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Without a word, Eric stood and gently pulled me to my feet. I could feel my eyebrows draw together.

They were all around us. They circled the house.

Their brains were wound up to fever pitch. If Trudi hadn’t been babbling earlier, I might have heard them as they crept up to circle the house.

“Eric,” I said, trying to catch as many thoughts as I could, hearing a countdown, oh, God!

“Hit the floor!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.

Every vampire obeyed.

So when the Fellowship opened fire, it was the humans that died.

Chapter 8

A YARD AWAY, Trudi was cut down by a shotgun blast.

The dyed dark red of her hair turned another shade of red and her open eyes stared at me forever. Chuck, the bartender, was only wounded, since the structure of the bar itself offered him some protection.

Eric was lying on top of me. Given my sore condition, that was very painful, and I started to shove at him. Then I realized that if he were hit with bullets, he would most likely survive. But I wouldn’t. So I accepted his shelter gratefully for the horrible minutes of the first wave of the attack, when rifles and shotguns and handguns were fired into the suburban mansion over and over.

Instinctively, I shut my eyes while the blasting lasted. Glass shattered, vampires roared, humans screamed. The noise battered at me, just as the tidal wave of scores of brains at high gear washed over me. When it began to taper off, I looked up into Eric’s eyes. Incredibly, he was excited. He smiled at me. “I knew I’d get on top of you somehow,” he said.

“Are you trying to make me mad so I’ll forget how scared I am?”

“No, I’m just opportunistic.”

I wiggled, trying to get out from under him, and he said, “Oh, do that again. It felt great.”

“Eric, that girl I was just talking to is about three feet away from us with part of her head missing.”

“Sookie,” he said, suddenly serious, “I’ve been dead for a few hundred years. I am used to it. But she is not quite gone. There is a spark. Do you want me to bring her over?”

I was shocked speechless. How could I make that decision?

And while I thought about it, he said, “She is gone.” While I stared up at him, the silence became complete. The only noise in the house was the sobbing of Farrell’s wounded date, who was pressing both hands to his reddened thigh. From outside came the remote sounds of vehicles pulling out in a hurry up and down the quiet suburban street. The attack was over. I seemed to be having trouble breathing, and figuring out what I should do next. Surely there was something, some action, I should be taking?

This was as close to war as I would ever come.

The room was full of the survivors’ screams and the vampires’ howls of rage. Bits of stuffing from the couch and chairs floated in the air like snow. There was broken glass on everything and the heat of the night poured into the room. Several of the vampires were already up and giving chase, Joseph Velasquez among them, I noticed.

“No excuse to linger,” Eric said with a mock sigh, and lifted off of me. He looked down at himself. “My shirts always get ruined when I am around you.”

“Oh shit, Eric.” I got to my knees with clumsy haste. “You’re bleeding. You got hit. Bill! Bill!” My hair was slithering around my shoulders as I turned from side to side searching the room. The last time I’d noticed him he’d been talking to a black-haired vampire with a pronounced widow’s peak. She’d looked something like Snow White, to me. Now I half-stood to search the floor and I saw her sprawled close to a window. Something was protruding from her chest. The window had been hit by a shotgun blast, and some splinters had flown into the room. One of them had pierced her chest and killed her. Bill was not in sight, among the living or the dead.

Eric pulled off his sodden shirt and looked down at his shoulder. “The bullet is right inside the wound, Sookie,” Eric said, through clenched teeth. “Suck it out.”

“What?” I gaped at him.

“If you don’t suck it out, it will heal inside my flesh. If you are so squeamish, go get a knife and cut.”

“But I