Sookie Stackhouse Boxed Set (Books 1-8) - Charlaine Harris [198]
He bared his teeth at me. “I took this bullet for you. You can get it out for me. You are no coward.”
I forced myself to steady. I used his discarded shirt as a swab. The bleeding was slowing, and by peering into the torn flesh, I could just see the bullet. If I’d had long fingernails like Trudi, I’d have been able to get it out, but my fingers are short and blunt, and my nails are clipped close. I sighed in resignation.
The phrase “biting the bullet” took on a whole new meaning as I bent to Eric’s shoulder.
Eric gave a long moan as I sucked, and I felt the bullet pop into my mouth. He’d been right. The rug could hardly be stained any worse than it already was, so though it made me feel like a real heathen, I spat the bullet onto the floor along with most of the blood in my mouth. But some of it, inevitably, I swallowed. His shoulder was already healing. “This room reeks of blood,” he whispered.
“Well, there,” I said, and looked up. “That was the grossest—”
“Your lips are bloody.” He seized my face in both hands and kissed me.
It’s hard not to respond when a master of the art of kissing is laying one on you. And I might have let myself enjoy it—well, enjoy it more—if I hadn’t been so worried about Bill; because let’s face it, brushes with death have that effect. You want to reaffirm the fact that you’re alive. Though vampires actually aren’t, it seems they are no more immune to that syndrome than humans, and Eric’s libido was up because of the blood in the room.
But I was worried about Bill, and I was shocked by the violence, so after a long hot moment of forgetting the horror around me, I pulled away. Eric’s lips were bloody now. He licked them slowly. “Go look for Bill,” he said in a thick voice.
I glanced at his shoulder again, to see the hole had begun to close. I picked up the bullet off the carpet, tacky as it was with blood, and wrapped it in a scrap from Eric’s shirt. It seemed like a good memento, at the time. I really don’t know what I was thinking. There were still the injured and dead on the floor in the room, but most of those who were still alive had help from other humans or from two vampires who hadn’t joined in the chase.
Sirens were sounding in the distance.
The beautiful front door was splintered and pitted. I stood to one side to open it, just in case there was a lone vigilante in the yard, but nothing happened. I peered around the doorframe.
“Bill?” I called. “Are you okay?”
Just then he sauntered back in the yard looking positively rosy.
“Bill,” I said, feeling old and grim and gray. A dull horror, that really was just a deep disappointment, filled the pit of my stomach.
He stopped in his tracks.
“They fired at us and killed some of us,” he said. His fangs gleamed, and he was shiny with excitement.
“You just killed somebody.”
“To defend us.”
“To get vengeance.”
There was a clear difference between the two, in my mind, at that moment. He seemed nonplussed.
“You didn’t even wait to see if I was okay,” I said. Once a vampire, always a vampire. Tigers can’t change their stripes. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I heard every warning anyone had ever fed me, in the warm drawl of home.
I turned and went back into the house, walking obliviously through the bloodstains and chaos and mess as if I saw such things every day. Some of the things I saw I didn’t even register I’d seen, until the next week when my brain would suddenly throw out a picture for my viewing: maybe a closeup of a shattered skull, or a spouting artery. What was important to me at the moment was that I find my purse. I found that purse in the second place I looked. While Bill fussed with the wounded so he wouldn’t have to talk to me, I walked out of that house and got in that rental car and, despite my anxiety, I drove. Being at this house was worse than the fear of big city traffic. I pulled away from the house right before the police got there.
After I’d driven a few