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

and tourists are cautioned to visit them in large guided parties, and to leave at the end of the day.


"Hadley and I had gone to St. Louis Number One that night, right after we rose, to conduct a ritual."
Waldo's face looked quite expressionless. The thought that this man had been the chosen companion of
my cousin, even if just for an evening's excursion, was simply astounding. "They leaped from behind the
tombs around us. The Fellowship fanatics were armed with holy items, stakes, and garlic—the usual
paraphernalia. They were stupid enough to have gold crosses."


The Fellowship refused to believe that all vampires could not be restrained by holy items, despite all the
evidence. Holy items worked on the very old vampires, the ones who had been brought up to be devout
believers. The newer vampires only suffered from crosses if they were silver. Silver would burn any
vampire. Oh, a wooden cross might have an effect on a vamp if it was driven through his heart.


"We fought valiantly, Hadley and I, but in the end, there were too many for us, and they killed Hadley. I
escaped with some severe knife wounds." His paper-white face looked more regretful than tragic.


I tried not to think about Aunt Linda and what she would have had to say about her daughter becoming a
vampire. Aunt Linda would have been even more shocked by the circumstances of Hadley's death: by
assassination, in a famous cemetery reeking of Gothic atmosphere, in the company of this grotesque
creature. Of course, all these exotic trappings wouldn't have devastated Aunt Linda as much as the stark
fact of Hadley's murder.


I was more detached. I'd written Hadley off long ago. I'd never thought I would see her again, so I had a
little spare emotional room to think of other things. I still wondered, painfully, why Hadley hadn't come
home to see us. She might have been afraid, being a young vampire, that her blood lust would rise at an
embarrassing time and she'd find herself yearning to suck on someone inappropriate. She might have
been shocked by the change in her own nature; Bill had told me over and over that vampires were human
no longer, that they were emotional about different things than humans. Their appetites and their need for
secrecy had shaped the older vampires irrevocably.


But Hadley had never had to operate under those laws; she'd been made vampire after the Great
Revelation, when vampires had revealed their presence to the world.
And the post-puberty Hadley, the one I was less fond of, wouldn't have been caught dead or alive with
someone like Waldo. Hadley had been popular in high school, and she'd certainly been human enough
then to fall prey to all the teenage stereotypes. She'd been mean to kids who weren't popular, or she'd
just ignored them. Her life had been completely taken up by her clothes and her makeup and her own
cute self.


She'd been a cheerleader, until she'd started adopting the Goth image.


"You said you two were in the cemetery to perform a ritual. What ritual?" I asked Waldo, just to gain
some time to think. "Surely Hadley wasn't a witch as well." I'd run across a werewolf witch before, but