"What has happened to you?" he asked.
I glared at him, so incensed I could hardly speak. "I am a message to you," I said, almost in a whisper. "This woman in the woods made Bill's car stop, and maybe even made us argue, and then she came up to me with this hog."
"A pig?" Eric could not have been more astonished if I'd said she had a canary up her nose.
"Oink, oink. Razorback. Wild pig. And she said she wanted to send you a message, and I turned in time to keep her from getting my face, but she got my back, and then she left."
"Your face. She would have gotten your face," Bill said. I saw his hands clenching by his thighs, and the back of him as he began pacing around the office. "Eric, her cuts are not so deep. What's wrong with her?"
"Sookie," Eric said gently, "what did this woman look like?"
His face was right by mine, his thick golden hair almost touching my face.
"She looked nuts, I'll tell you how she looked. And she called you Eric Northman."
"That's the last name I use for human dealings," he said. "By looking nuts, you mean she looked... how?"
"Her clothes were all ragged and she had blood around her mouth and in her teeth, like she'd just eaten something raw. She was carrying this kind of wand thing, with something on the end of it. Her hair was long and tangled... look, speaking of hair, my hair is getting stuck to my back." I gasped.
"Yes, I see." Eric began trying to separate my long hair from my wounds, where blood was acting as an adherent as it thickened.
Pam came in then, with the doctor. If I had hoped Eric meant a regular doctor, like a stethoscope and tongue depressor kind of person, I was once again doomed to disappointment. This doctor was a dwarf, who hardly had to bend over to look me in the eyes. Bill hovered, vibrating with tension, while the small woman examined my wounds. She was wearing a pair of white pants and a tunic, just like doctors at the hospital; well, just like doctors used to, before they started wearing that green color, or blue, or whatever crazy print came their way. Her face was full of her nose, and her skin was olive. Her hair was golden brown and coarse, incredibly thick and wavy. She wore it clipped fairly short. She put me in mind of a hobbit. Maybe she was a hobbit. My understanding of reality had taken several raps to the head in the past few months.
"What kind of doctor are you?" I asked, though it took some time for me to collect myself enough.
"The healing kind," she said in a surprisingly deep voice. "You have been poisoned."
"So that's why I keeping thinking I'm gonna die," I muttered.
"You will, quite soon," she said.
"Thanks a lot, Doc. What can you do about that?"
"We don't have a lot of choices. You've been poisoned. Have you ever heard of Komodo dragons? Their mouths are teeming with bacteria. Well, maenad wounds have the same toxic level. After a dragon has bitten you, the creature tracks you for hours, waiting for the bacteria to kill you. For maenads, the delayed death adds to the fun. For Komodo dragons, who knows?"
Thanks for the National Geographic side trip, Doc. "What can you do?" I asked, through gritted teeth.
"I can close the exterior wounds. But your bloodstream has been compromised, and your blood must be removed and replaced. That is a job for the vampires." The good doctor seemed positively jolly at the prospect of everyone working together. On me.
She turned to the gathered vamps. "If only one of you takes the poisoned blood, that one will be pretty miserable. It's the element of magic that the maenad imparts. The Komodo dragon bite would be no problem for you guys." She laughed heartily.
I hated her. Tears streamed down my face from the pain.
"So," she continued, "when I'm finished, each of you take a turn, removing just a little. Then we'll give her a transfusion."
"Of human blood," I said, wanting to make that perfectly clear. I'd had to have Bill's blood once to survive massive injuries and once to survive an examination of sorts, and I'd had another vampire's blood by accident, unlikely as that sounds. I'd been able to see changes in me after that blood ingestion, changes I didn't want to amplify by taking another dose. Vampire blood was the drug of choice among the wealthy now, and as far as I was concerned, they could have it.
"If Eric can pull some strings and get the human blood," the dwarf said. "At least half the transfusion can be synthetic. I'm Dr. Ludwig, by the way."
"I can get the blood, and we owe her the healing," I heard Eric say, to my relief. I would have given a lot to see Bill's face, at that moment. "What is your type, Sookie?" Eric asked.
"O positive," I said, glad my blood was so common.
"That shouldn't be a problem," Eric said. "Can you take care of that, Pam?"
Again, a sense of movement in the room. Dr. Ludwig bent forward and began licking my back. I shrieked.
"She's the doctor, Sookie," Bill said. "She will heal you this way."
"But she'll get poisoned," I said, trying to think of an objection that wouldn't sound homophobic and sizist. Truly, I didn't want anyone licking my back, female dwarf or large male vampire.
"She is the healer," Eric said, in a rebuking kind of way. "You must accept her treatment."
"Oh, all right," I said, not even caring how sullen I sounded. "By the way, I haven't heard an 'I'm sorry' from you yet." My sense of grievance had overwhelmed my sense of self-preservation.
"I am sorry that the maenad picked on you."
I glared at him. "Not enough," I said. I was trying hard to hang on to this conversation.
"Angelic Sookie, vision of love and beauty, I am prostrate that the wicked evil maenad violated your smooth and voluptuous body, in an attempt to deliver a message to me."
"That's more like it." I would have taken more satisfaction in Eric's words if I hadn't been jabbed with pain just then. (The doctor's treatment was not exactly comfortable.) Apologies had better be either heartfelt or elaborate, and since Eric didn't have a heart to feel (or at least I hadn't noticed it so far) he might as well distract me with words.
"I take it the message means that she's going to war with you?" I asked, trying to ignore the activities of Dr. Ludwig. I was sweating all over. The pain in my back was excruciating. I could feel tears trickling down my face. The room seemed to have acquired a yellow haze; everything looked sickly.
Eric looked surprised. "Not exactly," he said cautiously. "Pam?"