"Do you not want to be a couple anymore?"
The pain in my chest was so bad I put my hand over it, pressing the area above my breast.
"Sookie?" He was kneeling by me, an arm around me.
I couldn't answer. I had no breath.
"Do you love me?" he asked.
I nodded.
"Why do you talk of leaving me?"
The pain made its way out through my eyes in the form of tears.
"I'm too scared of the other vampires and the way they are. What will he ask me to do next? He'll try to make me do something else. He'll tell me he'll kill you otherwise. Or he'll threaten Jason. And he can do it."
Bill's voice was as quiet as the sound of a cricket in the grass. A month ago, I might not have been able to hear it. "Don't cry," he told me. "Sookie, I have to tell you unwelcome facts."
The only welcome thing he could have told me at that point was that Eric was dead.
"Eric is intrigued by you now. He can tell you have mental powers that most humans don't have, or ignore if they know they possess them. He anticipates your blood is rich and sweet." Bill's voice got hoarse when he said that, and I shivered. "And you're beautiful. You're even more beautiful now. He doesn't realize you have had our blood three times."
"You know that Long Shadow bled onto me?"
"Yes. I saw."
"Is there anything magic about three times?"
He laughed, that low, rumbly, rusty laugh. "No. But the more vampire blood you drink, the more desirable you become to our kind, and actually, more desirable to anyone. And Desiree thought she was a vintage! I wonder what vampire said that to her."
"One that wanted to get in her pants," I said flatly, and he laughed again. I loved to hear him laugh.
"With all this telling me how lovely I am, are you saying that Eric, like, lusts for me?"
"Yes."
"What's to stop him from taking me? You say he's stronger than you."
"Courtesy and custom, first of all."
I didn't snort, but I came close.
"Don't discount that. We're all observant of custom, we vampires. We have to live together for centuries."
"Anything else?"
"I am not as strong as Eric, but I'm not a new vampire. He might get badly hurt in a fight with me, or I might even win if I got lucky."
"Anything else?"
"Maybe," Bill said carefully, "you yourself."
"How so?"
"If you can be valuable to him otherwise, he may leave you alone if he knows that is your sincere wish."
"But I don't want to be valuable to him! I don't want to ever see him again!"
"You promised Eric you'd help him again," Bill reminded me.
"If he turned the thief over to the police," I said. "And what did Eric do? He staked him!"
"Possibly saving your life in the process."
"Well, I found his thief!"
"Sookie, you don't know much about the world."
I stared at him, surprised. "I guess that's so."
"Things don't turn out ... even." Bill stared out into the darkness. "Even I think sometimes I don't know much, anymore." Another gloomy pause. "I have only once before seen one vampire stake another. Eric is going beyond the limits of our world."
"So, he's not too likely to take much notice of that custom and courtesy you were bragging about earlier."
"Pam may keep him to the old ways."
"What is she to him?"
"He made her. That is, he made her vampire, centuries ago. She comes back to him from time to time and helps him do whatever he is doing at the moment. Eric's always been something of a rogue, and the older he gets the more willful he gets." Calling Eric willful seemed a huge understatement to me.
"So, have we talked our way around in circles?" I asked.
Bill seemed to be considering. "Yes," he confirmed, a tinge of regret in his voice. "You don't like associating with vampires other than myself, and I have told you we have no choice."
"How about this Desiree thing?"
"He had someone drop her off on my doorstep, hoping I would be pleased he'd sent me a pretty gift. Also, it would test my devotion to you if I drank from her. Perhaps he poisoned her blood somehow, and her blood would have weakened me. Maybe she would just have been a crack in my armor." He shrugged. "Did you think I had a date?"
"Yes." I felt my face harden, thinking about Bill walking in with the girl.
"You weren't at home. I had to come find you." His tone wasn't accusatory, but it wasn't happy, either.
"I was trying to help Jason out by listening. And I was still upset from last night."
"Are we all right now?"
"No, but we're as all right as we can get," I said. "I guess no matter who I cared for, it wouldn't always go smooth. But I hadn't counted on obstacles this drastic. There's no way you can ever outrank Eric, I guess, since age is the criterion?"
"No," said Bill. "Not outrank..." and he suddenly looked thoughtful. "Though there may be something I can do along those lines. I don't want to - it goes against my nature - but we would be more secure."
I let him think.
"Yes," he concluded, ending his long brood. He didn't offer to explain, and I didn't ask.
"I love you," he said, as if that was the bottom line to whatever course of action he was considering. His face loomed over me, luminous and beautiful in the half-darkness.
"I feel the same about you," I said, and put my hands against his chest so he wouldn't tempt me. "But we have too much against us right now. If we can pry Eric off our backs, that would help. And another thing, we have to stop this murder investigation. That would be a second big piece of trouble off our backs. This murderer has the deaths of your friends to answer for, and the deaths of Maudette and Dawn to answer for." I paused, took a deep breath. "And the death of my grandmother." I blinked back tears. I'd gotten adjusted to Gran not being in the house when I came home, and I was getting used to not talking to her and sharing my day with her, but every now and then I had a stab of grief so acute it robbed me of breath.
"Why do you think the same killer is responsible for the Monroe vampires being burned?"
"I think it was the murderer who planted this idea, this vigilante thing, in the men in the bar that night. I think it was the murderer who went from group to group, egging the guys on. I've lived here all my life, and I've never seen people around here act that way. There's got to be a reason they did this time."