Sookie 10 Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris Page A

were being flagged down.
    “Shit,” Pam said. “That’s Bruno Brazell. We have to stop.” She pulled over to the shoulder and stopped in front of the car. “And Corinna,” she said, sounding bitter. I glanced in the side mirror to see that a woman had gotten out of the Lexus.
    “They’re here to kill us,” Pam said quietly. “I can’t kill them both. You have to help.”
    “They’re going to try to kill us?” I was really, really scared.
    “That’s the only reason I can think of that Victor would send two people on a one-person errand,” she said. She sounded calm. Pam was obviously thinking much faster than I was. “Showtime! If the peace can be kept, we need to keep it, at least for now. Here.” She pressed something into my hand. “Take it out of the sheath. It’s a silver dagger.”
    I remembered Bill’s gray skin and the slow way he moved after silver poisoning. I shuddered, but I was angry with myself for my squeamishness. I slid the dagger from the leather sheath.
    “We have to get out, huh?” I said. I tried to smile. “Okay, showtime.”
    “Sookie, be brave and ruthless,” Pam said, and she opened her door and disappeared from sight. I sent a last waft of love toward Eric by way of good-bye while I was sticking the dagger through my skirt’s waistband at the back. I got out of the car into the pelting darkness, holding my hands out to show they were empty.
    I was drenched in seconds. I shoved my hair behind my ears so it wouldn’t hang in my eyes. Though the Lexus’s headlights were on, it was very dark. The only other light came from oncoming headlights from both sides of the interstate, and the brightly lit truck stop a mile away. Otherwise, we were nowhere, an anonymous stretch of divided interstate with woods on either side. The vampires could see a lot better than I could. But I knew where everyone was because I cast out that other sense of mine and felt for their brains. Vampires register as holes to me, almost black spots in the atmosphere. It’s negative tracking.
    No one spoke, and the only noise was the pelting of the rain drumming on the cars. I couldn’t hear an oncoming vehicle. “Hi, Bruno,” I called, and I sounded perky in a crazy way. “Who’s your buddy?”
    I walked over to him. Across the median, a car whizzed by going west. If the driver caught a glimpse of us, it probably looked as though two Good Samaritans had stopped to help some people with car trouble. Humans see what they want to see. what they expect to see.
    Now that I was closer to Bruno, I could tell that his short brown hair was plastered to his head. I’d seen Bruno only once before, and he was wearing the same serious expression on his face that he’d worn the night he’d been standing in my front yard ready to move in and burn down my house with me in it. Bruno was a serious kind of guy in the same way I’m a perky kind of woman. It was a fallback position.
    “Hello, Miss Stackhouse,” Bruno said. He wasn’t any taller than me, but he was a burly man. The vampire Pam had called Corinna loomed up on Bruno’s right. Corinna was—had been—African-American, and the water was dripping off the tips of her intricately braided hair. The beads worked into the braids clicked together, a sound I could just pick up under the drumming of the rain. She was thin and tall, and she’d added to her height with three-inch heels. Though she was wearing a dress that had probably been very expensive, her whole ensemble had suffered by the drenching it had taken. She looked like a very elegant drowned rat.
    Since I was almost out of my head with alarm anyway, I started laughing.
    “You got a flat tire or something, Bruno?” I asked. “I can’t imagine what else you’d be doing out here in the middle of nowhere in the pouring rain.”
    “I was waiting for you, bitch.”
    I wasn’t sure where Pam was, and I couldn’t spare the brainpower to search for her. “Language, Bruno! I don’t think you know