Sookie Stackhouse Boxed Set (Books 1-8) - Charlaine Harris [808]
“You can’t mean this! Where is your pride?” Michael was yelling and on his feet.
Two men stepped forward out of the shadows at the back of the stage. They were both vampires, of course, and they were both good-sized men. They held Michael, who put up quite a fight. I was a little shocked by the noise and the violence, but in a minute they’d take Michael off to some vampire prison, and the calm proceedings would continue.
To my absolute astonishment, Dahlia nodded to the vamp sitting on Jodi, who got up and assisted her to rise. Jodi, smiling broadly, was across the stage in one leap, like a panther. She grabbed up the stake lying on the judges’ table, and with one powerful swing of her lean arm, she buried the stake in Michael’s chest.
I was the only one who was shocked, and I clapped both hands over my mouth to keep from squeaking.
Michael looked at her with utter rage, and he even kept struggling, I suppose to free his arms so he could pull the stake out, but in a few seconds it was all over. The two vamps holding the new corpse hauled it off, and Jodi stepped off the stage, still beaming.
“Next case,” called Dahlia.
The next was the one about the vampire kid, and there were humans involved in this one. I felt less conspicuous when they came in: the hangdog parents with their vampire representative (was it possible that humans couldn’t testify before this court?) and the “mother” with her “child.”
This was a longer, sadder case, because the parents’ suffering over the loss of their son—who was still walking and talking, but not to them—was nearly palpable. I wasn’t the only one who cried, “For shame!” when Cindy Lou revealed the parents were giving her monthly payments for the boy’s upkeep. The vampire Kate argued for the parents ferociously, and it was clear she thought Cindy Lou was a trailer-trash vampire and a bad mother, but the three judges—different ones this time, and I didn’t know any of them—abided by the written contract the parents had signed and refused to give the boy a new guardian. However, they ruled, the contract had to be equally enforced on the parents’ behalf, and the boy was required to spend time with his biological parents as long as they chose to enforce the right.
The head judge, a hawk-faced guy with dark, liquid eyes, called the boy up to stand before them. “You owe these people respect and obedience, and you signed this contract, too,” he said. “You may be a minor in human law, but to us, you are as responsible as . . . Cindy Lou.” Boy, it just killed him, having to admit there was a vampire named Cindy Lou. “If you try to terrorize your human parents, or coerce them, or drink their blood, we will amputate your hand. And when it grows back, we’ll amputate it again.”
The boy could hardly be whiter than he was, and his human mother fainted. But he’d been so cocky, so sure of himself, and so dismissive of his poor parents, I thought the strong warning was necessary. I caught myself nodding.
Oh, yeah, this was fair, to threaten a kid with having his hand amputated.
But if you’d seen this kid, you might have agreed. And Cindy Lou was no prize; whoever had turned her must have been mentally and morally deficient.
I hadn’t been needed after all. I was wondering about the rest of the evening when the queen came through the double doors at the end of the room, Sigebert and Andre in close attendance. She was wearing a sapphire blue silk pantsuit with a beautiful diamond necklace and small diamond earrings. She looked classy, absolutely smooth, sleek, and perfect. Andre made a beeline to me.
“I know,” he said, “that is, Sophie-Anne tells me that I have done wrong to you. I’m not sorry, because I will do anything for her. Others don’t mean anything to me. But I do regret that I have not been able to refrain from causing something that distresses you.”
If that was an apology, it was the most half-assed one I’d ever received in my life. It left almost everything