Dead Reckoning(9)

Normally, I’m not an indecisive person. But as I patted myself dry and combed through my wet hair (feeling how strange it was that my comb completed its passage much more quickly), I worried about sharing my suspicions with Eric. When a vampire loves you — even when he simply feels proprietary toward you — his notion of protection can be pretty drastic. Eric loved going into battle; often he had to struggle to balance the political savvy of a move with his instinct to leap in with a swinging sword. Though I didn’t think he’d go charging off at the two-natured community, in his present mood it seemed wiser to keep my ideas to myself until I had some evidence one way or another.

I pulled on sleep pants and a Bon Temps Lady Falcons T-shirt. I looked at my bed with longing before I left my room to rejoin the strange crowd in the kitchen. Eric and Pam were drinking some bottled synthetic blood I’d had in the refrigerator, and Immanuel was sipping on a Coke. I was stricken because I hadn’t thought of offering them refreshment, but Pam caught my eye and gave me a level look. She’d taken care of it. I nodded gratefully and told Immanuel, “I’m ready now.” He unfolded his skinny frame from the chair and gestured to the stool.

This time my new hairdresser unfolded a thin, shoulders-only plastic capelet and tied it around my neck. He combed through my hair himself, eyeing it intently. I tried to smile at Eric to show this wasn’t so bad, but my heart wasn’t in it. Pam scowled at her cell phone. A text had displeased her.

Apparently Immanuel had passed the time by combing Pam’s hair. The pale golden mane, straight and fine, was pushed off her face with a blue headband. You just couldn’t get any more Alice-like. She wasn’t wearing a full-skirted blue dress and a white pinafore, but she was wearing pale blue: a sheath dress, perhaps from the sixties, and pumps with three-inch heels. And pearls.

“What’s up, Pam?” I asked, simply because the silence in my kitchen was getting oppressive. “Someone sending you a nasty text?”

“Nothing’s up,” she snarled, and I tried not to flinch. “Absolutely nothing is happening. Victor is still our leader. Our position doesn’t improve. Our requests go unanswered. Where is Felipe? We need him.”

Eric glared at her. Whoa, trouble in paradise. I’d never seen them seriously at odds.

Pam was the only “child” of Eric’s I’d ever met. She’d gone off on her own after spending her first few years as a vampire with him. She’d done well, but she’d told me she was glad enough to return to Eric after he’d called her to help him out in Area Five when the former queen had appointed him to the position of sheriff.

The tense atmosphere was getting to Immanuel, who was wavering in and out of his focus on his job . . . which was cutting my hair.

“Chill out, guys,” I said sharply.

“And what is it with all the crap sitting out in your driveway?” Pam asked, her original British accent peeking through. “To say nothing of your living room and your porch. Are you having a garage sale?” You could tell she was proud of getting her terminology correct.

“Almost finished,” Immanuel muttered, his scissors snicking at a frantic rate in response to the growing tension.

“Pam, that all came out of my attic,” I said, glad to talk about something so mundane and (I hoped) calming. “Claude and Dermot are helping me clean it out. I’m going to go see an antiques dealer with Sam in the morning — well, we were going to go. I don’t know if Sam’ll be able to make it, now.”

“There, see!” Pam said to Eric. “She lives with other men. She goes shopping with other men. What kind of husband are you?”

And Eric launched himself across the table, hands extended toward Pam’s throat.

The next second the two were rolling on the floor in a serious attempt to damage each other. I didn’t know if Pam could actually initiate the moves to hurt Eric, since she was his child, but she was defending herself vigorously; there’s a fine line there.

I couldn’t scramble down from the stool fast enough to escape some collateral damage. It seemed inevitable that they would slam into the stool, and of course they did in a second. Over I went to join them on the floor, banging my shoulder against the counter in the process. Immanuel very intelligently leaped backward, and he didn’t drop his scissors, a blessing to all of us. One of the vampires might have grabbed them as a weapon, or the gleaming scissors might have become embedded in some part of me.

Immanuel’s hand gripped my arm with surprising strength, and he yanked me up and away. We scuttled out of the kitchen and into the living room. We stood, panting, in the middle of the cluttered room, staring down the hall in case the fight followed us.