outi2.cc 
“As you live on in Sookie,” Pam said very quietly.
My great-grandfather came to see me two days later. After she let him in, Amelia went upstairs to cry
some more. She knew the truth, of course, though the rest of our community was shocked that someone
had broken into Tray’s house and tortured him. Popular opinion said that his assailants must have
believed Tray was a drug dealer, though there was absolutely no drug paraphernalia found in an
intensive search of his house and shop. Tray’s ex-wife and his son were making the funeral
arrangements, and Tray would be buried at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church. I was going to try
to go to support Amelia. I had another day to get better, but today I was content to lie on my bed,
dressed in a nightgown. Eric couldn’t give me any more blood to complete my healing. For one thing, in
the past few days he’d already given me blood twice, to say nothing of the nips we’d exchanged during
lovemaking, and he said we were dangerously close to some undefined limit. For another thing, Eric
needed all his blood to heal himself, and he took some of Pam’s, too. So I itched and healed, and saw
that the vampire blood had filled in the bitten-out flesh of my legs.
That made my explanation of my injuries (a car accident; I’d been hit by a stranger who’d driven away)
just feasible if not too many people examined the wounds. Of course, Sam had known right away that
wasn’t the truth. I had ended up telling him what had happened the first time he came to see me. The
patrons of Merlotte’s were very sympathetic, he reported when he came the second time. He had brought
me daisies and a chicken basket from Dairy Queen. When he’d thought I wasn’t watching, Sam had
looked at me with grim eyes.
After Niall pulled a chair close to the bed, he took my hand. Maybe the events of the past few days had
made the fine wrinkles in his skin a fraction deeper. Maybe he looked a little sad. But my royal greatgrandfather
was still beautiful, still regal, still strange, and now that I knew what his race could do . . . he
looked frightening.
“Did you know Lochlan and Neave killed my parents?” I asked.
Niall nodded after a perceptible pause. “I suspected,” he said. “When you told me your parents had
drowned, I had to consider it possible. They all had an affinity to water, Breandan’s people.”
“I’m glad they’re dead,” I said.
“Yes, I am, too,” he said simply. “And most of Breandan’s followers are dead, as well. I spared two
females, since we need them so much, and though one of them was the mother of Breandan’s child, I let
her live.”
He seemed to want my praise for that. “What about the child?” I asked.
Niall shook his head, and the sheet of pale hair moved with the gesture.
He loved me, but he was from a world even more savage than mine.
As if he had heard my thoughts, Niall said, “I’m going to finish blocking the passage to our land.”
“But that’s what the war was over,” I said, bewildered. “That was what Breandan wanted.”
“I have come to think that he was right, though for the wrong reason. It isn’t the fae who need to be
protected from the human world. It’s the humans who need to be protected from us.”
“What will that mean? What are the consequences?”
“Those of us who’ve been living among the humans will have to choose.”
“Like Claude.”
“Yes. He’ll have to cut his ties with our secret land, if he wants to live out here.”
“And the rest? The ones who live there already?”
“We won’t be coming out anymore.” His face was luminous with grief.
“I won’t get to see you?”
“No, dear heart. It’s better not.”
I tried to summon up a protest, to tell him that it was not better, it was awful, since I had so few
relatives, that I would not talk to him again. But I just couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth.
“What about Dermot?” I said instead.
“We can’t find him,” Niall said. “If he’s dead, he went to ash somewhere we haven’t discovered. If he’s
here, he’s being very clever and very quiet. We’ll keep trying until the door closes.”
