No one shot Bill through the peephole. No one tried to batter the door down. No one screamed.

The continuing silence was breaking me out in goose bumps. I didn't even see Bill move. His cool voice came from right beside my ear. "It is a very young woman. Her hair is dyed white or blond, and it's very short and dark at the roots. She's skinny. She's human. She's scared."

She wasn't the only one.

I tried like hell to think who my middle-of-the-night caller could be. Suddenly I thought I might know. "Frannie," I breathed. "Quinn's sister. Maybe."

"Let me in," a girl's voice said. "Oh,please let me in."

It was just like a ghost story I'd read once. Every hair on my arms stood up.

"I have to tell you what's happened to Quinn," Frannie said, and that decided me on the spot.

"Open the door," I said to Bill in my normal voice. "We have to let her in."

"She's human," Bill said, as if to say, "How much trouble can she be?" He unlocked the front door.

I won't say Frannie tumbled in, but she sure didn't waste any time getting through the door and slamming it behind her. I hadn't had a good first impression of Frannie, who was long on the aggression and attitude and short on the charm, but I'd come to know her a fraction better as she sat at Quinn's bedside in the hospital after the explosion. She'd had a hard life, and she loved her brother.

"What's happened?" I asked sharply as Frannie stumbled to the nearest chair and sat down.

"Youwould have a vampire here," she said. "Can I have a glass of water? Then I'll try to do what Quinn wants."

I hurried to the kitchen and got her a drink. I turned on the light in the kitchen, but even when I came back to the living room, we kept it dark.

"Where's your car?" Bill asked.

"It broke down about a mile back," she said. "But I couldn't wait with it. I called a tow truck and left the keys in the ignition. I hope to God they get it off the road and out of sight."

"Tell meright now what's happening," I said.

"Short or long version?"

"Short."

"Some vampires from Vegas are coming to take over Louisiana."

It was a showstopper.

Chapter 11

Bill's voice was very fierce. "Where, when, how many?"

"They've taken out some of the sheriffs already," Frannie said, and I could tell there was just a hint of enjoyment at getting to deliver this momentous news. "Smaller forces are taking out the weaker ones while a larger force gathers to surround Fangtasia to deal with Eric."

Bill was on his cell phone before the words had finished leaving Frannie's mouth, and I was left gaping at him. I had come so late to the realization of how weak Louisiana's situation was that it seemed to me for a second that I had brought this about by thinking of it.

"How did this happen?" I asked the girl. "How did Quinn get involved? How is he? Did he send you here?"

"Of course he sent me here," she said, as if I were the stupidest person she'd ever met. "He knows you're tied to that vampire Eric, so that makes you part of the target. The Vegas vamps sent someone to have a look at you, even."

Jonathan.

"I mean, they were evaluating Eric's assets, and you were considered part of that."

"Why was this Quinn's problem?" I asked, which may not have been the clearest way to put it, but she got my meaning.

"Our mother, our goddamned screwed-up, screw-upmother," Frannie said bitterly. "You know she got captured and raped by some hunters, right? In Colorado. Like a hundred years ago." Actually, it had been maybe nineteen years ago, because that was how Frannie had been conceived.

"And Quinn rescued her and killed them all, though he was just a kid, and he went in debt to the local vampires to get them to help him clean up the scene and get his mom away."

I knew Quinn's mother's sad history. I was nodding frantically by now, because I wanted to get to something I hadn't heard yet.

"Okay, well, my mom was pregnant with me after the rape," Frannie said, glaring at me defiantly. "So she had me, but she was never right in the head, and growing up with her was kinda hard, right? Quinn was working off his debt in the pits." (ThinkGladiator with wereanimals.) "She never got right in the head," Frannie repeated. "And she's kept getting worse."

"I get that," I said, trying to keep my voice level. Bill seemed on the verge of thumping Frannie to speed up her narrative, but I shook my head.

"Okay, so she was in a nice place that Quinn was paying for outside Las Vegas, the only assisted-living center in America where you can send people like my mom." The Deranged Weretiger Nursing Home? "But Mom got loose, and she killed some tourist and took her clothes and caught a ride into Vegas and picked up a man. She killed him, too. She robbed him and took his money and gambled until we caught up with her." Frannie paused and took a deep breath. "Quinn was still healing from Rhodes, and this about killed him."

"Oh, no." But I had a feeling I hadn't heard the bottom line on this incident yet.

"Yeah, what's worse, right? The escape, or the killing?"

Probably the tourists had had an opinion on that.

I vaguely noticed that Amelia had entered the room, and I also realized that she didn't seem startled to see Bill. So she'd been awake when Bill had taken Pam's place. Amelia hadn't met Frannie before, but she didn't interrupt the flow.

"Anyway, there's a huge vampire cartel in Vegas, because the pickings are so rich," Frannie told us. "They tracked down Mom before the police could catch her. They cleaned up after heragain. Turns out that Whispering Palms, the place that lost her, had alerted all the supes in the area to be on the lookout. By the time I got to the casino where they'd grabbed Mom, the vamps were telling Quinn that they'd taken care of everything and now there was more debt for him to work off. He said he was coming off a bad injury and he couldn't go back in the pits. They offered to take me on as a blood donor or a whore for visiting vamps instead, and he just about took out the one who said that."

Of course. I exchanged a glance with Bill. The offer to "employ" Frannie had been designed to make anything else look better.

"Then they said they knew of a really weak kingdom that was just about up for grabs, and they meant Louisiana. Quinn told 'em they could get it for free if the King of Nevada would just marry Sophie-Anne, her being in no position to argue. But it turned out the king was right there. He said he detested cripples and no way would he marry a vampire who'd killed her previous husband, no matter how sweet her kingdom was, even with Arkansas thrown in." Sophie-Anne was the titular head of Arkansas as well as Louisiana since she'd been found innocent of her husband's (the King of Arkansas's) murder in a vampire court. Sophie-Anne hadn't had a chance to consolidate her claim, because of the bombing. But I was sure it was on her to-do list, right after her legs grew back.

Bill flipped his phone open again and began punching in numbers. Whoever he called, he didn't get an answer. His dark eyes were blazing. He was absolutely revved up. He leaned over to pick up a sword he'd left propped against the couch. Yep, he'd come fully armed. I didn't keep items like that in my toolshed.

"They'll want to take us out quietly and quickly so the human news media won't catch on. They'll concoct a story to explain why familiar vampires have been replaced with strange ones," Bill said. "You, girl—what part does your brother have to play in this?"

"They made him tell them how many people you-all had and share what else he knew about the situation in Lousiana," Frannie said. To make matters perfect, she began to cry. "He didn't want to. He tried to bargain with them, but they had him where they wanted him." Now Frannie looked about ten years older than she was. "He tried to call Sookie a million times, but they were watching him, and he was scared he'd be leading them right to her. But they found out anyway. Once he knew what they were going to do, he took a big risk—for both of us—and sent me on ahead. I was glad I'd got a friend to get my car back from you."