• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Arlene curtly briefed me on the tables as she headed out the back door, her face set hard against me. As I watched her go, I wondered how her kids were. I used to babysit them a lot. They probably hated me now, if they listened to their mother.

I shook off my melancholy, because Sam didn’t pay me to be moody. I made the rounds of the customers, refreshed drinks, made sure everyone had enough food, brought a clean fork for a woman who’d dropped hers, supplied extra napkins to the table where Catfish Hennessy was eating chicken strips, and exchanged cheerful words with the guys seated at the bar. I treated the FotS table just like I treated everyone else, and they didn’t seem to be paying me any special attention, which was just fine with me. I had every expectation that they’d leave with no trouble . . . until Pam walked in.

Pam is white as a sheet of paper and looks just like Alice in Wonderland would look if she’d grown up to become a vampire. In fact, this evening Pam even had a blue band restraining her straight fair hair, and she was wearing a dress instead of her usual pants set. She was lovely—even if she looked like a vampire cast in an episode of Leave It to Beaver. Her dress had little puff sleeves with white trim, and her collar had white trim, too. The tiny buttons down the front of her bodice were white, to match the polka dots on the skirt. No hose, I noticed, but any hose she bought would look bizarre since the rest of her skin was so pale.

“Hey, Pam,” I said as she made a beeline for me.

“Sookie,” she said warmly, and gave me a kiss as light as a snowflake. Her lips felt cool on my cheek.

“What’s up?” I asked. Pam usually worked at Fangtasia in the evening.

“I have a date,” she said. “Do you think I look good?” She spun around.

“Oh, sure,” I said. “You always look good, Pam.” That was only the truth. Though Pam’s clothing choices were often ultra-conservative and strangely dated, that didn’t mean they didn’t become her. She had a kind of sweet-but-lethal charm. “Who’s the lucky guy?”

She looked as arch as a vampire over two hundred years old can look. “Who says it’s a guy?” she said.

“Oh, right.” I glanced around. “Who’s the lucky person?”

Just then my roomie walked in. Amelia was wearing a beautiful pair of black linen pants and heels with an off-white sweater and a pair of amber and tortoiseshell earrings. She looked conservative, too, but in a more modern way. Amelia strode over to us, smiled at Pam, and said, “Had a drink yet?”

Pam smiled in a way I’d never seen her smile before. It was . . . coy. “No, waiting for you.”

They sat at the bar and Sam served them. Soon they were chatting away, and when their drinks were gone, they got up to leave.

When they passed me on their way out, Amelia said, “I’ll see you when I see you”—her way of telling me she might not be home tonight.

“Okay, you two have fun,” I said. Their departure was followed by more than one pair of male eyes. If corneas steamed up like glasses do, all the guys in the bar would be seeing blurry.

I made the round of my tables again, fetching new beers for one, leaving the bill at another, until I reached the table with the two guys wearing the FotS shirts. They were still watching the door as though they expected Pam to jump back inside and scream, “BOO!”

“Did I just see what I thought I saw?” one of the men asked me. He was in his thirties, clean-shaven, brown-haired, just another guy. The other man was someone I would have eyed with caution if we’d been in an elevator alone. He was thin, had a beard fringe along his jaw, was decorated with a few tattoos that looked like home jobs to me—jail tats—and he was carrying a knife strapped to his ankle, a thing that hadn’t been too hard for me to spot once I’d heard in his mind that he was armed.

“What do you think you just saw?” I asked sweetly. Brown Hair thought I was a bit simple. But that was a good camouflage, and it meant that Arlene hadn’t sunk to telling all and sundry about my little peculiarities.