw the body and then exchanged a few words. They seemed astonished. But they weren't scared, and they weren't acting like they expected the guy to get up and fight, so I crept across the back porch and out the screen door.



They knew I was there, but they continued their eyeballing of the body.



My great-grandfather raised his arm and I crept under it. He held me to him, and I glanced up to see that he was smiling.



Okay,that was unexpected.



"You're a credit to our family. You've killed my enemy," he said. "I was so right about humans." He looked proud as punch.



"This is a good thing?"



The other fairy laughed and looked at me for the first time. He had hair the color of butterscotch, and his eyes matched his hair, which to me was so weird that it was really off-putting - though like all the fairies I'd met, he was gorgeous. I had to suppress a sigh. Between the vampires and the fairies, I was doomed to be a plain Jane.



"I'm Dillon," he said.



"Oh, Claudine's dad. Nice to meet you. I guess your name means something, too?" I said.



"Lightning," he said, and gave me a particularly winsome smile.



"Who is this?" I said, jerking my head at the body.



"He was Murry," Niall said. "He was a close friend of my nephew Breandan."



Murry looked very young; to the human eye, he'd been perhaps eighteen. "He said he was looking forward to killing me," I told them.



"But instead, you killed him. How did you do it?" Dillon asked, as if he was asking how I rolled out a flaky piecrust.



"With my grandmother's trowel," I said. "Actually, it's been in my family for a long time. Not like we make a fetish of gardening tools or anything; it just works and it's there and there's no need to buy another one." Babbling.



They both looked at me. I couldn't tell if they thought I was nuts or what.



"Could you show us this gardening tool?" Niall said.



"Sure. Do you-all want some tea or something? I think we've got some Pepsi and some lemonade." No, no, not lemonade! They'd die! "Sorry, cancel the lemonade. Tea?"



"No," said Niall quite gently. "I think not now."



I'd dropped the bloody trowel in among the cannas. When I picked it up and approached them, Dillon flinched. "Iron!" he said.



"You don't have the gloves on," Niall said to his son chidingly, and took the trowel from me. His hands were covered with the clear flexible coating developed in fairy-owned chemical factories. Coated with this substance, fairies were able to go out in the human world with some degree of assurance that they wouldn't get poisoned in the process.



Dillon looked chastened. "No, sorry, Father."



Niall shook his head as if he were disappointed in Dillon, but his attention was really on the trowel. He might have been prepared to handle something poisonous to him, but I noticed he still handled it very carefully.



"It went into him really easily," I said, and had to repress a sudden wave of nausea. "I don't know why. It's sharp, but it's not that sharp."



"Iron can part our flesh like a hot knife in butter," Niall said.



"Ugh." Well, at least I knew I hadn't suddenly gotten superstrong.



"He surprised you?" Dillon asked. Though he didn't have the fine, fine wrinkles that made my great-grandfather even more beautiful, Dillon looked only a little younger than Niall, which made their relationship all the more disorienting. But when I looked down at the corpse once more, I was completely back in the present.



"He sure did surprise me. I was just working away weeding the flower bed, and the next thing you know, he was standing right there telling me how much he was looking forward to killing me. I'd never done a thing to him. And he scared me, so I kind of came up in a rush with the trowel, and I got him in the stomach." Again, I wrestled with my own stomach's tendency to heave.



"Did he speak any more?" My great-grandfather was trying to ask me casually, but he seemed pretty interested in my answer.



"No, sir," I said. "He kind of looked surprised, and then he ... he died." I walked over to the steps and sat down rather suddenly and heavily.



"It's not exactly like I feel guilty," I said in a rush of words. "It's just that he was trying to kill me and he was happy about it and I never did a thing to him. I didn't know anything about him, and now he's dead."



Dillon knelt in front of me. He looked into my face. He didn't exactly look kind, but he looked less detached. "He was your enemy, and now he is dead," he said. "This is cause for rejoicing."



"Not exactly," I said. I didn't know how to explain.



"You're a Christian ," he said, as if he'd discovered I was a hermaphrodite or a fruitarian.



"I'm a real bad one," I said hurriedly. His lips compressed, and I could see he was trying hard not to laugh. I'd never felt less like mirth, with the man I'd killed lying a few feet away. I wondered how many years Murry had walked this earth, and now he was crumpled in a lifeless heap, his blood staining my gravel. Wait a minute! He wasn't anymore. He was turning to ... dust. It wasn't anything like the gradual flaking away of a vampire; it was more like someone was erasing Murry.



"Are you cold?" Niall asked. He didn't seem to think the disappearance of bits of the body was anything unusual.



"No, sir. I'm just all upset. I mean, I was sunbathing and then I went to see Claude and Claudine, and now here I am." I couldn't take my eyes off the body's incremental disappearance.



"You've been lying in the sun and gardening.We like the sun and sky," he said, as if that was proof positive I had a special relationship with the fairy branch of my family. He smiled at me. He was so beautiful. I felt like an adolescent when I was around him, an adolescent with acne and baby fat. Now I felt like amurderous adolescent.



"Are you going to gather up his ... ashes?" I asked. I rose, trying to look brisk and purposeful. Action would make me feel less miserable.



Two pairs of alien eyes stared at me blankly.



"Why?" Dillon asked.



"To bury them."



They looked horrified.



"No, not in the ground ," Niall said, trying to sound less revolted than he was. "That isn't our way."



"Then what are you going to do with them?" There was quite a heap of glittering powder on my driveway and in my flower bed, and there was still his torso remaining. "I don't mean to be pushy, but Amelia might come home anytime. I don't get a lot of other visitors, but there's the odd UPS delivery person and the meter reader."



Dillon looked at my great-grandfather as if I'd suddenly begun speaking Japanese. Niall said, "Sookie shares her house with another woman, and this woman may return at any moment."



"Is anyone else going to come after me?" I asked, diverted from my question.



"Possibly," Niall said. "Fintan did a better job of protecting you than I am doing, Sookie. He even protected you from me, and I only want to love you. But he wouldn't tell me where you were." Niall looked sad, and harried, and tired for the first time since I'd met him. "I've tried to keep you out of it. I imagined I only wanted to meet you before they succeeded in killing me, and I arranged it through the vampire to make my movements less noticeable, but in arranging that meeting I've drawn you into danger. You can trust my son Dillon." He put his hand on the younger fairy's shoulder. "If he brings you a message, it's really from me." Dillon smiled charmingly, displaying super-naturally white and sharp teeth. Okay, he was scary, even if he was Claude and Claudine's dad.



"I'll talk to you soon," Niall said, bending over to give me a kiss. The fine, gleaming pale hair fell against my cheek. He smelled so good; fairies do. "I'm sorry, Sookie," he said. "I thought I could force them all to accept ... Well, I couldn't." His green eyes glowed with intensity and regret. "Do you have - yes, a garden hose! We could gather up most of the dust, but I think it more practical if you simply ... distribute it."



He put his arms around me and hugged me, and Dillon gave me a mocking salute. The two took a few steps to the trees, and then they simply vanished into the undergrowth as deer do when you encounter them in the woods.



So that was that. I was left in my sunny yard, all by myself, with a sizeable pile of glittering powdery dust in a body-shaped heap on the gravel.



I added to my mental list of the odd things I'd done that day. I'd entertained the police, sunbathed, visited at a mall with some fairies, weeded, and killed someone. Now it was powdered corpse removal time. And the day wasn't over yet.



I turned on the faucet, unwound the hose enough so the flow would reach the right area, and compressed the spray head to aim the water at the fairy dust.



I had a weird, out-of-body feeling. "You'd think I'd be getting used to it," I said out loud, startling myself even more. I didn't want to add up the people I'd killed, though technically most of them weren't people. Before the past two years (maybe even less if I counted down the months), I'd never laid a finger on another person in anger, aside from hitting Jason in the stomach with my plastic baseball bat when he tore my Barbie's hair out.



I pulled myself up sharply. The deed was done now. No going back.



I released the spray head and turned the hose off at the faucet.



In the fading sunlight, it was a little hard to tell, but I thought I'd dispersed the dust pretty thoroughly.



"But not from my memory," I said seriously. Then I had to laugh, and it sounded a little crazy. I was standing out in my backyard hosing down fairy blood and making melodramatic statements all to myself. Next I'd be doing the Hamlet soliloquy that I'd had to memorize in high school.



This afternoon had brought me down hard, to a real bad place.



I bit down on my bottom lip. Now that I was definitely over the intoxication of having a living relative, I had to face the fact that Niall's behavior was charming (mostly) but unpredictable. By his own admission, he'd inadvertently put me at great risk. Maybe I should have wondered before this what my grandfather Fintan had been like. Niall had told me he'd watched over me without ever making himself known, an image that seemed creepy but touching. Niall was creepy and touching, too. Great-uncle Dillon just seemed creepy.



The temperature was dropping with the creeping darkness, and I was shivering by the time I went in the house. The hose might freeze tonight, but I couldn't bring myself to care. There were clothes in the dryer, and I had to eat since I'd missed eating lunch at the mall. It was getting closer to suppertime. I had to concentrate on small things.



Amelia phoned while I was folding the laundry. She told me she was about to leave work and was going to meet Tray for dinner and a movie. She asked me if I wanted to come along, but I said I was busy. Amelia and Tray didn't need a third wheel, and I didn't need to feel like one.



It would have been nice to have some company. But what would I have done for social chitchat?Wow, that trowel slid into his stomach like it was Jell-O .



I shuddered and tried to think of what to do next. An uncritical companion, that was who I needed. I missed the cat we'd called Bob (though he hadn't been born a cat and wasn't one now). Maybe I could get another cat a real one. It wasn't the first time I'd considered going to the animal shelter. I'd better wait until this fairy crisis was over before I did that. There wasn't any point in picking out a pet if I was liable to be abducted or killed at any moment, right? Wouldn't be fair to the animal. I caught myself giggling, and I knew that couldn't be good.



Time to stop brooding; time to get something done. First, I'd clean off the trowel and put it away. I carried it to the kitchen sink, and I scrubbed it and rinsed it. The dull iron seemed to have a new gloss on it, like a bush that had gotten watered after a drought. I held it to the light and stared at the old tool. I shook myself.



Okay, that had really been an unpleasant simile. I banished the idea and scrubbed. When I thought the trowel looked spotless, I washed it and dried it all over again. Then I walked quickly out the back door and through the dark to hang the damn thing back in the toolshed on its designated hook.



I wondered if I might not get a cheap new trowel at Wal-Mart after all. I wasn't sure I could use the iron one the next time I wanted to move some jonquil bulbs. It would feel like using a gun to pry out nails. I hesitated, the trowel poised to hang from its designated hook. Then I made up my mind and carried it back to the house. I paused on the back steps, admiring the last streak of light for a few moments until my stomach growled.



What a long day it had been. I was ready to settle in front of the television with a plate of something bad for me, watching some show that wouldn't improve my mind at all.



I heard the crunching of a car coming up the driveway as I was opening the screen door. I waited outside to see who my caller might be. Whoever it was, they knew me a little, because the car proceeded around to the back.



In a day full of shocks, here was another: my caller was Quinn, who was not supposed to stick his big toe into Area Five. He was driving a Ford Taurus, a rental car.



"Oh, great ," I said. I'd wanted company earlier, but not this company. As much as I'd liked and admired Quinn, this conversation promised to be just as upsetting as the day had been.



He got out of his car and strode over to me, his walk graceful, as always. Quinn is a very large shaved-bald man with pansy purple eyes. He is one of the few remaining weretigers in the world and probably the only male weretiger on the North American continent. We'd broken up the last time I'd seen him. I wasn't proud of how I'd told him or why I'd done it, but I thought I'd been pretty clear about us not being a couple.



Yet here he was, and his big warm hands were resting on my shoulders. Any pleasure I might have felt at seeing him again was drowned by the wave of anxiety that swept over me. I felt trouble in the air.



"You shouldn't be here," I said. "Eric turned down your request; he told me so."



"Did he ask you first? Did you know I wanted to see you?" The darkness was now intense enough to trigger the outside security light. Quinn's face had harsh lines in the yellow glare. His gaze locked with mine.



"No, but that's not the point," I said. I felt rage on the wind. It wasn't my rage.



"I think it is."



It was sunset. There simply wasn't time to get into an extended argument. "Didn't we say it all last time?" I didn't want to go through another scene, no matter how fond I was of this man.



"You said what you thought was all, babe. I disagree."



Oh, great. Just what I needed! But since I really do know that not everything is about me, I counted to ten and said, "I know I didn't give you any slack when I told you we shouldn't see each other anymore, Quinn, but I did mean what I said. What's changed in your personal situation? Is your mom able to take care of herself now? Or has Frannie grown up enough to be able to manage your mom if she escapes?" Quinn's mom had been through an awful time, and she'd come out of it more or less nuts. Actually, more. His sister, Frannie, was still a teenager.



He bowed his head for a moment, as if he were gathering himself. Then he looked directly into my eyes again. "Why are you harder on me than on anyone else?" he asked.



"I am not," I said instantly. But then I thought, Am I?



"Have you asked Eric to give up Fangtasia? Have you asked Bill to give up his computer enterprise? Have you asked Sam to turn his back on his family?"



"What ... ?" I began, trying to work out the connection.



"You're asking me to give up other people I love - my mother and my sister - if I want to have you," he said.



"I'm not asking you to do anything ," I said, feeling the tension inside me ratchet up to an almost intolerable level. "I told you that I wanted to be first with the guy in my life. And I figured - I still figure - that your family has got to come first with you because your mom and your sister are not exactly stand-on-their-own-two-feet kind of women. I haven't asked Eric to give up Fangtasia! Why would I do that? And where does Sam come into it?" I couldn't even think of a reason to mention Bill. I was so over him.



"Bill loves his status in the human and vampire worlds, and Eric loves his little piece of Louisiana more than he'll ever love you," Quinn said, and he sounded almost sorry for me. That was ridiculous.



"Where did all the hating come from?" I asked, holding my hands spread in front of me. "I didn't quit dating you because of any feelings I had for someone else. I quit dating you because I thought your plate was full already."



"He's trying to wall you off from everyone else who cares for you," Quinn said, focusing on me with unnerving intensity. "And look at all the dependents he has."



"You're talking about Eric?" All Eric's "dependents" were vampires who could damn well take care of themselves.



"He'll never dump his little area for you. He'd never let his little pack of sworn vamps serve someone else. He'll never - "



I couldn't stand this anymore. I gave a scream of sheer frustration. I actually stomped my foot like a three-year-old. "I haven't asked him to!" I yelled. "What are you talking about? Did you show up to tell me no one else will ever love me? What's wrong with you?"



"Yes, Quinn," said a familiar, cold voice. "What's wrong with you?"



I swear I jumped at least six inches. I'd let my quarrel with Quinn absorb my attention, and I hadn't felt Bill's arrival.



"You're frightening Sookie," Bill said from a yard behind me, and my spine shivered at the menace in his voice. "That won't happen, tiger."



Quinn snarled. His teeth began growing longer, sharper, before my eyes. Bill stood at my side in the next second. His eyes were glowing an eerie silvery brown.



Not only was I afraid they'd kill each other, I realized that I was really tired of people popping on and off of my property like it was a train station on the supernatural railroad.



Quinn's hands became clawed. A growl rumbled deep in his chest.



"No!" I said, willing them to listen to me. This was the day from hell.



"You're not even on the list, vampire," Quinn said, and his voice wasn't really his any longer. "You're the past."



"I will make you a rug on my floor," Bill said, and his voice was colder and smoother than ever, like ice on glass.



The two idiots launched themselves at each other.



I started to jump in to stop them, but the functioning part of my brain told me that would be suicidal. I thought,My grass is going to get sprinkled by a little more blood this evening . What I should have been thinking was,I need to get the hell out of the way . In fact, I should have run inside and locked the door and left them to it.



But that was hindsight. Actually, what I did was stand there for a moment, hands fluttering uselessly, trying to figure out how to separate them ... and then the two grappling figures lurched and staggered. Quinn threw Bill away from him with all his strength. Bill cannoned into me with such force that I actually went up in the air an inch or two - and then, very decisively, down I came.