Sookie Stackhouse Boxed Set (Books 1-8) - Charlaine Harris [895]
Jonathan.
“I mean, they were evaluating Eric’s assets, and you were considered part of that.”
“Why was this Quinn’s problem?” I asked, which may not have been the clearest way to put it, but she got my meaning.
“Our mother, our goddamned screwed-up, screw-up mother,” Frannie said bitterly. “You know she got captured and raped by some hunters, right? In Colorado. Like a hundred years ago.” Actually, it had been maybe nineteen years ago, because that was how Frannie had been conceived.
“And Quinn rescued her and killed them all, though he was just a kid, and he went in debt to the local vampires to get them to help him clean up the scene and get his mom away.”
I knew Quinn’s mother’s sad history. I was nodding frantically by now, because I wanted to get to something I hadn’t heard yet.
“Okay, well, my mom was pregnant with me after the rape,” Frannie said, glaring at me defiantly. “So she had me, but she was never right in the head, and growing up with her was kinda hard, right? Quinn was working off his debt in the pits.” (Think Gladiator with wereanimals.) “She never got right in the head,” Frannie repeated. “And she’s kept getting worse.”
“I get that,” I said, trying to keep my voice level. Bill seemed on the verge of thumping Frannie to speed up her narrative, but I shook my head.
“Okay, so she was in a nice place that Quinn was paying for outside Las Vegas, the only assisted-living center in America where you can send people like my mom.” The Deranged Weretiger Nursing Home? “But Mom got loose, and she killed some tourist and took her clothes and caught a ride into Vegas and picked up a man. She killed him, too. She robbed him and took his money and gambled until we caught up with her.” Frannie paused and took a deep breath. “Quinn was still healing from Rhodes, and this about killed him.”
“Oh, no.” But I had a feeling I hadn’t heard the bottom line on this incident yet.
“Yeah, what’s worse, right? The escape, or the killing?”
Probably the tourists had had an opinion on that.
I vaguely noticed that Amelia had entered the room, and I also realized that she didn’t seem startled to see Bill. So she’d been awake when Bill had taken Pam’s place. Amelia hadn’t met Frannie before, but she didn’t interrupt the flow.
“Anyway, there’s a huge vampire cartel in Vegas, because the pickings are so rich,” Frannie told us. “They tracked down Mom before the police could catch her. They cleaned up after her again. Turns out that Whispering Palms, the place that lost her, had alerted all the supes in the area to be on the lookout. By the time I got to the casino where they’d grabbed Mom, the vamps were telling Quinn that they’d taken care of everything and now there was more debt for him to work off. He said he was coming off a bad injury and he couldn’t go back in the pits. They offered to take me on as a blood donor or a whore for visiting vamps instead, and he just about took out the one who said that.”
Of course. I exchanged a glance with Bill. The offer to “employ” Frannie had been designed to make anything else look better.
“Then they said they knew of a really weak kingdom that was just about up for grabs, and they meant Louisiana. Quinn told ’em they could get it for free if the King of Nevada would just marry Sophie-Anne, her being in no position to argue. But it turned out the king was right there. He said he detested cripples and no way would he marry a vampire who’d killed her previous husband, no matter how sweet her kingdom was, even with Arkansas thrown in.” Sophie-Anne was the titular head of Arkansas as well as Louisiana since she’d been found innocent of her husband’s (the King of Arkansas’s) murder in a vampire court. Sophie-Anne hadn’t had a chance to consolidate her claim, because of the bombing. But I was sure it was on her to-do list, right after her legs grew back.
Bill flipped his phone open again and began punching in numbers. Whoever he called, he didn’t get an answer.