Chapter 3

After a grueling spin class early Monday morning, I made it to work early, hair still slightly damp from the gym showers. I never had the patience to blow dry it completely before work if I'd been to the gym.

The offices weren't open to the public yet, so I swiped my staff card through the digital reader. I heard the telltale click and the sliding doors opened. I entered, coffee in one hand. After breaking up with Danny, I'd had to give up on my favorite cafe since that was his local haunt too. It meant waiting in a longer line with other fellow office drones at a bigger chain. The to-go coffee was worse, too. But I didn't want to risk running into Danny. I wasn't prepared for the awkward small talk yet. I rarely wore my hummingbird necklace now too–the enchanted necklace that silenced my telepathic abilities. The idea of bumping into him and running the risk of hearing his thoughts or opinions of me felt too much to bear. The breakup had been amicable, but he'd been hurt. It had shown plainly on his face. He'd really thought we had a good shot. You and me both, buddy.

Aubrey stood and raced around the reception desk. She wrapped me in a quick hug as I passed reception and made me promise to take my lunch hour with her. I gleaned from my brief brush with her thoughts that she had gossip to dish, but I set it aside. My thoughts were squarely on work, more specifically the massive pile of work I was sure to have. I headed through the bullpen, past the various associates, paralegals and administration staff already with their heads down for the day, and made my way up the central glass staircase (my legs shaking, thanks to spin) to where my desk was situated.

While the hardwood floors downstairs echoed with the sounds of phones, papers, and harried conversations, up here was quiet and library-like, the floors lined with a plush damask-print carpet in muted shades of red and gold. The center of the room was occupied with six simple yet functional walnut desks, including my own, with the supe law library in one corner of the room and the law partner offices in each of the other three corners. While the partners had the customary offices with stunning views, the rest of us had one bank of arched windows which filled the room with natural light and allowed us a much-needed sense of the outside world, which I can tell you is crucial when you're neck deep in documents and at risk of drowning. The rest of us being myself, a couple of other paralegals, an office administrator named Honey and the legal ops guy, Germaine.

The design on this floor was a lot more fancy-pants than downstairs for no reason other than to woo prospective clients. The bullpen, where most staff worked, was like any modern law office, minimalist and uninteresting—function over form. But the big name (or rather, deep pocketed) clients that the partners courted were ushered from reception directly up to this floor by the elevators, conveniently by-passing the bullpen, and were led straight into the old-world traditional charm of the law partner's offices.

My desk sat as I had left it, the only new addition being a stack of unread memos and a few file folders. I withdrew my laptop from my oversized handbag, and plonked my bag on the ground, and my ass in my seat. Hannah zipped in right at eight-thirty and winked at me. I spent the first little while sipping my coffee and catching up on the alarming number of emails waiting for me. My phone messages weren't as huge as I had expected, but there were a bunch from a number I didn't recognize, no name given. Well, if they didn't want to give me their name and tell me the nature of their message or why they needed me, then they could kick rocks. I turfed those in the bin and focused on eliminating all the easy problems that had gathered in my absence. I had a short meeting with Mr. C after that, going over what needed to be tackled that week and when I left his office, Hannah wheeled her office chair over to me.

"How was your vacation?"

"Not much of one," I said, pausing my typing. I was mid-reply with one of the other paralegals downstairs who'd taken on some of my workload in my absence. "I mostly studied. I did a little thrifting, caught up with family." And the King of Rock and Roll also appeared at my front door so I had to cut my trip short by a day. "How are things with you?"

"Fine. My sister tore up the carpet in our apartment and is sanding back the floors." Hannah grimaced. "I'm staying at Amelia's currently."

Well, that explained why I hadn't heard hide-or-hair from Amelia in the last two weeks, despite texting her a handful of times. The elevator dinged and Hannah hurriedly wheeled her seat back to her desk before Lucretius could burn her to cinders with his fiery stare on his march to his office. The most terrifying of all the law partners, he didn't like it when we openly fraternized on company dime.

Aubrey, Hannah and I took lunch together downstairs in the breakroom, at our usual table and they filled me in on all the things I missed. Which was surprisingly not a lot, though two associates were apparently caught by janitorial staff mid-coitus in the copy room a couple of Friday nights ago. A company-wide memo was issued by HR on the following Monday stating that company property must be utilized solely for company activities. Aubrey was sure that meant they were doing it on the photocopier.

When I got back to my desk, I spent the first part of the afternoon arranging meetings between various clients and Mr. C, as well as scheduling his calendar for the coming weeks. If his calendar was organized, then I could arrange my work schedule and tasks to suit. I walked down to the break room to stretch my legs and refill my coffee cup and when I returned a tall, familiar man was filling my computer chair.

"Hi Curtis."

"Sookie," he said coolly, spinning the seat to face me. I noticed he'd been rifling through one of the open files on my desk. It was a file from the demon case I'd been working on the last couple months. I was an idiot for not putting it away before stepping away from my desk. A sure sign my head was still in vacation mode.

"Whaddya want? I'm not working any investigations currently." I'd chosen to temporarily hang up my investigator hat for the firm after Lydia Ryker's death. Partly so I could focus on my studies and paralegal role. Partly because I was still reeling from the trauma of it all. Solving her murder had taken it out of me.

Curtis, the law firm's other investigator, vacated my seat and motioned me to take it. I narrowed my eyes at the were and sat down. He was dressed in his usual business casual suit, the top button of his white shirt undone revealing a perfect triangle of dark, balmy skin.

"I came for a quick chat," he said. He leaned and placed a proprietary hand on my desk.

I set my coffee cup down and crossed my arms. "Fine. Let's chat."

We weren't exactly buddy-buddies, particularly because if he ever reached a dead-end with one of his investigations it would be hand-balled to me. I was a physical representation of his failure. As far as he was concerned, I was persona non grata. Which was stupid, since he had all the real skills in digging up info and was the one to put in the tedious leg work when it came to investigating. I just did the mind-reading. I had a distinct advantage in discovering info when nothing else could be found. Regardless, he saw me as a threat, or maybe more like gum on his shoe, so we were decidedly not on "chit-chat" basis.

"I was wondering if you could look into something for me." He said it flatly, there was no request being brokered, in fact it sounded like a demand.

"Nope. I've got enough on my plate at the moment."

"It's not a work thing."

"Then what is it?"

"A favor."

"What sort of favor?"

"A favor between two colleagues on amicable terms."

Now he was really sucking up.

"I'm taking a break from favors," I said and made an obvious point of flipping the demon file closed and placing it into my desk drawer. He watched it with cool disinterest. I intuited from the static of his two-natured were thoughts that he'd been sticky beaking at the file out of boredom.

"Meet me after work," he said. He really wasn't planning on removing his hand from my desk, was he? From the corner of my eye, I caught Hannah at her desk staring at us in unabashed, wide-eyed curiosity.

So, I said exactly what she was thinking, not really meaning to. "Like a date?"

He scoffed and with a hard emphasis said, "No. Trust me, I do not see you in that way."

I couldn't help it. I laughed. I had to appreciate his honesty, if anything else.

"Meet me after work and I can explain the favor I'm asking."

I narrowed my eyes at him, and he narrowed his gaze right back. He knew I was trying to scrape his mind for clues but his damn werewolfy thoughts were preventing me from getting any clear info. I sucked my teeth and thought over it for a few seconds.

"Fine. I'll meet you in Lafayette Square at five thirty. You get five minutes."

He acknowledged this with a nod and left without saying a word.

"What the hell was that about?" Hannah hissed, leaning over her desk. It drew a scowl from the office manager Honey, who was on the phone.

"Beats me." I couldn't get a clear read from his thoughts. It was something serious. But it was always something serious with types like him. His request piqued a small amount of my interest though I did my level best to tamp it down. I needed a break. My life needed a break.

At five thirty, the sun had dipped behind New Orleans' tallest building, the Hancock Whitney Centre, and the modest skyscraper cast a long shadow across Lafayette Park, offering some relief from the humid evening. I sat myself down on a bench nearest to the law firm building at exactly five thirty-three pm and waited. I waited until the clock tower showed five forty-five and gave up. He was a no show and I'd given him more of my time than I'd intended. Put it down to curiosity. Stupidity, more like it.

I walked the two blocks to stretch my legs and shake off the day and hopped on the next streetcar. I got home to an empty condo. Diantha worked part-time as a runner for the firm and the rest of the time as a document server, and in between that she acted as a sort of gal-Friday for Mr. C. She kept irregular hours. I changed out of my business skirt and blouse into denim cut-offs and a t-shirt, and made a simple pasta dish with okra sautéed in butter. Okra we'd bought the day before at the market. I topped the pasta with a squeeze of lemon and some shaved parmesan and parked my butt on the couch with a can of diet sprite.

The day had been long. I was beat. So it shouldn't have been a surprise when my cell started ringing sometime after eight.

"Hey, Sook, did I catch you at a bad time?"

It was Amelia. Preppy and cheerful.

"Hey, stranger. I was beginning to think you'd forgotten about me."

"Moi? Never. You're unforgettable."

I muted the episode of Gossip Girl I was watching and laid back on the couch. "What's the dirt? What have you been up to?"

"Look," she said and immediately my ear pricked at her tone. "I'd love to chat. But I'm phoning you to ask a favor."

"There must be somethin' in the water,'' I muttered. Amelia glossed over my comment and continued.

"Just wondering if you weren't busy, that maybe you could quickly pop by the palace?"

"Thalia's palace?" I said and then felt silly. Like there were any other palaces in New Orleans.

"Yeah, I'm here trying to help Bubba."

Ah... It all made sense now. I'd completely forgotten all about the sorry vampire during the course of my frazzled return to work.

"Is he actually cursed?" I asked.

"Hard to say. But I want to see how your presence affects his current condition."

I sighed. "Okay. I'll come down."

"Perfect," she said, perky again. "Thalia already sent a car, it should be there at any second."

As if on command, the buzzer from the front gate sounded at my door. Maybe it was on command. Amelia was getting unnervingly more like Samantha from Bewitched with every passing day.

I hopped in the back of the town car and it zipped me through the relatively quiet back streets of New Orleans and delivered me fifteen minutes later to the front gates of the palace. The guards led me through the vestibule and into the main foyer where Rasul was anxiously waiting.

He took me by the crook of the elbow and marched me up the grand staircase.

"Hurry," he said, "he's already flooded the day room, despite the plumbing being turned off in there. He cracked the marble counter in the dining hall last night. And that's just the worst of many accidents."

I bristled at his tone but allowed myself to be ferried along. It wasn't like it was my problem. Sure, I felt bad for Bubba, but it wasn't up to me to fix whatever the heck had befallen him.

Bubba was pacing inside the suite of a modestly furnished studio apartment on the third floor. Thalia slipped out of downtime at our entrance and stood from her seat. Amelia was consulting what appeared to be some sort of witchy ancient tome at a wooden dining table to my right and didn't look up at all. Bubba regarded Rasul and I with agitation, his hair was unkempt, his hands fisting by his sides as he paced.

"There's nothing—nothing." Amelia said. She slammed the book closed. "I haven't encountered anything like this before. If it's a curse it's not one cast by witches' hands. Or at least any magic I've come across. I've tried all counter-hexes available to me, tried all the curse breaking spells available in my office stores. There are some older, esoteric ones that take time to prepare and decoct, but they are antidotes for very specific curses. Nothing like this."

She had a fine sheen of sweat on her forehead. Her panicked thoughts assailed me, despite my shields being erected high. Thalia was angry with a capital A, demanding an immediate resolution and unhappy that Amelia hadn't solved Bubba's "little" problem, particularly since Amelia's after-hours consulting was costing the palace an exorbitant amount by the hour.

"I can sense no curse," she said. Save me, her mind squeaked at me. She was picturing her head on a pike. With a start, I realized that maybe that vision was actually a thought of Thalia's I'd inadvertently picked up on.

"Well, apparently I'm the mysterious salve to this curse." I set my purse down and walked over to Bubba. "How ya doing, Bubba?"

"Not good, Miss Sookie, not good. I broke my leg when I got up for the night. Miss Thalia said I needed a human donor to heal. But respectfully, ma'am, I said no." He said the last word with such harsh emphasis it made me jump. I didn't ask how that situation resolved itself since he was clearly walking around fine and rosy cheeked.

Thalia strode to Bubba, carrying an empty crystal vase she'd plucked from a side table.

"Take this," she said. And thrust it into his hands.

He took hold of it and we all stood around watching, waiting for something—anything—to happen.

"What do you want me to do with it?" he asked eventually, somewhat confused.

"Place it down on that glass coffee table there."

He nodded uncertainly but crossed the room and placed it down without causing a hint of ruin or injury.

"That would not have been possible before your arrival," Rasul said with palpable relief. After spending years on site serving Sophie-Anne when she was Queen, Rasul had a deeply sentimental attachment to the palace and all its various accouterments. "Your being here is indeed the salve to his curse."

"Why me?" I asked Amelia. "Why do I have this effect on him?"

Maybe it's your ancestry? she thought at me. My fairy-ness was not common knowledge, and she knew as well as I did that I preferred it that way. "I'm going to have to look into it. I'll put my witches on staff to work, maybe try making those older counter-curse spells. I'll also consult with some other witches. There's a coven in Prague that have made a name for themselves as hex breakers. They may know something."

"Very well," Thalia said.

"It'll cost more money," Amelia shot back, and Thalia stonily told her that as Bubba was a ward of her state, it was her responsibility to tend to him.

I wondered if Amelia was right about it being to do with my ancestry. I hadn't responded to Niall's letter yet. Once we were in private, I'd tell Amelia that I'd write him back and ask if he knew of any reason why my presence might work as some sort of buffer to the curse.

"Well. He cannot stay here," Rasul said, gesturing to Bubba. "I will not let it happen. It is untenable."

All eyes turned to me.

"My apartment's full!" I felt myself clasping for straws; it was an almost out-of-body experience. "I don't even have a light-tight place for him to rest in."

"You will stay here then," Thalia said.

"No," I said vehemently. I'd just gotten home. I'd missed my little urban dwelling. I was not moving into a vampire palace.

"What about next door?" Amelia asked.

"I doubt living next door to the palace would be close enough to have any effect," I said. The palace was surrounded by gardens, while not huge, it did mean the space between the palace and the surrounding buildings would be too far to make any difference. I also had no idea what was in the buildings either side of the palace. Were they even residences?

"No, I don't mean here. I mean how about Bubba stays next door to you?"

I opened my mouth to protest and closed it again. The gated compound where I lived in New Orleans was comprised of a number of two-story duplex condos. There were two very crucial reasons why I managed to survive living in an attached duplex despite being in the middle of a city. The first being the mind-muting effects of the wards that Amelia placed on the complex grounds, and the second being the fact that the apartment attached to mine was permanently empty. That duplex was one of Mr. C's properties. He rented it to Diantha and I specifically because he understood the delicate needs of a telepath living in the city, given he was a telepath himself. Diantha, not a telepath, was just there to split the rent with me. I could tolerate her thoughts, much like I could when I lived with Amelia. Primarily because I had mental space all around me. And the empty condo next door, according to Mr. C, was a tax write-off for him.

"Yes. But the apartment next door to me is empty… On purpose," I said.

"To give your telepathy more breathing room. But a vampire won't be a problem."

I blinked and wondered how it was that the world could shift so suddenly under my feet without my having to do a thing.

"True," I responded as neutrally as I could.

"Very well. He can stay next to you while we figure this out," Rasul said. The pent-up tension that had kept him in a knot since I'd arrived visibly melted from his dark features.

I opened my mouth to protest. To point out that I'd need to be near Bubba at all times in order for things not to go haywire. To point out that no one was asking me if I was happy to babysit. But then I caught sight of Bubba.

He'd stopped pacing and was looking at me with an expression of such glum, woeful hope. Everyone, myself included, were talking around him. As if he weren't in the room. I was all-too familiar with how lousy that felt; it characterized just about every early encounter I'd had with vampires. Bubba was the one truly suffering out of all of this. Who was I to complain about being inconvenienced?

Was this how all vampires treated him when he was shuffled from one state to another? Like an inconvenience?

"Would you be comfortable doing that? Staying next to me?" I asked him.

He nodded vigorously.

"I'll have to talk to Mr. Cataliades," I told the others with a sigh. "Check it's okay. He owns both apartments."

"No, he owns all the apartments in that compound," Amelia said. "…What?" she said in response to my visible surprise. I'd had no idea. "I've got staff going there every month to top up those protection and quietening wards. I know these things."

"I'll contact him," Thalia said. Rasul withdrew a cell phone from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and passed it to her. It was an unconscious action, an automatic response, like the salivating dog to Pavlov's bell.

Well, well. Perhaps they had finally forged a truce in their working relationship. No more screaming fights with flying furniture. Thalia left the room to go call Desmond.

"How do I know my condo won't completely collapse while I'm out or at work?"

"I don't think the curse has the strength to do anything so grand or devastating," Amelia said. "From what you've described, Bubba, nothing that disastrous has happened has it?"

"No ma'am."

"Though he may flood your home," Rasul said, with a dark grimace.

Wonderful.

"No, no, my dear," Rasul hurried to explain. My face must've said it all. "The risk is minimal. The effects of the curse seemingly cease when he is dead for the day. You will be fine to go to work."

I could tell he was just trying to push Bubba out the door.

"It'll be like old times, Miss Sookie." Bubba said. "Back when I used to watch over you and your home at night."

"Sure." I stifled another sigh. My inner crystal ball foresaw many nights of staying in and studying in my future. Bye-bye nightlife. Thalia returned to the room and the phone to Rasul's outstretched hand.

"It is organized," she said.

"I'll arrange for palace staff to bring some furniture over to make it more comfortable," Rasul said to Bubba.

"Don't fear," Thalia said and clamped her small cool hand on my shoulder. "It's only temporary."

"It's not me you need to reassure," I said. She blinked at me in that alien manner of hers. The meaning was lost on her. Poor Bubba.

Bubba went to go and pack the meager belongings he'd accrued since his arrival to the state, while Amelia collected her own things and beat a hasty departure. Felix was home sleeping and Hannah said she'd stay up to wait for her.

"So, Eric is still busy, I take it," I said to Thalia. He was nowhere to be seen.

"Indeed," Thalia said faintly. I tried not to wonder just what 'busy' entailed.

"Ready to hit the road, Miss Sookie," Bubba said to me. He was in a good mood once more, duffel bag on his shoulder, just like he'd been the night of our road trip. Meanwhile I was so tired I felt like I could scrape myself off the floor with a spatula.

"Bubba, you will wait here and arrive to your new accommodations with the staff delivering the furniture," Thalia said and firmly cut off all our protests with a swift wave of her hand and vicious expression. Rasul was livid.

"The palace!" he cried.

"It will not take long. Bubba, go through the vacant apartments on this floor and pick the furniture you wish to take to furnish your accommodations. My wish for you is to be comfortable," Thalia said.

Since when did Thalia care about anyone's comfort?

"Have you gone mad, woman?" Rasul snapped at Thalia. So things were not as calm in paradise as I'd hoped. I briefly wondered how there was any furniture left in the palace given the death stares they were flashing at one another. (I had a sneaking feeling any truce was merely a pipedream of mine.)

"Sookie, before you return home, I'll have the driver stop by and you can collect blood bags suitable for Bubba," Thalia continued.

"Fine."

"Ah," Rasul said with a sort of delayed understanding.

I shot him a questioning glance.

"You have saved me a trip," he explained. His smile was oblique and knowing. "I'd arranged a blood order with the veterinarian hospital last night but unforeseen disasters had prevented me from collecting it."

Ew. Were they procuring cat's blood for Bubba? I knew all too well it was his preferred meal of choice. "Please, spare me the details. Just tell me what I need to do, and I'll go collect it for him."