Free Dead Ever After: A True Blood Novel by Charlaine Harris

telling him before the wedding that she could turn into an animal. But Don shouldn’t have shot her when he found out, either. You don’t just haul off and shoot the one you love.
    “ ‘Maybe’ is such a bad word,” I said. “You can ‘maybe’ yourself back to Adam and Eve and the serpent.”
    Bernie laughed, and Sam looked up. I could see a glimmer of his former self in that look. The bitter truth welled up in my throat like bile. The price of bringing back Sam from death was that he wasn’t quite the same man anymore. The experience of death had changed him, maybe forever. And maybe resurrecting him had changed me.
    “How are you feeling physically?” I said. “You seem a little shook up.”
    “That’s one way to put it,” he said. “The first day Mom was here, she had to help me walk. It’s weird. I was okay riding back with you that night, and I drove home okay next morning. But after that it was like my body had to relearn things. Sort of like . . . after a long sickness. I’ve felt so bad, and I can’t figure out why.”
    “I guess part of it is that process of grief.”
    “Grief?”
    “Well, it would only be natural,” I said. “You know. Jannalynn?”
    Sam looked at me. His expression was not what I expected; it was compounded of confusion and embarrassment. “What about her?” he asked, and I could swear his puzzlement was genuine.
    I cut my eyes toward Bernie, who was every bit (and more understandably) as unenlightened as Sam. Of course, she hadn’t been at the pack meeting, and she hadn’t talked to anyone else who’d been there until now. She’d met Jannalynn, though I wasn’t sure she’d known how involved Sam had been with the werewolf. There’d been sides of Jannalynn that few men would want their moms to see.
    “That Were that showed up at the house?” Bernie said. “The one Sam didn’t want me to know he’d been seeing?”
    I felt horribly awkward. “Yes, that Jannalynn,” I said.
    “I have been wondering why I hadn’t heard from her,” Sam said readily. “But considering all the bad things she was accused of—and the fact that I believed she’d done them—I hadn’t planned on seeing her again. Someone told me she’d gone to Alaska.”
    There wasn’t a psychologist hotline at hand. I didn’t know how to handle this.
    “Sam, do you remember what happened to you that night? You remember why we were there?” Begin at the beginning.
    “Not exactly,” he admitted. “It’s pretty hazy. Jannalynn was accused of doing something to Alcide, right? I remember feeling mad and pretty miserable, because I’d liked her so much when we started dating. But I wasn’t exactly surprised, so I guess I’d figured out that she wasn’t basically . . . a good person. I remember driving to Alcide’s farm with you, and I remember seeing Eric and Alcide and the pack, and I think I remember—there was a swimming pool? And some sand?”
    I nodded. “Yeah, a swimming pool and a sand volleyball area. Remember anything else?”
    Sam began to look uneasy. “I remember the pain,” he said. He sounded hoarse. “And something about the sand. It was all . . . I remember riding back in the truck, with you driving.”
    Well, shit. I hated to be the designated revelator. “You’ve forgotten a few things, Sam,” I said, as gently as I could. I’d heard of people forgetting traumatic stuff, especially when they’d been badly injured: people in car wrecks, people who’d gotten attacked. I figured Sam was entitled to blank out on a thing or two since he’d actually passed over.
    “What did I forget?” He was looking at me with the sidelong wide eyes of a nervous horse, and his back was stiff as a board. Somewhere in his head, he knew what had happened.
    I held out my hands to him, palms up. Do you really want to do this now?
    “Yeah, I guess I should know,” he said. Bernie crouched by her son’s chair in a distinctly nonhuman way. She was looking at me with a level gaze.