Dead Reckoning - Charlaine Harris [37]
After that, Pam and Eric began to move with speed, as if we had a deadline to get off the property.
Pam simply picked up Miriam and hurried to Eric’s car. He opened the back door, and she got her girlfriend in and slid in after her. Seeing that haste was the order of the night, I climbed into the front passenger seat and buckled up in silence. I looked back to see that Miriam had passed out the minute she realized she was safe.
As the car left the parking lot, Pam began sniggering and Eric grinned broadly. I was too startled to ask them what was funny.
“Victor just can’t restrain himself,” Pam said. “Making the show of my poor Miriam.”
“And then the priceless offer from the leather twins!”
“Did you see Antonio’s face?” Pam demanded. “Honestly, I haven’t had so much fun since I flashed my fangs at that old woman who complained about the color I painted my house!”
“That’ll give them something to think about,” Eric said. He glanced over at me, his fangs glistening. “That was a good moment. I can’t believe he thought we’d fall for that.”
“What if Antonio and Luis were sincere?” I asked. “What if Victor had taken Miriam’s blood or brought her over himself?” I twisted in my seat to look back at Pam.
She was looking at me almost with pity, as if I were a hopeless romantic. “He couldn’t,” she said. “He had her in a public place, she has lots of human relatives, and he has to know I’d kill him if he did that.”
“Not if you were dead first,” I said. Eric and Pam didn’t seem to have my own respect for Victor’s lethal tactics. They seemed almost insanely cocky. “And why are you both so sure that Antonio and Luis were making all that up just to see how you’d react?”
“If they meant what they said, they’ll approach us again,” Eric said bluntly. “They have no other recourse, if they’ve tried Felipe and he’s turned them down. I suspect he has. Tell me, lover, what was the problem with the drinks?”
“The problem was that he’d rubbed the inside of the glasses with fairy blood,” I said. “The human server, the guy with the gray eyes, gave me the tip-off.”
And the smiles vanished as if they’d been turned off with a switch. I had a moment of unpleasant satisfaction.
Pure fairy blood is intoxicating to vampires. There’s no telling what Pam or Eric would have done if they’d drunk from those glasses. And they’d have gulped it down as quickly as they could because the smell is just as entrancing as the actual substance.
As poisoning attempts went, this one was subtle.
“I don’t think that amount could have caused us to behave in an uncontrollable way,” Pam said. But she didn’t sound so confident.
Eric raised his blond eyebrows. “It was a cautious experiment,” he said thoughtfully. “We might have attacked anyone in the club, or we might have gone for Sookie, since she has that interesting streak of fairy. We would have made public fools of ourselves, in any case. We might have been arrested. It was an excellent thing that you stopped us, Sookie.”
“I have my uses,” I said, suppressing the jolt of fear that the idea of Eric and Pam going fairy-struck on me evinced.
“And you’re Eric’s wife,” Pam observed quietly.
Eric glared at her in the rearview mirror.
The silence that fell was so thick I wished I’d had a knife. This Pam-and-Eric secret quarrel was both upsetting and frustrating. And that was the understatement of the year.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” I asked, frightened of the answer. But anything was better than not knowing.
“Eric got a letter—” Pam began, and before I could register that he’d moved, Eric had whipped around, reached over the seat, and seized her throat. Since he was still driving, I squawked in terror.
“Eyes ahead, Eric! Not with the fighting again,” I said. “Look, just go on and tell me!”
With his right hand, Eric was still holding Pam in a grip that would have choked her if she’d been a breather. He was steering with his left hand, and we coasted to a stop on the side of the road. I couldn’t see any oncoming traffic, and there were no lights behind us, either. I didn’t know if the isolation