Oh. No wonder I'd been sick. I hadn't eaten anything since then. I'm a girl who likes her meals, so it hadn't been a weight-loss tactic. I'd just been too busy bumping from crisis to crisis. Go on the Sookie Stackhouse Narrow Avoidance of Death Diet! Run for your life, and miss meals, too! Exercise plus starvation.

When you've been really beaten, you realize that you are just an envelope of skin, an easily penetrated envelope that holds together a lot of fluids and some rigid structures, which in their turn can simply be broken and invaded.

Sweetheart," Bill said formally, "I have always loved you, and I will be proud to die in your service. When I'm gone, say a prayer for me in a real church.

Sookie, my little bullet-sucker" Eric, my big bullshitter

My bodyguard was mowing the lawn in a pink bikini when the body fell from the sky.

You take I-55 south, and you'll run into I-20. Or you could take..." I was about to be overloaded with information. "Oh that sounds just perfect. Let me do just that, or I'll lose track." Sure, glad I could help." Oh, you surely did." We beamed at each other, just two nice women. I had to fight an impulse to say "I have a tortured vampire in my trunk," out of sheer giddiness.

Finally, a human man saw me as intensely valuable. Just my luck he was happily married and thought I was a freak.