Pam came in then, with the doctor. If I had hoped Eric meant a regular doctor, like a stethoscope and tongue depressor kind of person, I was once again doomed to disappointment. This doctor was a dwarf, who hardly had to bend over to look me in the eyes. Bill hovered, vibrating with tension, while the small woman examined my wounds. She was wearing a pair of white pants and a tunic, just like doctors at the hospital; well, just like doctors used to, before they started wearing that green color, or blue, or whatever crazy print came their way. Her face was full of her nose, and her skin was olive. Her hair was golden brown and coarse, incredibly thick and wavy. She wore it clipped fairly short. She put me in mind of a hobbit. Maybe she was a hobbit. My understanding of reality had taken several raps to the head in the past few months.

"What kind of doctor are you?" I asked, though it took some time for me to collect myself enough.

"The healing kind," she said in a surprisingly deep voice. "You have been poisoned."

"So that's why I keeping thinking I'm gonna die," I muttered.

"You will, quite soon," she said.

"Thanks a lot, Doc. What can you do about that?"

"We don't have a lot of choices. You've been poisoned. Have you ever heard of Komodo dragons? Their mouths are teeming with bacteria. Well, maenad wounds have the same toxic level. After a dragon has bitten you, the creature tracks you for hours, waiting for the bacteria to kill you. For maenads, the delayed death adds to the fun. For Komodo dragons, who knows?"

Thanks for the National Geographic side trip, Doc. "What can you do?" I asked, through gritted teeth.

"I can close the exterior wounds. But your bloodstream has been compromised, and your blood must be removed and replaced. That is a job for the vampires." The good doctor seemed positively jolly at the prospect of everyone working together. On me.

She turned to the gathered vamps. "If only one of you takes the poisoned blood, that one will be pretty miserable. It's the element of magic that the maenad imparts. The Komodo dragon bite would be no problem for you guys." She laughed heartily.

I hated her. Tears streamed down my face from the pain.

"So," she continued, "when I'm finished, each of you take a turn, removing just a little. Then we'll give her a transfusion."

"Of human blood," I said, wanting to make that perfectly clear. I'd had to have Bill's blood once to survive massive injuries and once to survive an examination of sorts, and I'd had another vampire's blood by accident, unlikely as that sounds. I'd been able to see changes in me after that blood ingestion, changes I didn't want to amplify by taking another dose. Vampire blood was the drug of choice among the wealthy now, and as far as I was concerned, they could have it.

"If Eric can pull some strings and get the human blood," the dwarf said. "At least half the transfusion can be synthetic. I'm Dr. Ludwig, by the way."

"I can get the blood, and we owe her the healing," I heard Eric say, to my relief. I would have given a lot to see Bill's face, at that moment. "What is your type, Sookie?" Eric asked.

"O positive," I said, glad my blood was so common.

"That shouldn't be a problem," Eric said. "Can you take care of that, Pam?"

Again, a sense of movement in the room. Dr. Ludwig bent forward and began licking my back. I shrieked.

"She's the doctor, Sookie," Bill said. "She will heal you this way."

"But she'll get poisoned," I said, trying to think of an objection that wouldn't sound homophobic and sizist. Truly, I didn't want anyone licking my back, female dwarf or large male vampire.

"She is the healer," Eric said, in a rebuking kind of way. "You must accept her treatment."

"Oh, all right," I said, not even caring how sullen I sounded. "By the way, I haven't heard an 'I'm sorry' from you yet." My sense of grievance had overwhelmed my sense of self-preservation.

"I am sorry that the maenad picked on you."

I glared at him. "Not enough," I said. I was trying hard to hang on to this conversation.

"Angelic Sookie, vision of love and beauty, I am prostrate that the wicked evil maenad violated your smooth and voluptuous body, in an attempt to deliver a message to me."

"That's more like it." I would have taken more satisfaction in Eric's words if I hadn't been jabbed with pain just then. (The doctor's treatment was not exactly comfortable.) Apologies had better be either heartfelt or elaborate, and since Eric didn't have a heart to feel (or at least I hadn't noticed it so far) he might as well distract me with words.

"I take it the message means that she's going to war with you?" I asked, trying to ignore the activities of Dr. Ludwig. I was sweating all over. The pain in my back was excruciating. I could feel tears trickling down my face. The room seemed to have acquired a yellow haze; everything looked sickly.

Eric looked surprised. "Not exactly," he said cautiously. "Pam?"

"It's on the way," she said. "This is bad."

"Start," Bill said urgently. "She's changing color."

I wondered, almost idly, what color I'd become. I couldn't hold my head off the couch anymore, as I'd been trying to do to look a little more alert. I laid my cheek on the leather, and immediately my sweat bound me to the surface. The burning sensation that radiated through my body from the claw marks on my back grew more intense, and I shrieked because I just couldn't help it. The dwarf leaped from the couch and bent to examine my eyes.

She shook her head. "Yes, if there's to be any hope," she said, but she sounded very far away to me. She had a syringe in her hand. The last thing I registered was Eric's face moving closer, and it seemed to me he winked.

I opened my eyes with great reluctance. I felt that I'd been sleeping in a car, or that I'd taken a nap in a straight-back chair; I'd definitely dozed off somewhere inappropriate and uncomfortable. I felt groggy, and I ached all over. Pam was sitting on the floor a yard away, her wide blue eyes fixed on me.

"It worked," she commented. "Dr. Ludwig was right."

"Great."

"Yes, it would have been a pity to lose you before we'd gotten a chance to get some good out of you," she said with shocking practicality. "There are many other humans associated with us the maenad could have picked, and those humans are far more expendable."

"Thanks for the warm fuzzies, Pam," I muttered. I felt the last degree of nasty, as if I'd been dipped in a vat of sweat and then rolled in the dust. Even my teeth felt scummy.

"You're welcome," she said, and she almost smiled. So Pam had a sense of humor, not something vampires were noted for. You never saw vampire stand-up comedians, and human jokes just left vampires cold, ha-ha. (Some of their humor could give you nightmares for a week.)

"What happened?"

Pam relaced her fingers around her knee. "We did as Dr. Ludwig said. Bill, Eric, Chow, and I all took a turn, and when you were almost dry we began the transfusion."

I thought about that for a minute, glad I'd checked out of consciousness before I could experience the procedure. Bill always took blood when we were making love, so I associated it with the height of erotic activity. To have "donated" to so many people would have been extremely embarrassing to me if I'd been there for it, so to speak. "Who's Chow?" I asked.

"See if you can sit up," Pam advised. "Chow is our new bartender. He is quite a draw."

"Oh?"

"Tattoos," Pam said, sounding almost human for a moment. "He's tall for an Asian, and he has a wonderful set of . . . tattoos."

I tried to look like I cared. I pushed up, feeling a certain tenderness that made me very cautious. It was like my back was covered with wounds that had just healed, wounds that might break open again if I weren't careful. And that, Pam told me, was exactly the case.