Dead and Gone

“Is Bill alive?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. He looked down at his arm. He’d been wounded, too: a bad slash on his left forearm. I hadn’t even seen it happen. Through the torn sleeve, I watched the cut begin to heal.

My great-grandfather squatted in front of me.

“Niall,” I said, my lips and mouth working with great effort. “Niall, I didn’t think you would come in time.”

Truthfully, I was so stunned I hardly knew what I was saying or even which crisis I was referring to. For the first time, keeping on living seemed so difficult I wasn’t sure it was worth the trouble.

My great-grandfather took me in his arms. “You are safe now,” he said. “I am the only living prince. No one can take that away from me. Almost all of my enemies are dead.”

“Look around,” I said, though I lay my head on his shoulder. “Niall, look at all that’s been taken.” Tray Dawson’s blood trickled slowly down the soaked sheet to patter on the floor. Bill was crumpled against my right thigh. As my great-grandfather held me close and stroked my hair, I looked past his arm at Bill. He’d lived for so many years, survived by hook or by crook. He’d been ready to die for me. There is no female—human, fairy, vamp, Were—who wouldn’t be affected by that. I thought of the nights we’d spent together, the times we’d talked lying together in bed—and I cried, though I felt almost too tired to produce tears.

My great-grandfather sat back on his heels and looked at me. “You need to go home,” he said.

“Claudine?”

“She’s in the Summerland.”

I couldn’t stand any more bad news.

“Fairy, I leave cleaning this place to you,” Eric said. “Your great-granddaughter is my woman, mine and mine alone. I’ll take her to her home.”

Niall glared at Eric. “Not all the bodies are fae,” Niall said with a pointed glance at Clancy. “And what must we do with that one?” He jerked his head toward Tray.

“That one needs to go back into his house,” I said. “He has to be given a proper burial. He can’t just vanish.” I had no idea what Tray would have wanted, but I couldn’t let the fairies shovel his body into a pit somewhere. He deserved far better than that. And there was Amelia to tell. Oh, God. I tried to pull my legs up preparatory to standing, but my stitches yanked and pain shot through me.“Ahh,” I said, and clenched my teeth.

I stared down at the floor while I got my breath back. And while I was staring, one of Bill’s fingers twitched.

“He’s alive, Eric,” I said, and though it hurt like the dickens, I could smile about that. “Bill’s alive.”

“That’s good,” Eric said, though he sounded too calm. He flipped open his cell phone and speed-dialed someone. “Pam,” he said. “Pam, Sookie lives. Yes, and Bill, too. Not Clancy. Bring the van.”

Though I lost a little time somewhere in there, eventually Pam arrived with a huge van. It had a mattress in the back, and Bill and I were loaded in by Pam and Maxwell Lee, a black businessman who just happened to be a vampire. At least, that was the impression Maxwell always gave. Even on this night of violence and conflict, Maxwell looked neat and unruffled. Though he was taller than Pam, they got us into the back with gentleness and grace, and I appreciated it very much. Pam even forewent making any jokes, which was a welcome change.

As we drove back to Bon Temps, I could hear the vampires talking quietly about the end of the fairy war.

“It will be too bad if they leave this world,” Pam said. “I love them so much. They’re so hard to catch.”

Maxwell Lee said, “I never had a fairy.”

“Yum,” Pam said, and it was the most eloquent “yum” I’ve ever heard.

“Be quiet,” Eric said, and they both shut up.

Bill’s fingers found mine, gripped them.

“Clancy lives on in Bill,” Eric told the other two.

They received this news in a silence that seemed respectful to me.

“As you live on in Sookie,” Pam said very quietly.

My great-grandfather came to see me two days later. After she let him in, Amelia went upstairs to cry some more. She knew the truth, of course, though the rest of our community was shocked that someone had broken into Tray’s house and tortured him. Popular opinion said that his assailants must have believed Tray was a drug dealer, though there was absolutely no drug paraphernalia found in an intensive search of his house and shop. Tray’s ex-wife and his son were making the funeral arrangements, and Tray would be buried at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church. I was going to try to go to support Amelia. I had another day to get better, but today I was content to lie on my bed, dressed in a nightgown. Eric couldn’t give me any more blood to complete my healing. For one thing, in the past few days he’d already given me blood twice, to say nothing of the nips we’d exchanged during lovemaking, and he said we were dangerously close to some undefined limit. For another thing, Eric needed all his blood to heal himself, and he took some of Pam’s, too. So I itched and healed, and saw that the vampire blood had filled in the bitten-out flesh of my legs.

That made my explanation of my injuries (a car accident; I’d been hit by a stranger who’d driven away) just feasible if not too many people examined the wounds. Of course, Sam had known right away that wasn’t the truth. I had ended up telling him what had happened the first time he came to see me. The patrons of Merlotte’s were very sympathetic, he reported when he came the second time. He had brought me daisies and a chicken basket from Dairy Queen. When he’d thought I wasn’t watching, Sam had looked at me with grim eyes.

After Niall pulled a chair close to the bed, he took my hand. Maybe the events of the past few days had made the fine wrinkles in his skin a fraction deeper. Maybe he looked a little sad. But my royal great-grandfather was still beautiful, still regal, still strange, and now that I knew what his race could do . . . he looked frightening.

“Did you know Lochlan and Neave killed my parents?” I asked.

Niall nodded after a perceptible pause. “I suspected,” he said. “When you told me your parents had drowned, I had to consider it possible. They all had an affinity to water, Breandan’s people.”

“I’m glad they’re dead,” I said.

“Yes, I am, too,” he said simply. “And most of Breandan’s followers are dead, as well. I spared two females, since we need them so much, and though one of them was the mother of Breandan’s child, I let her live.”

He seemed to want my praise for that. “What about the child?” I asked.

Niall shook his head, and the sheet of pale hair moved with the gesture.

He loved me, but he was from a world even more savage than mine.

As if he had heard my thoughts, Niall said, “I’m going to finish blocking the passage to our land.”

“But that’s what the war was over,” I said, bewildered. “That was what Breandan wanted.”

“I have come to think that he was right, though for the wrong reason. It isn’t the fae who need to be protected from the human world. It’s the humans who need to be protected from us.”

“What will that mean? What are the consequences?”

“Those of us who’ve been living among the humans will have to choose.”

“Like Claude.”

“Yes. He’ll have to cut his ties with our secret land, if he wants to live out here.”

“And the rest? The ones who live there already?”

“We won’t be coming out anymore.” His face was luminous with grief.

“I won’t get to see you?”

“No, dear heart. It’s better not.”

I tried to summon up a protest, to tell him that it wasnot better, it was awful, since I had so few relatives, that I would not talk to him again. But I just couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth. “What about Dermot?” I said instead.

“We can’t find him,” Niall said. “If he’s dead, he went to ash somewhere we haven’t discovered. If he’s here, he’s being very clever and very quiet. We’ll keep trying until the door closes.”

I hoped devoutly that Dermot was on the fairy side of that door.

At that moment, Jason came in.

My great-grandfather—our great-grandfather—leaped to his feet. But after a moment, he relaxed. “You must be Jason,” he said.

My brother stared at him blankly. Jason had not been himself since the death of Mel. The same edition of our