A Touch of Dead by Charlaine Harris Page B

hard on not getting any visuals. Since she was older than I by three years, Hadley had been a mere twenty-nine when she’d died. She’d been my physical opposite in most ways. I was robust and blond, she was thin and dark. I was strong, she was frail. She’d had big, thickly lashed brown eyes, mine were blue; and now, this strange man was telling me, she had closed those eyes for good.
    “A month ago.” Mr. Cataliades had to think about it. “She died about a month ago.”
    “And you’re just now letting me know?”
    “Circumstances prevented.”
    I considered that.
    “She died in New Orleans?”
    “Yes. She was a handmaiden to the queen,” he said, as
though he were telling me she’d gotten her partnership at a big law firm or managed to buy her own business.
    “The Queen of Louisiana,” I said cautiously.
    “I knew you would understand,” he said, beaming at me. “‘This is a woman who knows her vampires,’ I said to myself when I met you. ”
    “She knows this vampire,” Bill said, appearing at my side in that disconcerting way he had.
    A flash of displeasure went across Mr. Cataliades’s face like quick lightning across the sky.
    “And you would be?” he asked with cold courtesy.
    “I would be Bill Compton, resident of this parish and friend to Miss Stackhouse,” Bill said ominously. “I’m also an employee of the queen, like you.”
    The queen had hired Bill so the computer database about vampires he was working on would be her property. Somehow, I thought Mr. Cataliades performed more personal services. He looked like he knew where all the bodies were buried, and Waldo looked like he had put them there.
    Bubba was right behind Bill, and when he stepped out of Bill’s shadow, for the first time I saw the vampire Waldo show an emotion. He was in awe.

    “Oh, my gracious! Is this El—” Mr. Cataliades blurted.
    “Yes,” said Bill. He shot the two strangers a significant glance. “This is Bubba . The past upsets him very much.” He waited until the two had nodded in understanding. Then he looked down at me. His dark brown eyes looked black in the stark shadows cast by the overhead lights. His skin had the pale gleam that said “vampire.” “Sookie, what’s happened?”
    I gave him a condensed version of Mr. Cataliades’s message. Since Bill and I had broken up when he was unfaithful to me, we’d been trying to establish some other workable relationship. He was proving to be a reliable friend, and I was grateful for his presence.
    “Did the queen order Hadley’s death?” Bill asked my visitors.
    Mr. Cataliades gave a good impression of being shocked. “Oh, no!” he exclaimed. “Her Highness would never cause the death of someone she held so dear.”
    Okay, here came another shock. “Ah, what kind of dear . . . ? How dear did the queen hold my cousin?” I asked. I wanted to be sure I was interpreting the implication correctly.

    Mr. Cataliades gave me an old-fashioned look. “She held Hadley dearly,” he said.
    Okay, I got it.
    Every vampire territory had a king or queen, and with that title came power. But the Queen of Louisiana had extra status, since she was seated in New Orleans, which was the most popular city in the United States if you were one of the undead. Since vampire tourism now accounted for so much of the city’s revenue, even the humans of New Orleans listened to the queen’s wants and wishes, in an unofficial way. “If Hadley was such a big favorite of the queen’s, who’d be fool enough to stake her?” I asked.
    “The Fellowship of the Sun,” said Waldo, and I jumped. The vampire had been silent so long, I’d assumed he wasn’t ever going to speak. The vampire’s voice was as creaky and peculiar as his appearance. “Do you know the city well?”
    I shook my head. I’d only been to the Big Easy once, on a school field trip.
    “You are familiar, perhaps, with the cemeteries that are called the Cities of the Dead?”
    I nodded. Bill said,