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“Yep,” I said, and got up to answer it.

Mr. Cataliades hadn’t had the kindness of a maid, so he was still in the soiled clothes of the day before. But he managed to look dignified, anyway, and his hands and face were clean.

“Please, how is everyone?” I asked.

“Sophie-Anne has lost her legs, and I don’t know if they’ll come back,” he said.

“Oh, geez,” I said, wincing.

“Sigebert fought free of the debris after dark,” he continued. “He’d hidden in a safe pocket in the parking garage, where he landed after the explosions. I suspect he found someone to feed off, because he was healthier than he ought to have been. But if that’s the case, he shoved the body into one of the fires, because we would have heard if a drained body had been found.”

I hoped the donor had been one of the Fellowship guys.

“Your king,” Mr. Cataliades said to Barry, “is so injured it may take him a decade to recover. Until the situation is clear, Joseph leads, though he’ll be challenged soon. The king’s child Rachel is dead; perhaps Sookie told you?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I just had too much bad news to finish getting through it all.”

“And Sookie has told me the human Cecile perished.”

“What about Diantha?” I asked, hesitating to do so. It had to be significant that Mr.Cataliades hadn’t mentioned his niece.

“Missing,” he said briefly “And yet that piece of filth, Glassport, has only bruises.”

“I’m sorry for both things,” I said.

Barry seemed numb. All traces of his flippant mood had vanished. He looked smaller, sitting on the edge of the bed. The cocky sharp dresser I’d met in the lobby of the Pyramid had gone underground, at least for a while.

“I told you about Gervaise,” Mr. Cataliades said. “I identified his woman’s body this morning. What was her name?”

“Carla. I can’t remember her last name. It’ll come to me.”

“The first name will probably be enough for them to identify her. One of the corpses in hotel uniform had a computer list in his pocket.”

“They weren’t all in on it,” I said with some certainty.

“No, of course not,” Barry said. “Only a few.”

We looked at him.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I overheard them.”

“When?”

“The night before.”

I bit the inside of my mouth, hard.

“What did you hear?” Mr. Cataliades asked in a level voice.

“I was with Stan in the, you know, the buy-and-sell thing. I had noticed the waiters and so on were dodging me, and then I watched to see if they were avoiding Sookie as well. So I thought, ‘They know what you are, Barry, and there’s something they don’t want you to know. You better check it out.’ I found a good place to sort of skulk behind some of those fake palm trees, close by the service door, and I could get a reading on what they were thinking inside. They didn’t spell it out or anything, okay?” He had gotten an accurate reading on our thoughts, too. “It was just, like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna get those vamps, damn them, and if we take some of their human slaves, well, that’s just too bad, we’ll live with it. Damned by association.’ ”

I could only sit there and look at him.

“No, I didn’t know when or what they were going to do! I went to bed finally kind of worrying about them, what the plan was, and when I couldn’t settle into a good sleep, I finally quit trying and called you. And we tried to get everyone out,” he said, and began crying.

I sat beside him and put my arm around him. I didn’t know what to say. Of course, he could tell what I was thinking.

“Yes, I wish I’d said something before I did,” he said in a choked voice. “Yes, I did the wrong thing. But I thought if I spoke up before I knew something for sure, the vamps would fall on them and drain them. Or they’d want me to point out who knew and who didn’t. And I couldn’t do that.”

There was a long silence.

“Mr. Cataliades, have you seen Quinn?” I asked to break the silence.

“He’s at the human hospital. He couldn’t stop them from taking him.”

“I have to go see him.”

“How serious is your fear that the authorities will try to coerce you into doing their bidding?”

Barry raised his head and looked at me. “Pretty