"Charlaine Harris - Sookie Stackhouse 4.5 - One Word Answer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harris Charlaine)

"Is Hadley still alive?" I said, hardly able to get the words out.


"Alas, no," said the big man, absently polishing his black-framed glasses on a clean white handkerchief.
His black shoes gleamed like mirrors. "Your cousin Hadley is dead, I'm afraid." He seemed to relish
saying it. He was a man—or whatever who enjoyed the sound of his own voice.


Underneath the distrust and confusion I was feeling about this whole weird episode, I was aware of a
sharp pang of grief. Hadley had been fun as a child, and we'd been together a lot, naturally. Since I'd
been a weird kid, Hadley and my brother Jason had been the only children I'd had to play with for the
most part. When Hadley hit puberty, the picture changed; but I had some good memories of my cousin.


"What happened to her?" I tried to keep my voice even, but I know it wasn't.


"She was involved in an Unfortunate Incident," he said.


That was the euphemism for a vampire killing. When it appeared in newspaper reports, it usually meant
that some vampire had been unable to restrain his blood lust and had attacked a human. "A vampire
killed her?" I was horrified.


"Ah, not exactly. Your cousin Hadley was the vampire. She got staked."


This was so much bad and startling news that I couldn't take it in. I held up a hand to indicate he
shouldn't talk for a minute, while I absorbed what he'd said, bit by bit.


"What is your name, please?" I asked.


"Mr. Cataliades," he said. I repeated that to myself several times since it was a name I'd never
encountered. Emphasis on the tal, I told myself. And a long e.


"Where might you hail from?"
"For many years, my home has been New Orleans."


New Orleans was at the other end of Louisiana from my little town, Bon Temps. Northern Louisiana is
pretty darn different from southern Louisiana in several fundamental ways; it's the Bible Belt without the
pizzazz of New Orleans, it's the older sister who stayed home and tended the farm while the younger
sister went out partying. But it shares other things with the southern part of the state, too; bad roads,
corrupt politics, and a lot of people, both black and white, who live right on the poverty line.