Since the fact that Danny was totally smitten with Kennedy was obvious to the dimmest bulb, we were all struck silent with astonishment at her blindness.
"Did you ask him?" Michele said, in her forthright way.
"Hell, no!" Kennedy was too proud (and too scared, but only I knew that) to ask Danny directly.
"Well, I don't know who to ask or what to ask, but if I hear anything, I'll tell you. I really don't think you need to worry about Danny stepping out on you," I said. How such massive insecurity could lurk behind such a pretty face was amazing to me.
"Thanks, Sookie." There was a little sob in her voice. Oh, Lord. All the fun of the evening was draining away in a hurry.
We pulled up at the front of my house none too soon. I said my good-byes and my thank-yous in my brightest and most cheerful voice, and then I was hurrying to my front door. Of course the big security light was on, and of course Tara didn't back out until I'd reached my front door, unlocked it, and stepped inside. I locked the door behind me instantly. Though there were magical wards around the house to keep supernatural enemies away, locks and keys never hurt.
Not only had I worked today, I'd endured the raucous crowd and the pulse-pounding music, and there was all the drama with my friends, too. If you're telepathic, your brain gets exhausted. But in a contradictory way, I felt too twitchy and restless to head directly to my bedroom. I decided to check my e-mail.
It had been a couple of days since I'd had a chance to sit down at the computer. I had ten messages. Two were from Kennedy and Holly, setting a time to pick me up. Since that was a done deal, I tapped the Delete button. The next three were ads. Those were gone in a flash. There was a note from Amelia with an attachment, which proved to be a picture of her and her boyfriend, Bob, sitting at a cafe in Paris. "We're having a good time," she wrote. "The community over here is very welcoming. Think my little problem with my NO community has been forgiven. What about you and me?"
"Community" was Amelia's code word for "coven." Amelia's little problem had arisen when she'd accidentally turned Bob into a cat. Now that he was a man again, they'd resumed their relationship. Go figure. And now Paris! "Some people just lead charmed lives," I said out loud. As for Amelia and me being "okay"-she'd offended me deeply by trying to shove Alcide Herveaux into my sex life. I'd expected better from her. No, I hadn't entirely forgiven her, but I was trying.
At that moment there was a quiet knock on the front door. I jumped and spun around in the swivel chair. I hadn't heard a vehicle, or footsteps. Normally, that would mean a vampire had come calling; but when I cast out my extra sense, the brain it encountered was not the blank of a vampire's, but something else entirely.
There was another discreet knock. I edged to the window and looked out. Then I unlocked the door and flung it open.
"Great-grandfather," I said, and leaped up and into his embrace. "I thought I'd never see you again! How are you? Come in!"
Niall smelled wonderful-fairies do. To some extra-sensitive vampire noses, I have a faint trace of the same odor, though I can't detect it myself.
My ex-boyfriend Bill had told me once that to him the fae smelled like his memory of the taste of apples.
Enveloped in my great-grandfather's overwhelming presence, I experienced the rush of affection and amazement I always did when I was with him. Tall and regal, clad in an immaculate black suit, white shirt, and black tie, Niall was both beautiful and ancient.
He was also a dab unreliable when it came to facts. Tradition says fairies can't lie, and the fairies themselves will tell you so-but they sure skirt the truth when it suits them. Sometimes I thought that Niall had lived for so long that his memory simply skipped a beat or two. It was a struggle to remember this when I was with him, but I forced myself to keep it in my mind.
"I'm well, as you see." He gestured at his magnificence, though to do him credit I believe he simply intended to draw my attention to his unwounded state. "And you are beautiful, as always."
Fairies are also somewhat flowery in their speech-unless they've been living among humans for a long time, like Claude.
"I thought you were sealed off."
"I widened the portal in your woods," he said, as if the action had been a casual whim of his. After the big deal he'd made about sealing the fae in for the protection of humanity, severing all his business ties with the human world, and so on, he'd enlarged an opening and come through ... because he wanted to check on my well-being? Even the fondest great-granddaughter could smell a rat.
"I knew that portal was there," I said, because I couldn't think of anything else to say.
He cocked his head. His white-blond hair moved like a satin curtain. "Was it you who put the body in?"
"I'm sorry. I couldn't think of anywhere else to put it." Corpse disposal was not one of my talents.
"It was consumed entirely, if that was your purpose. Please abstain in the future. We don't want there to be crowding around the portal," he said in gentle admonishment, rather as though I'd been feeding pets from the dinner table.
"Sorry," I said. "So-why are you here?" I heard the bluntness of my words and felt myself turning red. "I mean, to what do I owe the honor of your visit? Can I get you a drink or something to eat?"
"No thank you, dearest. Where have you been this evening? You smell of the fae and humans and many other things."
I took a deep breath and tried to explain Ladies Only night at Hooligans. With every sentence, I felt more of a fool. You should have seen Niall's face when I told him that one night a week, human women paid to watch men take their clothes off. He sure didn't get it.
"Do men do this also?" he asked. "Go in groups to special buildings, pay to watch women undress?"
I said, "Yes, men much more often than women. The other nights, that's what happens at Hooligans."
"And Claude makes money this way," Niall said wonderingly. "Why don't the men just ask the women to take their clothes off, if they want to see their bodies?"
I took another deep breath but let it out without attempting further explanation. Some topics were just too complicated to tackle, especially with a fairy who'd never lived in our world. Niall was a tourist, not a resident. "Can we bypass this whole discussion until another time, or maybe until never? Surely there's something more important you want to talk about?" I said.
"Of course. May I sit?"
"Be my guest." We sat on the couch, angled forward so we were looking into each other's faces. There's nothing like having a fairy examine you to make you acutely aware of your every flaw.
"You've recovered well," he said, to my surprise.
"I have," I said, trying not to glance down, as if my scarred thigh would show through my clothing. "It took a while." Niall meant I looked good for someone who'd been tortured. Two notorious fairies who'd had their teeth sharpened like the elves' had left me with some permanent physical damage. Niall and Bill had arrived in time to save my body parts and my sanity, if not all of my actual flesh. "Thanks for coming in time," I said, forcing a smile on my face. "I'll never forget how glad I was to see you-all."
Niall waved away my gratitude. "You are my blood," he said. That was reason enough for him. I thought about my great-uncle Dermot, Niall's half-human son, who believed Niall had cast a crazy spell on him. Kind of contradictory, huh? I almost pointed that out to Great-Grandfather, but I did want to keep the peace since I hadn't seen him in so long.
"When I came through the portal tonight, I smelled blood in the ground around your house," he said abruptly. "Human blood, fae blood. Now I can tell there is fae blood upstairs in your attic, recently spilled. And fairies are living here now. Who?" Niall's smooth hands took mine, and I felt a flush of well-being.
"Claude and Dermot have been living here, kind of off and on," I said. "When Eric stays over, they spend the night in Claude's house in Monroe."
Niall looked very, very thoughtful. "What reason did Claude give you for wanting to be in your house? Why did you permit this? Have you had sex with him?" He didn't sound angry or distressed, but the questions themselves had a certain edge.
"I don't have sex with relatives, first off," I said, an edge to my own voice. My boss, Sam Merlotte, had told me that the fae didn't necessarily consider such relationships taboo, but I sure did. I took yet another deep breath. I would hyperventilate if Niall stayed very long.
I tried again, this time making an effort to modify my indignation. "Sex between relatives is not something humans condone," I told him, making myself stop right there before adding any codicils. "I have slept in the same bed with Dermot and Claude, because they told me that would make them feel better. And I admit it helped me, too. They both seem kind of lost, since they're not able to enter Faery. A bunch of the fae got left outside, and they're pretty miserable." I did my best not to sound reproachful, but Hooligans was like Ellis Island in lockdown.
Niall was not going to be diverted. "Of course Claude would want to be close to you," he said. "The company of others with fairy blood is always desirable. Did you suspect ... he had any other reason?"
Was this a hint, or just a simple hesitation in Niall's speech? As a matter of fact, I did think the two fairies had another reason for their attraction to me and my house, but I thought-I hoped-this reason was quite unconscious. This was a chance to unburden myself of a great secret and gain more information about an object I had in my possession. I opened my mouth to tell Niall about what I'd found in a secret compartment in an old desk.
But the sense of caution I'd developed in my life as a telepath ... well, that sense jumped up and down, screaming, "Shut up!"
I said, "Do you think they had another reason?"
I noticed Niall had mentioned only his full-fairy grandson, Claude, not his half-human son Dermot. Since Niall had always acted very lovingly toward me, and my blood had only a trace of fairy, I couldn't understand why he wasn't equally loving toward Dermot. Dermot had done some bad things, but he'd been under a spell. Niall wasn't cutting him any slack for that. Just at the moment, Niall was looking at me doubtfully, his head cocked to one side.
My cheeks yanked up in my brightest smile. I felt increasingly uneasy. "Claude and Dermot have been real helpers. They carried down all the old stuff in the attic. I sold it to an antiques dealer in Shreveport." Niall smiled back at me and stood. Before I could say Jack Robinson, he'd glided up the stairs. He came back down them a couple of minutes later. I spent the time sitting there with my mouth hanging open. Even for a fairy, this was odd behavior. "I guess you were up there sniffing Dermot's blood?" I said warily.
"I can tell I have irritated you, dearest." Niall smiled at me, and his beauty warmed me. "Why was there bleeding in the attic?"
Niall didn't even use the pronoun "he." I said, "A human came in looking for me. Dermot was working and didn't hear him coming. The human clocked him one. Hit him on the head," I explained, when Niall looked confused.
"Is that the human whose blood I smelled outside in the ground?"
There'd been so many. Vampires and humans, Weres and fairies. I actually had to think a minute. "Could be," I said at last. "Bellenos healed Dermot, and they caught the guys ..." I fell silent. At the mention of Bellenos's name, Niall's eyes flashed, and not with joy.
"Bellenos, the elf," he said.
"Yes."
His head turned sharply, and I knew he'd heard something I hadn't.
We'd been too involved in our conversation to hear a car on the driveway, apparently; but Niall had heard the key in the lock.
"Cousin, did you enjoy the show?" Claude called from the kitchen, and I had time to think, Another OSM, before Claude and Dermot walked into the living room.
There was a frozen silence. The three fairies were looking back and forth like gunfighters at the OK Corral. Each one waited for the other to make some decisive gesture that would determine whether they fought or talked.
"My house, my rules," I said, and shot up from the couch like someone had lit my ass on fire. "No brawling! Not! Any!"
There was another beat of the tense silence, and then Claude said, "Of course not, Sookie. Prince Niall-Grandfather-I had feared I'd never see you again."
"Claude," Niall said, nodding at his grandson.
"Hello, Father," said Dermot very quietly.
Niall didn't look at his child.
Awkward.
Chapter 2
Fairies. Never simple. My grandmother Adele would definitely have agreed. She'd had a long affair with Dermot's fraternal twin, Fintan, and my aunt Linda and my father, Corbett, (both dead for years now) had been the results.
"Maybe it's time for some plain speaking," I said, trying to look confident. "Niall, maybe you could tell us why you're pretending Dermot isn't standing right here. And why you put that crazy spell on him." Dr. Phil to the fae-that was me.
Or not. Niall gave me his most lordly look.
"This one defied me," he said, tilting his head at his son.
Dermot bowed his head. I didn't know if he was keeping his eyes down so he wouldn't provoke Niall or if he was concealing rage or if he just couldn't think of where to begin.
Being related to Niall, even at two removes, was not easy. I couldn't imagine having a closer tie. If Niall's beauty and power had been united with a coherent course of action and a nobleness of purpose, he would have been very like an angel.