Of course, those effects faded, unless you drank more blood.

A certain percentage of people who experienced drinking vampire blood could hardly wait to scratch up money for more. These blood junkies were extremely dangerous, of course. City police forces were glad to hire vampires to deal with them, since regular cops would simply get pulped.

Every now and then, a blood drinker simply went mad—sometimes in a quiet, gibbering kind of way, but sometimes spectacularly and murderously. There was no way to predict who would be stricken this way, and it could happen on the first drinking.

So there were men with glittering mad eyes in padded cells and there were electrifying movie stars who equally owed their condition to the Drainers. Draining was a hazardous job, of course. Sometimes the vampire got loose, with a very predictable result. A court in Florida had ruled this vampire retaliation justifiable homicide, in one celebrated case, because Drainers notoriously discarded their victims. They left a vampire, all but empty of blood, too weak to move, wherever the vamp happened to fall. The weakened vampire died when the sun came up, unless he had the good fortune to be discovered and helped to safety during the hours of darkness. It took years to recover from a draining, and that was years of help from other vamps. Bill had told me there were shelters for drained vamps, and that their location was kept very secret.

Witches with nearly the physical power of vampires—that seemed a very dangerous combination. I kept thinking of women when I thought of the coven that had moved into Shreveport, and I kept correcting myself. Men, Holly had said, were in the group.

I looked at the clock at the drive-through bank, and I saw it was just after noon. It would be full dark by a few minutes before six; Eric had gotten up a little earlier than that, at times. I could certainly go to Shreveport and come back by then. I couldn't think of another plan, and I just couldn't go home and sit and wait. Even wasting gas was better than going back to my house, though worry for Jason crawled up and down my spine. I could take the time to drop off the shotgun, but as long as it was unloaded and the shells were in a separate location, it should be legal enough to drive around with it.

For the first time in my life, I checked my rearview mirror to see if I was being followed. I am not up on spy techniques, but if someone was following me, I couldn't spot him. I stopped and got gas and an ICEE, just to see if anyone pulled into the gas station behind me, but no one did. That was real good, I decided, hoping that Holly was safe.

As I drove, I had time to review my conversation with Holly. I realized it was the first one I'd ever had with Holly in which Danielle's name had not come up once. Holly and Danielle had been joined at the hip since grade school. They probably had their periods at the same time. Danielle's parents, cradle members of the Free Will Church of God's Anointed, would have a fit if they knew, so it wasn't any wonder that Holly had been so discreet.

Our little town of Bon Temps had stretched its gates open wide enough to tolerate vampires, and gay people didn't have a very hard time of it anymore (kind of depending on how they expressed their sexual preference). However, I thought the gates might snap shut for Wiccans.

The peculiar and beautiful Claudine had told me that she was attracted to Bon Temps for its very strangeness. I wondered what else was out there, waiting to reveal itself.

Carla Rodriguez, my most promising lead, came first. I'd looked up the old address I had for Dovie, with whom I'd exchanged the odd Christmas card. I found the house with a little difficulty. It was well away from the shopping areas that were my only normal stops in Shreveport. The houses were small and close together where Dovie lived, and some of them were in bad repair.

I felt a distinct thrill of triumph when Carla herself answered the door. She had a black eye, and she was hungover, both signs that she'd had a big night the night before.

"Hey, Sookie," she said, identifying me after a moment. "What're you doing here? I was at Merlotte's last night, but I didn't see you there. You still working there?"

"I am. It was my night off." Now that I was actually looking at Carla, I wasn't sure how to explain to her what I needed. I decided to be blunt. "Listen, Jason's not at work this morning, and I kind of wondered if he might be here with you."

"Honey, I got nothing against you, but Jason's the last man on earth I'd sleep with," Carla said flatly. I stared at her, hearing that she was telling me truth. "I ain't gonna stick my hand in the fire twice, having gotten burnt the first time. I did look around the bar a little, thinking I might see him, but if I had, I'd have turned the other way."

I nodded. That seemed all there was to say on the subject. We exchanged a few more polite sentences, and I chatted with Dovie, who had a toddler balanced on her hip, but then it was time for me to leave. My most promising lead had just evaporated in the length of two sentences.

Trying to suppress my desperation, I drove to a busy corner filling station and parked, to check my Shreveport map. It didn't take me long to figure out how to get from Dovie's suburb to the vampire bar.

Fangtasia was in a shopping center close to Toys "R" Us. It opened at six P.M. year-round, but of course the vampires didn't show up until full dark, which depended on the season. The front of Fangtasia was painted flat gray, and the neon writing was all in red. "Shreveport's Premier Vampire Bar," read the newly added, smaller writing under the exotic script of the bar's name. I winced and looked away.

Two summers before, a small group of vamps from Oklahoma had tried to set up a rival bar in adjacent Bossier City. After one particularly hot, short August night, they'd never been seen again, and the building they'd been renovating had burned to the ground.

Tourists thought stories like this were actually amusing and colorful. It added to the thrill of ordering overpriced drinks (from human waitresses dressed in trailing black "vampire" outfits) while staring at real, honest-to-God, undead bloodsuckers. Eric made the Area Five vampires show up for this unappealing duty by giving them a set number of hours each week to present themselves at Fangtasia. Most of his underlings weren't enthusiastic about exhibiting themselves, but it did give them a chance to hook up with fang-bangers who actually yearned for the chance to be bitten. Such encounters didn't take place on the premises: Eric had rules about that. And so did the police department. The only legal biting that could take place between humans and vampires was between consenting adults, in private.

Automatically, I pulled around to the rear of the shopping center. Bill and I had almost always used the employee entrance. Back here, the door was just a gray door in a gray wall, with the name of the bar put on in stick-on letters from WalMart. Right below that, a large, black, stenciled notice proclaimed STAFF ONLY. I lifted my hand to knock, and then I realized I could see that the inner dead bolt had not been employed.

The door was unlocked.

This was really, really bad.

Though it was broad daylight, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Abruptly, I wished I had Bill at my back. I wasn't missing his tender love, either. It's probably a bad indicator of your lifestyle when you miss your ex-boyfriend because he's absolutely lethal.

Though the public face of the shopping center was fairly busy, the service side was deserted. The silence was crawling with possibilities, and none of them was pleasant. I leaned my forehead against the cold gray door. I decided to get back in my old car and get the hell out of there, which would have been amazingly smart.