Sookie Stackhouse Boxed Set (Books 1-8) - Charlaine Harris [810]
“Quality of the lumber,” I said as quietly as a hummingbird’s wings.
That took forever to hammer out, and it was boring, boring, boring. Some of the wannabe providers didn’t have humans with them, and I was no help with those; but most of them did. Sometimes the human had paid the vampire a substantial sum to “sponsor” him, so he could just be in the hall and pitch his woo in a one-on-one setting. By the time vendor number eight simpered to a stop in front of the queen, I was unable to suppress my yawns. I’d noticed Bill was doing a landmark business selling copies of his vampire database. For a reserved kind of guy, he did a good job of explaining and promoting his product, considering some of the vampires were very mistrustful of computers. If I heard about the “Yearly Update Package” one more time, I was gonna puke. There were lots of humans clustering around Bill, because they were more computer savvy than the vamps as a whole. While they were absorbed, I tried to get a scan in here and there, but they were just thinking megahertz and RAM and hard drives—stuff like that.
I didn’t see Quinn. Since he was a wereanimal, I figured he’d be completely over his wound of the night before. I could only take his absence as a signal. I was heart-heavy and weary.
The queen invited Dahlia, the little, pretty vampire who’d been so direct in her judgment, up to her suite for a drink. Dahlia accepted regally, and our whole party moved up to the suite. Christian Baruch tagged along; he’d been hovering around Sophie-Anne all evening.
His courtship of Sophie-Anne was heavy-handed, to say the least. I thought again of the boy toy I’d watched the previous evening, tickling the back of his ladylove in imitation of a spider, because he knew she was frightened of them, and how he’d gotten her to snuggle closer to him. I felt a lightbulb come on over my head and wondered if it was visible to anyone else.
My opinion of the hotelier plummeted. If he thought such a strategy would work on Sophie-Anne, he had a lot of thinking to do.
I didn’t see Jake Purifoy anywhere around, and I wondered what Andre had him doing. Something innocuous probably, like checking to make sure all the cars were gassed up. He wasn’t really trusted to handle anything more taxing, at least not yet. Jake’s youth and his Were heritage counted against him, and he’d have to bust his tail to earn points. But Jake didn’t have that fire in him. He was looking to the past, to his life as a Were. He had a backlog of bitterness.
Sophie’s suite had been cleaned; all the vampire suites had to be cleaned at night, of course, while the vamps were out of them. Christian Baruch started telling us about the extra help he’d had to take on to cope with the summit crowd and how nervous some of them were about cleaning rooms occupied by vampires. I could tell Sophie-Anne was not impressed by Baruch’s assumption of superiority. He was so much younger than her, he must seem like a swaggering teenager to the centuries-old queen.
Jake came in just then, and after paying his respects to the queen and meeting Dahlia, he came to sit by me. I was slumping in an uncomfortable straight chair, and he pulled a matching one over.
“What’s up, Jake?”
“Not much. I’ve been getting the queen and Andre tickets to a show for tomorrow night. It’s an all-vampire production of Hello, Dolly!”
I tried to imagine that, found I couldn’t. “What are you going to be doing? It’s marked as free time on the schedule.”
“I don’t know,” he said, a curiously remote tone in his voice. “My life has changed so much I just can’t predict what will happen. Are you going out tomorrow in the day, Sookie? Shopping, maybe? There are some wonderful stores on Widewater Drive. That’s down by the lake.”
Even I had heard of Widewater Drive, and I said, “I guess it’s possible. I’m not much of a shopper.”
“You really should