From the Waist Down

Chapter 2

I squirmed, trying to rescind the invitation over and over again. My words came out garbled, and apparently, no matter how much thought you put behind a rescinded vampire invitation, if you didn't say it clearly and out loud, it didn't mean much at all. Victor grinned at me, his lips peeling back from two rows of clean ivory teeth. His fangs were only half-visible, the pointed canines barely descending below the straight front teeth. I caught myself wondering if Victor had been alive after braces had been invented or if he was just unbelievably lucky.

"You are a pretty young woman, Miss Stackhouse, and an enormous asset to my King's growing empire. The only thing missing is your obedience. I understand you have a…" he paused, almost relishing the sound of his own sinister voice. "…a spitfire personality." He took a few steps toward me, and with each beat of his shoe upon the old maple floor, his fangs seemed to drop a little further. When he was inches from my face, the smell of his mouthwash slapping me in the face, they were grazing his tongue. His hand darted toward my face and I, of course, flinched. The Weres clamped onto me, even tighter, to hold me still. Victor's fingers were slivers of ice on my cheek. He traced the line of my face, his fingernails gliding over my cheekbone, tracing my chin. I would have shaken with rage if I could have moved at all.

"Don't worry, though," Victor grimaced. "I'll cure you of that little flaw soon enough."

He nodded, almost imperceptibly, to his two muscled associates. Before I knew what was happening, a thumb pressed painfully into the back of my skull. I yelped, but the sound was muffled. The world turned to darkness in mere seconds, moments of time that lapsed before I could even complete a fully realized sound.

The technique has something to do with pressure points, a fact I remembered from a mystery novel as I came back to the land of consciousness. My head throbbed, particularly at the base of my neck. Fingers of pain radiated down my back and up into my head like some kind of killer migraine from Hell. I tried to sit up, to move around, and that was when I realized the lights were out. In fact, I didn't even have a sense that light had ever existed here. I didn't even know where 'here' was located. The floor rumbled beneath me, and when I did manage to get into a sitting position, I smacked my already aching skull on a low ceiling. It hurt to think, to move, to function. I wiggled, outstretching my arms. They felt like lead, limbs so heavy and laden that I could barely move them at all. When I did, my arms knocked against more walls. I dropped a hand to the floor and my fingers brushed against rough carpeting. The ground under me continued to vibrate, and it was then that I realized where I had ended up. It was like my worst nightmare, come true.

I was in a car trunk, and that car was moving.

I didn't have a great history with car trunks. In fact, my ex-whatever had attacked me in a trunk only a year ago and it was an event that I never really released from my thoughts. That night still haunted me, sometimes plaguing me in my dreams. There I was, pushed into a trunk by a friend's deranged ex-girlfriend. Bill was starving, and after he'd fed from me, he decided to complete the deal with the instinct most closely related to eating. He'd violated me, right there in that trunk, in the pitch blackness.

The memory came rushing back to me like a battering ram. I began knocking on the four walls that surrounded me like a coffin. Despite the pain in my head, I started screaming. I knocked and screamed, knocked and screamed, and by the time the car stopped with a squeak of the brakes, I was exhausted and out of breath. The trunk popped open and I moved to wiggle out. A rough, heavy hand collapsed over my arm and yanked me viciously from the back of the car. I dropped to my knees on a square of gravel, only to be hauled back to my feet with such extreme force that I let out a squeal.

The parking lot looked eerily familiar, but I couldn't place it until the Were, a pale-skinned, black haired, dark eyed werewolf wearing black leather on every scrap of his body, dragged me up to a plain gray door. It was the service entrance for Fangtasia, Eric's vampire bar in Shreveport.

"Welcome to Fangtasia, Miss Stackhouse," Victor grinned, standing so suddenly before me that I had to do a double-take. Where had he come from? He had a comb in his hand, and he used it to swirl the pomade curls in his thick brown hair. Apparently, Victor Madden was still stuck in 1955 with the greasers. "You should know, it's under new management."

"What the hell do you mean?" I spat at him, trying to take a swing at him but missing pathetically. "Where's Eric? What did you do to him?"

"He's on another assignment, my dear." Victor deposited the comb in his breast pocket and sank toward me again, his hand wrapping around my throat. The Were dropped my arm as Victor lifted me off the floor. Air caught in my larynx and I began to choke. My toes tingled as I kicked them to and fro. My arms rose instinctively to claw at his hand. Can't breathe. Need air.

"My dear," he mused, squeezing my neck tighter. I could see black and blue spots in front of my eyes. My ears were buzzing, and it was difficult to hear him. Eric, oh God, Eric!

"I like the sound of that." Victor smiled. He leaned in and pressed his mouth against mine. He smelled like greasy pomade and Listerine mouthwash. I was gagging, pulling at his fingers. I had to open my mouth to choke down air and when I did, his tongue shot down my throat like a cobra attacking its prey. Though I couldn't think or breathe, I reacted as instinctively as my body knew how. My leg jumped out, catching him right in the kneecap.

I hit the floor, smacking into a barstool on the way down. Air rushed into my lungs, blessed relief. Victor looked to his two companions, their faces identical in their disinclination to give two shits about me. He grunted at them, and the two men stomped out the way we had come in, through the slate gray service door. I was alone in the dark bar, closed while Eric and Pam were out of town. One of the house lights had been turned on over the bar, and I could see a few boxes of True Blood sitting out, waiting to be stowed away. I grabbed onto the barstool beside me and dragged my bruised body to its feet.

"I'm under the King's protection. You can't keep me here." I sneered at Victor, trying to reason my way out of this mess. I suddenly regretted telling Bill to leave. I was most definitely not fine right now. Was there a way to kick in that whole blood bond thing? I still knew almost nothing about the process, but I did know that when you exchanged blood with a vampire, he could find you. The question was, would he know to look for me?

"The King would be extremely pleased if I bonded with you, Miss Stackhouse. We could be rid of Eric Northman for good. In fact," he paused, checking his watch. "We may already be rid of the Viking."

"What did you do to him?" I yelled, taking a step backward. Victor was advancing on me, his footsteps slow and methodical. I ran my hand along the bar. There were three exits out of Fangtasia: the front door, the service entrance, and Eric's private door through his office. If we kept going this way, I'd eventually be in Eric's office. I could barricade myself inside, maybe find a weapon. I could get the hell out of here.

"Why is that any of your concern?" Victor winked. "It's not as though you care for him, is it?"

"What?" I guffawed. "Of course not."

"Right," Victor smirked. He moved forward with the speed of a vampire, suddenly shoving me up against Eric's office door. The wind rushed out of my lungs like a squeezed accordion. I was gasping for air again, like a fish out of water.

"He's certainly not in your thoughts right now. You're not thinking about him coming for you, saving you, protecting you. You're not wishing he was in your bed, or shoving you up against a kitchen counter, or slamming you into the first few steps on your white wash staircase."

Oh God, I thought. Oh God. He knows.

I wasn't sure how he knew, but Victor Madden knew a lot. He knew more than he should have known about my escapades with a certain Viking vampire. I couldn't even imagine how he might have found out, unless he'd been watching us through a hidden camera. Maybe…maybe he'd spoken to Amelia somehow, or maybe his secret vampire ability was invisibility? I couldn't think about that now. It didn't matter. What mattered was what he had done to Eric, what he planned to do to me. I realized I was hyperventilating, sucking in sharp, shallow breaths that only caused more tension.

Victor reached past my hip, his cufflink scraping my skin. He turned the knob on the door and it fell open. I lurched backward into the office and Victor followed, shutting the door behind us. He didn't bother to lock it. No one was going to disturb us here. No one knew I was missing. Eric was in danger, somewhere between Bon Temps and New Orleans. Pam was with him. Bill was probably moping at his house. Sam was likely asleep by now. Bile crept up the back of my throat. I was in Deep Shit, Louisiana, and for the first time, I realized there was no way out.

***

Back in Bon Temps, Bill Compton was standing on the Stackhouse porch, his hands stuffed uneasily in the pockets of his khaki pants. Behind him, the gravel driveway rumbled and a blue pickup truck rolled down alongside Sookie's Malibu. Sam fell out of the car and marched up to the backdoor, prepared to knock. He was holding a cellular phone in one hand, the screen lit up.

"Bill," Sam grunted, taking a long look at the vampire. "Still keeping watch I see."

"What are you doing here?" Bill narrowed his eyes.

"I had a bad feeling that Sookie might be in trouble. I tried calling her a couple times, but she didn't answer. It's only been forty minutes. She couldn't possibly have gone to bed already."

"I had a bad feeling as well," Bill agreed, turning to look at the door.

"What do you mean? You just got here!" Sam looked angry now. He knocked on the back door. They waited a moment.

"We fought. I left for awhile to let her cool off. I have only just returned." Bill paused to listen. "I do not hear anything inside."

"Just a sec. She keeps a key under the mat somewhere." Sam lifted up the welcome mat to search for the key. Bill stepped past him and pulled open the door.

"We won't need it. It is unlocked."

Sam and Bill walked inside, moving in either direction. Sam lifted his nose to the air and inhaled, yanking in a number of familiar smells and a few not so familiar ones. He stopped in front of the ugly floral sofa that had been in Sookie's house for as long as he'd known her. Bill stepped up beside him, as if out of nowhere. There might have been another reaction, a squeak from Sam as his personal space was grossly invaded. However, the smell at this very spot was so foreign that neither man seemed to notice the other.

"Do you smell that? Pomade and Fresh Mint Listerine mouthwash?" Sam touched the cushion, and then lifted his hand to his face.

"It's Victor Madden," Bill growled. "He has Sookie."