“I tried to save one of his sisters, too, but she was beyond my recall,” Ocella said bleakly. His teeth were white and even, though he was missing the one next to his left canine. If you had lost teeth before you became a vampire, they didn’t regenerate.

“Sookie, what is it?” Eric was not following, for once.

“The Romanovs,” I said, trying to keep my voice hushed as though the boy couldn’t hear me from twenty yards away. “The last Russian royal family.”

To Eric, the executions of the Romanovs must seem like yesterday, and perhaps not very important in the tapestry of deaths he’d experienced in his thousand years. But he understood that his maker had done something extraordinary. I looked at Ocella without anger, without fear, for just a few seconds, and I saw a man who, finding himself an outcast and lonely, looked for the most outstanding “children” he could find.

“Was Eric the first vampire you made?” I asked Ocella.

He was bemused by what he saw as my brazen attitude. Eric had a stronger reaction. As I felt his fear roll through me, I understood that Eric had to physically perform whatever Ocella ordered him to do. Before, that had been an abstract concept. Now I realized that if Ocella ordered Eric to kill me, Eric would be compelled to do it.

The Roman decided to answer me. “Yes, he was the first one I brought over successfully. The others I tried to bring over—they died.”

“Could we please leave my bedroom and go into the living room?” I said. “This is not the right place to receive visitors.” See? I was trying to be polite.

“Yes, I suppose,” said the older vampire. “Alexei? Where do you suppose the living room is?”

Alexei half turned and pointed in the right direction.

“Then that’s where we’ll go, dearest,” Ocella said, and Alexei led the way.

I had a moment to look up at Eric, and I knew my face was asking, “What the hell is going on here?” But he looked stunned, and helpless. Eric. Helpless. My head was whirling.

When I had a second to think about it, I was pretty nauseated, because Alexei was a child and I was fairly sure that Ocella had a sexual relationship with the boy, as he’d had with Eric. But I wasn’t foolish enough to think that I could stop it, or that any protest I made would make the slightest difference. In fact, I was far from sure Alexei himself would thank me for intervening, when I remembered Eric telling me about his desperate attachment to his maker during the first years of his new life as a vampire.