"No," I said, startled at the sudden turn in the conversation.

"Just a little bit more," Sarah coaxed. "We'll have seen the whole church." We'd come to the last door at the end of the corridor. The corresponding door on the other wing had led to the outside. The wings had seemed to be exactly balanced from the outside of the church. My observations had obviously been faulty, but still . . .

"It's certainly a large place," said Hugo agreeably. Whatever ambivalent emotions had been plaguing him seemed to have subsided. In fact, he no longer seemed at all concerned. Only someone with no psychic sense at all could fail to be worried about this situation.

That would be Hugo. No psychic sense at all. He looked only interested when Polly opened the last door, the door flat at the end of the corridor. It should have led outside.

Instead, it led down.

"You know, I have a touch of claustrophobia," I said instantly. "I didn't know many Dallas buildings had a basement, but I have to say, I just don't believe I want to see it." I clung to Hugo's arm and tried to smile in a charming but self-deprecating way.

Hugo's heart was beating like a drum because he was scared shitless—I'll swear he was. Faced with those stairs, somehow his calm was eroding again. What was with Hugo? Despite his fear, he gamely patted my shoulder and smiled apologetically at our companions. "Maybe we should go," he murmured.

"But I really think you should see what we've got underground. We actually have a bomb shelter," Sarah said, almost laughing in her amusement. "And it's fully equipped, isn't it, Steve?"

"Got all kinds of things down there," Steve agreed. He still looked relaxed, genial, and in charge, but I no longer saw those as benign characteristics. He stepped forward, and since he was behind us, I had to step forward or risk him touching me, which I found I very much did not want.

"Come on," Sarah said enthusiastically. "I'll bet Gabe's down here, and Steve can go on and see what Gabe wanted while we look at the rest of the facility." She trotted down the stairs as quickly as she'd moved down the hall, her round butt swaying in a way I probably would have considered cute if I hadn't been just on the edge of terrified.

Polly waved us down ahead of her, and down we went. I was going along with this because Hugo seemed absolutely confident that no harm would come to him. I was picking that up very clearly. His earlier fear had completely abated. It was as though he'd resigned himself to some program, and his ambivalence had vanished. Vainly, I wished he were easier to read. I turned my focus on Steve Newlin, but what I got from him was a thick wall of self-satisfaction.

We moved farther down the stairs, despite the fact that my steps had slowed, and then become slower again. I could tell Hugo was convinced that he would get to walk back up these stairs: after all, he was a civilized person. These were all civilized people.

Hugo really couldn't imagine that anything irreparable could happen to him, because he was a middle-class white American with a college education, as were all the people on the stairs with us.

I had no such conviction. I was not a wholly civilized person.

That was a new and interesting thought, but like many of my ideas that afternoon, it had to be stowed away, to be explored at leisure. If I ever had leisure again.

At the base of the stairs there was another door, and Sarah knocked on it in a pattern. Three fast, skip, two fast, my brain recorded. I heard locks shooting back.

Black Crewcut—Gabe—opened the door. "Hey, you brought me some visitors," he said enthusiastically. "Good show!" His golf shirt was tucked neatly into his pleated Dockers, his Nikes were new and spotless, and he was shaved as clean as a razor could get. I was willing to bet he did fifty push-ups every morning. There was an undercurrent of excitement in his every move and gesture; Gabe was really pumped about something.

I tried to "read" the area for life, but I was too agitated to concentrate.

"I'm glad you're here, Steve," Gabe said. "While Sarah is showing our visitors the shelter, maybe you can give our guest room a look-see." He nodded his head to the door in the right side of the narrow concrete hall. There was another door at the end of it, and a door to the left.

I hated it down here. I had pleaded claustrophobia to get out of this. Now that I had been coerced into coming down the stairs, I was finding that it was a true failing of mine. The musty smell, the glare of the artificial light, and the sense of enclosure . . . I hated it all. I didn't want to stay here. My palms broke out in a sweat. My feet felt anchored to the ground. "Hugo," I whispered. "I don't want to do this." There was very little act in the desperation in my voice. I didn't like to hear it, but it was there.

"She really needs to get back upstairs," Hugo said apologetically. "If you all don't mind, we'll just go back up and wait for you there."

I turned around, hoping this would work, but I found myself looking up into Steve's face. He wasn't smiling anymore. "I think you two need to wait in the other room over there, until I'm through with my business. Then, we'll talk." His voice brooked no discussion, and Sarah opened the door to disclose a bare little room with two chairs and two cots.

"No," I said, "I can't do that," and I shoved Steve as hard as I could. I am very strong, very strong indeed, since I've had vampire blood, and despite his size, he staggered. I nipped up the stairs as fast as I could move, but a hand closed around my ankle, and I fell most painfully. The edges of the stairs hit me everywhere, across my left cheekbone, my breasts, my hipbones, my left knee. It hurt so much I almost gagged.

"Here, little lady," said Gabe, hauling me to my feet.

"What have you—how could you hurt her like that?" Hugo was sputtering, genuinely upset. "We come here thinking of joining your group, and this is the way you treat us?"

"Drop the act," Gabe advised, and he twisted my arm behind my back before I had gotten my wits back from the fall. I gasped with the new pain, and he propelled me into the room, at the last minute grabbing my wig and yanking it off my head. Hugo stepped in behind me, though I gasped, "No!" and then they shut the door behind him.

And we heard it lock.

And that was that.

***

"Sookie," Hugo said, "there's a dent across your cheekbone."

"No shit," I muttered weakly.

"Are you badly hurt?"

"What do you think?"

He took me literally. "I think you have bruises and maybe a concussion. You didn't break any bones, did you?"

"Not but one or two," I said.

"And you're obviously not hurt badly enough to cut out the sarcasm," Hugo said. If he could be angry with me, it would make him feel better, I could tell, and I wondered why. But I didn't wonder too hard. I was pretty sure I knew.

I was lying on one of the cots, an arm across my face, trying to keep private and do some thinking. We hadn't been able to hear much happening in the hall outside. Once I thought I'd heard a door opening, and we'd heard muted voices, but that was all. These walls were built to withstand a nuclear blast, so I guess the quiet was to be expected.

"Do you have a watch?" I asked Hugo.

"Yes. It's five-thirty."

A good two hours until the vampires rose.

I let the quiet go on. When I knew hard-to-read Hugo must have relapsed into his own thoughts, I opened my mind and I listened with complete concentration.

Not supposed to happen like this, don't like this, surely everything'll be okay, what about when we need to go to the bathroom, I can't haul it out in front of her, maybe Isabel won't ever know, I should have known after that girl last night, how can I get out of this still practicing law, if I begin to distance myself after tomorrow maybe I can kind of ease out of it . . .