Free Club Dead by Charlaine Harris Page A

importance to his last sentence. “I’m sorry the vampires have a hold on your dad. But I have to find Bill. If this is the only way I can do it, this is what I have to do. I at least owe him that much, even if . . .” My voice trailed off. I didn’t want to finish the sentence. All the possible endings were too sad, too final.
    He shrugged, a large movement on Alcide Herveaux. “Taking a pretty girl to a bar isn’t that big a deal,” he reassured me again, trying to bolster my spirits.
    In his position, I might not have been so generous. “Is your dad a constant gambler?”
    “Only since my mother died,” Alcide said, after a long pause.
    “I’m sorry.” I kept my eyes off his face in case he needed some privacy. “I don’t have either of my parents,” I offered.
    “They been gone long?”
    “Since I was seven.”
    “Who raised you?”
    “My grandmother raised me and my brother.”
    “She still living?”
    “No. She died this year. She was murdered.”
    “Tough.” He was matter-of-fact.
    “Yeah.” I had one more question. “Did both your parents tell you about yourself?”
    “No. My grandfather told me when I was about thirteen. He’d noticed the signs. I just don’t know orphaned Weres get through it without guidance.”
    “That would be really rough.”
    “We try to keep aware of all the Weres breeding in the area, so no one will go unwarned.”
    Even a secondhand warning would be better than no warning at all. But still, such a session would be a major trauma in anyone’s life.
    We stopped in Vicksburg to get gas. I offered to pay for filling the tank, but Alcide told me firmly this could go on his books as a business expense, since he did in fact need to see some customers. He waved off my offer to pump the gas, too. He did accept the cup of coffee I bought him, with as many thanks as if it had been a new suit. It was a cold, bright day, and I took a brisk walk around the travel center to stretch my legs before climbing back into the cab of the truck.
    Seeing the signs for the battlefield reminded me of one of the most taxing days I’d had as an adult. I found myself telling Alcide about my grandmother’s favorite club, the Descendants of the Glorious Dead, and about their field trip to the battlefield two years before. I’d driven one car, Maxine Fortenberry (grandmother of one of my brother Jason’s good buddies) another, and we’d toured at length. Each of the Descendants had brought a favorite text covering the siege, and an early stop at the visitors’ center had gotten the Descendants all tanked up with maps and memorabilia. Despite the failure of Velda Cannon’s Depends, we’d had a great time. We’d read every monument, we’d had a picnic lunch by the restored USS Cairo, and we’d gone home laden with souvenir booty and exhausted. We’d even gone into the Isle of Capri Casino for an hour of amazed staring, and some tentative slot machine feeding. It had been a very happy day for my grandmother, almost as happy a time as the evening she’d inveigled Bill into speaking at the Descendants meeting.
    “Why did she want him to do that?” Alcide asked. He was smiling at my description of our supper stop at a Cracker Barrel.
    “Bill’s a vet,” I said. “An Army vet, not an animal-doctor vet.”
    “So?” After a beat, he said, “You mean your boyfriend is a veteran of the Civil War ?”
    “Yeah. He was human then. He wasn’t brought over until after the war. He had a wife and children.” I could hardly keep calling him my boyfriend, since he’d been on the verge of leaving me for someone else.
    “Who made him a vampire?” Alcide asked. We were in Jackson now, and he was making his way downtown to the apartment his company maintained.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “He doesn’t talk about it.”
    “That seems a little strange to me.”
    Actually, it seemed a little strange to me, too; but I figured it was something really personal, and when Bill wanted to