Dead in the Family Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    He managed a smile. “As to your being worthy, I don’t think falling in love has much to do with the worth of the object of love. But I’d dispute your assessment. I think you’re a fine woman, and I think you always try to be the best person you can be. No one could be . . . carefree and sunny . . . after coming as close to death as you