Hadley had been one of the few remaining members of my family, and I felt her loss; at the same time, I had to admit that Hadley, in her teenage years, had been the cause of much grief to her mother and much pain to my grandmother. If she'd lived, maybe she'd have tried to make up for that—or maybe she wouldn't. She hadn't had the chance.

I took a deep breath. I opened the door. "Mr. Cataliades," I said, feeling my anxious smile stretch my lips unconvincingly. The queen's lawyer was a man composed of circles, his face round and his belly rounder, his eyes beady and circular and dark. I didn't think he was human—or perhaps not wholly human—but I wasn't sure what he could be. Not a vampire; here he was, in broad daylight. Not Were, or shifter; no red buzz surrounding his brain.

"Miss Stackhouse," he said, beaming at me. "What a pleasure to see you again."

"And you also," I said, lying through my teeth. I hesitated, suddenly feeling achy and jumpy. I was sure Cataliades, like all the other supes I encountered, would know I was having my time of the month. Just great. "Won't you come in?"

"Thank you, my dear," he said, and I stepped aside, filled with misgivings, to let this creature enter my home.

"Please, have a seat," I said, determined to be polite. "Would you care for a drink?"

"No, thank you. You seem to be on your way somewhere." He was frowning at the purse I'd tossed on my chair on my way to the door.

Okay, something I wasn't understanding, here. "Yes," I said, raising my eyebrows in query. "I had planned on going to the grocery store, but I can put that off for an hour or so."

"You're not packed to return to New Orleans with me?"

"What?"

"You received my message?"

"What message?"

We stared at each other, mutually dismayed.

"I sent a messenger to you with a letter from my law office," Mr. Cataliades said. "She should have arrived here four nights ago. The letter was sealed with magic. No one but you could open it."

I shook my head, my blank expression telling him what I needed to say.

"You are saying that Gladiola didn't get here? I expected her to arrive here Wednesday night, at the latest. She wouldn't have come in a car. She likes to run." He smiled indulgently for just a second. But then the smile vanished. If I'd blinked, I would have missed it. "Wednesday night," he prompted me.

"That was the night I heard someone outside the house," I said. I shivered, remembering how tense I'd been that night. "No one came to the door. No one tried to break in. No one called to me. There was only the sense of something moving, and all the animals fell silent."

It was impossible for someone as powerful as the supernatural lawyer to look bewildered, but he did look very thoughtful. After a moment he rose ponderously and bowed to me, gesturing toward the door. We went back outside. On the front porch, he turned to the car and beckoned.

A very lean woman slid from behind the wheel. She was younger than me, maybe in her very early twenties. Like Mr. Cataliades, she was only partly human. Her dark red hair was spiked, her makeup laid on with a trowel. Even the striking outfit of the girl in the Hair of the Dog paled in comparison to this young woman's. She wore striped stockings, alternating bands of shocking pink and black, and her ankle boots were black and extremely high-heeled. Her skirt was transparent, black, and ruffled, and her pink tank top was her sole upper garment.

She just about took my breath away.

"Hi, howareya?" she said brightly, her smile revealing very sharp white teeth a dentist would fall in love with, right before he lost a finger.

"Hello," I said. I held out my hand. "I'm Sookie Stackhouse."

She covered the ground between us very speedily, even in the ridiculous heels. Her hand was tiny and bony. "Pleasedtameetya," she said. "Diantha."

"Pretty name," I said, after I figured out it wasn't another run-on sentence.

"Thankya."

"Diantha," Mr. Cataliades said, "I need to you to conduct a search for me."

"To find?"

"I'm very afraid we are looking for Glad's remains."

The smile fell from the girl's face.

"No shit," she said quite clearly.

"No, Diantha," the lawyer said. "No shit."

Diantha sat on the steps and pulled off her shoes and her striped tights. It didn't seem to bother her at all that without the tights, her transparent skirt left nothing to the imagination. Since Mr. Cataliades's expression didn't change in the least, I decided I could be worldly enough to ignore it, too.

As soon as she'd disencumbered herself, the girl was off, moving low to the ground, sniffing in a way that told me she was even less human than I'd estimated. But she didn't move like the Weres I'd observed, or the shape-shifting panthers. Her body seemed to bend and turn in a way that simply wasn't mammalian.

Mr. Cataliades watched her, his hands folded in front of him. He was silent, so I was, too. The girl darted around the yard like a demented hummingbird, vibrating almost visibly with an unearthly energy.

For all that movement, I couldn't hear her make a sound.

It wasn't long before she stopped at a clump of bushes at the very edge of the woods. She was bent over looking at the ground, absolutely still. Then, not looking up, she raised her hand like a schoolchild who'd discovered the correct answer.

"Let us go see," Mr. Cataliades suggested, and in his deliberate way he strode across the driveway, then the grass, to a clump of wax myrtles at the edge of the woods. Diantha didn't look up as we neared, but remained focused on something on the ground behind the bushes. Her face was streaked with tears. I took a deep breath and looked down at what held her attention.

This girl had been a little younger than Diantha, but she too was thin and slight. Her hair had been dyed bright gold, in sharp contrast with her milk chocolate skin. Her lips had drawn back in death, giving her a snarl that revealed teeth as white and sharp as Diantha's. Oddly enough, she didn't seem as worse for wear as I would have expected, given the fact that she might have been out here for several days. There were only a few ants walking over her, not at all the usual insect activity… and she didn't look bad at all for a person who'd been cut in two at the waist.

My head buzzed for a minute, and I was little scared I would go down on one knee. I'd seen some bad stuff, including two massacres, but I'd never seen anyone divided like this girl had been. I could see her insides. They didn't look like human insides. And it appeared the two halves had been separately seared shut. There was very little leakage.

"Cut with a steel sword," Mr. Cataliades said. "A very good sword."

"What shall we do with her remains?" I asked. "I can get an old blanket." I knew without even asking that we would not be calling the police.

"We have to burn her," Mr. Cataliades said. "Over there, on the gravel of your parking area, Miss Stackhouse, would be safest. You're not expecting any company?"

"No," I said, shocked on many levels. "I'm sorry, why must she be… burned?"

"No one will eat a demon, or even a half demon like Glad or Diantha," he said, as if explaining that the sun rises in the east. "Not even the bugs, as you see. The ground will not digest her, as it does humans."

"You don't want to take her home? To her people?"

"Diantha and I are her people. It's not our custom to take the dead back to the place where they were living."

"But what killed her?"

Mr. Cataliades raised an eyebrow.

"No, of course she was killed by something cutting through her middle, I'm seeing that! But what wielded the blade?"

"Diantha, what do you think?" Mr. Cataliades said, as if he were conducting a class.

"Something real, real strong and sneaky," Diantha said. "It got close to Gladiola, and she weren't no fool. We're not easy to kill."