We moved into the dining room and polished everything that could be polished. When the wood of the table and chairs was gleaming, Sam asked me how long it’d been since I’d done Gran’s silver.
I hadn’t ever polished Gran’s silver. We opened the buffet to find that, yes, it certainly needed it. So into the kitchen we carried it, and we found the silver polish, and we polished away. The radio was on, but I gradually realized that Sam was turning it off every time the news began.
We cleaned all day. It rained all day. Sam only spoke to me to direct me to the next task.
I worked very hard. So did he.
By the time the light was growing dim, I had the cleanest house in Renard Parish.
Sam said, “I’m going now, Sookie. I think you want to be alone.”
“Yes,” I said. “I want to thank you some time, but I can’t thank you now. You saved me today.”
I felt his lips on my forehead and then a minute later I heard the door slam. I sat at the table while the darkness began to fill the kitchen. When I almost could not see, I went outside. I took my big flashlight.
It didn’t matter that it was still raining. I had on a sleeveless denim dress and a pair of sandals, what I’d pulled on that morning after Jason had called me.
I stood in the pouring warm rain, my hair plastered to my skull and my dress clinging wetly to my skin. I turned left to the woods and began to make my way through them, slowly and carefully at first. As Sam’s calming influence began to evaporate, I began to run, tearing my cheeks on branches, scratching my legs on thorny vines. I came out of the woods and began to dash through the cemetery, the beam of the flashlight bobbing before me. I had thought I was going to the house on the other side, the Compton house: but then I knew Bill must be here, somewhere in this six acres of bones and stones. I stood in the center of the oldest part of the graveyard, surrounded by monuments and modest tombstones, in the company of the dead.
I screamed, “Bill Compton! Come out now!”
I turned in circles, looking around in the near-blackness, knowing even if I couldn’t see him, Bill would be able to see me, if he could see anything—if he wasn’t one of those blackened, flaking atrocities I’d seen in the front yard of the house outside Monroe.
No sound. No movement except the falling of the gentle drenching rain.
“Bill! Bill! Come out!”
I felt, rather than heard, movement to my right. I turned the beam of the flashlight in that direction. The ground was buckling. As I watched, a white hand shot up from the red soil. The dirt began to heave and crumble. A figure climbed out of the ground.
“Bill?”
It moved toward me. Covered with red streaks, his hair full of dirt, Bill took a hesitant step in my direction.
I couldn’t even go to him.
“Sookie,” he said, very close to me, “why are you here?” For once, he sounded disoriented and uncertain.
I had to tell him, but I couldn’t open my mouth.
“Sweetheart?”
I went down like a stone. I was abruptly on my knees in the sodden grass.
“What happened while I slept?” He was kneeling by me, bare and streaming with rain.
“You don’t have clothes on,” I murmured.
“They’d just get dirty,” he said sensibly. “When I’m going to sleep in the soil, I take them off.”
“Oh. Sure.”
“Now you have to tell me.”
“You have to not hate me.”
“What have you done?”
“Oh my God, it wasn’t me! But I could have warned you more, I could have grabbed you and made you listen. I tried to call you, Bill!”
“What has happened?”
I put one hand on either side of his face, touching his skin, realizing how much I would have lost, how much I might yet lose.
“They’re dead, Bill, the vampires from Monroe. And someone else with them.”
“Harlen,” he said tonelessly. “Harlen stayed over last night, he and Diane really hit if off.” He waited for me to finish, his eyes fixed on mine.
“They were burned.”
“On purpose.”
“Yes.”
He squatted beside me in the rain, in the dark, his face not visible to me. The flashlight was gripped in my hand, and all my strength had ebbed away. I could feel his anger.
I could feel his cruelty.
I could feel his hunger.
He had never been more completely vampire. There wasn’t anything human in him.
He turned his face to the sky and howled.
I thought he might kill someone, the rage rolling off him was so great. And the nearest person was me.