“You see Vampire Bill much?” Sam asked when I was helping him close up an hour later.

“No. I haven’t seen him in a long time,” I said. “I wonder if Bill’s dodging me. I went by his house a couple of times and left him a six-pack of TrueBlood and a thank-you note for all he did when he came to rescue me, but he never called me or came over.”

“He was in a couple of nights ago when you were off. I think you ought to pay him a visit,” Sam said. “I’m not saying any more.”

MARCH

THE END OF THE FOURTH WEEK

On a beautiful night later that week, I was rummaging in my closet for my biggest flashlight. Sam’s suggestion that I needed to see Bill had been nagging at me, so after I got home from work, I resolved to take a walk across the cemetery to Bill’s house.

Sweet Home Cemetery is the oldest cemetery in Renard Parish. There isn’t much room left for the dead, so there’s one of those new “burial parks” with flat headstones on the south side of town. I hate it. Even if the ground is uneven and the trees are all grown up and some of the fences around the plots are falling down, to say nothing of the earliest headstones, I love Sweet Home. Jason and I had played there as kids, whenever we could escape Gran’s attention.

The route through the memorials and trees to Bill’s house was second nature, from the time he’d been my very first boyfriend. The frogs and bugs were just starting up their summer singing. The racket would only build with the hotter weather. I remembered D’Eriq asking me wasn’t I scared, living by a graveyard, and I smiled to myself. I wasn’t afraid of the dead lying in the ground. The walking and talking dead were much more dangerous. I’d cut a rose to lay on my grandmother’s grave. I felt sure she knew I was there and thinking of her.

There was a dim light on at the old Compton house, which had been built about the same time my house had been. I rang the doorbell. Unless Bill was out in the woods roaming around, I was sure he was home since his car was there. But I had to wait some time until the creaking door swung open.

He switched on the porch light, and I tried not to gasp. He looked awful.

Bill had gotten infected with silver poisoning during the Fae War, thanks to the silver teeth of Neave. He’d had massive amounts of blood then—and since—from his fellow vampires, but I observed with some unease that his skin was still gray instead of white. His step was faltering, and his head hung a little forward like an old man’s.

“Sookie, come in,” he said. Even his voice didn’t seem as strong as it had been.

Though his words were polite, I couldn’t tell how he really felt about my visit. I can’t read vampire minds, one of the reasons I’d initially been so attracted to Bill. You can imagine how intoxicating silence is after nonstop unwanted sharing.

“Bill,” I said, trying to sound less shocked than I felt. “Are you feeling better? This poison in your system. Is it going away?”

I could swear he sighed. He gestured me to precede him into the living room. The lamps were off. Bill had lit candles. I counted eight. I wondered what he’d been doing, sitting alone in the flickering light. Listening to music? He loved his CDs, particularly Bach. Feeling distinctly worried, I sat on the couch, while Bill took his favorite chair across the low coffee table. He was as handsome as ever, but his face lacked animation. He was clearly suffering. Now I knew why Sam had wanted me to visit.

“You are well?” he asked.

“I’m much better,” I said carefully. He’d seen the worst they’d done to me.

“The scars, the. mutilation?”

“The scars are there, but they’re much fainter than I ever expected they’d be. The missing bits have filled in. I kind of have a dimple in this thigh,” I said, tapping my left knee. “But I had plenty of thigh to spare.” I tried to smile, but truthfully, I was too concerned to manage it. “Are you getting better?” I asked again, hesitantly.

“I’m not worse,” he said. He shrugged, a minimal lift of the shoulders.

“What’s with the apathy?” I said.

“I don’t seem to want anything any longer,” Bill told me, after a lengthy pause. “I’m not interested in my computer anymore. I’m not inclined to work on the incoming additions and subtractions to my database. Eric sends Felicia over to package up the orders and send them out. She gives me some blood while she’s here.” Felicia was the bartender at Fangtasia. She hadn’t been a vampire that long.

Could vampires suffer from depression? Or was the silver poisoning responsible?

“Isn’t there anyone who can help you? I mean, help you heal?”

He smiled in a sardonic sort of way. “My creator,” he said. “If I could drink from Lorena, I would have healed completely by now.”

“Well, that sucks.” I couldn’t let him know that bothered me, but ouch. I’d killed Lorena. I shook the feeling off. She’d needed killing, and it was over and done with. “Did she make any other vampires?”

Bill looked slightly less apathetic. “Yes, she did. She has another living child.”

“Well, would that help? Getting blood from that vamp?”

“I don’t know. It might. But I won’t. I can’t reach out to her.”

“You don’t know if it would help or not? You-all need a Handy Hints rule book or something.”

“Yes,” he said, as if he’d never heard of such an idea. “Yes, we do indeed.”

I wasn’t going to ask Bill why he was reluctant to contact someone who could help him. Bill was a stubborn and persistent man, and I wasn’t going to be able to persuade him otherwise since he’d made up his mind. We sat in silence for a moment.

“Do you love Eric?” Bill said, all of a sudden. His deep brown eyes were fi xed on me with the total attention that had played a large part in attracting me to him when we’d met.

Was everyone I knew fixated on my relationship with the sheriff of Area Five? “Yes,” I said steadily. “I do love him.”

“Does he say he loves you?”

“Yes.” I didn’t look away.

“I wish he would die, some nights,” Bill said.

We were being really honest tonight. “There’s a lot of that going around. There are a couple of people I wouldn’t miss myself,” I admitted. “I think about that when I’m grieving over the people I’ve cared about who’ve passed, like Claudine and Gran and Tray.” And they were just at the top of the list. “So I guess I know how you feel. But I—please don’t wish bad stuff on Eric.” I’d lost about as much as I could stand to lose in the way of important people in my life.

“Who do you want dead, Sookie?” There was a spark of curiosity in his eyes.

“I’m not about to tell you.” I gave him a weak smile. “You might try to make it happen for me. Like you did with Uncle Bartlett.” When I’d discovered Bill had killed my grandmother’s brother, who’d molested me—that’s when I should have cut and run. Wouldn’t my life have been different? But it was too late now.

“You’ve changed,” he said.

“Sure, I have. I thought I was going to die for a couple of hours. I hurt like I’ve never hurt before. And Neave and Lochlan enjoyed it so much. That snapped something inside me. When you and Niall killed them, it was like an answer to the biggest prayer I’d ever prayed. I’m supposed to be a Christian, but most days I don’t feel like I can even presume to say that about myself any longer. I have a lot of mad left over. When I can’t sleep, I think about the other people who didn’t care how much pain and trouble they caused me. And I think about how good I’d feel if they died.”

That I could tell Bill about this awful secret part of me was a measure of how close I’d been to him.

“I love you,” he said. “Nothing you do or say will change that. If you asked me to bury a body for you—or to make a body—I would do it without a qualm.”

“We’ve got some bad history between us, Bill, but you’ll always have a special place in my heart.” I cringed inside when I heard the hackneyed phrase coming from my own mouth. But sometimes clichés are true; this was the truth. “I hardly feel worthy of being cared about that strongly,” I admitted.