"Oh," she said gently, "you have no idea." Sophie-Anne closed her eyes for just a second, as if she were too anxious for words. "Andre," she said, and with that word he took off for the bedroom - didn't need any directions, I noticed - and while he was gone, the queen looked oddly incomplete. I wondered why he hadn't accompanied her to Bon Temps, and on an impulse, I asked her.
She looked at me, her crystalline eyes wide and blank. "I was not supposed to be gone," she said. "I knew if Andre showed himself in New Orleans, everyone would assume I was here, too." I wondered if the reverse would be true. If the queen was here, would everyone assume Andre was, also? And that sparked a thought in me, a thought that had gone before I could quite grasp hold of it.
Andre came back at that moment, the tiniest shake of his head telling the queen he hadn't found what she wanted to reclaim. For a moment, Sophie-Anne looked quite unhappy. "Hadley did this in a minute of anger," the queen said, and I thought she was talking to herself. "But she may bring me down from beyond the veil." Then her face relaxed into its usual emotionless state.
"I'll keep an eye open for the bracelet," I said. I suspected that the value of the jewelry did not lie in its appraisal. "Would that bracelet have been left here the last night before the wedding?" I asked cautiously.
I suspected my cousin Hadley had stolen the bracelet from the queen out of sheer pique that the queen was getting married. That seemed like a Hadley thing to do. If I'd known about Hadley's concealment of the bracelet, I would have asked the witches to roll the clock back on the ectoplasmic reconstruction. We could have watched Hadley hide the thing.
The queen gave one short nod. "I must have it back," the queen said. "You understand, it's not the value of the diamond that concerns me? You understand, a wedding between vampire rulers is not a love match, where much can be forgiven? To lose a gift from your spouse, that's a very grave offense. And our spring ball is scheduled for two nights from now. The king expects to see me wearing his gifts. If I'm not..." Her voice trailed away, and even Andre looked almost worried.
"I'm getting your point," I said. I'd noticed the tension already rolling through the halls at Sophie's headquarters. There'd be hell to pay, and Sophie-Anne would be the one to pay it. "If it's here, you'll get it back. Okay?" I spread my hands, asking her if she believed me.
"All right," she said. "Andre, I can't spend any more time here. Jade Flower will report the fact that I came up here with Sookie. Sookie, we must pretend to have had sex."
"Sorry, anyone who knows me knows I don't do women. I don't know who you expect Jade Flower's reporting to..." (Of course I did, and that would be the king, but it didn't seem tactful to say "I know your business," just then.) "But if they've done any homework, that's just a fact about me."
"Perhaps you had sex with Andre, then," she said calmly. "And you let me watch."
I thought of several questions, the first one being, "Is that the usual procedure with you?" followed by, "It's not okay to misplace a bracelet, but okay to bump pelvises with someone else?" But I clamped my mouth shut. If someone were holding a gun to my head, I'd actually have to vote for having sex with the queen rather than with Andre, no matter what my gender preference, because Andre creeped me out big-time. But if we were just pretending...
In a businesslike way, Andre removed his tie, folded it, put it in his pocket, and undid a few shirt buttons. He beckoned to me with a crook of his fingers. I approached him warily. He took me in his arms and held me close, pressed against him, and bent his head to my neck. For a second I thought he was going to bite, and I had a flare of absolute panic, but instead he inhaled. That's a deliberate act for a vampire.
"Put your mouth on my neck," he said, after another long whiff of me. "Your lipstick will transfer."
I did as he told me. He was cold as ice. This was like... well, this was just weird. I thought of the picture-taking session with Claude; I'd spent a lot of time lately pretending to have sex.
"I love the smell of fairy. Do you think she knows she has fairy blood?" he asked Sophie-Anne, while I was in the process of transferring my lipstick.
My head snapped back then. I stared right into his eyes, and he stared right back at me. He was still holding me, and I understood that he was ensuring I would smell like him and he would smell like me, as if we'd actually done the deed. He definitely wasn't up for the real thing, which was a relief.
"I what?" I hadn't heard him correctly, I was sure. "I have what?"
"He has a nose for it," the queen said. "My Andre." She looked faintly proud.
"I was hanging around with my friend Claudine earlier in the day," I said. "She's a fairy. That's where the smell is coming from." I really must need to shower.
"You permit?" Andre asked, and without waiting for an answer, he jabbed my wounded arm with a fingernail, right above the bandage.
"Yow!" I said in protest.
He let a little blood trickle onto his finger, and he put it in his mouth. He rolled it around, as if it were a sip of wine, and at last he said, "No, this smell of fairy is not from association. It's in your blood." Andre looked at me in a way that was meant to tell me that his words made it a done deal. "You have a little streak of fairy. Maybe your grandmother or your grandfather was half-fey?"
"I don't know anything about it," I said, knowing I sounded stupid, but not knowing what else to say. "If any of my grandparents were other than a hundred percent human, they didn't pass that information along."
"No, they wouldn't," the queen said, matter-of-factly. "Most humans of fairy descent hide the fact, because they don't really believe it. They prefer to think their parents are mad." She shrugged. Inexplicable! "But that blood would explain why you have supernatural suitors and not human admirers."
"I don't have human admirers because I don't want 'em," I said, definitely piqued. "I can read their minds, and that just knocks them out of the running. If they're not put off from the get-go by my reputation for weirdness," I added, back into my too-much-honesty groove.
"It's a sad comment on humans that none of them are tolerable to one who can read their minds," the queen said.
I guess that was the final word on the value of mind-reading ability. I decided it would be better to stop the conversation. I had a lot to think about.