Deadlocked by Charlaine Harris Page A

me. “I was surprised, since I was under the impression you were married to Miss Stackhouse. But the young woman seemed like a nice change of pace for you. She had such an interesting odor. If she hadn’t been earmarked for you, I might have taken her for myself.”
    “You would have been welcome to her,” Eric said in a completely empty voice.
    “She told you she’d been called?” I was puzzled.
    “That’s what she said,” Felipe said. His eyes were fixed on my face as though he were a hawk and I were a mouse he was considering for supper.
    On one level of my brain, I puzzled over this. I’d been delayed, the young woman had said she’d been called specifically for Eric … but on another level, I was busy regretting I’d saved Felipe’s life when one of Sophie-Anne’s bodyguards had been well on the way to killing him. I regretted this intensely . Of course, I’d been saving Eric, too, and Felipe had been a by-product, but still … back to level one, and I realized that none of this was adding up. I smiled at Felipe more brightly.
    “Are you simple?” Horst asked incredulously.
    I’m simply sick of you, I thought, not trusting myself to speak.
    Felipe said, “Horst, don’t mistake Miss Stackhouse’s cheerful looks for any mental deficiency.”
    “Yes, Your Majesty.” Horst tried to look chastened, but he didn’t quite make it.
    Felipe looked at him sharply. “I must remind you—unless I’m much mistaken—Miss Stackhouse took out either Bruno or Corinna. Even Pam couldn’t have handled both of them at the same time.”
    I kept on smiling.
    “Which one was it, Miss Stackhouse?”
    There was another fraught silence. I wished we had background music. Anything would be better than this dead air.
    Pam stirred, looked at me almost apologetically. “Bruno,” Pam said. “Sookie killed Bruno, while I took care of Corinna.”
    “How did you do that, Miss Stackhouse?” Felipe said. Even Horst looked interested and impressed, which was not a good thing.
    “It was kind of an accident.”
    “You are too modest,” the king murmured skeptically.
    “Really, it was.” I remembered the driving rain and the cold, the cars parked on the shoulders of the interstate on a terrible dark night. “It was sure pouring buckets that night,” I said quietly. Tumbling over and over down into the ditch running with chilly water, a desperate pawing to find the silver knife, sliding it into Bruno.
    “Was this the same kind of accident you had when you killed Lorena? Or Sigebert? Or the Were woman?”
    Wow, how’d he know about Debbie? Or maybe he meant Sandra? And his list was by no means complete. “Yeah. That kind of accident.”
    “Though I can hardly complain about Sigebert, since he would have killed me very shortly,” Felipe observed, with an air of being absolutely fair.
    Finally! “I wondered if you remembered that part,” I muttered. I may have sounded a wee tad sardonic.
    “You did do me a great service,” he said. “I’m just trying to decide how much of a thorn you are in my side now.”
    “Oh, come on !” I was really put out. “I haven’t done anything to you that you couldn’t have taken care of before it even happened.”
    Pam and Horst blinked, but I saw that Felipe understood me. “You maintain that if I had been more … proactive, you would have been in no danger from Bruno and Corinna? That Victor would have stayed down in New Orleans, where the regent should be, and that, therefore, Eric could have run Area Five the way he has always run it?”
    He had it in a nutshell, as my grandmother would have said. But (at least this time) I kept my mouth shut.
    Eric, by my side, was rigid as a statue.
    I’m not sure what would have happened next, but Bill appeared suddenly from the kitchen. He looked as excited as Bill ever looked.
    “There’s a dead girl on the front lawn,” he said, “and the police are here.”
    A variety of reactions passed on Felipe’s face in a few