My friends would miss me.
Sookie Stackhouse, barmaid, telepath, vampire's wife, great-grandaughter of a fairy prince, was no more. At least not in my former mostly human form. Just like I'd had to live my life overhearing people's most private thoughts, in death I apparently got "gift" of overseeing people too, whenever and wherever I felt like it.
I was a ghost. I'd witnessed my own funeral.
Apparently I'd have time to think more about that later. Right now, I was staying unseen while watching a private gathering of supes - furry, flying, fae, and otherwise. All here for me, though they didn't know I was here.
The awkward positioning among the different groups was over, and the stories were starting. This is what had kept me from staying away, from here or the more people-populated service during the day.
"You remember Jake Purifoy, the Were who was in on Rhodes?" The mixed crowd murmered as a young female Were continued. "She was there when he rose as a vamp. Her and the witch. She fought him off til the vamp cops turned up. Whole thing happened at the witch's apartment building, where Sookie's cousin Hadley, the vamp Queen's lover, used to stay."
I was sorry to hear Amelia referred to only as "the witch," and even sorrier she was no longer around to butt in.
There were faces here I'd seen on that painful New Orleans trip, but this were's wasn't one of them. I thought I recognized her from that night when Quinn and I had called out the Shreveport pack. While Quinn was scary in his own right, it was actually me who brought up my status as a friend of the pack. By their ways, that was part challenge and part shaming for failing me, or worse, knowingly attacking me.
The crowd had been mumbling about Rhodes. No denying it, I saved a lot of human and vampire lives that day. More than a few shifters, too.
"There was a little bomb, too, before the big ones. I heard she found it, and held it til the bomb robot could get it. Turned down help from both Eric and Quinn, and just held it in her hands."
Quinn had required some special permissions to be here in the first place, but nobody in this room or anywhere now needed an explanation of who Eric and Quinn were.
"She's the one who made the emergency crews take the vampires, made sure they went someplace safe."
"This woman interrupted the Great Pythoness in the middle of the Queen's trial, and made her see her way."
Laughter. Somehow hearing the chuckles about my own audacity made me grin with pride, instead of embarrassing me.
Alcide wasn't laughing. We hadn't really made amends, not that I was ever certain that was possible. Tonight he looked as somber as I'd ever seen him, but he'd required the Shreveport pack to make a good showing for my supposed send-off.
My brother didn't make it to this, though several of the born panthers did. He'd had enough of holding up at the daytime service, I guess, and I didn't blame him. I took a moment to be grateful that he had Michele to support him, along with a complicated acceptance out in Hotshot. I picked Calvin Norris and Tanya out of the crowd, while Bill started speaking.
Bill of course had some flowery things to say about how much he loved me, how he'd miss me dearly, and his regret that he wasn't there at the end to save me.
I'd saved Bill, more than once. I'd saved Eric, more than once, and Pam, and the vampires with Stan Davis, and at Rhodes. I'd fought with Pam to take out two of the toughest vampires around. I'd concocted the plan that took down Victor. I personally staked Lorena, I'd killed a fairy with a garden tool, and I'd been within a hair's breadth of taking out a thousand year old vampire's maker. They alone brought up my survival of gruesome fairy torture, and the fairies I'd killed myself. Bill bragged on me, that after an hour of Lochlan and Neave's torture, I'd looked the latter in the eye and told her she was going to die. And then smiled. I realized some of them probably would have missed out on the taste of fairy blood altogether if it weren't for me. My reputation for being around when Fangtasia's bartenders met their ends was already growing more exaggerated.
Pam was clearly going to do her best to play up those stories. She shared tales of our fighting together, against Bruno and Corinna, against the witches, against Victor, about how she'd fought to have Eric tell me truth about Oklahoma (earning a glare from him), but she also talked about how "delicious" I looked that first night at Fantasia, our trip to the strip club, watching me dance, and how I was her favorite "breather." Then she got uncharacteristically serious for a moment, and said how I and Eric had inspired her to love for the first time, even counting before she was made.
There was nowhere to go from there, and several people started sharing stories all at once to lighten the atmosphere.
"Did you know she had an honest-to-god fairy godmother? I wish I could get one of those."
"She saved Bubba from being crucified. With a phone call."
Bubba could be a challenge, but vampire fans, and especially those in Memphis, were grateful. I probably wouldn't see him now.
The witches got their own say. They were proud of the work Amelia had done to keep me safe, I'd saved a few during the Witch War, saved a Wiccan's child, and apparently just housing Octavia for a while had spread my name further than I'd realized. There was a somber mood about them, unlike the lighter mood that generally prevailed among among the rest of the room.
And then Eric. Eric. I always knew he'd outlast me, although we'd had some close calls. You didn't get to his age without some serious survival skills. Hearing him talk about me as brave, resourceful, creative, beautiful, a fighter - well, he should know, but listening to him was harder than almost anything I'd done. I no longer had a heart to break, and I spared the briefest moment of thought over whether I'd rather be here crying blood tears, mourning the others who'd been lost.
No. Still no, after everything I'd seen and experienced. I wasn't sure yet what the rules of this were, but I still didn't want to be a vampire.
The group seemed to avoid any mention of my misadventures with the Fellowship. I'd allowed their vampire hostage to kill my Fellowship captor and escaped. I'd exposed their hateful nature, along with their weapons. I'd caused the group legal trouble, property damage, and the loss of their leader, and foiled their plans again and again. I'd gotten staked and survived. I plain didn't believe in the hate and violence they spread, and I'd wanted to work against them however possible, especially considering that doing just that was usually necessary to save my own skin. My plans didn't always work.
When you totted it all up like that, I only wondered that I hadn't been in trouble more in the last few years. Most of the time, I was just trying to get through the current crisis, but this added up to an interesting and adventurous life. One I never could have imagined growing up as "Crazy Sookie" in Bon Temps. And I was getting to witness the beginnings of the stories people (well, not people, exactly) would tell about it.
Amelia told me when we first met that you have to be human to leave a ghost behind. It wasn't her fault she was wrong. She'd never heard about a mostly human, part fairy telepath turned ghost before.