Sookie Stackhouse Boxed Set (Books 1-8) - Charlaine Harris [690]
Something definitely off-kilter here. But with the acute vampire hearing all around, there wasn’t anything to say about it.
Quinn took my arm. We walked into a long hall that seemed to run nearly the length of the building. A Threadgill vampire was standing at the door of a room that seemed to serve as a reception area.
“Would you like to check your bag?” she asked, obviously put out at being relegated to a hat-check girl.
“No, thanks,” I said, and thought she was going to pull it out from under my arm.
“May I search it?” she asked. “We screen for weapons.”
I stared at her, always a risky thing to do to a vampire. “Of course not. I have no weapons.”
“Sookie,” Quinn said, trying not to sound alarmed. “You have to let her look in your purse. It’s procedure.”
I glared at him. “You could have told me,” I said sharply.
The door guard, who was a svelte young vamp with a figure that challenged the cut of the white pants, seized my purse with an air of triumph. She turned it out over a tray, and its few contents clattered to the metal surface: a compact, a lipstick, a tiny tube of glue, a handkerchief, a ten-dollar bill, and a tampon in a rigid plastic applicator, completely covered in plastic wrap.
Quinn was not unsophisticated enough to turn red, but he did glance discreetly away. The vampire, who had died long before women carried such items in their purses, asked me its purpose and nodded when I explained. She repacked my little evening bag and handed it to me, indicating with a hand gesture that we should proceed down the hall. She’d turned to the people who’d come in behind us, a Were couple in their sixties, before we’d even exited the room.
“What are you up to?” Quinn asked, in the quietest possible voice, as we moved along the corridor.
“Do we have to pass through any more security?” I asked, in a voice just as hushed.
“I don’t know. I don’t see any up ahead.”
“I have to do something,” I said. “Excuse me, while I find the nearest ladies’ room.” I tried to tell him, with my eyes, and with the pressure of my hand on his arm, that in a few minutes everything would be all right, and I sincerely hoped that was the truth. Quinn was clearly not happy with me, but he waited outside the ladies’ room (God knows what that had been when the building was a monastery) while I ducked into one of the stalls and made a few adjustments. When I came out, I’d tossed the tampon container into the little bin in the stall, and one of my wrists had been rebandaged. My purse was a little heavier.
The door at the end of the corridor led into the very large room that had been the monks’ refectory. Though the room was still walled with stone and large pillars supported the roof, three on the left and three on the right, the rest of the decor was considerably different now. The middle of the room was cleared for dancing, and the floor was wooden. There was a dais for musicians close to the refreshments table, and another dais at the opposite end of the room for the royalty.
Around the sides of the room were chairs in conversational groupings. The whole room was decorated in white and blue, the colors of Louisiana. One of the walls had murals depicting scenes from around the state: a swamp scene, which made me shudder; a Bourbon Street montage; a field being plowed and lumber being cut; and a fisherman hoisting up a net in the Gulf Coast. These were all scenes featuring humans, I thought, and wondered what the thinking was behind that. Then I turned to look at the wall surrounding the doorway I’d just entered, and I saw the vampire side of Louisiana life: a group of happy vampires with fiddles under their chins, playing away; a vampire police officer patrolling the French Quarter; a vampire