Sookie Stackhouse Boxed Set (Books 1-8) - Charlaine Harris [432]
Pam shrieked like a giant teakettle. I’d never heard a noise that loud come out of a throat—in this case not a human throat, but a throat nonetheless. Since Pam was definitely of the “get even” school, she pinned Hallow to the floor by gripping both her upper arms and pressing, pressing, until Hallow was flattened. Since the witch was so strong, it was a terrible struggle, and Pam was hampered by the blood streaming down her face. But Hallow was human, and Pam was not. Pam was winning until one of the witches, the hollow-cheeked man, crawled over to the two woman and bit into Pam’s neck. Both her arms were occupied, and she couldn’t stop him. He didn’t just bite, he drank, and as he drank, his strength increased, as if his battery was getting charged. He was draining right from the source. No one seemed to be watching but me. I scrambled across the limp, furry body of a wolf and one of the vampires to pummel on the hollow-cheeked man, who simply ignored me.
I would have to use the knife. I’d never done something like this; when I’d struck back at someone, it had always been a life-or-death situation, and the life and the death had been mine. This was different. I hesitated, but I had to do something quick. Pam was weakening before my eyes, and she would not be able to restrain Hallow much longer. I took the black-bladed knife with its black handle, and I held it to his throat; I jabbed him, a little.
“Let go of her,” I said. He ignored me.
I jabbed harder, and a stream of scarlet ran down the skin of his neck. He let go of Pam then. His mouth was all covered in her blood. But before I could rejoice that he’d freed her, he spun over while he was still underneath me and came after me, his eyes absolutely insane and his mouth open to drink from me, too. I could feel the yearning in his brain, the want, want, want. I put the knife to his neck again, and just as I was steeling myself, he lunged forward and pushed the blade into his own neck.
His eyes went dull almost instantly.
He’d killed himself by way of me. I don’t think he’d ever realized the knife was there.
This was a close killing, a right-in-my-face killing, and I’d been the instrument of death, however inadvertently.
When I could look up, Pam was sitting on Hallow’s chest, her knees pinning Hallow’s arms, and she was smiling. This was so bizarre that I looked around the room to find the reason, and I saw that the battle appeared to be over. I couldn’t imagine how long it had lasted, that loud but invisible struggle in the thick mist, but now I could see the results all too clearly.
Vampires don’t kill neat, they kill messy. Wolves, too, are not known for their table manners. Witches seemed to manage to splash a little less blood, but the end result was really horrible, like a very bad movie, the kind you were ashamed you’d paid to see.
We appeared to have won.
At the moment, I hardly cared. I was really tired, mentally and physically, and that meant all the thoughts of the humans, and some of the thoughts of the Weres, rolled around in my brain like clothes in a dryer. There was nothing I could do about it, so I let the tag ends drift around in my head while, using the last of my strength, I pushed off of the corpse. I lay on my back and stared up at the ceiling. Since I had no thoughts, I filled up with everyone else’s. Almost everyone was thinking the same kind of thing I was: how tired they were, how bloody the room was, how hard it was to believe they’d gone through a fight like this and survived. The spiky-haired boy had