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dodge the realization that I was sitting in the lap of a murderer. Yet I was quite happy to sit there, his arms around me.
    “I should worry about this, but I’m not,” I said, before I knew what I was going to say. I felt that rusty laugh again.
    “Sookie, why did you want to talk to me tonight?”
    I had to think back hard. Though I was miraculously recovered from the beating physically, I felt a little hazy mentally.
    “My grandmother is real anxious to know how old you are,” I said hesitantly. I didn’t know how personal a question that was to a vampire. The vampire in question was stroking my back as though he were soothing a kitten.
    “I was made vampire in 1870, when I was thirty human years old.” I looked up; his glowing face was expressionless, his eyes pits of blackness in the dark woods.
    “Did you fight in the War?”
    “Yes.”
    “I have the feeling you’re gonna get mad. But it would make her and her club so happy if you’d tell them a little bit about the War, about what it was really like.”
    “Club?”
    “She belongs to Descendants of the Glorious Dead.”
    “Glorious dead.” The vampire’s voice was unreadable, but I could tell, sure enough, he wasn’t happy.
    “Listen, you wouldn’t have to tell them about the maggots and the infections and the starvation,” I said. “They have their own picture of the War, and though they’re not stupid people—they’ve lived through other wars—they would like to know more about the way people lived then, and uniforms and troop movements.”
    “Clean things.”
    I took a deep breath. “Yep.”
    “Would it make you happy if I did this?”
    “What difference does that make? It would make Gran happy, and since you’re in Bon Temps and seem to want to live around here, it would be a good public relations move for you.”
    “Would it make you happy?”
    He was not a guy you could evade. “Well, yes.”
    “Then I’ll do it.”
    “Gran says to please eat before you come,” I said.
    Again I heard the rumbling laugh, deeper this time.
    “I’m looking forward to meeting her now. Can I call on you some night?”
    “Ah. Sure. I work my last night tomorrow night, and the day after I’m off for two days, so Thursday would be a good night.” I lifted my arm to look at my watch. It was running, but the glass was covered with dried blood. “Oh, yuck,” I said, wetting my finger in my mouth and cleaning the watch face off with spit. I pressed the button that illuminated the hands, and gasped when I saw what time it was.
    “Oh, gosh, I got to get home. I hope Gran went to sleep.”
    “She must worry about you being out so late at night by yourself,” Bill observed. He sounded disapproving. Maybe he was thinking of Maudette? I had a moment of deep unease, wondering if in fact Bill had known her, if she’d invited him to come home with her. But I rejected the idea because I was stubbornly unwilling to dwell on the odd, awful, nature of Maudette’s life and death; I didn’t want that horror to cast a shadow on my little bit of happiness.
    “It’s part of my job,” I said tartly. “Can’t be helped. I don’t work nights all the time, anyway. But when I can, I do.”
    “Why?” The vampire gave me a shove up to my feet, and then he rose easily from the ground.
    “Better tips. Harder work. No time to think.”
    “But night is more dangerous,” he said disapprovingly. He ought to know. “Now don’t you go sounding like my grandmother,” I chided him mildly. We had almost reached the parking lot.
    “I’m older than your grandmother,” he reminded me. That brought the conversation up short.
    After I stepped out of the woods, I stood staring. The parking lot was as serene and untouched as if nothing had ever happened there, as if I hadn’t been nearly beaten to death on that patch of gravel only an hour before, as if the Rats hadn’t met their bloody end.
    The lights in the bar and in Sam’s trailer were off.
    The gravel was