As soon as Bud declared himself satisfied, Eric and I went to my car. He took the keys from my shaking hand. I got in the passenger side. He was right. I shouldn’t drive until I’d recovered from the shock.

Eric had been busy on his cell phone while I was talking to Bud, and I wasn’t totally surprised to see a car parked in front of my house. It was Pam’s, and she had a passenger.

Eric pulled around back where I always park, and I scrambled out of the car to hurry through the house to unlock the front door. Eric followed me at a leisurely pace. We hadn’t exchanged a word on the short drive. He was preoccupied and still dealing with his temper. I was shocked by the whole incident. Now I felt a little more like myself as I went out on the porch to call, “Come in!”

Pam and her passenger got out. He was a young human, maybe twenty-one, and thin to the point of emaciation. His hair was dyed blue and cut in an extremely geometric way, rather as if he’d put a box on his head, knocked it sideways, then trimmed around the edges. What didn’t fit inside the lines had been shaved.

It was eye-catching, I’ll say that.

Pam smiled at the expression on my face, which I hastily transformed into something more welcoming. Pam has been a vampire since Victoria was on the English throne, and she’s been Eric’s right hand since he called her in from her wanderings in northern America. He’s her maker.

“Hello,” I said to the young man as he entered the front door. He was extremely nervous. His eyes darted to me, away from me, took in Eric, and then kind of strafed the room to absorb it. A flicker of contempt crossed his clean-shaven face as he took in the cluttered living room, which was never more than homey even when it was clean.

Pam thumped him on the back of his head. “Speak when you’re spoken to, Immanuel!” she growled. She was standing slightly behind him, so he couldn’t see her when she winked at me.

“Hello, ma’am,” he said to me, taking a step forward. His nose twitched.

Pam said, “You smell, Sookie.”

“It was the fire,” I explained.

“You can tell me about it in a moment,” she said, her pale eyebrows shooting up. “Sookie, this man is Immanuel Earnest,” she said. “He cuts hair at Death by Fashion in Shreveport. He’s brother to my lover, Miriam.”

That was a lot of information in three sentences. I scrambled to absorb it.

Eric was eyeing Immanuel’s coiffure with fascinated disgust. “This is the one you brought to correct Sookie’s hair?” he said to Pam. His lips were pressed together in a very tight line. I could feel his skepticism pulsing along the line that bound us.

“Miriam says he is the best,” Pam said, shrugging. “I haven’t had a haircut in a hundred fifty years. How would I know?”