Sookie Stackhouse Boxed Set (Books 1-8) - Charlaine Harris [660]
Ectoplasmic Hadley looked around her, hoping for help that didn’t come. She looked desperately uncertain. Her fingers never left Jake’s neck as she felt for his pulse.
Finally she bent over him and said something to him.
“It’s the only way,” Andre translated. “You may hate me, but it’s the only way.” We watched Hadley tear at her wrist with her own fangs and then put her bleeding wrist to Jake’s mouth, watched the blood trickle inside, watched him revive enough to grip her arms and pull her down to him. When Hadley made Jake let go of her, she looked exhausted, and he looked as if he were having convulsions.
“The Were does not make a good vampire,” Sigebert said in a whisper. “I’ve never before seen a Were brought over.”
It was sure hard for poor Jake Purifoy. I began to forgive him the horror of the evening before, seeing his suffering. My cousin Hadley gathered him up and carried him up the stairs, pausing every now and then to look around her. I followed her up one more time, the queen right behind me. We watched Hadley pull off Jake’s ripped clothes, wrap a towel around his neck until the bleeding stopped, and stow him in the closet, carefully covering him and closing the door so the morning sun wouldn’t burn the new vampire, who would have to lie in the dark for three days. Hadley crammed the bloody towel into her hamper. Then she stuffed another towel into the open space at the bottom of the door, to make sure Jake was safe.
Then she sat in the hall and thought. Finally she got her cell phone and called a number.
“She asks for Waldo,” Andre said. When Hadley’s lips began moving again, Andre said, “She makes the appointment for the next night. She says she must talk to the ghost of Marie Laveau, if the ghost will really come. She needs advice, she says.” After a little more conversation, Hadley shut her phone and got up. She gathered up the former Were’s torn and bloody clothing and sealed it in a bag.
“You should get the towel, too,” I advised, in a whisper, but my cousin left it in the hamper for me to find when I arrived. Hadley got the car keys out of the trouser pockets, and when she went down the stairs, she got into the car and drove away with the garbage bag.
18
YOUR MAJESTY, WE HAVE TO STOP,” AMELIA SAID, and the queen gave a flick of her hand that might have been agreement.
Terry was so exhausted she was leaning heavily against the railing of the stairs, and Patsy was looking almost as haggard out on the gallery. The nerdy Bob seemed unchanged, but then he’d wisely seated himself in a chair to start with. At Amelia’s wordless signal, they began undoing the spell they’d cast, and gradually the eerie atmosphere lessened. We became an ill-assorted bunch of weird people in a courtyard in New Orleans, rather than helpless witnesses to a magical reenactment.
Amelia went to the corner storage shed and pulled out some folding chairs. Sigebert and Wybert did not understand the mechanism, so Amelia and Bob set the chairs out. After the queen and the witches sat, there was one remaining seat, and I took it after a silent to and fro between me and the four vampires.
“So we know what happened the next night,” I said wearily. I was feeling a little silly in my fancy dress and high-heeled sandals. It would be nice to put on my regular clothes.
“Uh, ’scuse me, you might, but the rest of us don’t, and we want to know,” Bob said. He seemed oblivious to the fact that he ought to be shaking in his sandals in the queen’s presence.
There was something kind of likable about the geeky witch. And all four had worked so hard; if they wanted to know the rest of the story, there wasn’t any reason they couldn’t hear it. The queen raised no objection. Even Jade Flower, who had resheathed her sword, looked faintly interested.
“The next night, Waldo lured Hadley to the cemetery with the story of the Marie Laveau grave and the vampire tradition that