"Why should you care?"
"Because that was the deal! I know Hugo is a shit, and I hate him, too, but I feel sorry for him; and I don't think I can be implicated in his death and live with a clear conscience."
"Sookie, he will still be alive when you get up. We'll talk about it then."
I felt sleep pulling me under like the undertow of the surf. It was hard to believe it was only two o'clock in the morning.
"Thanks for coming after me."
Bill said, after a pause, "First you weren't at the Fellowship, just traces of your blood and dead ra**st. When I found you weren't at the hospital, that you had been spirited out of there somehow..."
"Mmmmh?"
"I was very, very scared. No one had any idea where you were. In fact, while I stood there talking to the nurse who admitted you, your name went off the computer screen."
I was impressed. Those shapeshifters were organized to an amazing degree. "Maybe I should send Luna some flowers," I said, hardly able to get the words out of my mouth.
Bill kissed me, a very satisfying kiss, and that was the last thing I remembered.
Chapter 7
I turned over laboriously and peered at the illuminated clock on the bedside table. It was not yet dawn, but dawn would come soon. Bill was in his coffin already: the lid was closed. Why was I awake? I thought it over.
There was something I had to do. Part of me stood back in amazement at my own stupidity as I pulled on some shorts and a T-shirt and slid my feet into sandals. I looked even worse in the mirror, to which I gave only a sideways glance. I stood with my back to it to brush my hair. To my astonishment and pleasure, my purse was sitting on the table in the sitting room. Someone had retrieved it from the Fellowship headquarters the night before. I stuck my plastic key in it and made my way painfully down the silent halls.
Barry was not on duty anymore, and his replacement was too well trained to ask me what the hell I was doing going around looking like something a train had dragged in. He got me a cab and I told the driver where I needed to go. The driver looked at me in the rearview mirror. "Wouldn't you rather go to a hospital?" he suggested uneasily.
"No. I've already been." That hardly seemed to reassure him.
"Those vampires treat you so bad, why do you hang around them?"
"People did this to me," I said. "Not vampires."
We drove off. Traffic was light, it being nearly dawn on a Sunday morning. It only took fifteen minutes to get to the same place I'd been the night before, the Fellowship parking lot.
"Can you wait for me?" I asked the driver. He was a man in his sixties, grizzled and missing a front tooth. He wore a plaid shirt with snaps instead of buttons.
"I reckon I can do that," he said. He pulled a Louis L'Amour western out from under his seat and switched on a dome light to read.
Under the glare of the sodium lights, the parking lot showed no visible traces of the events of the night before. There were only a couple of vehicles remaining, and I figured they'd been abandoned the night before. One of these cars was probably Gabe's. I wondered if Gabe had had a family; I hoped not. For one thing, he was such a sadist he must have made their lives miserable, and for another, for the rest of their lives they'd have to wonder how and why he'd died. What would Steve and Sarah Newlin do now? Would there be enough members left of their Fellowship to carry on? Presumably the guns and provisions were still in the church. Maybe they'd been stockpiling against the apocalypse.
Out of the dark shadows next to the church a figure emerged. Godfrey. He was still bare-chested, and he still looked like a fresh-faced sixteen. Only the alien character of the tattoos and his eyes gave the lie to his body.
"I came to watch," I said, when he was close to me, though maybe "bear witness" would have been more accurate.
"Why?"
"I owe it to you."
"I am an evil creature."
"Yes, you are." There just wasn't any getting around that. "But you did a good thing, saving me from Gabe."
"By killing one more man? My conscience hardly knew the difference. There have been so many. At least I spared you some humiliation."
His voice grabbed at my heart. The growing light in the sky was still so faint that the parking lot security lights remained on, and by their glow I examined the young, young face.
All of a sudden, absurdly, I began to cry.
"That's nice," Godfrey said. His voice was already remote. "Someone to cry for me at the end. I had hardly expected that." He stepped back to a safe distance.
And then the sun rose.
***
When I got back in the cab, the driver stowed away his book.
"They have a fire going over there?" he asked. "I thought I saw some smoke. I almost came to see what was happening."
"It's out now," I said.
***
I mopped at my face for a mile or so, and then I stared out the window as the stretches of city emerged from the night.
Back at the hotel, I let myself into our room again. I pulled off my shorts, lay down on the bed, and just as I was preparing myself for a long period of wakefulness, I fell deep asleep.
Bill woke me up at sundown, in his favorite way. My T-shirt was pushed up, and his dark hair brushed my chest. It was like waking up halfway down the road, so to speak; his mouth was sucking so tenderly on half of what he told me was the most beautiful pair of br**sts in the world. He was very careful of his fangs, which were fully down. That was only one of the evidences of his arousal. "Do you feel up to doing this, enjoying it, if I am very, very careful?" he whispered against my ear.
"If you treat me like I was made of glass," I murmured, knowing that he could.
"But that doesn't feel like glass," he said, his hand moving gently. "That feels warm. And wet."
I gasped.
"That much? Am I hurting you?" His hand moved more forcefully.
"Bill" was all I could say. I put my lips on his, and his tongue began a familiar rhythm.
"Lie on your side," he whispered. "I will take care of everything."
And he did.
"Why were you partly dressed?" he asked, later. He'd gotten up to get a bottle of blood from the refrigerator in the room, and he'd warmed it in the microwave. He hadn't taken any of my blood, in consideration of my weakened state.
"I went to see Godfrey die."
His eyes glowed down at me. "What?"
"Godfrey met the dawn." The phrase I had once considered embarrassingly melodramatic flowed quite naturally from my mouth.