Free From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris Page A

no human brains in the room were even registering our presence. My great-grandfather paused while I did this, and resumed speaking when I’d finished evaluating the situation.
    “I saw such a woman in the woods one day, and her name was Einin. She thought I was an angel.” He was silent for a moment. “She was delicious,” he said. “She was lively, and happy, and simple.” Niall’s eyes were fixed on my face. I wondered if he thought I was like Einin: simple. “I was young enough to be infatuated, young enough to be able to ignore the inevitable end of our connection as she aged and I did not. But Einin got pregnant, which was a shock. Fairies and humans don’t crossbreed often. Einin gave birth to twins, which is quite common among the fae. Einin and both boys lived through the birthing, which in those times was far from certain. She called our older son Fintan. The second was Dermot.”
    The waiter brought our wine, and I was jerked out of the spell Niall’s voice had laid on me. It was like we’d been sitting around a campfire in the woods listening to an ancient legend, and then snap! We were in a modern restaurant in Shreveport, Louisiana, and there were other people around who had no idea what was going on. I automatically lifted my glass and took a sip of wine. I felt I was entitled.
    “Fintan the Half Fairy was your paternal grandfather, Sookie,” Niall said.
    “No. I know who my grandfather was.” My voice was shaking a little, I noticed, but it was still very quiet. “My grandfather was Mitchell Stackhouse and he married Adele Hale. My father was Corbett Hale Stackhouse, and he and my mom died in a flash flood when I was a little girl. Then I was raised by my grandmother Adele.” Though I remembered the vampire in Mississippi who’d told me he detected a trace of fairy blood in my veins, and I believed this was my great-grandfather, I just couldn’t adjust my inner picture of my family.
    “What was your grandmother like?” Niall asked.
    “She raised me when she didn’t have to,” I said. “She took me and Jason into her home, and she worked hard to raise us right. We learned everything from her. She loved us. She had two children herself and buried them both, and that must have about killed her, but still she was strong for us.”
    “She was beautiful when she was young,” Niall said. His green eyes lingered on my face as if he were trying to find some trace of her beauty in her granddaughter.
    “I guess,” I said uncertainly. You don’t think about your grandmother in terms of beauty, at least in the normal way of things.
    “I saw her after Fintan made her pregnant,” Niall said. “She was lovely. Her husband had told her he could not give her children. He’d had mumps at the wrong time. That’s a disease, isn’t it?” I nodded. “She met Fintan one day when she was beating a rug out on the clothesline, in back of the house where you now live. He asked her for a drink of water. He was smitten on the spot. She wanted children so badly, and he promised her he could give them to her.”
    “You said fairies and people weren’t usually fertile when they crossbreed.”
    “But Fintan was only half fairy. And he already knew that he was able to give a woman a child.” Niall’s mouth quirked. “The first woman he loved died in childbirth, but your grandmother and her son were more fortunate, and then two years later she was able to carry Fintan’s daughter to completion.”
    “He raped her,” I said, almost hoping it was so. My grandmother had been the most true-blue woman I’d ever met. I couldn’t picture her cheating anyone out of anything, particularly since she’d promised in front of God to be faithful to my grandfather.
    “No, he did not. She wanted children, though she didn’t want to be unfaithful to her husband. Fintan didn’t care about the feelings of others, and he wanted her desperately,” Niall said. “But he was never violent. He would not have raped